Television ‘Bound’ : The Final Part of Neil Simon’s Trilogy Lands on Small Screen

Neil Simon, America’s most successful playwright, has seen the ups and downs of transferring hit plays to the screen.

“I thought ‘The Sunshine Boys’ was a better movie than it was a play,” said the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winner. “ ‘Plaza Suite’ really didn’t open up (into a movie) because I was foolish enough to do it all in the same suite. I could have used New York more. But when we did ‘California Suite,’ we opened it up quite a bit. I think three-quarters of that movie was rather successful. I think I do better for film when I write original films and I do better for stage when I write original plays.”

Simon’s most acclaimed and popular original plays of the 1980s are his semi-autobiographical trilogy, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound,” which chronicled the life of budding comedy writer Eugene Jerome from his teen-age years through a hitch in the Army to his landing a job with his brother as a radio writer.

The lavish 1986 film version of “Brighton Beach” was a critical and commercial failure. Though not a smash success, “Bixoli Blues,” directed by Mike Nichols in 1988, fared better.

Simon opted not to adapt his 1986 “Broadway Bound,” the final and most personal installment of the trilogy, for the big screen.

Instead, “Broadway” is bound for the small screen. Anne Bancroft, Hume Cronyn, Michele Lee, Jerry Orbach, Corey Parker and Jonathan Silverman star, Monday at 9 p.m. on ABC.

“I think because ‘Brighton Beach’ financially didn’t do all that well as a film, maybe the people I would usually do films with were afraid to go ahead and do (“Broadway Bound”),” Simon said in a recent phone interview from Winston-Salem, N.C., where he was trying out his latest play, “Jake’s Women,” which opens Tuesday on Broadway.

“I could have done it as a lower-budget film,” Simon said. “There was no necessity to make it into a big film. I know that Paul Newman did a very good job with ‘The Glass Menagerie,” but if I was to do it that way and released it, it would be more or less an art film in which we would have had a limited audience. I think we can reach a great many more people on television with our play. I wanted to keep the integrity of the play intact.”

Simon was approached by executive producers Michael Brandman and Emmanuel Azenberg, who also produces Simon’s plays, to do it for television. “The network felt it would work, it would find an audience,” Brandman said. “It was not just a broad Neil Simon comedy.”

Because of the time constraints in television, Simon had to pare the play. “I found it didn’t lose a lot by cutting it down,” he said. “I felt it had more power dealing with the essences of it.”

And, Simon said, he was able to add important touches to the TV film, “like when you see the father (Orbach) in the bedroom after a big fight with his sons and breaking into tears,” he said. “I couldn’t do that in a play.”

He said director Paul Bogart gave the piece “a semi-visual look. It’s not quite a play, it is not quite a movie. It is someplace in between--maybe it’s called television.”

Simon, who said he’s a better rewriter than a writer, changed lines and scenes on the set of “Broadway Bound.” “Paul would say, ‘Neil, I can’t make that little scene work, can you adapt it somehow? I did that on ‘The Goodbye Girl.’ I kept rewriting lines almost every single day.”

“He loves to change things,” said Corey Parker, who plays Eugene. “He never acts as if his words are very precious. He is never dictatorial.”

Simon said when he writes for films, he needs to work with producers and directors who are “behind me in terms of acting upon my wishes, like (producer) Ray Stark,” he said.

“You have to work with someone who is going to see the same thing you do more or less. You don’t make concessions. I have done 10 films with (Stark) and I am doing ‘Lost in Yonkers’ with him. I am able to collaborate with him and the director, Martha Coolidge. Writers generally in film, and maybe in television, get short-shrifted all the time.”

Which is what happened to Simon with his 1991 Hollywood Pictures comedy, “The Marrying Man.” The notorious film, starring Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin and directed by Jerry Rees, was a critical and commercial disaster. It received reams of publicity because of the reported on-set tantrums of it stars. Basinger also allegedly made disparaging comments about Simon’s ability as a comedy writer.

Simon said he left the set after two weeks. “I saw that what I had to say was not going to be listened to,” he said. “We had a first-time director; the actors were not necessarily listening to the director. Disney, I think, sometimes was not strong at all and sometimes too strong. I never had that before with a studio. I had them on my back all the time. They were on the back of the director and yet they never said anything to the actors. When I do a film with Ray Stark, I never really have any talks with a studio at all.

“I was not around to see the problems that were happening,” Simon said. “I could have rewritten (sections of the script) if I was given the time. I just couldn’t. But also I would have to take a lot of the blame myself because maybe the screenplay was not good. I am not saying they ruined a wonderful screenplay.”

But Simon is saying he would never allow a studio to treat him that way again: “I would rather stay here (in the theater) and write plays.”

“Broadway Bound” airs Monday at 9 p.m. on ABC.