Emmy-Winning Writer Bob Illes on Comedy, Chaos, and Classic TV – Episode 381

All right, everyone. I'm excited to introduce my next guest, Emmy, award winning writer and producer. He's written for silver spoons, The Carol Burnett Show Smothers Brothers. Show flow, amen, and so much more. Welcome to the show. Bob isles, Hello,

sir. Good to be here. Jeff, thanks so much.

I would have listed off all your credits, but we want to fill up the whole episode just introducing you. What are the origins of your career? But even like, what make, what got you interested in entertainment TV? What was the bug that sparked you? What was those early things as a kid that led you on this path I grew

up? You know, as a first generation on TV, we had this funky black and white TV. I would see stuff like the Mickey Mouse Club and things like that Sheriff John's lunch brigade, which is an afternoon cartoon show, and he'd play our game comedy Laurel Hardy, it definitely we got the bug that point. They just said, How do I get inside that TV? I threw a million other kids were equally enamored by the by the TV machine, but, but I stuck with it. My dad liked stuff like Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen, so we'd watch a lot of comedies. I bought Mad Magazine. Some guy introduced me to Mad Magazine, so that definitely wasn't made an impact. But I didn't think about making that a career, necessarily. Even though I lived in LA, I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do. How would I get into this business? Eventually, I went to USC, started working on the radio station there, which was called kusc, actually had a big signal. My partner and I, Jim Stein, we had a comedy radio show, sort of like Howard Stern, without the raunchiness. This kind of freewheeling kind of show, we had characters, and either ones that we made up or live ones, we had guests like Steve Allen and Joey Bishop and people like that. So anyway, that from that we got Stein found out some guy was teaching a class in TV writing at USC, a producer named Digby Wolf. So we got into the class. He also, likewise, had guest speakers in his class. It was not very big class. Maybe 25 or 30 people were in it. Eventually, he was producing a special for Tennessee Ernie Ford. I don't know if anybody remembers him at all, or heard of him, but he's kind of this hillbilly guy with a big, deep voice, singing voice. There's sort of a predating Jim neighbors. He said that he could hire a couple of student writers. So there was, like, a small competition. So we wrote, We researched Ernie Ford, and wrote a monolog for Ernie Ford, and I think maybe one other person did it in the class. So we gave it to Digby. And then it was Christmas vacation, so we never heard anything back. So during the Christmas and we knew that the show would be starting like in early in January. I found his name, his phone number in the phone book. I mean, how many Digby wolves are there? But in those days, everybody's name was in the phone book. So I called him up and said, hey, hey, what's going on with that Ernie Ford thing and all that? So he said the words that started my whole career. He said, You're hired. That's amazing. So we went to work. Then the 10 is the year before. It's special in like following January, which was 71 by the way, to keep you scoring, weird thing was, there's only two other writers, aside from Digby, who else would write. One of them was a guy named Tom Cook, the K, O, C, H, I recognize him right away. He's a MAD magazine writer. He did some classic Mad Magazine stuff. He also worked for Bob and Ray the radio team. So that was pretty wild, and we didn't really know what we were doing. And then nobody, really, luckily, nobody else kind of knew what they wanted to do with this special I mean, we took a trip to Disneyland and walked around that was kind of weird, seeing the backstage at Disney Disneyland looking for venues or like, what could Ernie do? And then we finally that got scrapped with just a show that was done at NBC, which is right across the street. And by the way, I first time I went over to NBC, first people I ran into were Ozzie and Harriet, who were coming out of the building as I was going in, wow, I'm in show business. And then Diane Carroll was a guest star on Danny Thomas and the Smothers Brothers, think, Arlene galanka from the Andy Griffith Show. So we were like, right in the middle of showbiz, we're just kind of observing more than anything, such newbies. It was a great experience. And the show was done like, I think it's shot in about it was like shot in about a month. I mean, we were there for about a month or so. The whole experience, we made like 700 bucks a piece, which at the time was like 7 million, but we got writing credit at the end of the show. So we were, obviously, we weren't members of the Writers Guild yet. That kind of got things going. It took a while, but, you know, we wrote for comedians, and over the next year and a half or so, we got a quiz show writing questions on some Quiz Show, which is awful. Finally, Digby, again, same guy that was teaching the class. He hired us onto a Bill Cosby. I. Was a variety show for CBS. It was a bunch of, oh, big team of writers. And again, we were like these. We weren't given writer credit or anything. We were just called researchers because so they could hire, have us on the show, but not pay us writer money, just to see how he would do. So eventually we ended up writing monologs For Cosby. I remember one time Cosby during while we were doing that show, Cosby went on The Dick Cavett Show. And of course, the discussion, he said, Oh, these two writers, these two young writers were writing my monologs. And cavit said, Well, really, what are their names? And Cosby said, Oh, I can't tell you, because they're not in the Writers Guild. We were that close to national fame. Eventually we got kicked up to writerhood in the on that show, we had to join the Writers Guild. Meanwhile, all these other old school writers on the show, Cosby really didn't like their stuff. It was too jokey for him. And the real executive producer of the show, George slaughter, who was doing laughing and her, had done laugh. I'm not sure if he was still working on laughing while we're doing that show. But so they couldn't have been more different. Cosby and slaughter, what stuff that Cosby does did what slaughter likes, just like the hard, jokey stuff. Since we were writing monologs For Cosby, then we were good. We were became Margaret farm writers. After that, we kind of went from show to show to show after that. Luckily, we got agents at William Morris, one of whom was Mike ovitz, who, at the time was just a 25 year old guy, a little bit older than us, maybe, and, and he hadn't become but, but already he was very effective, and he really helped us a lot. Got us jobs and stuff and but he soon became this giant figure in show business, started CAA and stuff like that, but he got us on The Carol Burnett Show. Eventually we created a show starring Richard Castellano that got on. So we did a lot of, I'm jumping around a little bit, but that kind of how everything started. We were lucky to just keep going for 30 years long time. And then eventually I split up with Stein, my partner, and then working in the last 10 years of the career, but on my own, you know, he encountered a lot of people, made a lot of fun. I wrote a book that the publisher now has called funniest money, 39 stories about how I made a ton of money in writing TV comedies that has a all this kind of crazy stuff laid out to the people we met, hung out with, all right, so anyway, that's kind of the overview.

