Stay Tuned, really.

I don't follow "the trades" or anything really about the going ons in Hollywood. Never have, never will. My media-savvy daughters are much more attuned to pop culture than I'll ever be. You can imagine my surprise when a friend sent me this link last week.

You might not know this, but back in the late 80s, I collaborated with screenwriters (copywriters) Tom Parker and Jim Jennewein at the initial stages of creating an original movie. We had just published MADWEEK, a full length advertising trade parody magazine that opened the doors for three obscenely underemployed copywriters, and were determined to put our warped minds together on the next big thing. 

The next thing happened to be a movie script -- 'Stay Tuned.'

As we were all aficionados of Groove Tube, Kentucky Fried Movie and National Lampoon, a send-up of TV in the late 80's seemed like a good idea. We spent many evenings and weekends cracking each other up and putting words down on paper. Occasionally. One of us had a connection to an agent, and before too long, 'Stay Tuned' became the highest paid script ever purchased (at least in 1989).

Unfortunately, my father's passing right about then necessitated my departure from the project, but Tom and Jim took it to completion. The film was released in 1992 and starred John Ritter, Pam Dawber and Eugene Levy.

It was a manifestation of something we learned while doing MADWEEK -- "dreamers dream, doers do."

My friends Tom and Jim went on to write a shit ton more scripts and produced a boatload more movies. A stellar achievement in a cutthroat business. 

My short attention span and pugilistic manner would have been disastrous in Hollywood. The stories they would tell me about studio notes, rewrites and 'D Girls,' still make me shudder like a piece of errant tin foil that found its way into my chicken salad sandwich. 

Had a small taste of that years later, when I teamed up with Rob Schwartz and we were hired to write an episode of 'Mission Hill,' an animated show created by Josh Weinstein and Bill Oakley who were show runners on a little series called 'The Simpsons.' We both discovered that sitting in a writer's room til 2 AM, surrounded by stale Burger King onion rings and a bunch of Harvard Lampoon grads who hadn't showered since their Cambridge days, was not the dream we had once dreamt.

Ironically and perhaps fittingly, I didn't find true happiness and freedom in writing until I started this blog 16 years ago. It doesn't make any money, other than operating as a self promo for my long-dormant freelance copywriting days. 

I don't get 'notes' or rewrite requests, unless Ms. Muse spots a glaring typo or one of my many run-on sentences (yes, she copyedited this draft). And I get to do and write what I please. Some days I don't even feel obligated to summarize the piece with a snappy, funny ending.

Last month, Jim contacted me and shared the amazing news that 'Stay Tuned', which over the years had become a 'cult classic,' was in development at Hulu as a new series, with 'Book of Mormon' starts Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells both starring and attached as executive producers.  

I know with talent like Gad and Rannells behind it, 'Stay Tuned' the series will be big on snappy, funny endings — who knows, maybe they'll even plug Round Seventeen in one of the shows — and have as many episodes as 'The Simpsons!'

So long Dirty Nursing Home.