"Odd" Mail

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Walter Matthau and Art Carney in the original.

Several folks have written to tell me that the Metropole Cafe in Times Square was open and operating, apparently as a strip club, into the eighties. I remember passing it there, recognizing it mostly from The Odd Couple…and then one trip, it suddenly wasn't there. I just don't recall which trip that was when it went away.

Regarding the infamous triple-play in The Odd Couple movie, Jerry Wolper sent me this link to a contemporaneous newspaper report on its filming. It was, as you may recall, filmed before a 1967 game at Shea Stadium between the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates and the home team, the New York Mets.

It says that Pirates Roberto Clemente and Maury Wills declined to participate. Clemente does not seem to have liked the idea of being in a movie for the fee each player received, which was $100. Wills apparently bowed out for the same reason.

The batter was indeed Bill Mazeroski and the baserunners were Don Clendenon, Matty Alou and Vern Law. Jack Fisher was the pitcher and Ken Boyer was the third baseman who fielded Mazeroski's hit, stepped on third, then fired the ball to the second baseman who hurled it on to the first baseman. The latter two Mets are unnamed. The whole thing took two takes. The first pitch was too wide for Mazeroski to hit but everything worked during the second throw.

Kim Metzger wrote to ask me if I ever saw Neil Simon's distaff rewrite of The Odd Couple, which turned Felix and Oscar into Florence and Olive. Yes, I did. I saw it here in L.A. in April of '85 at the Ahmanson in a pre-Broadway tryout. Sally Struthers played Florence, Rita Moreno was Olive and Lewis J. Stadlen and Tony Shalhoub played the Costazuela brothers, who replaced the Pigeon sisters.

My recollection is that the Costazuelas — pilots for Iberia Airlines who were on the make — were hilarious but the rest of the play didn't work with women. In the original, Oscar and Felix more or less turned into each other's wives, echoing the fights that had destroyed their respective marriages. In the new version, Olive and Florence did not turn into each others' husbands. They just got on each other's nerves for reasons that seemed forced and scripted. The show went on to New York, opening two months later to tepid reviews and running for eight months, which was probably a lot less than anyone expected. It was produced in a lot of regional and community theaters, which I think is the market for which it was mainly intended.

I also saw Simon's 2002 update of the original work which was called Oscar and Felix, A New Look at the Odd Couple and starred John Larroquette as Oscar and Joe Regalbuto as Felix. I wrote about that here and reading that posting now, I think I was a bit charitable towards it. That version never played Broadway and doesn't seem to have played too many regional theaters, either.  (I can't find a photo from it anywhere.)

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Tony Randall and Jack Klugman in the first sitcom version.

I suspect that both these versions were done because of two factors. One is that Mr. Simon famously sold all rights to The Odd Couple to Paramount Pictures as part of the deal that led to the movie. In later years, he seemed quite bitter about that. In his autobiography, he wrote…

In total, this is what I got: $125,000. Although it didn't become clear to me for some time, this is what I lost. Paramount made a TV series of The Odd Couple starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. Those were one of the ancillary rights Paramount got in buying [my company] Ellen Enterprises. I never received one cent from the series. I had my name on every episode but I never saw a dime, a nickel, or a penny. It ran for years and will run in syndication for years and years to come. Not just in America but all over the world. The value of what I had given up for The Odd Couple series was in the millions. Probably a great deal of millions.

This is not to suggest that any of us should have been too upset at the financial condition of the world's most successful playwright but it probably has a lot to do with what has become of the property. Paramount is about to launch its third sitcom version of it…the fourth if you count The Oddball Couple, the 1975 animated version that made them a cat and a dog.  Paul Winchell voiced the dog, whose name was Fleabag.  Frank "Yesssss?" Nelson voiced the cat, Spiffy.  I'm guessing they thought of calling them Oscar and Felix but there were trademark issues with naming a cartoon cat "Felix."

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Fleabag and Spiffy from the cartoon version.

They're making decisions about it to try and maximize their income from an acquisition, which is of course what corporations do. Someone obviously thought there was a lot of money in finding a new way to market the play, kind of like The Muppet Babies was a new way to merchandize Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy and the rest of that gang. At some point, we'll doubtlessly see The Odd Couple remounted with an entire cast under the age of twelve. Instead of a poker game, it'll be Grand Theft Auto and instead of leaving his wife, Felix will be running away from home.

If Mr. Simon had retained ownership, we might not have seen some of those exploitations. I like to think that if he'd made the money off the eighty zillion stage productions of The Odd Couple since he sold the rights, he would probably not have been that eager to see all these revised versions. He might have been satisfied with that dough or he might have okayed the Klugman/Randall sitcom and then felt he'd made enough off the play and had no need to exploit it further. As it was though, he couldn't stop the cartoon or the later sitcoms and I believe he participated in (or even instigated) the female version and the updated one in order to get a piece or two back of what he sold and to protect his play. After he's gone, I'll bet someone at Paramount says, "Hey, let's make a musical out of it!" That might come before the kid's version or CGI feature set in the future or the video game where you and another player battle to clean up or dirty up the apartment and to win green sandwiches and brown sandwiches.