Oh, that's great. That's awesome. So let's, let's go back to the Stein and Isles radio show. How did you mention like, guests like Steve Allen, yeah. How did you get like, such big name guests? Or were they not as big names yet? Or I'm not, I'm not sure, like the time frame in my head going back,

weirdly enough, Stein was from a wealthy I was not. Stein was from a wealthy family in Chicago, at least wealthier than me or mine were. He went to school called New Trier, which is pretty renowned in in the Chicago, Chicago suburb, like Dan Margaret went there. A lot of people went to that school. He was able to get people like Louis Armstrong on that when he was doing the radio work in in his high school and in Chicago. So when I met up with him, he was doing a serious talk show at kusc and and I sat in one time and screwing around. So we then we started doing a comedy show rather than a straight interview show. He knew ways to find these celebrities, and I think he mostly did that. He got in touch with like Regis Philbin and Steve Allen, someone we just interviewed on the phone, the Joey Bishop thing. Joey agreed to have us come down to his office at ABC. He was that time. This is like 70 or so. At that time, he was doing a show on ABC opposite Johnny Carson. We went down to his office at ABC, and it was in Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, and we brought an engineer with us with a little reel to reel tape quarter. And what we wanted to do is kind of incorporate it into our show. So we when the tape started, we were kind of doing voices, and I was doing like a Regis bit, oh, you'll never guess what kind of guess we have on the show, Mr. Stein, stuff like that. And then, and then Joey is kind of sitting there, stone face while we're doing this stuff. So finally, Stein whispered to me, like, don't you know, let's stop doing the bits, or something like that. And Joey saw that he was conferring with me, and he, he said, stop the tape. Stop the tape. First of all, he didn't think we were funny. Second of all, he he was concerned that we would edit the stuff and make him look bad on our radio show. This guy had a network TV show, and he's worried about us, our college radio show. And I think, you know, I said, Well, you're so right. He wasn't like, my favorite rat Packer. So then we started doing a straight interview with the guy, like, How'd you get started and stuff like that. And then he, then he finally, he said, let's have some fun. All of a sudden, he put a big damper and everything. And then he said, Oh, let's have some fun. So he started doing a he started doing impressions and stuff. He was just a jerk. So we were going, Yeah, I mean, we didn't know what the hell to say that we weren't gonna get yelled at or something. So finally we said, Okay, well, thank you, Joey or y'all, she had to, maybe he had to go and do a show or something, I don't know. But anyway, that was our Joey Bishop story, and we had Harry Shearer on a number of times. You know, Harry's major voice on The Simpsons now, but he, at the time, he was doing a show called the credibility gap radio show is a satirical news show. So we invited them on when they were mocking us and making fun of us, anybody. We befriended Harry, so we, we had him on a number of times. We were just praising, you know, we're just trying to make, make a name for ourselves something or be we weren't, I guess we. We probably figured we'll do some radio show somewhere, you know, we're hoping, but we didn't want to go to, you know, like wheeling West Virginia or something, which is a normal route of, you know, going to small stations and working your way back up to LA. We were already in LA, like I said, the so the Digby wolf thing kind of veered us into TV writing. Eventually aged out of our radio, our college radio show. So then we were on to writing for TV. I always loved the working on radio. That was a lot of fun. It was great. I really loved doing that. It was one of the things I always wanted to do when I was a kid. I would listen to disc jockeys and then eventually talk radio. And I said, God, do all that. So, so we got to do that at QSC, and we had a sizable audience, mostly 15 year old boys. They're not like there was audience research, or you didn't really know how many people are listening or what, but people that would come down to watch us or write fan letters, or mostly these teenagers, I guess they thought we were, like these wacky adults or

something, I don't know. Okay, so, all right, so, so Digby wolf kind of gives you this your first job. Yeah, you're hired. Yeah, he's a co creator of laughing with George Slatter. Yes,

