Television Producer Cancels 'Lost Cookies' Tube Debut

Thomas Kramer '78 lost his chance for television fame this week when producers at WCVB-TV in Needham decided his videotaped play, "Lost Cookies," was unsuitable for general audience viewing.

"They canned it because it was a little too raunchy," Kramer said yesterday.

Kramer wrote the play in conjunction with Adam Bellow, a Princeton University student, about Harvard undergraduate dormitory life. After its premiere at Eliot House last December, William Lull, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offered to produce the play in videotape form for television.

Lull gave the script to officials at WCVB, who made an offer to show the videotape as part of the weekly series "Nightshift."

After Lull and his co-producers spent about $10,000 making the tape, Dawkins, the producer of "Nightshift," decided the "tenor of the piece was not acceptable for general broadcasting."

Dawkins said yesterday he particularly objected to a scene in the play in which a character threw a box of contraceptives on a table.

Kramer said he believes the decision was unfair because he had warned Dawkins about the play's questionable language and had also given him a script to read before Lull made the tape.

Dawkins told Kramer and Lull he had read the play before Lull put it into production, but he admitted yesterday he had read only the first eight pages at that time because he believed they would be representative of the play as a whole.

"I figured we could work out the language problems after the tape was made," he added.

"The tragedy isn't that we're not going to be on T.V., but that a terrific cast had to spend 11 hours one night and 13 hours the next under the lights, and all we end up with is a pretty tape," Kramer said.

"We're going to take our tape and have a private party for the cast and call it at that," he added.