I wasnt sure how SuicideGirls might react to an interview with the very mainstream television creator Bruce Helford. But wait until I tell you what kind of artwork Helford and his wife Jan have in their new art gallery, the Corey Helford Gallery. Helford made his bones on such shows as Family Ties and Roseanne before he co-created The Drew Carey Show. Since that shows cancellation Helford co-created The George Lopez Show so hes sitting pretty on a large load of cash. Whenever I think of creators like Helford I always imagine Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold, Carl Barks style. Anyway the Corey Helford Gallery is based in Los Angeles, where most good ideas go to die, but the Helfords have decided to put their efforts into supporting artists like Eric Joyner, Chris Anthony, Van Arno and many more.
I got a chance to talk with Bruce Helford about his love of vintage toys and the ever-changing landscape of television comedy.
Check out the official website for the Corey Helford Gallery
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Bruce Helford: Today I just got done with the paperwork about setting up a new website for the art gallery. Im working on a pilot for CBS and Im writing a secret script for a one hour show.
DRE: Can you talk about that new half hour pilot?
BH: No, right now its just an idea and a script for a standup comic named Tom Papa who has opened for Seinfeld. He had a show but it didnt really go anywhere a couple years back. I love Tom so were developing something for him for CBS.
DRE: How did the Corey Helford Gallery get started?
BH: My wife Jan is a collector so she turned me onto it. I collect toys. I have millions of old toys like old superheroes from the 40s, robots and whatever I get my hands on. So Im a big toy collector and her bug is art. In the beginning, I didnt really get it. As a matter of fact, there was a point at which she wanted to buy a Mark Ryden for a very reasonable price and I said, No, its ugly. She passed up a painting that now is worth God knows what. Then she started introducing me more and more to the artists and the genre. I started picking up on people like Big Foot and Gary Baseman so I started really getting into it. But there really is a crossover in that world. A lot of these guys are illustrators and Im into comic books and the worlds started crossing over for me and Jan wanted to open a gallery. My grandfather was a noted artist back in the 40s and 50s named William S. Schwartz. He was one of the early modernists and he worked with the WPA and things like that out of Chicago so I had some history of my family being in the art business. I said, Lets open with a show of our family collections and then well start carrying all these artists. It ended up being a really great, cool thing.
DRE: How did your wife get into those paintings?
BH: Well, I would take her down to San Diego Comicon and that infected her with the comic book bug. She fell in love with guys like Dan Brereton, Mike Mignola and a lot of those people and she loves the whole DC Vertigo line of comics. But shes always been into art, like photography. I think that as she was introduced to a couple of these artists you end up following a trail. Its one of those things where once you meet one artist or you collect one artist, all of a sudden the gallery turns you on to someone else and someone else and pretty soon Jan was caught up with buying many pieces. I would see them and go I dont remember that painting. Whered you get that? Oh I had that painting for years. I go, No you didnt. Thats brand new. What are you doing? But the more they were up on the walls I thought I really like looking at these paintings. Shes got a fantastic eye and she found all these people that are starting out now so it made sense to start a gallery.
DRE: With the paintings and the toys your house must be very colorful.
BH: Yeah. I dont know if youve seen the documentary about it but theres a guy named Long Gone John who is the owner of a record company called sympathy for the Record Industry. He was the first to release a lot of the famous punk bands. Theres a documentary about him and you literally cant almost walk into his house. Ours isnt quite as bad but there isnt a room in our house, including the dining room, that isnt covered with art or filled with toys. Its a big playhouse and my kids love it.
DRE: What are your favorite toy lines that you collect?
BH: Anything related to superheroes or cartoon characters. Ive got some really cool Popeye things from the 1930s and 20s and a lot of Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel. There are always auctions online. Im always bidding against Jerry Seinfeld, hes a huge Superman collector, and Nicolas Cage who is also a big comic book guy and collector. So when there are these auctions, were always up against each other fighting and driving up the prices of all these things.
