INT: This is April 16th 2002. We are at the Directors Guild of America and this person here is John Rich; master filmmaker, and good storyteller and this is part of your history, sir. So thanks for being here. JR: Thank you for having me.

INT: Who were your teachers? If you look back and say, who taught you what you've learned, who are your mentors and what did they teach you?
JR: Well I think there was never a mentor, per se, because I was kind of in on beginning of things. You know, I started to work in 1950 when television was first rearing its not so ugly head. And I was a Stage Manager at NBC [National Broadcasting Corporation]. And I think if I had any mentor at all, it was working for bad Directors. I used to watch them and be so interested in seeing the decision-making process. And after awhile--first I just ran around doing my work, you know, as a Stage Manager. Pretty soon I became competent enough to finish my work rather quickly, so I could begin to observe what was going on, the dynamics between Director and Actor. After awhile I said, you know "I think that I'm on the wrong track." Never being sure of myself, but just saying, "I don't think that's the right solution." And some Producer would come around and straighten out the problem. And sometimes they would agree with my thinking, and sometimes I would say, "Wait a minute. I had that all wrong." And I would watch again. But again, I'd watch--competent Directors were so smooth that the job just went on, and I never learned anything. It was just, "Okay, I'm doing my little piece. I'm cog--I'm part of the cog, a part of the machinery." [INT: Right.] A cog in the machinery, excuse me. [INT: Right.] But the bad ones, for example I think of one early on, who was called Captain Video, I think. Mocking of course. [INT: Right., right.] And one day we were doing a remote at the Hudson River, and the battleship New Jersey was tied up, and that was the background. And this Director was looking through a primitive video camera of the time. It was being fed back to the RCA building. And he looked through the lens and he said, "Move the boat five feet to the right." Stunned silence. The boat? It's 45,000 tons of battleship [laughs] tied up. And somebody said, "Why don't you roll the camera the other way?" "Oh yeah, okay." But, you learn pretty quickly that that's a pretty stupid thing to say. So you say, "I'm not gonna do that anymore. Ever."

INT: Because of the skill that you have as--, among other things, as a Director of comedy, if you look at your development of your own sense of humor, how did it start, where did it come from?
JR: Well I think it was largely defensive 'cause I lived in a relatively abusive family situation. And, my father, when he was not being a carpenter in the winter, ran a luncheon store on the boardwalk at Rockaway Beach, and so they would banish me to the boardwalk at the age of three or four. They'd kind of keep an eye on me, but I began to converse with people. And after awhile, people would say, "Isn't he precocious?", something to that degree. Because I became very verbal, very quickly. And after awhile I would say something that would catch their fancy and I'd say, "Hey, that was good." It became something comedic, apparently. So I would keep working on that and try to be as funny as I could just to create attention, I suppose. And it worked for me. But the idea of precocity comes to me because, remember the Morris office? The William Morris Agency. It was led for so many years by Abe Lastfogel [Abraham Isaac "Abe" Lastfogel], who was very small, as you remember. In fact, I remember one client who said to his sub-agent, "If you don't get me what I want I'm gonna go under your head to Abe Lastfogel." But there were two Morris agents who were, subagents who were conversing. And one of them said, "Here are pictures of my child." He said, "Look at this boy; precocious. Only four years old and already he's short." You know. [INT: [laughs]] Now that was of value, I guess, but I began to see the humor in things like that just by standing on one leg, in effect, and looking at life through a kind of prism that bent everything that came along your way. And pretty soon you learned, in becoming more verbal, that the more bent you could say things, the more people laughed. And the more people laughed, it gave you a kind of credibility that you didn't have in the family, where I was the youngest of four competing siblings--three others, including myself. And a family that was largely not that concerned with my welfare.

INT: Were you the clown in the class when you were a kid?
