My TiVo's set to grab the Academy Awards tonight but I won't be watching in real time. We all have performers who usually fail to amuse us and near the top of my list is Jimmy Kimmel, plus it's always felt wrong to me to have the host be someone who's not a major motion picture star or Johnny Carson.
Actually, I don't think even a favorite film actor could get me to sit through all the self-congratulations and thanking of agents…but the show is sometimes fun when you have it all on a digital recorder and you race through it in twenty minutes via fast-forwarding.
My pal Ken Levine will be reviewing it on his fine podcast, and he has this article up about what it must be like to write that telecast. Like him, I came close to getting that gig once. A gent who produced the Oscars one year told me, "If I do it next year, you'll be one of the writers" and then he chose not to do it the following year.
I did work on one award show and it was chaotic but a lot of fun except when Lorne Greene decided he didn't like the speech someone had written for him. He'd had it for days and had rehearsed it on camera earlier but he waited until fifteen minutes before he was to read it on live television to demand new copy. I hadn't written the piece he suddenly wanted changed but it fell to me to placate him and I had to write the new lines with a big marker, right on the cue cards. Then I ran into the booth and told the director he'd be hearing a new speech there and I had no copy of it to give him.
Award shows can be crazy that way. One year, a lady I know worked as a Production Assistant on the Oscars and just before the ceremony started, the producer handed her a new presenter speech. It was hand-written on yellow legal paper and he said, "Here — get this typed-up and distributed!" She had about fifteen minutes to type it, copy it and get it to all the parties who'd need it: The director, the stage manager, the TelePrompter operator, etc.
Panicked, she raced to a trailer that was being used as a production office. This was back when the ceremony was at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and also before computers. She burst into her office and found Steve Martin, sitting at her desk in his tuxedo, rewriting the speech he was to give in about a half an hour. She yelled at him, "I need to type this up NOW!" and he apologized, grabbed his paper out of her IBM Selectric and immediately vacated her chair.
It wasn't even a self-correcting Selectric. When she sat down and made a bad typo, she grabbed for the Liquid Paper and screamed, "You used up all my white-out!" Martin apologized again and began running around through the other trailers, trying to find her more Liquid Paper. He found some, the page got typed and disseminated and later, she and Steve Martin both made amends. I just love the idea of the number one box office star in America scurrying through trailers, dressed in a tux, trying to locate office supplies in a panic.
Enjoy the show. And if you're at a party where everyone's going to do a shot whenever Trump gets slammed, make sure you have a Designated Driver for the rest of the month and all of March.