How a last-minute “panic” launched Robin Williams’ career: “We got nothing!”
There is no surefire way to break into Hollywood, and countless A-list careers, such as Robin Williams‘, have been kick-started by huge swathes of luck and good timing.
In 1976, the hairy, rubber-faced comedic force of nature began performing stand-up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and before long, he found himself at the centre of a comedy renaissance in the city. Instead of staying there, though, Williams took his buzz to Los Angeles, and in 1977, he was spotted by TV producer George Schlatter while performing at the iconic Comedy Store venue.
A couple of minor TV appearances later, Williams jumped at the chance to be a last-minute replacement for a guest star role on an episode of ABC’s ultra-successful sitcom Happy Days. Playing a quirky, oddball alien named Mork in an episode of the show that deviated from the norm by playing with sci-fi concepts, Williams’ performance was a revelation.
He reportedly improvised most of Mork’s dialogue on the spot, which impressed producer Garry Marshall, who hadn’t exactly been fond of the script. Suddenly, everyone involved in Happy Days, from the producers to the writers to the network executives, was convinced this manic young gentleman was a goddamn comic genius.
While Williams stunned everyone with his undeniably astonishing guest appearance, it was only intended to be a one-time deal. However, unbeknownst to him, the universe was about to align in a way he never could have fucking predicted. The Happy Days episode ‘My Favourite Orkan’ aired on February 28th, 1978, and that spring, ABC’s executives turned their attention to scheduling their autumn season for later in the year. To their horror, though, they didn’t like what they saw. “They look at all their pilots, and after they look through all the pilots, they say, ‘We got nothing!’ and they panic,” Marshall claimed in Dave Itzkoff’s biography Robin. “This is the modus operandi of television.”
Suddenly, ABC needed to get a new pilot into production as quickly as humanly possible, so it contacted Paramount’s Michael Eisner, as his studio produced Happy Days, the network’s biggest hit. Eisner soon got Marshall on the horn and asked if he had anything in development. Marshall admitted he didn’t, but when Eisner cheekily suggested, “They like you, so what else you got? Make up something,” the image of Williams’ zany face popped into his head.
“Well, we had a kid on the show,” Marshall mused, before telling Eisner all about Williams’ revelatory turn as Mork from Ork. Amusingly, he knew Eisner wouldn’t have actually been watching Happy Days, as the studio perspective was always, “It’s a hit? Good, fine, enough.” Therefore, he wouldn’t have known Williams from a hole in the wall. This is why Marshall launched into a big sales pitch, taking several minutes to sell the executive on how incredible Williams’ guest spot was, and how he “deserves his own show”. When he was finished, Eisner thought for a moment and then said, “Good. It’s a spin-off.”
Incredibly, the first episode of Mork & Mindy aired less than seven months after Williams’ Happy Days debut, showing that even the most iconic careers can be born from anything – even a network realising at the eleventh hour that all its pilots sucked.