DRE: I am disturbed at the idea of all these multimillionaires fighting over toys at swap meets.
BH: I know, its really pathetic, isnt it?
DRE: What about newer stuff?
BH: As for modern toys I did an animated show called The Oblongs and I loved the design. I also love the design of things like Spongebob Squarepants. Spongebob is a beautiful character and they did a really great job creating toys surrounding that. I also like fast food collectible toys because for a buck you get this really cool thing.
DRE: Well it brings up the fact that here you are working in Hollywood. You love comics. Why arent you doing any comic book adaptations?
BH: I wanted to. I have absolutely been talking to the people at Warner Bros because I have an exclusive contract there. So what Im trying to do is get rights on some of the characters that havent been swept up yet. Obviously Wonder Woman, Superman and all those are gone, but theres a lot of characters from the 40s and 50s that havent been taken yet and I just want to see which one of those I could option and play with. It is a dream of mine to write comics too. Tom Fontana [who created Homicide and Oz] has been writing Batman comics.
Comic creators are all like, Oh no, Id rather be doing TV and Im like No dude, Id rather be doing what youre doing. So someday when I slow down a little bit, I would love to do a comic book.
DRE: I liked your last TV show, Freddie.
BH: Yeah, I thought it was a good show too. Its an odd time in the business. Freddie was what they call a multi-camera show as opposed to these new single camera shows. Sitcoms are not doing well right now. I think there are 11 on the air as opposed to 1992 when there were about 67 of them. It is not the favorite genre now. Theyre trying to figure out ways to reinvigorate the audience towards sitcoms and theyre going toward these single camera, more cinematic looking shows. ABC liked Freddie but they said that they are going with all single camera shows so Freddie wouldnt look right anymore.
DRE: I liked how the characters in Freddie werent sappy all the time.
BH: No, theyre real people. My big thing was The Drew Carey Show and those characters were far from perfect so they werent sappy. They believed that beer was more important than love.
DRE: Yeah, I loved the beer mixed with coffee that they sold. I dont know why someone that has done that yet.
BH: Somebody actually finally came out with it. Of course, Drew used to say, Theres no way I would ever drink this crap.
DRE: Itll kill you. Thats why.
BH: The joke was that youre drunk and you cant fall asleep.
DRE: [laughs] Was Freddie just too different from the George Lopez show?
BH: No, Freddie did very well. The George Lopez show got good numbers and Freddie got even higher numbers. But it was really more about the style and the tone and the time. I think they said that Freddie was almost old fashioned in his look. The one hour shows look fabulous now. Theyre spending millions of dollars to make them look like movies and the sitcoms look like a bunch of dinosaurs in vaudeville. None of those single camera shows are funny enough yet. Nobodys really figured out yet how to try and keep the humor going without the laugh track, which is what triggers an audience to laugh at home. It really feels hollow in a no laugh track show for audiences that are used to it but for youngsters who are growing up on MTV stuff like Andy Milonakis or are watching American Misfits, they are used to it. Those shows are the new style which is fast cutting, cheap and no laugh track but the transition is hard because there is audience that still likes it the old way.
DRE: Obviously youve had great success with The Drew Carey Show and George Lopez but does having a show like Freddie that gets cancelled, slow down your career at all?
BH: Not really because everyone who created Friends has created five different shows but not every baby lives. You go out there, you invest 1000 percent but sometimes the show is just not good enough or sometimes the show is programmed at the wrong time and the audience never finds it. So there are a million different agendas going on. TV is a lousy art. Since it is very collaborative theres no pure vision. Theres a lot of interference and its the networks dime, so they have every right to be involved. When youre making a painting no one will ever come in and say, You know what, we need a painting that reaches people who are between 34 and 45. Its just a bad way to do art. [laughs] So when it works its magical and wonderful. Drew Carey was on for years and was a wonderful experience. I ran the Roseanne show which was a great experience. Freddie was still a great experience but we did it for a while and then it goes away and you move on to the next project. Freddie will be doing other movies, and so will Brian Green, who I thought was fantastically funny. You wish that every artistic endeavor would be bigger than the last but it never works that way.
