Gray List: No More Us vs. Them

A line in Chris Willman’s review of the movie “Folks”’Folks’ Hits a Nerve, Not Funny Bone,” Calendar, May 4) struck a nerve. Willman says senility isn’t inherently funny. I couldn’t agree with him more, although too many studio and network executives feel that stories about ageism are fodder for comedy.

But that’s only half the picture. At least stories about older actors--be they stereotypes or not--are portrayed by older actors. But which writer--young or old--is the network or studio going to buy the script from? Now that’s a problem.

We all know about the gray list in Hollywood. The Writers Guild, the prestigious Caucus for Producers, Directors and Writers and the TV Academy have viewed this with alarm, have rounded up the usual suspects and lectured them. There’s lots of finger-pointing, especially at the adolescent executives in charge of the studios and networks, but it hasn’t changed things much. Maybe, just maybe, we older writers can help our cause by adopting a different attitude.

Currently, we’re in an “Us vs. Them” mentality that precludes any kind of dialogue. We get defensive, negative and extremely hostile toward the young network executives, producers, show runners and agents who are calling the shots, forgetting that we were doing the same things we’re accusing them of--when we were young. If we were good in those bygone days, we were:

* Hot writers with multiple script deals in the heyday of the free-lancer (which may be coming back with reductions of writing staffs because of the recession and the proliferation of cable). And then we became . . .

* Show runners (executives), and hired our friends and contemporaries. We weren’t magnanimously offering jobs to older screenwriters who may have fallen on hard times--or even been blacklisted (and therefore had no recent credits). And we were . . .

* Working overtime and on weekends and grabbing scripts for ourselves because we had the energy and enthusiasm--and the greed that we accuse our young associates of now.

Now that we’ve “matured,” we approach the current young tyros in charge with an attitude of “Hey, I’ve paid my dues; I won’t do this and I won’t do that, and you don’t know what you’re doing, anyway.” Or else we do a 180 and refuse to list our early credits because the kids reading them were in preschool or in utero when they ran.

Look, I’m proud of surviving. I’m proud of the sitcoms I wrote in the ‘60s, the soaps I wrote and the series I created in the ‘70s and ‘80s; and here it is the ‘90s and I’m baaaaack because a couple of savvy executive producers took a chance and replaced the younger, hotter writer-producer of a long-running series with me.

Something else: A lot of one’s productivity is based on how one feels physically and mentally. And if this sounds Pollyannaish, well, that’s where I’m coming from. Over the years--and heaven knows there are a lot of them--I’ve been down and I’ve been up. And (please join in) up is better.

So, while I’m feeling “up,” I have a suggestion.

Maybe we should check our attitude and stop bashing the young. We were lucky enough to survive that stage of our lives, and here we are with firsthand knowledge and experience of what it means and how it feels to be young and to be middle-aged--everyone knows there are no old people in our culture.

Let’s call a truce. We older writers won’t tell any more kiddie/executive jokes or put you down for achieving success at such an early age if you’ll consider our talent, experience and age as the assets they are.

Can we make a deal?