There’s a certain risk – some might call it insanity – to producing true indie films. They’re costly, especially relative to the return on investment, time, and aggravation.
But still they get made.
Scott Miles made his. It’s called Little Chicago, and it's about a young man who returns home after college hoping his dad will stake him the money to get into the bar and restaurant business. Of course, if his dad were to do that, this would be a short, not a full-length motion picture.
Miles wrote, produced, and starred in Little Chicago.
But if you haven’t seen Little Chicago, maybe you know him from some of his other film roles, including Remember the Titans, The Patriot, or October Sky. On television, he was in episodes of “NCIS” and “Star Trek Voyager.”
I think you'll find what he has to say about producing indie films quite interesting.
You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!
Bill Prady is having a pretty good year, writers’ strike and all, thanks to the success of “The Big Bang Theory,” the hit CBS sitcom he co-created with Chuck Lorre.
If you haven’t seen “The Big Bang Theory,” it co-stars Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons as a couple of super-nerds named Leonard and Sheldon, an “in” joke for those of us who remember a sitcom master of old, the late Sheldon Leonard. Leonard produced everything from “Make Room for Daddy” with Danny Thomas to “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The Andy Griffith Show.” He was also a director, a writer, and a frequent guest star, including appearing on an episode of HBO’s “Dream On.”
More about that later.
Sheldon and Leonard, the lead characters in “The Big Bang Theory,” have absolutely nothing in common with their namesake that I can figure, except that he’d probably be proud of the tribute because they are smartly-drawn, literate, and most importantly, damn funny.
You can also LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: We’ve been watching this show from the first week in our house, and it’s just gotten better and better week after week.
BILL PRADY: That’s terrific. Glad you’re enjoying it.
ANDELMAN: I make a point of not having anybody on who’s doing anything I don’t enjoy, so there you go. You’re co-creator of “The Big Bang Theory,” a show about super-brainiac scientists. Can we assume that you, personally, are smarter than a fifth grader?
PRADY: Probably somewhere between fifth and sixth, I think, is where I would land.
ANDELMAN: Is that where it just sort of ended right there?
PRADY: I’m a college dropout, but my first career, I was a self-taught computer programmer, and that’s what I did in the early ‘80s, I guess. And that’s where I met a lot of the people who would become influences in the characters that we’re doing now on “The Big Bang Theory.”
ANDELMAN: It’s a tremendous concept, but I have to admit, after a couple weeks, personally, I’d become a little intimidated by writing some of the science and the technical references, or is that really not an issue?
PRADY: It actually hasn’t been. First of all, we have a marvelous technical consultant, Professor David Saltzberg, who’s an astrophysicist at UCLA, and we do have the ability if we’re pressed for time to write a lot of dialogue and write science to come and get an answer from David. We often pester him with near impossibilities: “What’s a small project Sheldon and Leonard might’ve done over a weekend a few years ago that was interesting enough that there would be a paper as a result of it that would be presented at a conference?” And he’ll say, “Let me think about that,” and he’ll get back to you. But a lot of times, we also do a little research ourselves and take a shot at it, and we get pretty close. For the pilot, we researched the science, and then we had David check it for us. And, as I’m proud to say, and as I have an official forged UCLA transcript from him, I got a B+. Chuck and I got a B+ on the pilot.
ANDELMAN: Very good, very good! You mentioned something that actually was a plot, which was that episode where we find them making a scientific presentation or, actually, I think it’s Leonard that makes the presentation, and then Sheldon shows up in disguise later to tear it apart. Something like that you always wonder, is there real science at work? I’m not smart enough to know.
PRADY: Was the science real? Every bit of the science is real. Absolutely every reference, every notation on a white board behind them, every bit of scientific dialogue is real. Some of the things are apparently inside jokes in the science world, and David will explain them to us, and we will say, “Yes, I can see how that might be an inside joke in the science world,” but everything is accurate. And David’s there when we film, and so if we’re gonna change a joke on the spot, and if that changes the science, then he’ll be right there to change the science. And actually a couple of weeks ago when we were changing jokes on the stage, he just came in and pitched a joke, and it had nothing to do with science, and it was very funny, and we put it in the show.
ANDELMAN: Oh God, the astrophysicist is writing jokes now.
PRADY: The astrophysicist wrote one, and he got a little taste of it. Now he pitches enthusiastically every week.
