14 April 2010
Posted in Dave Flebotte
“It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood, A beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?” – Mr. Rogers
What: Goody Valetta, the original Goody, opened a deli in the North End of Boston in 1954; in 1962 he added espresso to the menu and it became the place where locals and tourists alike came to gather.
Who: Goody Valetta, the grandson of the founder, now runs Goody’s with the help of his mother Sylvia, his acerbic sister Terry, and father John; but Goody is the heart and soul around whom everyone gathers. He’s warm and direct, generous and takes no prisoners. His circle of friends range from Tommy, a general factotum for the Irish Mob run by Taffy (so named because at one time he pulled off one of the ears of a rival as though he were pulling taffy); his charmingly immature cousin and roommate Pete; Sid, a New York lawyer new to the neighborhood; and Paulie, friend from childhood who adds just the right touch of sleazy on the make Italian stereotype to the group.
Paulie: Hey! Who’s the (bleep) who double parked his Mercedes out front?
Goody gets up to calm him.
Goody: Hey, hey… Paulie…
Paulie: Hey nothing, Goody. I’m sick of people moving into our neighborhood and being rude. A little respect, huh?
An attractive woman approaches. Hot, early 30’s.
Woman: I’m sorry… Did I block you in?
Paulie (taken aback) No… It’s just…
Woman: I thought I could get in and out quick. I’ll move it right now—
Paulie: No, no, it’s fine. I’m sorry. (Beat) I thought you were gonna be ugly.
She exits. They both watch her. When she’s gone Goody slaps Paulie on the back of the head.
Goody: Don’t ever talk to my customers like that. EVER.
They sit with the guys. Paulie is still watching her leave.
Paulie: You think she’s seeing anybody?
Sid: What’s it to you?
Paulie: Oh what, Sid, you don’t think I can get with her just cause I’m not a big shot lawyer like you?
Pete: No, because look at you and look at her. Her: business suit, stylish hair, manicured nails. You: greased back hair, gold chain and enough cologne on to mitigate every other smell in this deli and we’re like two feet from the salami case.
Goody: It’s true Paulie. You ever meet an Italian stereotype you didn’t like? All you need is a ring of sausages around your neck and your fly undone and you could be our Italian Buddha.
Into Goody’s deli, and he hopes in some way his life, walks the pretty Lisa, a new neighbor who has just moved in across the street. Too realistic about his looks to hold out any real hope of gaining anything but Lisa’s friendship, they, nevertheless are oddly attracted to the kindness each senses in the other and a shared love of Opera. That they can still sense a budding kinship even after Goody’s father has a heart to heart with Lisa is nothing short of miraculous:
John: You like my son?
Lisa: Goody? Yeah, he’s a great guy.
John: No, no, no, no. Do you like him?
Lisa: Don’t you think you’re being a bit presumptuous Mr. Valetta?
John: No. (then) My son hasn’t had a date in three years. There’s a woman out there though. And I don’t want him tearing himself up over something he’ll never get so that he misses her when she does show up. So why don’t you give the guy a break and get your kicks elsewhere.
And complications continue to entangle his friends when Tommy learns that Pete has stiffed Taffy of several large on a debt repayment. Pete will need to learn a lesson and Tommy has been instructed by Taffy to teach it – break Pete’s thumb and obtain title to Pete’s one and only possession – his Mustang. If Tommy doesn’t break Pete’s thumb, then Taffy will send over a goon to break both of Pete’s legs. A veritable Hobson’s choice.
No Meaner Place: Flebotte has an uncanny ability in setting the scene and fully developing the character of the protagonist in the cold open:
Angle on Goody Valetta, mid 30’s, overweight, pleasant enough looking, kinda boyish but not exactly eye candy. A young guy in a suit is at the front of the line.
Young Guy: I’ll have a half caff mocha latte whip to go please.
Goody: No.
Young Guy: Pardon?
Goody: You don’t want that.
Young Guy: I think I know what I want.
Goody: Trust me on this.
Young Guy: Am I going to get a coffee or what?