I believe so. I mean, there's a little, it's a little fuzzy because there's also, I think there was some Canadian guys who were making some claims about having kind of started flying beard. Alan, I worked, worked for both of them eventually, but Alan blind, both of them are goners now, as does Digby, but they were involved too at the beginnings, but mainly George and Digby were kind of the honchos there. That was a pretty major program at that time, basically Saturday Night Live, but it was like everyone's on Monday so and it wasn't live. But other than that, it was basically, kind of breaking the barriers, along with the Smothers Brothers, early, late 60s show, which was fantastic.

So when you were at the Bill Cosby a variety show, he's coming off, I Spy the original Bill Cosby Show. Yeah, there's a lot of heat on Bill Cosby at this point. Good heat. Well, do you have any like, was there any like, cool stories from working there, other than him almost mentioning your name? Well,

yeah, there was a big feud between him and and slaughter almost immediately, like, like, of what the tone of the show would be the very first episode. I mean, I don't think we had anything in it, in the script, but we went to this big table reading, and the first people I see there, oh, well, actually, even before the table reading, I'm thinking about it, Cosby said a few of the writers are hanging around. Cosby said I gave me some paper, and one of those pointing to a typewriter because he didn't like the script and he was gonna presumably rewrite it or something. I don't know. We're like, just observing. Anyway, the first two guests were Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. So that was pretty insane. So there they were sitting at the table, eventually, for the table reading, damn, this is amazing. I don't remember what they did on the show, or if they did bits, or what, or Cosby just kind of interviewed them or something, but they were doing a movie with Cosby. I forget the name of it, Buck and the preachers, I think that was it, which I believe Claudia was directing. So that pretty awesome. And then another time, we get a call in our office to come up to the rehearsal hall because Cosby and Peter Sellers wanted to see us. Peter Sellers was a guest. This was like 10 shows in, or 15 shows in, and we had written a bit about it was, like an English drive dictionary kind of thing. I forget the exact nature of the bit. Cosby and Peter Sellers, since we wrote this, yeah, it's called us upstairs to explain a couple of lines or something in this like, Man, I'm like talking about intimidating Mr. Peter Sellers, for God's sake. Guess we were sufficiently explained what we were doing, and they're they were fine. So he dismissed us. It was pretty amazing that we were in this whole mix. Pat McCormick was on the show, a writer on the show, the big, big Pat McCormick is a great guy. This hilarious guy. He had a drinking problem at that time, mainly. Oh, another time Groucho was a guest on the show. Toward the end of I guess, Cosby was a big fan of Groucho. They remember little wizard, little guy at that time and his wacky girlfriend, Groucho was there. They were singing some stuff around the piano. It's like some weird old songs that Groucho knew. And. Was talking to him, and he and I noticed Groucho had his cigar, but it was in cellophane, so, like, the girlfriend wouldn't let him actually light it up or anything. She was hanging around the office like mad that Edward G Robinson is going to get the special Academy Award instead of Groucho. And just oddball stuff. There it was, Groucho. So that was awesome. Yeah,

that's pretty amazing.

Marvin hamlis was the was his accompanies, I think it's free sting. But I, I'd heard of the guy, you know, I knew who was one

thing after another, legendary name after a legendary name. That's, yeah,

and then, oh, another big one was Mark. Why am I forgetting the guy won like, seven golden medals in the Olympics, the swimmer, he all of a sudden showed up. I was watching Olympics, and, you know, a few days before, and then all of a sudden he's there, and they're in the office as a guest on the show. There was that kind of thing, you know, that, you know, one after another. And Quincy Jones was like the music director Sergio aragonis, another Mad Magazine guy, he did like some artwork for the titles or whatever, interstitial stuff. So pretty amazing.

It's amazing. I mean, how many legends you were surrounded by? One of your early writing credits was on the Tom smothers organic prime time space ride. Oh, yeah, yeah. Notably, writing with Bob Einstein and Steve.