ANDELMAN: Tell me about the genesis of “The Big Bang Theory.” I remember reading about it, and it’s probably been about a year now and thinking, “Naah, it’ll never fly.” At the time, I thought that “Cavemen,” the exact opposite of your show, actually seemed like a better bet on paper because of the science involved.
PRADY: Oh, because our show was sciency?
ANDELMAN: Yeah, yeah.
PRADY: Fundamentally, the show isn’t about science any more than saying gee, “Why would anybody but cab drivers watch ‘Taxi’?” Our show is about the feeling of being an outsider, which is a feeling we all share. I think everyone has, at times in their life, looked at somebody else and said, “Gee, he’s got it all figured out, she’s got it all figured out, I find myself on the outside, why can’t I have it figured out?” And then the question is, what if you were the smartest guy in the world? Would it give you any leg up? And it turns out it doesn’t give you any leg up at all. So that, to us, is what the show has always been about.
The genesis of it is I had worked with Chuck for many years on “Dharma & Greg,” and I had gone off to do some other projects, and he had gone off to do “Two and a Half Men” with Lee Aronsohn. And we started talking about the notion of doing a pilot, and we kicked around a bunch of ideas, and then we did this in a very unusual way. We didn’t develop it with a network or studio. We developed it on spec. And if anyone’s interested in doing that, Step 1 is partner with a person who has an incredibly successful sitcom because it gives you a great deal of access. So we were developing two projects. We were developing one project that was about a young woman who was sort of on her own for the first time in her life, maybe she’d always been with her folks or a boyfriend, and she’d just broken up, and she was kind of on her own and a little lost. So we had that project. And then we were doing another project, and we had talked for years about these guys I knew back in the computer business and some other people from that time in my life who were a particular kind of person, and so we developed a show about two of those guys.
One day, we both had the same idea, which is, what if these guys met that woman? We actually did the pilot twice. The first time we did it we made her sort of rough on the outside and damaged on the inside, and we shot that pilot, and it really felt wrong. The show was really out of balance. She was just too rough for these guys, and you didn’t want her around them. And CBS, amazingly, said, “Let’s try it again,” and so we re-wrote it, we re-cast the part, we went with the incomparable Kaley Cuoco. She’s just unremarkable. And then that’s the show that went on the air.
ANDELMAN: It seems like, even as Johnny and Jim have really fitted themselves to their roles, that she has come probably the furthest in getting a handle on the role that she plays, and it just seems like she’s far more comfortable in her skin like a week ago than she was four or five months ago.
PRADY: I think that in the best of all possible worlds, when you’re doing weekly television, the characters become better defined as each week goes by and as the characters become better defined and the actors find themselves more comfortable in the characters, you ought to see that. You ought to see that kind of progression. And part of it is the audience. You spend more time with Penny, and you get to know her. There was an odd discussion about Penny. I remember when we first started that the notion that Penny was a dumb blonde, which was very peculiar to us because we’d never intended for her to be. In fact, we always say Penny represents the audience in the show. I’ll say, “Penny knows what we know when it comes to these guys and this stuff, and she’s the one who gets it.” When she says, “Huh?”, she’s saying “Huh?” to something pretty obscure. The other thing is that, as you spend more time with her and she spends more time around the guys, you see the difference between book smarts and street smarts. And we say that Penny is a person who knows how to rebuild a tractor engine, and these guys don’t. I think that we saw it early on when they were discussing how to put together her Ikea bookshelf, and she was putting together her Ikea bookshelf.
ANDELMAN: That’s good. I was actually going to ask you to talk a little bit about each of the characters. I think you’ve covered Penny pretty well. Let’s try Sheldon. What can you tell us about Sheldon?
PRADY: I think the easiest way to look at Sheldon and Penny both are the forces that tug on Leonard in opposite directions, and Penny tugs Leonard out into the world, and Sheldon tugs him away from the world. And Sheldon is not comfortable with people, and he’s not comfortable with conversation, and he’s not comfortable with change, and he’s not comfortable with a lot of things. He finds a particular kind of joy in the world, and it’s the joy of routine, it’s the joy of his work. Sheldon is a theoretical physicist. He works in his mind. He’s one of the people imagining how the building blocks of the universe go together, and that kind of order and perfection is a lot more appealing to Sheldon than the messy disorder of human interaction. I think if he could find a way to make it through the world without talking to people, I think it would be just fine.
