Careers Rewritten in German

Art’s Deli in Studio City is where you can often find, at midmorning on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday or Wednesday, television comedy writers with free time. They are middle-aged or older and still funny, even if they have been forced into a particular kind of Hollywood exile, their lives settled in the comfortable San Fernando Valley hamlets of Encino, Sherman Oaks and Studio City.

Lenny Ripps moved to Los Angeles in 1976 from Baltimore, after breaking into the business selling jokes to Joan Rivers. In the writers’ rooms on sitcoms like “Bosom Buddies” and “Full House,” Ripps, a friendly, roundish man you want to adopt as an uncle, earned a reputation as a tummler: Yiddish for someone who makes a lot of noise. And why not? He was, he reasoned, in the quantity business--pitching 50, 100 jokes a day, bad one-liners after good ones, all building what Ripps calls “the road” to the joke that would end up in the script.

Ripps did this, even though he stutters, an impairment that has abated since he was a child. “I made myself faster than anyone else,” he says of competing for laughs in the room. “So even with the stutter I’d beat them.”

Because he can’t stop himself, Ripps has jokes for the work he does now, as a Jew writing for German television.

“I don’t pay taxes, because I list it as reparations,” goes one.

In a subterranean world that seems lifted from a Coen Brothers movie, a loose collection of “older,” and mostly Jewish, sitcom writers is working for German television. The series are not called “Will & Grace” or “The Bernie Mac Show”; they are called “Ritas Welt,” “Nikola,” “Alles Atze” and “Mein Leben & Ich.” The writers speak by phone regularly with an excitable German TV producer whose nickname in German is “Seni,” which sounds like “Zany.” He is 42, a former musician and psychiatrist. His real name is Christian Munder.

Script drafts fly back and forth over the Internet, the writers e-mailing from their San Fernando Valley homes and Seni in Cologne, where he oversees production of a Friday night block of sitcoms that air on the commercial German television network RTL.

A few times a year, Seni travels to Los Angeles for meetings with writers. He stays at the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip. He could stay at a ritzier place, at a Four Seasons, but the Marmont, with its old Hollywood elegance and new Hollywood crowd, better suits the aesthetics of a Cologne sophisticate.

In turn, the writers find Seni amusing, trustworthy and smart--refreshingly unlike a network executive.

This is, evidently, one of the unexpected byproducts of a global electronic village: You can be 53-year-old Lenny Ripps or 58-year-old Ed Scharlach or 58-year-old Paula Roth, and still matter, creatively, by entertaining German television viewers.

To call the shows sitcoms is a tad misleading, because it suggests that Ripps and Roth have to know how to craft a joke, or a story, in German. In fact, they don’t speak the language, and the shows, shot on film without laugh tracks, play less like sitcoms than dramedies, the laughs more situational than joke-driven.

“I do try to stay away from very quick patter, because the German language does not lend itself to quick back-and-forth repartee,” Roth said. “Their nouns tend to be descriptive of what the object does.”

Roth helped create “Mein Leben & Ich” (Me and My Life), a new series about a cynical, brooding teenage girl named Alex. In a former life, Roth wrote for “Laverne & Shirley,” “Happy Days” and “Perfect Strangers.” Then she turned 50, and things changed. “Suddenly there I was, a 51-year-old writer who had not worked on a hit show for a year, who had an unsold pilot, and I looked behind me and there were a whole lot of other writers waiting to take my spot.”

Like Ripps, Roth recognizes that being unwanted in Hollywood but wanted in Germany is a bizarre twist on a 20th century phenomenon--Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe and reinventing themselves in Hollywood as purveyors of mass entertainment.

Ripps isn’t a son of Holocaust victims, but he is the child of Jewish parents who wouldn’t, he remembers, buy anything made by Krups, a German maker of small appliances. So there was a certain unease about this new line of work. “I needed to acknowledge to them that they’re Germans and I know they’re Germans,” he said recently. His colleagues in Cologne, Ripps said, expressed horror and guilt about an event that occurred before they were born.

