INT: Hi! My name is John Rich and today we have the honor of interviewing former Directors Guild President Gene Reynolds, distinguished member. We’re at the DGA headquarters in Los Angeles, California and this is part – what are we calling this? The DGA… [OFF CAMERA: Directors Guild of America Visual History--] Visual History Program. This is part of a wonderful idea and we’re happy to be part of it.

INT: Good morning, Gene. [GR: Good morning.] And according to the script it says, “Please give your full name”. 

GR: This is my original name. I was born Eugene Reynolds Blumenthal—[INT: Okay.]--in Cleveland, Ohio. [INT: Oh, you’re jumping ahead. That’s in the USA, partly. That’s good. And do you Have any nicknames?] No, no. Just—[INT: And what did you--] Gene, Gino, that’s… [INT: Gene, Gino… And your birth date.] My birthday was 4-4-23 [April 4, 1923]. [INT: Good grief.] [LAUGHS] Right. [INT: Glad you’re still with us.] Glad I could make it. [LAUGHS] [INT: I tried to buy a telephone the other day and when I gave the guy my birthdate, he said, “Wow!” [LAUGHS]] That’s frightening, that’s frightening. [INT: “Young man, what do you mean ‘Wow’?” It’s another century.]

INT: OK, we’re here to discuss your wonderful career. And perhaps we should start maybe at the beginning. I know you were an Actor, and would you like to talk about that for a bit? 

GR: Well, I don’t want to spend too much time on it, although I spent a lot of time on it in my life. I was a child Actor. I worked in Detroit, Michigan; I worked in radio and little acting groups around town and so forth. Came to California at the age 10 and started as an extra. I was an extra in BABES IN TOYLAND and OUR GANG. And I did extra work for a while. And then I worked at the Pasadena Playhouse in a Shakespeare play called KING JOHN. There’s a part of Prince Arthur, which is, I think, the best child's part in Shakespeare. [INT: Absolutely.] I played Prince Arthur, got an agent named George Allman, and I began to get bits and parts and so forth. And I did a lot of stars as children. You know, in the early days, the first reel was the star as a child, so I played James Stewart as a child in OF HUMAN HEARTS, I played Bob Taylor [Robert Taylor] as a child in THE CROWD ROARS, I played Don Ameche as a child in SINS OF MAN, Tyrone Power as a child IN OLD CHICAGO--[INT: I had no idea.] You had no idea [LAUGHS]. I haven’t told you everything. [INT: No, you haven’t. Keep going; that’s fascinating.] Well anyway, then I got a… In OF HUMAN HEARTS, I tested for that part and played James Stewart as a boy. It’s a film with Walter Huston and Beulah Bondi, directed by Clarence Brown. Lovely film. [INT: Wow.] Beautiful picture. And I got a contract at Metro [Metro Pictures], and at Metro I did BOYS TOWN, EDISON, THE MAN. And then I was loaned out to Goldwyn [Goldwyn Pictures Corporation]. I did THEY SHALL HAVE MUSIC.

GR: So, I did a lot films and I was working right up until the war [World War II]. I enlisted right after Pearl Harbor in January of '42 [1942] and I was in the Navy. I spent four years in the Navy. [INT: Which navy?] The United States Navy. [INT: Oh, oh, oh.] You mean which Navy? I was in the--[INT: No, no. I meant which Navy. I’m glad to hear that you served for our country. You know, because you never know who you’re talking to these days [LAUGHS].] Right, right. No, I was, I was… which navy? [LAUGHS] I served on a destroyer minesweeper in the Pacific, called the Zane [USS Zane], and I was in the same ship with Herman Wouk for a year and a half, from which he wrote the Caine Mutiny--[INT: The Caine Mutiny Court Martial]. Yes. Many of the characters and the incidents and so forth he drew from our experience on the Zane. Then I spent time in the Mediterranean on a Frank Knox class destroyer [USS Frank Knox] and after the service I finished school at UCLA, and then I went to Europe. Things were very bad after the war [World War II] in this town with frozen funds and whatever and it was quiet, so I went to Europe. I lived in Europe for about a year and a half. I lived in New York doing live television. I worked for Sidney Lumet. I worked for… I did KRAFT [KRAFT TELEVISION THEATRE] and US--not US STEEL [THE UNITED STATES STEEL HOUR], but… [INT: PHILCO [THE PHILCO TELEVISION PLAYHOUSE]?] PHILCO. KRAFT-PHILCO--[INT: Is it possible you and I worked together? I was a Stage Manager on KRAFT TELEVISION THEATER.] Oh it's possible. [INT: Studio 8H at NBC.] Yes, oh yeah. I worked on WE, THE PEOPLE a number of times. At any rate, I worked in television in New York for a couple of years, and I came back here and I resumed acting on the Coast [West Coast] and...

