80s TV Legends: Golden Girls, Love Boat and Jim Colucci Forever

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Weirding Way Media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Eighties, So pretty into the city.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
World. Welcome to Eighties TV Ladies, where we laugh in
order not to cry. I'm Saylor Franklin, filling in for Melissa,
who's off this week visiting family. So here are your hosts,
Susan Lambert HadAM and Sharon Johnson.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
Hello, I'm Sharon and I'm Susan.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
The thing we love equal to eighties television is books,
all kinds of books, but especially books about eighties television.
And today we have a very special guest joining us
in studio who wrote a book about, yes, the Golden Girls,
maybe the book about the Golden Girls.

Speaker 4 (00:58):
Jim Calucchi.

Speaker 5 (01:00):
Jim is a TV writer, author, and entertainment journalist. He
wrote Golden Girls Forever, an unauthorized look behind the Lunai,
published in twenty sixteen. It is the first ever detailed
retrospective of this famous eighties TV Ladies show. He is

(01:20):
a certified Golden Girls expert, though I'm not sure where you.

Speaker 4 (01:25):
Go to get certified for that.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
You go down to the Eighties TV Lady's Certified Expert store.

Speaker 4 (01:31):
Maybe we need a T shirt.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
But if there was a place to go get certified
Jim Calucci would be given the first stamp. He has
written for countless magazines, from The Advocate to TV Guide,
written television special has been a correspondent on The Frank
DeCaro Show, and he's.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
Married to Frank DeCaro.

Speaker 5 (01:48):
He has also written books on All in the Family
and Will and Grace, but his most famous book is,
of course, his New York Times bestseller Golden Girls Forever.

Speaker 4 (01:59):
Welcome to Eighties TD Ladies.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Jim, thank you for having me. I had heard about
this from other guests you've had, and I was waiting
for my turn on deck. I've been hanging out here
in my Weezy Jefferson T shirt waiting for my chance
to come on your show.

Speaker 4 (02:13):
I love your Weezy Jefferson T shirt.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
You know.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
I wore it because it is an a tribute to
two eighties ladies in one, and it's not only Isabelle
Sandford and Weezy, of course, but I got this at
the estate sale of a woman named Ali Willis. And
I don't know if you know about Ali. Ali was
a songwriter. She passed away a few years ago, and she,
first of all, her entire esthetic was very much like
Peewe's playoffs, and she was friends with Paul Rubens, and

(02:37):
so she had a house in the valley in Valley
Village that she painted pink, and it was like walking
into Pewe's playhouse and it was just TV epemera everywhere
and crazy stuff she collected, and she had her recording
studio there. Because she was a prolific songwriter. She was
the writer of the Friends theme song for one thing,

(02:57):
but also of September for earth Wind and Fire, which
is probably your biggest hit wo Neutron Dance. What have
I done to deserve this? The music from the musical
color Purple, And those are just the ones off the
top of my head. She was a prolific songwriter, ohly
cow and she had a great affinity for African American
culture because she was from Detroit first of all and
worked with Motown a lot. So at the sale there

(03:18):
were a lot of you know companies. I think they
were probably black owned T shirt companies that had fun
stuff on them, and I got Weezy Jefferson. It's probably
cultural appropriation because the name of this T shirt company
is called Gully Originals. That's probably not a brand I
would I should I should wear if I weren't culturally appropriating.
But I figure I'm a gay guy worshiping Isabelle Sandford.
I can get away with it.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
There you go.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, absolutely, And I think T shirts are for everything.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, and it's also you know, it's a way to
honor both Isabelle and Ali.

Speaker 4 (03:46):
I think that's amazing, isn't it amazing?

Speaker 2 (03:48):
All these incredible like singer songwriter creators that are sort
of unknown, like living in the valley, and no one
would know.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
She was a character. You'd know if you saw her.
She had an asymmetrical haircut she was known for and
was really always very loudly dressed, bigger than life. She
was so much fun.

Speaker 4 (04:07):
That is so amazing.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
And there's a documentary about her actually that just came
out in the past year or two. And I'm going
to get the title wrong, so don't. I think it's
called The World of Ali Willis, but it's on one
of the streamers. So if you're interested in Allie Willis,
it's a ll E E. Willis and she's just she's fascinating.

Speaker 4 (04:24):
All right, we'll put it in our audiography.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (04:26):
Oh yeah, well, I definitely need to see that.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Oh you'd love it.

Speaker 4 (04:29):
Oh my gosh, Oh my gosh.

Speaker 5 (04:30):
There's been so many great musical documentaries recently. I for
some reason, I missed the one about Stax Records and
found it on the plane on my recent trip, and
they only had one episode for some strange and odd reason,
and so i'd soon I'm going to go back and
watch the rest of it.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
You know, that's what airplanes are for. For some reason,
I when I'm at home now, I'm going to watch
the tried and true or I'm going to keep up
with a series, And so I never end up experimenting
as much as I do when I'm on a plane.
For some and I'm a different person. I'm like, you
know what, I'm going to try that, And often it's
a show that I end up becoming addicted to and loving.

Speaker 4 (05:05):
Isn't that fun? It is? It is sort of like
it feels like it's a it's like a freebe right.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, it does. It's like thirty thousand feet. Jim has
totally different tastes and it's totally more experimental.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
And there's all sorts of crazy documentaries now that are
really cool, Like yeah, is yes.

Speaker 4 (05:21):
My mom, Jane, that's so great.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
It is it so impressed. I always had been impressed
with Okay, here's the theory that my husband and I am.
We think that Marishka Hargeta is the great leveler in
terms of anyone would sleep with her, male or female,
straight or gay. We are convinced that she is. She
is like the unifier, She's the I dare anyone to

(05:44):
watch Olivia Benson and not have some reaction whether you
want her to mommy you or whether you want her
to sleep with you. I don't know what you want
out of her arrest you rough you up a little,
But there's I mean, Olivia Benson is amazing and Marishka
is amazing. And what what you see from that documentary
is I'm so impressed with her and her family because
so many showbized families are screwed up, and so many

(06:06):
regular families are screwed up. Never mind that, but the
consequences of some of the choices that Jane made in
her life, not meaning to hurt anyone. Jane was, it
seems like a pretty good person, but she made some
choices that you know, she was with different men at
different times, and I think that could have been hard
on her. Kids, and you know, choices have repercussions. The
fact that everybody comes together in that documentary and is

(06:28):
able to deal with everybody else's choices and say, okay,
well that happened, or you know, I accept you as
my half sibling and I accept It's just they are
really a lovely group of people, and they could it
could have gone so differently, right, They could hate each other.
They could be fighting over a fortune, they could be
fighting over who sold the house. And you're not really
her kid or I'm more her kid than you. You know,

(06:49):
it's you don't get any of that.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
It is true. Have you seen that, Doug?

Speaker 5 (06:53):
I have. It was amazing. It was absolutely amazing and fascinating.
Like you said that, the whole family dynamic mean, in
much better circumstances, things go completely and totally sideways, and
it certainly could have in this case. But for whatever reason, Yeah,
they all acted like grown ups and adults.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
Exactly, And I having not always acted like a grown
up in those situations myself, I walked away from that saying,
my god, I'm impressed with these people.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, and again she's she is the great leveler, Like
there's nobody that doesn't go, well, yeah, she's great.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yeah, you want something out of her.

Speaker 4 (07:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
Maybe maybe you don't want to sleep with her, but
you'd like her, you know, pat your hair and tell
you it'll all be okay.

Speaker 4 (07:31):
And you also watch the Paul Rubins document.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yes, another great one. Yes, I learned so much.

Speaker 5 (07:37):
That I did not know about him and his life.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
And his temperament because you see his temperament too in
the interviews where he's really fighting the filmmaker and you
know it worked out fine, but you can see wow, okay, Yeah,
people are complicated.

Speaker 4 (07:52):
Yes, and he comes off even more complicated.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
Than you thought he would be. Yes, would be exactly.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
You know, you can tell that it goes back to
the days of the improv of the groundlings.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yes. And also the complicated nature comes to the fact
that he really got unfairly treated on several occasions and
it's still smarting from that. Yeah, and doesn't want to
seed control to the filmmaker when you know things have
been done badly to him. So I get it well.

Speaker 5 (08:16):
And it also shows you too that whatever you hear
read on the internet here on the news, you have
to understand that you're not getting all.

Speaker 4 (08:25):
Of the story.

Speaker 5 (08:26):
It's impossible to because people are complicated. Situations are complicated,
and I mean I've long tried to take a beat
and go, Okay, what's the rest of the story, what
are the complications? Because nothing is simple? But yeah, it was.
It was terrific. I highly recommend that as well. Not
eighties TV ladies related, but still, who cares.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
It's very no. I sorry, I started us on a tangent.
Thank you, Jim. Oh we loved so we could be
here all day.

