The six-time Emmy winner, a frequent writing partner of James L. Brooks, was also behind ‘The Munsters’, ‘Lou Grant’ and ‘My Mother the Car’.
Allan Burns, the six-time Emmy winner who teamed up to create one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and one of the worst, My mom’s car, has passed away. He was 85.
Burns died Saturday, his steady partner, James L. Brooks, reported on Twitter.
“His remarkable writing career brought him every imaginable recognition.” He wrote. ‘But you had to know him to appreciate his complete rarity. He was simply the best man I’ve ever known. A beauty of a human being. ‘
Other details of his death were not immediately available.
Burns, who got an early career break by working for animation legend Jay Ward Rocky and his friends and The Bullwinkle Show, also co-created Rhoda and Lou Grant, two Mary Tyler Moore spin-offs, as well The Munsters; wrote down a season Get smart; and invented a famous cereal character, Cap’n Crunch, and his nemesis, the pirate Jean LaFoote.
He can also claim to have discovered Jim Carrey.
Burns occasionally worked in the movies, and he was nominated for an Oscar for an adapted screenplay A little romance (1979), a whimsical teenage adventure starring young Diane Lane and Laurence Olivier.
However, Burns made his eternal mark on television, spending more than two decades as a writer and producer for MTM Productions. His first job for the fledgling company, launched by producer Grant Tinker and his wife, Mary Tyler Moore, was the starting point for a CBS comedy starring Moore, which starred for five seasons on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
It was Tinker’s idea to link Burns with Brooks. The two had worked together Room 222, an ABC comedy drama set in a downtown school that Brooks had made, and Brooks had written spec scripts for My mom’s car.
“He and Mary were looking for someone to write a pilot and come up with a concept for her show, with a 13-episode commitment on CBS, and he chose us,” Burns said in a 2012 interview for the Writers. Guild Foundation. The Writer Speaks web series. “That was kind of astonishing to me; I mean, we had credits, and they were pretty good, but still …”
In their original concept, Mary Richards from Moore was a divorcee who worked as a stringer for a Hollywood columnist. “Nobody had done a show about someone who was divorced,” Burns noted. Tinker and Moore loved the idea – both divorced – but CBS execs had “a heart attack on the company” when they heard what the writers had in mind.
According to Burns, a CBS director told them, “Our research shows us there are four things the American television audience doesn’t like: New Yorkers, Jews, people with mustaches, and divorce.”
He added, “Over the next few weeks, we came up with the idea of doing it in a newsroom – Jim had worked in a newsroom in New York and said, ‘I always thought it was a great place for comedy.” They also made Mary a rejected woman who moves to Minneapolis after a broken engagement.
As a single, independent woman in the workplace, the character became an icon for the feminist movement.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show ran for seven seasons, from September 1970 to March 1977, and collected a then-record of 29 Emmys. Burns and Brooks won five trophies for their efforts on the show; the last two were for excellent comedy series and for writing (with four others) the admired series finale.
Not admired but certainly mocked, My mom’s car played Jerry Van Dyke as a lawyer who buys a 1928 Porter Stanhope from a lot of used cars and discovers that the antique vehicle is his mother’s reincarnation. Created by Burns and Chris Hayward, the comedy lasted only 30 episodes in 1965-66 before being axed.
“It’s nice to know that some people think The Mary Tyler Moore Show is one of the better shows of all time and that I’ve also done a show that everyone knows for sure is the worst, ”he said in a 2004 chat for The Interviews: An Oral History of Television.
Allan Burns was born on May 18, 1935 in Baltimore. His father died when he was 9, and three years later he and his mother moved to Honolulu, where his older brother was stationed in Pearl Harbor.
He went to the Punahou private school (Barack Obama would go there later) and designed a cartoon that was published a few times a week. Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspaper.
Burns received a partial grant to study architecture at the University of Oregon, but left school in 1955 and moved to Los Angeles, where he got a job as an NBC Page. He asked what he said in the interview that convinced his new employer to hire him.
