HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE MOVIE SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS?
If you haven’t, you should. (The same goes for all Preston Sturges movies.) In the movie, the protagonist is a film director who has only done comedies and wants his next film to be something that will be meaningful and will change the world. He’s going to call the film, “O Brother Where art Thou” — which is how that movie got its name. Hijinks ensue and he winds up in jail, where the prisoners are watching one of his comedies. He looks at these men in a miserable situation who are being lifted out of it by watching what he thinks is a meaningless movie and he learns something.
Let me tell you what everyone in show biz was thinking on 9/11. Well, not everyone. The studio executives were trying to figure out how to capitalize on it. But the writers and producers (I spent the day in a room full of them) were feeling like what we did for a living was silly and that we should be in New York helping search for people under the rubble. Hearing us voice this, one of the production assistants said, “Are you crazy? What people really need right now is to watch a TV show and not think about this for an hour.” That made me think back to a letter from a fan that I had received when I was on Moonlighting. She basically described her life — she hated her job and her best friend had dumped her — and told me how much it meant to her to be able to turn on Moonlighting every Tuesday night to laugh for an hour. I still think about that letter. Time went by and my family had some hard years of our own and that made me think about the woman who wrote the letter because when things were really bad and even scary, it was HUGE to our family that we could sit down and watch Survivor every week.
What does any of that have to do with a subscription “happy mail” service? Well, in the last few years I have been stewing about the fact that life has become so much harder for everyone and there are so many new and serious things to worry about, and I started to feel like everyone was being robbed of the kind of spontaneous joy that we used to take for granted. Then an artist friend suggested that I start a “happy mail” subscription service and I thought, “That’s it!” Since I’m not writing for television any more (they put you out to pasture once you hit 40, but that’s another story for another time) this would be a way that I could do something creative AND provide the kind of “this just dropped out of the sky” joy that used to be so much a part of life.
So that’s how we came to be here. I’m very excited about this new venture and I’m so grateful to you all for being willing to go on this journey with me!