Speaker 4 (08:51):
Yeah, but let's get back to you.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
And I am very curious what television meant to you
growing up and eighties teles in particular, and how it
led you to today.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
You know, I think that my answer is probably in
a lot of ways everybody's answer, and I will say
the full thing to you now. But I think sometimes
I'm almost shy about saying what television means to me
because I think that I'm being maudlin about it or
making it about me when probably everybody has this feeling.
So that's my caveat Like, Okay, if I'm going on

(09:26):
too long and I'm being emotional about television when everybody
feels that way, then tell me to shut up. But
I mean, television has always been a huge part of
my life. The one part that might be a little
bit different is that I have a older brother who
is one year older, who is developmentally disabled, severely disabled,
doesn't speak and doesn't read, and so when we were

(09:47):
practically irish twins and in matching cribs, my parents would
wheel in PBS for us to watch every iteration of
Sesame Street that aired on Channel thirteen New York and
I think it aired like three or four times a day,
and so so as a result, it didn't do anything
for him. But I could read before I was two,
and so TV was just always education for me. It

(10:09):
wasn't even like a guilty pleasure where people call it
the boob tube and say, you know, it's rotting your brain.
I never saw it that way because I saw what
it did for me from the very beginning. Electric Company
was my favorite show. And so the other part of
it is being a young gay kid growing up in
the eighties, which were way more conservative about that, and
growing up in a family that was a little more

(10:30):
conservative about it and all those issues. TV was an
escape and it was a place where there were you
when there was seldom but there was occasionally a gay character,
they had some dignity in the episode. They were treated
often by the end like they deserved to be equal,
and so that was always a nice message. There were
ideal families that were in some of those sitcoms where

(10:54):
a gay character might be introduced, but even if not
an ideal family that was functional. I mean, those were
great escapes, and so I just always did that. I
just and I think it brought me to of course,
and I think this is what it does for everyone TV.
It brings you a greater understanding of the world and
of other types of people. You know, I was growing
up in the suburb of New Jersey. I don't know

(11:16):
if I actually still live part time in New Jersey,
and I have noticed I think it's more integrated than
it used to be. The New Jersey of my youth
in the seventies and eighties was very segregated black versus
white in you know. I guess if you look at
the history of race relations in New Jersey, there were
the Newark Riots in the sixties, and that was a
town that was considered very black, and I think that

(11:37):
caused white flight in the cities, and because everything became
more and more separated, right, And so that was the
legacy I grew up in. And so I grew up
in a very white suburb, and I don't think I
knew it was very Italian, very Jewish. That would be
the only other minority I would know. And other than TV,
and you know, going to the mall, you didn't get

(11:58):
to meet other types of people that often. And so
I'm glad that TV brought that to me that I
didn't grow up to be, you know, in an adult
before I had ever seen other types of people and
seen them again presented with dignity and humor and everything else. So, yeah,
just the politics of the television, because TV's more progressive
than a lot of the real life people. And I'm

(12:18):
glad to have been exposed to progressive politics and diversity.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, Like I think because we love the characters so much,
and we're invited into, particularly in the sitcom world and
put all of the worlds where you're invited into people's
homes through television, and it's a little bit different.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Right, Yeah, it is. I always say that, you know,
media obviously, as it's both a mirror that reflects who
we already are, and it also is who we could be.
And film is great at that, because there are, of
course films that have completely changed American culture or the world.
But a film is a two hour, maybe three hours

(12:59):
sometime vehicle, and a TV show can come into your
living room when you're at your most vulnerable, when you're
in your underwear, when you're most receptive in a lot
of ways. Maybe you're tired, maybe it's a long day,
the world has beating you down, and you're receptive to
something that's going to make you laugh or make you cry.
But TV can come into your living room for a
half hour an hour every week, for twenty something weeks

(13:21):
every year, year on end. You fall in love with
these characters. A film character can be iconic, a film
character can be a poster. It can be something to
aspire to. But it's not going to become your best friend.
Mary Tyler Moore, Mary Richards could be your best friend.
Dorothy's bornet could be your best friend in your mind.
Of course, we know they're not real, but they really
they become a part of you. They become someone you

(13:41):
feel you know. And so when someone like that then
has an experience that's either great or can be awful.
Maybe they're discriminated against, maybe they are. There's violence, maybe
there's a home invasion, maybe there's you know, whatever it is,
they're joys in their triumph. You feel them so deeply
because you've gotten to know them so well over all
this time, and so the power of that is enormous,

(14:04):
and including to sneak in some progressive messaging, as I
wrote a book with Norman Lear all about all in
the Family, and you know, that's what he saw so
brilliantly that even Archie, by the way, was lovable because
of Carol O'Connor and the writing. But the other characters
who were more progressive, if they had been in a film,
character who had lectured you once, you might say, you
know what, go to hell meete head, Mike, I don't

(14:25):
want to be lectured about this. But Mike came into
your living room every week for those nine years, actually
he was only for the first eight, and became a
friend and became a trusted source. And so I think
that a lot of his viewpoint kind of resonated with
people over time, even people who maybe by the film
the show's premiere in nineteen seventy one wouldn't have considered

(14:47):
themselves progressive, but some of that kind of got through
to them. So TV has such immense power and I
love that about it.

Speaker 5 (14:54):
Yeah, it has not just the entertainment value. Sometimes it
is all those those underlying things that along to make
TV so compelling and at least I know it does
for me.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Well, what better way to get through to someone than
with laughter or with through their emotions? Right? If we
all see on social media everybody trying to make and
maybe i'd say intellectual arguments, but some people are clearly
not very intellectual. But still sometimes it's just argument. Yes,
sometimes it's just arguments, but they're trying to appeal to
the intellect, to the brain to change people's minds via

(15:23):
the brain. And that's very hard to do because especially
in an era when people don't accept facts as facts anyway,
So it's going to be very hard to change somebody's
mind with a fact when they're just going to tell
you it's not a fact. However, emotion is where you
really change hearts and minds and laughter and you know,
the spoonful of sugar of delivering a designing woman I
always think of doing this is there it delivering great

(15:44):
messages along with hilarious situations, and you can laugh at
Susanne sugar Baker and laugh with Susanne sugar Baker and
still get the fact that she's being a buffoon. Here. Oh, here,
she's showing she has some heart. Here's what we really
should get out of this episode that this gay character
who they were to designing a room and a funeral
home for, deserved the dignity and not to be treated

(16:04):
like a parah or she's wrong when she shoots Anthony. Yes, yeah, yeah,
we get it, we get it, but it's because it's
done with laughter.

Speaker 4 (16:12):
I totally agree.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
We sort of talk about how how television, particularly eighties television,
but all television I think from the beginning was teaching
us stuff. It was our Internet before the Internet, because
you could learn about something a culture, a class, or
even again, Cagney and Lacy, they have a scene where
they teach the captain how to use a microwave, and

(16:35):
that was because America needed to learn how to use
their microwaves. Now, some of it was also selling microwaves,
I was going to say, but it was that thing
of like people didn't know how to use them, and
it was technology that you got this information, and then
they did it with rape and with you know, police brutality,

(16:56):
and with you know, cancer and all these these shows
had an opportunity to showcase life lessons but also life
information that you couldn't really access as immediately anywhere else.

Speaker 5 (17:14):
And it was really television, I think, the first thing
that really showed people across the country, across the world
about how other people lived, Yes, what sorts of families
and and you I could imagine going, oh, well, their
families maybe live here, but there.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
And they may pretty similar.

Speaker 5 (17:31):
Still I'm still just kind of like my family. It
was the beginnings of that. I mean, listen, as we
all know, at the end of the day, television is
all about making money, right, That's what That's what it
was made for, and that's why it exists, and that's okay.
But it also had all these consequences intended or otherwise
that has made a difference in our world and in

(17:53):
our lives over the years.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
Oh I think so. And not to be pollyannaish and
all positive about television all the time, but given where
even as screwed up as we are now and how
backward we seem to be moving, I'm going to say,
let's talk about twenty sixteen before this whole era started. Well,
that's okay, let's think of that as the good old days.

(18:14):
That twenty sixteen was so different from nineteen seventy one
when All in the Family started, It was so different
from nineteen eighty whatever. And I can't imagine such social
progress on so many issues taking place so quickly as
it did in the TV era in other eras, like
what were really the social differences for gay people or
black people or Jews between the twenties and the thirties

(18:37):
or the forties where they did. Was there that much progress?
Probably not? But once TV's in the equation, I think
that things kind of started to really accelerate in terms
of acceptance. And so you know, when I think of
All in the Family, and when you mentioned women's issues
and reproductive issues and stuff in All in the Family,
when they had Edith talk about either being in menopause
or breast cancer, they got hate mail for that. How

(18:58):
dare you talk about something so dirty? I watched this
show with my children, with my daughters, Like I'm a
grown man writing this. I write this, watch the show
with my daughters. What you don't want your daughters to
know the facts of life, that there's a such thing
as breast cancer, and then you know, think about by
the nineties, I would never have thought that even would
have happened, Like breast cancer was of course openly discussed,
and that was, you know, less than twenty years span.

