I really don’t remember exactly when I worked with Woody’s ex. I just remember it was extremely difficult. Louise Lasser was playing a transmission for AAMCO, a transmission repair company. Her sense of performance was intense as she actually wrote pauses and stammers into her scripts, much like Bob Newhart did when we worked together on Stamps.com. The problem wasn’t the pauses and stammers, because the client bought that when they signed her. The scripts were written to time and the pauses and stutters added time that we didn’t have.
I looked at her script with her annotations and it looked like a dead sea scroll (to me). We got through the days and Louise eventually hit it big with a teevee show.
There is a lot of Louise’s neurosis in Woodys’ later squeeze, Mia Farrow.