Bruce Vilanch on the writing of Oscars, “Star Wars Holiday Special”

Remember that Snow White-Rob Lowe Debân at the 1989 Oscars? What about the 1978 bizarre “Star Wars Holiday Special”? Or the village of 1980 Disco Bomb “Can't Stop The Music”?

Bruce Vilanch had a hand in all of the above and lived to kiss and say – and now write about it. His new book, “it seemed to be a bad idea at the time”, details his involvement in some of the most horrible moments in the history of entertainment. Never of the shy or retired type, Vilanch is happy to kiss his heritage (which is easier to do when you have also won two Emmy and writes for 25 Oscar television).

“These are some of the biggest disasters, but everyone has disasters,” he told Times in a recent interview. “It was not as if they said:” Oh, it's S—. Let's go to Vilanch. “It's just the chance of the draw.

Vilanch, now a snarky and young 76, appears as a great gay mupe, caustically friendly and wonderfully gay. He has succeeded enough for having been the subject of an excellent documentary on The Craft of Comedy (“Get Bruce” of 1999, with Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Nathan Lane, among others), and he is sufficiently seasoned to know where many bodies are buried.

And yes, he helped write serious seriousness.

Part of this can be attributed at the time when he made his showbiz bones. The 1970s were the decade of the special TV during prime time, generally built around an intermediate star and featuring talents of the ventilation network. (Synergy. This has existed for a minute.) The specials have been a blatant attempt to offer something for everyone, in a preposterous era defined by broadcasting, as opposed to the narrow fund of today.

It was not, by coincidence, an era when drugs were rather widespread.

“Many of these things have been done in a cloud of smoke,” said Vilanch. “It was also a crazy period when it was a three or four channel universe, so that you can get out of it with a lot because a lot of people came home and watched television at a certain hour. People really sat in the living room. They only do that now for a few events, either a football match, or Nikki Glaser roasts a football player. “”

Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Anthony Daniels as C3PO in “Star Wars Holiday Special” by CBS (1978).

(CBS via Getty Images)

These were the circumstances that gave us “The Star Wars Holiday Special. “George Lucas' space adventure – there was only one at the time – was heated to red.

The results, broadcast on November 17, 1978, were not spectacular, but they were spectacularly strange. I could feel it even as a “Star Wars”, 8 years old. History, as it is, implies Chewbacca's mission to return to its native kashyyyk planet to celebrate life day. The main members of the distribution were on site. The same goes for the pillars of CBS, including Art Carney, Bea Arthur and Harvey Korman, who all stopped to make eccentric pieces.

“We did it on a hand painted by hand gathered other things,” said Vilanch. “We did not go to London for six months to shoot this thing. It was crazy. We had extraterrestrials by hand that we had to get in the store store. Anyone who was interested in “Star Wars”, looked at him and went: “What is it?

“And then he disappeared. We thought we could put him in a shameless grave and no one would really find him. ”

Enter: Internet, where all the shallow graves are ultimately unearthed. As Vilanch recalled: “When I started to do podcasts during the covid, people much younger than I would say:” The special of Star Wars Holiday “, how did it happen? Who said yes? And have they paid their debt to society? “”

Vilanch writes on the “keyboard warriors” who find him when they discover that he was one of the responsible parties of such arches. They also want to know the 1989 OscarsWho started with the Snow White show, played by the relatively anonymous Eileen Bowman, interacting with stars in the audience bearing a collective look of “What's going on at the moment?” This led to a duet with Lowe on a Hollywood theme of “Proud Mary”.

The answer was far from enthusiastic. But Vilanch was essentially an innocent spectator, even as a writer in the series. The bit was an original idea of ​​producer Allan Carr, which also hired (and fired) Vilanch on “Can't Stop the Music” (and, it should be noted, also produced the huge 1978 -production “Grease”). The Oscar debacle effectively ended the Carr's career. He died in 1999.

“They had delivered the show to Allan as a Savior because the notes had dropped, and there was fresh blood at the academy,” said Vilanch. “His mandate was:” Make him different, make him young, make him unusual “. They therefore tried not to guess it. Vilanch always has a weakness for his late friend and is currently working on a play about him.

This television did not slow down the roller of Vilanch. He reigned for many years as a square of Wisecracking Center on “Hollywood Squares”, a space formerly occupied by Paul Lynde, for whom Vilanch wrote another special presented in the book, “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special” of 1976. “A game of six degrees by Bruce Vilanch would understand Bette Midler, Billy Crystal, Steven Tyler and a long list of others. The guy knows and wrote for many people.

“When you make the Oscars, you meet the stars who invite only in the series, and they all walk in your office with their publicists and their holistic spouses and psychiatrists for pets and all the other people around them,” he said. “So you meet a lot of people and I love it.”

He helped serve a lot of turkeys. And now it can swallow up.