| Dan Fiorella: Writer @ large |
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Well, the new season kicks off tonight, just I post the last of the old season. I tried to avoid doubling up on singers getting attacked in the ads, but poor Taylor Hicks got hit twice, but the two topics were too rich not to go after, especially when you've kinda milked the premise and ran out of terrible things to say about people who looked pretty nice (except Pickler. We all knew). Anyway, this was the final in the AI Negative Ad campaign series...
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Wow, this many posts in a week you'd think I'd have something to say! As we approach the start of AI '19, I wanted to show off and bring out my old ACN sketches written back in 2008. ACN had great production values and they were churning out this material constantly. They were always open to new ideas and playing around within the format. I was thrilled that I had come upon a new way to satirize a show without too much overhead; a few bars of the theme, an announcer talks and, boom, you're done. Wish I had some kind of trademark on the thing...
Sure, in March 2008, negative political ads were around long enough to be a comedy troupe, but then, the negativity was pretty much confined to the ad. People didn't feel the need to take it on the road. YET. Of course, applying that level of vitriol to a singing competition is so off-kilter that it made perfect comedy sense. I was very happy the way these things out. There was a good amount of re-writing on a couple of them, but once the template was set, I didn't feel as bad about the changes.
Holy Dunkleman! Sometimes it's hard to come up with a decent sketch idea. People mock SNL or Mad-TV for relying on repeating characters and routines, but sometimes that's all you got. I was lucky American Comedy Network (RIP) let me run with these things. So, from the 2008 season of Idol, we proudly post:
When they cancelled American Idol, who'da thought I'd ever get to pull out these old bits again. Sure, sure, they are very much of the cast of the March 2008 season, but I think they are silly enough to avoid aging, now that the show is back on the air. The biggest problem to these bits was deciding which singer was going to go negative on which other singer. I wasn't following the show that closely, so many of my first drafts were vague, but the guys at ACN, who produced and distributed the sketches filled in a lot of blanks...
Like 10 years ago, there was this big hit TV show that was all the rage. It was called "American Idol." It was a singing competition. I wonder what happened to it. Oh, right, it got rebooted last year and is on ABC now. Well, as the newest season approaches, I wanted to pull out some radio bits I wrote 10 years ago.
One of the great running gags I came up with for American Comedy Network was taking the negative political ads and applying it to other venues. I think it was the Iraqi elections that were held after our invasion that I did first, applying typical GOP dirty trick-style ads for an election that had nothing like that going on. Then it was the election for the Pope in 2005. Then Miss America and so on. The radio producers at American Comedy Network saw the logic and repeat-ability of the premise and did a couple without my involvement. That hurt. Again, the life of a freelancer, nobody ever comes back to your and says, "Hey how about doing one of these for the Oscar campaigns or "Dancing with the Stars" voting? They would just do it. But, it was some acknowledgement that I had created a viable radio comedy format that just wasn't a straight up parody of the show itself. Anyway, one of the biggest batches of material I did was these American Idol parodies. I wrote a slew of them. Some of them were re-worked by people who had been following the show more closely than I, but all in all, it was a nice healthy run for myself. Here we attempt to swiftboat Ace back in 2/2008 
Back in March 2008, I was hitching my comedy wagon to the American Idol juggernaut. I was able to marry my idea of bad political ads with the AI voting. The idea was pretty good, what if the contestants could run ads to get votes instead of just doing Ford commercials? I thought it would go something like this:
From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...
Here's another example of me coming up with a funny idea or bit and gets pulled out of what I submitted and winds up in another thing.
Another road show. PHC was broadcasting from Grand Forks, North Dakota. Which means they would need some site-specific material. So, I whipped up a couple of items and sent them in. One was taken from current events. There was a campaign back in 2001 about North Dakota changing it's name. The Chamber of Commerce thought the name brought up connotations of "Arctic" and "cold" and "freezing," "desolate," "tundra," etc. Weird, right? Therefore, my first skit was about the re-naming of the state. That material wound up in Garrison Keillor's Guy Noir sketch, one of his best known recurring characters. As for credits, there was no on-air credits, just the usual fake/punny writer names. Online, however, the sketch is marked as such: © Garrison Keillor, Dan Fiorella 2001
Like I said, it's just tough to get a handle on what he's doing out there. I mean, full co-writer credit online? Cool. But, really, considering how little of the actual sketch was used (see below) and how long the sketch was, it seems generous.
But on December 8, 2001 PHC preformed Guy Noir going to North Dakota. I'm attaching the material that I submitted to them below the break...
From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...
