How a few writers changed the hair-length (and face) of television. Early 1960s television characters came in a one-size-fits-all, squeaky-clean-cut style, from Dr. Kildare in his white lab coat, to Hoss Cartwright in his white Stetson, to Sr. Bertrille in her white habit. That lasted until 7:30 p.m. Monday, September 12, 1966 when four long-haired teenagers began dancing a Monkeewalk while singing, “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees.” Though it looked simple enough, the comedy was about more than four struggling musicians living in a beach house they couldn’t afford, without adult supervision, and hoping for success while engaging in Marx(Bros)ian humor. According to star Micky Dolenz, the only actor with previous television series experience: “It brought long hair into the living room and changed the way teenagers were portrayed on television.” Dolenz’s opinion is backed up by psychologist and author Timothy Leary in The Politics of Ecstasy: “While it lasted, it was a classic Sufi[ism] put-on. An early-Christian electronic satire. A mystic magic show. A jolly Buddha laugh at hypocrisy. And woven into the fast-moving psychedelic stream of action were the prophetic, holy, challenging words. Micky was rapping quickly, dropping literary names, making scholarly references.” Here’s a less-psychedelic example of what Leary is describing. A typical fourth-wall-breaking bit on The Monkees appeared in Season One, Episode 12, “Dance, Monkees, Dance” (written by Bernie Orenstein). In need of “a brilliant idea” to further the plot, Micky says, “I’ve gotta go talk to the writers,” after which he breaks the fourth wall by walking off the set of the band’s groovy pad and into a dingy writers’ room. The writers? Elderly Chinese laundry men. “We need something fast and groovy and hip, you know,” Micky announces. “Can you do it?” The laundry-writers type frantically on their old Underwoods, then yank the pages out. Strolling back onto the real set, Micky reads the pages, mumbling, “Man, this is terrible. Those guys are really overpaid.” From 1966–1968 The Monkees staff writers churned out 58 half-hours of what Time magazine contributor James Poniewozik recently described as “far better TV than it had to be. During an era of formulaic domestic sitcoms and wacky come Comedies, it was a stylistically ambitious show, with a distinctive visual style, absurdist sense of humor, and unusual story structure that was commercial, wholesome, and yet impressively weird.” That distinctive style originated from co-producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson (cowriter-director, Five Easy Pieces). Prior to developing Easy Rider, the pair conceived The Monkees in response to the mockumentary style and popularity of the Beatle’s 1964 film, A Hard Day’s Night. Schneider and Rafelson created and sold a concept about a wanna-be rock band, but when British bands such as the Dave Clark Five declined their offers, they held an open casting call. Their ad in the September 8, 1965, trade publications Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter sought, “Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series” (the ad described the characters as “4 insane boys”). After further audience research, relative unknowns Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Mike Nesmith were selected to act, sing, play instruments and otherwise conjure up the charisma of the Fab Four. (The auditions are available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63nhSFFFfJ4). Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker wrote the pilot but moved on to other projects. (Mazursky evolved into a major screenwriter of such classics as I Love You, Alice B. Toklas; Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; and Next Stop, Greenwich Village.) While most comedies of the day relied primarily on freelancers, again Schneider and Rafelson tried something different, making The Monkees one of the first comedies with a closed staff. Hunting Monkees 1 The hiring process for the writing staff was as eccentric as the casting. Treva Silverman, ultimately the sole female writer on the show, remembers going through a series of meetings while working in New York. “We were told that the show was looking for ‘the New York head’—the quick wit of the New York personality. They didn’t even want a résumé. The producers had told the agents they didn’t want ‘the same old trite Hollywood formula,’ Which, to me, was very exciting. First they held a meeting in a screening room with tons of dark-bearded, long-haired guys— and me—the only woman asked to be there.” Next the producers requested material. Silverman had written sketches for The Entertainers (a one-season sketch comedy starring Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart, and Dom Deluise); her material made the second and third meetings with Ward Sylvester, Davy Jones’ manager and the new show’s associate producer. “On the third meeting, I cheekily said, ‘So how many more of these meetings do you have in mind?’ And happily that’s when they said, ‘This is the last one. It’s to tell you that you’re on staff.’” Silverman joined a boys’ club, mostly fellow New Yorkers, who moved to the West Coast. In Los Angeles, Silverman participated in early staff meetings to shape the show. After having watched the filmed auditions of the actors, detailed planning went into creating the characters. “That’s when I really wanted to be on the show. The boys were so smart and cute and sweet.” The writing staff decided Nesmith would represent “us,” the leader, the one with his feet on the ground; Micky was meant to be the crazy off-the-wall type; Davy, the heartthrob. When they came to the decision whether Peter Tork would play a genius or a total idiot, “It was like voting on deciding the Pope,” Silverman says. “Peter was so smart and so perceptive and so insightful—yet we decided to make his character a total idiot for the sake of the comedy.” A long-held myth implies that a majority of the mayhem was made up on set, but comparisons between final drafts and aired episodes show that writers introduced much frivolity on the page, providing the actors with solid material for their vamping. As Dolenz remembers it, “People don’t appreciate how valuable and important the writers of the show were. We always had a finely crafted script with a story, a struggle—Davy falling in love with girl and getting her out of trouble. Great comedy has some sort of solid story underneath it. And then the humor, as part of the design, was not topical or satirical, so it didn’t date.” Hunting Monkees 2 I engaged in a combination scavenger hunt/Lost Ark lark. Ultimately, the quest reminded me that time moves swiftly— no longer with us are writers Dee Caruso (22 episodes), Jack Winter (five episodes), Robert Schlitt (four), Neil Nephew (three), David Panich (three), and Stanley Ralph Ross (two). I found the other staff writers scattered throughout the country: Silverman in New York shopping a new play; Bernie Orenstein on the East Coast teaching television history (“I am television history”); Gerald Gardner in his home office in Bel Air working on his 26th book; Dave Evans in the San Fernando Valley beginning a blog about conflict resolution; Peter Meyerson at his place in Santa Ana; and Coslough Johnson in his home off Mulholland, enjoying self-imposed-at-65 (“like the rest of the world”) retirement after “a great run—six Emmy nominations and one win for Laugh-In.” The writer with the most episode credits, Gerald Gardner (22 of 58), said it took a true collaboration among writers, directors, actors—and editors—to concoct the crazy, manic world of The Monkees. He and his then-partner, Dee Caruso, were hired after a stint on Get Smart to help shepherd the first season’s scripts. To generate stories, Gardner remembers turning first to the classics. “Many of the most successful ideas are about rejiggering existing ideas. We had to generate 32 stories that first season so you go to the classics: Charlie’s Aunt [became Dolenz in drag in ‘The Chaperone’], Romeo and Juliet [became Davy’s shotgun near-wedding in ‘Hillbilly Honeymoon’], identity copies ala A Tale of Two Cities [became Dolenz as a gangster in ‘Alias Micky Dolenz’]. Then we tried to always create an unpleasant authority figure to give the boys a funny way to clash with authority—and to attract a good name guest star.” Dave Evans, who earned the second-most number of credits (nine of 58) and joined the show after writing greeting cards and working on a pilot with Jay Ward of Bullwinkle fame, remembers being provided 24-hour access to a screening room for a week to watch all the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy films they could. “At end of the week Schneider said, ‘Now, go out and write that.’” Evans took the lessons to heart, eventually writing both the first episode to film (“Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth”) and co-writing (with Dolenz) the last to air (“Frodis Caper”). Bernie Orenstein, who wrote three episodes during his summer hiatus from The Hollywood Palace, recalls that, “We certainly gave them a framework in which to improvise, so more of the improv came in the physical comedy than the verbal.” Coslough Johnson came to the show from a freelance Bewitched and would go on to six Emmy nominations and one win for Laugh-In. He conceived the idea of Nesmith watching Liberace destroy his own piano with a sledgehammer in “Art for Monkees’ Sake.” That required casting Liberace (“He read the bit, liked it, and agreed to do the show”) and set dressing the recital room. The boys bemoan the dilemma of not being able to perform until they pay their union dues, yet not being able to pay their union dues unless they perform. At first Silverman disliked the romps (the seeds of today’s MTV music videos). “I remember referring to them as things that would be