DRE: I read that you used to do stories for Hustler magazine 30 years ago.
BH: Yeah, a long time ago I did humor stuff for magazines. I also did stuff for Oui Magazine. I did an article for Vanity Fair. I did some for a Los Angeles magazine but I found out very quickly that theres just no money in that at all. So I went to my wife and I said, Were going to starve if I just do magazine stuff so Im going to try and break into TV. This year Im just going to study the form of sitcoms and were not going to make any money. That year we earned like 3000 dollars. We starved, it was bologna sandwiches with ketchup every day. After that year I felt I had figured it out and I wrote a spec script with a partner who quickly left the business. We sold our sample script to Family Ties and from then on I never stopped working for TV.
DRE: What advice do you have for people who want to make in Hollywood?
BH: My feeling has always been that you have to keep your vision pure. But you have to somehow let everybody else feel that they are getting their input. A lot of guys have come up and said, Hey heres what I want to do and then get notes and they say, Screw you and they end up never being seen again. The toughest thing in the business is to hold on to what you originally wanted to do because anything is better when someone has a pure unified vision. It may fail but the odds are that if its going to succeed its going to succeed because of that. So you have to find a way to have everybody have their input. Their notes may not be exactly what you wanted but find ways to slip those notes into what you do. It is finding a way to collaborate that doesnt screw up what youre trying to accomplish and that is a real tricky thing for a lot of people to do. Also not getting cynical has been huge for me because a lot of comedy writers are really cynical and dark people. The trick is keeping your enthusiasm and your positive attitude so you dont get bogged down in your own mess when youre trying to create something. With Drew, we didnt know what was going to happen. The first year didnt have particularly strong ratings. The second year I came up with the idea of doing dance numbers and that just broke us out of the box. All of a sudden we were very different from anybody else and people started watching and then they realized Oh God this is really funny. Once you get momentum going its very hard to stop you. Once you get one big hit youre going to get at least about five or six more chances because everybodys waiting for your next big show and they want to be sure they get it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
I got a chance to talk with Bruce Helford about his love of vintage toys and the ever-changing landscape of television comedy.
Check out the official website for the Corey Helford Gallery
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Bruce Helford: Today I just got done with the paperwork about setting up a new website for the art gallery. Im working on a pilot for CBS and Im writing a secret script for a one hour show.
DRE: Can you talk about that new half hour pilot?
BH: No, right now its just an idea and a script for a standup comic named Tom Papa who has opened for Seinfeld. He had a show but it didnt really go anywhere a couple years back. I love Tom so were developing something for him for CBS.
DRE: How did the Corey Helford Gallery get started?
BH: My wife Jan is a collector so she turned me onto it. I collect toys. I have millions of old toys like old superheroes from the 40s, robots and whatever I get my hands on. So Im a big toy collector and her bug is art. In the beginning, I didnt really get it. As a matter of fact, there was a point at which she wanted to buy a Mark Ryden for a very reasonable price and I said, No, its ugly. She passed up a painting that now is worth God knows what. Then she started introducing me more and more to the artists and the genre. I started picking up on people like Big Foot and Gary Baseman so I started really getting into it. But there really is a crossover in that world. A lot of these guys are illustrators and Im into comic books and the worlds started crossing over for me and Jan wanted to open a gallery. My grandfather was a noted artist back in the 40s and 50s named William S. Schwartz. He was one of the early modernists and he worked with the WPA and things like that out of Chicago so I had some history of my family being in the art business. I said, Lets open with a show of our family collections and then well start carrying all these artists. It ended up being a really great, cool thing.
DRE: How did your wife get into those paintings?
