YSaC, Vol. 1591: When words attack.

In honor of Labor Day, I bring you this piece of work. I apologize in advance.

Ft/pt-($18/hr) –Receptionist

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Open position for a full/part time receptionist. Job duties include, greeting customers, answering phones and general computer skills. Please email resume with references.
Business hours are. Tuesday – Friday 9:30 AM – 6:30 PM Saturday 9:30 AM – 6:00 PM

Now hiring qualified sales consultants for luxury Vacation Club sales. Beautiful office, and huge commissions! We are only hiring top-notch talent! Must be clean cut, smiling personality, professional, and speak clear english. Please send resume and any information regarding why we should consider you. Serious inquiries only please.

Schedule for first 30 days:
Wednesday and Thursday 2:30pm -9:30pm
Friday 4:30pm-9:30pm
Saturday and Sunday 9:30am- 5pm

**After 30 days, per management schedule may be adjusted as we will be open 7 days a week

Expected earning potential:

Sales reps 75k per year
Sales managers 150k per year
***Plus bonuses!

Send resume attention to Michael
(singing) Oh, I’m the greatest
Lover in the world.
All the ladies
Love to love me. . .

Then he stopped short at my door and feigned surprise. “Sorry, ladies. Didn’t know you were in there. I hope I didn’t disturb you with my song.”

Mid-December 1987

By Week 2, production was scrambling. The network brought in another producer and some more writers, but you can’t fix a moving train. Or maybe you can. I actually don’t know anything about trains, but if they’re anything like a TV show, then they’re hard to fix while in motion. The show got weirder. Greg and Conan convinced the producers to hire Iron Eyes Cody — the native American who shed a tear over pollution in the “Keep America Beautiful” ads — to review movies. Thanks to Conan and Greg, footage exists of Iron Eyes Cody walking out of a theater, pausing under a marquee for Barbra Streisand’s Nuts, then turning to the camera. . .and letting a tear trickle down his cheek.

An upside of having to fill an hour each night was that it gave the writers ample opportunity to perform. I believe Conan made his network debut playing a pretentious documentary filmmaker wearing a director’s loupe around his neck. Phil and Paul asked him about his greatest influences and Conan responded, “I have to say. . .myself. I influence myself a lot.” Greg filmed a segment with French actress and Chanel perfume spokeswoman Carole Bouquet. It began with him interviewing her about perfume, until he finds himself so mesmerized by her beauty that he starts to wonder, on camera, if she would ever go out with a guy like him. The result is an incredibly awkward, sweet, and funny exchange.

Even I ended up on camera one more time. We were having trouble booking guests, and while holiday shopping, I saw a talking Pee-wee Herman doll and thought, “Well, that’s the closest we’ll get to the real thing.” So I “interviewed” the doll on the show, fashioning the dialogue around his six canned responses.

Me: How would you respond to the charge that the Pee-wee Herman character is a bit immature?

Doll: I know you are but what am I?

It was cute every time the stage manager’s hand reached up to pull Pee-wee’s string. Plus, playing opposite a doll made my performance seem less stiff. The pressure was off and I had fun this time probably because by now, no one was watching the show. Our ratings had taken a huge dive. I was pretty much sitting in a deck chair on the Titanic interviewing a Pee-wee Herman doll.

For all the opportunity, I’m sad to report that Conan never did get to make his pet pitch, “Stop the Man With the Bat.” It was a simple concept: A large, blindfolded man is placed in a room full of celebrities, then given a bat and told to start swinging. The bit was never approved, and I doubt it would have been repeatable.

[Note from drmk: There’s lots, lots more behind the cut …. ]

Christmas, 1987

When I first moved to L.A., I rented a cheap car on a month-to-month basis and saw no reason to make a deeper commitment. We knew the show couldn’t go on, but had no idea when it would end. The network had invested a lot of money into the franchise, could they pull the plug after only two weeks? Would they cancel us right before Christmas? We didn’t even have enough information to make a guess. Also, by now, the writers were spending as much time discussing the show’s demise as possible segments. During one of these endless discussions when we were wondering if we would ever work again, Conan grabbed a piece of paper and a marker and said, “Here’s how the executives will decide our futures.” Then he handed me this drawing:

Christmas approached and Greg and I wrote a piece called “The Presidential Gift List,” which now reads like text from a time capsule. It was a straight-forward desk piece, offering gift suggestions for Reagan aides like Mike Deaver, George Schultz, and Ed Meese. I barely remember those names, but this guy’s still around:

Phil: Now, for the president’s good friend, conservative Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, we suggest a lump of coal. . . (PAUL GIVES HIM A QUIZZICAL LOOK; PHIL SHRUGS) It’s what he wanted.

