JAlanRuss72
01-17-2010, 02:16 PM
====================BEWITCHED========================
Abner, I'm going over to the Stevens' to return the cookie cutters.
----MRS. KRAVITZ
It was a simple enough premise: a show about a man married to a woman who, it turned out, was a witch. Not so unusual. After all, Topper had a houseful of ghosts, and Tim O'Hara had an "uncle" who was a Martian. Wilbur had a talking horse, and later Dave Crabtree had a mother who was a car. So why not a witch?
From 1964 until 1972, American audiences answered that question every week by tuning into ABC and taking part in Samantha Stevens' benign witchcraft antics---whether it was finding a way to get a stoplight put up at a busy intersection, foiling her husband's boss, or simply waving her hands to clean up the kitchen when unexpected company arrived. On her wedding night, she confessed her talents to her husband, Darrin, who wasn't very happy about it. He wanted her to stop practicing witchcraft and to settle into being a nice suburban housewife . . . just another case of the witch who sits around the house all day doing nothing because her husband won't let her use her skills.
And so, Samantha became the Suburban Every-witch, sort of the Donna Reed of Sorcery, or, as Life Magazine put it, she was a witch "with her cauldron hooked to the rotisserie."
She was the kind of witch who used her broom for cleaning, not flying. But every once in a while (at least a few times each episode) she couldn't struggle any longer to contain her powers. She couldn't suppress the urge to make a flower grow or throw her voice so it sounded like her baby was talking. Samanthawas never unkind; she was just occasionally naughty.
Bewitched was fantasy with its feet firmly planted in reality, in which two myths collided---the myth of witchcraft and the myth of the suburban idyll. Lucy and Ricky took reality and bent it out of shape to fit a special fantasy. Samantha and Darrin took fantasy and bent it into shape to fit a certain reality. The main comic appeal of Bewitched was the possibility of dominion over environment. It was a one-joke show with a built-in situation.
It was all as simple as Samantha's upper lip, which she wriggled quite frequently to conjure up a spell or spirit (much like Lucy had conjured up an antic). Sam was mischievous and did all the things we wanted to. We didn't realize it, but, of course, we could do magic tricks with Samantha, making her appear and disappear simply by turning a knob on our magic boxes at home. Maybe it wasn't so mysterious after all.
Elizabeth Montgomery was on her third marriage, to producer/director William Asher. At thirty-two, she didn't want any part of television (her father was actor Robert Montgomery), and she agreed to star in the show only to work with her husband, who directed the pilot and the first fourteen episodes (he had previously directed I Love Lucy, the Danny Thomas and Patty Duke shows). She became pregnant right after the pilot was filmed. When the show was sold to ABC, twenty-four days after giving birth, she filmed twelve shows, in three months, working fourteen-hour days. It wasn't all bad; she ended up earning nearly $6 million from the show.
The first episode had the newlyweds invited to what they were promised was "a very casual" dinner party at Darrin's former girlfriend's house. naturally, when they arrived, everyone was dressed formally. Samantha was angry and ready to raise hell. She tried to control herself, but gave in to her temptation to sabotage the party and humiliate her well-dressed hostess by putting her elbow in the soup and giving her a black tooth.
Starring in the show with Montgomery was Dick York as Darrin and David White as his boss, Larry Tate. Right away, the show was a hit, beating out Bonanza in a thirty-city Nielsen survey. Bewitched was not particularly funny, per se. It was silly and fantastic. The most masterful thing about it was its special effects, which took a lot of time to devise and film. Dick Albain was the true star of the show; he was the special effects man. He was, under law, responsible if anyone got hurt on the set, and he always had about six assistants running around.
This is how it was done. When things appeared or disappeared from Samantha's hand, Montgomery would freeze at the proper point and Albain would come onto the set and take the object away. The footage of him would be cut away, and it would look like the object had vanished. Said Montgomery: "It took a lot of practice before I learned how to hold my hands perfectly still. But even that's much easier than the scene in which I was suppose to clean up the kitchen by witchery. I sort of went 'Swoosh' with my arms raised, then had to leave them up in the air---aching---while the crew rushed in and swept and dusted to get the kitchen immaculate before the scene resumed. I'm getting better at it, I guess," she said in 1964. "I almost never flinch or recoil anymore, no matter what happens."
Other tricks: the Stevens' magic vacuum cleaner (which seemed to work by itself) actually did work by itself. It was run by a reversible motor underneath, controlled by switches off-set.
