Ken Rotcop - Marvin Kaplan: A Prince of Comedy, Creativity, and Kindness

I dont know how many years I knew Marvin. Oh, I had seen him, of course, in Its A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Great Race and dozens of TV shows. I may not have known his name, but with those big, round, metal-rimmed glasses and that Brooklyn accent, I certainly remembered that sad-sack face.

But I really got to know Marvin when he joined my screenwriters workshop at my house. Every Tuesday, for years, Marvin was there.

And in the last years, when his friend Steve Carter would have to wheel Marvin up my driveway, pages of a new script sitting on Marvins lap, Marvin was there.

And when his eyesight began to fail him behind those thick, thick glasses and his hearing dimmed, Marvin was still there, in his regular chair, in my living room, every Tuesday evening. And every Tuesday hed bring in new pages of a screenplay or a theatrical play he would be writing.

Besides the workshop, wed do lunch or wed talk on the phone regularly.

Wed talk movies, or theater, or his scripts. Hed go to New York yearly and would tell me about all the Broadway plays he had seen. What was good and why it was good, and what was bad and why it was bad.

Wed talk about Watch Out for Slick, a movie he produced that he wrote in our workshop. While they were shooting, he worried about the director, the actors, the locations, and the cameraman.

He was a worrier. But never on the set, and never to the actors or the crew.

But to me he would talk about what was good with the film and why it was good, and what was bad and why it was bad.