Remembering Tom Cherones

Mark Hughes Cobb

Tuscaloosa News USA TODAY NETWORK

At the center of most wildly successful ventures, even as guitars flash and actors grandstand, there’s a calm middle, a rock, a gravity, a nucleus around which arms spin, a prime from which numbers arise.

Tuscaloosa native Tom Cherones was the level-headed core of major sitcom hits, a novelist, painter, friend and mentor to fellow filmmakers, a husband, a father and grandfather. Due to his guiding hand, the “show about nothing” originally titled “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” became not just something, but an icon of pop culture, adding not only laughs but lexicon: Yadda yadda yadda; soup Nazi; and “master of my domain,” among them.

His laid-back demeanor guided him into and through numerous projects, where he was not only the consummate professional director, but someone who kept his head even as others around may have been losing theirs.

“He was definitely calming, and extremely confident,” said his wife, Carol E. Richards. “His demeanor and presence just let people know that it was all going to work out. When you don’t have that (on a set), it trickles down to everybody, and you feel it.”

Cherones, who directed 82 of the first five seasons of “Seinfeld” and 56 episodes of fellow NBC hit, “NewsRadio,” along with 23 episodes of “Ellen,” and other shows including “Caroline in the City,” died recently at his home in Oregon. He was 86.

The winner of Golden Globes, Peabodys and more, Cherones also directed and produced episodes of “Boston Common,” “Growing Pains” and “Ladies Man,” and held numerous other jobs in TV and film.

Show’s he directed and produced are ranked in lists, including those compiled by Rolling Stone and TV Guide, of the greatest sitcom episodes of all time, among them “Seinfeld”‘s “The Parking Garage,” “The Chinese Restaurant,” “The Contest,” and “NewsRadio”‘s “Arcade.”

The family business

Cherones favored Hawaiian shirts, and shunned ties, which he wore only on demand. One such time was in 2003, when he was inducted into Tuscaloosabased Alabama Stage and Sceen Hall of Fame, along with the legendary Nat “King” Cole. Former “Saturday Night Live” actor Victoria Jackson inducted him, on the Bean-Brown Theatre stage.

Cherones wasn’t in on the pilot, so it took him a few episodes to fully understand the groove of “Seinfeld.”

“One script was about this jacket Jerry liked, with the pink and white lining. That was the whole show. How silly is that?” Cherones said, in a 2003 The Tuscaloosa News interview.

In a sense, the family business was sharing pleasure. Cherones’ Greek immigrant grandfather opened and ran the Tuscaloosa Cafe, a steakhouse on what’s now University Boulevard. His dad operated a TV and radio repair shop that also sold records, Radio Electric Company, and helped maintain radio station WTBC.

Tom Cherones began working in documentary films, served in the U.S. Navy from 1961-65, then continued in public television, at the flagship WQED, in Pittsburgh.

With his second wife, writer and photographer Joyce Keener, they moved to Hollywood in 1975. It took him half a year to land his first gig, as a production manager on the soap opera “General Hospital.”

That led to some of the pieces of advice he gave students hoping to make the leap into TV and film: Take six months’ rent and a reliable car. Equally important: Have something on your resume.

Cherones helped with the latter especially, when the couple began offering a series of workshops at the University of Alabama, where he’d earned his master’s in telecommunication and film. For each of the semester’s visits, they’d chose one submitted script, seeking those that made production demands, but without unrealistic expectations, then cast not just actors but a dozen or more directors, producers, grips and yadda yadda yadda, and guide the process to a completed short film.

Cherones continued the UA classes — at no pay — for more than a decade, remarrying after Joyce died in 2006, to photographer and filmmaker Richards, who knew him first as an employer and friend. Richards served on all but the first of those UA workshops.

More than a decade leading young would-be filmmakers through the creation of short films opened doors for many now working in Hollywood, including Allan MacLeod. The Mobile native is a writer, actor and director with credits including “You’re the Worst,” “Parks and Recreation,” “UCB Comedy Originals,” “Drunk History.” In between other projects, he’s created a video/ podcast series titled “Walkin’ About with Allan MacLeod,” in which he interviews other artists while strolling Central Park, Hell’s Kitchen, Forest Lawn or West Hollywood. He can be seen in the bang-up opening to new Apple TV smash “Pluribus,” as one of the researchers who discovers the incoming anomaly.

With fellow then-student Matt Stewart, he wrote the first script Cherones chose, a comedy titled “Speck.” When MacLeod and others took the leap, Cherones helped open doors. Even though semi-retired from filmmaking, living mostly in Oregon, he’d kept an apartment, and ties of the non-fabric kind, in Hollywood. Cherones not only bolstered the young artist’s career, but kept he and his family in their personal lives.

“So many people from that class would never have followed their dreams of working in Hollywood if it wasn’t for Tom and his generosity,” “MacLeod said.

“He was the first person to make me believe I had the potential to make a living doing what I love. I’m lucky to have remained close friends with Tom and have him as a mentor as I’ve navigated the industry the last 20 years.”

In a social media post following news of Cherones’ death, MacLeod also added the salient note that Cherones did a spot-on, uncanny Donald Duck impression.

Huntsville native and then-theater student Michael Thomas Walker auditioned for and was cast in the title role of “Speck,” about a man who struggled to address reality, falling in love with a woman who didn’t, in real life, know he existed. Walker, who acted professionally out of college, including national tours of “Seussical,” as Horton, and “Hairspray,” as Edna, segued into academia, moving back close to home to teach acting at the University of Montevallo. He just this month accepted the new position of executive producer at Theatre Tuscaloosa, replacing Tina F. Turley, who retired last summer.

Interviewed during the process of “Speck,” Walker estimated his involvement was about 52 hours And what was his pay?