Goody: “Coffee?” Yes! You are definitely going to get coffee. But there’s no coffee in what you said. Let’s break it down. “Half caff” that would connote that you want decaf which I don’t believe in. It’s like getting a flu shot and telling them to fill the syringe with water. Don’t carry the stuff anyway. Okay. “Mocha.” You want chocolate let me make you a nice cocoa. “Latte” – milk. Lots of milk. Another unnecessary agent added to the coffee to rob it of its original essence. And “whipped cream”? (Shakes his head) I’d slap my own mother if she put whipped cream on a cup of coffee. Isn’t that right, Ma?
Sylvia Valetta, Goody’s mom, sixties, plump, she works behind the counter part time, comes with a to-go cup and hands it to Goody.
Sylvia: (Flatly) It’s true. He’s a bastard.
She crosses off. Hands the to-go cup to the guy.
Goody: Here. This is a double shot of some of the finest Italian Roast espresso with a dab of steamed milk foam. Enjoy.
Young Guy: But that’s not what I want…
Goody: I don’t give people what they want. I give them what they deserve. And you deserve good Italian Roast. It’s on the house.
Sylvia crosses back with a small bag.
Goody: Here’s a couple biscotti. That’ll take care of the sweet tooth. Okay. I’m done with you.
The audience knows everything about Goody’s values, warmth, and personality within this short first scene. Circumstance and situation will fill in all the rest of the details as time goes on; but from the very outset we know, like and admire Goody. That his friends are “types” takes nothing away from the rich nougat center of this piece. All comedy is dependent on character and characters, and Flebotte has provided both in spades. NBC picked up a number of dramas and comedies in 2005-2006, the season they chose not to produce this pilot. With “Will and Grace” in its final year, and as two of the three comedy pilots that were picked up to series tanked almost immediately, one would have thought that they might have hedged their bets a bit better and at least kept this one on a back burner. More importantly, why is there an expiration date on television pilot scripts?
Life Lessons for Writers: Shelf life is important when it comes to milk, not writing.
Conversation with the Writer:
Neely: Thank you so much for talking to me and taking time from the writers’ room at “Desperate Housewives.” When we most recently spoke you mentioned that most of the last script was thrown out and that you guys had to scramble to get something completed for the shoot that started today.
Dave: We do that every week; it’s just now we’re on the last two episodes and because it’s the end of the season the stakes are higher. If you rip out one little thing then you rip up everything, and then the Network has contradictory thoughts. It’s crazy. I’m actually just taking a break from it right now
Neely: Well we’re actually here to discuss your pilot “Goody.” I’ve loved this script for years and could not believe it was never produced as a pilot. I know that “Goody” was all set for production; the cast was in place and the best ½ hour director in the business, James Burrows, had been attached. This allegedly didn’t go forward because of a cast contingency. What was the network looking for?
Dave: We really had everything in place, but it was a bunch of things. We had Will Sasso who was all right as our star but he was in second position for our show. We were supposed to shoot in late April, early May but ABC wouldn’t let him out so Kevin Reilly, who was head of programming at NBC at the time, said we should just push and shoot it in June. And I said to Kevin that my fear was that he’d come back from the upfronts satisfied with his slate and not care about this because he would have all of his shows in place. But he said that it wasn’t true and that shooting the pilot late wouldn’t even preclude it from the September schedule; he assured me that we were going to shoot this. At that point I wasn’t even concerned about getting it on the air; I just wanted to get it shot. And sure enough, two days before the table read, we had the cast, the sets were built, we were ready to go, and Jimmy, Dick and I got a phone call. Reilly no longer wanted to do it, allegedly because Will Sasso was in second position. I don’t think that was really the case, I think he just never shined to the project. I don’t think he ever really wanted to do the project; it actually was getting done because Jimmy Burrows picked this script out of a pile.
Neely: Was the problem with Will Sasso real?
Dave: He was on “Less than Perfect” and was like 8th on the Call Sheet. There were rumblings that they didn’t want to let him out and McPherson wasn’t happy about it and they made it difficult but I think we could have worked it out. Billy Gardell, who I wrote it for, was said to be too “on the nose.”
Neely: And “on the nose” is a bad thing? I so love Billy Gardell. He’s hilarious and warm and hilarious. There is an unforgettable scene with him in the short-lived TV series entitled “Lucky” where he goes out to earn some money by being hit (“accidentally” and repeatedly) by moving cars. I can’t think of anyone else who could have pulled it off as well –embracing slapstick, pathos, and idiocy in one fell swoop.