JR: No, I was very studious. I really buckled down. Later, I became what I thought was kind of a wit. [INT: But now that's an interesting thing, because there's a difference between a wit, [JR: Yeah.], which really does show intelligence, [JR: Yeah, that's interesting.] and a clown, that is a character.] No, I was not a clown. I would do wordplay. I enjoyed word--I still do. I mean, words are tremendous to me. Verbal jousting became a kind of thing with me and if I could find some kind of wordplay that would work against the word in progress, I would get a laugh in the class and that would be good. And in fact, that stood me in great stead when doing ALL IN THE FAMILY because we were talking about words all the time. I remember one day, in FAMILY [ALL IN THE FAMILY], the sequence had to do with menopause; Edith [Edith Bunker character] was going through menopause, which as it's own fun. And in the text Archie Bunker said to the meathead or whoever, "I have to see gynecologist today." And I stopped the rehearsal and I said, "Wait a minute, Carroll--" Carroll O'Connor [born John Carroll O'Connor, actor who played Archie Bunker]. "He could never make that word." He said, "Yeah, you're right." And we literally sat around for about ten minutes saying, "What would Archie Bunker say?" And I confess, I came up the line. And I said, "I think I got it, Carroll." He said, "What?" "I have to see the 'groinocologist.'" And that became kind of a catch word--a lot of women still say that, by the way, I'm told. My wife, who I didn't know at the time, you know, said she'd saw the program and she's always referred to that particular physician as the "groinocologist." But that was just one example of wordplay that always interested me.

INT: Now, this is an interesting issue because the choice of a career for you--you were studious, words were there--what was available to you? Where were you headed before you became a, you know, film and television Director? Where were you headed?
JR: Well you know, it's interesting because it was all by accident, I think. I think it came out of poverty, frankly. Because I went to Michigan, the University of Michigan, because it was very inexpensive in those days. It was $100 a semester for out-of-state students. It was far enough away from New York to be out of the grasp of my family. I wanted to get away [INT: Right.]. And I worked all summer early on to earn the $100--I arrived in Ann Arbor with $105 in my pocket and I immediately got work as a waiter, and I worked for there for a semester before--And I enlisted in the American Air Force [United States Air Force (USAF)]--I have to say the American Air Force. I want to say I was on the winning side for a change. [INT: laughs loudly] I had enlisted as an aviation cadet, but I was only seventeen, so they wouldn't take me 'til I was eighteen. So I had a semester at Michigan working as a waiter at the Michigan union. Then I went to the service, and when I came back I was in a dreadful hurry to get out. And Michigan was on a trimester program, so I took--I never went home--I took three semesters at once. I had some physics credits by virtue of having flown in the Air Force, and so the science requirement was kind of taken care of. I was good at languages. I took all the English courses I could, in that facet-- Again, words. English really got me, and I was very lucky to have a magnificent professor who happened to be the Chairman of the [English] department there, Louie Bredvold [Louis L. Bredvold], who was the eighteenth century maven. He wrote all the books on Dryden [John Dryden], for example. He was the head man on--. I don't know why I'm going into such a long, detailed-- Is this alright? [INT: No, keep go--yeah, keep going, because I'm interested--also because you just said this guy was a great teacher.] Oh, he was wonderful, yeah. [INT: And do you know why?] Words. Well, because he used to say-the idea that he would even take an English 1 class was extraordinary; the head of the department. And he taught us composition, so--. And he was always very, very keen on getting this precise word. "Don't get a word that has a penumbra effect. There is a meeting in the middle. Make sure you've got--" He was very strict about that, and wonderful. So when I came back, I took all of his courses in the eighteenth century. And in fact, I took all of the English courses available. [INT: You're probably the only person in the member of the Directors Guild's [DGA] who's not only heard of Dryden, but maybe even read something by him.] Oh no, I've read-- Well, but I took 'The Bible of Literature' for a year, which was a tremendous piece of ground, ground--foundation work. I took all of Shakespeare [William Shakespeare], Chaucer [Geoffrey Chaucer]; the eighteenth century Writers, Swift [Jonathan Swift], and Pope [Alexander Pope] and all of--. By the way, in my graduate year, well I'd been an A student. By that time, I'd earned Phi Beta Kappa key, despite working all the time; washing dishes, waiting on tables still. I'll get eventually to how I got there. [INT: We'll get there. I promise you [JR: Okay.] I've got the reins here, but I want to know where we're going.] But this was a wonderful moment because in my last year, having been a--as a prized student in all of Bredvold's, Louie Bredvold's classes, I got through the entire canon of what he taught. And he gave a final exam with five questions on it. I'll never forget them because one of them was, "As Rochefoucauld [François de La Rochefoucauld] his maxims drew from nature--I believe them true." And what it was, was "Who wrote this? Discuss it fully. What was it all abou?" etcetera, etcetera. And as often happens--maybe not to others, but to me--I drew a blank. I