Knock a Guy for His $9000 Bed?  Don’t Be Ridiculous!
Bronson Pinchot of Perfect Strangers relishes being as zany as his roles

By Bill O’Halleren
Cover photo by Mario Casilli
Photo by Gene Trindl

Bronson Pinchot, that odd-talking immigrant Balki on ABC’s Perfect Strangers, is bouncing around his weird (by his own definition) West Los Angeles apartment, acting out highlights of his life story, with emphasis on the sitcom that he felt was stifling his career, the bit part that made him a celebrity and the impossible demands of local Hollywood girls, when suddenly a letter plops through his mail slot.

He tears it open, stares at a pair of enclosed pictures, then goes into a war dance.  "Beautiful!  More than I ever dreamed.  Oh, my God!"  In time he shares the pictures, which depict a bed with an ancient wooden canopy.  The paint seems faded.  At first glance it looks like something bequeathed by an eccentric aunt, something all the other relatives refused.  "It’s coming Friday and no matter what time it comes, I’m jumping right in.  You don’t understand, do you?"

The visitor understands a little better when it develops the bed costs about $9000 and is a prize example of painted 19^th-century Scandinavian furniture, which Pinchot (and in his words, "maybe three other nuts") avidly collects.  As such it joins the painted Scandinavian gateleg table and Vaslav, the painted chair, already in the apartment.  The chair is so named because in profile it resembles a pose the great Vaslav Nijinsky often struck, as Pinchot has already demonstrated.

Pinchot’s tastes are clearly not those of the Yuppies who abound in the neighborhood (at that moment he still hadn’t acquired a refrigerator), nor does he come from the same mold as so many actors who are also young, bright and currently hot.  "There are people around who play at being characters," Tom Miller, co-executive producer of Strangers notes.  "Bronson isn’t one of them.  Bronson is a character."

Miller cites the moment when the final of last season’s episodes was completed.  "I came on the set and Bronson was standing there with tears in his eyes.  He turned to me and said, ‘Mark is going back to New York tomorrow.  You have to stop him.’"  Miller explained that Mark Linn-Baker, who plays Balki’s uptight American cousin, was going back to New York because the show had completed its run.  "But why do we have to stop?" said Pinchot.  "Why don’t we keep making more shows?"  Miller offered explanations about waiting for network pickup, etc., but Pinchot, still teary-eyed, was unconvinced.

Actually, the production of last season’s six episodes was a drama all its own, a case of never have so few done so much so fast.  Miller recalls, "My partner, Bob Boyett, and I had pitched the series to Brandon Stoddard (president of ABC entertainment) for the 1986-87 season.  Brandon liked the idea but reminded us if we started in the fall, we’d be competing with a lot of new shows.  Then he said, ‘If you guys can make six shows real fast, I can put them on now’."

Stoddard dangled an enviable slot: Tuesdays, between the hits Who’s the Boss? and Moonlighting.  "Who wouldn’t jump at a chance like that?" says Miller.

But it was nail-chewing time all the way.  As director Joel Zwick recalls, "The cast assembled for the first time one morning, and three weeks later, that show was on the air.  We were often dubbing Tuesday shows on Monday afternoons.  One show was on the air a week after first reading."

Strangers did well in the ratings, won some nice reviews and a renewal for this season (with a new slot on Wednesdays).  And Pinchot, playing the strangest of shepherds, became a TV celebrity.  "What that means is whenever I leave my apartment and walk down the street, about 20 people, mostly teen-age girls, follow me, giggling and taking pictures."

Pinchot’s success really began with 20 lines in the movie "Beverly Hills Cop."  He played a haughty art-gallery clerk with an accent totally new to the human ear, and to everyone’s surprise, including his own, it was a show stopper.  New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaimed: "Pinchot does a sweetheart of a comedy turn as the amiably swishy Serge . . . Pinchot sets his own comedy rhythms and he steals a couple of scenes from [Eddie] Murphy."

To Pinchot, his career is divided into Before and After "Beverly Hills Cop."  "Nothing before, everything after."  That accent, which has been somewhat modified for Strangers, "was inspired by an Israeli makeup woman I knew who set out to become the most elegant, fashionable, sexiest, mysterious Mata Hari who ever lived.  She had developed a speech that was so elegant and syrupy . . . and I did a deliberately imperfect re-creation of it."

