The Highs and Lows of Hugh Wilson

Few people have created so many well-known and well-loved projects and yet remained so anonymous as writer/ director/ producer Hugh Wilson (1943-2018).

Wilson started out as an ad-man; by 1973 he was the president of the prominent Atlanta-based Burton-Campbell Agency. On the side he had also written a directed a naughty sex comedy called The Bagel Report in 1972. (It was actually rated X, but that was back when the standards were very different). Then he made a major, and probably terrifying career shift. He was hired as a writer by MTM Enterprises, the production company of Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker. He started by penning some episodes of The Bob Newhart Show (1976) which led rapidly to being a co-producer of The Tony Randall Show (1977-78), and then he sold his own idea, which was WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-82). One-two-three, like that! In between, he co-wrote and directed a tv movie called The Chopped Liver Brothers, starring familiar character Philip Bruns.

In 1983 he wrote the movie Stroker Ace for Burt Reynolds and Lonnie Anderson. This led to him being able to write and direct a string of comedies, including at least a couple of major hits, including Police Academy (1984); Rustler’s Rhapsody (1985); Burglar (1987) with Whoopi Goldberg; Guarding Tess (1994) with Shirley MacLaine and Nicholas Cage; Down Periscope (1996) with Kelsey Grammer (just writer); The First Wives Club (1996) with Bette Midler, Diane Keaton, and Goldie Hawn (just director); Southie (1998) with Donnie Wahlberg (just producer); Blast from the Past (1999) with Brendon Fraser and Alicia Silverstone; Dudley Do-Right (1999) with Fraser; and the baseball story Mickey (2004) with Harry Connick Jr (just director, it was written by John Grisham).

Meanwhile he had not neglected television. In the gap between Burglar and Guarding Tess he had creator and produced four short-lived sit-coms: Easy Street (1986-87) with Lonnie Anderson, the critically acclaimed Frank’s Place (1987-88) starring Tim Reid, The Famous Teddy Z (1989-90) with Jon Cryer and Alex Rocco, and the inevitable The New WKRP in Cincinnati (1991-93). He was also one of the writers on the John Milius miniseries The Rough Riders (1997) about Teddy Roosevelt and his unit in the Spanish-American War. Wilson later wrote and directed a TV movie in 2000 called The Contender, about a rich kid who decides to become a boxer.

By the ’90s Wilson had moved to Charlottesville, where he occasionally taught at the University of Virginia.