said, "I cannot figure who wrote this." So I took the other four questions and dealt with them and then I came back. I said that's Rochefoucauld, nature. It must be Pope. So I wrote a very learned commentary on Pope's Essay on Man [An Essay on Man] and pretty good. But as I came up and handed in my blue book, Professor Bredvold said to me, "Well--" and he had a tic, and a series of [imitating Bredvold] vocalized pauses. He was a great big Norwegian; bald-headed giant of a man. "And, ah [speaking with tic] Mr. Rich, what did you think of the exam?" I said, "Well I was surprised that there was a question on Pope, number one." And he said, "Pope?" And my heart sank. He said, "No Pope. What did you think--?" I said, well, I pointed to question one, and he said, "Why Mr. Rich, how could you? Tetrameter." The verse had been written in iambic tetrameter. "It's Swift! Pope only wrote in pentameter." Okay so I said--and I thought I was dead. [INT: Sure.] But he was kind, he read the--and he thought I did a good job on Pope, I got an A in the course anyway. Okay, so here's the expert on Dryden. Now, fast forward fifty years, approximately, you know about that. I'm now having a meeting with James Winn [James Anderson Winn], professor at Michigan; he was chairman of the Institute for the Humanities at Michigan, a place where I ultimately donated a chair, the department, a professorship. Winn had just completed the definitive work on Dryden [laughs]. I just love this. And we're having lunch one day and I said, "By the way, did you ever know Louie Bredvold?" He said, "No, no, I never knew him, but by god, he was the giant." I said, "I know, I was fortunate enough to study with him." He said, "He was the Dryden man." I said "Yes, I know, and now you are the Dryden man." He had this wonderful book which I could recommend to anybody. It's wonderfully done. So I told him that story and I said, "I got into this exam and I drew the--and then I read the Rochefoucauld and I wrote this thing on Pope." He said, "Wait a minute. How could you do that? It's tetrameter!" [laughs] [INT: [laughs]] Two people in the world [INT: Who would know...] maybe who would know that. [INT: That's great.] It's come full circle!

INT: Now, but here is this man who inspired you [JR: Oh very much so.], and he obviously inspired you to love language. [JR: Oh boy. And--] So where was it going to go?
JR: Well I didn't know. At that point, I thought, well, maybe I'll be a teacher. [INT: Okay.] But one of the jobs that I had was driving a taxicab at night. [INT: This is in Wisconsin--] In Ann Arbor, right. And it was--I was also taking a class [INT: Michigan] in radio, from a wonderful professor named Garnet Garrison who used to be an NBC [National Broadcasting Corporation] radio Director, and had come to Ann Arbor because he was raising a family and he was teaching. And now this was a guy who had the real stuff about radio, and what it was to be a professional. I'd never even considered it. But, you know, you had rudimentary stuff like how to be an announcer, how to play a turntable disck; that sort of thing. So I was kind of in that-- when read or heard somewhere that there was a new radio station opening up on Packard Road called WHRV, for Huron River Valley. New radio station, they were hiring temporary help. And I thought, "Hey, I've done announcing in a class. Maybe I can get a job there." So I went out there. And sure enough, they hired three students, I was one of them. Dollar an hour to work on Saturday nights. You know, you'd spin records and read the news. Not bad. It was from that, that the whole thing began because, one day the manager came and said, "Which one of you guys knows something about basketball?" Well I had written a column for the sports pages of the high school newspaper, but I had never seen a Big Ten college game. I said, "Oh, I know basketball very well." He said, "Okay, you'll be announcing the game next week." I said, "What game?" He said, "We're playing Minnesota." Well, the backstory there is that Michigan was a powerhouse school in every sport imaginable: football, hockey, swimming. Couldn't get arrested at basketball. Nobody cared about it. They were the last of the big 10 every year. [INT: Right.] And I said, "Why are you covering it?" He said, "We have to fill up the air space." I have to tell you also, this radio station was post-war, [INT: Right.] so it was assigned 1600 kilocycles. Whic, you know, sounds innocent enough. Every radio in America had stopped at 1560 kilocycles at that time. The FCC had just added 40 kilocycles to the bandwidth. Nobody could hear this station [laughs]. So they were broadcasting it to the ether, and they were advertising in the newspapers and saying, "If you have a new radio you can hear us. If you have an old radio, we will send one of our engineers to your house and adjust the old radio so you can receive--" So the listenership must have been about 50 [laughs] in the whole town. [INT: Right.] Really bizarre. So I know nothing about basketball, so I went down to the field house. It was called Yost Field House after Hurry-Up Yost. Remember that name? [INT: [agrees]] Football. Great football coach. Yost Field House seated 5,000 people. If they had 50 or 100 spectators it was a big day. Nobody cared. But I watched a broadcast--I watched a practice and I was horrified to find that part of my broadcast would include names like Supranowitz, Michalowski. [INT: [laughs]] Everybody had a ten syllable name and I said, "How am I gonna get around this with any degree of speed?" A Chick Hearn, I wasn't [laughs]. I didn't even know that existed at that time. So I went down to Wahr's Bookstore [Wahr's University Book Store] on State Street and I said, "Do