CS Weekly Archive > Happenings > 06/30/06

The Business of Funny:
Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel
at the WGF's Storyteller Series

By ari eisner

Screenwriting comedic masters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel prove that their insight is as entertaining as the movies they write when they recounted how they met, how they work as a team, and how to take notes from the suits during last Thursday's session of the Writers Guild Foundation's Storyteller Series.

With 18 produced screenplays to their credit (the Oscar- and WGA-nominated Splash, plus Parenthood, and City Slickers, to name a few) and a countless number of ghost-writing and script-doctoring assignments (including this spring's RV), Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel began their writing careers in television. Or rather, Ganz did -- with a different writing partner -- before meeting Mandel outside the Comedy Story on the Sunset Strip over 20 years ago. After realizing they shared the same comedic sensibilities, Mandel joined Ganz on the Happy Days staff. On set one day, actor Ron Howard said to Ganz, "I'm gonna direct movies. Are you gonna write movies?" So, a few years later, he and Mandel wrote 1982's Night Shift for Howard (the actor/director's second feature), thus beginning a lucrative career in features.

Ganz says his earliest writing lesson came from actor Jack Klugman on The Odd Couple TV show. When presented with Ganz's script, Klugman walked up to the writer and promptly shouted in his face, "What do I want?" And there endeth the lesson on the foremost rule of writing for the young television scribe: always have your characters want something.

The writing duo makes no bones about the fact that they are in this business to write. Not to produce or to direct or to use the job as a stepping stone for some other higher-level Hollywood position. Ganz puts it simply: "I consider this a worthy career for grown-ups." The writers view their craft as a job and don't seek outside stimulation. As professionals, they feel it's necessary to do the work, even when they're not particularly inspired. When they do get into binds, they'll look to their idols -- Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, and to Jack Lemon's C.C. Baxter in The Apartment ("He's all at once ambitious, amoral, cowardly, and full of himself").

They'll often work from a one-line pitch and see how it can be fleshed out from there --"Someone once said to us, 'Three guys go on a cattle drive,'" noted Mandel -- and often look for an emotional connection to the material. "On that one, we knew the guys would have to bring the herd in on their own, with no outside help," Ganz says. When they write, their process is an animated one, with the duo improvising and taking turns playing each of the characters in their scenes. They work to find a common thread between themselves and the main characters and write from there. An unlikely example is the two lead female characters in A League of Their Own, a screenplay about two young women who leave their home and travel to a larger world. Ganz and Mandel both hailed from New York and moved to Los Angeles to write comedy-- separately, each unaware of the other until that fateful Comedy Store meeting -- identified with their leads through their own experience of moving away from home to start their careers.

Although considered A-list writers, the two scribes still have to pitch their scripts to executives. The key here, they say, is to always be entertaining. "We try to keep them laughing," Ganz says. And when it comes to notes from studios, they hearken back to Gary Marshall (to whom Ganz says he owes his career), who told them that when you're getting notes, "Don't listen to the solution (the studios) offer. Listen to their problem."

After three decades of working in a business infamous for jading its craftsmen, it's both surprising and refreshing to see two thriving, Oscar-nominated screenwriters remain so outspoken, humble, and hilarious. Ganz and Mandel have clearly and repeatedly earned their success, but they've yet to be diluted by it.

Ari Eisner is an award-winning writer/director who has written for the television show Still Standing and the print magazine Creative Screenwriting. He is co-creator of the trailer parodies Must Love Jaws and 10 Things I Hate About Commandments, which was featured on CNN (mature language in both).

Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel courtesy the Writers Guild Foundation

The Apartment courtesy MGM Home Video

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