When Ron Palillo died two weeks ago, it immediately brought to mind a one-act play festival we were both involved in back in 1989. Now I finally have time to tell you about it, and about the ironies of celebrity that I learned from the experience.

I was in grad school at USC, with a focus on playwriting. My play “Guest for Dinner” had been selected, along with three plays by three other writers, for the annual one-act play festival on campus. (A festival that, oddly enough, I became the producer of for two years about 20 years later.) This was a festival with fully staged productions — actors off-book, and with set pieces and costumes, with a three-night run, and this festival was a competition, meaning that one of us was going to be selected as a winner of something or other. As you can expect, each of us wanted to win, and at least two of us had all the arrogance and competitiveness rightly associated with male playwrights in their 20’s. (And, probably, most artists of any age.) One thing that the two of us agreed on was that the other two plays were terrible, and that we’d be happy to lose if we had to, so long as the other guy won. This is similar to the Oscar nominees who say “It’s an honor just to be nominated.” In other words, it’s bullshit. We both wanted to win. That said, I did think this other guy’s play was good, and perhaps better than mine, and that certainly ours were light years ahead of the other two.

But then Peter, the other guy, came up with an ace in the hole. He was able to cast a celebrity in his play. He announced excitedly one day that he had Ron Palillo (“Y’know, Horshack!”) in his play. I knew exactly who Ron Palillo was — I had grown up jeering at “Welcome Back, Kotter,” mostly, I think, because I knew kids like that at school and couldn’t stand them. At least, I now like to think that that’s why, because I’m friendly now with Mark Evanier, and “Kotter” was Mark’s first TV writing job. And Mark’s a good, clever, funny writer. Even though now, in 1989, “Horshack” was past his prime, 10 years earlier he had been a pretty big sitcom star, a guy whose face was on lunchboxes and board games and toys and on television screens around the world. Starring in my play I had a very good actor named Charlie Hayden who had once had a scene with Charles Bronson. (Quoth Charlie about working with Bronson: “Like acting with cement.”) Charlie was great, but he wasn’t on any lunchboxes.

During rehearsals, I would catch little breezes of trouble from Peter about working with Ron Palillo. I had no idea what any of this was about, but the general gist seemed to be that he was difficult and demanding. On the first two nights of performance, the plays came off without a hitch. Mine ran about the way it should, with laughs in the right places and the intentional anxiety of being made to wait in others, and Peter’s, about a troubled friend (or brother?) who had to be left behind, worked fine too, and the other two were still miserable to sit through. Occasionally, we would all comment on how lucky Peter was to have a celebrity in his, and Peter would accept that he was lucky indeed, at one point saying with consideration toward the inevitable judging night, “Well, yeah, and I’ve got ‘Horshack,’ too, so there’s that.”

On that judging night, a funny thing happened. For some reason, the sort of reason impossible to suss out in the theatre, that particular night’s audience really connected with my play. The laughs were bigger and the connection with the plight of our antihero was deeper. And, in Peter’s play, Ron Palillo came in on the wrong note, seemed angry and intense for no discernible reason as he tried his hand at “Acting!” with a big capital “a” and an exclamation mark, ran around the stage, and, when he jumped up on the bed on stage to make a point, he very loudly broke the frame of the bed, the bed cracking to the floor, Palillo tumbling off it, and the other two actors left first stunned then scrambling to regain some composure and continue. Later, much of the discussion was on Palillo’s antics and his on-stage calamity, and when the judges came back… I won.

Peter had thought he might win partly thanks to Ron Palillo. Now he was certain he’d lost entirely thanks to Ron Palillo.

After the performance and the announcement of the winner, one of my professors, Bill Idelson, who had written about a million hours of television and who I really liked and admired, told me what he thought of my play when I asked: He ripped it to shreds. And so, 23 years later, I still wonder if I did win because of Ron Palillo.

By the way, here’s what I won: a plaque. That’s it. A plaque that had my name and the title of my play engraved on it as winner. I’m looking at it right now on my wall as I write this. The following year, I was in this festival again, and this time I know I had the best play — and I lost. As they say, “You win some, you lose some.” The impact in this case was nil either way. Later that same year, I had a play in a festival run by Jerome Lawrence, the revered co-author of “Inherit the Wind,” “Mame,” “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail” and many other plays. One evening in the restroom, Jerry asked me what I thought of playwriting contests. Before I could respond he said, “I’m agin’ ’em.” He said we shouldn’t make playwrights compete against each other. He felt it was already too hard to be a playwright; why extend the suffering?

All this came back to me when I heard of Ron Palillo’s death — and then saw this piece on Mark Evanier’s blog. Mark doesn’t have very nice things to say about working with Ron Palillo either, and in my experience (and from reading his blog), Mark is generous with credit and good to work with. But I also wonder what it felt like to have been an enormous television star in 1979, and 10 years later to be performing for free in a one-act play festival at USC in the hopes that someone, anyone, from the film school, or perhaps one of the professional judges, or the next Spielberg in the audience, might spot you and give you again even the smallest taste of what you’d had so recently. And so that was the lesson of celebrity that I learned: that fame cuts both ways, for those who are famous, and also for those who expect things from association with it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Playwriting, Theatre, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.