ANDELMAN: Sheldon is the only one of the four men on the show who doesn’t seem to have noticed that there’s anything physically different about Penny from the rest of them.
PRADY: We don’t get the sense that Sheldon particularly looks at…He seems without any romantic desire. And, in fact, in an episode we’re working on now where we will meet his sister and we talk about the continuation of the Cooper line, Sheldon will probably talk about seeing his work as his legacy. So I don’t think Sheldon ever imagines himself in a relationship or in a family. I don’t think he’s incapable of it, but it just isn’t anywhere up there on his list of priorities.
ANDELMAN: I get the sense it’s not a matter of whether he’s straight or gay. He’s just not interested.
PRADY: I couldn’t put a name to it. There seems to be a certain asexuality to him, doesn’t there? We modeled Sheldon on some people that I knew and some other people we’ve seen, and there are some interesting folk on the Internet who have little webcasts, and they are people that are similar to Sheldon. And there seems to be that sort of characteristic theme of no need for any kind of human contact let alone romantic contact. On the other hand, there are some things that he really does seem to like doing with his friends. They’re big game players, and he likes doing that. They like going and playing paintball and other sorts of things. I wonder about Sheldon. If I knew Sheldon, I’d be curious to ask him if he’s more comfortable playing paintball or something where it has a role-playing aspect to it than being out there and being himself. I’ll bet that there’s some truth to that.
ANDELMAN: I guess a great season two or three twist for Sheldon would be if suddenly Penny took an interest in him for some strange reason, and you could probably spend weeks playing that out.
PRADY: We always talk about stories where Penny needs something from Sheldon. It’s not an antagonistic relationship, but their relationship has some friction to it and naturally so because the two of them represent, again, the sort of competing poles on Leonard.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Bill, you’ve worked on a number of genre favorites over the years. Obviously, the Muppets was one. Struck a real chord with Colleen. Let’s talk about a couple of the other ones. I know people will kill me if I don’t ask you about “Gilmore Girls.” I think you worked on the fourth season.
BILL PRADY: A single season of “Gilmore Girls.”
ANDELMAN: Anything you can tell us about that show? I know it’s still very popular. It was not necessarily the biggest audience in the world but a very loyal audience.
PRADY: I will say that, like many people, I enjoy watching the “Gilmore Girls.”
ANDELMAN: Are there any particular Bill Prady touches during that season that carried on?
PRADY: “Gilmore Girls” is very, very much the work of Amy Sherman Palladino and her husband, Dan Palladino, and it is a very particular vision that they have. I enjoyed “Gilmore Girls” very much as a viewer, and I think it continued to be their vision through all the various people who came on it at times to help them, and it’s very much Amy’s show.
ANDELMAN: That’s a very political answer I think I got there.
PRADY: Alright.
ANDELMAN: Alright. Let me try a different one. You wrote an episode of “Star Trek Voyager.”
PRADY: Oh, this is a fantastic story. Let me correct that by saying this is a story I personally find fantastic because I’m in the story, and I find stories that have me in them are just inherently interesting to me.
I wrote the story for an episode of “Star Trek Voyager,” and the episode wound up being called “Bliss,” I think. This was during the fifth season of “Dharma & Greg,” and I’d been on “Dharma” for its entire five-year run. And there is a thing that happens in February, and it is the notion that there are no more stories. We’re out of stories this year. We will never come up with another story. We’re done. And I remember going to bed and just basically waiting for the Muse of Television to visit me during the night, and sure enough, at 3:00 in the morning, I woke up and I said, “My God, I have the most amazing story.” And I never do this, and I wrote it down on a pad of paper by the bed, and I went back to sleep content that the next day I would be able to go into the office and we have a story to do. And I got up, and I looked at what I had written down, and it was a great story. It was a “Star Trek Voyager” story.
I’m a big “Star Trek” fan all my life and like Leonard and Sheldon are “Star Trek” fans, and I had written notes on a piece of paper. And, in fact, it actually was so complete. It had act breaks. I must’ve written for 10 minutes, and it was a functional outline. And I called my agent, and I said, “Listen, I’ve got this ‘Star Trek Voyager’ story, what do I do with it?” And he said, “Nothing. Go back to work.” I said, “No, no, no, you’ve got to believe me! This is a perfectly formed story. They’ll want this.” He, at the time, represented Michael Piller, who was one of the producers. And so he called Michael, and I met Michael. We had lunch, and it was amazing, meeting him, I’m a huge fan of his work, and he said, “So what’s the story?” And I told him the story, and he said, “You’re absolutely right. That’s a great Star Trek story. Let me give a call over to Brannon Braga.” Brannon was running “Star Trek Voyager” at the time.