‘You said you’re 42, right? Well, that’s the only uniform we have available right now. Someone just stopped, ”he recalled. “The reason I’m in show business is because I’m 42, that’s the truth.”
Burns used to joke The Tonight Show and to comedians George Gobel and Jonathan Winters without a bite to eat and script reading as part of a new NBC comedy-writing development program. He was fired and then worked as a writer for the game show for about a month Truth or consequences.
After spending the following years writing jokes and drawing cartoons for greeting card companies, Burns put together a portfolio of his work and left without an appointment for Ward’s offices on Sunset Boulevard.
While Burns was trying to find his way to a meeting with Ward, the producer came by by chance. “He looks at all my stuff, chuckles and says, ‘When do you want to start?’ Burns recalled. He started making advertising flyers for Rocky and his friends and The Bullwinkle Show, later graduating from “Fractured Fairy Tales” and other things for $ 215 a week.
While on vacation, Burns met execs from the Quaker Oats Co. and designed the mascot, an 18th century sea captain, for Cap’n Crunch. They wanted the cartoonist to know that the new grain “stays crunchy even in milk.”
“Stays crunchy even in milk? Stays crunchy even in sour,” Burns joked.
He and Chris Hayward co-founded the Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right for Ward’s company, and in 1965 they wrote the pilot for CBS ‘ My brother the angel, a sitcom starring the Tommy and Dick Smothers, before moving on My Mother the car.
“It was sold, someone bought it, someone must have thought it funny, but the critics certainly didn’t,” he said in his Oral History interview. “I probably lived the rest of my life with that show-down. We really – I promise you – meant it was going to be a satire, and it turned out to be the worst of all the shows we thought we satirized.”
The naive Burns and Hayward had pitched their idea The Munsters to an unscrupulous agent, who then passed the idea on to writers Norm Liebmann and Ed Haas at Universal. When they learned that the comedy about a family of monsters was in production at CBS, they petitioned the WGA and got their rightful credit.
Burns and Hayward then wrote for the 1967-1968 CBS sitcom He and she, starring Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss, and Burns won his first career Emmy (shared with Hayward). When it was canceled after a season, He and she creator Leonard Stern brought them aboard another show he produced, Get smart.
It was the fourth season of the spy parody, in which agents 86 (Don Adams) and 99 (Barbara Feldon) got married. “I don’t remember that was a particularly good idea,” he said. Burns was reminded of that after Rhoda Morgenstern’s wedding in 1974, when ratings on Valerie Harper’s sitcom plummeted.)
He and Hayward split up after about four years when Burns wanted to work on a screenplay and Hayward didn’t. (The film was ultimately not made.)
Burns and Brooks (along with Gene Reynolds) also created the thought-provoking one-hour MTM-CBS drama Lou Grant, which meant an unprecedented change of genres for a spin-off. The show got off to a slow start, perhaps because viewers were expecting to see the sitcom version of Ed Asner’s Mary Tyler Moore character.
“The guy at CBS said to us at the time, ‘Guys, what you seem to be doing is The New York Times. People don’t read The New York Times, they read it Daily news, “Burns remembered.” I remember Grant just exploded, ‘You don’t want to The New York Times on your network ?! ‘”
Grant said to the network execs, “Well, guys, wait a minute, the show is good, it’s going to be fine.” And he said to us, “Keep doing what you’re doing.” ”
Burns saw Carrey perform stand-up at a West Hollywood comedy club and hired him to star as a cartoonist on a 1984 sitcom he created, The Duck Factory. Burns based the show on his experiences at Ward.
Other shows he made for MTM were included Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers; Eisenhower & Lutz, starring Scott Bakula; and FM, tuned to a public radio station. He received a total of 16 Emmy nominations, and he and Brooks were honored with the WGA’s prestigious Laurel Award in 1988.
Burns also wrote for the big screen Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979) and Kristy McNichol’s romantic comedy The way you are (1984) and wrote and directed Just between friends (1986), starring long-time friend Moore.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.