“Love,” Walker said, smiling. “And he’s getting paid twice as much as me,” Cherones said, laughing, in that 2002 interview. “Nobody’s getting paid, but they’re working like they’re getting $100,000 an hour.”

Walker is currently commuting from Homewood — he and his wife, actor Kate Feerick Walker, want to let their son finish third grade in his current school before Tuscaloosa house-hunting — while adjusting to his new office at Shelton State Community College.

“I did love getting to do that project with Tom. He was so kind to us,”he said. Walker recalled valuable lessons in verisimilitude, when filming at a local Mexican restaurant, where Speck watched his love object from afar. At 9 a.m., he was supposed to be eating chips and salsa. The student director advised he fake eat, but after the first take, Cherones stopped and asked why Walker wasn’t eating.

“He turned to everyone and said ‘Do it again, with chips,’ “ Walker said. But that was too much for the sound. Cherones told Walker to dunk the chips in water first, and eat them soggy.

“Before I could say a word he quipped, ‘No one said this would be easy,’ “ Walker said. The actor didn’t eat Mexican again for at least a month.

“Tom had a great way of being direct without being rude. And his sense of comic timing was great.”

Cherones also knew when to step in, and when to lay back.

“In Hollywood, I’d have 60 or 70 people working on a project like this,” Cherones said, in 2002. “Here, I have 15 students, but they’re all motivated.

“Everybody did multiple jobs. Everybody picked up garbage — literally.”

Tom Cherones and ‘NewsRadio’

Cherones knew not just everyone, but every job on a set. The only thing he wouldn’t tolerate was lack of professionalism. Tom Spezialy worked on the pilot of “Seinfeld,” and though Cherones came on after that, they worked together for years, in production. Cherones let him go, because he wanted to encourage Spezialy to pursue his passion: writing. The director’s vision was correct: Spezialy has writing credits now for “The Leftovers, “Watchmen,” “Reaper,” “Ash Vs. Evil Dead,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Dead Like Me” and many others.

“Tom was fearless that way. He was a truth-teller, a raconteur, a wine enthusiast, a chili maker, a smoker, and… to me…a father figure,” Spezialy said, reached by email. “I owe him my career in television. Which means I owe the whole of the life I’ve built off that career to him.

“His (substantial) creative powers and self-assurance granted him the ability to stand by — chortling — while his creative partners were gripped by doubts and indecision. End of day, I suppose, Tom’s thick skin was born out of the fact that he both prioritized and took comfort in knowing that he loved his life. …” with Richards, and Keener, and other family.

Richards shared part of an email from Paul Simms, producer and writer for “NewsRadio,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” “What We Do in the Shadows,” “Atlanta,” “Flight of the Conchords,” and numerous others.

“Doing ‘NewsRadio’ with Tom remains one of my favorite times of my whole life,” Simms wrote. “There are some people, I suppose, who come into your life exactly when you need them, and that’s what Tom was to me.

“No one could wrangle all those personalities — and get their best work out of them — like Tom, and he did it in such a calm steady way. I feel like when I finally found him, I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I’d found someone who got exactly what we were trying to do — and did it without ever looking like it took any effort.

“I’ve thought about Tom so much over the years at various job on various shows. Usually when it feels like everything is going wrong and falling apart — that’s when I basically slip into ‘Tom mode,’ which involves shrugging, having a laugh at all the chaos and panic, and then reminding everyone that it’s all going to work out in the end.”

Cherones in semi-retirement

In his filmmaking semi-retirement, Cherones painted, and wrote a novel “The Hardly Boys: The Mystery of the Golden Goblet.” It was the first in an intended series, a spoof of the old mysteries he devoured while growing up in Tuscaloosa, in the1940s and ‘50s, working at his dad’s store, collecting scrap to resell until he could compile the dollar needed to buy a new Hardy Boys book.

In a 2013 interview with The Tuscaloosa News, Cherones, then 73, said “I just started with the idea of 70-year-old men with the minds of 17-year-old boys from the ‘50s.” A mad scientist had zapped Tom and Billy Hardly into “cryogeriatrically” frozen sleep.

Awakened after 50 years with the bodies of men in their 70s, they struggled with the 21st century and hunt for a mysterious golden goblet, aided by chubby pal Whit Moore and 90-something, still-in-demand private detective dad, DeVern Hardly. Cherones drew from the names of friends such as Whit Gibbons, longtime Tuscaloosa News environmental columnist, and from his mother’s maiden name, which was Moore. Even with his long connections in the industry, a hoped-for TV series didn’t arise, Richards said.

“He had a blast writing that,” she said. “He just wanted to do that, as far as TV and directing he would have, had it gotten picked up.”

Though Cherones began living with Alzheimer’s in 2022, Richards said at core he remained the same loving, lighthearted, centered guy. “Tom’s sense of humor was fully intact, right up to the end. When there were times I felt he was hard to reach, doing something inane, silly or vulgar was a guaranteed laugh,” she said. “He lived his life to the fullest, with humor and acceptance.”

A few years back, when he couldn’t recall a family member’s name, she found his acceptance remarkable.

“He said, ‘Well, that’s how it is.’ “ On news of his death, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, MSN, The A.V. Club and others have eulogized him.

You can view an extensive interview with Cherones at interviews.televisionacademy. com/interviews/tom-cherones? chapter=1&clip=81088.

Survivors include his third wife, Carol; his daughter, Susan, and her husband, Daniel; his son, Scott, and his wife, Linda; and his grandchildren, Jessa and Thomas. He earlier was married to Bobby Cherones, and to Keener, until her death in 2006.

Reach Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com . To support his work, please subscribe to The Tuscaloosa News .