Robert Wuhl

Gotham Globe, the Durham Bulls, and Al Stump

Before the Emmys, Wuhl had become a recognizable face in other people's films. The Hollywood Reporter sums up the roles he is still stopped on the street for as Bull Durham, Batman and Cobb; the Napa Valley Register adds Good Morning Vietnam, Mistress and Blaze to the list.

In Tim Burton's 1989 Batman he played Alexander Knox, a reporter for the Gotham Globe. In Bull Durham he gave what PineStraw Magazine calls "the Gettysburg Address of pitching mound speeches," a scene he ad-libbed around some candlesticks. In Cobb (1994) he played the sports writer Al Stump opposite Tommy Lee Jones as Ty Cobb, and Variety's review called him "a dedicated second banana" to Jones.

The Art of the Sport Super Agent

In September 2018 Wuhl sat down with Mike Tollin and a Hollywood Reporter writer over eggs benedict at John O'Groats, a Westside diner in Los Angeles, to go back over how Arli$$ was made. The first thing he admitted was where the framing came from. Each episode opened with Arliss Michaels saying, "My name is Arliss Michaels, I represent athletes, these are my stories," as a mocked-up book called The Art of the Sport Super Agent spun into frame. Around 1995 Wuhl had read Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal and did not believe a word of it. His idea was to let the agent tell you what happened, then show what really happened.

Tollin's one-line pitch to the studio executive David Picker was "The Larry Sanders Show of sports." Wuhl remembers it as "the This Is Spinal Tap of sports." Tollin had first imagined a sports documentary maker in the Spinal Tap mold; Wuhl said to make him an agent instead, at a time when agents were becoming the power people in the game. He pointed to the Yankees' fight to sign the 1991 draft pick Brien Taylor and to the fraud convictions of the agents Norby Walters and Lloyd Bloom. "I thought we could tell a satire of the sports world through the eyes of a self-serving agent," he said.

The show was first meant as a limited series with Arliss telling his stories from jail. When Chris Albrecht took over HBO's original programming, Tollin recalled, he told them the good news was that he was now in charge of the show and the bad news was that he did not like any of the six scripts. The pilot that aired was the seventh script, and HBO paid what Tollin called "the princely sum of $2,500" for it. Real agents fed the writers stories; Tollin named Dennis Gilbert as the biggest contributor in the early days. For the office, Wuhl cast Jim Turner, whom he knew from the early days of MTV, as the ex-athlete Kirby Carlisle, Michael Boatman as the financial adviser Stanley Babson, and Sandra Oh as the secretary Rita Wu, a part that came down to Oh or Lauren Graham. He said a diverse cast was in the forefront of everything and was not an accident.

Seven Seasons on the Bubble at HBO

Arli$$ ran on HBO from 1996 to 2002, seven seasons and 80 original episodes, with Wuhl as star, writer and executive producer and Tollin as co-creator and producer. Multichannel News also credits Wuhl as the show's creator. Athlete cameos were part of what HBO had bought. For the pilot the target was Shaquille O'Neal, and Tollin got him by promising his agent Leonard Armato a spot on screen beside him, which is why the two share a walk-and-talk shot framed so tightly that Armato could not be cut out. By the end, Tollin said, the show was approaching 400 cameos, four or five an episode.

The stories went darker than a half-hour comedy usually does: domestic abuse, steroids, alcoholism, gay and transgender athletes, unwanted pregnancies. One episode put Ed Asner in the booth as a Dodgers broadcaster losing his memory to Alzheimer's. Wuhl said it was inspired by the Baltimore Orioles broadcaster Chuck Thompson, who was losing his eyesight, and by his own family: "My father-in-law died of Alzheimer's. I knew how to script it." Another episode, drawn from a story by the agent Arn Tellum, had Arliss trade a client out of the National League to win his own fantasy league. Wuhl said that was the lesson the real agents taught him: "Numbers are meaningless. They have no emotional context."

