Director tells tales from TV

[gilligan fanatic]

Director tells tales from TV

John Rich worked on classic sitcoms

No way. Never going to happen.

That's what John Rich thought the first time he read the pilot script for "All in the Family" 36 years ago.
"I said, 'They certainly are not going to do this on TV,' " recalled Rich recently.
You may not instantly recognize the name, but John Rich's Emmy Award-winning work as the director of two of television's greatest comedies, "All in the Family" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show," should ring a pretty familiar and funny bell.
"It was the most remarkable thing," says Rich of working with people like Carroll O'Connor, Jean Stapleton, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore and others on those two classic sitcoms.
"Both those shows had insanely brilliant actors who weren't afraid to take chances," says Rich, whose career from the 1950s to 1990s also included work as a director or producer on such beloved series as "The Jeffersons," "Maude," "Barney Miller," "The Brady Bunch," "Gilligan's Island," "Newhart," "MacGyver" and more.
Now the 81-year-old Rich has put his many memories into book form, "Warm Up the Snake, A Hollywood Memoir" (University of Michigan Press, $29.95), a breezily entertaining, behind-the-scenes reflection on the famous shows, colorful personalities, aggravating network executives and strange show business behavior he has encountered.
(It's no coincidence that the University of Michigan Press published "Warm Up the Snake." Rich, a New York native, graduated from U-M in 1948 with a degree in speech and English after military service in World War II. Having endowed a $1-million professorship at U-M's Institute for the Humanities in 1991, Rich was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by the university in 2002.)
What about that title?
"Warm up the snake" is an old entertainment industry expression Rich first heard while directing a Western in which one called for a rattlesnake.
"Rattlers will not move until their bodies have been heated by the sun," Rich recounts. So a critter wrangler had to take the snake and warm it up before the reptile could do its rattler thing on "Gunsmoke" or "Bonanza" (two Westerns Rich directed) or some other show.
Rich also directed a number of feature films during the 1960s with stars like Elvis Presley ("Roustabout"), Shelley Winters ("Wives and Lovers") and Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis ("Boeing-Boeing").
But it was his work in TV sitcoms -- especially the top-shelf collaborations with producers Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and Norman Lear on "All in the Family" -- that brought Rich his greatest acclaim and many of his most rewarding experiences.
"Dick and Mary Tyler Moore were so attractive. It was just a pleasure looking at them," recalls Rich, who chatted during a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles.
As bright, engaging and very funny Rob and Laura Petrie, Van Dyke and Moore became America's sweethearts in the early 1960s.
"They just looked like people who slept together, even though in those days they had to use separate beds (on TV)," jokes Rich. "You knew they really loved each other and cared about each other."
Though Van Dyke was already an established comic performer, Moore's sitcom skills were an unknown when she was hired in 1961.
"At first, we didn't know she was so talented," says Rich. "And then a few episodes into the opening season, we did an episode ... in which Laura Petrie dyed her hair and it came out half-blond and half-brunette. And Mary was brilliant."
A decade later, in 1970, Moore called Rich to ask him to direct the pilot for a new series about a single woman working at a Minneapolis TV station. Hmmm.
But the very same day Rich was pitched the chance to direct "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," he was also offered the opportunity to do the same for another new CBS series in the works, "All in the Family." Yikes.
Despite the smart, incredibly witty script for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," Rich was even more knocked out by the bold, provocative "All in the Family."
"I had my doubts about the network's ability to live up to this commitment, but the attempt intrigued me," writes Rich, who chose to direct the more artistically bodacious comic stories of Archie Bunker and "All in the Family."
"It led off such a splendid night of television," says Rich, referring to CBS's astonishing Saturday night comedy lineup of the 1970s: "All in the Family," "M*A*S*H," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Bob Newhart Show" and "The Carol Burnett Show."
But it was the barbed, politically charged social comedy of "All in the Family" that rattled the TV landscape.
"Initially a lot of the white press panned it," remembers Rich. "But the black press loved it. They got it immediately. This was showing what Whitey thinks and says behind closed doors."
After starting slowly, "All in the Family" took off.
There was a bit of apprehension that some of the show's popularity might be from people who thought of racially bigoted Archie Bunker as a hero. But Rich, who produced and directed nearly 100 episodes, including the entire first four seasons, says, "On balance, most people got it. You almost have to feel sorry for Bunker ... trapped in a cultural turmoil he couldn't explain."
Though he's no longer working in television, John Rich is still a fan.
" 'Boston Legal' is one of my favorites, it's brilliantly written and acted," he says. "And I really like 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,' which is floundering. Aaron Sorkin and (director) Thomas Schlamme are a terrific team.
"But people who like dance contests, giveaways and game shows don't like shows like 'Studio 60.' It's too complicated and requires too much effort."
Nope, Archie Bunker wouldn't dig "Studio 60."

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