Aside from perhaps the dubious hairstyles and the VCR-referencing dialogue, 1991’s City Slickers is still a strongly relatable movie about a man nearing his fortieth birthday and contemplating mid-life and what brings him happiness. Starring Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Jack Palance, the movie follows a trio of unhappy Manhattan yuppies on a two-week cattle drive.

“I’m so relieved when a movie works well today because it’s so easy for it not to,” said screenwriter Lowell Ganz. “We attended a screening with Billy a couple of years ago and the audience responded as if they had never seen it before — just a delight.”

“I never think in terms of what we would have done differently,” added Ganz when asked what they would do differently if they had the chance to remake City Slickers thirty years after the original. “Maybe we wouldn’t have killed Curly (Jack Palance).” In retrospect, Babaloo Mandel added, “To make it today, you’d probably need more women and people of color in the movie.”

In addition to City Slickers, Ganz and Mandel also have credits on Splash, Spies Like Us, Parenthood (1989), A League of Their Own, Fever Pitch, Edtv, and City Slickers II, among others.

The Idea Behind City Slickers

The initial spark of an idea actually came from Billy Crystal, who pitched us the premise. “We hadn’t met him yet,” said Ganz, “but he knew our work and we knew his work. So he invited us to a meeting and he pitched a one-liner, or elevator pitch, and wanted to know if we were interested.”

Lowell Ganz

It’s been argued that screenplays work best when writers add a personal element to the story.

Ganz said he personally most identified with Mitch (Billy Crystal), who sold advertising time on the radio, or Bill (Daniel Stern), who worked at a supermarket for his father-in-law. “Those are vivid, frightening, alternative realities for me,” joked the writer about these alternative careers. “I escaped those paths through luck.”

“I don’t identify with any of those guys. Mitch was in a happy place, in a career that made him depressed. I was in a dream career. My father never cheated on my family — he was always there,” answered Mandel. “Those are just three characters we created.”

Writing Broad Comedies

“I don’t know if our comedic style is unique, but our movies tend to be very sincere. They’re not satirical. You are supposed to believe these characters exist in the real world,” pondered Ganz. “I don’t know if that is unique to us, but it’s specific to our writing.”

In one film example, Splash, the majority of the story is real except for one fictional aspect, which is Daryl Hannah inviting Tom Hanks to live life as a mermaid. But, if that were real, “this is how it would happen,” proclaimed the duo. “Tom’s relationship to the event is sincere. We believe in our characters. They’re real people in a real world.”

Aside from their movies, the writers also worked in television, on classic projects like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and Hiller and Diller. 

“The lack of time in TV writers’ rooms made us light on our feet and agile, so by the time we were writing screenplays, we had a very good reputation for not getting frozen. There are a lot of notes in the business, and there are some very talented writers who freeze up if the movie can’t be done a certain way. TV is a great training ground for being able to do that because you have to, and you have to do it quickly.”

A Perfect Writing Team

Logistically, Ganz and Mandel work as an integrated team, chatting from opposite sides of the desk. “Every word in every one of our scripts came out of a session in which we were in the same room at the same time. One of us might get an idea driving to the office, but basically it’s very tight and conversational at work,” said the team. “Writing is the last thing we do. We’re talking writers and edit as we speak.”

“It works because we have faith in each other. Neither one of us has a different agenda in the room. We don’t sell to each other. We don’t say, ‘No, you’re not getting the brilliance of what I’m saying…’” joked Ganz. Mandel added, “That usually ends with partners breaking up.”

Babaloo Mandel

This non-competitive writing approach also doesn’t have a single individual who makes the decisions, but rather a single sensibility. “If either one of us has an idea, we can tell instantly whether or not the other person sparks to it. If that’s the case, the one who has the idea doesn’t like it anymore either.”

Across their lifetime of screenwriting work, the writers have learned and re-learned many rules of writing. “Writing is rewriting,” they opined. “We don’t produce or direct our own films, so even if it was our nature to be bull-headed, we don’t have that luxury.”