interrupting all our wonderful comedy.” But they were required to write out the entire romp in their first and second scripts, and Silverman discovered that “it was a lovely feeling to write the romp.” Missing the 1960s As to what Timothy Leary called the “jolly laugh at hypocrisy,” no LSD was dropped during story meetings. Indeed, few of the writers considered themselves connected to the emerging counterculture of the time. “I was too busy trying to make a living, pay the kids tuition and orthodontia,” Gardner jokes. Ten years older than the actors, Gardner came to the show after working as a speechwriter and “humor consultant” on Robert F. Kennedy’s successful campaign for the New York senate. To illustrate his lack of counterculture cache, Gardner recalls going to the set for the filming of a party at the Monkees’ pad. “I wanted to call for the costumer because none of the party guests was wearing a dinner jacket, but the AD said, ‘That’s not how kids dress for parties anymore.’ So I let it go.” Gardner noted that actors had changed a line in a script called “Monkee Chow Mein.” In the script, Nesmith and Jones were kicked out of a restaurant while pretending to be from the Food and Drug Administration. Gardner’s final draft read: “Maybe we should have tried to sell them protection.” The line in the filmed version became: “They probably serve bad food and drugs anyway.” To Johnson, “Counterculture meant you were a communist. I was older than the actors and most of the writers. I’d been in the military [during the Korean conflict] first and then done industrial films, so I didn’t even know the smell of marijuana. When you walked into the producer’s offices on The Monkees, you smelled that sweet smell. I assumed it was sweet tea.” Bernstein admits, “My wife accuses me of missing the ’60s entirely, and I’m afraid she’s right. I avoided the ‘emerging counterculture scene’ mostly because I didn’t know there was one going on. When I worked on The Monkees, I was 35 years old, and my ‘regular’ job was as a writer (including musical-special material) for The Hollywood Palace, a show noted more for Sinatra and Crosby appearances than for the emerging music of the ’60s.” That left the injection of counterculture comments to the actors—or to fellow writer Peter Meyerson, who wrote eight of 58 episodes, including the first to air (“Royal Flush”), and the one where Frank Zappa dressed as Nesmith and Nesmith dressed as Zappa (“Monkees Blow Their Minds”). By then Meyerson had become friendly with the actors, hanging out at parties in their Laurel Canyon homes and happily catching on to the current scene. Soon Meyerson’s scripts became studded with sly ad-libs to the camera that commented on controversies. In “Captain Crocodile,” for example, Meyerson mimics the Wasteland speech given by FCC Chairman Newton Minow in 1961; as the band enters a TV studio to perform on a children’s television show, Micky says, “So this is the world of television,” to which Peter replies, “That’s funny—it doesn’t look like a vast wasteland.” In Meyerson’s fifth episode, “Monkee Mother,” the boys are seen playing dominos. When all the dominos fall, someone asks, “What do you call this game?” The answer: “Southeast Asia.” This was a particularly sharp comment considering both Dolenz and Jones received draft notices during the show’s first season. In “Monkees in a Ghost Town,” Davy makes a secret telephone call for help and reaches a caricature of an Indian chief who insists he “doesn’t understand white man’s problems.” Next, Davy reaches a limping deputy who offers to get “Mr. Dillon” to help. Davy asks, “Marshall Dillon?” and the deputy answers, “No. Bob Dylan. He can write a song about your problems.” Meyerson even spoofed the producer who hired him. Schneider had sold The Monkees to Columbia Studios where his father Abe Schneider was president, so Meyerson conceived a 10-year-old network executive who called the president of the network dad. A deeper dig at the studio establishment came later in the show when the band insisted on being able to actually sing (rather than have pies thrown in their faces) during the “Captain Crocodile” show. This episode was filmed and aired as the relationship between the band and music producer Don Kirschner grew more volatile over questions of who would choose the music they’d record. In the episode, the pint-size executive guarantees the Monkees that “there will be no more pies in the face and you WILL sing.” Later, when the boys are reading to children, their story takes place in the “Land of Kirschner.” Meyerson was also considered the intellectual of the pack. “You want Shakespeare, you go to Peter,” Evans said. Part of that can be seen in “Monkees in a Ghost Town,” which reads like a mashup of The Great Escape and Of Mice and Men. Silverman was the other writer who identified with the counterculture world of the time, so it comes as no surprise that Meyerson and she became good friends