ANDELMAN: Right.
PRADY: So he calls Brannon, Brannon calls me, Brannon says, “Tell me the story again.” I did, and he says, “Yeah, that’s a story, we’ll do that. Can you write it?” And I said, “Brannon, I can’t. I’m running ‘Dharma & Greg.’” And he said, “I’ll tell you what. We’ll get a writer to write it, but do you want to come in while we break the story?” The expression “to break the story” means to outline the story in detail in preparation for writing it. And I said, “Oh, my God, I’d love to be there for that.” And in an act of just kindness to a crazed fan, the “Star Trek Voyager” writing staff stayed late into the evening so that I could come over after I finished my day of work at “Dharma,” and I met them over at their offices at Paramount about 7:00 at night, and we worked till about 11:00 at night, and we broke out the story. And they assigned it to one of their writers. The name escapes me but a very, very talented fella (Robert J. Doherty). And they went off and wrote and produced the episode, and I came by while they were shooting it, and I watched them shoot a couple of scenes, and it was really, really, really, really cool.
ANDELMAN: So when “Dharma” ended, why no more “Star Trek” scripts from you?
PRADY: Periodically, I would call Brannon, and I would pitch scripts, and I nearly went to work on “Enterprise.” It was actually one of my great regrets because I was doing a one-hour series for a while, and I went over and talked to Brannon, and I said, “I think I’d like to give this a shot.” And at the same time, I’d gotten a call from Kohan and Mutchnick, and they had a series, a sitcom, called “Good Morning Miami,” which had been renewed on the condition that somebody be brought in to sort of revamp it a little bit. And I was encouraged by many people to take that offer instead of the “Star Trek” offer. Brannon made me an offer to come work on “Enterprise.” And I had a really rough time on “Good Morning Miami,” and ultimately, I wasn’t able to accomplish what everyone hoped could be done with the show, and I left. I quit. And to this day when I look back on that year, I wish I’d gone to work on “Star Trek.” Bob, who knows what that would’ve lead to? I would be doing a different thing now, but in terms of what that year was like, I wish I’d done it differently.
ANDELMAN: I remember “Good Morning Miami.” That was a tough show to get your arms around as a viewer.
PRADY: It was very difficult. It was very, very difficult, and I was never able to sort of understand what the intent of the thing was and to figure out a way to make the stories sustain. And it’s one of those things. There’ve been two experiences where the offer has been very flattering and people say, “Please come and help the situation that’s in trouble,” and when you get a call like that, it’s a flattering call. Somebody saying, “We’re having difficulty, and we think you’re the person who can help.” Unfortunately, in both cases, it wound up being a situation where I said, “You know what? I can’t help. I don’t know what to do.” There’s some inherent problems in this thing. My friend Jeff Green sort of talks about TV shows having a DNA, and sometimes there’s something flawed in the DNA of something, and you just kind of can’t swing it back around and get it to get up there and run away. So, yeah, and I talked to Brannon. I think Brannon is writing on “24” this year, and I’ve run into him. I ran into him a while back, and we talked about regretting the choice that I made that year.
ANDELMAN: You’ve worked -- written, and produced -- on a number of shows, but the one I want to ask you about before we run out of time is a long-time favorite in our house and that was “Dream On.” I’m wondering what your role in that was.
PRADY: “Dream On” was great. “Dream On” was my first half-hour writing job, and I met John Landis, who was the executive producer of “Dream On,” while I was at the Muppets. He was directing the “Disneyland 35th Anniversary Special” that was shot at the theme park, and there was a Muppets segment in it which I had written. John was very much responsible for a chunk of my career, among other things, just encouraging me, saying, “You’ve done this Muppets stuff for a while, you could go do other things. Let me know when you want to try something else.” And I remember calling him and saying, “I’d like to try something else,” and he said, “We’ll get you on ‘Dream On.’” Stephen Engel was running “Dream On” at the time, and John recommended me in the way a boss can, sort of like telling Stephen, “It’s up to you,” but he put a little pressure on him, and I’m glad he did. And Stephen now works here at “The Big Bang Theory.” It was two shooting seasons of “Dream On” which, because of HBO, were three airing seasons, so the last three seasons of the show. It was a great show to work on. I learned so much about story and structure and plot and character working on that show. Just loved it.