Once, when Sam decided to leave Darrin, she first became invisible so that the suitcases seemed to pack and leave home on their own. This was done by having a special effects man standing on planks above the set, working wires attached to everything, like puppets.
As ratings declined, Bewitched viewers saw a number of changes---none of them invisible. First, Darrin and Samantha became parents of Tabitha, who turned out to be (on the first show of the third season) a witch just like her mommy. Samantha's mother Endora (played by Agnes Moorehead, most famous as Orson Welles' mother in Citizen Kane), added an elegant element---the old my-mother-in-law-the-witch routine---to the show. Then they added Samantha's twin cousin, Serena (also played by Montgomery), a naughty, fun-loving witch. In 1969, the Stevens had another kid---Adam, a warlock.
There was another big change in the show: at the end of the 1968-1969 season, Dick York left and was replaced by another Dick---Dick Sargent, who looked alot like him. There was no announcement about the switch. It just happened. One week York was Darrin, the next week Sargent was Darrin. It was like witchcraft.
Said Sargent: "I don't know why York quit the show. I just thank God that he did." Sargent had been considered for the role of Darrin when the show was originally cast, but he was under contract to Universal. He had played Kathy Nolan's boyfriend in Broadside, Tammy Grimes' twin brother on her short-lived (four episode) series, and had appeared in a number of movies.
Sargent (his real name was Cox, but he changed it when Wally Cox got hot) became a father after five episodes with the birth of Adam (whose sexual identity, until the "birth", was kept a secret, a precedent started on I Love Lucy years before when Ricky, Jr. was born).
On Sargent's first show, Tabitha decides that Samantha and Darrin like boys better, so she runs away by changing places with Jack (played by Family Affair's Johnny Whitaker) and climbing his beanstalk, with Sam following her. (LA Rams' defensive end Deacon Jones made his TV debut in this episode as the guardian of the giant's castle.)
Samantha's mother, Endora, was one of the most popular characters of the program, counterbalancing Sam's own golden goodness. Said Moorehead about her role: "I am quite a sophisticated gal. Endora is a very attractive and charming witch with a supernatural philosophy all her own. The humans in the script do plenty of foolish things, and she loves showing up their foolishness."
When she would teleport in for tea, one of the objects of her scorn was her son-in-law. "Oh, Derwood---or Darrin", whatever! she would say, "it's impossible to carry on a successful relationship with something that is ninety percent water, six percent potash, and four percent mohair."
Other character actors made made occasional appearances on the show: Paul Lynde sometimes appeared as Samantha's Uncle Arthur, a warlock in the mold of Lynde's typical snide characterizations. Marion Lorne (Mrs. Gurney from Mr. Peepers) was hilarious as Aunt Clara, a senile witch. Alice Ghostly played a retiring wallflower witch named Esmeralda.
Tabitha was played by three sets of twins (California law at the time dictated that babies could work only two hours a day, and Bewitched had a long shooting schedule). Although she looked different each time, it was hard to tell which witch was which.
Once, in 1970, Darrin was turned into a toad when he refused to accompany Samantha to a witches' convention in Salem, Massachusetts, home of the famous 1962 witch hunts, in which nineteen men and women were hanged for allegedly being witches.
DARRIN: Sam, I've been thinking . . . I mean, Salem, Mass.---isn't that kind of a dumb place for a witches' convention?
SAM: Not when you consider that one of the items on the agenda is to install a new resident . . . We've had one living there secretly ever since the witch hunts of 1692---just to make sure it doesn't happen again.
The Salem locations were the first exterior shots ever done on Bewitched; the rest was done on Hollywood back lots. However, during the show's last season, when the situation (and the comedy) were really running dry, the cast went off to Europe and filmed episodes such as the one in which Samantha and Darrin were transported back to Henry VIII's court, where she was stripped of her powers and her memory. Endora---noticing that Henry seemed to be taking a fancy to Sam---sent Darrin back home. Guess if it ended happily or not . . .
Probably the happiest ending the show had was when it finally ended on July 1, 1972, after eight seasons. It had become stale and tired---not because anyone had cast a spell over it---but just because it had run its course. Its gimmick had lost its glow.
In 1977, ABC tried a spin-off called Tabitha, about the Stevens' now-grown daughter who worked for a TV talk-show host. The show---and Tabitha---vanished after a few episodes. All we have left of Bewitched is reruns---hundreds of them---as the show continues to be popular. Why?
Agnes Moorehead answered the question best when she responded to a writer who wanted her to write the introduction to a book on witchcraft. "But you are a witch, aren't you?" the writer asked her.
