All the Kids Do It

In 1983, on my 21^st birthday, I moved to Los Angeles to be a movie star. I was brought straight to Canoga Park on a 102 degree August day, and immediately taken to a Del Taco on Sherman Way. This was not the upper west side of Manhattan. 

Over the next weeks I did what a New York boy who comes to LA to be an actor does. I bought a '65 Dodge Dart, and got a West Hollywood apartment--a large studio in a 1932 Spanish building. The building had a banana tree in the courtyard, the Dodge Dart, a trunk big enough to fit a dead little league team. I picked a tangerine off a neighborhood tree, and ate it in awe. Fucking Los Angeles!

I got really close right off the bat, getting to the final callback for a Cannon Films teen comedy called Making the Grade. It came down to me, Judd Nelson (who got the part-- it would not be the last time I lost out to that nostril king) and a really odd cat named Andrew Silverstein who was doing this very bizarre tough guy shtick and never breaking character even when we were just hanging out. Of course, I'm talking about Andrew Dice Clay, but he wasn't full on Dice yet, and so he was just this freak with a pompadour, and you didn't know whether you were supposed to take him seriously or tell him to knock it the fuck off.

I killed that final callback or thought I did. It was at some theater on McCadden Place, and the casting director was this young, very sexy Jewish woman named Julie Seltzer who I thought wanted to fuck me until I saw her talking to Judd. Then I realized that was how she dealt with everyone. Anyway, I really went for it and got an ovation when I finished my scene, but they got almost none of my great acting on tape because I had no awareness of the camera. I was flying all over the place being very "real" and very out of frame.

After the near miss with the Judd Nelson flick, things went cold. My manager (a nice, dull Jewish lady whose office was in a huge converted brick chicken coop on Lankershim called the "Egg Factory") heard that I was "a bit green" from a couple of casting directors, which didn't help my confidence. But two months later lightning struck and I got my first part. It was a CBS School Break Special called 'All the Kids Do It". It was about drinking and driving, and starred Scott Baio. The director was Henry Winkler. That's right, my first acting gig ever starred “Chachi” and was directed by “The Fonz!” 

This is 1983 mind you, Happy Days is still on the air, wheezing across the finish line, and now old Henry is plotting his future and ready to test his directorial chops (as will his Happy Days co-star Ron Howard to much more lavish results).

The auditions are on the Paramount lot. Back then Paramount was pretty much like it was in the 40s, and the Nickodell Restaurant still right there in front on Melrose. The Nickodell was this great old-school liver and onions type joint built right into the side of the studio.

Henry and I

The audition went great, yet the Fonz had concerns. My improvs had him rolling, but he was worried I might be uncontrollable and take over the show. "No Fonz," I said, "you got me wrong. I'm a team player! I'll behave myself. I swear!" Eventually, he softened. I was CBS School Break Special ready. 

Baio and Winkler were thick as thieves. TV Royalty, they had a very unique communication style. The kind of hard-earned, but at the same time jive-ass rapport that only years on the set, and a huge shared success can create, and after Baio would finish a take he would turn to Winkler for approval, and the Fonz would say "everything you do is golden Scotty." 

The whole thing was nuts. I had grown up around plenty of actors, but the Fonz was a whole other category. I was eleven when the pilot episode of Happy Days aired, and I remember Irene Rothkrug coming into school the next day and saying it was the best show ever! I remember when the Fonz went from the James Dean cotton windbreaker to the leather jacket, and his epic romance with Pinky Tuscadero, and when I met him, I was slightly awed (and of course a bit surprised by what a little nebbish he was). It happened again twenty years later when Larry Storch who played Corporal Agarn on F Troop came in to audition for a pilot my partner and I had written. I couldn't believe it. F-Troop had formed my early childhood. When he walked in, I said "Larry Storch. You don't understand the amount of real estate you take up in my collective subconscious." 

Larry S. as Agarn

Scott Baio was a trip, but his father Mario (also his manager) was even trippier. A real social club goombah from the old school, Mario knocked on my honey-wagon door one day between set-ups. 

"Hey Tommy?" 

“Hey Mario, what's up?" 

There's a guy here from Bop Magazine, you want to get your picture in Bop Magazine?" 

"What's Bop Magazine?” 

"You know, it’s one of those magazines... like "Teen Beat”." 

"Oh. No, I'm not interested in that, thanks." 

And I wasn't interested. I wanted to be Bobby De Niro, not Bobby Sherman. 

"Look kid, I'm trying to help you here, this is how it's done." 

"I appreciate that Mario, It's just not for me." 

"So, you don't want your picture in Bop Magazine?" "No." 

“Alright kid, suit yourself.” 

He left shaking his head.

After the first few days of shooting, I knew I would end up as a writer, because I rewrote pretty much every bit of dialogue I had. The one line I remember is when Baio doubts me and my driving ability due to my inebriated state, and I tell him "Worry not comrade, I am the tzar of vehicular travel!" getting both sides of the Bolshevik Revolution in one after school special. The Fonz loved that one, and after I delivered it, Baio said to him, “In a couple of years, he’s gonna be trouble.” They had no idea, and neither did I.