An interview with Bruce Vilanch, high-demand Hollywood funnyman
and subject of the documentary Get Bruce! By Rob Blackwelder / SPLICED Online
Having a smoke outside San Francisco's Prescott Hotel, Bruce
Vilanch is getting stares from passers-by.
In most any other city, it could just be his shaggy, sheepdog blond
mane and beard, and his glasses with bright red frames garnering all the
amused looks. But in a berg quite accustom to the bizarre, such protracted
glances don't come so easy.
It's the fact that he's wearing a T-shirt sporting a huge print of
the Cowardly Lion, which looks remarkably like Vilanch himself, that seems
to be garnering the man amused sideways glances - and he's eating it up.
Waving at people and flashing an effervescent, quizzical smile, he's at
least as amused as they are.
Such whimsy is Vilanch's stock in trade. As Hollywood's
behind-the-scenes court jester, he's the man almost every star in town
calls on when they need something funny to say in public.
He writes for Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal
when they host "Comic Relief." Paul Reiser, Lily Tomlin, Roseanne, Shirley
MacLaine, Carol Burnett, Nathan Lane and Bette Milder all come to him for
material at times. His jokes are the life support that keep the Oscars,
Emmys and Grammys broadcasts from flat-lining. And now Hollywood had
decided to show its appreciation in the love-letter documentary, Get
Bruce!, which catalogs Vilanch's background - class clown, Chicago Tribune
columnist, self-described "big queen," writer for "The Brady Bunch Variety
Hour" and "Donny and Marie" - in between interviews with adoring
celebrities.
Always ready with a quick witticism (when the phone rings during
our interview, he answers it and chirps, "Hello, proctology..."), Vilanch
is in town, on a break from his most recent full-time gig as head writer
and frequent panelist for the new "Hollywood Squares," to talk about the
movie that sings his praises. But, he insists with an ironic grin added to
his rapid-fire speech pattern, "I'm not doing this as an act of
self-promotion...although it will wind of being that anyway."
PopcornQ: I don't expect you to tell us how much money you make, but how do you
bill someone for making them funny? Per hour? Per joke? Per project? How
does this work?
Vilanch: I've done it every which way. I mean, when I started out I was
billing per hour, like a shrink because you would sit with somebody and
work. But most of it, if it's for a live show it's usually a buy-out. A flat
fee. I've worked where people have called and said, "I'll pay you by the
hunk" - I've been hoping to get paid by a hunk someday! [Putting on
imperial airs.] Have him shaved and oiled and brought to my tent!
But they say, you know, "I need five minutes on living in Beverly
Hills" or whatever it is, and I'll write five minutes for a flat fee. But I
do a lot of other kinds of work. I write screenplays that don't get made
and pilots that don't get picked up, and I re-write other people's movies,
and those are all different kinds of fees.
PopcornQ: Has your price gone up since the movie?
Vilanch: [Laughing] Not yet, but it hasn't opened yet! [The film opens
September 17.] But the kind of stuff I do, I mean, the price can never go
up on the Academy Awards and the Emmys or any of those things because
they're like honorariums anyway when you do them. It's an honor to be
working on them.
PopcornQ: Well, that's a bit of a stretch.
Vilanch: Can you believe it? I know! They make a humongous profit, but the
people that work on the shows don't get paid a lot because they're working
on the Oscars show. It's the biggest show in the world.
PopcornQ: Do you do a lot of screenwriting?
Vilanch: I do a lot of screen re-writing. I've written about 15 screenplays
and they all sold - they were all sold on pitches. I've never had to write
a spec script. But I've had everything happen, you know - as [film critic]
Pauline Kael says, Hollywood is where you can die from encouragement. I
mean, I've sold all these scripts and nothing's been made. Studios have
closed, stars have died. I had a director find Jesus. And the pictures just
don't get made.
PopcornQ: So what's your work routine? Somebody calls you up with a project and you...
