Neil Simon
Marvin Neil Simon was an American playwright, screenwriter and author. He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly film adaptations of his plays. He received three Tony Awards and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for four Academy Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards. He was awarded a Special Tony Award in 1975, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2006.
Simon grew up in New York City during the Great Depression. His parents' financial difficulties affected their marriage, giving him a mostly unhappy and unstable childhood. He often took refuge in movie theaters, where he enjoyed watching early comedians like Charlie Chaplin. After graduating from high school and serving a few years in the Army Air Force Reserve, he began writing comedy scripts for radio programs and popular early television shows. Among the latter were Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, and The Phil Silvers Show, which ran from 1955 to 1959.
His first produced play was Come Blow Your Horn. It took him three years to complete and ran for 678 performances on Broadway. It was followed by two more successes, Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. He won a Tony Award for the latter. It made him a national celebrity and "the hottest new playwright on Broadway". From the 1960s to the 1980s, he wrote for stage and screen; some of his screenplays were based on his own works for the stage. His style ranged from farce to romantic comedy to more serious dramatic comedy.
Overall, he garnered 17 Tony nominations and won three awards. In 1966, he had four successful productions running on Broadway at the same time and, in 1983, he became the only living playwright to have a New York theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honor.
Early years
Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927, in The Bronx, New York City, to Jewish parents. His father, Irving Simon, was a garment salesman, and his mother, Mamie Simon, was mostly a homemaker. Neil had one brother, eight years his senior, television writer and comedy teacher Danny Simon. He grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan, and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School when he was sixteen. He was nicknamed 'Doc', and the school yearbook described him as extremely shy.Simon's childhood was marked by his parents' "tempestuous marriage" and the financial hardship caused by the Depression. Sometimes at night he blocked out their arguments by putting a pillow over his ears. His father often abandoned the family for months at a time, causing them further financial and emotional suffering. As a result, the family took in boarders, and Simon and his brother Danny were sometimes forced to live with different relatives.
During an interview with writer Lawrence Grobel, Simon said: "To this day I never really knew what the reason for all the fights and battles were about between the two of them ... She'd hate him and be very angry, but he would come back and she would take him back. She really loved him." Simon has said that one of the reasons he became a writer was to fulfill a need to be independent of such emotional family issues, a need he recognized when he was seven or eight: "I'd better start taking care of myself somehow ... It made me strong as an independent person.
He was able to do that at the movies, in the work of stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. "I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud." Simon acknowledged these childhood films as his inspiration: "I wanted to make a whole audience fall onto the floor, writhing and laughing so hard that some of them pass out." He made writing comedy his long-term goal, and also saw it as a way to connect with people. "I was never going to be an athlete or a doctor." He began writing for pay while still in high school: At the age of fifteen, Simon and his brother created a series of comedy sketches for employees at an annual department store event. To help develop his writing skill, he often spent three days a week at the library reading books by famous humorists such as Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman and S. J. Perelman.
Soon after graduating from high school, he signed up with the Army Air Force Reserve at New York University. He attained the rank of corporal and was eventually sent to Colorado. During those years in the Reserve, Simon wrote professionally, starting as a sports editor. He was assigned to Lowry Air Force Base during 1945 and attended the University of Denver from 1945 to 1946.
Writing career
Television
Simon quit his job as a mailroom clerk in the Warner Brothers offices in Manhattan to write radio and television scripts with his brother Danny Simon, under the tutelage of radio humorist Goodman Ace, who ran a short-lived writing workshop for CBS. Their work for the radio series The Robert Q. Lewis Show led to other writing jobs. Max Liebman hired the duo for the writing team of his popular television comedy series Your Show of Shows. The program received Emmy Award nominations for Best Variety Show in 1951, 1952, 1953, and 1954, and won in 1952 and 1953. Simon later wrote scripts for The Phil Silvers Show, for episodes broadcast during 1958 and 1959.Simon later recalled the importance of these two writing jobs to his career: "Between the two of them, I spent five years and learned more about what I was eventually going to do than in any other previous experience." "I knew when I walked into Your Show of Shows, that this was the most talented group of writers that up until that time had ever been assembled together."
