Ed Scharlach is a talented veteran of the television writing wars with whom I was privileged to work on the Mike Hammer series.
As Supervising Producer of the show I was supposed to be the writer with the last word, the show runner who decided exactly what went to film (with a little help from the suits, that is). Ed's title on the series was "Producer," which nominally made him one of those who was supposed to report to me.
And he did report to me. But he also did something else.
He sat in the trailer of Stacy Keach, our Mike Hammer, all day, and punched up the dialog. He changed anything that didn't work on the set. And, thank God, he put in the jokes.
A former writer-producer of Happy Days and Mork & Mindy, among others, Ed is one of the funniest writers I've ever read. He works in the Neil Simon tradition of insightful wisecracks, as the following teleplay written for the German sitcom Nikola illustrates.
Did I say "German sitcom?" Yes, I did. Lately, German television has been on a "Do it the American way" kick, and a number of shows, most of them comedies, are being written in English by U.S. writers and then translated into German to be shot for the Deutsche audience.
"Production is fast and furious, and because of the translation and language situation there aren't a lot of layers of approvals to go through," Ed says. "I don't have much material to give you to show how the script was created and changed because there was never a lot of input and no reason for a paper trail. All that ever counted when I was writing Nikola was whatever I was writing now."
So here it is. The "now." You saw a few pages of this script in the print Television Writing from the Inside Out: Your Channel to Success. Now enjoy some good laughs from the rest.
Final Draft