INT: How did you make the transition to Director? 

GR: Well, I was acting, my career wasn't going any place, I was not happy. And I remember, it occurred to me--I woke up one morning and I realized that I would be a lot happier if I went to work everyday instead of Schwab's drugstore [Schwab’s Pharmacy], sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. So I made great efforts and I obtained a job--eventually, after about six months, I obtained a job in casting on a show called MATINEE THEATER. The way that came about was as a--[INT: Oh, Albert McCleery.] Albert McCleery. As an Actor I was working in Monty Factor's clothing store and a woman named June Leff was next door buying a lamp. There was an Actor selling lamps and she said, “I had no idea you were selling lamps.” He says, "Go next door, Reynolds is selling suits.” And as soon as he said it, he said, “I shouldn’t have said that because it doesn’t look good for an Actor to be outside of his craft,” whatever. She went home. She was looking for a Casting Director and she said, “If this man has the enterprise to be out there doing something aside from acting, I will consider him for this casting job.” I got the job in casting. MATINEE THEATER was a very interesting show. [INT: I remember it very well.] Daily hour live anthology. So we were casting--everyday the play would be different. You'd be doing an all-Irish cast, or all cowboys, or all character women. So we were--there were three different Casting Directors, but we were about the best-educated Casting Directors in town because we had such variety and there was so much of it and so forth. At any rate, I worked on that for about a year and a half. And then I went, when it went off the air, I went out to cast the first year of PETER GUNN for Blake Edwards. [INT: For Blake, oh yeah.] Yes. And after--then I was offered a job at NBC, casting BONANZA. And that was not a very happy job, because I was in an office and it had two doors. I would see a couple of Actors, and one door would open and the, and the Director would stick his head in and say, "Don't cast anybody 'till you talk to me,” and I'd say, “Right.” Then the other door would open, the Producer would say, "Never mind him. It’s me.” [INT: Oh no.] It was one of those… It was a very difficult situation. [INT: That’s interesting, ‘cause I was one of those Directors. I directed BONANZA [LAUGHS]…] Right. I think I left it before you came along. [INT: I have never had that experience, but--] But it was quite--it wasn’t a pleasant situation. And the early days of a show are always frantic, are always, there’s a lot of flop sweat and a lot of tension.