(19:19):
So I really think that things really accelerated through television
in a good way.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yes, And I think it's also the power of storytelling, yes, right,
like we had, you know, but it's storytelling on steroids.
It's not we got to get everybody into an amphitheater
and teach them about the Greek chorus.

Speaker 4 (19:36):
You know.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
It's Oh, we can feed this right into your home.
It's so intimate. Yep, it's so intimate, and you do
find characters you fall in love with and they're with
you forever. Like you know, there won't be another scare
Chromasis King episode, but damn it, I still love it.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
Oh why will not reboot that? I mean they're both
we have Kay Jackson and Bruce Boxitler. I was at
a part pready recently, maybe six months ago, where Bruce
box Lightner was and I was so tempted to go
up and geek out and I didn't, and I kind
of regret it.

Speaker 4 (20:06):
He would have loved it. Had him. We've talked to him.
He was amazing. They met him in person.

Speaker 5 (20:13):
Melissa I, Melissa and our producer and I went to
the fortieth anniversary of Scarecrow Missus King event that they had.
He was there, and Martha Smith was there, and a
number several of the other cast members former cast members
were there, and he was a delight Bruce, I mean
they all were, but yeah, it was a great storyteller.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
And now I doubly regret not having a costume.

Speaker 4 (20:40):
Yeah, I have that same experience.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
I was in a theater and dig Van Dyke was
right now with two people next to him that were younger,
and I assume they were with him, and I was like,
I want to go up, but I felt like I couldn't.
And then later I found out that he absolutely adores that.

Speaker 4 (20:58):
Because that's the thing. You don't know.

Speaker 5 (21:00):
Some people are like, please leave me alone. Others are
like Dick and Bruce and like love to talk to you. It's,
you know, nice to meet you, and they really enjoy
those interactions.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
More often than not, they actually do like it. But
it's more a case of Do I have anything smart
to say right now? Or am I just gonna be
one of those peopleho goes remember that show memoer like
I don't want to do that. I just at okay,
let me have something smart to say in this moment,
or maybe I shouldn't do it.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
And that's so funny because it is one of my
questions for today, so we'll ask it right now, which is,
you know, what's your advice if you see somebody and
you want to say something, what you know?

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Oh boy, I am so the wrong person to give
that advice because I have screwed it up on so
many occasions. There are legendary stories of encounters that went
wrong because of me, And I think this was one
of your questions that I showed to my husband and said,
this one could take an hour alone. I have an
infamous story about accosting Meryl Streep on the New York

(21:59):
cupt Way and how badly that went because of me.
She was fine because of me, And same thing with JFK.
Junior on the New York Subway. You know, I would
say a don't go up to people when they're around
their kids or grandkids. They get very protective and even
if you know you're just saying a quick hello. I
have said hello to people in restaurants where the kids
were around and gotten kind of like a weird look,

(22:20):
and I was like, okay, yeah, you're being protective. There's
one actress from an eighties TV show I guess I
won't say her name now, but I saw her walking
a baby pushing a baby carriage it must be her grandchild,
right near the entrance to one of the studios here
in town. And I was walking by and I needed
her for my love Boat book, and so I went
up and talked to her, and she could not have

(22:41):
run away faster and faster, and I was just like, wow, Okay,
that went really not well. So yeah, I would say,
don't go up to people when they're around their kids,
and also go up with something specific to say and
a compliment that means something, you know. I always think
of my husband talking about when he saw Juliane on
the New York subway and he was ready to He

(23:03):
was like, I know exactly what I'm gonna say to
or and he was waiting for the moment where maybe
one of them would be getting off the train so
they would she would know that it wouldn't have to
be a long conversation. And the stop before my husband
was going to get off, another gay guy walks by
Julia and Moore and says, I loved you Insafe, and
she was like, thank you so much. No one ever
talks about that movie when they talk about my stuff.
And they had a nice conversation, and then when Frank

(23:25):
got off the subway just said to her he took mine,
like because that was what I was gonna say, and
he couldn't come up with a plan B, so that's
all he could say to where he took mine.

Speaker 5 (23:34):
I always wish that I had like a sign or
something or something that I could say sort of indicate
I'm not crazy.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
Yes, but see the problem is that often makes you
look crazy. With Meryl Street, just the long and the
short of it is.

Speaker 4 (23:45):
Oh yeah, I got to hear this story.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
It's a really long story. I look so bad in it.
I see her get onto the New York subway. I'm
the only one who recognizes her. She goes and she
sits by the pole, you know the pole that we're
on the other side. There's the gap for the door,
and she just hangs down to the pole with her
right hand and puts her head down and just closes
her eyes like she doesn't want to make contact with people.
And I'm all like, that's Meryl's great, all right, I

(24:08):
got everybody and nobody is paying attention. It's New York,
they're all blaise. So I, like a creepy person, go
stand in the gap of the door and have my
left hand over her right hand, and I'm just looking
down at her the entire like I'm inches from her
face for the entire ride. And it was a crowded subway,
so she didn't necessarily think that like I was. It's
not like there were feet around, but I still I
was the one who was inches from her face, and

(24:30):
I start telling myself that, oh, she must be doing
what I'm doing. I was on my way to a
Carrie Fisher book signing at Lincoln Center of the Barnes
and Noble when it was there, and I did. I
knew Carrie a little bit, and I so I was
going to the book signing, and then I thought, wait
a minute, Merril's probably going to the Carrie Fisher book signing.
Why else would she be on the one nine train
right now? And so Okay, Meryl's going to the signing.

(24:52):
I'm going to So I'm convincing myself of this. So
we start to get near the Lincoln Center stop and
she's still not looking up or paying any attention. I
think this in the day before earbuds, but you can
imagine like maybe she had earbuds in. And I said, how
am I going to alert Meryl that we're at our
stop and she's not paying attention without telling everybody else
that she's Meryl Street Because I did that to JFK

(25:14):
Junior once I outed him on the subway, and he did.
He was nice about it, but I could tell he
did not appreciate it. So I was like, I know,
this is this is the crazy this is the crazy way.
Even the T shirt that says I'm not crazier the
sign would not help. I said to myself, I'm going
to address her in a way that only she will
and I will understand. That's a bad thought when you

(25:34):
have that right there, run away from that thought. So
I thought, well, she's on her way to Carrie Fisher's
book signing. She was in Postcards from the Edge. I'm
going to call her Suzanne, her character name, so yeah,
this is this is crazy. This is crazy. I like
how you're gasping. This son hasn't even happened yet, and
you're gasping with embarrassment. So I'm already only like three
inches from her ear. So I lean into her ear
and I say, come on, Suzanne, this is our stop.

(25:56):
And the moment I said it, it all hit me.
Oh I made this all up. She I don't know
where she's going. I just called her. I just watched
the frequency Kenneth's Meryl Streep if you remember that reference.
I just watched the frequency Kenneth Meryl Streep. And so
at the moment I'm done saying it, she tilts her
head towards me and opens her eyes and just looks
at me, and I was like, oh my god. And

(26:17):
I'm like, now three inches by'd eye with Meryl Streep,
and I'm like, you know, she's she could be intimidating
when she wants to. She wasn't even trying. And I'm like,
oh my god, I have screwed this up. So the
doors open at Lincoln Center and I jump off the train,
and you would think, for devilment, the doors don't close.
The train just sits there in the station, and I

(26:38):
now need to know whether she's getting off the train,
Like how crazy am I? So I hide behind a
pillar and I'm the only one. I'm the only one
on this This never happens either. I'm the only one
on the entire platform at Lincoln Center and I hide
behind this pillar. Not well, I'm fat and I'm fatter
than the pillar. And I'm watching the door of the

(26:58):
subway and just it'sting there and I'm like, wow, lo,
when do subways just sit it? And finally I hear
the ding dong ding dong, like it's gonna close, and
I'm like, oh, she wasn't even getting off here. And
with that, she stands up and like adjusts this long
dramatic scarf she was wearing and glides off the train
as if the conductor had been saying, Meryl, we'll wait,
wait whenever you're ready. And so she gets off the