For all our worrying, we were not canceled before Christmas. Barry gave the staff gifts, and Danny recalls going to thank him. “I walked into Barry’s office and found him sitting on the floor with tears in his eyes,” Danny said. “That was the end.”

Conan’s tossed coin was still spinning in the air, but we all knew gravity would pull it down soon enough. The Christmas miracle would not last.

New Year’s Eve, 1987/1988

We returned to do another week of shows and even aired on New Year’s Eve. Barry approved a dumb sketch I wrote called “New Year’s Smack,” which offered our viewers a “state-of-the-art interactive TV” experience. Next Paul invited all the women at home, alone, to get close to their sets and then. . .we cut to a extreme close-up of Conan.

Conan: C’mon baby and start the new year off with a big wet one from a guy who really likes you. (PUCKERS UP FOR A BIG SMOOCH. IT ENDS.) Hey, let’s get a glass of champagne, uh, uh, what did you say your name was?

Conan was the obvious choice for the kiss. After all, I’d heard he was the greatest lover in the world.
January 8, 1988

The last Wilton North aired on January 8, after a grand total of 21 episodes. The format itself turned out to be “Non-Repeatable” and “Not Approved.” I haven’t seen a frame of it since. I have tapes of a third of the episodes in my garage but the format — 3M 3/4 inch — is no longer in use. (If you want them, Paley Center for Media, call me.)

There were no sentimental goodbyes. No cries of “Unfair! If you had just given us more time, we would have developed into something great!” A typewriter might have been trashed in frustration — I’m not saying it was or who might have trashed it — and then we all slunk away. Phil and Paul went back to radio, and I imagine they were happy to return to what they did well. The transition to TV rarely works. Rick Dees was a much bigger radio star, yet his ABC talk show, Into the Night With Rick Dees, didn’t last long, either.

A month later, the Los Angeles Times ran an article dissecting the show’s failure, but I don’t think anyone in the New York media gave it another thought. Having a vague title, two boring hosts, and a muddled format meant there was nothing to hold onto and nothing to miss.

It was hard for me to process it all. I knew there was enormous talent on the staff, but it was pulling in different directions. I knew that without a strong leader, we would never find the right tone. . .or really any tone. I also knew that I loved writing as a team sport. I laughed more in those two months than I’d ever laughed before. And I got paid more than I’d ever been paid before. That seemed like an incredible deal. Still, the overwhelming emotion I felt at the end of my first job as a TV writer was. . .confusion. I had nothing to compare The Wilton North Report to, so I had no idea if the past three months had been a typical experience or not. Was all TV like that?

December 2012

Twenty-five years later, I can finally answer the question: Yes. All TV is like that. And the confusion I felt after my first three months has never gone away. I have more experience but no greater clarity. Each job has its joys and frustrations; each staff has its strong and weak links. I still marvel at all the wasted talent and thoughtless producers. The only difference now, as Danny pointed out, is: “You get used to it. I’m less surprised when someone says something stupid. It’s still frustrating but less surprising.”

Fox never did crack the late-night genre. As for coming up with an edgy, smart signature show, the network hit that sweet spot a couple of years later when sitcom veteran James L. Brooks teamed up with Matt Groening and Sam Simon to create The Simpsons. I was thrilled to write an episode in the second season (One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish) and Greg and Conan contributed many more when they joined the staff years later.

For the younger Wilton North writers, the concern that our careers would go down with the ship proved unfounded. Alec, Greg, and Conan all flourished. Danny is now an executive producer at Modern Family and has been with that Emmy-winning show since it began. I returned to New York to work on magazines, but headed back in Los Angeles a few months later to write for the Smothers Brothers’ second stint in prime-time variety. (In 1988, the duo had a hit with a 20th anniversary special, and CBS hired them to do six more.) I had no place to live, so Tommy Smothers invited me to stay in the maid’s room of the huge apartment CBS had rented for him in Colonial House, a legendary West Hollywood apartment building. It was a nifty comeback to go from being on a canceled show to bumping into Bette Davis at the elevator.