Vilanch: Well, it depends on what it is. Generally with the Oscars or the Emmys
there isn't much you can do until the nominations are announced. Then you
know what kind of year you're dealing with - what's been overlooked, what
the issues are. On the Emmys show [this year], for example, "The Sopranos"
got 16 nominations, which is something we're going to be making jokes about
in the course of the show. But who knew before the nominations came out?
PopcornQ: Or that Saving Private Ryan would get nominated for everything at the
Oscars last year.
Vilanch: Well, that one we kind of knew. We didn't know Shakespeare in
Love was going to sweep. But one of the reasons Billy didn't do the show
was that we both knew Saving Private Ryan was going to be very big, and
you can't make fun of it. He didn't do the show the Schindler's List
year, either - Whoopi did the show that year, too - because you just can't
make fun of some of these things. I mean, what was Billy's production
number gonna be? Was he going to be hopping around the beach on one leg
looking for his arm to "Me and My Shadow"?
PopcornQ: Are there any jokes that you won't do? Anything off limits?
Vilanch: Sure. My general rule of thumb is: did anybody die? It's difficult
to do joke in which death is involved! We've all seen the JFK, Jr. jokes on
the internet, but you can't do those publicly. Sometimes there are people
you can't make jokes about because the situation is embarrassing,
especially if they're going to be there. It's just cruel.
Billy sights this Robert Downey, Jr. joke we had a few years ago.
It was a funny joke, but the guy was really in trouble. It was trouble
trouble. He's not like Charlie Sheen, who admits he's spent 150 grand on
Heidi Fleiss's girls. We had one joke one year about Richard Gere. It was
the year of those Richard Gere rumors, and it happened to be the same year
that An American Tail came out... [slipping into a capricious grin].
PopcornQ: Ooohhhh, nooooo. [laughing]
Vilanch: So we had this joke that Richard Gere was going to present the
next award with Fievel, but Fievel backed out.
PopcornQ: Oooo!
Vilanch: It went right down the wire, and Billy noticed Richard Gere was in
the audience...and we just couldn't do that. Then, of course, the following
year, he came out and made a speech about how we should all save Tibet and
we should all channel our thoughts toward the Dalai Lama and it was a big
grandstanding thing and everybody just sat there. When Richard came off, I
said to him, "Richard, the Dalai Lama just called. He changed the channel.
He's watching 'Lucy'!"
PopcornQ: Is there a celebrity you haven't written for that you'd like to?
Vilanch: [English comedian and actor] Eddie Izzard is absolutely brilliant.
I would love to write something for him. I'm sure there are others out
there, but off the top of my head...I'm tempted to say Matt Damon, just for
the meeting [tosses off a quick, naughty smile]. But I actually know him so
PopcornQ: You seem like the kind of affable guy that everybody likes. Have you
faced any kind of discrimination in showbiz because of your sexuality?
Vilanch: Not that I've known...but I'm assuming it's happened because I've
seen it happen with other people. I've had a producer say to me, "I don't
think women are that funny. I don't like to work with women writers." I
mean, that bald-faced. So I'm sure that someone has said [about me],
"Well, he's a little light in the loafer for this kind of thing."
It's probably happened in areas like TV pilots or screenwriting or
things like that. I think for a long time there was a code. George Cukor
told me there was a code at MGM. If you said a writer was strong on
dialogue, that meant he was gay. Strong on story, that meant big, butch
man. Hire him for the Clark Gable movie. But if you said strong on
dialogue, that meant a bitchy queen and he can write for women.
PopcornQ: Tell me what makes you laugh.
Vilanch: What makes me laugh? Richard Nixon always made me laugh [ironic
smile]. I think, pomposity deflated. Failed seriousness, which I think is
the definition of camp. Drag queens [for example] are trying very hard to
be real women, and they fail, and that's what so wonderful about them. And
of course, the reason they fail is because they extend themselves beyond
real women. They become like hyper-women, and that's hilarious. They're
commenting on women at the same time they're trying to be women. I mean,
they would love to be them. That's why they're in drag. That's always made
me laugh.
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