Someone who should be mourned today- a great talent.
Oh, too bad. I saw “Brighton Beach Memoirs” with Matthew Broderick in 1983. The trip to New York was a reward for earning a National Merit Scholarship. We bought cheap, weekday-afternoon seats from the USO.
“Now it’s garbage”.
A difficult childhood often leads to comedy.
From Wiki:
Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927, in The Bronx, New York, to Jewish parents. His father, Irving Simon, was a garment salesman, and his mother, Mamie (Levy) Simon, was mostly a homemaker.[4] Simon had one older brother by eight years, television writer and comedy teacher Danny Simon. He grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan during the period of the Great Depression, graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School when he was sixteen, where he was nicknamed “Doc” and described as extremely shy in the school yearbook.[5]:39
Simon’s childhood was difficult and mostly unhappy due to his parents’ “tempestuous marriage” and financial hardship caused by the Depression.[3]:1 He would sometimes block out their arguments by putting a pillow over his ears at night.[6] His father often abandoned the family for months at a time, causing them further financial and emotional hardship. As a result, Simon and his brother Danny were sometimes forced to live with different relatives, or else their parents took in boarders for some income.[3]:2
During an interview with writer Lawrence Grobel, Simon stated: “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.”[7]:378 Simon states that among the reasons he became a writer was to fulfill his 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.[7]:378
To escape difficulties at home he often took refuge in movie theaters, where he especially enjoyed comedies with silent stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. Simon recalls: “I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.”
Poor guy died the wrong week. He’s gonna get Fawcetted.
RIP Mr. Simon.
Always loved these quotes from him on honorary degrees;
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/04/us/neil-simon-takes-his-honorary-lld-with-grain-of-salt.html
Great movie, underrated all around:
Wrote comedy for Sid Caesar!
RIP, Mr. Simon.
The Odd Couple Movie can’t hold a candle to the TV Show. Not even close.
Not to be confused with the continual pain in the a...
Norman Lear and his “protege” Reiner... a meathead in real life and fortunately falling apart.
It’s Simon who should be the subject of 24/7 coverage/tribute. He actually gave something worthwhile and lasting to the world. The traitorous dope from AZ, not so much.
That experience led Reiner to create a TV show based on it. The Petries are loosely based on the Reiners, and Alan Brady is based on Sid Caesar.
For a time, Simon lived in LA because several of his plays were being made into movies. Like most dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers, he found LA, shall we say, a bit boring. “There are no people on the streets”, he once complained. He also is quoted as saying that “there are 87 interesting people in Los Angeles.”
Simon said he used to go over to Westwood, where UCLA is located, to stand in the movie lines — not to see the movies, but to feel the press of people around him. It made a New Yorker feel more at home.