A regular writing partner of James L. Brooks, the six-time Emmy winner, was also behind ‘The Munsters’, ‘Lou Grant’ and ‘My Mother the Car’.
Allan Burns, the six-time Emmy winner who worked together to create one of the best sitcoms of all time, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and one of the worst, My mother the car, died. He was 85.
Burns passed away Saturday, his regular writer partner, James L. Brooks, report on Twitter.
“His simple writing career has earned him every conceivable recognition.” he wrote. ‘But you had to know him to appreciate his full rarity. He was simply the best man I ever knew. ‘ A beautiful of a man. ‘
No other details of his death were immediately available.
Burns, who got an early career break for animation legend Jay Ward Rocky and his friends and The Bullwinkle Show, also co-created Rhoda and Lou Grant, two Mary Tyler Moore spin-offs, as well as The Monsters; written for a season on Get smart; and invented a famous grain character, Cap’n Crunch, and his nemesis, the pirate Jean LaFoote.
He may also claim to have discovered Jim Carrey.
Burns sometimes worked in the movies, and he was nominated for a Custom Screenplay Oscar for A little romance (1979), a whimsical teenage adventure starring young Diane Lane and Laurence Olivier.
However, Burns made his mark on television and spent more than two decades as a writer and producer for MTM Productions. His first job for the young venture, launched by producer Grant Tinker and his wife, Mary Tyler Moore, was to be the subject of a CBS comedy starring Moore, who spent five seasons on the show. stood The Dick Van Dyke Show.
It was Tinker’s idea to pair Burns with Brooks. The two worked together Room 222, an ABC comedy drama set at a downtown school that Brooks created, and Brooks wrote specifications for My mother the car.
“He and Mary were looking around for someone to write a pilot and come up with a concept for her program, which had a 13-section commitment on CBS, and he chose us,” Burns said in 2012 for the Writers Guild Foundation. The Writer Speaks Web Series. “It was kind of surprising to me; I mean, we had credits, and it was pretty good, but still …”
In their original concept, Mary Richards of Moore was a shaver who worked as a leading artist of a Hollywood columnist. “No one did a show about someone being divorced,” Burns noted. Tinker and Moore loved the idea – both were divorced – but CBS executives had a ‘corporate heart attack’ when they heard what the writers had in mind.
According to Burns, a CBS executive told them, “Our research shows that there are four things American television audiences do not like: New Yorkers, Jews, people with mustaches and divorce.”
He added: “Over the next few weeks, we came up with the idea of doing it in a newsroom – Jim worked in a New York newsroom and said, ‘I always thought it was a great place for comedy. ‘They also turned Mary into a woman who moved to Minneapolis after a broken engagement.
As a single, independent woman in the workplace, the character became an icon for the feminist movement.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show ran seven seasons from September 1970 to March 1977, collecting a then-record 29 Emmies. Burns and Brooks won five trophies for their efforts to play at the show; the last two were for the outstanding comedy series and for writing (along with four others) the admired series finale.
Not admiring, but definitely ridiculous, My mother the car plays Jerry Van Dyke as a lawyer who buys a Porter Stanhope from a used garage in 1928 and discovers that the antique vehicle is the reincarnation of his mother. The comedy, created by Burns and Chris Hayward, lasted only 30 episodes in 1965-66 before being staged.
‘It’s nice to know that some people think The Mary Tyler Moore Show ‘s one of the best shows of all time and I’ve also done one show that everyone’s sure is the worst, ‘he told The Interviews: An Oral History of Television in 2004.
Allan Burns was born on May 18, 1935 in Baltimore. His father died when he was 9, and three years later he and his mother moved to Honolulu, where his older brother was stationed in Pearl Harbor.
He attended the private Punahou school (Barack Obama would go there later) and designed a cartoon that was shown several times a week in the Honolulu Star Bulletin newspaper.
Burns received a partial scholarship to architecture at the University of Oregon, but left school in 1955 and moved to Los Angeles, where he obtained a job as an NBC page. He asked what he said in the interview that convinced his new employer to hire him.