(27:18):
train and she's now on the Lincoln Center platform and
I'm hiding behind a pillar like four feet away, and
she sees me, oh do And so she comes up
to me and says, I'm sorry, what did you say?
And this is my this was my opportunity to make
something up that wouldn't be crazy, but I just couldn't
think fast enough, and I thought, you know what, she's
going to hear that it's different and think I'm so
I just repeated it sheepishly, come on, s in, this

(27:41):
is stop. And she's like uh huh, and then she
waited to see which direction I went, which exit I
took from the platform, and she took the other one,
but she did go to the Carrie Fisher book Silence
my god, Okay. I actually ran up the stairs into
the Barnes and Noble. They had closed off the upper
level where they were having the book signing, and there
was a poor Barnes and Noble employee like blocking the escalator,
which was a really skinny escalator, and I just I

(28:02):
practically ran her over. I just zoomed past her and
like red faced and crying, like I have me get
up here with my holenses up there waiting for me,
and I just said something crazy mel Streep.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
And.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
The one was just like, oh, he's crazy. I'm not
going to get in fight with some So I got
upstairs and I see Frank and he's standing right by
the entrance to the like the glassroom where the book
signing will be, which is already overflowing with people, and
I just start saying to whimpery, I love the subway.
There's Meryl stream and he's like, you're not making any sense.
And with that, Merrill comes up behind me on this
way and just on the escalator and just glides past

(28:37):
me and goes led to the green room where she's
apparently going to meet carry And I never saw her again,
but I was like, Meryl, Oh my god, so yes.
The answer to how to go up to people that
you admire is, hey, don't do it when they're kids
and their grandkids around. Be have something smart or respectful
and a unique compliment and see, don't be me, don't

(28:58):
do anything I've done.

Speaker 4 (29:01):
Don't make up a whole story.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
Don't make up a whole story in your head about
how you know them, and you can intimately call them
by another name in their ear. I mean, oh my god,
the idea that she didn't like call security or like,
it's so nice about it.

Speaker 4 (29:16):
I love.

Speaker 5 (29:17):
That's what road took you to writing in journalism in particular,
and TV, how did what was that journey?

Speaker 1 (29:27):
Like, oh my god, it was so not the right
road or the straightforward road, and now I have to
say the straightforward road to journalism is probably one that
I would tell kids. Don't do it anyway, because journalism
has completely fallen apart, like many things, and not just
because of the politics of today. But I was saying
this ten years ago because the Internet really undercut what
I do and I think what a lot of other

(29:48):
journalists do. Because the democratization of voices, well you could
see democratization in most things is usually a good thing.
It also can have negative consequences, and one of those
is that when everybody's voice has equal including people who
are just making stuff up off the top of their heads,
it's very hard to distinguish through the clutter who is
a qualified voice and people who have trained to be journalists.

(30:11):
So it's very hard to make a living now because
whereas newspapers and magazines used to only hire qualified journalists
and they get paid two dollars a word or whatever
it was, now there's almost no such thing as two
dollars a word, and a lot of those magazines and
newspapers died because they were competing against the Internet. So

(30:31):
that being said, I didn't even take that the standard
journalism road to journalism anyway. I was a marketing and
computer science major. I didn't want to do the computer
science part particularly. But while I was working in New
York at an ad agency, which not in a creative
capacity at all, is working in a numbers capacity, my
husband was writing for TV Guide. He had a deal there,

(30:53):
and actually I got a break. I had always written
it kind of keep me saying, even when I was
studying computers. So I wrote for the school newspaper and
their features magazine all through college anyway, So I had
always kind of been doing it, but not I knew
it wasn't a career, and I didn't know if it
could be a career.

Speaker 5 (31:10):
Were you writing about television at that time? Or were
the features about a variety of things.

Speaker 1 (31:15):
It was a lot about television, a lot of film.
I was a film reviewer. I'm not a good film reviewer,
and so I didn't make it as a film reviewer
on that magazine for that long because I have very
mainstream taste, and they wanted artists, you know, they wanted
people to review the latest European film, and I would
that wasn't me, But you know, I didn't see that
as a career. I'm working for the ad agency in
New York and my husband, who was writing for TV Guide,

(31:38):
was asked to cover a particular story. He had been
chronicling the Sopranos from the very beginning of that show.
We're both Italian and from New Jersey. I think that's
how he got the beat. He did an interview with
James Gandalfini before the show was ever on the air,
and he's on set and so he really was ingrained
and meshed with them. And then the Sopranos, this was
probably nineteen ninety nine or two thousand. They were having

(32:00):
a very hyped up casting call in New Jersey at
a high school in Harrison, New Jersey, and they were
going to possibly cast some people for probably only minor roles.
They didn't say it that way from this casting call,
and so the TV Guide editors asked my husband Frank,
to go cover it, but they wanted someone to do
it undercover, and they didn't realize until a couple of

(32:23):
days before. Wait a minute, he can't go undercover. They
know him, and so they had a last minute like
who can we get And so they asked if I
wanted to do it, because I knew his editors too
just throw him, and I was like, sure, I'll go
undercover at the Sopranos casting call. Well, a, I'm not
an early riser, so I probably left or too late
anyway for this casting call. But they expected I don't

(32:46):
know how many the maybe a thousand people, they got
something like twenty or thirty thousand people come to this
high school. It was so much that had overwhelmed the
entire town. It shut down the highways in every direction.
The police had to come and shut it down. And
so I, at the time that it was supposed to
be starting, was still stuck on route to eighty halfway
between New York and Halfway and Harrison, New Jersey because
all the exits were closed. And so by the time

(33:08):
I made it to the town, the cops had shut
it down hours early but earlier, but there were still
thousands of people standing in line, milling about, pissed that
they didn't get in with their headshots. And so that
became my story, talking to all the people who were
pissed that they didn't get to go to the Sopranos castimal.
And then once I did that, I just kept pitching
to TV Guide and It was honestly not something I

(33:28):
again saw could be a career. But it was that
I had a New York rent that was killing me,
and I had a not great paying job in advertising,
and this was a way to make up the difference. Oh,
I could sell some freelance stories on the side, and
I wasn't always busy at work in advertising. So I
would secretly close the door of my office and do
an interview with Don Adams, you know, and then the
gl open my door again and pretend I was crunching numbers.
So I did that for years, where I had like

(33:50):
a secret double life where I'm interviewing celebrities with the
door closed. And so eventually I had always wanted to write.

Speaker 4 (33:57):
Was it two dollars a word?

Speaker 1 (33:59):
Yes? TV Guide was dollars. I don't know what they
are now. I don't think they probably are, but back
then it was a story. Yeah, it could be, I mean,
and they would assigned low word counts, like you would
get a story that was like three hundred or four
hundred words, but hey, for six hundred and eight hundred
bucks extra this month, that's great. And they especially if
you did a couple of stories a month, and so
After a couple of years, I started thinking, well, I've

(34:20):
always wanted to write a book about a TV show,
and the reason is really because of the consumer of
books that I've always been about TV shows that and
the books were always terrible. When I was a kid,
before the Internet, the only place to learn about your
favorite shows would be either the columns and TV guide
that would like would be about it, and my parents

(34:41):
were too cheap to suscribed to the actual TV guide,
so I just had to rely on the TV supplement
in the local newspaper and there'd be a Q and
a column and maybe three or four questions with answers
about current shows, and that was the only source I had.
But I always thought, I want more. And there would
be occasionally books about TV shows, but when you'd get them,
they often be written on the cheap, they have errors

(35:02):
in them that, as even a casual fan, you'd be like,
that's not even right. And so I thought, you know,
with the shows that I love, I want to do
a deep dive. I want to be able to tell
people that every single detail that I've always wanted to
know about the show and have it be right. And
so after the couple of years of experience with TV Guide,
I started pitching a Golden Girl's book and this is

(35:22):
year this, Oh, so this would be two thousand and two, okay,
And I wrote a Golden Girls book proposal. I wanted
to be able to tell everything about that show, the
way I always wanted to know every little nitty gritty
detail that hasn't been either revealed or it's been in
many different places not compiled into one. And I didn't

(35:42):
instantly get a deal to do a Golden Girls book
because of the agism and misogyny that is in the
world and of so many publisher it would that's exactly
what I would get. The pattern would often be that
my agent would approach a junior person at a publish company,
who would often be a gay guy, a young woman,

(36:02):
a person of color, somebody who would get it and
they would say, oh my god, how has there not
been a book about the Golden Girls? Y, Yes, yes,
I can't wait to do this, and they'd run it
up the flagpole. And then we'd hit some old white
guy in marketing who'd say, that's a show that's over
ten years old at this point, over ten years old
about old ladies who'd want to watch that? Why would
we publish a book on that? And then we'd die.
So in the meanwhile, there was an open writing assignment

(36:25):
to write a book about Will and Grace and like
my second favorite show that I'm also obsessed with, and
so I auditioned for and got that assignment, and then
later I was able to, based on the strength of that,
able to sell my first Golden Girls book and keep going.
So I had no training other than other than writing
for the school paper, which was good training because there
were people who were journalists, students and grad students or

(36:47):
whatever who were my editors.