Okay, so here's the deal. While messing around on my computer, I stumbled across some of my older Prairie Home sketches! There's a few unused skits prior to December 1999 and I found the sketches from the year 2000 of the 1999-2000 season. Go figure.
One of the bits I found was a rejected skit I submitted in April 2000. As you are aware, PHC was first and foremost a radio show, a theater of the mind. And the cast and crew played mightily in that arena. Garrison Keillor would do entire sketches just about sound effects to give their sound effects guy, the late, great Tom Keith, a chance to shine. They were quite whimsical and silly. I found myself drawn to them and would write several of them, none of which made it to air. Around this time, the big TV show was "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" and there were weird game show rip-offs like "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire." That was my inspiration. I remember emailing the producer to ask if Tom Keith was married, because the ending tag kinda revolved on that fact, his wife demanding to know what was going on. I was told Keith wasn't married and dropped that part. Since the show was broadcasting from Town Hall in New York City, I gave it a New York flavor---which explains the Trump reference. As happy as I was with the piece, the fact is, I violated the first rule of writing for Keillor; I based the skit on pop culture, a TV show. He wouldn't get it. As my motto is "Never throw anything out," I held on to those radio bits. Many years later, the Writers Guild of America, East, began a program to try and get radio dramas back on the air. They cut a deal with the local radio station, WNYC, and produced a number of episodes of a show called "Anything Goes." I pulled out and submitted some of my radio-intensive sketches rejected from PHC and a couple of them were produced for this new show during the summer of 2005. I wasn't thrilled with the results. There's no sense of fun, the comic timing is off and there's no studio audience, so it's a bit ponderous as opposed to absurd. Oh, well. We'll file this under "What might have been." But I recorded it and I'm posting it here. I've included the original script from the PHC version beneath. WHO WANTS TO MARRY A SOUND EFFECTS GUY?
From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...
Frankly, after the heady rush of my first few months of submitting to PHC and getting four sketches picked between October and December 1999, the rest of the season was a bust! Not a single bit picked for the rest of the 1999-2000 season.
At one point I contacted producer Christine Tschida about the situation and she basically said that none of the material was striking Keillor's fancy. And to be honest, not everything I sent was a gem. There were a couple of bits I resurrected from other work to submit and they were weak. I couldn't get as biting as SNL would get on topical events (or as stupid) so my skits meandered around. But I kept at it. And at it. Although the time gap is about a year and a half, I was technically in the 2000-2001 season. To my way of thinking, that means I got something in the show for my first two season in a row. This was a quirky sketch. PHC was on the road once again, this time in Laramie, Wyoming. We had gotten word that the show wanted site-specific material, so I did some research into Laramie and decided on two bits. One was ambitious; Garrison Keillor liked to do a kind of overview of the place they were broadcasting from when they traveled, so I decided to write up one of these whimsical histories about Laramie. I mean, it's one thing to write a sketch that GK is in, it's another to actually write for GK himself. And the second bit was a more generic take on the Hollywood westerns which were inspired by towns like Laramie. Two, I thought, very solid pieces. So here's what happened... GK combined material from each into a bit called "When Things were Different," hosted by the Old Story Teller. I have no idea if this was a running bit beforehand, but he took lines here and set-ups there along with dialogue and gags and came up with this. On air credits were the usual group of joke names and "Russ Ringsac and...and Laura Levine." So, no mention of me at all. At this point I emailed Tschida the producer and asked her about that. Her response? Keillor misread the copy. She apologized. He just skipped my name. Now, listening to it for the first time in ages, I can hear it, he loses his place while reading. That's live radio. At least the online credits listed me: © Garrison Keillor 2001, with material from Dan Fiorella
I'm including the original skits that I submitted here below. Once out of the 1999-2000 season, I have a copy of everything I sent all with limited title names because file names couldn't be that long back then.
To be honest, I didn't get too worked up about them merging these skits into one skit, because a lot of the Hollywood skit was pieced together from other things I had written. For instance, here's a bit of Galaxy Ranger trivia; the the Hollywood West skit ends with a song. I talk about westerns being make in space so I grabbed the lyrics from my Galaxy Ranger song, "Oh Tortuna." I redid the refrain to be "Cowboys in Space," but the rest of the song is the same. That section about the Pony Express? I lifted the prose from my novel (then in-progress), "Novel Concept." And "The Man Who Sued Liberty Valance" was one of my "Cold Draft" sketches that I had written years before as a follow up to my "It's a Wonderful Life" parody. Which brings us to The Old Story Teller from theMay 19, 2001 broadcast of PHC from the University of Wyoming in Laramie... |
Dan FiorellaFreelance writer, still hacking away. 
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