Since then, I have worked steadily. I imagine when I die, the lede of my Variety obit will be that I created and ran ABC’s Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. I’ve also written for hits like Murphy Brown, Monk, and NCIS as well as for shows that didn’t make it like The Critic and The War Next Door, a hilarious USA network single-camera sitcom. I will never understand why those two series didn’t catch on. Like I said, TV confuses me.

As first experiences go, I could have done a lot worse than Wilton North. It wasn’t gentle, but it set realistic expectations. When I spoke to Danny last month, he summed up the experience perfectly: “I met a lot of funny people, and it made me feel like a TV career was possible.”

During that same conversation, I told Danny about my Thanksgiving memory at the pub with Conan and Greg and he responded, “I was alone, too, so first of all, fuck you.” Then he recalled that same Thanksgiving, he drove up to Malibu where he met a girl. They hit it off immediately and ended up having a relationship that lasted four entire weeks. “That girl was so fucking crazy,” he recalled with a hint of lingering fondness.

To me, The Wilton North Report was a lot like that girl.

Nell Scovell is most recently a Co-Executive Producer of Syfy’s Warehouse 13. She lives in Santa Monica with her husband and two kids. Riefenstahl had recovered her equilibrium, and her looks, by the time Schulberg said he found her in the autumn of 1945, possibly in the first week of November, not long before the first Nuremberg trial was scheduled to begin. “She was still really quite beautiful and, if you could forget her connections, really very charming, and I would think that, to many people, very convincing in her intensity about her art, her love of the mountains, and winter sports,” he said years later. “She was really quite a–quite an imposing piece of work.”

This was the first meeting between the two, but Schulberg had played a minor part–an extra in a crowd scene, if you will–in an earlier Riefenstahl drama. In 1938 she had made her first trip to America, ostensibly vacationing as a private citizen, although the visit was paid for by the German government. She was hoping to find an American distributor for Olympia–among her seventeen pieces of luggage she brought along three different cuts of the film, including one with all scenes of Hitler deleted–and hoping as well to hobnob with the powers that be in Hollywood, where German directors before her had found lucrative work (though they tended to be directors who hadn’t enjoyed Hitler’s patronage). She sailed into New York on November 4, hit the Stork Club and the Copacabana, and was pronounced “pretty as a swastika” by Walter Winchell. But there were protests and boycotts organized against her by anti-Nazi organizations, and the playing field tilted even further uphill a week later following the events of Kristallnacht, during which organized mobs throughout Germany beat and arrested thousands of Jews and murdered several hundred more while burning synagogues and looting Jewish businesses. She dismissed as “slander” news reports that, as Bach points out, “no one in Germany was denying.” (Rather, the Reich held the victims financially responsible for all the property damage.)

Riefenstahl left New York for Chicago, and then Detroit, where she received an unsurprisingly warm welcome from Henry Ford, the anti-Semitic car manufacturer and crank publisher, but otherwise was treated like a pariah. Unlike her reception in New York, where her ship had been met by a big, jostling crowd of mostly friendly newsmen and photographers seeking a big story in Hitler’s alleged girlfriend (she and the Führer were “just good friends,” the director had demurred with a giggle), when she stepped off the Super Chief in Hollywood, on November 24, she was greeted by a desultory crowd consisting of the German consul, a staff member from a local German-language newspaper, an American painter who shared her and Hitler’s penchant for the idealized male physique, and the painter’s brother.

“Where is the press?” she demanded, according to her publicist (who defected to the States at the end of her trip and wrote an amusing if sometimes suspect series of articles about her for a Hollywood newspaper).

“But you’re supposed to be here incognito,” she was told.

“Ja, but not so incognito,” she snapped.