you have a book on the rules of intercollegiate basketball?" I always go back to books. [INT: Right.] So I read the rules and I said, "Well, this gives me some insight." Then I saw Fritz Crisler who was the athletic director and I said, "Where do I sit to broadcast the game?" He said, "What do you want to broadcast these games for?" He said, "Nobody's interested." I said, "Well, that's not the point." He said, "Nobody's ever asked before but we have no place for that." So I said, "Well would it be alright if my station built a little box up in the--leaning down from the rafters?" He said, "I don't care what you do." He said, "Nobody really cares." So the station came out, and they built a little plywood box. I had to climb over the rafters of the field house and climb into the box, which was fine. Fifty yard line, in a [mumbles] center court. Sorry, I'm mixing metaphors. And I got a friend to spot the names for me so I'd know who had the ball, you know. And knowing nothing at all, I plunged into the game and Michigan won that day. It was a fluke. And so, next week, we played another team and they won, and the next week. Suddenly the team that everybody figured was a doormat, suddenly became alive. And I'm broadcasting these games, and now the field house is filling up. And pretty soon it's filled up to the point where you can't get in. [INT: Wow.] So people are now listening to my broadcast and I became a minor celebrity in Ann Arbor. I'm still a student, mind you. I was a graduate student, but I was still a student. And one day, the powerhouse teams began to arrive. They had always ignored us. Now here comes Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and the dreaded Ohio State. All of those people are showing up and their broadcasters are saying, "Where do we sit?" And Fritz Crisler would say, "There's no room." So they'd say, "Well how do we broadcast the games?" He'd say, "Talk to that guy." Me. So for 25 dollars an extra city, I was on our network! [INT: Great.] I'd make 25 bucks from each of these towns that were picking up my broadcast. Michigan went through the whole year undefeated; the most extraordinary event, you know. Meanwhile the station was--because people couldn't get in--were getting, were being clamored with for people to, "Fix my radio so I can hear to this guy." Again, so now I'm becoming a little smoother, you know. And at the end of the year, Michigan won the Big Ten title [champions of the Big Ten Conference (B1G), formerly Western Conference and Big Nine Conference]. So I went to the Station Manager, and I said, "Listen, you're gonna have to send me to New York. He said, "What for?" I said, "They're playing in the Final Four at Madison Square Garden." "Ah, Come on, we don't have the money for that. I mean, I can't do it." I said, "Listen, if you don't do it, the villagers are gonna come out here with torches and they'll be burning down your station because we've created a monster. People like these broadcasts, they're rooters now." "Oh my god, what do I do?" I said, "Let me take care of it. Lemme see if I can sell the program." I went down to a Ford agency and got myself a sponsor. [INT: Wow.] I'm learning the craft of backstage maneuvering. To me, it was kind of fun. [INT: Right.] Better than washing dishes at the campus steakhouse, which I did for lunch; better than driving a cab all through the night. I'm now an entrepreneur of sorts. Very low level, but okay. I made a deal with Michigan [University of Michigan] to let me ride with the [men's basketball] team to New York; I paid a very small amount. And I had to--the manager said, "I'll can send nobody with you. You go there alone." So I had to deal with a local radio station, I picked on WBNX, the Bronx, to send me an Engineer. I made a deal with the telephone company to get a--the cheapest line possible back to Ann Arbor. It was a class D broadcast line, which meant they could hear me but I couldn't hear them. Can you imagine? We would synchronize watches on the telephone. A regular phone call. Hang up and then I'd start talking at eight o'clock or whatever the time was. I made a deal with Madison Square Garden to have a box. [INT: Right.] And I was delighted with it. I'm a guy with the press. And I got up there and I broadcast the games. And Michigan was creamed by Holy Cross and Kentucky. [INT: [laughs]] I can't remember the fourth team. Excuse me a minute. [INT: Was this your--?] I do remember that Bob Cousy and Ralph Beard were some of the players. [INT: Wow. Now this was your first time back in New York, from some--?] Oh yeah, from--since before the war. [INT: Got it.] Yeah. So here I am, parading around Madison Square Garden. And on the train back to Ann Arbor I thought, "You know, I don't see myself doing this business as a career. I don't really like really having to describe, essentially the same thing with minor variations, guys running up and down a basketball court in their underwear. I don't think I'll want to see this as a life work." I did enjoy hiring, not the announcer, but the engineer; I enjoyed dealing with the phone company; I enjoyed Madison Square Garden. I liked being a Producer. I never thought about it in those terms before, but that's what came. So, okay. So, at the end of my time at Michigan, I got my degree and I went to professor Garrison [Garnet Garrison]. [INT: And your degree was in English?] The degree was in English, yeah. Well, as I say I [INT: Got it.] I had taken--oh god, what professors I had. Humphries and the bible. HT Price for Shakespeare [William Shakespeare] and Chaucer [Geoffrey Chaucer]. Oh, Joely Davis from the American novel. I mean, I went through--I was insatiable. I just wanted to sop up all the English I possibly could.