GR: At any rate, while I was working BONANZA, the phone rang--oh, while I was at Universal [Universal Pictures], before I came to BONANZA doing PETER GUNN and a show called STEVE CANYON, Jackie Cooper, with whom I had worked as a kid, he called me up and he said, “Would you--and Don McGuire, they were doing HENNESEY--[INT: Right. He was doing HENNESEY, wasn’t it?] They were doing HENNESEY. They were doing the pilot of HENNESEY, and said, "Can you get away for one day and act in this pilot?" I went to the Producer's office and I said, “I can work in this pilot, as an Actor, pick up a check, and only be gone for one day.” And the Producer ignored me. So instead--another words, he was saying, “No.” But I just sat in the office; I didn't leave. Good move. After about a half an hour he says, "Ok, but if anything messes up, you're finished". It was very gracious. At any rate, I went off and did the show. I was driving along Sunset Blvd. on my way to work, one morning, on my way to Paramount [Paramount Pictures], and Don McGuire who had written and produced HENNESEY was in the middle of the street. He had seen me go into a shop and buy some rolls. I used to bring some donuts, or whatever, for the girls in the office. He was in the middle of the street, which is real gag, stopping traffic. Stops me, “Pull over!” So I pulled over. He says, "We sold HENNESEY. We sold HENNESEY. Come over and see it,” whatever. So I said, “Wonderful. Congrat--“ Well, I was working. I never could go to the showing of the pilot. At any rate, I was working on BONANZA, unhappily--[INT: This was with David Dortort, wasn’t it?] Dortort, yeah. It was just the early days of his show and I had left--made a mistake leaving PETER GUNN to come over to NBC. Anyway, the phone rang and Don McGuire says, "Gene, have you ever considered directing?" [INT: No kidding?] And I said, 'I'll be right over," and hung up. [INT: [LAUGHS]] So I walked out, I said to the girl, she says, “Where you going?” And I said, “I may never come back.” So McGuire said to me, and Cooper, "You can do one show. If it works out, we'll give you two. If they work out, we'll give you three". It was one of those deals. And so I started on… I went to NBC. I said, “I need a month off. They want me to watch the show for three weeks and then do an episode.” And they said, “Absolutely not.” And I said, “Well, I quit.” They didn't have me under contract, so I quit. At any rate, it was an easy decision to make. At any rate, I started one week, the week before Bob Butler [Robert Butler] started. [INT: Oh, Butler.] He and I started on the same show at the same time. At any rate, that got me started. We each did six, and then Jackie decided that he wanted to direct. He was not directing up to that point, but that got us both started. And I kind of wen the field, way of comedy shows, and Bob was in some comedy and then he branched out, so he--[INT: Now this was single camera television.] This was all single camera, film. [INT: So you were doing a small movie.] It’s a little movie, right. Each a little movie, right. And so that's how I got started. [INT: It's a fascinating story. So in effect then, Jackie was kind of your mentor, you would say?] Well, Jackie was extremely--Jackie and Don McGuire were extremely crucial. Also, getting the job casting PETER GUNN was Blake Edwards. And Blake Edwards had been extremely helpful to me. And of course, the original job came from McCleery [Albert McCleery], and so I'm indebted to all those people. [INT: Well, that’s great.]

INT: Now, what other filmmakers did you or were you in awe of or possibly enjoyed very much. 

GR: I did a wise thing. When I was knocking around in television, I was doing these half-hours, mostly. Occasionally, I'd get an hour show but not often. I assembled a little group of Directors, some Writers, Actors; we had a little film group. And Ivan Dixon was in it, Alan Rubin was in it, Bob Butler [Robert Butler] was in it. Gene Nelson was in it. Michael Pate was in it. [INT: What a good group.] Pretty good. At any rate, I would get a film, a classic film, hopefully, but I tried to get as good a film as we could get, and there were these exchanges around town. They may not exist now, but you could go in and get a 16mm print and I had the equipment and I would schlep the equipment to these different guys' houses or my own house and on Saturday, run a film. And I did this every week, for a long time. And we would look--and of course, my… the guys I think that influenced me the most early on was John Ford, Bill Wellman [William A. Wellman], Hathaway [Henry Hathaway], Lubitsch. Ernst Lubitsch is a hero of mine. He is--they're all heroes. But Ernst Lubitsch, because of that worldly humor, that worldliness, the insight, the humanity, the marvelous way of looking at life realistically and yet having that marvelous humor. [INT: Standing on one leg to observe the world.] Exactly. He was a brilliant, a brilliant… And he was a Writer, as well as a… He wrote with his… He worked very closely with his Writers, as well as a marvelous Director.

INT: Did you watch any Billy Wilder at that time? Because Billy was like that very much.

