Chuck Lorre Can Sing Too By Matt Hader

Award winning television writer Chuck Lorre, creator of Two and a Half Men, shares his thoughts on the upcoming CSI/Two and a Half Men cross-over episodes, television writing outside of LA, Vanity Cards, and much more.

I received an unexpected phone call the other day from John E. Johnson, Executive Director of the American Screenwriters Association. “I have an interesting assignment for you,” he started, “I want you to interview one of television’s top writers for us. Chuck Lorre. Interested?”

Um, yeah!

So, here I am, an Indie screenwriter dude, composing an article about one of the kings of television sitcoms. Talk about a tall task. But I have to admit that this lofty gig was made much easier than expected with the help of just one person. Chuck Lorre. Especially after he calmed my nerves by singing to me a few lines from the theme song of the animated television series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but more on that later.

The one word that best describes Chuck Lorre is gracious. No, wait, humble is probably more appropriate. And despite all his success he’s not arrogant about it, more like ‘candidly certain’ with a humble twist. As Lorre puts it, “I don’t know how you can become arrogant doing this (television). Believe me, I’ve tried.” Lorre’s difficult to pin down, in that good, you want to get to know more about him, way.

This is a man who sincerely says ‘thank you’ a lot when complimented on his creations, and who humbly deflects accolades making sure the credit includes his cast, crew, and especially the writers he works with on a daily basis.

If you’re not familiar with Chuck Lorre, he’s the brilliant co-creator of TV sitcoms Two and a Half Men, The
Big Bang Theory, Dharma & Greg, and Cybill. He also had Executive Producer/Writing stints on Grace Under
Fire, and Roseanne. Did you catch the ‘brilliant’ remark above? Okay, all right, I’m a fan. I’m especially fond
of Lorre’s show Two and a Half Men. Why, you ask? For me, Two and a Half Men works because despite its
raucous, naughty, sexist (that goes both ways, ladies & gents) ways, the show is about family. Sure a really
messed up family, but family all the same. The characters on the sitcom may exhibit comedic disdain for one
another, but there’s a big old beating heart that thumps under the surface week after week.

If you’ve never seen the show, wrongly thinking as a few of my more uninformed acquaintances have, that Two and a Half Men is mostly about the kid’s character, you’re in for an un-politically correct treat. Two and a Half Men revolves around Charlie (played by Charlie Sheen), a hard drinking Casanova, who takes in his
recently divorced cheap skate brother, Alan (played by Jon Cryer), and his young son, Jake (Angus T. Jones). Lorre says, “Sure, the Charlie character is a wishful life for some men,” then adds, “For a real person to live Charlie Harper’s life, they’d be in rehab or dead in about 6 months.” Alan Harper is the down on his luck, twice divorced chiropractor brother to Sheen’s Charlie character. “We’re all Alans,” says Lorre, “He’s the character in the show that reflects what we all really are.”

Did Chuck Lorre just call me a schlub? After a glimpse of my social calendar and a glance at my checkbook,
ouch, Lorre’s words hit the mark.

He also prides himself on creating a comical, yet, fairly realistic characterization of the son Jake. “We didn’t
want the perfect kid who is always smarter than the parents. Let’s face it; teenage boys can be as dumb as soup sometimes.” I have two sons of my own, and I love them dearly (now 23 and 17 years old), however, Chuck’s words ring quite true for me.

When pressed on the razor thin ‘to censor/not censor-line’ subject matter of the show, Lorre says, “My aunt
who is in her 80’s watches the show. Her favorite episodes are the naughtiest ones.” Lorre goes for broke with his show’s dialogue, in a ‘write them all, let the censors sort it out’ kind of way. The numbers don’t lie. Two and a Half Men has nearly 16 million viewers each Monday night. And the show is in syndication, too. (A little Hader family secret…Men is my dad’s favorite show. He turns 80 in October.)

Mark this on your calendars…respectively on Monday May 5, and Thursday May 8, 2008, Two and a Half Men and CSI will be exchanging writers for their weekly episodes. Seems a while back Chuck Lorre was at a writer’s conference in Banff, Canada with his friend Carol Mendelsohn (Executive
Producer/Writer of CSI,) when Lorre turned to her and said, “You know what would be fun?”

That fun comes in the form of the main writers for each series switching jobs for a week. Mendelsohn will be writing an episode of Men along with CSI co-Exec Naren Shankar, while Lorre and Lee Aronsohn (co-creator of Men) will tackle the CSI episode. “It’s an obvious stunt with promotional value,” says Lorre, unapologetically. “But the shows will feature the writing as the principal focus of the episodes,” he adds.