INT: Now did you want to write at all?
JR: No. [INT: That wasn't part of it.] No, writing--it's interesting. I--for many years I had a block about writing. And I think part of it was because my older brother, Larry, was an English teacher in high school, and anything I wrote was not good enough. And I think I was stunted. [INT: And yet, the admiration for Writers--] Oh, complete. Writers? I love 'em. And even today, with all the nonsense going on with the Guild [Directors Guild of America, DGA], against the Writers Guild [WGA] and some of their craziness. But I love Writers and I've always got along great with them, with all my work. [INT: But, you start with this love of writing. I mean, clearly, this is a--] Anyway, so I said to Professor Garrison [Garnet Garrison], "What do I do now?" And I said, "I've got some background now as an announcer. Where should I go?" I said, "I hear there's this new thing called television." He said, "Right. Go to Grand Rapids." I said, "Grand Rapids? What the hell is Grand Rapids?" He said, "Well, it's a little town out in Michigan." He says, "It's some place to start." I said, "Hey. Here's my estimation of that. If I start in Grand Rapids, in five years, if I'm good, I'll make it to Detroit." In another five years, I might get to Chicago. In fifteen years," I said, "Maybe New York or Los Angeles." I said, "That's a crazy way to go." He said, "What are you gonna do?" I said, "Well, my family still has an apartment in Rockaway Beach, I can live there rent free. The government is going to pay me 52 dollars--no, 20 dollars for 52 weeks, as a veteran." I said, "I can subsist and I can try to get a job in New York." He said, "New York's gonna break your heart." I said, "Well, I gotta try it." So I did. And he was right, it broke my heart. [INT: Did it?] Oh, no work. Could not get arrested. I mean, I would go into New York constantly. [INT: Right.] All the time. I'd hang out at the--are you familiar with the NBC [National Broadcast Company]? [INT: Yeah.] Well, you know, at that time, I don't know if it was still there when you came along, but the Kaufman Bedrick drugstore, on the ground floor of the RCA building where NBC was located, was a hang out for all the unemployed people who'd read discarded copies of Variety to see what's going on. [INT: Right.] You'd drink a--pay for a cup of coffee and sit there for most of the day, trying to catch a rumor of anything. Couldn't do it. Went to my father-- [INT: Are we talking a year? Are we talking more than a year?] Oh, no, no. It seemed like a century, but it's about six or seven months. [INT: Got it.] No work, and I would constantly on the subway. Thank god it was a nickel [5 cents]. I had to take a bus, and another bus, and still another bus, and then the subway at Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, and then all the way into Manhattan. It was a chore--but I read. All the time I was on the subway, I read. I'm an insatiable reader still. [INT: Right, right, right.] So you see, the love of the word has pursued me this whole time. [INT: So you're six months here, no job.] No job, no. Finally my father looks at me with that Archie Bunker expression, he said, "When are you gonna go to work?" I said, "Well, I'll get there." He said, "Listen. I have the need for a laborer this week. I'm gonna hire you. Come to work with me." [INT: Yeah.] I said, "How could I turn that down?" As I learned after a week of back-breaking labor, it would have been easy to have turned it down. [INT: [laughs]] I never have worked so hard in my life. Of course, this man is an ox. My father was incredible. Lifting lumber, wood. And I'm a klutz. In fact, I'm a reaction formation to my father's skill. He was a tremendous carpenter, I mean, and brute strength. He could drive ten penny nails with four strokes of a hammer with either hand. I mean, okay. There's a sideline to this about when I was producing MACGYVER, I had a wonderful Director named Charles Correll, Jr. Do you know Charlie? [INT: Yes.] Charlie--well, you know what a lovely man he is, and he's a good action Director. And one day looking at dailies, and Charlie had conspired with our star, Richard Dean Anderson, to do something comedic. Well, it's a disaster [laughs]. I mean, two ultra white boys from the Protestant side of the river do not have that innate structure that makes for comedy. That may be an oversimplification, but [INT: They didn't.] it seems you need Black guys or Jews or Irish to give you comedy, you know. And these two are neither. And I thought, "Oh god, I love Charlie, but how am I gonna correct this? But I can't let him go on." So I called him in to a meeting. And