"No," she said, "I'm just a fantasy witch."
Abner, I'm going over to the Stevens' to return the cookie cutters.
----MRS. KRAVITZ
It was a simple enough premise: a show about a man married to a woman who, it turned out, was a witch. Not so unusual. After all, Topper had a houseful of ghosts, and Tim O'Hara had an "uncle" who was a Martian. Wilbur had a talking horse, and later Dave Crabtree had a mother who was a car. So why not a witch?
From 1964 until 1972, American audiences answered that question every week by tuning into ABC and taking part in Samantha Stevens' benign witchcraft antics---whether it was finding a way to get a stoplight put up at a busy intersection, foiling her husband's boss, or simply waving her hands to clean up the kitchen when unexpected company arrived. On her wedding night, she confessed her talents to her husband, Darrin, who wasn't very happy about it. He wanted her to stop practicing witchcraft and to settle into being a nice suburban housewife . . . just another case of the witch who sits around the house all day doing nothing because her husband won't let her use her skills.
And so, Samantha became the Suburban Every-witch, sort of the Donna Reed of Sorcery, or, as Life Magazine put it, she was a witch "with her cauldron hooked to the rotisserie."
She was the kind of witch who used her broom for cleaning, not flying. But every once in a while (at least a few times each episode) she couldn't struggle any longer to contain her powers. She couldn't suppress the urge to make a flower grow or throw her voice so it sounded like her baby was talking. Samanthawas never unkind; she was just occasionally naughty.
Bewitched was fantasy with its feet firmly planted in reality, in which two myths collided---the myth of witchcraft and the myth of the suburban idyll. Lucy and Ricky took reality and bent it out of shape to fit a special fantasy. Samantha and Darrin took fantasy and bent it into shape to fit a certain reality. The main comic appeal of Bewitched was the possibility of dominion over environment. It was a one-joke show with a built-in situation.
It was all as simple as Samantha's upper lip, which she wriggled quite frequently to conjure up a spell or spirit (much like Lucy had conjured up an antic). Sam was mischievous and did all the things we wanted to. We didn't realize it, but, of course, we could do magic tricks with Samantha, making her appear and disappear simply by turning a knob on our magic boxes at home. Maybe it wasn't so mysterious after all.
Elizabeth Montgomery was on her third marriage, to producer/director William Asher. At thirty-two, she didn't want any part of television (her father was actor Robert Montgomery), and she agreed to star in the show only to work with her husband, who directed the pilot and the first fourteen episodes (he had previously directed I Love Lucy, the Danny Thomas and Patty Duke shows). She became pregnant right after the pilot was filmed. When the show was sold to ABC, twenty-four days after giving birth, she filmed twelve shows, in three months, working fourteen-hour days. It wasn't all bad; she ended up earning nearly $6 million from the show.
The first episode had the newlyweds invited to what they were promised was "a very casual" dinner party at Darrin's former girlfriend's house. naturally, when they arrived, everyone was dressed formally. Samantha was angry and ready to raise hell. She tried to control herself, but gave in to her temptation to sabotage the party and humiliate her well-dressed hostess by putting her elbow in the soup and giving her a black tooth.
Starring in the show with Montgomery was Dick York as Darrin and David White as his boss, Larry Tate. Right away, the show was a hit, beating out Bonanza in a thirty-city Nielsen survey. Bewitched was not particularly funny, per se. It was silly and fantastic. The most masterful thing about it was its special effects, which took a lot of time to devise and film. Dick Albain was the true star of the show; he was the special effects man. He was, under law, responsible if anyone got hurt on the set, and he always had about six assistants running around.
This is how it was done. When things appeared or disappeared from Samantha's hand, Montgomery would freeze at the proper point and Albain would come onto the set and take the object away. The footage of him would be cut away, and it would look like the object had vanished. Said Montgomery: "It took a lot of practice before I learned how to hold my hands perfectly still. But even that's much easier than the scene in which I was suppose to clean up the kitchen by witchery. I sort of went 'Swoosh' with my arms raised, then had to leave them up in the air---aching---while the crew rushed in and swept and dusted to get the kitchen immaculate before the scene resumed. I'm getting better at it, I guess," she said in 1964. "I almost never flinch or recoil anymore, no matter what happens."
Other tricks: the Stevens' magic vacuum cleaner (which seemed to work by itself) actually did work by itself. It was run by a reversible motor underneath, controlled by switches off-set.
Once, when Sam decided to leave Darrin, she first became invisible so that the suitcases seemed to pack and leave home on their own. This was done by having a special effects man standing on planks above the set, working wires attached to everything, like puppets.