He needed to hear the guilt expressed. “As long as they have that,” Ripps said, “I’m happy.”

“Nikola,” set in a Cologne hospital, centers on the romantic and professional tensions between a nurse and a high-handed surgeon. “ Welt” (Rita’s World) stars comedian Gaby Koster as a supermarket checkout clerk. “Alles Atze” (Always Atze) stars Atze Schroder as a brazen store owner in the German city of Essen-Kray. He has a Turkish sidekick.

Last year, Columbia TriStar International Television, the Sony-owned entity that produces the German comedies airing on RTL, threw a party at the Chateau Marmont for the 15 or so writers involved in the shows. “Many of the writers, even though they live in the same town and belong to the same union, hadn’t seen each other in 15 years,” said John Barber, a consultant at Columbia TriStar who has been integral in establishing the link between writers here and production abroad. “I think a lot of them were surprised to see who else was there and who else was doing this.”

For Roth, it began with a call from her agent, suggesting she go to the Chateau Marmont to meet with some German producers. It sounded odd, but it had been a while since she’d last worked. And it was breakfast at the Chateau Marmont.

By that time, Roth was paying her own health insurance, her coverage through the Writers Guild of America having lapsed from lack of recent work. She had downsized, selling the boat and the 5,000-square-foot house, behind gates in Encino, for a smaller version of a still-comfortable life.

Roth, who is from the Bronx, speaks with the matter-of-fact tone of a New Yorker. When she got her first sitcom job, on “Laverne & Shirley,” Roth says, she became valuable in the room because she’d been a childhood friend of Penny Marshall and understood how to voice Laverne.

Roth’s work on “Mein Leben” is covered by the WGA through Columbia. She is not getting rich (per-script payments are about $15,000). But penning two episodes means surpassing the $18,659 yearly that writers must earn to keep their WGA benefits active. More significant to Roth, however, “Mein Leben” represents an unexpected afterlife, a way to do meaningful work at a time when Hollywood might consider her career over.

“It was certainly not about economic need. It was about emotional need,” she said of that initial meeting. “The thing about this town is, you are what you do. And the first question anyone says to you, after ‘Hi, how are you? You look great’ is ‘What are you doing?’”

The work that found Roth is not unprecedented. In addition to five comedies on RTL, Columbia, which has been more aggressive than other domestic studios, produces dramas overseas as well.

Mainly, though, studios have gone hesitantly into foreign television, which lacks the advertising and syndication markets that can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S. More often, companies have tried to adapt their hit series for other cultures.

In 1991, when Columbia and RTL signed their three-year production deal, they initially took two Columbia sitcom properties “Who’s the Boss?” (which had done well adapted in England) and “Married ... With Children,” and adapted the scripts and reshot the episodes for German TV, mimicking the sets of the original shows.

It didn’t work, says Christiane Ruff, who at the time was an RTL executive, because German audiences rejected what they saw as reconstituted American TV.

According to Scott Siegler, then head of Columbia Pictures Television, “Who’s the Boss?” ran into a number of production troubles peculiar to German culture. Producers had trouble, for instance, finding an actor to play the male housekeeper popularized by Tony Danza because, Siegler said, German actors “didn’t want to be laughed at.”

Around this time, Barber and Ruff took the deal in a new direction: They began to look at doing original scripts for German TV, giving up on American sitcom hits as source material. They were immediately encouraged when a pilot called “Die Campers” (The Campers), set in a campground, was well-received. But while Barber had discovered that you could hire set decorators and cameramen, finding writers well-versed in the tricky math of telling a logical and amusing story in 22 sitcom minutes was another matter.

Writers in Germany, Ruff says, tend to work “at home, in their ivory towers. Whereas in the States it’s considered a job.”

“I didn’t care what their status was over here,” Barber said of the American writers he sought, some of whom he knew from his ABC days, “other than the fact that they were available and they liked what we were doing and they were enthusiastic when we sat down and talked to them about the shows. That was the criteria. I would have worked with an 18-year-old guy or a 70-year-old guy.”