GR: Yes. Billy Wilder, we did look at some Billy Wilder stuff. But he was just begin--he was still Brackett [Charles Brackett] and Wilder. It was Brackett and Wilder and he was just beginning to direct. [INT: It’s just wonderful to hear about these--] I should've kept that little group up till this day. [INT: Well, you know, we do have a group--when I say we, the Directors Guild [DGA] has a kind of, every three or four months, a meeting of television Directors, usually in my way with comedy, Directors who meet for breakfast and talk. And I think it's an outgrowth of what you started.] We had this every week, and then after a while every week became a bit much. I mean there was a place in San Francisco called Audio-Brandon Films. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them. [INT: Never heard of them.] They had all the European films and the European Directors were especially helpful because their point of view, their technique was different from the Americans. Somehow you see enough American films and you almost, you've experienced a great deal of their ideas and so forth. Suddenly you look at European Directors and their technique was different and that was valuable because it broadened you.

INT: How does the job of TV directing differ, how does it differ from feature directing in your opinion?

GR: If we're talking about one camera film--[INT: Same thing, isn’t it?] Yes, one camera film. I would say it’s the same, except that--[INT: You have a little more time.]--the production values there are so much more enhanced with a feature film and you do have time, you have time to prepare. You have time to search out locations, you have time to cast, you have time to work over the script. When you’re--if you’re doing... See, I've never done a theatrical feature. I've done two-hour movies for television, which approaches, which is a step closer to theatrical film because you do have more time, you do get involved with the Writer, ideally. So that I would say that there is great similarity, except that you can work on a much broader canvas, you can be more detailed. You've got to be, I think, I think you’ve got to be, perhaps, more careful than you can be in certain instances because, certainly if you're going to work in the theater, theatrical film, the screen is so much larger. But for the most part, I would say the basic problems, the basic problems, the kind of golden moments you want to achieve, realizing the story and so forth, are the same.

INT: Do you find sometimes that you have too much time in a feature, or in a two-hour production?

GR: Never. I've never had too much time. I’ve always… because, by the time they've finished negotiating the deal, you know, it's time to hit your marks. I find that, I find that I don't recall any two-hour movie that I ever said, “Gee, I have so much time, I wish…” I get to the point where you're dying to go. Dying to go, but never felt--[INT: I think I meant, in terms of lighting and so on in the early days particularly.] Do you mean within each scene? [INT: Yeah.] I thought you meant before the film starts. [INT: No, the photography would take so much time on a bigger production, that you didn't have as much time with the Actors that you'd like.] Well I find… That is true; you never… I wouldn’t say never, but often don't have enough time with the Actors. [INT: That’s what I meant.] You'll block and there is this business. And the Assistant [Assistant Director] will jump and say, "Okay, we got it, we got it!" Three worst words in the English language: "We got it," meaning you're finished, step aside and so forth. And then if you can corral the Actors, if you can bulldog the Actors, and say, “Let's do a little work here.” “Oh I got to do this, I got to go change my makeup, I got to call my Agent,” whatever. If you can nail them and get that little work, that helps. [INT: Yes, that does help a lot.]

INT: What role do you play in the development of a script when you're doing TV?