We knew one of the producers of that, so I think he was Mike, another guest lecture at USC that we met somehow we got hired on there, maybe probably some of its I don't remember, but again, one of those kind of amorphous things, like, what are we supposed to do? And the guys were working, were kind of running, weren't that supportive. But yeah, I remember one early, early on or in the office, and in comes Steve Martin. I was a big fan of his already. He wasn't well known he was at that time. I just remember one thing about his wearing the extremely short shorts. I know what the hell that was. It was kind of a warm days. I didn't see him much after that. I think he maybe just sent in stuff occasionally, or something. And Einstein, probably the first time I met Einstein, who it also is because he would be on the, he was Officer Judy on the smothered Brother show. And he also would do a lot of bits on Steve Allen, just put on bits. And he was really good at that, where he would just keep that straight face, and he would do that in the office like some delivery guy came in. He was giving that guy a hard time, and he just would not get off the guy. I wasn't sure if he's serious or not. I forget what was going on, but it was a hilarious and he became a pretty good friend of ours. Einstein, he we worked on several shows for him. And yeah, he was a very nice guy. Could be difficult to work for, but he was nice guy. And Martin, we, I think we, oh, I know we did work with Steve Martin as a writer in another show for Dick Van Dyke called Van Dyke and company. It's a pilot. Was kind of a pilot for a show that did go on. We were committed to doing something else, but that was mid 70s, but Steve was a writer on that show. And one time I remember Einstein there was, it was Rosh Hashanah or or young, where were Yom Kippur? You know, it's a big Jewish high holiday, yeah, it might have been Yom Kippur. The thing was it? Einstein, it was a hard but he wanted all the Goya writers to still come in and work, but the Jewish writers or whoever could stay home and go to temple or whatever. So my partner, Stein, he, of course, yeah, he took the day off, but I was there with Steve Martin and a guy named George Burdette. We were like the non Jewish writers on the show. So I had lunch with these guys, with Steve Martin, and around the corner from the studio. So that was pretty cool. Steve Martin a little bit. But then almost like God, not long after that, he skyrocketed with the King Tut stuff and all that. And he never looked back. He was like, then he became big movie star later on, we were working on, like, late 70s. We're working on a Dick Clark live show. It's called Dick Clark's live. And we're sitting at the NBC commissary, and there comes Steve Martin, I guess he was doing, maybe he was doing the tonight show or something. He recognized us, and he said, Oh, congratulations. We had just won an Emmy for The Carol Burnett Show. We said, Hey, man, we really want you to do the show. We're trying our best. Oh, he cast, shined us on. He and he walked on, because by that time, he was, like, too big, but he at least he was friendly. I don't know if he knows me anymore. I haven't talked to him since then. That was pretty amazing.

Was Van Dyke and Company. Was that after the Dick Van Dyke Show, because that was Mary Tyler Moore Carl Reiner as well, right? Or,

um, no, no, it was. I mean, after the year the classic Dick Van Dyke Show, which was early 60s, I think he did some iterations of that. I don't know. Remember if Mary Tyler Moore and Reiner were involved in those or not, but they, I don't remember, you. Reiner or Mary Taylor Moore being on this Van Dyke, maybe on the series. They were on the pilot. I don't believe they were, but we left after that pilot. We had created a show called Jones sons with Richard Castellano. We went to go work on that. We weren't involved in the series, but the pilot did get a Emmy nomination, but we didn't win, but for writing. But we didn't win that, but I believe the series did. After we left, you

were also involved in Lily's homelands for a special I assume this is part of the laughing connections you had since she was on.

Yeah, that all helped. I mean, I believe it was, I think it Ovid's got us that job. I mean, it means, at that point, Zion was about ready to go to law school, kind of chicken up a few things here and there, but he was kind of losing confidence in the whole writing career. But then all of a sudden, I think, I believe it was Ovid's, our agent called us about going down to meet but on this Lily Tomlin special, which was for CBS, so we met with her manager, not sure if we met with Herb sergeant. He was the head writer we're it was almost like the fix was in. We didn't have to sweat that too much. Was Lorne Michaels part of that? Yes, he was, he wasn't a head writer, but he was, I think I saw later the other producer crib, when we met him there, he was like another writer. As far as I could tell. Again, we were still newbies. Remember, we're still low on the totem pole. There's big, kind of a big staff of writers, and of course, Jane Wagner and Lily, and I don't know how much Lauren was involved in her they wrote the bulk of the show, which I didn't think was that funny myself at the time, but whatever it won the Emmy for writing. Emmy. Yeah, Lauren was there. He seemed like an okay guy at that time, when it came to When, when, Saturday Night Live. I think they pitched it to Saturday night, Saturday Night Live, which is like a couple years later, maybe, and he, he turned us down. Oh, Lauren Michaels, I don't know if he was that familiar with, maybe stuff we wrote on the show that didn't get on, that he wasn't that happy with. I don't remember, and we never found out much about it, but he didn't seem to be a hon show. He just seemed to be like another writer come and say hello once a while. So you know, he kind of banter back and forth, but then didn't, didn't know, didn't work with him too much.

Another classic sitcom that you wrote on Sanford and Son.

