Phil Margo's Autobiography

FORWARD: 

ROW ROW ROW YOUR BOAT
GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM
MERRILY MERRILY MERRILY MERRILY
LIFE IS BUT A DREAM

As we go through life we are deluged by various philosophies on how to live. We are bombarded by words from religious and political leaders, parents, teachers, friends celebraties and media pundits. Even ubiquitous talk show hosts.

Given all of this, I have recently observed that the small, unpretentious ditty ROW ROW ROW YOUR BOAT is a golden nugget handed to us as children. Almost everyone can sing it but few realize that this seemingly innocuous childhood rhyme contains the quintissential basic lesson plan for living. 

The first most obvious observation about ROW ROW ROW YOUR BOAT is that it has THREE ROWS and FOUR MERRILYS and the highest note in the song is on a MERRILY not a ROW. I believe it suggests that we try to live our lives on the crest of the FOURTH MERRILY. More play than work. Unfortunately, most people seem to live their lives one MERRILY short and a half tone flat.

The tune advises us to go GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM. Among the words used in the definition of gently or gentle are: kind, amiable, soft, delicate and moderate. Not harsh, stern or violent. War, murder and rape are not gentle. Love is. When we go down the stream we "go with the flow" on the path of least resistance. Unless you're a salmon or a lemming. Maybe too many of us are lemmings. 

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM. We exist from moment to moment but everything fore and aft of that existance is a dream. All that which we hope to attain must begin as a dream and when we achieve our desires and reflect, much of it feels like a dream. Wispy and intangible. But hopefully sweet. Further the tune is fine when sung by one person but with more than one we have harmony. 
 

CHAPTER 2 I have observed that there is a certain universal truth about the male gender. We all are inexorably drawn to women outside our normal spheres of ladydom. Japanese men drool over blonde Americans while American males covet oriental ladies. Short guys have the hots for tall gals and on and on. Most Jewish guys I hung out with had the same major carnal fantasy. They were constantly on the psychological hunt for the ultimate shicksa/goddess. That same lust still holds true today. Maybe it's a cruel prank played on us by our genes. Maybe it goes back to David and Bathsheeba. Maybe we think that non-Jewish women or "shicksas" as they are called in Yiddish, have different physiognomies and are somehow sexier or hornier than Jewish women. I don't know. All I do know is that I was unexplainably riveted by my first official, if only fictional shicksa/goddess sighting.

Back in the early nineteen fifties, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13 were the most important numbers to a kid growing up in the New York Metropolitan area. No, they weren't numbers to bet on with your local "gaming director." They were the seven television channels that came in on our seven-inch-screened Motorola TV sets. That was it! Only seven channels. Certainly the dark ages of man.

Actually Brooklyn only had six and a half channels. Unless the conditions were just right, thirteen (WATV) came in snowy. My dad said it was because Channel 13 originated in Newark, New Jersey. New Jersey was like China to a kid from Brighton Beach. But most other places had only a few channels so I considered myself lucky with six and a half. I would have had no desire to watch "half-channel thirteen" except they showed all the good westerns were broadcast. 

One wet Sunday afternoon, punch ball and stick ball were out and the Dodger game was postponed on account of the rain. I was turning the dial to find something to watch. The reception on Channel 13 was particularly bad that day so a good western was not in the cards. Then, on one of the stations, I think it was Channel 2, I saw a title card for the "Picture For A Sunday Afternoon"--One Touch of Venus. Great! Science fiction sounded okay. Maybe it was about an alien race from the water planet threatening to vaporize Earth. I made some Bosco chocolate milk and settled in. 
 

So here's Robert Walker playing a klutz in a department store, making a fuss over a statue of Venus the Goddess of Love. Love? Some thrill for an eleven year old. I'm looking for inter-planetary warfare and they give me kissy-face stuff. This did not seem like a trip I wanted to take. I headed for the kitchen to get a Bosco refill. When I got back in front of the TV set, the statue of Venus was turning into--Ava Gardner! 

I knew I was supposed to turn it off. I mean how could I tell my friends I actually watched a movie about the Goddess of Love. I could almost feel the salvo of noogies raining down on me. But wait. Seeing the exquisite Miss Gardner emerge out of marble, reached somewhere deep in my brain. An almost irresistible force kept me away from the dial. I saw my Goddess of Love. 

I'm flashing forward to 1979 when I was getting my feet wet in the television business and I thought it would be clever to do a remake of the Ava Gardner film that had diddled with my pre-pubescent libido. I would try to get "One Touch of Venus" set up as a movie for television. I tried without success to get the rights. I couldn't even track down the current owner of the rights. However, the search revealed that the play and the movie "One Touch of Venus," were based on a book, "The Tinted Venus." Thomas Guthrie Anstey wrote fantasy-comedy stories in 1882. I believe that he took the name pen name of F. Anstey because it looked like the word fantasy. Among the books he wrote were; "The Brass Bottle," The Talking Horse," and "The Tinted Venus."

We found the "Tinted Venus" in an antique bookstore in London and discovered that the book would be in the public domain in 1983. All I had to do was put the project in a drawer for four years and it would be mine.

