Remembering producer Peter Engel-- The Man Behind Saved By The Bell who changed my life
and was inadvertently responsible for me moving to Pittsburgh
Last week, I was stunned to hear Peter Engel passed away, though at 88 he lived a long and interesting life. When I worked for Peter in the 1990s at NBC, he was introduced to crowds before "Saved By the Bell" tapings as "The Man behind the Bell." These were the days of what we who worked for him referred to as "The Engel Empire," when Peter had six shows running at the same time—a feat matched only by television mega-producer Aaron Spelling. Peter reinvented himself throughout his career, but the man I knew was a rarity in the often cold-hearted entertainment industry, a man who, though not without his flaws, was at his heart driven by kindness and caring.
Believe it or not, because of the Children’s Television Act and President Clinton, “Saved By the Bell” was considered by the government “educational television” in the 1990s. As I have been working on a new documentary about the beginning of educational television in 1954 on the Pitt campus, and lessons it has today as another new technology—artificial intelligence-- stands poised to transform education again, I started to think about some unlikely parallels between Peter and Fred Rogers and wrote them in this guest column in deadline.com.
I was surprised that Deadline editor Michael Fleming found a photo of Peter in a sweater, as the man I knew was almost always in Canali suits. I received a few nice emails from those who read the piece from readers saying how Peter’s work changed their life for the better. But he also changed my life, and so what follows is more about the Peter I remember and eventually, how the show Peter and I co-created “Malibu, CA”, an unholy cross between “Saved By the Bell” and “Baywatch”, led to the end of his Saturday morning empire and me eventually moving to Pittsburgh.
When I was working with him as a writer/producer at NBC on four spin-offs of the "Saved By the Bell," we used to have picnics with all the employees, and I believe at one time there were 1600 people working on his shows which aired on the network's TNBC lineup. These included "Saved By the Bell: The New Class," "California Dreams," "Hang Time," "City Guys," "U.S.A. High," and the ill-fated "Malibu CA." If it was anyone's birthday, we got a cake, and Peter inevitably would mimic Lee Strasberg's Hyman Roth character in "The Godfather" saying "make sure they see the cake." (Each season, my wife Natalie retired a pant-size for me as Peter had every meal delivered to the writers' room and we started calling ourselves human veal.)
At these company picnics, Peter made his often un-athletic writers play softball, and delighted in making good-natured fun of our lack of athletic prowess. When one of our colleagues Jeff Sachs turned in a script for "Hang Time" which was about a girl on a boys' basketball team, and there was a line about getting tickets "front row center," Peter came into the writers' room and playfully reminded Jeffrey this wasn't Broadway, and that basketball tickets were "courtside." The show was quite remarkable in its cameos as we had guest stars that included Gary “The Glove” Payton, Damon Stoudamire, and an 18-year-old Kobe Bryant. I remember, between takes, Kobe could not stop putting up free throws. Peter also had me write an episode for "Saved By the Bell: The New Class" where Screech, who at this point was working as Mr. Belding's assistant, was trying to help one of the football-playing students who had lost a game for Bayside by doing a touchdown dance before he reached the end zone. So Screech brought in his cousin who happened to be former player and now famed coach Jim Harbaugh. (I've gotten calls over the years from everyone from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal about Harbaugh's acting chops and the Times even did this oral history on Jim Harbaugh as “Screech’s Cousin”)
What made Peter's shows work was also what made it a pleasure to work on them—he treated everyone like family. As I wrote about in deadline, one of the reasons for the proliferation of Peter's Saturday morning lineup was that "Saved By The Bell" had been cited by members of Congress as wholesome programming for young people and given "educational TV" status under Clinton's Children's Television Act. (They seemed to ignore the skimpy outfits our costume designer Liz Bass dressed particularly the girls in.) But it was important from the start that “Saved By the Bell” had a moral center for Peter, for he would tell us, the idea of the show came to him in a dream.
At that point, Peter, who was born Jewish, had become a born-again Christian. As Peter himself told it, when he came to Hollywood in the 1970s from his beloved New York, he fell into the stereotypical decadent life, doing drugs and dating an adult film actress that starred in the X-rated Emmanuelle films. Then one day he saw a vision of Jesus on the beach. Peter would say, "No one said a word when I did a thousand bucks of cocaine, but when I saw Jesus in Malibu, everyone said 'are you crazy?'" Peter was married to his wife Connie when I met him, and we all got to watch his sons Josh and Stephen grow up on our sets and to meet his daughter Lauren from his first marriage.
It was because of Peter that I got to have my own family for working for him for years gave me that stability that is often elusive in Hollywood. I had been doing well as a screenwriting writing scripts for every studio which never got made. A child of television, I was also writing network pilots and Peter had read an NBC show I wrote for comedian Louie Anderson and asked to have lunch with me in the NBC Commissary. There, I was reunited with a girl I had had a crush on at Duke, NBC executive Linda Mancuso who would later become the president of Peter's company. (She had been a stage manager of the one play I acted in, The Beeple, playing a bumble bee, and I blushed as Linda spray painted my stripes over yellow long underwear.) Peter offered me to come on the new spin-off he was doing "Saved By the Bell: The New Class" for the first 13 episodes. I only knew what “Saved By the Bell” was because my then girlfriend Natalie would wake me up on Saturday mornings by watching this silly show about a group of friends from Bayside High School that was strangely watchable. To me, it had that addictive quality of TV shows I grew up watching like "The Brady Bunch."
