I've been thinking a lot lately about Sally Rogers. My favorite character on The Dick Van Dyke Show, she was the first girl comedy writer I ever heard of, so as far as I was concerned, she must be what we were all supposed to look like. If all I needed was a smart mouth, a pair of sensible pumps and a dime store bow in my hair to make it in network television, show me the way to Woolworth's. Imagine my disappointment at learning that they won't let a woman meeting Sally's general description anywhere near the lot nowadays, except maybe to work the cash register at the commissary.In the pilot episode, Rose Marie, the former film actress who played Sally, was thirty-eight years old. Her writing partner, Buddy, who got his start in vaudeville, was in his fifties, but they were inexplicably portrayed as being around the same age. She even called him "kid," but then she called everybody that. I was never sure what the deal was between Buddy and Sally, since he was supposedly married to somebody else--but even back in third grade, when I became hopelessly addicted to classic TV watching re-runs after school--I felt a certain forbidden tension in their relentless banter.
What really didn't add up for me, though, was the way Sally was far savvier than either Buddy or their head writer Rob at answering the senseless demands behind the scenes at The Alan Brady Show. As smart as she was, the poor girl couldn't get a decent date to save her life. Laura Petrie, meanwhile, was played by a twenty-four-year-old mother of a six-year-old child, putting Mary Tyler Moore in eleventh grade at the time old Dick knocked her up and moved her out to New Rochelle for a life of leisure. Remarkably, this fundamentally accurate depiction of socio-sexual politics driving the industry hasn't changed much over the last fifty years. This despite all that nonsense with the Women's Movement and the thousands of girl soldiers dying and dismembered in Iraq and that loud mouth one with the philandering husband who's running for president.
The upshot of all this is that I'm feeling a tad miffed today at having been unlinked by fellow bloggers Ken Levine and Craig Maizin. This is the blogospheric equivalent of asking a girl to leave a party because of an embarrassing drunken rant. I actually know Ken, peripherally, through his writing partner, a fellow Miamian who came to see me performing in an improv club back before South Beach was a cool place for either one of us to be. Coincidentally, they had a sitcom about a girl writer called Almost Perfect on the air at around the time I came out here. The character was the show runner of a hard-nosed cop show who would call her daddy and cry when the guys beneath her were mean. Although I didn't know it at the time, that too was a spot-on skewering of the goings on in a typical writer's room. What I like about Ken's blog is that unlike everybody else in Hollywood, Ken actually does know everything, and he really has been around forever. He's not old or anything, just a very young success I'm told was running M*A*S*H* by the time he was in his mid-twenties. I was like eleven at the time, so by all rights the job should have been mine. I suspect the real reason his blog is so popular is that deluded fans like me honestly believe he'll have an astonishing late career success and start doling out jobs based on the pithy one upsmanship going on in his comments section.
Craig I don't know personally, but when he first linked "Things They Don't Tell You In Film School," he probably expected semi-relevant screenwriting tips from someone who actually has some of those to share. A top feature writer and longtime activist, his site offers a valid service to aspirants--though I'd wager that the bulk of his anonymous commentary is left by major screenwriters representing warring factions within the Writers Guild. Half the time I have no idea what the heck they're talking about, the other half I find it a bit hard to care, inasmuch as gender inequity, fat discrimination, how to extend an unemployment claim and other super important stuff that's all about me so rarely comes up among the big boys. I don't personally know any girl bloggers in the Scribosphere, although I like Jane Espensen because she always tells you what she had for lunch. I think that's an important thing to know about people, as is what they choose to wear in front of the computer and whether or not they drink and blog. A turkey sandwich, pajamas, and hell yes are my current stats. Diablo Cody isn't really one of us, since she was a blogger before she was a screenwriter as opposed to vice versa. She's also a former stripper who wrote a memoir called Candy Girl resulting in a three-picture blind deal at Paramount. What can I tell you, powerful men like whores. Not that I'm accusing her of being a whore, just because she sold her body for money and got a career out of it, so please don't have her lawyers call my lawyers. And yes, I am just jealous, especially since she also wrote an impossibly buzzworthy first screenplay, Juno, which white hot director Jason Reitman just wrapped for John Malkovich's production company. It's about a girl who sells her baby and thinks it's funny. I'm predicting this one becomes next year's Little Miss Sunshine. As for Jill Soloway, her post entitled "Courtney Cox's Asshole," may be the funniest piece of American literature to come down the "pike" in the last century.
Sometimes I think we're this big Algonquin Round Table in the sky, and I only wish I were a latter day Dorothy Parker, who never wrote a novel or any real masterpiece and is thus best remembered for her easy way with a quip fueled by talent, martinis and bitterness. If she had a blog in her declining Hollywood years, I might have unlinked the poor dear myself. Other days, I'm good old Sal, only with too much fashion sense to shellac my hair into an immovable wave and paint my lips into a permanent smile--and too many street smarts to believe the truly important thing is to keep them laughing in the aisles. Unless of course you're writing about the bleached anal canal of a certain Mrs. David Cox-Arquette. Damn, I wish I'd come up with that one.
