Word: meehanics
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Like many of the characters he writes about, Meehan had a modest upbringing that was the prelude to a life of fame and fortune. Raised in Suffern, N.Y., then a small town dotted with apple orchards, he was the oldest of four brothers and sisters. When he was 15, his father died, and his mother returned to nursing to support her family. He says with astonishment in almost a whisper that he has a jacket that cost as much as the house he grew...
From the age of 10, Meehan was set on becoming a writer, and he went to college fully expecting to be a "serious" novelist one day. At Hamilton College in upstate New York, he earned the senior writing prize of $350 before graduating and moving to New York City. By age 24, he had landed a job at the New Yorker, where his first editor, Roger Angell, remembers him as being "terrifically funny" even then...
...Meehan wrote dozens of parodies, short stories and other humor pieces for the New Yorker. One of the more famous was a 1962 short story, "Yma Dream," a frequently anthologized tale of a strange cocktail party whose guests bear tongue-twister names. He adapted it as a sketch for Anne Bancroft's 1970 television special, Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man, which not only won him an Emmy but also introduced him to both its director and producer, Martin Charnin, who later offered him his first Broadway show, and his future writing partner, Bancroft's husband...
...Donnell, who calls his partnership with Meehan "an arranged marriage but happily a loving one," is similarly inclined to repeat their Hairspray success. The two men have completed an outline for a musical based on Waters' Cry-Baby, a 1990 film starring Johnny Depp as a bad boy wooing a good girl. Other possibilities for the writing team: a musical version of The Addams Family film and a film version of the musical Hairspray...
First, however, is a movie of The Producers musical, which Meehan and Brooks say they plan to write next year and hope to begin filming in February 2005 for release by Christmas 2005. And Meehan is committed to Rocky, for which he has already turned in a detailed outline that Stallone calls "superb...