Speaker 5 (36:48):
There is it interesting that, you know, so many years after,
I'm sure many people said, oh, who's going to want
to watch this show about these middle aged women? And
this show it becomes a phenomenon, and yet there is
still the mentality out there.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
You will still hear that. Yeah, I mean more people
now get it because they see all the merchandise out
there and they see that, you know, they can read
about how it's a phenomenon, and the phenomenon is one
of the few the old shows that grows rather than
recedes in time. But you will still encounter people in
business who will be like about old ladies. So it's
as cool as the Golden Girls. I mean, I remember

(37:25):
not to bring up horrible names again. But you know,
in twenty fifteen or fourteen, Mitch McConnell, when he was
trying to be sexist about Hillary and ages about Hillary,
he said like, oh, the Democratic ticket is starting to
look like a rerun of the Golden Girls. And I
was like, you don't realize that's actually a compliment. Like
keep saying that because the Golden Girls has immense popularity,
you'll get people to want to like her better. But
you know, there are so many clueless people who just

(37:46):
refuse to get it. And it's because of the ingrained
disdain for older people and women that they think is
totally cool. They're cool with it, and.

Speaker 4 (37:54):
Dare I say, it's probably mostly men who are making it.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
So I think it is mostly men. I don't see
many women say hey, women should be irrelevant. I think
it's got to be men.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
Yeah, that's crazy, all right, So it took you. The
book came out in twenty sixteen, so it was.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
Well two books. I wrote two books about the Golden Girls.
What ended up happening was still in two thousand and six,
I was encountering the pushback about the Golden Girls. But
I was at a wedding where the gay best what
was his title, It wasn't best man. He was the
bride's best man basically. However, whatever he called himself, it
was a cute name. Happened to be an editor at

(38:30):
a gay and lesbian publishing company actually, and he was
just starting a book, a series of guide books that
would have the spines would be in different colors, so
it would form a rainbow on your shelf. Nice and
the yellow ones were going to be the guides to
pop culture. And so I said, well, Golden Girls. And
so the Q Guide to the Golden Girls ended up
becoming the first Q Guide in the yellow category, and

(38:52):
I dare say their bestseller ever because of the power
of the girls. But then I wanted, I always wanted
to do a larger book about the Golden Girls because
the QUE Guide for a lot of reasons, had to
be smaller. There was no budget, there was no photo budget.
But also Disney, which owns the Golden Girls to this
day and was one of the producers as Touchtoone Television,
didn't really want to be bothered with the Golden Girls

(39:13):
for the same reasons. Now, to be fair, Disney, of
course is the home of Star Wars and Frozen and
these billion dollar behemoths and more than I'm not even
thinking of to name. And although the Golden Girls as big,
it wasn't as big twenty years ago as it is now,
and it wasn't a billion dollar property. And so to them,
these library things I think were a headaches, particularly to

(39:35):
their lawyers. That's just a headache. That's just busy work
that we're going to have to do to make peanuts
where we're making money on Star Wars. Just go away.
So every time I would approach Disney for photo rights
for the Golden Girls, which was necessary to do the
kind of book I wanted to do, they would well,
first of all, ignore me for a good seven years,
like just not respond because of the way that they
had one person who was the photo rights person, and

(39:57):
her office was in Brigadoon, and I don't think she
was reachable via via email or any You get to
go over a bridge through the heather, through the mists
with a pigeon with a scroll, and then and they
could you know, she'd read the scroll and then right
back and wouldn't sign it with wax. I mean, like
it was, everything was done like it was done hundreds
of years ago in her office, and she just would
ignore you. But by the time I got the permission,

(40:19):
it was to get it out in time for twenty sixteen,
So ten full years later of needing begging Disney for permission,
and at the time that I did the book to
brag a little bit, the I say in the book
that there is no Golden Girls merchandising out there other
than I called it. Sisters are doing it for themselves,
making it on Etsy, bootlegged, because that's all there was.

(40:40):
And lo and behold, my book comes out as a
New York Times bestseller, and about six months later, Disney
starts rolling out Golden Girls merchandise and there's more and
more coming to this day. So I think it kind
of woke them up to the fact that there was
money being left on the table and this is growing.
Why are you ignoring it?

Speaker 4 (40:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (40:57):
Yeah, but they continued to do that, as they all do. Yeah,
it's like it, you know, Hidden Figures comes out does
amazing and.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yes, and they well, anytime a movie about women comes
out and as a hit, whether It's book Club or
was it Magnolia Hotel, the Great Marigol's Hotel, And they
view it like it's a one off, like it's a fluke,
Like oh yeah, yeah that was a hit, but like,
you know, that was just that was that it's not
gonna get like no, you idiots, Like these are people
who will want to go to the movies and see

(41:26):
themselves and you're not giving them vehicles to do it,
and when you do, they show up.

Speaker 4 (41:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Yeah. Some isms are so ingrained in Hollywood because if
you have to realize that Hollywood is a giant high school,
and if it were really about making money, people would
look in the niches where they could have have it
all to themselves and make the money there. But it's not.
It's about looking young and cool, and every executive wants
to look young and cool. So you don't want to
bet on the old lady property because if anything goes wrong,

(41:53):
they're going to say, well, why did you invest in
an old lady property? You're fired. If you invest in
the newest, you know, Marvel movie and it misfires, they
can say, okay, well that was a rare Marvel missfire.
I mean, like you're not gonna get fired because, like Marvel,
duh usually makes money. You're cool. So if you stick
in a narrow lane of what has been proven to
make money in a very male, young way, you won't

(42:14):
lose your job. But if you go out on a
limb to all these crazy things, like things about women
or people of color, then you'll be nuts and then
nobody will come and you'll get fired. It's a giant
high school.

Speaker 4 (42:25):
It's a giant high school.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
But and it's also wrong, right, Like they're so wrong,
they're leaving money on the table.

Speaker 4 (42:31):
It's will form ignorance.

Speaker 1 (42:32):
It is all right, well we've solved okay, we've solved
the problems of Hollywood.

Speaker 4 (42:37):
All right, but how do you organize?

Speaker 2 (42:39):
So how do you organize a quintessential guide to the
Golden Girls?

Speaker 1 (42:43):
Okay, So the funny thing is, having heard me talk
and go off on a lot of tangents, you probably
think that I'm very scattered. The irony is I'm a
really anal left brain virgo. And that actually helps with
books like this because there are so many little parts
and that you have to scynth the size and put together.
And you know, the Golden Girls was one thing. And

(43:04):
you know, there have were many guest stars that I
interviewed a couple. Maybe I had like a two hundred.
Now I'm doing a book about the Love Boat. I've
just finished, and I've interviewed about five hundred. And that's
because I always compare The Golden Girls is like doing
a hundred piece puzzle or a five hundred piece puzzle,
and doing the Love Boat. Writing about the Love Boat
is like doing a five thousand piece puzzle. Because if

(43:25):
you were a guest star and the Golden Girls, you
were there all week, you were probably one of only
a few guest stars the episode was you had a
major part in it. You would have stories, definitely about
working with those four women. There'd be something with the
Love Boat. You were one of maybe eight or ten
guest stars. You were only there on your day to
shoot your little scenes. You never know what people are
going to remember, and so it's like the pieces are

(43:47):
so much smaller to assemble to get the full story.
And either way you have to be very I think
right brain, left brain, left brand about it is the
left brain about it, which is very organic. I actually
this is the engineer part of me, the computer science part.
I actually take my notes in Excel, so I interview people,

(44:08):
I transcribe the interview, and then I actually have a spreadsheet. Okay,
this episode is going to have a hole when I
need to talk about the theme. It's going to have
a hole where I need to talk about the guest stars.
And so there's a cell for each of those things,
and I fill in the cells with quotes, and then
I can see visually where the holes are in the book.
And that's literally how I do it, because otherwise it's

(44:28):
too hard to keep track of what you have and
what you need and when you're done. And I'm not
good at knowing when I'm done because I love the interviewing.
But with Will and Grace, I did it even more,
where I literally took the notes as I was watching
the episodes in Excel, and I would tag them with
a like. I made up a series of keywords that
I could use as an index, so I would be
like Jack's feelings on being gay, Will's feelings on this,

(44:49):
and I made up maybe you know twenty of those keywords,
and then I could sort the spreadsheet by either by
episode name, by date, by season, by keyword, and so
anytime I needed to know anything about the show. I
could actually sort in an excel and come right to it.
And that's very anal but it worked.

