You can file this one under, “What they don’t teach in film school”:
“Penny [Marshall] and Cindy [Williams] would plow through writers, leaving me constantly looking for replacements. Sometimes I would go over to Happy Days and entice a writer or two to come and take a spin on Laverne & Shirley. I pretended it was an easy breezy show to write for, but most of the writers on Happy Days knew better. When you hire actors or actresses for a series, you look for people who have well-rounded-lives with supportive friends and family. But when hiring writers, you look for people with no lives so they will be willing to stay as long as you want them to in order to get the script rewritten before the cameras roll. I searched in comedy clubs, workshops, and bars for writers with no lives who would work late on any episode, difficult or not.”
Garry Marshall
My Happy Days in Hollywood (written with Lori Marshall)
Now Garry didn’t exactly say how Penny and Cindy would “plow through writers,” but he did comment that it was once bad enough that one of the writers wanted to run over the show’s stars with his car when he saw them in the studio parking lot. I have no idea how indicative that is of TV writers today, but here’s a somewhat related quote from the podcast Scriptnotes:
“Your passion is writing. You like the idea of writing screenplays, but that’s not what screenwriting is. Screenwriting is a job where you write and also get punched in the head a lot.”
Screenwriter Craig Mazin (The Hangover Part II)
Transcript of Scriptnotes, Ep. 54
So…even if you’re a working screenwriter—not all days are happy days.
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