Simon described a typical writing session:
Simon incorporated some of these experiences into his play Laughter on the 23rd Floor. A 2001 TV adaptation of the play won him two Emmy Award nominations.
Stage
His first Broadway experience was on Catch a Star! ; he collaborated on sketches with his brother, Danny.In 1961, Simon's first Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn, ran for 678 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Simon took three years to create that first play, partly because he was also working on television scripts. He rewrote it at least twenty times from beginning to end: "It was the lack of belief in myself", he recalled. "I said, 'This isn't good enough. It's not right.' ... It was the equivalent of three years of college." Besides being a "monumental effort" for Simon, that play was a turning point in his career: "The theater and I discovered each other."
Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, for which he won a Tony Award, brought him national celebrity, and he was considered "the hottest new playwright on Broadway", according to Susan Koprince. Those successes were followed by others. During 1966, Simon had four shows playing simultaneously at Broadway theatres: Sweet Charity, The Star-Spangled Girl, The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park. These earned him royalties of $1 million a year. His professional association with producer Emanuel Azenberg began with The Sunshine Boys and continued with The Good Doctor, God's Favorite, Chapter Two, They're Playing Our Song, I Ought to Be in Pictures, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, Broadway Bound, Jake's Women, The Goodbye Girl and Laughter on the 23rd Floor, among others. His work ranged from romantic comedies to serious drama. Overall, he received seventeen Tony nominations and won three awards.
Simon also adapted material originated by others, such as the musical Little Me, based on the novel by Patrick Dennis; Sweet Charity from the screenplay for the film Nights of Cabiria, written by Federico Fellini and others; and Promises, Promises a musical version of Billy Wilder's film, The Apartment. By the time of Last of the Red Hot Lovers in 1969, Simon was reputedly earning $45,000 a week from his shows, making him the most financially successful Broadway writer ever. Simon also served as an uncredited "script doctor", helping to hone the books of Broadway-bound plays or musicals under development, as he did for A Chorus Line. During the 1970s, he wrote a string of successful plays; sometimes more than one was playing at the same time, to standing room only audiences. Although he was, by then, recognized as one of the country's leading playwrights, his inner drive kept him writing:
Simon drew "extensively on his own life and experience" for his stories. His settings are typically working-class New York City neighborhoods, similar to the ones in which he grew up. In 1983, he began writing the first of three autobiographical plays, Brighton Beach Memoirs, which would be followed by Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound. He received his greatest critical acclaim for this trilogy. He received a for his follow-up play, Lost in Yonkers, which starred Mercedes Ruehl and was a success on Broadway.
Following Lost in Yonkers, Simon's next several plays did not meet with commercial success. The Dinner Party, which starred Henry Winkler and John Ritter, was "a modest hit". Simon's final play, Rose's Dilemma'', premiered in 2003 and received poor reviews.
Simon is credited as playwright and contributing writer to at least 49 Broadway plays.
Screen
Simon chose not to write the screenplay for the first film adaptation of his work, Come Blow Your Horn, preferring to focus on his playwriting. However, he was disappointed with the picture, and thereafter tried to control the conversion of his works. Simon wrote screenplays for more than twenty films and received four Academy Award nominations—for The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, The Goodbye Girl and California Suite. Other movies include The Out-of-Towners and Murder by Death. Although most of his films were successful, movies were always of secondary importance to his plays:Many of his earlier adaptations of his own work were very similar to the original plays. Simon observed in hindsight: "I really didn't have an interest in films then. I was mainly interested in continuing writing for the theater ... The plays never became cinematic". The Odd Couple, was one highly successful early adaptation, faithful to the stage play but also opened out, with more scenic variety.