Speaker 4 (45:07):
It's brilliant, actually, I think, I mean, well, thank you.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
If I want to understands my note I combine.

Speaker 5 (45:14):
I don't know that I ever would have come up
with that, but it is to me. It's just sounds
absolutely brilliant because as you said, it's it's much easier
to do that upfront than try to go back later
and try to.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
Reconstruct it exactly.

Speaker 4 (45:24):
So oh wow, that's amazing.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
When you know what you're looking at. It's like, oh,
you can see where the hole is. You can sort
and know like, okay, I have a lot on this topic,
but like you know, ten lines on this topic, but
there's one line on that topic. Okay, I god, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
Now, in Golden Girls Forever, you don't cover all the
episodes of the book.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
I wanted to, but then it would be like a
doorstop that no one could you know, fit on their
bookshelf or afford.

Speaker 4 (45:48):
You know.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
The thing is publishers are It's all done on via
a formula of how many pages is the book, how
much color printing, and how much will we have to
charge for a cover price. So they they are conservative
about how many pages they will let you have, and
that is always a problem. And so with the Golden Girls,
I actually begged for more pages. And so I learned

(46:10):
this that books are printed in their groupings of sixteen pages,
and each of those groupings of sixteen is called a signature.
And so when I was doing the Golden Girls book,
they had given me X number of signatures, and I
begged for more. I wanted three more signatures, meaning forty
eight more pages. They gave me two more signatures. So
I got thirty two more pages, which was even a

(46:31):
lot for them to do. Was generous in a way.
I mean, I wanted to give them a book that's
sold well. But I understand their formula and that they
were worried about the money, and so I knew from
the start just doing the math. You know, if you
have two hundred episodes of a show, and you know
that each show is going to take at least one
page in the layout, usually two. Okay, you can't do

(46:52):
every right there, You can't do every episode, So you
have to take a more thematic approach, and in a
way that's a good thing, because not every episode is
going to have a living guest star or a guest
star with a story, or some of the episodes are
just not as interesting. And so what I did with
the Golden Girls was I wanted to cover that, yes,
the episodes that everybody expects to see, and yes, the

(47:14):
case of the Libertine Bell is not in there, and
yes it was in there until my publisher cut it
into the last minute without telling me. But they needed pages.
I guess you've heard from some I have read from
some readers, and I don't blame them, because I would
have looked for that too, and there were good stories
that maybe in a future edition. But with the exception
of that, yes, I put in any episode that I

(47:35):
know fans are going to want to see. But after that,
the way I choose the episodes to talk about are
the ones that have stories that are very telling about
either how a show is put together, how the relationships
among the people that we care about evolved, or how
the show shaped the world. And because it's a theme
that really was groundbreaking or something, and so it really

(47:57):
the episodes that went into the book are the ones
that for they're the arc of the story of the
Golden Girls, not necessarily just because they had a funny
line or whatever. I mean, they all have funny lines.

Speaker 4 (48:07):
Yeah, Can you talk about some.

Speaker 5 (48:09):
Of the surprising things that are your favorite things that
you learned and doing your research for the.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
Book for Golden Girls specifically? You know, I think that
we all knew that originally they wanted Betty White to
play Blanche and Rue mcclanney had to play Rose. I
think that's come out pretty well, but you know, when
I started the research in two thousand and five, that
wasn't as well known. So of course that makes you
think what would that have been like, you know, it
could have been good, and it maybe wouldn't have been

(48:35):
as good as what we got. So yeah, I just
hearing about the way the show was put together. I
think one of the things that I was surprised by
back then, and I don't know if people know this now,
And I compare it to The Love Boat ironically, because
it's something that Mark Cherry said too when I was
interviewing him. Mark Cherry got his first writing job ever

(48:58):
on The Golden Girls, having been a and this was
he and his writing partner, Jamie Wooten were the first
fans of the Golden Girls to be hired to write
for the show, because they came in with a second regime,
and the first regime had been there since the very beginning,
and so you know they were Mark was now a
second generation of writers being hired who already had watched
four seasons of the show and we're fans. But having

(49:19):
known the show as a fan and being a gay
man and knowing how LGBT positive the show was, he said,
he assumed that he would get to that writer's room
and it would just be a big old bunch of
queens and he'd have a great time. And he said, instead,
he walked in and it was all straight people, and
in fact, they were talking about a boxing Max match
they had just seen. And he walked in, like, am
I in the wrong What? Am I in the wrong place?

(49:41):
He was afraid of what he'd gotten himself into. Of course, today,
when they staff a sitcom or any show, they try
to get diversity in the writer's room. In fact, they
mandate diversity in the writers' room. And that's mostly a
good thing. And I say mostly because it's it's very
hard when you're staffing a group of sometimes only five
six people to represent everyone. You have every stripe, and

(50:04):
once you start mandating that every stripe has to be represented,
you may be knocking out some writers who would be
really good for your show. And so I have a
little bit of mixed feelings about that, even though diversity,
of course is a goal we should go for. And
so what I marvel at is that, for better or
for worse, it was mostly a bunch of straight white

(50:24):
men writing this show about women and getting it kind
of right. I mean, yes, it does sound like gay
men talking sometimes. And you know, we always joke that
the I think Mark Cherry jokes that there's an alchemy
that you take these straight white men's jokes, put them
in the mouths of the Arthur and it comes out
like a gay man. And there was there was occasionally

(50:46):
a gay man or writing group in the in the room,
and there were some women, and there was only one
person of color the entire time, and the writer Winnifred Hervey,
and so there was a little representation. But for the
most part, I really marvel at how they got it
as right as they did for who they were. And
then the reason I say compressed that to the love
Boat is the Love Boat is the straightest show ever?

(51:09):
They only talked about They made a couple of gay
jokes along the line. There was one kind of hidden
cloak to gay storyline in the later seasons, and that
show was produced by the biggest bunch of queens. There
were gay men in the writer's room, there were gay producers,
they were bisexual producers, and it was just that they
weren't allowed. That it was that much earlier than the
Golden Girls, and they weren't allowed to bring that kind

(51:30):
of subject matter to the television screen too. Some of
them did, some of them did, and some of them tried,
and they were actually so. One of the showrunners was gay,
and his niece wrote for the show as well, and
I know she kept pitching a gay storyline that they
kept turning down, and even her uncle would turn it down. No,
we can't do that. Eventually they did, as I said,
they did one very very You have to know what's
going on to know that it's a gay storyline called

(51:51):
Flat Brothers Forever, And that's as daring as they dared get.
But then they got daring on other things. It's just whatever.
Wherever that particular issue was in its trajectory of acceptance.
So civil rights had started earlier than gay rights in
terms of African Americans, and so there were stories on
the Love Boat that were very moving and smart about
equal rights for black people. So they did that, but

(52:12):
they didn't do gay people because the Black struggle was
a little further along at that point. And so it's,
you know, it's always what moment in time you catch them.

Speaker 4 (52:20):
Did they do women stories on the look Book?

Speaker 1 (52:23):
They did, and that they got some pushback, so Joan
Rivers did an episode. Joan had made it known that
she wanted to do a love Boat and that she'd
like to do something really kind of special. In the meanwhile,
one of the writers had pitched a story about a
woman who was a breast cancer survivor having a love
affair on the show. And it was one of the
young female writers, the same woman who actually pitched the

(52:44):
niece of the executive, the one who pitched the gay story,
and she pitched the story. And the reaction to the
story from the straight white guys in the room was,
why would anyone want to watch a love story about
a woman with one tit? Can you imagine saying that?
And at work never mind that you're in a writer's
room where you think you can be body or whatever. Okay,
forget that. Can you imagine looking at human being in

(53:06):
the eye and saying that in this day and age.
That's what I'm saying, Like, even women's issues, Look how
far they've come in those decades, that that is unfathomable
in it now and that was their their take on it.
Then no, we're not going to do that. No, we're
not going to do that. And she would argue back, well,
what if we did it this way? What does she know?
I think, like women and gay guys and people of

(53:28):
color have had to do for decades, you don't get
to tell them off for being a pig. You work
within the system, right, and so you take that note
like you're taking it seriously, and you say, okay, well
I hear you. What if we did this? I mean,
the fact that she had to do that is infuriating.
But she was persistent and it happened to dovetail with
Joan wanting an issue show to do, and so they
did an episode where Joan is a mystectomy survivor. I

(53:51):
don't know if she had a double or a single,
and she has this love affair, and so mostly that's
a triumph, right, And so Love Boat did take on
women's issues. Now that being said, if you watch that episode,
the man she falls in love with, she's like a
rich society lady and the man she falls in love
with his very blue collar. Now they do that on
the show sometimes there's you know, opposites attract whatever. But

(54:13):
he's also a garbage man, and so is the message
that if you are a breast cancer survivor, you're going
to get a guy. But he's basically literally be someone
who collects garbage. Like, oh wow, Okay, it's not the
one hundred percent home run that they may have thought
it was. But you know, again the times, oh my god.