BH: Well, I would take her down to San Diego Comicon and that infected her with the comic book bug. She fell in love with guys like Dan Brereton, Mike Mignola and a lot of those people and she loves the whole DC Vertigo line of comics. But shes always been into art, like photography. I think that as she was introduced to a couple of these artists you end up following a trail. Its one of those things where once you meet one artist or you collect one artist, all of a sudden the gallery turns you on to someone else and someone else and pretty soon Jan was caught up with buying many pieces. I would see them and go I dont remember that painting. Whered you get that? Oh I had that painting for years. I go, No you didnt. Thats brand new. What are you doing? But the more they were up on the walls I thought I really like looking at these paintings. Shes got a fantastic eye and she found all these people that are starting out now so it made sense to start a gallery.
DRE: With the paintings and the toys your house must be very colorful.
BH: Yeah. I dont know if youve seen the documentary about it but theres a guy named Long Gone John who is the owner of a record company called sympathy for the Record Industry. He was the first to release a lot of the famous punk bands. Theres a documentary about him and you literally cant almost walk into his house. Ours isnt quite as bad but there isnt a room in our house, including the dining room, that isnt covered with art or filled with toys. Its a big playhouse and my kids love it.
DRE: What are your favorite toy lines that you collect?
BH: Anything related to superheroes or cartoon characters. Ive got some really cool Popeye things from the 1930s and 20s and a lot of Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel. There are always auctions online. Im always bidding against Jerry Seinfeld, hes a huge Superman collector, and Nicolas Cage who is also a big comic book guy and collector. So when there are these auctions, were always up against each other fighting and driving up the prices of all these things.
DRE: I am disturbed at the idea of all these multimillionaires fighting over toys at swap meets.
BH: I know, its really pathetic, isnt it?
DRE: What about newer stuff?
BH: As for modern toys I did an animated show called The Oblongs and I loved the design. I also love the design of things like Spongebob Squarepants. Spongebob is a beautiful character and they did a really great job creating toys surrounding that. I also like fast food collectible toys because for a buck you get this really cool thing.
DRE: Well it brings up the fact that here you are working in Hollywood. You love comics. Why arent you doing any comic book adaptations?
BH: I wanted to. I have absolutely been talking to the people at Warner Bros because I have an exclusive contract there. So what Im trying to do is get rights on some of the characters that havent been swept up yet. Obviously Wonder Woman, Superman and all those are gone, but theres a lot of characters from the 40s and 50s that havent been taken yet and I just want to see which one of those I could option and play with. It is a dream of mine to write comics too. Tom Fontana [who created Homicide and Oz] has been writing Batman comics.
Comic creators are all like, Oh no, Id rather be doing TV and Im like No dude, Id rather be doing what youre doing. So someday when I slow down a little bit, I would love to do a comic book.
DRE: I liked your last TV show, Freddie.
BH: Yeah, I thought it was a good show too. Its an odd time in the business. Freddie was what they call a multi-camera show as opposed to these new single camera shows. Sitcoms are not doing well right now. I think there are 11 on the air as opposed to 1992 when there were about 67 of them. It is not the favorite genre now. Theyre trying to figure out ways to reinvigorate the audience towards sitcoms and theyre going toward these single camera, more cinematic looking shows. ABC liked Freddie but they said that they are going with all single camera shows so Freddie wouldnt look right anymore.
DRE: I liked how the characters in Freddie werent sappy all the time.
BH: No, theyre real people. My big thing was The Drew Carey Show and those characters were far from perfect so they werent sappy. They believed that beer was more important than love.
DRE: Yeah, I loved the beer mixed with coffee that they sold. I dont know why someone that has done that yet.
BH: Somebody actually finally came out with it. Of course, Drew used to say, Theres no way I would ever drink this crap.
DRE: Itll kill you. Thats why.
BH: The joke was that youre drunk and you cant fall asleep.
DRE: [laughs] Was Freddie just too different from the George Lopez show?
