Ron Friedman, who wrote for The Jonathan Winters show,, Chico and Man,, Starsky & Hutch And Fantastic islandRejuvenated Gi Joe and killed – against his will – the beloved Optimus prime in the first film Transformers, died. He was 93 years old.
Friedman died on September 16 complications from a lower gastrointestinal infection, his wife announced, Valerie Friedman.
During a career that lasted more than 700 hours of television, the architect only has also worked on Become intelligent,, The Andy Griffith show,, Delighted,, The strange couple, Gilligan Island,, I dream of Jeannie,, The Perdrix family,, Barney Miller,, Happy days,, Everything in the family,, Wonderful woman,, Forgeron hammer!,, The autumn guy And The new WKRP in Cincinnati.
He credited Danny Kaye for giving him his great break in Hollywood after the showbiz legend read materials he had written for the comic book idealist by John F. Kennedy Vaughn Meader the day after the president’s assassination in 1963.
After starting the comedies, then traveling to network dramas, Friedman had a third act as an animation writer when Hasbro called on GI Joe in life. The action figure had fallen into disgrace with the public, who had embittered the soldiers in the era of the Vietnam War.
“During these years, animation was considered the Boneyard for writers. Writers who wrote for television animation were considered models or incompetent,” said Friedman THR In 2016. “Hasbro sent me the filled action figurines, but there was no history yet. I decided to create these family groups. I created the bad family, which was [the terrorist organization] Cobra, to whom I gave the battle cry, “Co-Bra!” And the good family, to whom I gave the battle cry, “Yo, Joe!” “”
Friedman said that he had beaten more than 100 other writers who had launched for work to develop the mini-series of cartoons in five parts of 1983 GI Joe: A real American hero. He also worked on another GI Joe mini-series, a unionized series and 1987 Gi Joe: the film.
Meanwhile, Friedman had co-written the scenario for animation for Hasbro Transformers: the film (1986), which presented a vocal distribution which included Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack and, as a Herkic Autobot Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen.
Friedman said he did not think it was wise to kill Optimus – he ended up perishing in a duel with the tyrannical megatron – but the leaders of Hasbro would not have otherwise. There were relationships of children with a broken heart leaving theaters in tears, and the film underperformed at the box office, winning only $ 5.8 million at the national level.
“To remove Optimus Prime, to physically delete the family’s” dad “, that was not going to work,” said Friedman in 2013. “Hasbro did not know how to assess it. They did not recognize that Optimus Prime was the heart rate of the autobots. You cannot pass that and you have hope of duplication.
Optimus would return to a film directly to the video of 1987, and in 2019, Friedman published the book I killed Optimus Prime (so continue to me).
‘I killed Optimus Prime’
The former of the two sons, Ronald Irwin Friedman (appointed for the Star of Screen Ronald Colman) was born in Pittsburgh on August 1, 1932. His father, Louie, had a men’s clothing store and spoke of a dozen languages. Her mother, Mina, was a concert pianist and opera singer who became a piano teacher after the death of her husband in 1943.
Raised in Weirton, in Virginia-Western, Friedman remembers having met anti-Semitism when he was a child. “We went to the store to get our comics, and there was a sign-” no Jews or dogs, “he said in 2016 about a training incident when he and his younger brother, Al, were prohibited by the new owner of their favorite shop.
Friedman graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1955 with a baccalaureate in architecture, then designed buildings for about seven years – he even collaborated with Frank Lloyd Wright – before trying to comedy. He accepted an invitation from the comic strip Shelley Berman to come to New York in 1960, and Goodman Ace, writer on The Perry as a showhelped him win an agent at William Morris.
Friedman wrote jokes for comics around New York and was hired by Meader, who had expressed JFK on the 1962 successful comedy album in 1962 The first family But realized that his livelihood was in danger with the man whom he has now came dead.
Friedman proposed a new act for Meader, who interpreted it for the first time at the Blue Angel nightclub before a very curious audience. “Each magazine, each newspaper, each television point was there, the place was stuck to see what it would do,” he said in an interview on television television / writers of the Writers Foundation. “The act went very well, but all the criticisms have summed up the same thing: Vaughn Meader is an indifferent interpreter, but the material is brilliant.”
Kaye saw his stuff and brought him to Los Angeles, where he wrote for the CBS Variety Show from Kaye from 1964 to 1966 and shared an Emmy nomination in 1966 with Paul Mazursky, Larry Tucker and Pat McCormick, his frequent writing partner.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Friedman rubbed shoulders with many legends, including Lucille Ball, for whom he and McCormick wrote the 1966 special Primetime CBS Lucy in London. The colored Friedman liked to tell stories of these meetings, like this on The incredible colossal podcast by Gilbert Gottfried in 2018.
According to Ball, she and Desi Arnaz had hired Welles to deliver a script in exchange for the couple paying her tab of $ 100,000 to Château Marmont. They put it in their house in Palm Springs, but the weeks passed without the script materializing. Meanwhile, Welles sounds expenses.
An angry Arnaz led to Palm Springs in the middle of the night with a pistol, and as he told the story: “I put the pistol in his nose. I said, “You fuck. You will bring us something that we can draw in three weeks, or I will kill you. »A script appeared 10 days later. The result was The youth fountainA television driver who won a Peabody prize.
In the 1970s, Friedman served as a “troubleshooting” in several Norman Lear programs and wrote an episode of CBS ‘ Everything in the familyThe hilarious episode of 1974 “Archie’s contract”, where a crook obtains the character of Carroll O’Connor to buy an aluminum coating for his brick house.
Friedman said that while working on the 1974-78 sitcom NBC Chico and ManHe tried to convince Freddie Prinze to abandon cocaine. When this did not work, he brought the problem of the star’s drug to the attention of network executives.
“They said:” It is not my concern, it is in hand, the drugs are a reality of life, there is no moral clause that we invoke, he knows his lines, “he recalls. Prinze died by suicide with a gunshot in January 1977.
In its transition from sitcoms, Friedman landed on the orbit of Aaron Spelling after writing an episode of 1976 of the criminal drama Starsky & Hutch. The prolific producer occupied him, with dozens of missions on Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island,, Vega $ and 19 television drivers.
“Episodic television is to write a game for this guest [star]”, He recalls that the spelling told him.” They are what maintains the show [alive]. “”
Friedman noted that for decades, fans of transformers angry “stop me and said to me:” You fuck, you killed Optimus Prime. I was a little child and I cried my eyes and my mom didn’t let me see him ”or why did you kill him? You are a cock, ”he noted. “But Hasbro insisted. They wanted to create a new character with a new attachment base and tools and weapons. »»
Friedman has worked on other animated shows featuring the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, The Bionic Six and, with the good friend Stan Lee, Marvel action time.
For more than three decades, he gave conferences and taught the scenario at the USC and Chapman University.
“I wanted to teach the ability to overcome impossible situations without losing hope,” said Friedman THR. “The darker things are, the more essential it is that you do not forget what your mission is and that you do not lose hope that the property will triumph.”
He and his wife got married in 1973 and had three children, Ian, Liza and Ashley.
