Word: gelbart
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despite the desperation surrounding a play in trouble, doctors have strict rules of courtesy. "The first thing you find out is if the author knows that someone is being brought in," says Larry Gelbart (Sly Fox), whose efforts on Ballroom were not enough to keep it from closing. "You owe that to a colleague." Jerome Robbins notes ruefully, "I've needed help...
...seen her before I worked on her.'" If a show is a smash, the original team generally gets the credit, not the doctor. So why does a successful playwright or director answer those frantic calls late at night? "You've got to make a house call," says Gelbart, who, like many play doctors, often slips medical touches into his conversation. He adds, "Any Christ complex you have rises immediately to the top." Power may in fact be the best satisfaction. Says Joe Stein: "I've learned something about what it is like to be a medical specialist...
MOVIE MOVIE Directed by Stanley Donen Screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller...
...want something light and fun, try Movie, Movie. Larry Gelbart co-wrote it, and he's good (see how fast I've fogotten Oh, God?), and the cast includes George C. Scott, wife Trish, George Burns (Oh, Shit), Barry Bostwick ("Asshole" of Rocky Horror fame and a good Broadway actor), and Kathleen Beller, who just played a terminally ill girl in a movie filmed in my home town of West Hartford, Connecticut (thank you), and who swam very naked in The Betsey. A group of silent and old-movie parodies, which we need like we need sequels to The Poseidon...
Technically, Oh God! is an unholy mess, with soupy music and thoroughly insensitive editing (which, for example, totally destroys the performance of William Daniels as Denver's boss, an actor whose magnificent comic timing is chopped to pieces). Maybe Reiner and Gelbart could have wrung more humor from hell instead of heaven; Exorcist II: The Heretic was infinitely more amusing...