Within days of "Cop"’s preview, calls were coming in from reporters, and later from producers like Miller.  Pinchot was hot.  But there was a new problem.  "A month before ‘Cop’ came out, I had committed to NBC’s Sara series.  I was playing the fourth banana in a sitcom no one was watching.  On Sara, they didn’t want me to improvise or shine.  They kept a lid on what I was doing; they wouldn’t let me be funny."  Miller, who saw him in the show, agrees: "I thought he was being restrained."

Miller and Boyett, specializing in what they call "buddy" shows, had developed the Perfect Strangers idea during the 1984 Olympics, when, as Miller explains, "so many foreigners were encountering Americans in American settings."  When they saw Pinchot in "Cop," "we knew there was our innocent foreigner.  I have no idea what that accent is, but it’s hip, cute and it works."

Pinchot was offered the role in Strangers, and when Sara folded, the series was off and running.  There was an intensive search for a Larry that ended, according to Pinchot, "the moment Mark walked through the door."  Linn-Baker, as silent as Pinchot is talkative, believes "there was immediate rapport.  Our first scene clicked and after that it was easy."

Lise Cutter, who plays the cousins’ neighbor, Susan, says of Pinchot, "He’s insane.  But that’s OK.  He makes up all those crazy movements – all those antics.  He ad-libbed ‘Don’t be ridiculous’ one day and it became part of the show."

Linn-Baker is also, while looking totally stone-faced, able to reduce Pinchot to a laughing basket case.  "He flares his nostrils at me," Pinchot reports.  "He’s a big brother who can push my button.  He’s a devil."  Scenes have had to be redone up to 15 times because of Linn-Baker’s button pushing.  "There are times," Pinchot says, "when I think the producers are going to send us to bed without supper."

Pinchot, no matter the giggles, has all the toughness he needs.  "I had heard," says Zwick, "that Bronson was a notorious non-truster.  But he quickly appreciated the fact that I am smart.  Some actors can’t perceive intelligence or capability in others.  Bronson and Mark can."

There have been problems.  "If Bronson is frustrated or unhappy, you hear it immediately, though he’s not always that capable of explaining his frustration.  But whatever, he lets it all out.  Mark keeps it all in," Miller says, adding: "Bronson has never said, ‘I won’t’."

At the start, Pinchot even had doubts about that Balki sound.  "You just want somebody to do a funny little accent?" he asked Miller.  "Why don’t I do Greek?  Balki is a Greek shepherd."  (Actually, Balki is from a Mediterranean island country called Mypos.)

Miller says, "I then sat him down and told him this was a major career decision.  That special accent was his alone – like Andy Kaufman’s Latka on Taxi.  I urged him not to go far from it – and he agreed."  Miller adds that Pinchot could have done almost any accent, "because he has an uncanny ear.  After two minutes he can do anybody – and I’m not talking Rich Little here – I mean absolutely the essence.  He works from inside."

Pinchot was raised in South Pasadena, Cal.  His father, of Russian background, and his mother, Italian, are passionate fans of 19^th-century New England transcendentalism, and their son was named Bronson Alcott Pinchot after Louisa May’s father.  Pinchot earned top grades, won a scholarship to Yale and "immediately felt right at home in the New England environment."

He studied theater there (as did Linn-Baker, who never met him even though they had overlapping terms).  That was followed by some stage work in New York and supporting roles in the movies "Risky Business" and "The Flamingo Kid," where he was spotted by the casting director of "Beverly Hills Cop."

Pinchot, 27 and unmarried, mourns that success is crushing his love life.  "Before Sara, the shortest time I ever spent with a girl was at least a year.  Now it’s only about three weeks.  They can’t compete with a career.  Word will come that I have to go to New York or San Francisco and the girl will ask, ‘What about me?  Aren’t I important?’  Yes, you are, but my show, my show."

And he insists actresses are no more understanding than others.  "Besides, with actresses, there’s the problem of levels.  I’ll fall for a girl who’s a major star and I’m not, or I’ll fall for a girl who’s a little starlet and I’m above that.  This has been the most dramatic change in my life."

But he has hopes.  Pointing to the beloved antique table in his apartment, he observes: "When it’s unfolded it seats 10.  I figure when I get married I won’t have more than eight children.  Can’t you see all 10 of us sitting there?"  Yes.  And speaking in strange accents and laughing a lot.