Speaker 4 (54:35):
That's a bad well, I'm so excited about the Love Boat.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
Oh me too. And I've been collecting amazing stories and
it's it's from the seventies and eighties when there were
lots of crazy body druggy things going on, and so
the stories are wild from the Love Boat and it's
just like, oh my god. I mean the number of
stories of the people who in the number of people
who saw Carol Channing inadvertently naked alone are just back

(55:02):
avail at not necessarily. I mean, if you sit in
the door of your trailer with the door flying wide open,
in a yoga pose, naked eating a chicken wing, you
should realize that someone's going to walk by at some point.

Speaker 4 (55:15):
Oh, I think that's the point.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
I think that might be the point.

Speaker 6 (55:22):
Oh gosh, my gosh, that's crazy. All right, Well, here's
here's a question about Love Boat. Did they really just
go on a ship and send people on those ship
on trips?

Speaker 1 (55:32):
Yes and no. Okay, so they there were three pilots
to the love Boat. They were shot. Those were shot
on real cruises back in the day when Princess a
very nascent relationship with Princess, they just did from one
of them. They did a quickie three day trip to
Mexico for one of them. They did it on the
Queen Mary while it was docked and long beach so
it didn't go anywhere. And then for the most of

(55:54):
the early seasons they would shoot everything on the sound stage,
but they would shoot b roll but like often dialogue
scenes with no dialogue with the cast, and they would
take them every however, many months, maybe twice a season.
On one of those quickie Mexico cruises and just shoot
them walking on the on the deck, so you'd see
a scene with no dialogue of Isaac can gopher like

(56:15):
crossing from the pool into the weever, and that would start,
and then they'd cut to a sound stage scene. So
they would do a lot of that. Then they started
and even in those early seasons, maybe doing some scenes
on the real deck that they would incorporate with scenes
from the same storyline that would be done in the
in the sound stage. So you might have the I remember,

(56:36):
you know Rue McClanahan and was it ted night with her?
I remember sitting out on deck having a conversation, and
there's the real pool behind them, and then you cut
to there in the dining room and it's on the
fox lot. So they would do that. But they really
were smart with the Love Boat, and they realized they
had this captive audience that was enthralled with cruising, enthralled
with all the foreign ports of call that they could

(56:58):
have coming into their living room. So they started to
get adventurous. So they experimented early on, maybe in season
three or four, with an Alaska cruise. Okay, well, now
that's a longer cruise and it goes through another country
to go through Canada to Alaska. Because it's more adventurous.
They had to really invent ways this. I mean I
actually went on a leg of the Amazing Race as
a journalist and I loved it, and I marveled at

(57:18):
how they put together all those moving parts. And that
was in the day of cell phones and paging and
texting an email. The Love Boat did this Alaska cruise
and everything they would subsequently do without email, without cell phones.
They would shoot footage on a real ship, which it
presents its own problems in terms of what do you
plug into and how do you keep things grounded and
from getting wet and from like people electrocuting and all that.

(57:40):
Then they would have to fly the dailies back to
Aaron Spelling in Hollywood for him to watch them. You
couldn't transmit them electronically, and Aaron didn't fly. He was
afraid of planes. So they are all these analog ways
that they had to do, these really complicated things, but
they manage it, and they tested it with this Alaska cruise. Hey,
that went well, now let's go here. They ended up
by the end of the show going all over the world.

(58:00):
And in the latter seasons, I would say maybe six, seven,
eight nine. What they would do was it their breaks.
They ended up they started out their life on the
love Boat with a weird schedule for network because most
network dramas start filming maybe around June, like after the
upfront announcement in May of what goes on the schedule,

(58:21):
dramas and drama will start filming maybe in June. Sitcoms
film in like August. They're ready to go by September,
and then they're kind of always kind of trying to
beat the clock producing new episodes before the old ones air.
With the Love Boat, because they started as TV movies,
they kind of were always off calendar, and then also
a strike in nineteen eighty kind of threw them off calendar.
But it ended up being a good thing because they

(58:42):
they started realizing that, oh, if we are in production
at different times of the year from everybody else, we
can get some of the TV stars from other shows
while they're on their hiatus, and we can get all
these great guest stars who have nothing else to do
and our hiatus. The way it has been working out
is rather than be from like March to June, we
could take a hiatus that starts in like April and

(59:03):
goes to August, and that's summer in the Northern Hemisphere,
and it's when a lot of these great cruises go out.
And we could partner with Princess and just cruise the
whole summer and then chop up each cruise into individual episodes.
So that's what they would do. They would go out
in April, May, June, maybe not the whole summer, but
they'd go for six or eight weeks, and they'd go
around a region of the world, so say Europe, and

(59:27):
they would fly casts in and out to different chunks
of the cruise, and they would then chop up into
those casts and have episodes ready to go. So there
was one summer where they cruised all around from like England,
they went to Norway, then they went around Spain to
Italy and Greece, and so that became okay, here's the
Greek episode, here's the Italian episode, and they had different casts.

(59:48):
And what was great for those casts is that if
you got that gig, not only did Spelling always send
you everywhere first class, but you could cruise the whole
summer for free first class. You didn't have to be
there for just your episode. If you wanted to be
with them all summer, you could do it. So a
lot of these the great stories that in my book
come from these weird groupings of people that you didn't
even know were on the show at the same time,

(01:00:09):
because they were in different episodes that aired at different
parts of that season. And you know, there's a story
about Henry Morgan choking on a piece of steak in
the dining room, and Caesar Romeiro, who wasn't even in
his episode, tried to save his life with the Heimlich
maneuver and it wasn't working. And then Audrey Landers, who
was in yet another episode, her her boyfriend at the
time he became her husband, I believe, was a doctor,

(01:00:31):
and they had just been in Marrakesh, I think, and
they had all picked up these like pirate outfits with
the swords or what everything. And so he ran across
the long banquet table with his swashbuckling sword and grabbed
Henry Morgan and ripped the piece of steak out of
his mouth, and like, well, while you know, all these
other random people like Jamie Farr and whatever, we're like applauding,
like you think that this is a pop culture fever
dream and you didn't even know these people were in

(01:00:51):
the same episode, but they weren't. They were just cruising
all summer.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Because that's I remember hearing stories of stories who said,
I did it because I got to go to China, Right,
I did it because I got And I was like, okay,
So they actually win on these cruises.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
They did, and those were in the latter years. They
were the first show Western show to film in China.
There's a question whether the Muppets actually did it before them,
but they were either first or second, and they have
stories about that. You know, Bernie Capel talks about you know,
you go in your hotel room, you'd be like, that's
an unusual light fixture and because it would be a bug.

Speaker 4 (01:01:20):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
It was like the and the guides who would show
them stuff were very particular about what you could and
couldn't do, and they were you had to bribe certain
certain cultural attaches to let you see this at a
certain time, and it was it was crazy that all
the details they had to deal with on these shows.
And again in an analog world where if you know,
you weren't just texting somebody. No, I'm not going to
pay you a bribe, but it would be like you, secretary,

(01:01:43):
take a memo.

Speaker 4 (01:01:44):
Do you hear so?

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
And so? I will not bribe you, but okay, now
fold that up, put it in an envelope, Put it
in the mail, put a stamp on it. In a
few weeks, will know you know it was crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
You Now put another envelope, put two hundred dollars in
it's You're right exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:01:58):
You mentioned an amazing race.

Speaker 5 (01:02:00):
That is one of the few reality competition shows that
I watched. I've watched it since season one. I love
that show. At some point, maybe after we're done, I
need to hear about your.

Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
Experience of season thirteen in Salvador, Brazil. It was an
amazing experience. I would do it again in a hard pap.

Speaker 5 (01:02:16):
Oh my god, I've always thought that it would. If
there was any show it do would be that one.
I just love that show, the way it's put together,
the way you can't cheat, the way you can't screw
with other people.

Speaker 4 (01:02:27):
Because that's what I hate about most of them. I
don't care.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Yeah, they've gotten crazy now who like it hasn't just
gotten more and more?

