I tried to watch a little of The Man Called Flintstone last night on TCM but turned it off after ten or fifteen minutes. I never saw this movie when it was in theaters…which I suspect it was for ten or fifteen minutes. But I've tried watching it on TV in the past and I'm not sure I've ever made it to the end. For all I know, it may be a wonderful experience if you do that. But it was not successful and that ended plans for a lot of sequels and other movies based on Hanna-Barbera's TV properties.
I have a hunch what went wrong with it. It might be the same thing that we who try to write comedy know goes wrong with a lot of sitcoms and variety shows. Here's how it goes that way…
Let's say your show is going to tape on Tuesday, which is what we did when I worked on Welcome Back, Kotter. You start rehearsing the script on the Wednesday before and let's say the script has a lot of good things in it but also some weak spots. During that week of rehearsals, everyone — the writers, the performers, the producers, the director, sometimes even the stagehands — all try to eliminate the weak spots and replace them with better material, better jokes, maybe a better song, whatever.
Which is fine. That's how the process works. Neil Simon used to say that his plays were not written, they were written, then rewritten and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten and so on. And one of the reasons they (usually) turned out well that he was doing all that rewriting and he was good at that and also good at knowing what to leave alone. No rewriting was done because the makeup lady said, "You know, I've been thinking for a few days now…that joke isn't that funny." No rewriting was done because the associate director said, "Hey, I just had a thought!"
But what happens too often is that during the rehearsal process, everyone involved gets tired of hearing the same lines over and over. If I told you the funniest joke I know, you'd probably laugh. You might even laugh if I told it to you again the next day. But if I told it to you ten times in one day, at some point, you'd stop laughing and might even get really, really sick of that joke. Which is what sometimes happens on a TV show that starts rehearsing a new script on Wednesday. By Monday, the day before it's placed before cameras and a live audience, everyone's tired of that great joke they first heard at the Wednesday read-through and anything — anything! — new sounds better.
So instead of the terrific joke the audience didn't hear, they hear something that isn't as good. Ah, but to the people who make the show, it's fresher.
I am not the only writer to make this observation. Ask anyone who's worked in television and they'll tell you stories of great material that never got on the air because it was just plain around too long. They may even tell you about how they didn't put a great joke into that Wednesday script; how they saved it until Monday so it might survive the rehearsal process. The late Larry Gelbart, who was as fine a comedy writer as the field has ever had, could cite hundreds of examples from his career.
Now, I wasn't around Hanna-Barbera when they made The Man Called Flintstone and I had a good reason. I was fourteen years old. But I was working for the firm in 1980 and 1981 when they were in production on an animated feature called Heidi's Song which was released to theaters — again, for ten or fifteen minutes — in 1982. I never worked on it and I was darn near the only person in the studio then that didn't.
Because it was around for years. It had been in production for a long time and everyone was tired of it and they were rewriting the script, especially on the parts that hadn't been completed but also redubbing and changing dialogue on scenes that were allegedly finished a long time before. Lorne Greene was the voice of Heidi's grandfather and I once saw him in the hallway outside the recording studio arguing with Joe Barbera about replacement dialogue for a scene he'd recorded more than a year earlier.
I was reminded of that when I watched the opening titles of The Man Called Flintstone last night. Here was the card crediting two very good writers who had written the original script…
That title card was immediately followed by this one…
Four people credited for, essentially, rewriting parts of the script. To briefly identify them: Warren Foster was a very good animation writer, Alex Lovy was a pretty good director, and William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were really good at being William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Knowing their studio, if they credited four people at fiddling with and changing the script, that probably means everyone on the premises took a whack at it, janitors included.
My hunch is that the problem with The Man Called Flintstone was that various hands — and probably a lot of them — "improved" it too much. I have the same hunch about Heidi's Song, which also did not do well, and one big "improvement" came when someone decided to put rats in it.
In 1971, there was a surprise box office hit with a movie named Willard. It was a horror film about a social misfit kid whose only friends in the world are rats. Ten years or so later, someone at Hanna-Barbera looked at the work-in-progress called Heidi's Song and said, "You know what this movie needs? It needs rats!"
How do I know this? Joe Barbera told me that at one point when he was thinking of having me do some fixing to that unfinished movie. I'm not sure if the original script had rats somewhere in it and they decided it needed more or if it was rat-free to start with and they decided it shouldn't be. But Barbera told me they were doing it and they'd called back Sammy Cahn and Burton Lane, who'd written the songs for it, and told them they needed a big rat song for Sammy Davis, Jr. who'd be playing the head rat. And J.B. told me that it had something to do with that horror film of ten years earlier.
Don't expect a better explanation from me. I still don't get it. All I know is they didn't wind up with the movie they set out to make. My best guess would be that in the time it took to make the movie, they believed tastes were changing in the marketplace; that when they started making it, they felt audiences were responsive to one kind of film and by the time they were looking at a release date for the finished product, it didn't seem as attuned to that marketplace years later. As the noted screenwriter William Goldman said of the movie business, "No one knows anything."
Well, that's not exactly true. I know I don't want to watch The Man Called Flintstone again — or Heidi's Song for that matter. And it's just a theory of mine that what went wrong is that they were around so long that the people working on them got tired of them and tried freshening up what the public hadn't yet seen…and wound up with a bit of a mess.
That's the end of this article. But in case you're wondering about the big rat song for Sammy Davis Jr. in Heidi's Song…