I'm not sure what I'm doing up at this hour, either. I should tell the students in my class that the advantage of writing comedy material at five in the morning is also the disadvantage: Everything seems funny.
In another life when I was working on Welcome Back, Kotter, my partner Dennis and I would sometimes be at the studio or at Gabe Kaplan's house 'til five or thereabouts in the ayem, trying with occasional success to rewrite that week's script into something worthy of videotape. The hours were especially rough on Mr. Kaplan when he participated in the rewrite, as he often did. Unless it was Friday night, he had to be at the studio at 10 AM to rehearse what we were writing. The rest of us could straggle in a bit later.
This was before Internet or computers or fax machines. If a page of the script needed a major redo, we'd type a new page on a thing called a typewriter. If we just had to change a line or three, we'd handwrite it in on the appropriate page of the previous draft. I usually did this because I had the neatest handwriting. Then when we were close to done, I'd phone the script service — a company that charged and got a fortune for executing the following tasks. As we left, I'd leave the revised script in an envelope either with the guard at the studio gate or if we were working at Gabe's house, on his doorstep. The script service would send a runner to pick it up and he'd take it back to their office where a squadron (I assume) would retype the whole thing, sometimes for Xeroxing but sometimes for mimeographing, a reproduction process that was becoming largely Flintstonian in the seventies. On the front of the script, there'd be a note with the phone number of one of the participating writers — usually, me — so they could call if they had a question. It was understood that they were to do this only in the most desperate of circumstances.
I'd drive home and get whatever sleep was still possible. While I was doing this, the script service would be mass copying the scripts. If it was a Saturday morn when I awoke, there'd be a copy of the revised draft on my doorstep, just as everyone who worked on the show would be finding one on theirs. If it was a weekday, there'd be a crate of copies at the studio when everyone arrived. It never seemed humanly possible but it was always done.
One night, we were at Gabe's 'til about five…and we were not only rehearsing but taping later that day. It was us, Gabe, a producer and one other story editor and we were all punchy. To amuse ourselves, and maybe to send out a cry that we were working this hard, we began inserting obscene stage directions. One of the milder ones was something like, "Mr. Woodman enters the classroom and begins french kissing all the male students." Others would have made Larry Flynt blush.
Now, understand that we were not suggesting that any of this would actually be performed on the ABC Television Network, especially during the Family Hour. It was just there to amuse us and the cast and the staff, and everyone was highly amused. Everyone except the Standards and Practices lady — i.e., The Network Censor. She insisted that the scripts be collected, destroyed and reissued with proper stage directions. We suggested that she had no jurisdiction to demand this. She could rule on what we proposed to put on the air but not on our stage directions.
I'm not sure why the producer stuck to his guns on this one for even a few hours…we'd already gotten our laugh from the crew. Eventually, he took pity on the Censor Lady, who was honestly concerned that we'd cost her her job. Near the end, she was arguing that though the scripts were just for us, they did have a way of leaking out and being sold and even studied in classrooms. I rewrote all the offending stage directions.
That night, just before taping, I was backstage and John Sylvester White, who played Mr. Woodman, came up to me. John was a lovely little man with a wicked sense of humor but before each taping, he suffered a brief panic attack. Everyone had to assure him that he'd be fine, that the audience would love him, that we'd given him all the best lines in the show. (All of that was true.) I gave him the customary reassurance and he headed for the stage. But before he went, he turned to me and said, "Hey, remind me. Which is the scene where I french kiss all the male students?"
Good night, Internet. See you in the morning.