Novelist, Playwright and Screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman Guests on THEATER TALK, Now thru 9/24

Writer Bruce Jay Friedman visits THEATER TALK to discuss his successful career in New York and subsequently Hollywood during the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. Beginning as the editor of men’s adventure magazines, Friedman broke through to become a novelist (Stern was the first of eight, including A Mother’s Kisses), humorist (The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life), playwright (Scuba Duba, Steambath), and screenwriter (Stir Crazy and Splash).

This episode of THEATER TALK with Bruce Jay Friedman, co-hosted by Michael Riedel of the New York Post and producer Susan Haskins, will premiere at 1 a.m. today, September 21 (2012; early Saturday morning) on Thirteen/PBS, followed in New York City on CUNY TV* Saturday at 8:30 PM, Sunday at 12:30 PM, and Monday at 7:30 AM, 1:30 PM, and 7:30 PM.

Friedman tells Riedel and Haskins about his good friend, author Mario Puzo, whom he hired to write for True Action magazine. “He asked me what I thought of his title, The Godfather. My answer? ‘Not so good.’” Puzo, says Friedman, “always denied a connection to the Mafia. But if you saw ‘that look’… .” Friedman also touches on the late-night literary scene at Elaine’s, the fabled and now-shuttered restaurant on the Upper East Side that became “a nest of playwrights and writers” in the early 1960s. Now, as he did then, the Bronx-born author of the recently published memoir, Lucky Bruce lives up to his reputation as a “spritzer,” an entertainer who fires one-liners at his audience.

THEATER TALK is the weekly series dedicated to the world of the stage. Not-for-profits Theater Talk Productions and CUNY TV, jointly produce the program, which is taped in the Himan Brown TV and Radio Studios at The City University of New York (CUNY) TV in Manhattan, and is distributed to more than a hundred public television stations nationwide.

*CUNY TV, the City University of New York television station, is carried in New York City’s five boroughs – on Channel 75 on Time Warner and Cablevision, Channel 77 on RCN, and Channel 30 on Verizon FiOS.