02-03-2025
The man responsible for the worst Oscars ever
When Bruce Vilanch appears via Zoom from his self-described 'Hollywood man cave', his screen name reads ' Travis Kelce's mother'. With his long blond hair and outsized glasses, the veteran comedy writer is certainly the doppelgänger of Donna Kelce, parent of the NFL tight end whose girlfriend is superstar Taylor Swift. 'I want them to stay together because I want to ride this joke for a while,' he grins. 'The resemblance is alarming.'
It's the type of zinger that celebrities from Bob Hope to Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams have paid Vilanch, who is Jewish, gay and outrageously unfiltered, to craft for over 50 years. As an award-winning writer for over 25 Academy Award ceremonies (graduating to head writer from 2000 to 2014), arguably nobody else has shaped the Oscars in their own waspish – and Donna Kelce-like – image.
His one-liners have won him two Emmys, including one for the 1992 Oscars ceremony. After then 73-year-old Jack Palance did one-armed push-ups during his Best Supporting Actor acceptance speech to prove his virility, Vilanch supplied host Billy Crystal with a cascade of punchlines, including, 'Jack Palance is the father of all those kids', following a musical number from the children of the Steven Spielberg film Hook.
Rather than focusing on his achievements, however, Vilanch's riotous new book It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote is a compendium of his most memorable turkeys. 'Over the years, people would ask me 'How did this happen? Who said yes to this? And have they paid their debt to society?,' says the 77-year-old of the book's inception.
Starting his career writing jokes for Bette Midler, Vilanch might be best known to US viewers for occupying a box on the popular game show Hollywood Squares (the British version of which was retitled Celebrity Squares). in the Nineties But most of the follies in It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time…hark back to the sequin-spangled 1970s variety gold rush in US television.
The flop he's asked about the most is 1978's Star Wars Holiday Special, a two-hour TV event involving Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford's Han Solo, and Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia journeying to Chewbacca's home planet to celebrate 'Life Day'.
It encompassed a trainwreck of sketches featuring a four-armed cook, Chef Gormaanda (Harvey Korman in drag), Diahann Carroll singing seductively via a VR programme and sitcom stalwart Bea Arthur reminding everyone of her Tony-winning roots by belting out a doomy substitute for Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht's The Alabama Song (which she wanted to perform) to a Cantina-full of shonky aliens. Behind the scenes, Arthur and the crew profanely nicknamed one creature 'C–t face', owing to his mask resembling something a gynaecologist might encounter. During one take, she hurled her arm out with cinematic grandeur, knocking him to the ground, before deadpanning: 'I've never hit a man in the c–t before.'
Even diehard fans wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot-lightsaber – it was never made officially available, Fisher described it as 'so bad it's bad', and Star Wars creator George Lucas vowed he would destroy every bootleg copy of it if he 'had the time and a sledgehammer.' 'Whenever I'd run into George Lucas at the Oscars afterwards, you had to pretend it hadn't happened,' laughs Vilanch. 'It was like the child they never talk about in Virginia Woolf.'
Fisher, who had grown up performing with her famous mother Debbie Reynolds, was jockeying to croon a maudlin Joni Mitchell number in a bid to secure a recording contract as a singer-songwriter. Mitchell vetoed the idea, leaving Fisher to bring the curtain down with a hilariously overwrought anthem extolling the joy of Life Day to John Williams' Star Wars theme.
Rumours persist that Fisher – whose addictions were spiralling at the time – was high on cocaine while singing it. 'She may have been, but not with me,' dismisses Vilanch. 'We joked about it a lot, but if I was doing it, I would have had the chemical additive! None of the cast wanted to be there. They all wanted to cash the check and get out of there.'
Some of his clunkers have a cultural legacy beyond kitsch time capsules. Bizarrely, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, on which Vilanch was head writer, marked the first ever TV appearance of rock band Kiss. Lynde was the waspish, effeminate, double entendre-deploying breakout star of Hollywood Squares. In the UK, he's chiefly remembered as Uncle Arthur in the sitcom Bewitched or the sibilant voice of The Hooked Claw in the Hanna-Barbera animation Wacky Races. Lynde had no idea who Kiss were, remaining blithely uninterested until frontman Gene Simmons stuck his legendary-long tongue out at him. At which point, Lynde drawled, with cheeky innuendo: 'I would like to meet him...'
On screen, Lynde was yukking it up in genial skits alongside Margaret Hamilton (The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West) and dancing with hoe-downing truckers. But his personal life was volatile, and Vilanch says his mood could change when drunk. 'On one drink, he was charming and funny,' remembers Vilanch. 'On two drinks, he was like the Nazi High Command. He was fundamentally unhappy. He had come up in New York theatre with Woody Allen and Mel Brooks who became movie stars, but Paul was a strong flavour – he could only be a sidekick, because if he was in your face for 90 minutes it would be too much.'
Yet they found common ground in being gay men in Hollywood – although Lynde never officially came out. Whenever they visited bars together, Lynde would be thrown out. During a stint on the wholesome Donny & Marie Show, the program-makers frequently had to cover up the aftermath of his disruption. 'The Osmonds had a team – the Osmo Fuzz we called them – who were like a SWAT team that would dive in and pull him out of situations because he was always getting into trouble,' says Vilanch. Lynde passed away in 1982, feeling he'd achieved nothing. 'If he knew we were talking about him 40 years later, he would be entirely amused,' notes Vilanch. 'He would be the last person to expect that his work would live on.'
From The Village People's ill-fated 1980 musical film Can't Stop the Music, the script of which Vilanch drafted on a 'fat farm' at the behest of producer Allan Carr ('The idea was we'd be in isolation and get more work done. That we'd be starving and in foul moods never crossed his mind') to 1976's infamous The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, the making of a Vilanch production often wound up more chaotically entertaining than anything on screen.
Case in point: Vilanch's baptism of fire at the 1989 Academy Awards, with what might be its most controversial telecast. Gilded in camp infamy, producer Allan Carr unleashed 'the Titanic of TV production numbers'.
It began with an unknown actress, Eileen Bowman, playing Snow White, attempting to glad-hand squirming A-listers such as Tom Hanks and Sigourney Weaver, before joining Rob Lowe to duet on a parody version of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary. Then septuagenarian Merv Griffin crooned his 1950 hit I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts in a mockney accent, before visibly-aged stars of yesteryear like Dorothy Lamour were ushered on stage, and the auditorium looked shocked. It was such a colossal cringe-inducing debacle that Disney filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement and 17 Hollywood icons (among them Julie Andrews and Paul Newman) signed an open letter decrying it as 'an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry'. Bowman signed a gagging order preventing her from speaking about it.
'I mean, it was a crazy spectacle, but ultimately it was a misfire because it was the wrong room,' says Vilanch, who says his role at the Oscars was to defuse it from being 'pompous and a lot of insincere people being sincere'.
Though he predicts this year's ceremony will be 'subdued' due to the wild fires ('lots of first responders in tuxedos and firefighters in ballgowns'), you hope that in an increasingly risk-averse world, someone takes a big, misguided swing -- since failure makes for far better stories. He notes that nobody sets out to write the worst shows in TV historyn, but sometimes a perfect storm conspires to birth a monster.
'Nobody's going to watch any of the works in my book thinking they're finding old Fellini movies, insisting 'no, this was his early period but it's significant',' concludes Vilanch. But, he says, stoned podcasters will stumble across footage and boggle 'Dude, how did this get made?'.
It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote is published on March 4 through Chicago Review Press
