Bios: Marshall Karp

It’s been a great life so far.

I’ve been a writer all my life. Commercials, TV sitcoms, a play, a movie and nobody wanted to know much about me. Now I’m an author, and people are stalking me. Well, maybe not stalking, but they sure have a lot of questions.

I was born in Manhattan, but spent the first four years of my life in Schenectady, NY. My family then moved to West New York, N.J., a small factory town across the river from New York City. Happily, I had lots of relatives across that river and spent a lot of time in the city. Uptown, downtown, Brooklyn, The Bronx and Queens. In fact, my movie, Just Looking, is about a 14-year-old boy who is fascinated with sex, gets caught spying on his mother and stepfather, and gets sent to Queens to live with his Jewish aunt and his Italian uncle for the summer.

The boy, Lenny Levine, is still determined to learn about sex, but it’s 1955, so there’s no Playboy, no MTV, no R rated movies to sneak into. Just some National Geographics and a few equally determined 14-year-old boys and girls, who did exactly what I did when I spent my summers in Queens. They start a Sex Club. They don’t do it (hey… it’s the 50’s). They just obsess over it. So, if you want to know about my early years, rent the movie. It was directed by my friend Jason Alexander.

At Memorial High School in WNY, NJ, my favorite English teacher, Cornelius O’Connor, encouraged me to write. But I knew my parents would be happier if I pursued a real job, so off I went to Rutgers University, to study biology and become a dentist. I flunked biology. I’m also hopelessly clumsy. I decided not to apply to dental school.

Fortunately, I was doing a lot better in my English classes (Thank you, Dr. Arthur Young). And I had a lot of fun writing for the daily paper, The Rutgers Targum.

I graduated during the Vietnam era with a BA in English and 110 percent chance of getting drafted. I didn’t dodge the army. Just the war. I joined the National Guard. It wasn’t a political statement. It’s this phobia I have about being in a jungle with people shooting at me. I spent six months in active duty, most of which was in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I learned to build bridges, wrote letters to the girl back home, drove the 860 mile round trip to Chicago with my friend Barry Labovitz as many weekends as we could, and not much else.

By the time I got out of the army my girlfriend had a job as an advertising copywriter, so I got one too. And I spent the next 22 years in the advertising business. I got off to a fast start, and was one of those Young Turks. In 1975, along with my art director, Andy Langer, I created two award-winning campaigns.

The first was for Mutual of New York Life Insurance. The spots were more like 60-second films than commercials. They featured people who appeared to have bright futures, until you find out that the breadwinner of the family died, leaving them without enough money to realize those futures. The first spot starred John Travolta, who was 21 and not yet known. He appears to be a young college kid on his way to school. Then he stops at a luncheonette, unlocks the door, and starts sweeping the floor. (“Sometimes the saddest things about a man’s death is to watch his dreams die with him.”) It won me a bunch of awards and young Mr. Travolta did pretty well himself.

Immediately following came the successful “Thank You, Paine Webber” campaign. It won awards, put Paine Webber on the map, and had a major impact on my career. I hope this is boring the shit out of you, because maybe it will stop people from asking so many questions about what I did before The Rabbit Factory.

In advertising, it seems that the punishment for being a good copywriter is to promote you and tell you not to write. I became Executive V.P/Executive Creative Director supervising about a hundred other people doing creative work on Sprite, Grey Poupon, Gillette, Citibank Visa, and dozens of other accounts. Sounds exciting, but it left no time during the day to write any commercials on my own.

So I started writing at night. In 1982, my play Squabbles was produced at The Waldo Astoria Dinner Theatre in Kansas City, Mo. The director, Larry Carpenter, then helped me reshape it, and took it to The American Stage Festival in New Hampshire, where it got great reviews in the Boston media, and was published by Samuel French. It’s a comedy, and I guess it’s timeless, because a quarter of a century later, it has played in nearly a thousand theatres around the world. And it’s still going. (For those of you who want to buy Squabbles, either to read or to act out in your garage, please don’t buy a grungy old used copy from the online scalpers. You can get a nice new clean one much cheaper if you go to the publisher at www.samuelfrench.com.)

When the TV networks and Columbia Pictures TV read Squabbles they wanted to turn it into a sitcom, and I got hired to write the pilot. It didn’t fly, so they asked me to write more pilots. I did, and in 1985 CBS picked one up for series. But I wasn’t ready to quit my day job in advertising. Then in 1987, another pilot got picked up for series. I took a shot and having never worked in the TV business before, I became producer/head writer of Everything’s Relative starring Jason Alexander. The show crashed and burned before the end of the first season.

But failure in show business isn’t a bad thing. Nobody says that loser had a show that got cancelled. They say he got a show On The Air. He must be good. Let’s hire him for an even bigger job. So off I went to L.A. to be a writer-producer on NBC’s hit show Amen with Sherman Helmsley. In the grand tradition of Hollywood, failure led to better things and I was plummeting my way to success.

It was fun (except for the fact that I didn’t want to uproot my wife and kids, so I left them in New York.) I got to work with, and learn from, some legendary TV writers and some talented incredibly actors, like Anna Maria Horsford (for dozens of episodes) and Cuba Gooding, Jr. (for one).

After Amen I worked on Honor Bound with the late Ray Sharkey and Baby Talk with George Clooney and Connie Sellecca. But by now, I was homesick for my wife and kids, so I headed back East.

I spent a few more years writing for TV, but there’s not a lot of work in New York, and I didn’t want to go back to L.A. So I went back into advertising. I became Exec. VP/Exec. Creative Director at McCann-Erickson International overseeing global businesses like UPS, Gillette, Esso, Coca-Cola, and Nestle.

And then, along came the Internet.

Once again, I switched careers.

In 1994, I opened Compelling Content, an Internet advertising agency. I created and marketed websites for Chase Manhattan Bank, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Schering-Plough, Hearst, Prodigy and others. Five years later I sold the company. I spent the next year in indentured servitude working for the people who bought it.

Then in the fall of 2000, two wonderful things happened. My film, Just Looking, was released by Sony Classics. And I got fired by the people who bought Compelling Content.

At long last, I had time to write a novel.

It took five years. From hiring an editor, to shuffling index cards, to first draft, second draft, finding an agent, finding a publisher, fifth draft, sixth draft, to the day I finally walked into a bookstore and said to the clerk “do you have The Rabbit Factory?”

He tapped into his computer and said, “by Marshall Karp?”

“Yeah, that guy,” I said.

“We’re sold out, and four people have it on order,” he said. “Do you want me to order you a copy?”

I was about to answer him, when my wife dragged me out of the store.

“Why did you do that,” I said.

“Because I know you. You were going to whip out your driver’s license, show him who you were, and ask for the home phone numbers of the four people who ordered the book, so you could thank them.”

God, the woman knows me so well.

So, that’s my bio. From birth through The Rabbit Factory. I left out a lot of parts. And I’m sure I’ll add them from time to time.

But you get the theme. It was right there at the top of the page.

It’s been a great life so far.