Word: writer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rock, despite his brash stage persona, is often subdued in private. His head writer, Jeff Stilson, says the man viewers see on Rock's specials is actually "Chris Rock times 1,000." Still, when a subject strikes a chord with him, Rock will go off on a comic jam session. Take white rap-rock. "It's kind of sad that when you watch MTV, you don't see a lot of cool white guys anymore that are cool without acting black," he says. "Like when I was a kid, Axl Rose was cool. David Lee Roth was cool. And they...
...receive such praise, from such stars, in public, you should have to be either God or dead. Bruce Vilanch is neither. He is a comedy writer. His name can't be found on film scripts or Broadway marquees or even as Executive Associate Creative Consultant on a UPN sitcom. Yet he is the unseen perp of some of the funniest, most famous or notorious moments in recent show-biz history...
...song to Johnny Carson (You Made Me Watch You). He helped Billy Crystal with the '90s' most sit-throughable Oscar shows, capped by the 1993 gender-bending song parody (to the tune of The Tender Trap): "Those eyes/ Those thighs/ Surprise!/It's The Crying Game." He was the writer when Whoopi Goldberg performed before President and Mrs. Clinton--and when Ted Danson did his blackface bit at a 1993 Friars Club banquet. "He told the worst, racist, dirty, just filthy awful jokes," Vilanch recalls. "All mine." The assembled luminaries were embarrassed, aghast. "I mean, they were like marble...
Stars typically take the cheers or the heat for these moments; writers just take the money. It has ever been thus. Bob Hope's gagmen were awakened at 3 a.m. for emergency jokes; James Allardice wrote the droll TV monologues that made Alfred Hitchcock a household deity. But these scribes were as anonymous as the Roman speechwriter who whispered into the dying Caesar's ear, "Say, 'Et tu, Brute?'" So it's nice that Vilanch, a wide guy with a blond mop that makes him look like an obscene Senor Wences puppet...
...realized it was 10% of nothing. That felt like a small price for a guy to call me all the time and tell me I'm funny. Still, I wanted to be sure I had the very best manager telling me I'm funny. So I asked some writer friends for the names of their agents and called three of them...