Yeah, that was a weird one, because when I first got a call from, not from all of us, but another William orange agent, probably who was covered NBC, said, call up Aaron Rubin at San Frans son, because he apparently, Ruben was a fan of QSC, so we assumed, oh God, he listened to our Show. He wanted us to work on Sanford's Son, so that, however, however, KSC came up in pitching us to him, that sparked his attention. So he was intrigued. But it turned out he only he listened to the classical music shows he didn't listen to. I don't think he listened to her show, or any of the other, I don't know how many other comedy shows were on KFC. It was mostly either classical music us or rock and roll. It wasn't much else. I talked to him, and he is kind of giving me the rundown of what, what kind of stuff they were looking for, whatever. I mean. Again, this is something where he had no idea about how to write a sitcom, or what kits that we we brainstorm ideas at Stein. So we knew, we knew we would have to go in and pitch to the guy, pitch story ideas to the guy. So one idea that we came up with was Bubba, which is one of Fred's friends. He sees Lamont and Rollo. Lamont was the son of San Franson, and Rallo is his friend, to have them going into what turned out to be a gay bar. The backstory being that Lamont and Rolla didn't know anything about they didn't know there was a gay bar. They just were looking for a bar. They were out, out on the town, or whatever. Bud reports that to Fred, and so Fred's freaking out that his son may be gay. Now this was 1973 so people were not woke at that point, and we even told Aaron Rubin, I said, Well, we'll be tasteful about it. We're sensitive to what kind of jokes we were doing, and do a bunch of gay, gay jokes and stuff like that. So anyway, we wrote the script. I don't think it was like so great. He rewrote the hell out of it, and it became, it was eventually called Lamond. Is that you, because there was a, there was a big, famous play about Norman, is that you it was a lot of the farcical stuff Fred's trying to grill Lamont about, you know, without saying it directly. And it's sounding like Lamont, maybe, yay, and then he had to see a doctor, and so anyway, kind of dumb at, you know, even looking at it now. But the problem, the thing was, they had a lot of protests when that show came on. There was a lot of protesting from the gay community about airing of that show. So it was, it was left off of the syndication for a long time now. Now it's in the mix again, but at that time, and we that wasn't, definitely wasn't. Our intention. We're just trying to idea. So eventually, Ruben would give us other he would give us scripts to write, give us premises. We didn't really have to invent them. We were just novices, so we were trying our best to kind of replicate that kind of writing, just total on the job training. So Chris, he rewrote everything, and it was okay. Yeah. We ended up doing like, two or three other episodes after that one. So he was impressed at the very first that was the very first thing. We pitched in that gay bar thing, and he he bought it almost immediately. So we were lucky there

right back then. It was kind of real cutting edge. You know, today it would just be like, no one would even think twice about

it. Probably not, and they'd probably do in a different way or something, because it was just feeding on old views of these old these old timers have these right, right views about homosexuality and stuff. So that was definitely a sign of those times. I was surprised that there was protests and stuff like that. So obviously there was big awareness even at that point. I guess it was a little bit after the Stone Ridge, whatever called in New York, where they were more awareness of that gay community and stuff. I don't know how much Reuben knew about that, or cared or NBC they. I'm sure they're a surprise to such a controversy, big ratings, though. I mean, not specifically our episode, but Sam brinson's major, major hit show.

Well, I had a great theme song, so that helped out that. Yeah, it was great. You worked with Norman Lear a couple times, one day at a time, Fernwood tonight, or at least on Norman Lear projects. Yeah, Fernwood tonight with Martin mall and Fred Willard, which became America tonight, and that's another one that you received in the Emmy a nomination for right? How is it working? I mean, Martin Mull and Fred Willard, two of the funniest people ever. How was that experience?

