It is not that Billy, Robin, Whoopi, Bette and the others are idiots who need Vilanch to put words in their mouths. Quite the opposite, as this film shows in some fascinating footage of them at work. Vilanch is a foil, a collaborator, a dueling partner, a lateral thinker able to help them move in the direction they want to go. Only when some clients are insecure or truly at sea does he become a ventriloquist.
I knew him a long time ago, in Chicago, when he worked for the Tribune, the film says, although I recall, perhaps imperfectly, that it was Chicago Today. He was very funny then. He looked about the same: large, always wearing a well-stretched T-shirt, his face a cartoon made of a mass of hair, a Santa beard and glasses. He wrote wonderful celebrity profiles, and that's how he met Bette Midler at Mister Kelly's and went from rag to riches.
I may not have actually been present when they met, but I was there at Kelly's one night at about the same time. Mort Sahl was on the stage. I was in the booth next to the runway to the dressing rooms. I heard a voice. "Why do I have to open for this guy?" It was Bette Midler. Another voice. "Why do I have to be your piano player?" Her piano player was Barry Manilow.
The world was young then and Bruce flirted briefly with the possibility that he could build a performing career of his own. He actually opened at Kelly's as a stand-up comic. This was in the days before comedy clubs, and it took nerve to stand up in front of a room of friends and critics (the friends were more frightening) and try to be funny. I do not recall that he was a hit. I can see from "Get Bruce," however, that he's good in front of an audience these days, no doubt because he has a lot more confidence and because his persona is familiar to his audiences.
"There isn't a show in town that can be held without him," says one of the subjects of "Get Bruce." He recalls, usually with the perpetrators, how specific material was generated. Not just the triumphs (Palance's pushups) but the disasters like Ted Danson's appearance in blackface at the Friars' Club roast for Whoopi Goldberg. Vilanch wrote a lot of Danson's material, which went over so badly, it occupied the entire front page of the New York Daily News the next day, but Goldberg defends him: "It was my idea. All my idea." I remember when he left for the coast. There was a farewell party at mutual friend Larry Dieckhaus' and we all sat on the floor around a coffee table, eating pizza and weeping with laughter.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46gnK1lkqfCpLGManBycQ%3D%3D