I was nervous about doing TV which back then was still frowned upon in the feature world. But my agent Rob Carlson said it might be good for me to be around people instead of staying at home writing features alone. He assured me the show would probably only last 13 episodes anyway. Rob was not the only one who predicted “Saved By The Bell's demise. The show was conceived as a co-venture between Brandon Tartikoff at NBC and Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney as a fast-paced show that could compete on Saturday mornings with cartoons. There was an order of 70, but after the first seven shows, Disney pulled out because Katzenberg didn’t think the show had more stories than that. Saved by the Bell and its various spin-offs ended up with almost 900 episodes. Despite never having the chemistry of the original cast, "Saved By the Bell: The New Class" went for multiple seasons and was throughout the 90s, the kickoff to the popular TNBC lineup.
I also wrote pilots for Peter’s company and was finishing up an hour called "Hawaii High" when I paused as I was in Little Rock working with the Clinton campaign. (Long story, but I had helped persuade Clinton's adviser George Stephanopoulos that the Arkansas Governor go after young people by putting him on MTV.) Peter called me to ask for the latest draft on Election Night just as the Secret Service and their dogs were searching the place for bombs. When we were doing a show with an anti-smoking message on Bell, Peter told me to call up my buddy Clinton and ask him to be on the show. I thought he was kidding, but Peter insisted and so I called The White House, and told George this crazy idea. To my shock, he did not hang up, but said he would check. George called back and though they were working on a Mid-east peace deal, asked if I would like The President to come in person or tape a message. Just thinking of how Peter might react if President Clinton was a no-show, I said a taped message would be fine, and sure enough, at the end of the episode Bill Clinton urges young viewers not to smoke.
Because of the stability of working on Peter's shows, after a few seasons, I proposed to Natalie and we bought our dream house on Londonderry Place above Sunset Plaza. Natalie soon was pregnant, and my good friend Jenji Kohan who I met at NBC while she was working on Fresh Prince assured me babies brought good luck. Sure enough, Peter called me into his office and said he had a new show idea which he wanted us to write together.
"Malibu!" he shouted, as if that was the show itself. He then explained it would be about a cool, hip father who is living in Malibu and owns a restaurant, and he has to take in his teenage sons while their mother was working in Saudi Arabia. I still was pretty unsure of what Peter was envisioning, and it didn't help when he said "there's this surfer named Murray and he has all these crazy ideas," but I got that would be the Screech-like character. Peter said we had a meeting with Dick Askins who was running Tribune in a week and I should come up with a story and some episodes. As I headed towards the door, Peter shouted "Malibu, CA!" as if that title change might explain everything.
To my shock, the next week Peter and I pitched "Malibu, CA" to Dick Askins and we got an order commitment of 26 episodes on air. Jenji's brother David Kohan who had an office at NBC next to Peter had a pilot he had written with his partner Max Mutchnick and they had gotten an order of one for their show "Will & Grace." What Peter and Dick knew was that foreign markets were becoming important, and a California beach show could have international appeal. With our kid on the way, Peter cautioned me to have the first episodes broken before Campbell arrived because after that, he knew I would be distracted.
We ended up making the show with a fake beach on the KTLA soundstage next to Judge Judy and though it would get picked up for 26 more episodes, "Malibu, CA" never really clicked. As the original “Saved By the Bell” girls had gone from wholesome to playing some racy parts with Tiffani Amber Theissen as the bad girl on “Melrose Place” and Elizabeth Berkley starring in “Showgirls,” Peter seemed empowered to cast Malibu differently. We soon had a former Playboy playmate as part of this new gang, and instead of crowds of high school students, we had squads of Marines showing up to our tapings which included guest stars like the former Miss Universe and Playmate of the Year Victoria Silvstedt.
Shortly after “Malibu, CA” was mercifully canceled after 52 episodes, I started thinking about why I had come to Hollywood in the first place— to tell stories that meant something. I increasingly started to feel like Holden Caufield’s older brother who wrote one good short story, and then drove around the Hollywood Hills in a Jaguar. (Okay, I had a BMW convertible with vanity plates with my pen name C.K. Lander. which I had used to write my first short story “St. Elmo’s Fire” in college.). Perhaps seeking a way to redeem myself, I ended up accepting a serendipitous job offer to teach screenwriting at the University of Pittsburgh. Natalie and I sold our dream house, thinking we would soon move back, put our stuff in storage, and as we headed for Pittsburgh, my friend Jenji called what we were doing “brave.”
Tragically, shortly after I started teaching at Pitt, Linda Mancuso passed away way too soon of cancer . At her memorial at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Peter apologized to Linda and the 500 attendees for "Malibu, CA." Peter and Linda had built the Engel Empire together and it was a deep loss. Looking for a new chapter in his life and intrigued that I was teaching, Peter accepted a job offer at Liberty University as the Dean there. But after a year, Peter decided academia was not for him, and he returned and found another success in producing the show "Last Comic Standing," the kickstarted the careers of Amy Schumer, Roy Wood Jr., and Taylor Tomlinson.
I would keep in touch with Peter over the years, and he even had a cameo in "My Tale of Two Cities" our documentary about Pittsburgh reinventing itself. When I told Peter I was working with city leaders to help the city become a production hub, he cautioned me that I was trying to recreate what I had in LA in Western PA and it would not work. We filmed Peter in the place he was living at, right on the beach. Even though he was getting on in years, Peter still had that gleam of Zack Morris about him and was going to make every moment count before the bell rang.
Peter and I emailed every now and then, but I still feel like I never felt I got a chance to thank him for all he did for me. I have so many photos of the casts and crews over the years, and have been frustrated that I don’t have one of Peter and myself outside of these screenshots from My Tale of Two Cities. In that way, Peter really was a behind the scenes player— The Man Behind The Bell. But I hope he realized from all the posts I saw when he passed from others who worked with him, just how much he meant to me and so many others.