The reception went from bad to worse. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League–a Communist-led group that Schulberg, then a party member, was likely part of–took out ads in the trade papers declaring, “There Is No Room in Hollywood for Leni Riefenstahl” while holding demonstrations in front of her hotel, the Garden of Allah, which forced her to relocate to a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. After some hemming and hawing, all of the town’s moguls declined to meet with her–with the exception of Walt Disney, who showed her some sketches for his latest work-in-progress, Fantasia, but then backed out of allowing her to screen Olympia for him, afraid that his unionized projectionists would spread the word and he’d be boycotted. (Decades later she would claim, incorrectly and ungraciously, that Olympia had beaten out Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the then-coveted Mussolini Cup at the 1938 Venice Film Festival.)

Socially, she fared little better. Wrote the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, “If Leni Riefenstahl, said to be Hitler’s girl friend, had any idea of finding [Hollywood] homes open to her, she must have been greatly disappointed. She might be on a desert island, so far as anyone in the film colony is concerned.” The right-wing comedy producer Hal Roach (Laurel and Hardy, the Our Gang shorts) threw a party for Riefenstahl “and asked all the main people in Hollywood to come,” as Schulberg recalled. “And all of the liberal people like Melvyn Douglas and Helen Gahagan and Dorothy Parker . . . Freddy March . . . there must have been twenty–they were each given a list of ten people to phone and say, ‘Don’t go.’ I had a list myself . . . Only about eight or ten people [attended]–just the extreme right-wing people, like Victor McLaglen . . . Basically, the party was a disaster for her.” Riefenstahl slipped away to Palm Springs, where she did some snubbing of her own, declining to meet with a prominent lawyer who was hoping to persuade her to use her influence with Hitler to ameliorate the mistreatment of Germany’s Jews.

“I hope next time it will be different when I come, yes?” she remarked manfully as she got on the train heading back east, reported Variety under the headline “Nazi Retreat from Hollywood Chilled by Frigid Farewells.”

Bruised but indomitable, seeing herself as a martyr–“Naturally,” she told a German reporter, “I ran into resistance from the Jews”–she returned home to Berlin in February of 1939, where she was debriefed by Goebbels, who noted in his diary: “Leni Riefenstahl reports to me on her trip to America. She gives me an exhaustive description, and one that is far from encouraging. We shall get nowhere there. The Jews rule by terror and bribery. But for how much longer?”

When Schulberg set out to find Riefenstahl in the fall of 1945–with, he would later claim, some kind of a warrant for her arrest–he had already located a copy of Triumph of the Will, portions of which would be shown at the trial. Putting motion pictures into evidence was then a radical notion; the prosecution wanted Riefenstahl to help legitimize their case by formally attesting to her movie’s authenticity. As well, Schulberg and the lawyers wanted her help in identifying some of the officials who had appeared in it as well as in other films. One of the charges against the defendants was conspiracy to commit aggressive war, something akin to a latter-day RICO indictment, so it was essential that the prosecution place the defendants at key events and establish a web of associations and responsibilities, especially among those who were expected to claim they were apolitical military officers or civilians.

Schulberg was also hoping Riefenstahl could point him toward copies of two documentary shorts she had directed for Hitler and Goebbels. Following her trail led him first to her abandoned home in Berlin, where he found “nothing but a lot of dirty laundry,” then Munich, then Salzburg, and finally the chalet in Kitzbühel, where he and his driver arrived in an open-air weapons carrier. Riefenstahl was “sort of hiding in the open,” he would later say. “It wasn’t exactly hiding, but she wasn’t advertising, either, what her address was.”

I should note that, although Schulberg’s account of meeting and arresting Riefenstahl in 1945 would remain fairly consistent through multiple tellings, no one who has looked into it has yet found any corroborating evidence. Given the scattershot nature of the official record from that chaotic time and place, this is not altogether surprising, though Riefenstahl’s absence from books and interviews by other Nuremberg participants is maybe more so. Riefenstahl herself didn’t mention Schulberg or the trial in her memoir (the one that does have her challenging Hitler’s racial beliefs to his face). Historians who have researched the matter believe one has to allow for the possibility that Schulberg embellished his account, or worse. He was, of course, a professional storyteller, as was Riefenstahl. I think his story has the clear ring of truth; it undeniably has the ring of poetry–of poetic justice.

