'Honeymooners' creator dies

Producer, writer and director Leonard Stern, who created with Jackie Gleason the iconic TV series "The Honeymooners" as well as almost two dozen other series and 12 films and was also a leader of the Producers Guild of America, died Tuesday, June 7, in Los Angeles. He was 88.

Stern, who also partnered with Roger Price and Larry Sloan in the Price/Stern/Sloan literary publishing company, authored several books, including "Dear Attila the Hun" and "A Martian Wouldn't Say That!" Jay Leno has regularly dipped into the latter, a collection of memos from TV executives that they wish they hadn't written, on "The Tonight Show." The firm was launched with the popular Mad Libs, the word game created by Stern and Price and published since 1958.

Stern quickly grew to become one of the busiest creative forces in television, writing a season of "The Phil Silvers Show" (aka "Sergeant Bilko") and drawing a shared Emmy in the process, followed by 150 episodes as head writer of "The Steve Allen Show," for which he was also Emmy nommed. He also produced "Get Smart" for five years, earning an Emmy nomination for best comedy series and winning one, together with Buck Henry, for comedy writing.

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