No Middle Ground

“We used to have a sign that said, ‘No one knows anything — especially us.’ It would hang above the desk in our old office just so, no matter how many hits you got, we didn’t want to fall in the trap of  ‘We know the code.’” The writers said they learned this after the release of their first movie in 1982, Night Shift, which starred Henry Winkler and Michael Keaton.

The creatives said this truth found them when the Producers promised this movie would be bigger than Superman (1978), “but when they opened Night Shift, you could hear the wind whistling through the theater. You could hear people breathe in the audience,” they joked.

Needless to say, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel have seen many industry changes during their long careers.

“I’m always nervous to address this subject, because I could fall into that ‘get off my lawn’ old-guy attitude, but it’s not like it used to be. When we talk to much younger screenwriters, we tell them what the business was like thirty years ago, they’re shocked and jealous.”

“If you check the recent Academy Awards nominations, you’ve kind of lost that middle ground movie. Not even award-winning movies, but the movie between something dark and ‘arthousey’ and a Marvel movie.”

They added, “There’s a great gap between those two genres where most of people’s all-time favorite movies reside. Most of our career took place when big studios embraced the kind of movie we were doing. Popular movies, but no one was flying.”

Writing Characters

All in all, despite changes in the industry, the writers always write people. One could argue the type of movies they wrote have gone to television, but in terms of staying relevant, true characters are always appreciated no matter the decade.

“When we wrote Fever Pitch, about young people, no one told us those weren’t relatable characters. We were in our 50s, but we don’t think about it much. We do have kids in their 20s and 30s, and we’re very close to them and observe them.”

In terms of style, the writers see different perspectives in their films. “Night Shift is written by kids, almost like feelings we had leftover from high school. I think we’re writing in the same style, but from a more grown up perspective.”

Curly (Jack Palance)

“When we wrote Night Shift, we couldn’t have written Parenthood, or City Slickers. We would have written them, but they would have been less mature, and probably sillier than they were. If anything, we’ve striven to be closer to life as we’ve gone along in our careers.”

Another form of wisdom from the team comes from jokes in the room. Just because one person says something that makes the other laugh, it doesn’t necessarily reach the script unless it’s also serving a truth for the film. “It’s perspective more than style,” said Ganz. 

Screenwriting Misfits

In the good ol’ days, when people like Ron Howard, Penny Marshall or Billy Crystal had deals with the studios, the writers could talk to them about a project, then they would approach the studio, and the movie would essentially be in the works.

For City Slickers, they discussed the idea of “running of the bulls” to start the movie. They pitched this idea in Billy Crystal’s office. Billy loved the idea so much he ran down to Martin Shafer’s office, and Martin loved the idea so much he started to book rooms for the crew in Pamplona. “He had that freedom,” said the duo. “If we tell that story to a writer now, they would look at you like you just landed from Neptune.”

Back then, they described all screenwriters as misfits. Today people are more professional and train more to become writers where back in the day, most writers fell into the industry. “It’s the difference between a wildcat oil excavation and actually being a geologist.”

Bonnie Rayburn (Helen Slater)

“We were never dissatisfied with the movies we were seeing. Great writers see something and decide it needs a new approach. They take it somewhere else. I don’t think we moved the form or expanded the film landscape, particularly. I just think we brought a lot of craft and commitment to what we do. I’m still waiting to meet the geniuses, but there are a lot of people who do the craft and can do a difficult job well.”

As for breaking in, the writers advise novice creatives to “be lucky.” For longevity, they tell writers to “be agile and light on your feet.” The team added, “Just get a toe in the door so you can get the rest of the foot in at some point. You don’t know what the path is, so take any industry job you can get. Any kind of writing is better practice than staying home and writing alone without any professional input. Be where they’re making it, even if you’re bringing them coffee. Just be around a company that makes movies you like.”