Roseanne Barr has broken her silence on Chuck Lorre’s memoir claims about working on her self-titled sitcom.
“Unbelievably — I don’t think you’ll hear me say this often — but Tom Arnold is telling the truth for once,” Barr, 73, told The Hollywood Reporter about her ex-husband, 67, in an interview published on Tuesday, October 20. “Talk about the paradigm switch here. Tom Arnold is defending me. I have to thank him for that. That’s the first time he’s done something right by me in his f***ing life. Thanks, Tom.”
Lorre, 74, worked as a writer on Roseanne from 1990 to 1992. (The sitcom aired for 10 seasons on ABC from 1988 to 1997.)
In his recent memoir, Sitcom, Lorre claimed that he experienced a “cruel” and toxic environment on the show’s set, alleging that Barr was often hostile toward the writers and that the writing team endured 70-hour work weeks as a “punishment.”
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The TV producer also claimed that writers were forced to ghostwrite scripts for Arnold, who was Barr’s husband at the time, and did not receive credit for their work. (Arnold and Barr were married from 1990 to 1994. He served as a writer, actor and producer on Roseanne during their relationship.)
“[Roseanne’s original head writer, Danny Jacobson,] showed me a sloppy, hand-scribbled couple of pages and explained this was a ‘script’ by the show’s new executive producer, Tom Arnold,” Lorre alleged. “It had been part of Danny’s job to write real scripts and put Tom’s name on the front page — as if Tom had written them.”
Arnold denied the ghostwriting claim in a response to Entertainment Weekly.
“I never would put my name on a script that [Lorre] wrote,” he told the outlet before sharing “how it went on the show.”
“Roseanne and I sat around talking about what we wanted to do in the next season, or maybe some ideas we had that’d be fun episodes, or groundbreaking, or whatever our bulls*** was, and I’d write them down. We kind of doodled around. And then, you know, in probably June, the head writer and the writers would come back and the show starts shooting in August,” Arnold claimed, adding that “every writer’s fingerprints” were on the scripts by the time they were done.
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“They all work on everything,” he said. “Even the guys that are brought in to be the punch-up guys, the joke guys, everybody in the room at some point is pitching different things.”
Despite Arnold’s denial, Jacobson corroborated Lorre’s claims.
“In the middle of the second season of Roseanne, Tom Arnold came around, and it was a headache,” Arnold recalled. “It impeded the process. [Barr] was all about him and wanted him to be the warm-up guy. I said, ‘You know, you can’t just be a standup and go do warm-up.’ Anyway, that was a disaster. She bullied me into letting him write a script, which as Chuck described, was exactly right. So it was really — it was a bad energy on the show.”
Jacobson continued, “What happened is, [Barr] said, ‘You gotta let him write a script. I want you to let him write a script to prove himself.’ So we sat in the writers’ room, and it was a very small writers’ room. We sat in there and we pitched him out a story. Beat by beat … he had an approved outline, because that’s the first step. You don’t go to a script unless you have one. So he handed in a script, and it was terrible.”
The producer added, “But the script thing was actually a thing. I said, ‘Of course he didn’t write it. Of course he didn’t write it.’ But the truth is, on a lot of shows, people hire their friends. Sometimes it works out, but very often it doesn’t.”