BH: No, Freddie did very well. The George Lopez show got good numbers and Freddie got even higher numbers. But it was really more about the style and the tone and the time. I think they said that Freddie was almost old fashioned in his look. The one hour shows look fabulous now. Theyre spending millions of dollars to make them look like movies and the sitcoms look like a bunch of dinosaurs in vaudeville. None of those single camera shows are funny enough yet. Nobodys really figured out yet how to try and keep the humor going without the laugh track, which is what triggers an audience to laugh at home. It really feels hollow in a no laugh track show for audiences that are used to it but for youngsters who are growing up on MTV stuff like Andy Milonakis or are watching American Misfits, they are used to it. Those shows are the new style which is fast cutting, cheap and no laugh track but the transition is hard because there is audience that still likes it the old way.
DRE: Obviously youve had great success with The Drew Carey Show and George Lopez but does having a show like Freddie that gets cancelled, slow down your career at all?
BH: Not really because everyone who created Friends has created five different shows but not every baby lives. You go out there, you invest 1000 percent but sometimes the show is just not good enough or sometimes the show is programmed at the wrong time and the audience never finds it. So there are a million different agendas going on. TV is a lousy art. Since it is very collaborative theres no pure vision. Theres a lot of interference and its the networks dime, so they have every right to be involved. When youre making a painting no one will ever come in and say, You know what, we need a painting that reaches people who are between 34 and 45. Its just a bad way to do art. [laughs] So when it works its magical and wonderful. Drew Carey was on for years and was a wonderful experience. I ran the Roseanne show which was a great experience. Freddie was still a great experience but we did it for a while and then it goes away and you move on to the next project. Freddie will be doing other movies, and so will Brian Green, who I thought was fantastically funny. You wish that every artistic endeavor would be bigger than the last but it never works that way.
DRE: I read that you used to do stories for Hustler magazine 30 years ago.
BH: Yeah, a long time ago I did humor stuff for magazines. I also did stuff for Oui Magazine. I did an article for Vanity Fair. I did some for a Los Angeles magazine but I found out very quickly that theres just no money in that at all. So I went to my wife and I said, Were going to starve if I just do magazine stuff so Im going to try and break into TV. This year Im just going to study the form of sitcoms and were not going to make any money. That year we earned like 3000 dollars. We starved, it was bologna sandwiches with ketchup every day. After that year I felt I had figured it out and I wrote a spec script with a partner who quickly left the business. We sold our sample script to Family Ties and from then on I never stopped working for TV.
DRE: What advice do you have for people who want to make in Hollywood?
BH: My feeling has always been that you have to keep your vision pure. But you have to somehow let everybody else feel that they are getting their input. A lot of guys have come up and said, Hey heres what I want to do and then get notes and they say, Screw you and they end up never being seen again. The toughest thing in the business is to hold on to what you originally wanted to do because anything is better when someone has a pure unified vision. It may fail but the odds are that if its going to succeed its going to succeed because of that. So you have to find a way to have everybody have their input. Their notes may not be exactly what you wanted but find ways to slip those notes into what you do. It is finding a way to collaborate that doesnt screw up what youre trying to accomplish and that is a real tricky thing for a lot of people to do. Also not getting cynical has been huge for me because a lot of comedy writers are really cynical and dark people. The trick is keeping your enthusiasm and your positive attitude so you dont get bogged down in your own mess when youre trying to create something. With Drew, we didnt know what was going to happen. The first year didnt have particularly strong ratings. The second year I came up with the idea of doing dance numbers and that just broke us out of the box. All of a sudden we were very different from anybody else and people started watching and then they realized Oh God this is really funny. Once you get momentum going its very hard to stop you. Once you get one big hit youre going to get at least about five or six more chances because everybodys waiting for your next big show and they want to be sure they get it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
zoetica:
I wasnt sure how SuicideGirls might react to an interview with the very mainstream television creator Bruce Helford. But wait until I tell you what kind of artwork Helford and his wife Jan have in their new art gallery, the Corey Helford Gallery. Helford made his bones on such shows as Family Ties...