Speaker 4 (01:02:36):
Like? Oh, and now you have to cross this gullt.
You know, there are amazing things that's always been well.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
There have always been things that I, as someone who
has a fear of heights and other things, just wouldn't do.
It'd be like, nope, I'm out of the show by yeah.
And you know, actually a lot of the shows, including
Amazing Race, do something that they call like the elimination station.
So if you're eliminated from the show, you don't go
home because that would be a tell to everybody that
you didn't win. So what they do is they sequester
you at some resort. And so a couple of times,

(01:03:04):
like in Salvador, there was a height challenge that I'm like, Okay,
if I were the contestant, I would be like, see yah,
not doing it. But I'd be like, wait a minute.
That means I could spend the entire production of the
show in the elimination station, which is basically sitting around
the pool drinking my ties at somebody else's expense. I
think I want to be eliminated.

Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
First, Yes, I'm totally in that. But you can't go
out and explore other things because you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:25):
Can't sess not Although the elimination station is usually somewhere
remote on it. You know, it's not like it's in
the continental US where people would recognize you. But yeah,
I guess maybe not. You know what, I'd be okay
with that if they say you have to spend the
next six weeks sitting by this pool drinking, and people
will come and wait, people will come and wait on you,
and then eventually other contestants will come and keep you company.
It's not like you're gonna be alone.

Speaker 4 (01:03:43):
Yeah, and you just and it's all paid for, and it's.

Speaker 1 (01:03:45):
All paid for. I'd say, you know, that may sound
better than going on the Amazing Race.

Speaker 4 (01:03:48):
Okay, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
My sister wanted us to do that, and I was like, no, No,
I would murder my husband. I mean, he's so slow
witted at some things, and I'm so impetuous that I
think we'd kill each other.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
Well, now, how did you guys? Because I wondered if
you met through the work or through not.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
Really. We grew up in neighboring towns in New Jersey,
although we didn't know it, and he wrote a memoir
about it. And I read his memoir in the Barnes
and Noble and went to his Barnes and Noble book
signing and met him there. Wow, and the rest of
the station and the rest is history.

Speaker 4 (01:04:18):
That's so sweet.

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
Yeah, So we grew up five minutes away from each
other and didn't know it. I mean we're seven years apart,
so we wouldn't have known each other really, But yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:04:27):
That's so cool. And then you both ended up because
you've worked together.

Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
How's that? Well, we don't really work together much. I
mean we overlap a lot. While I was researching my
love Boat book, he was researching his disco book, and
so of course there's a lot of overlap there. I
think of all the times it's a disco song, Charles
singing the disco love boat theme, and so there would
be quite a few times where we would be like,
we want to gang interview you. And I remember we

(01:04:52):
were going to go out to lunch with Donna Pescou
and as COVID flared up, particularly again the week that
we were going to do it, and so we decided
to be safe, and so we did it by phone.
So I just remember him talking to her for like
an hour about a Saturday night fever, and then she
was so you know, such a good sport that he's like,
I'm now handing you over to the love Boat. And
then I got an hour about the love Boat, and

(01:05:13):
so yeah, we had a lot of overlap.

Speaker 4 (01:05:15):
That that is, I don't know, it seems totally fun.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
It was, Oh no. I mean that doing with the
research for all of these books has been a dream
come true because I've always been able. I've been lucky
enough to be able to pick shows that I want
to spend years with. For me to write about a show,
you know, I guess there are many people out there
who are smarter than me and do things for a
paycheck or a credit or a stepping stone. I just
don't have it in me because I do spend years

(01:05:42):
with a show. I mean, it took me ten years
to get that other Golden Girls book out. In this
love Boat book, I've been researching. I mean, there was
a blip in the publishing process, which is why it's
not out yet. But still I started researching it nine
years ago. For me to want to spend nine years
on something, it has to be a show I love
and that I really get a kick out of talking
to all the people because other you're going to just go.

Speaker 4 (01:06:00):
Crazy and so what was it about the Love Boat?

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):
When I was picking my next book after The Golden Girls,
and I didn't know that the I would get asked
to do the All in the Family book in the meanwhile,
So actually that happened in between as well. But I
came up with a list for my publisher. They asked
me for a list of shows that I'd want to
write about. And when you really think, I have a
list of criteria in my head and that this is

(01:06:25):
not a genius list of criteria, it's all common sense.
But when you go through that checklist, there aren't many
shows to write about because it has to be a
show first of all, obviously that there's an enduring following
For me, and this is my personal preference. It should
be a show that's no longer on the air. And
I learned that lesson from Will and Grace only because
books have a really long lead time and shows have
a really short lead time. And so for me, for

(01:06:47):
Will and Grace, the plan was to cover it through
season six. We were writing a while the show was
in production and so but I had to turn my
manuscript in by the latest February. They haven't finished writing
season six by February, you know it airs in May,
and so it was very hard to try to stay
up to date on the latest of what's happening on
the show when you had to turn your book in
before they were even done, right, And I didn't want

(01:07:08):
to do that ever again, Okay, only write about shows
that are in the past, and it gives you a
better perspective. It should be a show where the cast
is mostly alive and also amenable to talking about it again.
So that eliminates things like Friends and Seinfeld, because I
don't think that those actors would give me more time
to talk about the same thing over and over. They've
done books, and I don't blame them, like why would
they want to do it again? And that's another thing.

(01:07:30):
There shouldn't be a definitive book already about the show
I compete with somebody else's book. And so when you
really go through all of that list, it really narrows
down what there is left to talk about in a
way that I would want to go deep. And so
at the time that I was choosing in twenty sixteen,
what would my next book be, the one thought I
had was The Big Bang Theory, because it's popularity and

(01:07:53):
because I love it and all that. However, it had
just gotten a two season renewal and I was like,
I'm gonna have the will and grace problem, and so
I didn't pursue that. And now Jessica Radloff has written
a brilliant book about it, So I'm glad you know
that worked out that way. And so I kind of
went into the meeting with the publisher like, Okay, I'm
sheepish because the one idea I know that you'd like,
because it's a hot show, I don't want to do.

(01:08:15):
But I have a couple of like those back pocket
ideas that they tell you to go into pitch meetings
with that are the crazy ones and you never know
whether they're spark to it. And so I had a
couple of classic shows that were even older than The
Golden Girls, like The Love Boat is and you know,
a lot of times I thought that the publishers thought
that The Golden Girls was too far in the past,
and so I started naming them, and I think the
Love Boat was the second one I said, and they

(01:08:36):
were like, yes, that do it. And I was like, oh,
I'm so happy you feel that way, because I was
noticing it bubbling up in pop culture even then. You
know those memes that people make of putting yourself in
the love Boat credits or putting a famous person in
the love Boat credits. I see them on Instagram all
the time. When someone dies, they put them in the
love Boat credits, whether they were in it or not.
Or sometimes around Halloween they'll put in like eraser Head

(01:08:56):
or Freddy, you know. So I just start to hear
people talking about the show more anecdotally, and I knew
it was getting more play on me TV and Cozy
and the meme was coming out, and that's one of
the reasons I put it on the list. Hey, that's
a show I would love to spend time with. I know,
there's good, good stories. It has an amazing array of
guest stars I would get to meet, and it's becoming

(01:09:18):
more popular. And so I was the fact that the
publisher said yes and got it as a miracle.

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
That's that's fantastic. It makes a total sense. It makes
total sense. I'm so excited.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):
Yeah, I'm excited for everyone to see it because you're
not going to believe some of the stories, and some
of them, some of them I'll tell you outside the
book because you know, maybe the lawyers will make me
take them out.

Speaker 5 (01:09:39):
When you started working on the Golden Girls book, had
the entire series been released on DVD at that point?
I mean, what were you relying in terms of being
able to go back and watch the episode?

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
Good question. I can tell you exactly how many have
been released on DVD.

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
Oh my gosh, Eighties TV Ladies listeners this interview with Jim,
we talked for two hours and twenty minutes. We had
such a good time. However, we got to cut this
one short here. So if you want to hear the
second half of this interview, where we continue talking about
the Golden Girls stories and love boat stories and all
things Jim, please go to our patreon patreon dot com

(01:10:21):
slash eightiestv Ladies.

Speaker 4 (01:10:23):
You can try it out for free, or you.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
Can join and listen to the second half of this
So check us out on Patreon.

Speaker 4 (01:10:30):
For today's audioography.

Speaker 5 (01:10:32):
You can find Jim Kalucci at Jimcalucci dot com. That's
Jim Colgucci dot com and on Instagram at Jim Kalucci.

Speaker 4 (01:10:45):
Links will be in our description.

Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
Golden Girls is streaming on Hulu Filo. Oh yeah, and
it's on Disney Plus unless you gave up on that
one because they caved.

Speaker 5 (01:10:54):
You can also buy it on Apple TV or Amazon.
You can buy it on YouTube. Sometimes you can just
find episodes on YouTube. As always, we hope Eighties TV
Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous
new and old shows to watch, all of which will
lead us forward toward being amazing ladies of the twenty

(01:11:15):
first century's.

Speaker 4 (01:11:21):
Bread through the city

Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
World.

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