I said "Charlie, I'm just looking at yesterday's dailies." He said, "Do you like them?" I said "Yeah, for the most part they're very good. You're doing lovely work. However, I want to tell you a little story..." I said, "My father was an expert carpenter." And I told him about the driving of the nails and all of that. I said, "As a result, I'm a reaction formation. I cannot saw a straight line. I cannot pick up a piece of wood without getting splinters and injuring myself. I cannot change a lightbulb without calling in an electrician. I'm a complete mechanical moron." He said "Why are you telling me this?" I said, "Well, your father was Charles Correll, Sr." You know who that was? [INT: Of course.] He was Andy on the AMOS 'N' ANDY radio show. I said, "Charlie, it skips a generation. [laughs] [INT: laughs] Humor might come out in your children. My children were pretty good with tools. Your kids might be good with comedy." I said, "But, you and Richard should lay off. Play it straight." He said, "I got you, boss." [INT: Great, great, great.] So it worked, though. In a gentle way, I was able to get my message across.

INT: Good metaphor. Now get back to this six months, we don't have a job yet.
JR: I don't have a job, okay. I lasted a week with my father. [INT: Right] I said, "That's it. [laughs] I'm going back to--" [INT: Ox you're not.] An ox I'm not. I can't do this. But, what stayed in my mind was the Bunker [Archie Bunker from ALL IN THE FAMILY] character, years later, "When are you going to go to work?" you know. Well, that was a refrain [INT: Yep.] we used with the Meathead [character]. Anyway, I got another job. Finally, I found a radio job as a disc jockey announcer reading the news in Freeport, Long Island. A 250 watt station. It's a light bulb. [INT: Yeah, it'll broadcast across the street.] Well, except they were smart enough to put their transmitter right into a salt pond near the ocean and it boosted its energy somehow, I don't know how, but salt apparently does something. So it was like 1,000 watts. But the manager was so cheap and so difficult that he'd had a hundred announcers before. And I lasted a week. I said, "I can't--" You know, the guy was incredible. I mean, he was really one of those people that flash the whip without any need. So one week and I said, "Back to the Kaufman Bedric drugstore." And then in some despair, I remembered that Garnet Garrison had told me about a Director at NBC [National Broadcasting Corporation] named Walter McGraw. One of his students that had been at Wayne in Detroit. Wayne State [Wayne State University], I'm not sure. I think it was just Wayne at that time. He said, "Look up Walter at some point and say hello." So I took a chance and with great trepidation, I called him. He was kind enough to take my call. I said, "I'll meet me for coffee." So we sat in the Kaufman Bedric coffee shop and Walter, who had been at NBC staff Director was out of work [laughs]. I said, "Well that's why he was able to meet with me." I didn't realize it at the time. [INT: [laughs]] But we were sitting around. And we met frequently. We liked each other. [INT: Right.] And we met for coffee and we'd read Variety [Variety Magazine] and we'd chat. And Walter one day said, "What's the most popular shows on radio today?" This was--remember, this was 1950. Or '49 [1949]? It was post-'49 [1949], it was just early '50 [1950]. [INT: Right.] And I said, "Well the most popular shows are DRAGNET, JACK WEBB on radio, and a show called WE THE PEOPLE on radio." And the charm of that show was that they would take real people who would come upon some interesting incident in their lives and they'd bring them to the studio and they would recount their adventure. The problem was when they got to the studio audience and looked at that microphone, they were terrified. "[Stutters] I saw this body--" And they got it out, and it was still interesting enough because the announcer covered for them and they had Actors, okay. DRAGNET had Actors playing real people in that laconic delivery of Jack Webb. "Just the facts, ma'am." And McGraw said, "I have an idea for a show that we could marry those two ideas using the new technology." I said, "What's the new technology?" The new technology was audio tape. He said, "Bing Crosby has put a lot of money into Ampex." And the reason he did that was because for years, the comics on the west coast wanted to be able to avoid the second broadcast. You know, in those days, they broadcast at 5 o'clock for example for 8 PM east coast audience. [INT: Right.] And then they would have to reconvene at 8 PM west coast time to broadcast another show. Well it was torture for