J. Benedict asks me something…
I've always been fascinated by your stories of sneaking into movie and TV studios when you were younger to watch rehearsals and tapings. Most of your sneaking seems to have been at NBC to watch Laugh-In or Johnny Carson but what other studios did you do this at?
Not as many as I'd liked…but I'll take slight issue with the verb here. I didn't "sneak" that much. The first two times I got into NBC, I had actual passes which I arranged through my connection with Laugh-In magazine. I wrote briefly for its publisher just before the publication was terminated. Thereafter, with a chutzpah I probably could not generate now, I just walked in, waving to the guards like I knew where I was going, hoping they remembered me from my previous visits. Maybe they did. Maybe it was my attitude. Maybe it was that I'd carry a copy of Variety. Maybe it was all three. I dunno. I just know no one ever questioned me.
And I do know that even if I did have the chutzpah, that would not work today. All the studios have tightened security to the point where it's sometimes difficult to get in even when you the right credentials and clearance.
NBC in Burbank was my most frequent field trip because I had as much access as I had and because I was then freelancing for Disney Studios a few blocks away. So I'd spent the morning on that lot, fully authorized to the there of course, then walk over to NBC in the afternoon. You can call my entrances into NBC "sneaking" if you like but the security guards always saw me go in and I never lied, at least verbally.
I got into CBS a few times — again with real passes — once to watch one of Red Skelton's infamous "dirty hours." He was supposed to be rehearsing the show they'd tape the next day and he did a little of that…but mostly, his aim was to break up his co-stars, his crew and an audience largely made up of studio personnel. It was dirty joke after dirty joke after dirty joke and I couldn't understand how that helped them get a show taped. One of Skelton's writers — Martin A. Ragaway, mentioned here recently — told me, "It was just something Red needed to get out of his system before he could focus on the actual script."
Never even tried to get into ABC or most of the movie studios. I got to wander around the Universal lot for a few days when I did a job for the Universal Studios Tour, rewriting and punching-up the script that the tour guides rattled off for the folks on the trams. Others I hear have claimed authorship of one much-delivered joke in that loose, ever-changing script but I claim I was the one who came up with "There's the house where the movie Psycho was filmed. That little road alongside the house is called the Psycho Path."
Don't stone me. I was seventeen.
The most interesting thing that happened to me on that lot — and it's keeping with the theme of the above joke — is that I was walking by a bungalow when a man shuffled out and I recognized him instantly. How could you not recognize instantly Alfred Hitchcock? I said hello and he held up a card with the address of some other office on that vast lot and asked if I could tell him how to get to it. I was carrying around a folder of maps of the whole studio and I shuffled through them and delivered a semi-educated guess that it was on the far, far other side of the lot.
I don't know if I was right but Mr. Hitchcock assumed I was so he announced he was going to order a car and driver to take him. He thanked me and then waddled into the bungalow and that was my entire experience with Alfred Hitchcock. It's still one of the most interesting things that ever happened to me.
The only other studio I visited more than once in that period of my life was Paramount. I remember watching some of the filming of the pilot for a short-lived series called Me and the Chimp on an exterior set. On my next visit, I watched a scene filmed on the exact same exterior set for Mannix.
On both of those visits, I watched some of the rehearsal for episodes of The Odd Couple, where anyone who wandered in seemed welcome to sit in the bleachers. Here's a scene in a finished, aired episode that I watched some of in rehearsal…
What I recall most from watching that series rehearse is that Jack Klugman and Tony Randall were so professional and so determined to find the right way to read every single line, where to stand, how to turn, etc. They'd do a few lines, then stop and discuss what was right and wrong with what they'd done. Sometimes, it involved the director and once in a while, Garry Marshall would be around and he'd be involved. But mostly it was like Randall was directing Klugman and Klugman was directing Randall. The attention to detail was total.
Once, a page of rewrite was suddenly delivered to the set, essentially negating what the two men had just spent the previous half-hour rehearsing. They bitched and moaned, then went sharply back into professional mode and began learning and discussing the staging of the new lines. Having heard the stories of another nicely-matched duo, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, barely rehearing a Honeymooners before doing it in front of a live audience, I was aware that I was witnessing the exact opposite — and probably the way most sitcoms were done.
I'll probably think of other moments of this sort in the future but this is enough for this post. Thanks for asking, J.
