You're not going to watch much, if any of this link. I'm only embedding it because, well, I can. And I thought you might like to hear the story that went with it.
In early 1976, I was teamed with a bright gent named Dennis Palumbo and together, we were one of a bazillion up-and-coming comedy-writing teams skulking about Hollywood, waiting for a break to find us. Nothing we'd written had made it to a TV screen yet but we were getting a rep and we'd gotten some good agents…and there were folks at studios and networks who looked favorably, they claimed, on our work. And I guess they did because we were being offered jobs.
Our representatives called and told us to report to a screening room at ABC to view a new, as-yet-unaired pilot. We so reported and were shown a two-hour TV-movie called The Love Boat — an anthology starring as the ship's crew, Dick Van Patten, Terri O'Mara and a whole bunch of other actors who would not be in the subsequent series. After the viewing, which was just for Dennis and me, we met Dawn Aldredge and Marion C. Freeman, who were the writing team that was developing the project. Here is what they told us…
ABC liked the pilot but had major problems with the cast and with the show's level of sophistication. The latter was all over the place, inconsistent from one segment to the next. What we'd just been shown might never air. A few months later, it did, though heavily re-edited to try and correct that inconsistency.
In the meantime, ABC had ordered another Love Boat pilot — another two-hour TV movie which, like the one we'd just seen, would interweave four separate stories. The ship's crew would be completely recast and they were about to sign Sandy Duncan to play the cruise director, who'd been tentatively named Sandy. (I have no idea what happened there.)
The plan at that moment was to make this a racy, adult series with way more sex than had ever been featured before on network TV. It would probably not become a weekly hour series but would more likely be a string of more two-hour movies. They'd run from time to time in some unspecified late night berth that didn't yet exist — maybe on Saturday nights from 10 PM 'til Midnight, changing forever the whole parameters of customary network time slots and on-screen sexuality. What's more, the material might be filmed and edited in two forms. The one that would air on ABC would feature adult themes and brief nudity. Another version, featuring more adult language and more nudity, would probably be released overseas, perhaps even as theatrical films.
Anyway, Dennis and I were hired at a nice fee to write one of the segments for the second Love Boat pilot, and we came up with a story about a bunch of frat boys who go for a cruise. One of them is a virgin…a condition which causes the lad to be much-mocked by his buddies to the point where the whole ship gets to talking about it. Before long, strangers are even giggling at him and wagering as to whether he'll become a Real Man by the time the ship makes port. All of this ratchets up the pressure on Danny (as we called him) to score and he tries like crazy, making an increasingly-grander fool of himself with the ladies upon whom he hits.
Finally, on the night before the ship docks, he gives up and it's only then, when he drops the Blitzkrieg approach, that he meets a woman who likes him without his tricks and "lines." They spend that last night together and it's so wonderful that when it comes time to disembark and his friends ridicule him for having spent a whole week on the guaranteed-to-get-you-laid Love Boat without being deflowered, he doesn't tell them otherwise. He and the lady go their separate ways with nice memories, uncheapened by him bragging to his pals.
We handed in our script and everyone said they liked it. One exec at ABC was so impressed that it helped us land our jobs as story editors on Welcome Back, Kotter, which in turn kept us from writing more for Love Boat. But our script was not filmed for the second two-hour Love Boat TV movie or even the third. We were told that the network was balking at making the franchise as "adult" as had been planned and that our script would be "ruined" if it had to be rewritten to the current-but-likely-to-loosen standards. It was being held, we were told, until the network would allow two people to have sex without them either being married or deciding to immediately get that way.
And indeed, that script was not ruined until Love Boat became a weekly one-hour series. It aired at 9 PM and all talk of making it close to R-rated subsided. Someone rewrote darn near every word of our effort to fit the much-less-naughtier motif. Robert Hegyes, with whom we worked on Kotter, was grossly miscast as the boy. We'd written the role for someone frail and innocent…no actor in mind but we were thinking, like, a younger Gene Wilder maybe?
The lady with whom he finally canoodles was to be played by someone who was not a star. That was because she was supposed to more or less come out of nowhere and apart from a parting exchange of smiles on the dock, she would disappear after. At least, that's what everyone understood when we wrote it. But ABC now wanted billable names in their show so they got Maureen McCormack of The Brady Bunch and then they had to give her scenes earlier in the story to establish her presence and make sure Maureen got enough to do.
The biggest change, of course, was that the one-night stand could not be a one-night stand because, though that's apparently what the real Love Boats were mainly about, there were none then on network television. The boy and girl had to have a real relationship that was likely to culminate in wedlock. So the rewriters rewrote such that Danny and the lady turned out to be friends from school (it had briefly slipped his mind) and they were going to continue dating after the cruise and probably get married. Not at all what our story was about.
By the time it aired, Dennis and I felt pretty distanced from it all. It was a nice credit since the weekly Love Boat series was a pretty big hit but there were only two lasting remnants for me from the experience. One was that after Dennis and I decided to go our separate ways, I teamed up for a time with Marion Freeman and worked on a couple of shows, and she's still a good friend. And every so often, I get a Love Boat residual check for about a buck-eighty.
Embedded below is the entire hour episode. Our heavily-rewritten script is entwined with two other scenarios…and I'm really not suggesting you view it. I didn't, except the first minute or so, just to see if the type font of the writer credits was actually as hard to read as I recalled. It was, which coupled with how briefly our names were on the screen, may have been a blessing. I believe all the credited folks complained and Love Boat later changed fonts and increased screen time of their credits. In any case, the link below may require you to sit through an ad before it plays…in which case, I would really recommend you not watch it. But I put it there because I could and because I thought you'd enjoy the story that leads up to it. You've read it so now you can find something better on the Internet to watch…like this, for instance.