That was great. That was one of the great experience, because it was at least kind of like, along the lines of the kind of comedy we like to do. I mean, others shows that we were doing, we're kind of forcing ourselves even the sitcom, The Castellano sitcom, we just didn't know about. It's like writing a play a week. So it's like we had to really figure that out. But firm with tonight was just a talk show, a take off with, with a very specific band, where it was like a two tiered thing, whereas there's some people believing it's a real show, some people realizing that it's a it's a spoof. So even with the audience, they bring in, like an older audience, who kind of take it at face value, and then a younger audience, a younger portion would see that we're doing bits, but we would, for example, we had a one bit we did was a guy played by a guy who played gopher on The Love Boat, Fred Fred grand Yeah, Fred Grandy, he played a doctor. We had just read about it, that marijuana is like a good treatment for glaucoma. We read that in the paper, so we said, Oh, how about if he's a guy, it comes out as, like a legitimate doctor. That turned out he's basically a drug dealer, you know, does a very serious setup about how, yes, it relieves the pressure and all this stuff. And then he says, eventually, said, I realized that your entire band of glaucoma. We had the little happy kind and the mirth makers of the band on the show, they were all, don't so then, you know, kind of, as you go along, you see this guy's just a basically a dope dealer, and that's the sort of stuff we did that's kind of the main material on the show. And mull and Willard, nobody better. If nobody's familiar with it, it's on YouTube. A lot find it on YouTube, but it was basically an offshoot of Mary Hartman, where Barth gimbal is, like, I don't know if he had been a big talk show guy before, but now he's in this small town called Ohio, and he's and there's, like, TV trays for sort of a desk, very sparse, and he would open the show with a big monolog. And now, which, I think Harry Shearer wrote, mainly wrote, Martin would always say that he it was ad lib, but it wasn't really ad lib. That show was not, I mean, maybe some elements kind of went off script, but mostly, mostly well scripted show. And then Fred would chime in with stuff. I mean, it was just genius stuff. We I became really good friends with Fred, and whenever we could, we'd hire Fred Fitz on on other shows. It was just a brilliant thing. I mean, and then and Norman was never much around Norman Lear, I mean, horrible time on a show called one day at a time, but a year before we started working on Fernwood. So such a relief to be on Fernwood and not on one day at a time. There's a lot of other characters that would come on regularly. And weirdly enough, Alan Thicke was the head writer, Canadian guy. I mean, he, but he. Father, Robin Thicke, right? I don't know he really organized it well. I mean, it was like on every night. I mean, obviously we pre taped the show. It was a lot of work. They would shoot a couple of shows a day, I think, schedule, but we were constantly churning out. There were several other writers just churning out the bits, and then they had weird guests would come on, and it was great. It was really a fun show. And then then it became America tonight because it was a syndicated show, firm with a syndicated show. So it became America tonight because the stations wanted celebrities, more celebrities on the show. I guess Norman Lear's company is thinking, was they would move the show to a small town in California, near Los Angeles. So you could believe that some celebrities might come through there, or be willing to go down to this small town to be a guest on the show. Steve Garvey was on the baseball player, and Fred starts giving him batting tips. I mean, it was just like some wacky stuff. And Carol Burnett was a guest. I forget what her bit was. The celebrities had bits that they would do part of the show. And I remember she came into our office like this is right after The Carol Burnett Show ended. We were on one year, and she decided to pull a plug. And everybody's kind of annoyed, including me. But then a couple of weeks after, right after the Burnett Show. We had been working in firmware tonight, early in the Burnett Show, just on the side after the Burnett Show, and we're working on America tonight, and she came into our office and she was like, Oh, you guys didn't weren't out of work very long. So she was a guest on the show. That show was nominated for an Emmy based on her episode. That's the way they would do it. Oddly enough, we had been also nominated the show. The writing staff of the Burnett Show was nominated based on an episode starring Steve Martin and Betty White, the Steve Martin connection. So we were up against ourselves, you know, on three other shows. So we wanted, you know, the writing staff wanted for The Carol Burnett Show, beating out America tonight.

You beating out you. How was the one year you were on The Carol Burnett Show? What was that? Well,

that was amazing. Again, the fix was in because obits obvis was like a greatest agent. We were so lucky man. He's the greatest agent ever. You know, he obviously knew Joe Hamilton, who was Burnett's husband and kind of the executive producer of the show. They're pretty, pretty much, said, yeah, come on down. And so we worked on some little he had some little project about English as a Second Language class. Kind of helped him with that. This is before the Burnett show started. The Burnett Show itself started into production a little bit after that, and Ed Simmons, who had had been Norman Lear's partner back in the day, was the head writer. We were young guys. I mean, we're and I was kind of cocky, but Ed was kind of, you know, thought we're too big for our britches or something, I don't know, but, you know, we were on there with, I think they might have had a whole new staff of writers. I don't remember exactly how many of these people had been there before gene Perrette and Bill Richmond. They became really good friends, and Liz sage and Rick Hawkins and some good people. And our really good friends, Dick Claire and Jenna McMahon, they wrote the family, those long family sketches, which then they spun off into Mama's family. So at first we were having trouble getting going there, and so Bill Richmond, who's like the father figure to us at that time, you know, Richmond wrote a lot of those early old Jerry Lewis movies. So he sat us down basically at some restaurant across the street and was telling us, You got, you got to get it together, or this or that, you know, like, but we definitely got the message, and we refocused. And so we became kind of the ED Simmons. Became very fond of it finally. But we would basically write up gets a day or a week I get it was amazing. It was like real smooth show to do, because there's a always a lot of music and dancing and stuff. So they took up a lot of time, which Ed was happy about. And Erica, there was a mama's family episode sketch that would take 20 minutes. Ed was happy about that. So we'd write these little sketches, maybe one per day. Or did we get folded into the you know, that week's show? Ed had a kind of a well organized system. We're working with Tim Conway. And weirdly enough, Dick Van Dyke had taken over for Harvey Korman, so he was like Carol and and Vicki Lawrence and Tim Conway and Dick Van Dyke were like the main core. And Van Dyke really did some brilliant stuff on the show. He replicated the Singing in the Rain Dance, a lot of the great stuff. And Tim Conway is just the greatest guy. He would come around the office and he just have a good old laugh his job. He made it, and he made every effort to crack up the other actors on these sketches. So he's pretty much deliberately doing that so they transport. Pulled it in, and a lot of times they couldn't. Yeah, it was a fun show. We were there like, nine to five. It was like, so funny. Somebody told Carol, hey, when I drive home underneath to turn my headlights on, you know? And Carol said, Well, maybe we should start working a little longer, something like that. They would do, take the sketches, and they wouldn't change a thing. I mean, it would not change a thing. It was just, that's awesome, amazing, amazing experience. It would just make it work. And of course, they'd make it 100 times better than you would think. And there was another Mad Magazine alumnus on the show named Larry Siegel. It was like a real dour, grouchy guy. He did a lot of Mad Magazine sketches. I just remember one time at a rehearsal, Bernadette Peters was on, was, was, was on the show, and there was this dance number that she was doing her song and dance number, it was, it was a joy doing that show. Really a lot of fun. Carol was