As ratings declined, Bewitched viewers saw a number of changes---none of them invisible. First, Darrin and Samantha became parents of Tabitha, who turned out to be (on the first show of the third season) a witch just like her mommy. Samantha's mother Endora (played by Agnes Moorehead, most famous as Orson Welles' mother in Citizen Kane), added an elegant element---the old my-mother-in-law-the-witch routine---to the show. Then they added Samantha's twin cousin, Serena (also played by Montgomery), a naughty, fun-loving witch. In 1969, the Stevens had another kid---Adam, a warlock.
There was another big change in the show: at the end of the 1968-1969 season, Dick York left and was replaced by another Dick---Dick Sargent, who looked alot like him. There was no announcement about the switch. It just happened. One week York was Darrin, the next week Sargent was Darrin. It was like witchcraft.
Said Sargent: "I don't know why York quit the show. I just thank God that he did." Sargent had been considered for the role of Darrin when the show was originally cast, but he was under contract to Universal. He had played Kathy Nolan's boyfriend in Broadside, Tammy Grimes' twin brother on her short-lived (four episode) series, and had appeared in a number of movies.
Sargent (his real name was Cox, but he changed it when Wally Cox got hot) became a father after five episodes with the birth of Adam (whose sexual identity, until the "birth", was kept a secret, a precedent started on I Love Lucy years before when Ricky, Jr. was born).
On Sargent's first show, Tabitha decides that Samantha and Darrin like boys better, so she runs away by changing places with Jack (played by Family Affair's Johnny Whitaker) and climbing his beanstalk, with Sam following her. (LA Rams' defensive end Deacon Jones made his TV debut in this episode as the guardian of the giant's castle.)
Samantha's mother, Endora, was one of the most popular characters of the program, counterbalancing Sam's own golden goodness. Said Moorehead about her role: "I am quite a sophisticated gal. Endora is a very attractive and charming witch with a supernatural philosophy all her own. The humans in the script do plenty of foolish things, and she loves showing up their foolishness."
When she would teleport in for tea, one of the objects of her scorn was her son-in-law. "Oh, Derwood---or Darrin", whatever! she would say, "it's impossible to carry on a successful relationship with something that is ninety percent water, six percent potash, and four percent mohair."
Other character actors made made occasional appearances on the show: Paul Lynde sometimes appeared as Samantha's Uncle Arthur, a warlock in the mold of Lynde's typical snide characterizations. Marion Lorne (Mrs. Gurney from Mr. Peepers) was hilarious as Aunt Clara, a senile witch. Alice Ghostly played a retiring wallflower witch named Esmeralda.
Tabitha was played by three sets of twins (California law at the time dictated that babies could work only two hours a day, and Bewitched had a long shooting schedule). Although she looked different each time, it was hard to tell which witch was which.
Once, in 1970, Darrin was turned into a toad when he refused to accompany Samantha to a witches' convention in Salem, Massachusetts, home of the famous 1962 witch hunts, in which nineteen men and women were hanged for allegedly being witches.
DARRIN: Sam, I've been thinking . . . I mean, Salem, Mass.---isn't that kind of a dumb place for a witches' convention?
SAM: Not when you consider that one of the items on the agenda is to install a new resident . . . We've had one living there secretly ever since the witch hunts of 1692---just to make sure it doesn't happen again.
The Salem locations were the first exterior shots ever done on Bewitched; the rest was done on Hollywood back lots. However, during the show's last season, when the situation (and the comedy) were really running dry, the cast went off to Europe and filmed episodes such as the one in which Samantha and Darrin were transported back to Henry VIII's court, where she was stripped of her powers and her memory. Endora---noticing that Henry seemed to be taking a fancy to Sam---sent Darrin back home. Guess if it ended happily or not . . .
Probably the happiest ending the show had was when it finally ended on July 1, 1972, after eight seasons. It had become stale and tired---not because anyone had cast a spell over it---but just because it had run its course. Its gimmick had lost its glow.
In 1977, ABC tried a spin-off called Tabitha, about the Stevens' now-grown daughter who worked for a TV talk-show host. The show---and Tabitha---vanished after a few episodes. All we have left of Bewitched is reruns---hundreds of them---as the show continues to be popular. Why?
Agnes Moorehead answered the question best when she responded to a writer who wanted her to write the introduction to a book on witchcraft. "But you are a witch, aren't you?" the writer asked her.
"No," she said, "I'm just a fantasy witch."