James L. Brooks, a six-time Emmy winner, was a frequent writing companion also behind ‘The Munsters’, ‘Lou Grant’ and ‘My Mother the Car’.
Allan Burns, the six-time Emmy winner who partnered to create one of the best sitcoms of all time, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and one of the worst, My mom the car, died. He was 85 years old.
Burns died on Saturday, his fellow frequent writer, James L. Brooks, reported on twitter.
“His unique writing career has brought him every imaginable recognition.” He wrote. “But, you had to meet him to appreciate his utter rarity. He was simply the best man I have ever met. The beauty of a human.”
No other details of his death were immediately available.
Burns, who had a break early in his career working for animation legend Jay Ward in Rocky and his friends and The Bullwinkle Show, also co-created Rhoda and Lou Granttwo Mary Tyler Moore spinoffs as well as The Munsters; wrote for a season in Stay smart; and invented a famous cereal character, Cap’n Crunch, and his enemy, the pirate Jean LaFoote.
He can also claim that he discovered Jim Carrey.
Burns occasionally worked in the cinema and was nominated for a screenplay Oscar adapted by A little romance (1979), an eccentric teenage adventure that starred young Diane Lane and Laurence Olivier.
Burns, however, left his eternal mark on television, spending more than two decades as a writer and producer for MTM Productions. His first job for the fledgling company, launched by producer Grant Tinker and his wife, Mary Tyler Moore, was to invent the premise for a CBS comedy that would star Moore, who starred for five seasons on the The Dick Van Dyke Show.
It was Tinker’s idea to join Burns with Brooks. The two worked together on Room 222, an ABC comedy drama set in a downtown school that Brooks had created, and Brooks had written specific scripts for My mom the car.
“He and Mary were looking for someone to write a pilot and come up with a concept for her program, which had a 13-episode commitment on CBS, and he chose us,” Burns said in a 2012 interview for the Writers Guild Foundation’s Series The Writer Speaks web site. “That was incredible for me; I mean, we had credits and they were very good, but still …”
Its original concept had Mary Richards of Moore portraying a divorcee working as a stringer for a Hollywood columnist. “Nobody had done a show about someone being divorced,” noted Burns. Tinker and Moore loved the idea – both were divorced – but CBS executives had “a corporate heart attack” when they heard what the writers had in mind.
According to Burns, a CBS executive told them, “Our research shows us that there are four things that American television audiences dislike: New Yorkers, Jews, mustaches and divorced people.”
He added, “For the next few weeks, we came up with the idea of doing this in an office – Jim had worked in an office in New York and said, ‘I always thought it was a great place for comedy.'” They also turned Mary into a rejected woman who moved to Minneapolis after a broken engagement.
As an independent maiden in the workplace, the character has become an icon of the feminist movement.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show it ran for seven seasons, from September 1970 to March 1977, and won the record for 29 Emmys. Burns and Brooks won five trophies for their efforts on the show; the last two were for prominent comedy series and for writing (with four others) the admired finale of the series.
Not admired, but certainly ridiculed, My mom the car starred Jerry Van Dyke as a lawyer who buys a 1928 Porter Stanhope from a batch of used cars and discovers that the old vehicle is his mother’s reincarnation. Created by Burns and Chris Hayward, the comedy lasted only 30 episodes in 1965-66 before being discarded.
“It’s good to know that some people think The Mary Tyler Moore Show is one of the best shows of all time and I also did one that everyone is sure is the worst, “he said in a 2004 chat for The Interviews: An Oral History of Television.
Allan Burns was born on May 18, 1935, in Baltimore. His father died when he was 9 and, three years later, he and his mother moved to Honolulu, where his older brother worked in Pearl Harbor.
He attended Punahou private school (Barack Obama would go there later) and drew a cartoon that he spent a few times a week at Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspaper.
Burns received a partial scholarship to study architecture at the University of Oregon, but left school in 1955 and moved to Los Angeles, where he got a job as an NBC page. He asked what he had said in the interview that convinced his new employer to hire him.
