“Behind the Scenes with Mark Rothman” at Ella Johnson Memorial Public Library, 109 South State Street, this weekend offered area residents a chance to spend time with the head writer/producer of “The Odd Couple,” “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley” television shows.
Rothman is also a playwright, screenwriter, occasional actor and the author of “Mark Rothman Essays” and “I’m Not Garbo (A Fable about Hollywood).”
He began his talk on Saturday afternoon by reading passages from his blog about growing up during the 1960s in the Bronx and Queens boroughs of New York City.
“We were a Jewish middle class family,” Rothman said. “When I was eight years old, I wanted a brown coon skin hat like the one worn by Fess Parker as Davy Crockett in the Walt Disney television mini-series. My father gave me a hat, but it was white. He told me: ‘Anyone can have a brown hat. This hat makes you special.’ When I wore the white hat to school, I was told by my contemporaries that I looked like Harpo Marx with a tail.”
Rothman said his father also bought his sister, Leslie, an “Eskimo” coat for $4 that was two sizes too big for her. He told her she could grow into it. She wore the coat for four years.
When Rothman later asked his sister whey she did not complain about the coat, she asked him why he did not complain about the hat.
Rothman said he attended Queens College in New York, studied theater, and majored in communications.
“I did a lot of acting in college,” Rothman said. “It prepared me for a writing career. Screenwriters should take acting classes. A lot of writers don’t know what their material should sound like. I also tell actors that they should take writing lessons. Actors need to know how to get into the heads of writers.”
Rothman said he learned how to write by watching “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” He also wrote sketches, including the lyrics and music, for college competitions that would win first place.
In 1971, he was a college graduate without a job. His father owned a limousine business in New York whose fares included famous actors and talk show hosts.
“My father was vital in getting my break,” Rothman said. “He would tell me which celebrities would be in his car so that I could write a sketch for them.”
When the “The Odd Couple” sitcom went on hiatus after two seasons, the show’s stars, actors Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, agreed to be talk show guests in New York. Rothman’s father knew he would be driving both actors, so he asked his son and his son’s partner at the time, Lowell Ganz, to write a script for “The Odd Couple.”
“We had never seen the television show, but we knew the play and had seen the movie (with actors Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.) We wrote a script. Less than a week later, Jack Klugman called my house,” Rothman said. “They didn’t buy or shoot our script, but they hired us and flew us to Los Angeles. We were head writers for the ‘The Odd Couple’ for three years. Tony and Jack loved us. They said we were the best writers.”
Rothman was 24 years old when he first started writing for the “The Odd Couple.”
“Tony and Jack were the lords and masters of that show,” Rothman said. “They launched my career. Tony was as good as you can get as Felix Unger. He had the ability to think outside the box. Jack was the kind of person you could talk to about anything.”
Rothman said he had the chance to watch Randall and Klugman’s last performance together in Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” at a theater in New York.
Rothman became a “Happy Days” head writer when producer Garry Marshall turned it from a one-camera to a three-camera show with a live audience.
“The show became a huge hit,” Rothman said. “When Fonzie (played by actor Henry Winkler) came into Arnold’s Drive-In, the girls would go berserk. Working on ‘Happy Days’ was a delight. I loved Marion Ross, and Henry Winkler was one of the nicest people you could ever meet.”
Marshall teamed his sister, Penny, with actress Cindy Williams and put them on “Happy Days.”
“They were on ‘Happy Days’ five times,” Rothman said. “Fred Silverman thought they should have their own sitcom. We co-created ‘Laverne & Shirley.’ Penny and Cindy were great physical comedians. People compared them to the Lucy and Ethel characters on the ‘I Love Lucy’ show.”
Rothman said he has an encyclopedic memory of everything he has ever watched on television. He also said he has total recall of his dreams.
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His book, “I’m Not Garbo (A Fable about Hollywood),” was originally written as a screenplay that takes place during the 1930s and 1940s.
“I turned it into a novel,” Rothman said. “In a novel, you can tell the reader what the characters are thinking. You can’t do that in a screenplay. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”
Rothman and his wife, Camille Jablonski, recently moved to the Chicago area when Camille started working for Abbott Laboratories in North Chicago.
Rothman will have a talk and book signing at Columbia College Chicago at noon on Monday, Feb. 23. He will also be making appearances this year at libraries in Blue Island, Cary, Orland Park, Palos Heights and Forest Park.
People can obtain copies of Rothman’s books for $20 each by contacting him at: [email protected].