Bruce Vilanch has written monologues for Oscars hosts like Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman, and more. And in this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, he not only shares some of his favorite jokes, but also reveals which of the many hosts he worked with over more than two decades gave him the most trouble.
As the 97th annual Academy Awards approach this weekend, Vilanch walks through the highs and lows of his illustrious Oscars career, from nearly blowing it his first time out with the disastrous Rob Lowe and Snow White opening, through the game-changing Crystal years, to the Anne Hathaway and James Franco-hosted year that marked the unfortunate end of his long run.
Along the way, he also shares some shocking stories about Oscar presenters, including his jaw-dropping theory about the origins of that Richard Gere gerbil rumor—and reveals why he turned down the opportunity to write for the very first season of Saturday Night Live. And Vilanch, whose new book It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time chronicles his biggest failures as a writer, takes us inside the most infamous bomb of his career: The Star Wars Holiday Special.
Before he even turns his Zoom camera on, Vilanch manages to deliver a solid joke just with the name that appears in the bottom left corner of the screen: “Travis Kelce’s Mother.”
With his signature shoulder-length blonde hair and thick-framed round red glasses, the 76-year-old comedy veteran does slightly resemble that NFL star’s Midwestern mom—even if it’s not the most flattering comparison. But it’s also just the type of ruthless—yet somehow still self-deprecating—joke Vilanch has become known for after more than 50 years spent writing one-liners for the biggest names in Hollywood.
Vilanch explains that he called his new book It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time—about the mostly dreadful variety specials he wrote during the 1970s and ’80s—because “pretty much all of them seemed like a bad idea at the time.” He adds, “Some were interesting, but some were more like, “Well, that’s ridiculous… How much are they paying?”
But if he did projects like The Star Wars Holiday Special or The Brady Bunch Variety Hour for the money, it was his pure love of Hollywood that made him say yes to writing the Oscars for the first time in 1989. And although the last time he officially worked on the show was 2011, Vilanch says he still gets calls from celebrity presenters the week before the show asking him to punch up their material.
Vilanch says he was “in the doghouse” after the disastrous Rob Lowe and Snow White opening—not his idea, he still stresses 36 years later—and therefore missed Crystal’s first year as host in 1990. But he was brought back into the fold the following year and became a consistent presence behind the scenes at the Oscars through the ’90s and 2000s.
“They don’t make them like that anymore,” Vilanch says of Crystal. “He’s funny, but he’s an actor, and he can be serious. He sings, he dances, he’s for real, and he’s a vaudevillian. He throws himself into it.” This year’s host, Conan O’Brien, is from a different generation and feels like more of an outsider to the movie world—not unlike Letterman or Jon Stewart, who Vilanch also wrote for when they each took their turns as host.
Unlike those men and others, including four-time host Jimmy Kimmel, Crystal didn’t arrive with his own team of late-night writers who would often sideline an Oscars veteran like Vilanch. But no host gave him more trouble, he reveals, than Ellen DeGeneres. “Only because she isolated herself,” Vilanch explains. “She had her staff from her talk show, and she didn’t really want to have other people involved.”
“I mean, to throw more fire on the more logs on the Ellen fire is kind of ridiculous,” he adds, alluding to the stories that emerged in recent years about the comedian and daytime talk show host mistreating her staff. Vilanch confirms that he was not as surprised as many others were about those revelations.
“She was a lot of fun before she came out, and before she was bearing this responsibility of a movement on her shoulders,” Vilanch, who was one of the first openly gay male comedians on TV, added. “My only bad experience with her was at the Oscars, where she just was not interested in input from anybody but her own people.”
Eventually, he says, the situation got so untenable that Oscars producer Laura Ziskin was forced to call DeGeneres and issue an ultimatum. When DeGeneres’ assistant returned the call to ask what Ziskin wanted to talk about, Vilanch says the producer replied, “It’s about, if she still wants to host the Oscars, she should call me back, because otherwise she can walk away.”
“Two minutes later, Ellen called back,” Vilanch says, noting that even after that confrontation, DeGeneres was not receptive to his writing team’s input on her monologue or other jokes.
There was a similar dynamic when Letterman hosted the show in 1995, only flying out to L.A. a few days before the broadcast after holing up in New York to craft bits for the ceremony with his Late Show writers. “There was a negotiation about stuff that we thought probably wouldn’t work,” Vilanch explains. “Some of that got cut, some of it went on the air anyway.” When I reference Letterman’s infamous “Uma, Oprah” gag that bombed in the room, Vilanch says, dryly, “Yeah, that was one.”
Ultimately, Vilanch’s disastrous Oscars debut was bookended by the critically panned attempt to bring in younger viewers by tapping Hathaway and Franco to host the show together in 2011. “That was a real bad idea at the time,” he jokes, “and James has apologized repeatedly.”
“I didn’t know at the time it would be my last, because I’m never sure, but it was,” Vilanch says, wistfully, now. As he explains it, Franco “realized he needed material” and turned to Judd Apatow, “who brought in four intern-like writers, young guys who were like right off the Pineapple Express, and they were not writing stuff that we could use.”
Hathaway, meanwhile, who Vilanch calls a “precision instrument,” got “freaked out enough to bring in her own writer just to cover her.”
The whole thing was such a mess that this time, Vilanch was never invited back as a writer afterwards, despite saying around that time that would “absolutely” want to keep working on the show for another two decades.
“I mean, every year they do it like they’re reinventing the wheel,” Vilanch says. “They get a new producer, they get a new director, and some writers hang on,” he adds, but for whatever reason, he has now spent 14 years on the outside looking in. “I’m sure that the taint of the Franco-Hathaway show was still on me, so I can’t say it wasn’t the reason.”
When I ask if he still thinks about returning to the fold, Vilanch jokes, “I consider it every year,” but it’s not in the cards. “I thought it would be when my friend Craig Zaden was producing it for three years [2013-2015] but then he ghosted me.”
“And now he literally ghosted me, he’s gone,” Vilanch says of Zaden, who died in 2018. “So I thought I’d be back with him. But that didn’t happen, although he said he was going to do it, it didn’t happen.”
Despite a long and complicated history with the show, Vilanch insists that he still enjoys watching the Oscars as merely a viewer every year, and now even hosts his own podcast recapping individual ceremonies.
“It’s the Oscars!” he says with delight. “I’ve been watching it since I was a kid. I have a rollicking good time.”
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