ANDELMAN: I have to ask you cause she’s dying to know: Did you have a Compuserve account back in those days?
PRADY: Did I have a Compuserve account?
ANDELMAN: I’ll tell you why at the end. Did you ever use Compuserve?
PRADY: I think I did years and years and years and years ago.
ANDELMAN: My wife somehow, in the early days of the wild west Internet, wound up corresponding with you and David Fury via Compuserve at the time you were doing “Dream On.”
PRADY: Is that so?
ANDELMAN: Yeah, so we always felt a little extra tug on that show.
PRADY: It’s funny. I met Dan Schneider, and Dan, who was an actor in “Head of the Class” and now produces all the kid sitcoms over at Nickelodeon, wonderful writer, and his wife has the same story that we were email buddies during a period of time when I was, I think, at the Muppets or something. So apparently I have some night-stalker personality that talks to people, and then I have no memory of it.
ANDELMAN: When did you know that you could support yourself doing this kind of work? Was it when you were with the Muppets?
PRADY: I don’t know that I can. I don’t know that I can. I’m terrified every day that I’ll have to go back and see if Radio Shack will take me back.
ANDELMAN: Is that where you started?
PRADY: I did work at Radio Shack. I don’t think anyone ever doing this for a living ultimately becomes comfortable that they can continue to do this for a living. This, like acting, is a precarious line of work. You’re unsure everyday, and so, truly, the answer to your question is that day has yet to arrive.
ANDELMAN: Does it help to be credited with co-creating a show now in terms of being able to pay the bills in the future?
PRADY: It helps for now.
ANDELMAN: Is this the first show that you have created or co-created?
PRADY: Yes.
ANDELMAN: That must be very exciting.
PRADY: It’s very exciting.
ANDELMAN: So what the heck? Obviously, you’ve got another season on “Big Bang” clearly ahead of you. Could you see yourself going five to seven years on this show?
PRADY: I’d like to do this show. It’s hard to focus on anything pretty much besides this. I will do this show until I have a heart attack, and then I will sit in a lawn chair.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Let’s talk about Leonard, Johnny Galecki’s character. He obviously has an interest in girls, unlike his roommate. What else do we need to know about him?
BILL PRADY: I think Johnny, to me, is the emotional center of the show. I personally find that he’s the character I most comfortably, personally identify with, that he’s the guy who’s sort of nerd by breeding but aspires to something else. He’s open to Penny telling him how to dress better or what’s there beyond this world. I’m a big musical comedy fan, and Leonard in my mind is always Cornelius in “Hello Dolly” who sings to Barnaby that there’s a world out there beyond Yonkers. And there’s a world out there beyond science that he sees more, that he aspires to, and of the characters, he’s the character most in motion in his life, and that’s very interesting to me. He also, like many characters who find themselves in the center, is the Mary Tyler Moore or the Kermit the Frog paradigm, the sort of sane center in the middle of craziness at times, and at times, he’s crazy himself.
ANDELMAN: And let’s talk about the supporting cast, Raj and Howard. What purpose do they serve in there?
PRADY: In the pilot, you’ve met Leonard and Sheldon, and you evaluate them. You decide who they are, and then here come their two friends, and you say, “Oh, look at that!” In their world, Leonard and Sheldon are near the middle, not the extremes, and Koothrappali and Wolowitz bracket them on either side. If Sheldon is withdrawn, Koothrappali withdraws to the point where he can’t speak to half the world. And if Leonard wants to be outgoing, there’s Wolowitz outgoing to a fault, the notion that he doesn’t need to figure out how to deal with women in the world, that he’s got it made. But the other thing that they do, and I remember this so, so clearly from the time that I spent working with people like this, is that idiosyncrasies are acknowledged, and no one pushes anyone to change. I worked with a fellow who could not speak to women. He would simply shut up when they walked into the room. And we all said, “Well, that’s his nature.” Would you send him to go talk to that woman over there? No, you wouldn’t any more than you would ask a deaf man to conduct an orchestra. It’s just his nature. And I think that that’s one of the great things about these kind of characters is that they are accepting of each other’s idiosyncrasies.