“You said you were 42, right? Well, this is the only uniform we have available now. Someone just gave up,” he recalled. “The reason I’m in show business is because I’m 42, that’s the truth.”
Burns sent jokes to The Tonight Show and comedians George Gobel and Jonathan Winters without taking a bite and reading scripts as part of a new NBC comedy script development program. He was fired and lasted about a month as a game show screenwriter Truth or Consequences.
After spending the next two years writing jokes and drawing caricatures for greeting card companies, Burns put together a portfolio of his work and went unattended to Ward’s office on Sunset Boulevard.
While Burns was trying to convince himself of a meeting with Ward, the producer happened by accident. “He looks at all my stuff, starts laughing and says, ‘When do you want to start?’ “Burns recalled. He started working on promotional brochures for Rocky and his friends and The Bullwinkle Show, later graduating in “Fractured Fairy Tales” and other parts for $ 215 a week.
When Ward was on vacation, Burns met with executives from Quaker Oats Co. and designed the mascot, an 18th-century naval captain, for Captain Crunch. They wanted the cartoonist to know that the new cereal “remains crunchy even in milk”.
“Is it even crunchy in milk? It is crunchy even in acid,” joked Burns.
He and Chris Hayward co-created Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right for Ward’s company and, in 1965, wrote the pilot for CBS ‘ My brother the angel, a sitcom starring Tommy and Dick Smothers, before embarking on My Car mother.
“It sold, someone bought it, someone must have thought it was funny, but the critics weren’t,” he said in his interview for Oral History. “I probably spent the rest of my life living that show. We really – I promise you – intended it to be a satire, and it ended up being the worst of all the shows we thought we were making fun of.”
The naive Burns and Hayward launched their idea to The Munsters to an unscrupulous agent, who then conveyed this idea to Universal’s writers Norm Liebmann and Ed Haas. When they learned that the comedy about a monster family was in production on CBS, they filed a petition with the WGA and received due credit.
Burns and Hayward wrote for the 1967-68 CBS sitcom He and she, starring Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss, and Burns won his first career Emmy (shared with Hayward) for that. When it was canceled after one season, He and she creator Leonard Stern brought them on board another program he was producing, Stay smart.
It was the fourth season of the espionage parody, the one in which agents 86 (Don Adams) and 99 (Barbara Feldon) were married. “I don’t remember being a particularly good idea,” he said. Burns remembered this after Rhoda Morgenstern’s wedding in 1974, when Valerie Harper’s audience plummeted.)
He and Hayward broke up after about four years together, when Burns wanted to work on a movie script and Hayward didn’t. (The film ended up not being made.)
Burns and Brooks (along with Gene Reynolds) also created the thought-provoking hour-long drama MTM-CBS Lou Grant, which marked an unprecedented gender change for a spinoff. The show started slowly, perhaps because viewers expected to see Ed Asner’s sitcom version Mary Tyler Moore character.
“The CBS guy at the time said to us, ‘Guys, what you guys seem to be doing is The New York Times. People don’t read The New York Times, they read the Daily News, “Remembered Burns.” I remember Grant exploding: ‘You don’t want to The New York Times on your network ?! ‘”
Grant told network executives, “‘Well, guys, wait, the program is good, it will work.’ And he said to us, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing’. “
Burns saw Carrey performing at a comedy club in West Hollywood and hired him to star as a cartoonist on a 1984 sitcom he had created. The Duck Factory. Burns based the show on his work experiences for Ward.
Other programs he created for MTM included Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers; Eisenhower and Lutz, starring Scott Bakula; and FM, set on a public radio station. He received 16 Emmy nominations in all, and he and Brooks were honored in 1988 with the prestigious WGA Laurel Award.
For the big screen, Burns also wrote Butch and Sundance: the first days (1979) and Kristy McNichol’s romantic comedy The way you are (1984) and wrote and directed Just between friends (1986), starring his old friend Moore.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.