Like a true Gemini, you said you were torn between the sciences and the arts. (Laughs) Yes. I had two best friends growing up, Jerry, who was my friend for doing plays and anything theatrical, and my nature friend Carl Schnizler who I would collect bugs with. We were literally nature bugs. The two friends never mixed so I had two distinctly different worlds, like a Gemini. What was the nudge that ultimately focused you on your life’s work? My father was ill and couldn’t afford putting me through college. So my great aunt was going to put me through college to be a doctor. I went to Dartmouth for pre-med. After a year, I was so involved with the Dartmouth Players, the radio station, and writing film notes for the Film Society, I changed my major at which point my great aunt cut me off completely. They were real estate barons and thought theater types to be undesirable. My uncle, thank God, came to the rescue. He actually talked them into giving me a very small scholarship. I had a lot of student loans, and I had three jobs. That’s how I got through Dartmouth.
When they took out my tonsils I almost died, and I was out of school for a year recovering in Florida. I taught myself to read by reading comic books. When I went back to school the next year, I could read just as well they did. Growing up we had a great library of books and a wonderful stamp collection because he got letters from all over the world. That influenced me tremendously in the arts.
scenesarasota.com
You have always had a fondness for radio. Tell me how it influenced your career. In high school, we had a local radio station. I actually got to do a show that was largely school news and occasionally we would fall into something resembling Regis and Kelly. The heartthrob of our school got the show because she was the heartthrob. I got to do it because I wrote them. This experience definitely influenced what I wanted to do later in life on TV.
Speaking of books, tell me about the many bound scripts from your life in TV that I’m staring at on your shelf. They literally are a history of the television medium. I bound them because the only thing left after a live show is the script. In the early days we did not have videocassettes or anything to put them on. I wanted something tangible to remind me of the shows that I did.
What was your first big break in show business? Lee Hats was trying to get students to wear hats again and had a commercial writing contest. I was one of the winners who were brought to New York for a day at Grey Advertising and at CBS television. When I went to CBS, which had two beautiful brand new television studios above Grand Central, I loved that it was radio, theater, and film all combined and that it was live and immediate. So I said to myself, “I really want to get into this.” Eureka, everything clicked for me at that moment.
What were your early influences in high school, and how did you initially get the theater bug? Jerry and I went to a wonderful high school. It had a beautiful theater and that was unique for a public school. We did four plays and a musical a year plus many one act plays. It was just a fantastic experience.
Tell me about that Ed Sullivan and Beatles experience. As 73 million watched at home, you were a young man making his bones in the business so to speak. I was the associate director, and my job really was to ready the shots that the director would take. In the February 2015
|
SCENE
87