At their Sherman Oaks home recently, Ken Cinnamon and Karen Wengrod, a husband-and-wife writing team who spent seven seasons rising through the ranks on ABC’s “Who’s the Boss?,” screened an episode of “Nikola.”

The show, which recently completed production on a sixth season, stars Mariele Millowitsch and Walter Sittler as Nikola and Dr. Schmidt, respectively. In a country with fewer than a third of the estimated 105 million television households in the U.S., “Nikola,” which airs Friday nights at 9:15, after the still popular “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” has been averaging 6.6 million viewers of late, giving it an audience share that in the States would be almost “ER”-like.

“There’s a long learning curve involved,” Wengrod said. “It takes some time to develop the relationship and learn the thing. The problem they had with some American writers was this attitude of ‘I’ll give you what I want, and you’ll be grateful.’”

Cinnamon says they watch episodes on the Internet; they also get tapes, which sometimes have subtitles. And sometimes they don’t. “We know the story, we wrote it, but we have no idea what is being said,” Cinnamon said.

Still, for Cinnamon and Wengrod, “Nikola” arrived as an unusual lifeline at a time when the broadcast networks were moving away from family sitcoms. Already under contract at Columbia, they were asked to create a show set in a German hospital, centering on a nurse and single mother. Pioneers of this German experiment, they came up with a light romantic comedy, accented on the German end with undertones of class and workplace politics.

“The early reviews said, ‘Finally, a show that matches the German sensibility,’” marveled Cinnamon.

This chapter in their careers has been a crash course not only in the vagaries of international production, but also in cultural differences. If you’re writing for German TV, for instance, the Chinese delivery guy becomes the Turkish delivery guy. Nudity is not verboten. Nikola’s best friend is a gay transvestite, further suggesting Germany’s more open attitudes toward sex.

In turn, Cinnamon and Wengrod are providing German writers with an education in how to develop a situation comedy over a long run of episodes.

The two both script and assign episodes to other writers here, including Scharlach and Paul Wolff. “Basically the show we’re doing is classic battle of the sexes,” Wolff said. “The couple that loves to hate each other. It kind of cuts across all lines.” The more culturally specific “Die Campers” and “Atze,” by contrast, rely more heavily on German writers.

According to Ruff, who today is managing director and head of creative affairs for Columbia TriStar International Television, the shows employ about a dozen in-house writers in all. These writers, Ruff said recently over coffee in the Chateau Marmont garden, do more than translate the Americans’ final drafts.

“A translation would never be enough,” she said. “We still would have a script with an American feel.”

It was clear that she knew what this meant, even if it was somewhat difficult to articulate. It had to do with culture, with the school system, with dating rituals. It had to do with taking something no one can build better than Americans--the situation comedy--and adding one’s own imprint.

Last March, the man Paula Roth and Lenny Ripps and Ken Cinnamon call “Zany” arrived in Los Angeles for story meetings on “Ritas Welt,” “Mein Leben,” “Atze” and “Nikola.”

Munder, or Seni, or Zany, made the rounds of the writers he normally deals with via e-mail and over the phone. With him were Mark Werner, another RTL writer-producer, and Barber, Columbia’s go-between for what they hope is a budding empire of German television shows.

As the creative point man, on the German side, for the shows in the RTL-Columbia arrangement, Munder has opinions about American shows, likes and dislikes. Like Ruff, he loves “Seinfeld.” But he could do without “Friends.”

In the lobby of the Marmont, Roth showed up to go over another season of “Mein Leben,” and soon Ripps appeared. He kibitzed about his trip to Florida to visit his parents. Then he and Seni went off to another part of the lobby to talk about “Ritas Welt.”

By then, the lobby was filling up with people-in-black having afternoon drinks. A pianist started to play. It felt like Hollywood, where all the world is on the verge of signing a movie deal. In truth, of course, all of Hollywood is just looking for work, an angle to play. In truth, show business is a German nicknamed Zany, telling you that when he was younger, he “really loved ‘The Golden Girls.’”

*

Paul Brownfield is a Times staff writer.