What's so great about Neil Simon?

Here’s a Friday Question that became two complete posts. Part 2 is tomorrow.

It’s from Thomas Tucker:

I just re-watched The Odd Couple and still find myself wondering why people thought Neil Simon's works were so good. I don't but I see that as a fault in myself rather than a fault with Neil Simon. I know you saw him as a master playwright and wonder if you could give some details about why that is. What made him so good, and what am I missing?

Okay, first of all, you can’t judge his plays by his movies. None of his movies crackled the way his plays did. A few are just awful. What the movies should be are just filmed versions of the plays with a live audience, like a multi-camera show using the original Broadway casts.

Instead, studios would tamper with them. They would “open them up” and take them outside their normal settings to make them more cinematic. So they’re unnecessarily adding content when none is needed. You don’t need scenes of Oscar and Felix at a diner. You don’t need to see Jane Fonda & Robert Redford in the park in BAREFOOT IN THE PARK.

Also, they tamper with the spirit of the casting. PLAZA SUITE is supposed to have the same two actors play all three acts. In the movie it’s Walter Mattau and three different actresses.

The movies also don’t know how to judge for laughs, how long to pause. And when you’re watching alone at home the punch lines fall flat.

Add to that, Hollywood casting. Matthau and Jack Lemon were great, but Jane Fonda instead of Elizabeth Ashley for BAREFOOT IN THE PARK? I love Jane Fonda. I admire Jane Fonda. In her younger days I was in love with Jane Fonda. But she’s not funny. She always has this “clenched” quality that certainly goes against a character who is a flighty free-spirit. Many theatre adaptations were killed by bad Hollywood casting, shoehorning stars into roles they’re not equipped to play.

Finally, sometimes the studio rewrites the scripts. Simon’s first hit play, COME BLOW YOUR HORN, was totally rewritten and destroyed by Norman Lear, miscast with Frank Sinatra, and was a total piece of shit.

Now, for the plays themselves. Remember he burst upon the scene in the early 1960’s. What was American comedy like then? Other than THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW, all sitcoms were single-camera mindless fluff. GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, THE FLYING NUN. Or variety shows with quick sketches.

Movie comedies were frothy romcoms like PILLOW TALK and GOOD NEIGHBOR SAM. And bad remakes of plays like COME BLOW YOUR HORN. Attempts to do laugh-out-loud comedy were overblown affairs like IT’S A MAD MAD MAD WORLD. The jury is still out on whether it’s hilarious or just an exercise in excess. It was in Cinerama and loaded with stars so it was more a gimmick than well-structured comedy.

And on Broadway, plays were mostly dramatic, although there were a few comedies that broke through. But it wasn’t like the ‘20s or ‘30s when you had playwrights like George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart turning out blockbuster comedies like THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER and YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU. Most of the “comedy” on Broadway in the early ‘60s was found in musicals (better known as musical comedies).

Then along comes Neil Simon with plays loaded with fantastic jokes that are all character-based and all move the plot forward. Audiences would go to the theatre and laugh out loud for two hours. No one else was doing that. Not to that degree. Not with that consistency. He was a revelation. Lines for tickets would be around the block. It’s a lesson that Broadway still hasn’t learned. People like to LAUGH. They stand in line for tickets for comedies, not dark depressing dirges on society’s woes.

But I digress…

Around the same time Herb Gardner wrote A THOUSAND CLOWNS. It’s my all-time favorite comedy play. It also has a lot of heart. But he never topped it. Never came close. And it took him years to write a play. Tony Shaloub was in a new Herb Gardner play and I asked how he rewrote. You need to be able to rewrite quickly while in rehearsals and previews. How does a guy who takes a year or more to write a play, rewrite on the fly? Tony said he didn’t. He over-wrote the play. It was originally way too long and he just pruned it as they went along.

Neil Simon was a master re-writer. He was super-tough on material and would rewrite constantly, sometimes whole new scenes over night.

The end result was a body of work that was remarkable. The older he got, the more depth found its way into his plays. But make no mistake; Neil Simon is the single most successful playwright in the American Theatre. (Maybe not the best, but the most successful.)

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