About ten years ago, maybe a little more, I was writing a mammoth 150,000-word book about Blake’s 7 and while I relished the conversations I had with practically everyone, while I’m still friends with one in particular, the interviewee who was the most deliciously open and downright acerbic was writer Chris Boucher. And while I can’t find the quote now, I know he said something to me along the lines of how you should never give an actor a pencil.<\/p>\n
We were talking about an unproduced Blake’s 7 script that actor Paul Darrow had written. I’ve read that script and it was poor, it also just didn’t seem finished, but I don’t remember it having precisely the actor\/pencil problem Chris meant.<\/p>\n
The problem he said — and he is far from the only writer\/producer I’ve heard this from — is that an actor will write a brilliant part for themselves and the rest of the script won’t work. I’m not sure how I feel about that: I believe that the show comes first, to the extent that if the best thing for the project is for me to be chucked out, I’ll find the door. But then on the other hand, if I were able to act, I don’t know that I could resist writing myself a lot to act.<\/p>\n
Plus I can’t count how many actors have told me that they had to turn to writing because it was the only way to get the acting parts they wanted. <\/p>\n
And I’ve friends who are both actors and writers, and I would trust them all with pencils. <\/p>\n
Funnily enough, those same actor\/writers have mentioned feeling as narked as I was over actors like Lisa Kudrow who seem to truly believe they created the character they play. There’s an interview with her in which you finally hear the exasperated interviewer asking “wasn’t that in the script?” And she looks shocked, like she’d never thought to read that.<\/p>\n
Actually, Gareth Thomas seemed a bit like that to me about his character Roj Blake. I feel I can tell you that now since he’s died, but then so has Paul Darrow, so has Chris Boucher.<\/p>\n
And you know this is all on my mind this week because so has Matthew Perry.<\/p>\n
I seem to remember there being some criticism of him when his book, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir<\/a>” was released. But since he died, of course all you hear is the good stuff about the man.<\/p>\n Why I rated Matthew Perry, though, was a story I heard during production of Friends. Reportedly, he would spend a lot of time in the writers’ room. Specifically, he did that and none of the rest of the cast did. I seem to remember, but I’m not sure all these years later, that the writers asked him in.<\/p>\n I hope so. I mean, otherwise, he’s an actor barging his way into a script session.<\/p>\n I just liked the completeness of it. I liked how he saw the writing as vital. And amongst all of the tributes to him this week, I saw one that mentioned this business with the writing staff. The story claims that Perry would pitch ten jokes for each episode of Friends and would consistently get two in.<\/p>\n There’s no way to know now whether he gave himself those two jokes, but then that’s the thing. If you can’t tell that an actor is destroying the entire fabric of a show by giving themselves the best lines, then they aren’t.<\/p>\n I’m obviously pro-writer. I mean, unlike Lisa Kudrow, I read that pilot script to Friends and right there on the page it’s very good. I just see that television is better when everyone is working together and it always seemed that this is what Matthew Perry thought too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" About ten years ago, maybe a little more, I was writing a mammoth 150,000-word book about Blake’s 7 and while … Continue reading