Dave: I’ve always loved the movie “Marty” and I wanted a character like that – someone where you had to look a little harder to find the beauty. It was a hard sell; the cast was very average looking. No one was a beauty; there was one girl who was the love interest and she was very beautiful, but everyone else looked like regular people. I don’t know, maybe that hurt us.
Neely: As an aside, I just wrote a blog for Studio System about how networks have forgotten that the shows create the stars, not the stars that create the shows. http://www.blssresearch.com/research-wrap?detail/C7/more_stars_than_there_are_in_the_heavens.
The best thing that can happen is for the audience to identify with your cast and there aren’t a whole lot of regular people out there for us to identify with.
Dave: Jimmy and I had the opportunity to pitch it to Reilly again and I made the mistake of pitching it from a “passion” point of view and what I should have done was explain that this was about the characters and I wanted to redefine the sitcom. Everyone responded to the character of Pete getting his thumb broken but were thinking of this as a traditional sitcom wondering “how’s he going to get out of it;” but that was the point, this was real life and “he doesn’t get out of it.” At the end of the first season he was going to disappear because he couldn’t stop gambling and his body would show up a year later. There were a lot of interesting and unusual places I wanted to go.
The “dark” and the “light” are right next to each other and I’ve always been able to fin the funny even in the darkest of situations. The comedy resonates much more when it’s juxtaposed with the dark side, when it’s based on something real. I was going to go all kinds of places and I knew I could make it funny. I wanted to do a dramedy that we’d shoot proscenium style. Mostly on a single set with maybe a couple of scenes outside and make this about these people and their lives. In traditional TV you put your characters in predicaments and then a week later they’re all better. I didn’t want to do that. It would be like a play. I didn’t want easy resolutions.
Neely: Besides Jimmy Burrows, you had a heavy hitter behind you in Dick Wolf. Now there has to be a story in that because this is not a guy know for a lot of yuks.
Dave: I had just been fired off “Will and Grace.” Max (Mutchnick) and David (Kohan) had come back and I became superfluous so I left the show in October; I had two years left on my deal so I wanted to develop something. Nena Rodrigue who does the non-traditional stuff for Dick Wolff is a good friend of mine and she wanted to get him into comedy. I wrote my script in two weeks and turned it in and Dick was sort of perplexed and said he didn’t get it, but everyone else loved it so he said “Go with God.” Once Jimmy Burrows signed on Dick got very enthusiastic, but he wasn’t very involved. He was involved in some of the casting and went to a few of the meetings, but mainly his involvement was as a backer and a producer. As a side note, Jimmy Burrows had been part of the team that had just fired me from “Will and Grace.” So when he picked up my script and said he loved it and wanted to shoot it, I thought “No Way! The guy just fired me one month ago.” When I went in to see him and asked why he was interested after he’d just let me go, he said, “Honey, that’s (“Will and Grace”) not your voice, this is.”
Neely: But comedy chops or no comedy chops, Dick Wolff was a 2 ton gorilla for NBC and that alone should have yielded an order.
Dave: It should have, but I think the 2 ton gorilla didn’t always get along with people at NBC and it was a case of two immovable forces. I actually thought with Dick Wolff behind it and Jimmy Burrows as well…in the end, nothing happened.
Neely: Were you happy with the casting process?
Dave: It was great. We got all the people we wanted – It was great. We got all the people we wanted – Will Sasso, Vincent Pastore, Michael Weaver, Jon Bernthal, Beth Lacke and Elizabeth Regan. We had a great cast. I just saw Jon Bernthal in “The Pacific” and he was terrific. He would have played Paulie and he was so authentic and so funny; and Michael Weaver came in and had a better Irish brogue than most of the authentic Irish actors who auditioned and he had a comedy background; Vinnie Pastore was great – the exchange his character had with his wife was lovely; he brought something different to it, something I wasn’t thinking of. The network loved him because they thought he was a marketable face and Jimmy loved him. The lead was the hard part and the leading lady – but Beth became available when her pilot dropped out and she was a dream.
The casting process can be tedious because everybody and his brother comes out. And when you’re “testing” Italians (and I can say this because I’m 100% Sicilian) you get these guys who come in the room then stop in the middle of the audition and tell you, they “Gotta go take a leak” - they think that’s what you’re looking for. We’re not looking for Italians we’re looking for people who can act. Otherwise I’ve got family I can throw in there. You just end up rolling your eyes and thinking “how did you even get in here?” They’re trying to show you that they’re real Italian.