these guys. [INT: Sure.] Eddie Canter, Jack Benny, Crosby [Bing Crosby]. All those, you know--Bob Hope. All those people. They wanted to have a recording made, and the network said, "No, the recordings are too tricky." They used to record on acetate disc, and they were not really broadcast quality, they figured. It might have been but they didn't want to take the chance. Well along came tape and Crosby was able to convince the network that they could re-broadcast tape. Wow, that was a breakthrough. Wow, this is something. And the comics loved it. So now they were using audio tape to broadcast the second pass. And the comics would go home and listen to their own show. McGraw said "They now have a portable tape recorder." I said, "How portable is it?" He said, "Oh, it weighs 60 pounds, but a strong engineer can carry it." And we can take a studio microphone and get network quality broadcast into somebody's home and if we set out a narrative of people talking about incidents that led to a criminal who was wanted by the police, at that moment, we could create a show called WANTED which has the best of WE THE PEOPLE, the best of DRAGNET. I said, "That seems like a--yeah, okay." He said, "Do you want to work with me on that? I can't pay you anything." I said, "If I get my lunches and dinners on occasion." He said, "Yeah." So he and his wife Peggy McGraw worked up an idea. They called crime reporters around the country and they'd say, "Send us--go into your morgue and send us the story of some guy that's loose right now and we'll pay you 25 dollars." That was a lot of money in 1950. [INT: Sure.] And if we put it on our show, you'll get another 25. Well, stuff came floating in, you know, from all these guys. And from that, they extracted a series of programs that they could create a log that by using about 22 to 23 voices--you never heard an Actor--you could tie together a narrative at the end of which you would say, "This guy is wanted. Go get him" to the audience. We took the show--we, I mean I was the silent partner of course. Took it to NBC radio department and Walter said, "We want to do a presentation." I don't think the word pilot was in use at that time. But the one network Executive had come into being, and I don't know if it was--it can't have been cloning because cloning hadn't been invented or talked about yet, but certainly some defective genetic pool created the network Executive [laughs]. And it was my first experience in a network meeting and I had no idea how presage the continuation of that particular brand of human offspring-- I don't know what it was, but I swear, it's the same defective process at work in creating these people that become network Executives. To this day, I beat them all in time. These people listened very carefully, they said, "It's not a bad idea but it's too risky to have a guy who's loose. Why don't you do a show using your technique, but have the man in prison?" And we said, again, when I use the 'we' it's king we [plural pronoun]. It's not me. Walter and Peggy did the talking. They said, "Well, what about the title WANTED?" And they said, "Well we like that. That's catchy. So keep the show called WANTED, but it's about somebody who's no longer wanted, okay. Got it?" [INT: "Got it."] So McGraw, being a professional said, "Okay, so we got $5,000 dollars to do a radio pilot and I found myself standing on a railroad track somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania on a rainy day interviewing the mother of a guy that was incarcerated at a prison next door [laughs], jesus. And Walter did the interviewing, but you never heard his voice. The narrative would be told by the person. Here's where I learned how to edit and to construct. Now we knew what this particular individual would say by virtue of the board information and they would tell us, "Say something." And Walter would say, "That was very nice, but you don't have to tell us the part about shopping for the groceries. Tell it to us again, leave that out." And they would tell it again. And then Walter would say, "That was excellent, but you know, you left out the part where you got off the bus." "Oh yeah!" And then they would tell that, and gradually, they would be shrinking the narrative down to where it was very lean. And the last line would be, "I called--" let's say that was the person who found the body. "I called the sheriff's department." The next voice would be the sheriff. [INT: Got it.] The next voice would be the prosecutor. Next voice would be whatever. And through this method, we were all the way through and finished the show and we put the tape together, and by the way, we learned how to edit.