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We spent a lot more money on production as a single-camera show than other three-camera in-studio situation comedies. We were actually making a mini movie every week. We shot on location. It would have been a lot easier to set up three TV cameras and shoot it like I Love Lucy. But it wouldn’t have captured the great production quality that Get Smart showed every week.
We rehearsed for two weeks. I told everybody: “Get everything out in terms of ideas and suggestions during rehearsals. Let’s not waste time and ad-lib during the actual shooting.”
That axiomatic way of rehearsing stayed with me through all of my movies: fun, insanity, creativity, total chaos during rehearsal, but total discipline during shooting.
Our producer was Jay Sandrich, who had worked on The Andy Griffith Show and then later on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. His father, Mark Sandrich, worked at RKO Studios and directed great movie musicals including Shall We Dance, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Holiday Inn, with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.
Leonard Stern, who had worked for Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, and Steve Allen, was brought in as our show runner. He came up with the opening and closing sequences that framed the show and became a visual signature and great way to remember it. The entrance to the secret headquarters of CONTROL is a long corridor, divided by a series of steel doors. An agent dials a number in a phone booth, and a trap door opens and drops him into headquarters. He came up with the closing sequence as well and kept coming up with great innovations.
The pilot episode opens with a voiceover narration:
This is Washington, D.C. Somewhere in this city is the headquarters of a top-secret organization known as CONTROL. Its business is counterespionage. This is Symphony Hall in Washington. Somewhere in this audience is one of CONTROL’s top employees, a man who lives a life of danger and intrigue. A man who’s been carefully trained never to disclose the fact that he is a secret agent.
The concert is interrupted by a phone ringing, as Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent 86, excuses himself amid the confused and disturbed patrons to answer his shoe-phone.
That was the first time that a phone rang in an audience during a public event. We were prescient. We knew that one day the audience would abound with shoe-phones interrupting public gatherings, or as they are now called, cellphones.
Originally, we did the pilot for ABC, which we shot in black and white. When they saw it, they said, “We pass.” I don’t know whether it was that they thought the production budget would be too high, or if they simply didn’t go for it.
That turned out to be lucky for us because we had some really good friends at NBC. I ran into Grant Tinker, who was running NBC at the time, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He asked, “Do you have anything that fell on the floor from the Sid Caesar shows that you didn’t use? We’re always looking for new funny shows.”
I said, “It so happens that we have a brand-new funny show that’s just been passed on by ABC.”
He said, “Great! I’d love to see it!”
Without wasting a moment, we sent the pilot over to Grant Tinker’s team and they loved what we had done and bought the show immediately.
The same thing happened to me almost ten years later with Columbia Pictures and Young Frankenstein. They were tough on the budget, and when I told them I wanted to shoot it in black and white they went crazy and said, “Never!” We then took it to Alan Ladd, Jr., at Twentieth Century Fox. The rest is not only history; it’s also explained in a later chapter.
For the first season of Get Smart, a few teams of writers were hired, all of whom were friends of ours. Buck was the script supervisor. There were three people responsible for the quality of the show: Don, Buck, and Lenny Stern.
We added some terrific characters and actors later. Hymie the Robot was played by Dick Gautier. I had first seen Dick in Bye Bye Birdie. His timing was impeccable. I loved him so much that when I did When Things Were Rotten, the television show based on the legend of Robin Hood, I immediately thought of Dick to play Robin Hood. Bernie Kopell was cast as KAOS agent Baron Von Siegfried, who was Max and 99’s frequent nemesis and a brilliant addition to the show.
After the first season NBC sadly informed us that the ratings didn’t warrant its being picked up for another season. They had made several new pilots and tried them out that summer, thinking that one of them would be a good replacement for Get Smart. Once again luck was with us; the new pilots didn’t test well. “The powers that were” at NBC decided to give Get Smart a shot at another season.
From there on, it took off. Sometimes, getting the audience into the habit of watching a new show is just as important as its quality.
As I look back at Get Smart, if I had to do it again now, I would have maybe trimmed a few jokes, but would have basically kept it the same. It holds up because we were having fun with inept idiots. Inept idiots will always be fun. I’m very proud of the bold wit we laced through the pilot script and the other scripts I wrote. We never condescended to the lowest common denominator with the goal of getting the best ratings—the standard network concept of the lower the brain level of the script, the more people were going to watch it. We never gave in to that. Buck and I decided that it was only what made us laugh, and that would also make the world laugh.
In the end, I think we were right.
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What Get Smart’s success meant for me personally was that at last I was getting a steady paycheck. So on August 5, 1964, I was able to marry Anne and pay the bills. I was not only able to take her out to dinner, but now she didn’t have to slip me money under the table anymore to pay the check—I could actually pay for it.
We went down to city hall in lower Manhattan to get married by a justice of the peace. We were in such a hurry that I forgot two things: one, a ring and two, a witness! We were lucky on the ring, Anne happened to be wearing hoop earrings and she took them off and we used one of them for the ring. But a witness, where would I get a witness? There was a couple at city hall that had just been married, so we asked to borrow their witness. They called over this kid named Samuel Boone.
Here we are, newly married and standing in front of our first home together in Greenwich Village.
And I walked up to him and said, “Sam, we don’t have a best man or anything. Could you stand up for us?”
He said, “Yeah. Sure.” And then he said, “But I want to warn you. Let me tell you about the clerk who is gonna marry you. He just married my friends, and he has a really crazy voice. We had a tough time not breaking up when we heard that loopy voice.”