When asked what his episode of CSI will be about, Lorre snickers, “It’s about the murder of a sitcom diva.
She’ll be played by the fantastic Katy Segal.” When asked if the story line is about anyone he’s worked with on a past sitcom, he sarcastically adds, “Oh, Noooo….” Look for brief cameos of Men actors on CSI and visa
versa. “Charlie Sheen, Jon Cryer, and Angus Jones will be on CSI, but if you blink, you may miss them.”
Conversely, Lorre says the Two and a Half Men episode that week “will be about a suspicious death and the
subsequent investigation.” Lorre adds, “It’s risky having a death on a sitcom, but Mendelsohn and Shankar pull it off.”

Lorre, like the rest of Hollywood, is happy to be back at work after the recent WGA strike. “I think we’re all so
grateful to be back,” and adds, “We had only a one week timeline to get both of our shows (Men and The Big
Bang Theory) back up to speed.” Lorre says, “We wound up losing 5 episodes of the shows because of the
strike, but we could’ve lost more if it weren’t for the great cast, crew, and writers. We have a deep writing staff here. The financial hardship is starting to fade.”

This brings us back to Chuck Lorre’s musical chops. When I was doing a bit of research on Chuck I found a
few snippets about his song-writing/guitar-playing career. I was mildly surprised to learn that Lorre’s music
career really kicked in during the 80’s when he wrote Blondie’s hit song “French Kissin’ in the USA.” As I dug
deeper I discovered another tidbit for Trivial Pursuit. Chuck Lorre wrote the title song for the animated
television series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. During our conversation he sings, “When the evil Shredder
attacks these turtle boys don’t cut him no slack. Heroes in a half shell!” He adds, “That was the pinnacle of my musical career. Now you know why I went into T.V. But unconsciously, maybe my music background has
helped me to write comedy. It’s all about timing.” And when asked if the Charlie character on Two and a Half
Men being a musician was taken from his own personal life, he adds, “Yes, Charlie being a jingle writer is
taken from my own background as a musician, but the character isn’t based on me.”

As fans of Lorre’s sitcoms know, at the very end of each of his sitcoms episodes there’s a Vanity Card that
appears. The networks give this brief moment of time to the show’s creators to display a company logo. Chuck Lorre has, for years, taken that brief moment of expensive network time to write about things from his everyday life. Some are quite comical, others, more introspective.

“It all started on the pilot episode of Dharma & Greg back in the 90’s but you needed a really good VHS player to freeze the frame and read it without the words jumping all over the screen. Then the Internet took off and web sites started displaying the cards each week.”

Now Chuck has his own web site with links to all of the cards he’s written over the years (www.chucklorre.com). After last Monday’s episode an audio Vanity Card was displayed, a first for Chuck, and the web host for Lorre’s web site bit the dust due to the tremendous amount of hits to the site. That seems like a good problem to have. When asked if the Vanity Cards have ever been censored, he says, “Sometimes CBS says ‘not on our nickel, you don’t.’”

It’s not all fun and games for Lorre, either. Chuck has been a long time contributor to the Venice Family Clinic in LA, one of the largest free medical clinics in the country. In 1999 he founded the Dharma/Grace
Foundation that provides funds, in perpetuity, to the clinic. And recently, Chuck funded The Robert Levine
Family Health Center (named after his father) as an addition to the Venice Family Clinic. This new addition
provides 2,000 women and teens with free health care services. In addition to being a core benefactor and
advocate for the organization, Chuck Lorre is also a member of the clinics’ Philanthropy Board.

We all know that most beginning writers are not currently living in LA. But ‘the’ question is asked time and
time again at writer’s conferences, on web sites, blogs, etc. ‘Can I begin a writing career outside of LA?’

Lorre says, “I can only speak to 30 minute single camera sitcom writing,” adding, “You have to be where the
production is. You can’t do this type of work from a distance. Sitcoms are a constant work in progress.”

When asked if the actors improvise on any of his programs, Lorre states, “There’s no Improv among the actors. If we find a line that’s not working in front of the live audience – and it is a live audience and not a laugh track on Two and a Half Men – all the writers huddle together to either fix or cut the line. Sometimes to fix the line we simply move words around. Comedy writing is a very difficult thing to do. It’s an instinctive thing. But by gauging live audiences reactions to some of the lines I’m sometimes surprised by how wrong I can be. The actor delivers a line and all you get is crickets. It’s a good thing that I’m surrounded by pro writers. A very, very deep writing staff.”

If you want to read more about how Chuck climbed to the top of the sitcom writing world, do yourself a favor
and check out this article www.chucklorre.com/index.php?p=writtenby.

Finally, when asked about the constant changing landscape of television (comedies, reality programming, new media, et al), Chuck states, “I’m trying to do what I’m supposed to do. Make people laugh. Comedy is supposed to be in a transition now, but we’re still very successful doing old-school sitcoms.” He adds, “There’s a push to change sitcoms, but it’s all simply theater. People still love the theater. Jackie Gleason back in the 50’s in his little kitchen was a hit. No bells and whistles. It’s theater, and it’s not going away.”

(Matt Hader is a screenwriter living in California) (and one heck of an indie! Clive)