As the “Projects Worked On” page testifies, Darrell Vickers and I have a lot of material that never saw the light of day, or of a studio: pilots ordered but not shot, or shot but not aired; sketches for which we were unable to solve technical or casting problems. Some of that material is included here.
Scripts, sketches, poems, short stories and stage plays in PDF form.
Tongue Twister Sketch
Written for The Tonight Show, August, 1990. Johnny enjoyed the sketch, but, with all material performed in one take essentially “live” to the NBC satellites, he wasn’t convinced we could find an actress capable of flawlessly doing the rapid-fire lines.
History Of The World In 4 Minutes…
The Tonight Show. Performed August, 1990. (He only caught one of the waffles.)
First draft sketch, written for The Tonight Show, probably 1990. Johnny enjoyed the idea, but director Bobby Quinn said it “couldn’t be shot.”
The pilot script for our Family Channel sitcom, Debra! “Skippy Liberty, are those real magic tricks?” (Niamb Wilson won the 2012 Young Artist Award for leading actress in a TV series.)
Yes, And…
A half-hour stage play on one set, for 4 performers. “When improv goes wrong…”
As Man Is To God
My 65-page essay-in-verse on the troubled 1979-81 filming of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Klaus Kinski: “This much idiot no one has ever been in the world!”
Fiction from Issue # 16 of the L.A. Review Of Books Quarterly Journal. A faculty wife has an odd phobia.
“Terri has a thing,” he says. “An uh inability we have to kinda work around.” Here it is, I think: rabbit mask. Nicole shows me her I-love-you-but face. Terri scoops her shrimp across a battlefield of red sauce. “In fact,” Mikkel says, “I’d be interested to know what you two think about it.” He puts a hand on his wife’s shoulder and Terri looks up at him like, here we go. I picture the four of us out on the path in twenty minutes, grassy-kneed, brawling like Project Runway.
A popular episode of the Nickelodeon cartoon series. Phyllis Diller played Granny Neutron. “What’s wrong with the diaper she’s wearing now?” “It’s full of POO!”
Darrell and I wrote this bible for the 2008 Disney XD + YTV series Kid vs Kat, based on the art and concept by Rob Boutilier. “Have you ever encountered an animal that just didn’t like you…?“
THE HINDEN-LUSI-VALDEZ-BIGHORN-TANIC-BERG-SHAKUR!
A sketch for “Dr Fegg’s Lerning Channel,” 1998, based on Michael Palin and Terry Jones’s Dr. Fegg books. Unproduced, though Terry emailed me to say parts of it had made him laugh out loud. “How was it that on a boat considered unsinkable, thirteen hundred people were drowned, burned, smothered in oil, shot, scalped and frozen to death before it even left the dock?”
A speech about rewriting that I prepared for the annual trade show Story Expo in Pasadena, in 2022. That year’s event was cancelled. I pass the savings on to you.
Andrew Nicholls Writes 