Neely: Going back to Kevin Reilly being lukewarm about the show and then going to the upfronts and dropping this, one of the shows he picked up was this real dog entitled “Four Kings.” Perhaps they felt the shows were too similar as “Four Kings” was about four male friends. It’s like there’s a TV Universe where there can’t be more than one show about four male (or female for that matter) friends on at the same time because all friends are the same. And then, of course, “Four Kings” was created by Mutchnick and Kohan and they had more mojo than you.
Dave: That’s what’s really odd because they were suing NBC at the time (which was the reason I was originally brought on to “Will and Grace” because they were no longer welcome there – until they were again). I read the script of “Four Kings” and it was okay, the produced pilot, however, was dreadful. But actually, I think that what occurred was that NBC was hedging their bets with “Four Kings” because “Goody” just didn’t follow the format of a traditional sitcom. My show had no easy breezy resolutions and the characters were well intentioned but crass. In so many ways I thought I was writing a play. But I think my show didn’t go, not because of Kevin Reilly, but because I didn’t sell it right. Saying I wanted to reinvent the multi-camera sitcom sounds pretty arrogant, but I wanted to do something that hadn’t been seen since “All in the Family.”
I think someone will someday do something like this on network; I’m just afraid it won’t be me. I think my future development is with cable because the networks know what I have to say and are no longer interested.
Neely: I think there might still be a life for it on cable. There’s universality in the story and you have such a distinct voice. But whether it ever goes or doesn’t go, I have two questions and the first one is: Was Goody ever going to get the girl?
Dave: I don’t think so. What I wanted to do was something like “Marty.” You know there’s a caste system in dating that relies on looks, and here you’ve got this really pretty girl from a different place who finds herself falling in love with a guy she can’t fully embrace. There’s real love there but I didn’t know for sure if he would get her in the end. It was a complicated mess – she’s got ambivalence, he’s not really putting himself out there because he’s afraid of getting hurt. I went back and forth but I didn’t really think they should get together.
Neely: I loved the lack of resolution. But question number two, and this is really important – would we have ever gotten the chance to meet Taffy?
Dave: I don’t know. As I mentioned, his “customer” was going to disappear; the presence of his character would only be there for half a year; his henchman Tommy was going to end up in jail – there were lots of other stories I wanted to tell.
Neely: You know, since this didn’t actually get made, these rights should revert to you.
Dave: I know but once something has the stink of rejection on it, it’s really hard to get someone to look at it in a different light. They do in some circumstances but the lack of courage of conviction is so disheartening. You know, people love it and then they talk about it and then they talk themselves out of it. They talk themselves out of more good things because of all the testing; testing that gives you things like “Emeril.”
Neely: What inspired you to write this? Do you know these guys?
Dave: I just made it up. I am from Boston and my relatives are these guys, but lighter. The father, the mother, Goody – these are all people that I know. You grow up in a Sicilian household like I did and the holidays are all big and loud. I know the North End and it’s been undergoing gentrification for the last 30 years and the older Italians are getting pushed out. I mean there are still pockets of them there but I thought it would be just great if I could create a place that was like the last refuge for the neighborhood.
Neely: I usually try to find a way to repurpose material in a different medium but this is so very television and definitely not a film; but I’m struck by something you said earlier. This would make a great play, because in theater, you don’t have to have resolutions. They can be open ended and about character, and this is all about character. It shares some similarities with August Wilson’s character studies when his series ventured into the 50s and 60s. Have you ever written a play?
Dave: It’s so funny that you ask because I just got theatrical representation with Abrams Artists in New York for a play that I wrote. I just met with Amy Brenneman and she wants to help get the play done, possibly by being in it. I just had a reading of it and we’re trying to get it put up at one of the small theaters. It’s taken me 7 years to get it to this point and I’m finally happy with it. It’s a three act that’s sexual but not really just about sex. It’s called “Fuck T*lk” where the a in “talk” has the asterisk, not the u in “fuck.” I really don’t want to turn “Goody” into a play; it was always something bigger to me, something where I could push out the edges of storytelling on a network.