The odds against getting a TV show or a movie made in Hollywood are astronomical. The first step is called "development." That usually results in a script being commissioned. To get that far is amazing enough. But to navigate a project through the vagaries of hidden agendas and incompetent executives where logic is the first casualty, takes on all the complexities of a moon shot. 
 

I started pitching the project in 1983. A pitch is a sales presentation. You go to a network executive and use your best salesmanship to get the project launched. The tough part is that you are selling an idea as opposed to an object. On any given project reasons can be found to either pass on it or put it into development. But the real reason for a "yes" has more to do with how the seller is perceived than the merits of the project itself. After a series of pitch-meetings, The Tinted Venus finally made it into development as The Goddess Of Love in 1986. To what did I owe this breakthrough? Did I become an expert in the art of pitching? No. The main reason we finally got into development was because my very good friend Tony Masucci, became the Senior Vice President of Movies and Mini-Series at NBC. Make no mistake. It's not what it's who! Tony's perception of me was in the acceptable range. Do you have to have friends in high places to succeed in Hollywood? Abso-fucking-lutely! 

My partner Don Segall and me spent a year writing and re-writing the script. Maybe it wasn't Shakespeare but it was painstakingly crafted. When Don had to go to the hospital for tests, I brought my speaker-phone from home and hooked it up to the hospital phone so we could receive script notes (comments and corrections) from the network. What dedication. The two of us in Don's room at Cedars Sinai listening to the words of wisdom >from Ruth Slawson, our development executive at NBC. 

In January of 1988, Ruth called and said that we had a pickup on "The Goddess of Love" subject to casting. Who would be our Venus? NBC suggested that we offer the role of Venus to Vanna White. Vanna was someone I saw as I was flipping through the channels with my remote control, (ahh progress) or in the tabloids (maybe not). 

I instantly began to tune in WHEEL OF FORTUNE. Vanna was indeed a shicksa/goddess. Maybe not an Ava Gardner, but Vanna was pretty enough to be believable as Venus and well known enough to cast. Also, she was majorly shicksa--but could she act? NBC said test her. Hey, it's their money so we arranged a screen test.
 

Vanna is adorable, dedicated, and perhaps the finest letter turner and best applauder the world has ever known. She is not however, a technically gifted actress. This is not a put down. I don't want to imply that I think she is a bad actress. It's just that asking Vanna White to play the Venus we wrote, at her level of acting experience, was like asking a first year medical student to do neuro-surgery. I sincerely believed that when NBC saw the screen test they would change their minds and allow us to cast someone who had the craft to handle the role. I also believed that Ronald Reagan would never be re-elected for a second term.

I was stunned when the word came down back from Tony Masucci to "hire her." You see, the reality is that networks are in the numbers business not the review business. According to their research people, Vanna would draw a big viewing audience.

Hire her? Any writer wants his or her work presented in the best possible light. Maybe Vanna would get numbers but at what cost?

I had been trying to launch this project for almost ten years. Nine years to track it down and get it into development, and a tenth year to write it. I didn't become a writer until I was in my forties. In Hollywood, that's an age where many of the younger network and movie executives believe writers suffer from acute brain cell loss. All of a sudden those men and women who successfully toiled over typewriters and word processors are perceived to have suddenly contracted syntax-Alzheimers and dialogue dementia. Like somehow at the junction between one birthday and the next they lost their ability to create a good story or have forgotten how people speak. Is that bullshit or what? 

Needless to say we hired Vanna. Working with her was a pleasure because she knew what she was supposed to do. She brought cookies, knew her lines and was never tardy. But watching the words in our script, the result of a year's sweat and blood, turn to lead and sink through the floor on the set each day was sheer torture for me. I couldn't wait until we finished the damn thing.

The ratings of television shows are most crucial in November, February and May. These are called "sweeps." The ratings attained during these periods are used as a barometer to set prices paid by the sponsors for advertising time. NBC decided to program The Goddess of Love on a Sunday night during the November sweeps against the blockbuster Mini-Series, "War and Remembrance." Our future "cult classic" was going up against a Titan.

In the preceding months I had been working day and night involved in; finishing Goddess for NBC; writing one hour of a two hour "Love Boat" for CBS; and preparing a half hour sitcom with Bob Guillaume for ABC.

On the day before "Goddess" was to air, I was driving up Wilshire Boulevard, when I started to feel like my body was shutting down, closing in on itself. It was the weirdest sensation I had ever experienced. I thought I was dying, having a heart attack. With my whole body shaking, I drove to Cedars Sinai Hospital Emergency and told the admissions nurse that I wasn't feeling real well. An understatement. She must have noticed the stark fear in my eyes and the fact that there was no blood in my face and immediately had me brought to an examination room... I sat there trembling worse than the Cowardly Lion did in the Emerald City during his first encounter with the Wizard Of Oz. I kept thinking--Am I in Peggy Lee land? Is That All There Is? Is this were I get off? Am I at the end of the potholed road that led me from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn to Beverly Hills? Oh shit! Another wave of body failure. Now I was sure I was heading for "dumper city" as bits and pieces of my life began to flash before my eyes--the songs, the women, the sunshine, the storms. What brought me to this juncture? Was I truly on my last Merrily?