great. Now you also worked with Mary Tyler

Moore. Yes, there's nobody having encountered, it seems like this

was, this was The Mary Tyler Moore hour, and Michael Keaton was in this.

Yes, Michael. He was a great guy, really funny. Show was kind of weird. It was like, I think, in fact, I think they got rid of one's cast, a bunch of cast, people and writers, and put in a whole new group. It was kind of having problems there. Basically she was doing Jack Benny, where she has a life of a woman who does it, who has this variety show, kind of go in between her life and this variety show, Keaton played a played a page at the studio where she worked. And I knew his manager, Harry Columbia. He was always pitching him before, and I never, I had never, I didn't know who the guy was, and finally met him on this show. He's hilarious. I don't know of how happy Mary was about the whole thing. Quality show wasn't so great, but we did the best we could. You

know, you did silver spoons forever five years

we had a accountant who also represented David duklahon, who who was the executive producer of silver spoon. So I think that he helped get us a meeting, and we're, you're kind of like struggling around at that point, like trying to find some work. This is like 8082 we had a meeting with Dun at Universal, and he showed us the pilot for silver spoons, which was Ricky Schroeder and Joel Higgins. His played his dad and Aaron gray Jason secretary and Bateman was like his, like Eddie Haskell friends. It was basically, originally, it was like Ricky's father on the Joe Higgins, on the show had a toy company. It's kind of a screwball. And Ricky had been at, I think he was a long lost son or something like that. But he had been in military school, and he comes to live with with Joel, with his Well, Edward was his name on the show, and as his dad in the big, kind of a mansion, and he was supposed to be the more mature one. So don't know where the hell they thought that was going to go. Kind of a to me, it was just seemed kind of bland, more kid oriented show. But Ricky wasn't, didn't do that much comedy wise. Joel is a great actor. I mean, he had been in Best of the West. I don't know why the hell they canceled that, but that was that was a great show just before this anyway, that kind of switched the show went on. Joel became more of a dad, and Ricky became not a screw up, but he was kind of straight, but he had goofball friends and would get into various problems. Aaron Gray was like his dad's secretary, originally, Leonard Lightfoot played kind of a lawyer friend, and then he got fired. And then they brought in Franklin to play the lawyer. They hired us. David hired us to do the show. It was we were back in business. We went to the meeting with the with press, with Ricky. And they would talk about the show and talk about Ricky, would talk about himself and stuff like that. And of course, they would always bring up from a tonight, something, because they knew we worked on furwood Tonight, and so Jason Bateman was excellent. He was like his nemesis, kind of a like, I said, like an Eddie Haskell, as how we thought about it. From Eddie Haskell, from Leave It to Beaver, kind of this. He'd be very obsequious to adults, but then he'd, you know, have these crazy schemes when they weren't around. I remember we had a meeting with the two mothers, David and Stein and Ricky's mother and Jason's mother at lunch. Think this even before the show got into production. I don't remember. It was very early on anyway, and so one of the first things that Jason's mother said, Oh, wouldn't it be fun if Jason Derek moved into the mansion, then you could see the the knives coming out of Ricky Schroeder's mother's eyes when she said that. And so almost at that moment, Jason Bateman was doomed from that. Show, because then everything that he did was like Ricky was jealous of I mean, he was a great character, so of course, he got good lines and and bits, and then the audience really loved Jason. I was doing the audience warm up. I got sucked into doing the audience warm up, because the first warm up guy was, was not great, Bob. What you do? They warm up for the second show. It could we did two shows for each we shot two shows, two different audiences each episode. So I started doing different audience warm ups. So I would to kill time in between resets and stuff like that. I would interview Ricky, or I'd interview Jason. Ricky's mother is always in the audience. She couldn't stand that. So she could have stopped to that. It evolved eventually that, I think, in the early in the second season that Diane, with Ricky's mother, insisted that Jason's got to go. I obviously they agreed to it. I mean, the company agreed to it, which was a Norman Lear company, but Norman wasn't really, again, it wasn't involved in the show, but it was an offshoot of his company. So we said, All right, I mean, we're going to do, I guess Ricky's the key man kind of thing. Obviously, we agreed to it, but she thought that, like, let's say we were working on show eight, and she thought by show nine, he'd be gone. So then show nine comes along, and the reading, you know, we're all the actors all sitting around the ring, and there was Jason Diane got, like, almost blew her cork because she thought Jason was going to be gone. The previous show was his last show. So somebody had to mail her out. I think my partner, Stein was on Diane duty. He would talk to her cool around.