Neely: You have so much interesting work out there, but one pilot you’ve written has taken on almost cult status – “Working, Dating and Dying in Hollywood.” In a nutshell, it’s about a comedy writer with cystic fibrosis. Where did this come from and what’s the connection to cystic fibrosis?
Dave: I was the one with cystic fibrosis and then 13 years ago I had a double lung transplant. Anyway, I went in to HBO with Susie Fitzgerald to pitch a show about an Italian, of course, family who run a family restaurant that’s going bankrupt and so they start shooting and producing porn in their restaurant at night in order to stay solvent. It was a comedy, it was fun, and it had a lot of rich characters. So we’re engaging in small talk and Carolyn Strauss, who was head of HBO at the time, turned to whoever else was in the room and said “Did you know that Dave had a double lung transplant?” And that was it and I pitched and the next day I got a call from my agent saying that they wanted to do “the transplant story.” But I didn’t pitch a transplant story. Well anyway I wrote it in two days; they loved it; they wanted to change a lot of it. I was going through a divorce at the time and was still in a two year development deal that was paying me a lot of money so I really couldn’t afford to do it. Besides it was going in a direction I didn’t want to go and they wanted to remove one of my favorite devices – the animation, which was a very different way of doing exposition. Eventually the rights reverted back to me. It’s one of those pieces like “Goody” that people like and always want to know why it didn’t get made.
Neely: I’ve never been a big fan of phlegm and what astonished me is that it didn’t seem to be as big a problem as I thought it would be for other people.
Dave: Why do something if you’re not going to go all the way. I think people responded to it because I didn’t hide anything. I made it hard hitting – it was real. The biggest compliment I can get from anyone is if they think what I wrote was honest story telling. Cystic Fibrosis is a big part of my life.
Neely: The double lung transplant, was that a cure for the Cystic Fibrosis?
Dave: It was a cure for the lungs because you don’t have the coughing any more but the body still has it; it’s in the pancreas and your cells still have it; but without the transplant I would have been dead at 38, no doubt. It was exchanging one illness for one that is easier to live with.
Neely: This year you created “Sherri” loosely based on the life of comedienne and “View” hostess Sherri Shepherd. How were you chosen for that project?
Dave: Nina Wass, a really good friend, asked me to do the show and I wasn’t interested. She asked me to meet Sherri and hear her life story and I said sure. I’d already known Sherri because we worked together on “Suddenly Susan.” We met and Sherri pitched her idea of a single camera show that was a really dark acerbic look at her divorce but there were a lot of laughs. So I agreed to do it and then we took it around and ended up selling it to the CW. It got softer after the first pass but then they said they wanted to do it as a multi cam and I said fine, I’ll write the pilot but then I’m done because it was no longer interesting to me. They ended up taking all the good stuff out of it – all the adult stuff. So I shot it and I’m a consultant on it, but it’s not a passion project; it’s not what it could have been which was very interesting to me. Terry Minsky took it over and she’s done a really great job.
Neely: What brought you out here in the first place?
Dave: I went to college as an advertising major and a writing minor and I had a class called “How to write sitcoms” and saw that I could make $80K in a year. So I said to my wife – let’s move to California. I wrote some specs and waited tables for three years and then got an agent. I was writing with a partner at the time and we did a “Larry Sanders” spec that got us attention After about a year we switched agents and we got our first job – a presentation for She TV with Bonnie and Terry Turner; and then “Good Advice.” After “Good Advice” I was on my own so I had to write a new “Larry Sanders” spec which also got me hired.
Neely: Did you ever work in advertising?
Dave: No. That first year I got a C in advertising and A’s in my writing classes and changed majors. It was a leap of faith because I didn’t think you could make a living as a writer until I saw that thing about making 80 Grand. I came from a household where we never made more than 20 Grand and there were 9 of us, so I just thought “Hee Haw!”
Neely: Well you did suffer for your art.
Dave: You mean waiting tables? That wasn’t suffering; everyone has to put in their time and pay their dues. The suffering was the waiting, not the waiting tables.
Neely: What’s next?
Dave: I’m in negotiations to write a script for James Gandolfini at HBO – it’s my version of a French Canadian series called “Taxi 22.” It’s about a cab driver in New York. I’ve got another idea I’m going to pitch to HBO in about a month.
Neely: Can’t wait to follow more of the adventures of Dave.
Neely can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