‘You said you were a 42-year-old, didn’ t you? This is the only uniform we currently have available. “Someone just stopped,” he recalls. “The reason I’m in the show business is because I’m a 42 year old, that’s the truth.”
Burns submitted jokes to The Tonight Show and to comedians George Gobel and Jonathan Winters without getting a bite and reading text as part of a new NBC comedy writing development program. He was fired, and then spent about a month as a writer for the game show Truth or consequences.
After Burns wrote gags for the next few years and drew cartoons for greeting card businesses, Burns compiled a portfolio of his work and headed to Ward’s offices on Sunset Boulevard without an appointment.
While Burns was trying to arrange a meeting with Ward, the producer happened to pass by. “He looks at all my stuff, starts laughing and says, ‘When do you want to start?’ Burns recalls. He started by working on promotional leaflets for Rocky and his friends and The Bullwinkle Show, who later graduated for $ 215 a week from “Fractured Fairy Tales” and other pieces.
When Ward was on vacation, Burns met experts from the Quaker Oats Co. and designed the mascot, an 18th-century naval captain, for Cap’n Crunch. They wanted the cartoonist to know that the new grain “remains crunchy even in milk.”
“Stay crunchy even in milk? Stay crunchy, even in sour,” says Burns.
He and Chris Hayward co-founded the Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right for Ward’s company, and in 1965 they wrote the pilot for CBS ‘ My brother the angel, a sitcom starring Tommy and Dick Smothers, before they begin Me Mom the car.
“It sold, someone bought it, someone must have thought it was funny, but the critics certainly did not,” he said in his oral history interview. “I probably spent the rest of my life showing it. We – I promise you – really meant it to be a satire, and it was the worst of all the shows we thought we were satirizing. “
The naive Burns and Hayward have their idea for The Monsters to an unscrupulous agent, who then gave the idea to writers Norm Liebmann and Ed Haas at Universal. When they heard the comedy about a family of monsters that were in production at CBS, they appealed to the WGA and received their rightful credit.
Burns and Hayward then wrote for the 1967-68 CBS sitcom He and she, with Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss, and Burns won his first Emmy career (shared with Hayward) for it. When it’s canceled after a season, He and she creator Leonard Stern brought them aboard another show he produced, Get smart.
It was the fourth season of the espionage ghost, the one in which agents 86 (Don Adams) and 99 (Barbara Feldon) were married. “I do not remember it being a particularly good idea,” he said. Burns was reminded of that after Rhoda Morgenstern’s wedding in 1974, when ratings of the Valerie Harper sitcom dropped.
He and Hayward divorced after about four years together when Burns wanted to work on a screenplay and Hayward did not. (The film is not made.)
Burns and Brooks (along with Gene Reynolds) also created the thoughtful MTM-CBS hourly drama Lou Grant, which marked an unprecedented change in genres for a spin-off. The program started slowly, perhaps because viewers expected to see the sitcom version of Ed Asner Mary Tyler Moore character.
‘The man at CBS at the time told us,’ Fellas, what are you apparently doing? The New York Times. People do not read The New York Times, they read the Daily news, “Remember Burns.” I remember Grant just exploding, ‘You do not want to The New York Times on your network ?! ‘”
Grant told the network administrators, “Well, guys, stay there, the program is good, it’s going to work out.” And he says to us: Keep doing what you are doing. ‘
Burns saw Carrey perform at a comedy club in West Hollywood and hired him to play as a cartoonist in a 1984 sitcom he created. The Duck Factory. Burns based the show on his experiences at Ward.
Other shows he created for MTM are also included Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers; Eisenhower & Lutz, starring Scott Bakula; and FM, at a public radio station. He received a total of 16 Emmy nominations, and he and Brooks were honored in 1988 with the WGA’s prestigious Laurel Award.
For the big screen, Burns also wrote Butch and Sundance: the early days (1979) and the romantic comedy Kristy McNichol Just the way you are (1984) and written and directed Only between friends (1986), starring his old friend Moore.
Duane Byrge disputes this report.