The series was never safe. Tollin called it "the original 'on the bubble' show every year," and the two of them had an assistant, Mason Gordon, collect every fan letter into thick binders to leave on Albrecht's desk. Multichannel News reported that Albrecht had once been set to cancel it and gave it a reprieve after his driver spoke up for the show. The seventh season was its best in the ratings, averaging an 8.1 rating and a 12 share within HBO homes, and the final episode on September 8, 2002 drew a 9.7 rating and a 14 share. HBO still declined an eighth season. "Our feeling was [that Arli$$] was a success by anybody's standard," Albrecht said in a statement. "Things can't stay on forever, and it seemed this was a good place to end the show."

The episode that closed the series, in which Arliss walks away from his office and his phone after a friend's death, was not written as a finale. Wuhl said it had been third from the end of the season and was moved to the last slot so that, if the show was cancelled, the ending would be ambiguous enough to stand. Of the reception, he said: "We were pretty polarizing, and that was pretty cool." In 2018 HBO put all seven seasons on HBO Go and HBO Now, and the two men said there had been no talks about a revival, though Wuhl made clear he would take one.

Assume the Position at New York University

After Arli$$, Wuhl turned a lifelong habit of arguing about American history into a stage act. His HBO specials Assume the Position with Mr. Wuhl and Assume the Position 201 were cut from lectures he gave to New York University students, playing a history professor who tests the class on myths that have hardened into fact. Before NYU he had tried the material at UCLA, the University of Southern California, Loyola Marymount and California State University. As he told The New York Times, in a line the Napa Valley Register quoted, "Spinning history is a way of making it fun, and if you make it entertaining and educational, you have something special."

By the summer of 2011 the specials had become a touring stand-up show of the same name, a few dates a month, which reached the Napa Valley Opera House for three shows on the first weekend of July that year. Wuhl described it to the Register as "an illustrative monologue" and said, "It's about how history as we know it comes down to who's telling it." At the same time he was hosting The Robert Wuhl Show on the Westwood One radio network, five days a week from noon to 3 p.m. Pacific, a program that started with sports and widened to media and entertainment.

The Sunshine Boys in the Sandhills and a Park Bench on Earth-89

In October 2017 Wuhl went to Moore County, North Carolina, to headline Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys for the Judson Theatre Company, which stages two plays a year at Owens Auditorium on the Sandhills Community College campus with a familiar television or film actor at the center of each. His fellow Sunshine Boy was Don Most, Ralph Malph on Happy Days. The run was October 19 to 22, and the company's custom has the cast come out to the lobby after every performance to meet the audience.

Two years later he put the Knox press card back on. In The CW's Arrowverse crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths, which ran across the 2019-2020 season, Wuhl appeared as Alexander Knox on a park bench on Earth-89, the world of the 1989 film, reading a Gotham City Gazette with the headline "Batman Captures Joker." He looks up at the bat signal against a red sky and says, "I hope you're watching, big guy." Newsweek noted that in the crossover a red sky marks a world about to be destroyed, which put Tim Burton's Gotham on the list.

A $2,500 Pilot Fee and No Net Worth Figure

No reputable outlet has published an estimate of Wuhl's wealth that shows its inputs, and the figures on celebrity net worth sites cite none. The one disclosed number in the record is Tollin's $2,500 fee from HBO for the pilot script, which says nothing about seven seasons of pay as star, writer and executive producer, Oscar writing work, or film roles. This article therefore gives no figure.

Sources

• Robert Wuhl | Emmy Awards and Nominations | Television Academy
• Billy Crystal on His Late Manager, David Steinberg: ‘He Was One of a Kind’
• 'Arli$$': Robert Wuhl and Mike Tollin on Why It's Time for a Revival
• HBO Hangs Up on Arli$$ | Next TV | Multichannel News
• Watch Arli$$ | HBO Max
• ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ Explained: Why Robert Wuhl Has Returned as Alexander Knox - Newsweek
• Cobb
• ‘Assume the Position’: Comedian Wuhl deconstructs history with a smile | Art & Theater | napavalleyregister.com
• Enter, Stage Left - PineStraw Magazine