A friend posted this on FB today:
Okay, so I’ve been waiting to tell this story for 24 years. In September of ‘94, I started working on a TV special as a writer’s assistant for my dear buddy Kenny Solms and a team of hilarious veterans from the Golden Age of tv variety shows.
The title? “The Roseanne Hanukkah Special.”
For three weeks I drove through the gates at CBS Television City on Fairfax and Beverly, where we were to tape in the same studio where Kenny was a writer on the first six seasons of “The Carol Burnett Show.”
We were in preproduction, lining up guest stars and choosing material. Bea Arthur was to read a poem called “Bruce, Bruce the Hanukkah Goose,” Roseanne and Joan Rivers were going to do a sketch as Ruth and Esther making latkes, Neil Diamond wrote a song called “One Star”, and Sandra Bernhard was going to sing a rock version of “The Dreydl Song” to a group of probably terrified children (No! Yes!).
So on the Friday morning of our third week at CBS, I was sitting in Kenny’s office revising the show rundown (tape day was ten days away), when a call came through from the Boss Lady. Whom I had still NEVER MET.
I heard her rattle on in a paranoid, nonsensical abusive manner where her ownership of a Macadamia NUT farm in Hawaii makes perfect sense. She decided on a whim that she didn’t want to do all the work involved in doing the show (which basically involved an opening monologue, one sketch and bumpers introducing the guest stars) and pulled the plug on the whole special. Period, full stop.
Kenny staggered out and told the staff to pack up their things and go home.
As the writers had not signed their WGA agreements yet, and they were doing prepro in good faith, they never got paid. Only the receptionist and me, who were paid directly by Kenny, ever saw a dime.
So yes, Roseanne fired me. And, yes, Roseanne, you’re a disgusting racist. And yes, I take a tiny bit of solace that horrible people (and if she plays the mental illness card, I say proceed at your own risk... she tried to mend fences with Kenny that way a few months later. Sorry/not sorry is the dodge of the unrepentant) are finally being held accountable for their words.
All I can say is a very wealthy person spewed their bigotry (which has been emboldened by the election of never my president) and ended up leaving innocent people unemployed. Again. In ‘94, it was only six people. This time it’s in the hundreds, and I salute their hard work and their lost potential for steady income.
Dig deep, Lady. You’ve got a lot of your crew’s kid’s tuition to pay for now.
(That being said, Kenny always made sure we had the BEST rugelach from Greenblatt’s every day)