So Ricky Schroeder's mom had it out for Jason Bateman. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. That probably didn't work out long term for them. No, it didn't. Yeah, he's in a different stratosphere now.

Yeah, totally, totally than poor Ricky. You know, there would be these petty jealousies like that among Ricky and other kids on the show, and somebody didn't invite him to a party. Or, you know, it's like, there, it's like the show is like a toy, or like a like a hobby or something. And so they would, it'd be frivolous kind of stuff. Ricky and his mother, there's a set a studio teacher. They're required when your kids are under 18, you have to have a teacher, you know, certain number of hours that you can shoot. So sometimes they'd be a little loose with that, because we wouldn't be finished exactly at 10s. We maybe have to go to 1015, little negotiations like that. Or if Ricky had a concert to go to, the teacher would say, No, Ricky's gotta go, you know. So it'd be not a concert for him, that he was going to see a concert of somebody. I don't know there'd be things like that. They kind of work the system. I don't know how much of an education poor Ricky got with the studio teacher. That was a little behind the scenes stuff, but that, it was an okay show. We tried to do some kind of cool stuff, but it was funny for what it was, but it was, in the end, it was, it was kind of a vanilla show. It wasn't much you could do wasn't going to turn into, you know, all the family or anything we tried, or we tried to make it, leave it, or Leave It to Beaver. We tried, you know, trying to make it more of a, like a Leave It to Beaver. Kind of show

you're being too hard on yourself. I have good memories of silver spoons. I enjoyed it. I think I remember like they had an arcade,

yes, yeah, yeah. That was from dukon, because he had these big games in his house. He had a bunch of arcade games in the set with speaking to Joel of the dad being kind of like a kid and there, of course, the train that came through the living room was a big thing, right? Everybody, everybody loved that. I mean, one time we had John Houseman, who played somehow he agreed to play the grandfather on the show. I remember when dukeline called him up to talk to him, and he was very nervous, and I guess is this imperious guy when he agreed to do it against anything for a buck from Houseman never mentioned in his obituary or anything. But anyway, he I remember one shot of him riding into the train looking very pompous, and it's hilarious. And then another time we had probably edict from NBC, why don't you have Pearl Bailey on the show? So we had Pearl Bailey on the show, who is a great person, but really great. But she who had been, we played it, where she had been Joe's nanny or something. I forget the whole story, backstory we came up with. But anyway, she got on the train and she didn't know how to stop it, so it was gonna run away down the track, and Ricky jumped on there and stopped it. I don't know if I ever operated it or not, but some trick to it, but that was a big thing on the show. There's some good episodes. There's some great Joel hires Mr. T to be Ricky's bodyguard at school, because he's worried about Ricky getting pushed around or bullied or whatever. So there's that. So he had some fun stuff. He had an orangutan on from Barbie Barzini, Bobby bargini had a show in Vegas with all these apes and chimpanzees and stuff. So we had, he had the orangutan. He was on the Clint Eastwood movies, like the any which way, but lose stuff. But anyway, this orangutans on the show, like, it's presumably a runaway and Ricky finds them and stuff.

I think that orangutan made its rounds on the different sitcoms,

probably because he was like, very he's fairly gentle. But I realized that it was because some guy hit him with a stick, like one of his, not berzini, but one of his, one of the trainers. So he that Durant thing could kill you with a punch in the head or careful, but he was pretty gentle, and then would follow directions, of course, you know, I get get hit. We all got a road trip up to Vegas to see the monkey show.

Hey, that makes it worth it. Yeah, Bob, you've had an amazing career, an amazing life, so many amazing stories. Thanks for hanging out with me and sharing a bunch of them.

Happy Jeff, thanks for thanks to you and Paul lander getting me hooking us

up. I know, right. Okay. Man, all right. Man, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Jeff.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai