ABOUT THAT TITLE....
Okay, I bet your wondering about the title of this cockamamie thing. Well, 'The Bad Pitch" is a sitcom writer's term. Basically, when a bunch of writers are in "THE ROOM" working on, or 'BREAKING" a story, we'll often use what's called "THE BAD PITCH" to proffer a story idea or "JOKE". It means, 'here's the obvious, not terribly original, probably not too funny version of what I'm thinking of and if you guys think it's a road we want to go down, then we'll come up with "THE GOOD VERSION".
A sample Bad Pitch: "So, what if Rerun says to the trampy girl, and here's the bad pitch, 'Hey, you're really trashy." And then she makes a fat joke about how he eats out of the trash." Which, after hours of work turns into this piece of comic dialogue:
RERUN: Girl, you're like a HIgh School on Sundays... no class.
SMART ALECK GIRL: Gee, Rerun that's so smart, they might accept you into Yale.
RERUN: Really? Yale in Connecticut?
SMART ALECK GIRL: No I mean Yale, in New Yersey.
That exchange took seven hours to perfect. But perfect it we did. And Fred Berry made that scene just sing. I miss him every day.
2 comments:
Hey: badpitch, what was Danielle Spencer like in real life?
A class act all the way. Never an unkind word for anyone. In fact, every time she had to insult Rerun we'd have to stop tape so she could go back in her dressing room and vomit. It distressed her so much to, as the kids put it these days, Diss Fred. I correspond with her often these days. She's married and with eight beautiful children. She doesn't act in front of the camera anymore, but she provides the voice of one of those puppet turkeys in the Foster Farms ads. Makes a nice living.
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