[Released on May 11, 1964, “I Get Around” would go on to become the first #1 hit for The Beach Boys. To celebrate that sunny anniversary, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of beachtastic texts, leading up to a repeat Guest Post from one of our up-and-coming BeachStudiers!]
On three
cultural genres and media on which Neil Simon left a
lasting imprint [yes, I know the post is officially about his semi-autobiographical
1982 play Brighton
Beach Memoirs, but I’m taking the blogger’s privilege and using the
occasion as a jumping-off point for Simon’s impressive career overall]:
1)
TV comedy: When Simon was just in his early
20s, he quit an entry-level job at Warner Brothers to write comedy scripts with
his
brother Danny. The bold move paid off, as the pair were hired by influential
producer
Max Liebman to write for the popular sketch and variety show Your Show of
Shows. Simon would later
describe just how loaded that writers’ room was: “There were about seven
writers, plus Sid [Caesar], Carl Reiner, and Howie Morris. Mel Brooks and maybe
Woody Allen would write one of the other sketches.” Yet even among that powerhouse
crowd, Simon stood out enough to be hired as well to write for a popular late
1950s sitcom, The
Phil Silvers Show. TV was in many ways the center of the comedy world
in that era, and Neil Simon became central to that community at a very young
age.
2)
Broadway shows: While he was working on those
TV shows, Simon was honing his first Broadway play, Come
Blow Your Horn. The honing paid off, as after the show opened in February
1961 it ran for 678 performances at New York’s Brooks
Atkinson Theatre (now renamed for the legendary Lena Horne). Over the rest
of the decade Simon would pen countless
Broadway smashes, including Barefoot
in the Park (1963), The Odd Couple
(1965), Sweet Charity (1966), and Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969). Those
and many other simultaneously running shows throughout the 1960s and 70s (with
many continuing into the 80s and 90s as he continued to produce new work like Brighton Beach Memoirs and the Pulitzer-winning Lost in Yonkers [1991]) made Simon the
highest-paid
Broadway writer in history, and as influential on the American stage as any
single voice has ever been.
3)
Film screenplays: Simon adapted many of his plays
into screenplays for the film versions, with The Odd Couple
(1968) being the most famous. But he also wrote original screenplays for some
of the smartest and funniest film comedies of all time, including The Out-of-Towners
(1970) and two of my favorites, the mystery parodies Murder By Death
(1976) and The Cheap Detective
(1978; Peter Falk has
never been better, and I say that as a die-hard Columbo fan). Given the understandable ways in which Simon’s
contemporary and Your Show of Shows
colleague Woody Allen has lost much of his luster in recent years, I’d say that
Simon’s film career is due for a reexamination—he was always a playwright first
and foremost, but nobody wrote film comedy better than his multi-talented
American icon.
Next Beach
text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other beachtastic texts you’d highlight?
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