The Sunday Memory Drawer - Season 2 of Diploma City

 

And the story continues about my college sitcom which premiered....well...multiple decades ago this month.

Back then, it was exciting times for Diploma City in its second season.

We graduated from mimeographed scripts to actual Xerox copies. That, of course, didn't stop the typos and the on-the-fly rewritten lines as shown above. But, press on, we did.

I used the summer after the first season to ascertain what this radio situation comedy had achieved in its initial episodes. The writing? A little too obvious and pedestrian. The production values? Way too sloppy. Both fell into my side of the ledger issued by the Blame Department. But, there was one other area that needed to be fixed. Immediately.

The acting.

Diploma City's first shows are a great example of what happens when mediocre scripts are read by bad actors. Admittedly, I wasn't working with graduates of the Actors Studio as taught by Lee Strasberg. I wasn't even working with graduates of Fordham University. Most were sophomores and juniors. Except for three regulars who stood a fighting chance, I decided to replace most of the folks on the show. I would do what most soap operas do. This week, the role is played by X and, the following week, it is played by Y. No questions asked or answered. At least I wasn't changing the ages of the characters. On soaps, you can see a character at the age of 5 on Friday and, suddenly on Monday, the same character is now played by a 16-year-old.

The biggest recast I faced was the role of the "white bread" freshman now sophomore, Steve Marshall. Not only was it tough for any actor to give life to this dullard (my fault), but the guy who did it the first year was a pain to deal with. He had delusions of mediocrity with this role and quickly fancied himself in the ranks of Sir John Gielgud. Over the hot weather months, I started to think of ways in which Steve Marshall could leave the series.

"He goes home for the summer and is killed by an air conditioner that falls out of a window."

"His boss at the ice cream stand goes postal and Steve is found dead alongside some Carvel Lollapaloozas in a freezer."

"Steve drops his dad off at the airport and suddenly finds himself employed as a Hare Krishna greeter in Terminal 4."

By the end of August, I simply opted to do a straight replace and hope I could breathe some life into the character on the written page. The guy who would play the role in the second season was not materially better as an actor. But he was a nice guy and fun to be with. That's all we wanted.

Plotlines for Season 2 came easier and easier to me. I simply borrowed from everybody's life. It's not hard to fashion stories for some kids on a college campus when you're actually a kid on a college campus. The guy who played our Bronx-grown student (he made the cut) had gotten himself into a cafeteria scrape with some lummox over an errant look at the asshole's girlfriend. We transferred it to a script. If you started dating somebody, that wound up in the show. If you broke up with somebody, that wound up in the show. If you were having a fight with somebody, that wound up in the show. If you made up with somebody, that wasn't so funny. This would not wind up in the show. Nevertheless, art imitated life so much that the rallying cry around our studio was "have something happen in your life and three weeks later, it's on Dip City."

I learned how to engineer my own tapings and also edit them. I frequently found myself in an editing bay for several hours on Saturday, cutting that week's show. So, besides writing and directing every episode, I pretty much controlled all other aspects of the series as well. It was a labor, but one of love. And I came to enjoy the fact that my actors could never seem to say a line or do a scene in one take.

Part of the reason why the acting was so tough to improve is that we were rushed to complete a taping in the course of one hour every Tuesday during Student Activity Hour. As I surveyed the station, I realized that production studios were available at all hours of the night. If we could tape at a leisurely pace in the evening, the production would sound a whole lot better.

I was right.

Once we transferred our taping to a two or three hour period every Tuesday night, Diploma City started to sound professional. As I really learned the voices of my cast, my writing improved. And so, gasp, did the acting. If a line was read with the wrong inflection, we had the luxury of doing it until the actor got it right. It might take twenty minutes, but, eventually, the line was read correctly. As a matter of fact, we got so bitchin' with those nighttime tape sessions, we sometimes taped two episodes in one evening. This allowed us to stockpile some shows and we could actually take a week or two off.

There was also another delicious by-product of our nighttime tapings. We came together as the ubiquitous family that lots of TV show casts turn into. Our tapings soon became a weekly party. And it showed on the air as well. Friends started to beg to come aboard. This resulted in our creation of some wonderful recurring characters. The ego-bloated Top 40 disc jockey at the college radio station. A good looking hockey player who considered himself God's gift to women. And a new kid in the dorm who may or may not have been gay. This was years before homosexual characters got, pardon the expression, hot on TV. I realized just recently how ahead of the times Diploma City was.

Late in Season 2, one of my newer actors, also known now in Blog World as "Djinn from the Bronx,"came to me with a script idea. Actually, it was more than a notion. It was a full blown radio play for an episode. Up to this point, Yours Truly had written every single word uttered on Diploma City. But, Djinn had taken a disastrous spring break vacation and turned it into a wonderfully funny episode that would feature our female characters. Moreover, it was something that I could not have even tried to write from a female perspective. While the Bermuda adventures were certainly not "Girls Gone Wild" material, it was still funny and organic. Sex-less in the City, but hilarious still. Djinn's script also afforded me my first opportunity at script editing, a creative process which I still now prefer to this very day.

During Season 2, WFUV had their annual fundraising marathon much akin to those silly pledge drives that are done by your local PBS TV station. Every WFUV show had to do something special for the marathon and Diploma City was no exception. What resulted was a story I've told here before, but it certainly bears repeating.

Recalling my show's ties to the Mary Tyler Moore Show, I hit on a 150 watt light bulb of an idea to promote our show during the fundraising. What if I got somebody from the MTM Show to be on our show and make a pitch for WFUV? I called MTM's publicist in Hollywood and this was surprisingly easy to set up. Per my specific request, I was given the appropriate time and phone number so I could engage Ted Knight for the task.

We awaited the appointed day and time as if it were Christmas morning. In advance, I fashioned a scene of dialogue that would break the fourth wall between one of our cast members and Ted. Then, Ted would go into his plug for listeners to send dough to WFUV. At the hour of our reckoning, I called Ted and he was incredibly gracious. I essentially explained to him what we were doing and I recited the dialogue so he could copy it over the phone. We rolled tape and it went well. For about a minute. Suddenly, Ted's mind veered off the road as if he was trying to avoid hitting a deer with his car. He started to ramble about WFUV and Fordham, which made virtually no sense in the context of the show. Amazingly, my actor followed Ted down into Confusionville and what resulted was a hilariously funny but impromptu conversation that I ran virtually unedited. Besides, I felt I had no creative license to ask Ted Knight for a second take.

Ted Knight's cameo appearance was just one highlight of what was a pivotal season in the radio life span of Diploma City. In the first season, we did 26 episodes. But, with our vast improvement in Season Two, we managed to do 30 installments. All was good.

But there was a new wrinkle. I was graduating. Yet, most of my cast would still have one year left in their college career. Figuring I had nothing better to do except get turned down for jobs, I opted to keep the show going for one last year.

And, for the conclusion of our story, you'll have to come back here one more Sunday.

Dinner last night: Beef rouladen at Red Lion Tavern.