ANDELMAN: Bill, Johnny Galecki was a known quantity before this show, thanks to his run on “Roseanne,” and Kaley spent several seasons on “8 Simple Rules.” Where on earth did you find Jim Parsons?
PRADY: He came in and auditioned.
ANDELMAN: Really?
PRADY: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: Was he what you had imagined?
PRADY: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. There were a number of people who came in who were terrific, but Jim came in and was astonishing. Every now and then you buy a lottery ticket, and you win, and this was exactly that. It was the most ordinary of processes to find someone. It was having a casting director who put out the call to agents and described the character, and he came in, and he did it. And then he came back to a callback, and he did it again. And we took him to the studio, and he did it again, and we took him to the network, and he did it again. And he does it every week.
ANDELMAN: Wow! Is it unfair to say that he plays Niles to Johnny’s Frasier at times?
PRADY: There are so many comedy teams that you can look at and make comparisons to. I actually find that he comes closer to playing Kramden to Johnny’s Norton.
ANDELMAN: Really?
PRADY: Or Stan to Johnny’s Ollie. I think that sometimes we say that these are the smartest dumb guys in the world. In terms of archetypes, I think, to a great extent, we go to “The Honeymooners” and to Laurel & Hardy. And I think that so does everybody. I think the great comedy teams wind up owing so much to that kind of comedy structure, which, my goodness, goes all the way back. It’s a Vaudeville structure. It’s very, very old. It’s the one person with the plan and his sidekick who, by his very nature, obstructs him.
ANDELMAN: I know it’s early in the run; you’re just completing your first season, but you have been renewed. Do you worry about it being too easy to focus on Sheldon and turn him into kind of the anti-Fonz, so uncool that he’s cool?
PRADY: We just sort of follow the stories where they take us, and I don’t know if we think that sort of thing through.
ANDELMAN: Personally, I’d like to see Sheldon crossover onto some other CBS shows. I was thinking about this like maybe we’d see Sheldon on “Survivor” or maybe “Big Brother.”
PRADY: I think Sheldon wouldn’t survive, and I think Sheldon walks into the Big Brother house, takes a look, and says, “Well, this won’t do.”
ANDELMAN: Along that line, though, what about having him walk through “CSI” and explaining how improbable the show’s science is?
PRADY: There you go. My partner is involved right now…”CSI” and “Two and a Half Men” swapped writing staffs.
ANDELMAN: That’s what made me think of it. Exactly.
PRADY: And so they’ve been doing that. I think that might take care of swapping over here in this neighborhood for a while.
ANDELMAN: We were talking about crossover, but one of the places where there is crossover is between the show and the web where, for example, the video of Sheldon and Leonard tussling at a scientific presentation shows up on YouTube the very same night that it airs.
PRADY: It was actually up before. It was up a week before just to see if anyone might find it, and I think a couple hundred people actually did find it. And it’s also not the same footage that was used in the show. What we put up on the web was what we assumed Howard shot. And it’s longer than what was in the show, and I think cut a little differently.
ANDELMAN: There are frequent web references where one of the characters will give out a URL. Are those always valid URLs?
PRADY: No, they’re not. It’s an extraordinary amount of work given how fast we work here and how much stuff changes and then the difficulty of getting stuff up on the web. One of the things I really hope that we can do in the second season is coordinate the Internet material better with the show, and I think we will. One of the things, actually, that was a result of the new Writers’ Guild contract is we now have the ability to pay writers to create material for the Internet, so it makes it a lot easier to generate material when it’s not being done on a volunteer basis. So, hopefully, we’ll have better coordination next season.
ANDELMAN: We’ve got a call here on the line for you. Hi, do you have a question for Bill Prady?
COLLEEN: Do you think your show will ever be as popular as “Friends”?
PRADY: Oh, our show?
COLLEEN: Yes.
PRADY: Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to aspire to? I think “Friends” had a terrific run and was very popular. I think that it succeeded by having respect for its characters by believing in its characters as real people. I think one of the things that contributes to the longevity of a sitcom or any show is consistence in character, the notion that when you come back next week, the people are who you’ve come to know them to be. And I think shows that fail often fail because the characters change. They’re whatever the writers needed them to be that week. And one of the things that we have here is an almost obsessive need to protect who these characters are, not to say well, this is a funny joke, let’s use it if it flies in the face of who these characters are and what they would really do. Could we wind up that popular? I would certainly hope so. And what do we do to achieve that? We make the characters real, and we try to have the comedy come out of real situations, and we want the situations to be relatable emotionally even if they’re not relatable in detail. With the exception of physicists, you can’t relate to the notion of presenting a paper at a conference on physics, but you can relate emotionally to an argument with somebody you’ve done work with as to how you should proceed, as to how partners should proceed in something. So that’s the goal is to create an emotional connection.
COLLEEN: I also read that you worked with The Muppets. I love The Muppets.
PRADY: I’m glad you’re a Muppet fan. I was a big Muppet fan growing up, and I had the astonishing privilege of working for Jim Henson for six years, the last six years of his life.
COLLEEN: That’s really good. I wish I had that opportunity.
PRADY: It was an amazing time. That’s where I first began writing, and I did so many different things there. Among my favorite things that I did there was there’s a short 3-D movie called Muppet Vision 3-D, which plays at the Disney theme parks in the United States, in Florida and in California. And I remember when we did this walking out with the producer of the movie, and she commented to me that this will last and someday our children will come to see this, and it was just last year that I took my then 7-year-old daughter to see it and completed that circle and a remarkable experience.
COLLEEN: Oh, that’s brilliant. So how was it like to actually be on “The Muppet Show” with…
PRADY: I wasn’t there on “The Muppet Show.” I came after “The Muppet Show” had been completed, and there were a number of projects that the Muppets at that point were doing, and there were new series that Jim was sort of in the beginning stages of creating, so I wound up involved in a hodge-podge of Muppet projects from comic books to a short-lived series called “The Jim Henson Hour” and a few other things.
Jim was an amazing creative energy. Jim had the ability to have an idea or hear an idea and say let’s go try that. The first thing that I ever wrote was because I started working at the Muppets in consumer products and that had to do with my transition from the world of computers, and the very first thing that I ever wrote that was ever performed that wasn’t produced was that year the United States Post Office had issued a stamp with Jim’s character Rowlf the Dog from “The Muppet Show.” They weren’t going to do it because it needed to be written, and I remember saying, “If nobody’s going to try to write this, can I take a shot at it?” And I sat down, and I thought, “Dogs and mailmen, there’s a story to tell about dogs and mailmen.” And so I had Rowlf the Dog give a speech introducing the stamp in which he took the opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about dogs and mailmen. He explained that the animosity that’s perceived to exist is completely untrue. In fact, “Dogs love mailmen. And we love when they come to the door and we bark a greeting. And then when the mailman goes to leave, we’re so sad that he’s leaving. We understand he has his rounds to complete, but we might follow after him, begging him to stay, but he has to go. So maybe we’ll gently tug on his pant leg a little bit, but, of course, he really has to go so he might struggle to get away. So we might get a better purchase by sinking our teeth into the flesh of his calf and pulling him back.” And then Rowlf said, “… but I digress.”
I remember writing that piece, and I had a little office in the basement of the Muppet offices on the Upper East Side of New York. I was sitting there, and Jim, who was a very tall man, about 6’6”, was standing in the doorway before he said anything, and I looked up, and he said -- and you have to remember that Jim and Kermit shared a voice, which was an odd thing because Kermit was talking to you. And he said, “Did you write this Rowlf piece about the mailmen?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I think we’re gonna produce that.” I said, “Do you want to have any notes or want to make any changes.” “No, I think we’ll go with it the way it is.” And that was that.
Then I wrote a whole bunch of very odd things for the Muppets and some very silly things. And the last thing that I wrote when I was there was the tribute to Jim after his death, the network special, and from time to time, I’ve gone back and done projects with them. I’ll get a call for some odd little thing, and I’ll go back and work with the guys for a couple of days, and it’s always an amazing treat. All the performers are just the coolest people, and I miss them everyday. They’re just remarkable.
ANDELMAN: Colleen, you got a very good story there for that question.
COLLEEN: I know. It’s excellent. I’m so pleased.
PRADY: Good to talk to you, Colleen.
COLLEEN: Yes, it was very good to talk to you, Bill.
All stories and interviews (c) 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved. Some stories may appear in unedited versions that are different from their print counterparts.
There’s a certain risk – some might call it insanity – to producing true indie films. They’re costly, especially relative to the return on investment, time, and aggravation.