during their two seasons on the show, to the point where they partnered up for some later work on other series (Captain Nice, Accidental Family). “I remember going back East and telling my old college roommates that I had started smoking grass,” Silverman says. “They were shocked. Pot hadn’t quite reached the East Coast to the extent that it had invaded the West Coast.” Silverman felt that, “I was born a few years too early. I loved everything that was going on. It felt like we’d finally found the key and this was how it’s always going to be.” When they first came to California, Silverman says Meyerson nailed the bicoastal conflict: “He realized that New York was vertical and California was horizontal. Here you could spread out and grow and change.” Evidence of Silverman’s electronic satire came in an episode set in Mexico. When an African-American character demanded a 50¢ fee for parking the Monkeemobile in his field, the boys question his authenticity. His answer: “If you can be Mexican bandits, I can be a Mexican parking lot attendant.” Evans, a confessed “nice boy from Kansas” and the son of a Presbyterian minister, “never defined myself in that [counterculture] way.” Yet his work co-writing “Frodis Caper” with Dolenz included some of the most outrageous counterculture references, from Marshall McLuhan to their choice of episode title. The urban dictionary defines frodis as a nickname for marijuana coined by Dolenz, who recalls that “it had to do with Frodo from Lord of the Rings. That was the first time when everyone was crazy about Tolkien.” The word frodis is heard often in other episodes and even had a meaning off screen when it was given to the “smoking room” provided for the actors and their visiting friends to use between camera shots on the set. In “Frodis Caper,” the word refers to the plant-based alien creature that appears to be hypnotizing humans in an attempt to take over the world. However, when the Monkees track the creature down, they discover it was kidnapped by an evil villainous wizard. When the wizard gets a whiff of the smoke from the Frodis plant he says, “I don’t Want to fight anymore. I just want to lay down on the grass and be cool.” How did such blatant references to drugs make it on broadcast television? Most of the writers felt that the studio and network executives had no idea what they meant. According to Silverman, they didn’t get the jokes, even though, “[the execs] were all wearing love beads. While they could accessorize the accessories, they never got the point.” Remembering the 1960s When asked their best memory of writing for The Monkees, each writer had a vivid recollection. Johnson’s memory involves walking to his car in the parking lot and “wading through all these kids hanging onto the studio fence like vultures waiting to beg for scripts or something from the set.” Meyerson fondly remembers the swimming pool at Peter Tork’s house where Tork taught his son, Jason, to swim and where, during a different kind of party on another night, “The most beautiful girl in the world stripped naked, climbed the roof of the music room, and dove into the pool.” Evans loved getting to know all the actors individually as friends. “Davy was so generous. I complimented a sweater he was wearing as we passed each other on the staircase one day. Without breaking stride, Davy stripped off the sweater and tossed it to me. I sent it to my 10-year-old niece who was a great Monkees fan.” Then, for the 45th anniversary tour in 2011, “Davy made sure there were free tickets at the Greek box office for me and my wife and mentioned me from the stage when he was thanking all the great writers they had.” Evans also came to know Dolenz well while working on “Frodis Caper.”: “They had trouble finalizing the deal since it was an actor coming in as writer-director, so we ended up with only one or two days to write the script. I went to Micky’s house in Laurel Canyon in a rainstorm lugging my typewriter and found him at home playing clarinet with a house full of other music people, having a jam. So I sat right down and wrote in the midst of that crowd.” Silverman vividly recalls the day she saw the Monkeemobile on the lot for the first time. “It made it all seem real, not just an abstraction anymore.” She smiles at the memory of a conversation with her mother who often called and was told her daughter was in a story meeting. “But after watching the show, my mother asked if they were telling the truth, because ‘there are no stories on The Monkees.’” Her favorite memory, however, comes from her penchant for writing at night. “I always liked writing at night. When everyone would leave at 6 or 6:30, I would start and I would write late into the night. I remember one night walking across the studio lot, the lights coming down, the only thing I could hear was the sound of my own shoes clicking on the cement, and I very distinctly thought, This is Hollywood. This is writing. This is it.”