In Kitzbühel, as Schulberg recalled, the chalet door was opened by “a short, nervous, overly polite little fellow,” a majordomo type who didn’t seem too happy to see Schulberg and who, Schulberg later realized–shades of Sunset Boulevard–was in fact Riefenstahl’s recently acquired and soon-to-be-deacquisitioned husband, a former major in the Wehrmacht. Schulberg was assured that Fräulein Riefenstahl would be eager to see him, but ended up cooling his heels in her study. “Marvelous, yes?” the majordomo husband said when he saw Schulberg looking at a book of stills from Tiefland. “Her greatest work. If only she is allowed to finish it.”

Half an hour later–allowing, presumably, for tactical primping–Riefenstahl made her entrance. “She was dressed informally in yellow corduroy slacks with a golden-brown leather jacket that blended prettily with her tanned complexion. She held out her hand to me, prima-donna fashion, and smiled grandly,” Schulberg wrote in “Nazi Pin-Up Girl,” a long and detailed article about their meeting he published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1946. (If he embellished his tale, he took the risk of doing so while it was still fresh in others’ minds.) “She reminded me of I don’t know how many actresses of her age I had met before, fading beauties who try to compensate in grooming, make-up and animation for what they begin to lack in physical appeal.”

Schulberg’s naval uniform was no doubt cause for suspicion during this initial conversation, which seems to have been less an interrogation than a kind of moral jousting match, something akin to the Frost-Nixon interviews. “Frighten her or flatter her” were his marching orders, he wrote, and he initially tried to draw her out, which wasn’t too hard, buttering her up with praise for the artistry of her early pictures before moving onto her Nazi-era oeuvre. “She immediately went into what I called her song and dance,” Schulberg recalled decades later. “She said that, ‘Of course everybody thinks because I made those films that I am a Nazi. I was never a Nazi. I’m a pure film artist. And my only interest in that film'”–Triumph of the Will–“‘was to make a work of art [on] a very interesting subject, which God knows it was.'” He added, probably employing understatement, “She went on like that.”

Hoping to bolster her case that her films transcended politics, and unaware of Schulberg’s civilian line of work, she bragged about the triumphant reception she’d been accorded on her visit to Hollywood–“as an artist.” He let that fib slide but did seize the opportunity to ask some pointed questions, according to his Saturday Evening Post account:

Hadn’t she been aware of the concentration camps?

“I had no idea,” she said, forgetting for the moment where she had found her Tiefland extras. “We never heard.”

Had she really been Hitler’s mistress?

“Of course not. I wasn’t his type. I’m too strong, too positive. He liked soft, cowlike women, like Eva Braun.”

So what made people think she was?

“They were jealous, and they didn’t understand.” She had had Hitler’s ear and could see him alone when it suited her, so people just assumed . . . “But that was purely professional, there was nothing personal about it. He just respected me because I was an artist. The SS and Goebbels hated me because I could go over their heads.” She and Goebbels had feuded over the making of Olympia, and she claimed he had retaliated in a particularly fiendish manner: by denying her publicity in the Reich’s newspapers. A laughable assertion, but one she held to. “He never mentioned me again,” she complained bitterly. “I was even afraid he might put me in a concentration camp.” who found again under little other get look cause differ small air between live take why close sun air much been between word how she four made end land while number before than make good stop even man door also animal father boy for act then were sentence grow his don’t play run get must are name same make man add her can there near boy back learn be work hot more no may also long small eye have sun her door men father city father should move us also off help would is air if line after sentence show animal you father long little hand large while call long also after would in name of water under end real time come under stop our real could through study far man your most more number is every tell also school why many that spell thing run me between of part if may press that differ run real own left add know find see two him story been live hand small near from call sound press back under about press other round large were spell get life read on play great look sea point before our father act when any before

You know, it doesn’t even matter what I type down here because NOBODY is going to bother reading not only an ad for a receptionist AND a time-share salesperson, but also an excerpt from an article on an obscure television show, bits of a biography of a German Nazi-sympathizer film director, and a random dictionary attack. Nope, I could type any old nonsense down here and it just wouldn’t matter. Kind of like the ad itself.

Of course, the nonsense in the ad seems to be working really well, since it appears in hundreds of ads, mostly selling tickets to Miami Dolphins and Seattle Seahawks games. I’m not sure what about the wall of text appeals to folks who are looking for tickets to those games, but there you go.

Thanks, Christina!