GR: If I’m doing, say, a two-hour movie? [INT: Or even a half-hour?] I've been very involved in scripts because I've produced so many shows. [INT: Yes, you have.] I’ve produced hundreds of shows. And in that case--and I was a very hands on Producer, I would work from the blank page with the Writer, or just the story I'd heard myself working out stuff. I know that with Gelbart [Larry Gelbart] on M*A*S*H, him and I would often work on stories and then we'd call a Writer in and give them the story. But in working with the Writer, working in that situation, I mean I would really work the thing through in which we would detail the outline of the production, of the material, in great detail. I always felt that in television, you had to have five story points per act. And I don't mean a story point “now we're in the living room, not we're in the kitchen.” I mean something really happening--a guy comes home and the wife is missing. That’s a pretty, that’s a story point. That's a story point. The next thing he calls up, whatever, calling the police and the police call up and say, "We've found her, meet us." Now that's the second move. And now, oh my god they've found her, now we're going. Those are real story points. You have to have five, I would say that at least five, in order to have an act that is not a lot of talk, that is not a lot--to really kind of move it along. That was a kind of discipline. Sometimes you might have seven story points, but if you have only three or two you begin to stretch your material and it's a lot less interesting. ‘Cause I was working, for the most part, although I worked on LOU GRANT for five years, which is an hour show, for the most part--[INT: Great show.] For the most part, I worked on half hour shows in which you really had to have… In comedy, you really had to have a lot of nice acceleration. You wanted the people to be going here and now you have a problem that takes you here and so forth. So you really needed that progress, things really had to be moving and happening.

INT: I thought LOU GRANT was a great show. Now tell us about some of that material that you worked witha and the problems or non-problems with people like Asner [Ed Asner] who played the lead. How'd you get along with the group?

GR: Well, when you say LOU GRANT, that's a whole, that’s an enormous story. [INT: I know.] But let me just, let me just talk about the LOU GRANT situation. I was asked to do a show starring Ed Asner, with the Lou Grant character swinging from TV news to news print, to print journalism. Sander Vanocur had suggested to Jim Brooks [James L. Brooks] and Allan Burns that they put Lou Grant into the print medium. He said, “That's much more interesting and so forth,” and more serious in terms of the journalism, which is true. So, that was all we knew. And there was a case where they wanted an hour show. So, I didn’t, I knew… What I knew about journalism, I sold the Herald Express on the corner of Melrose and La Brea when I was a kid, I was the Editor of my school paper at Bancroft Junior High School, which is not far from here. That's about all I knew of journalism outside of having read a lot of newspapers, especially the sports section. At any rate, I did what I did on M*A*S*H and ROOM 222, which we should go into later, and that is I resorted to research. Instead of sitting in our office and contriving the world of journalism and so forth, I went on the axiom that one borrows from life and not from theater. Journalism shows, up to that point, usually, certainly in television, and generally in film, anything dealing with journalism, the reporter was a cop reporter and he got involved in a crime and he's fighting with a villain on the eighth floor, fighting over the gun in the seventh reel; one of those things. Well, we wanted to investigate the drama of the city room, the comedy, the drama of the city room. First of all, reporters are very interesting people. They are a breed apart. They're very distinct. Extremely intelligent, extremely devoted as a rule, highly literate, skeptical, doubtful, you know, they don't believe a word of what you're saying unless you can corroborate. And that kind of skepticism, which is proper for the job, is not great in marriage, relationships, is not great in other ways. The wife--he says, "Hey, where have you been?" If you're talking to a reporter that becomes something, that's a tough question. At any rate, we did this research. I first went to The Los Angeles Times, and I went back to the Times, I don’t know, 12, 16 times, talking to different reporters. I interviewed reporters in San Francisco, in Toronto, which is my wife's hometown, in Chicago, in New York, in London. Wherever I traveled, I always interviewed reporters and chronicled them and taped the interviews. As I did on M*A*S*H, they would type up the interviews and I'd have all this material and pore over it. And sometimes a sentence, a sentence and a half, half a sentence would be a clue to a story or to a very interesting angle on a story. So anyway, that was the basis of LOU GRANT.

GR: The interesting thing about it [LOU GRANT] was they wanted an hour show. As a rule, form follows content. If you got a little story, you write a short story. If you got a long saga you write a novel. When you go from a half-hour to an hour, it changes---the form changes the content. You could no longer do wall-to-wall jokes. They did this beautiful comedy show on THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, but we could not do that with an hour formula. We need--to bring them back for four acts, you need more story, you need real act breaks, you need something really “What is going to happen?” Something to carry people over into that next break. [INT: And you need more than A and B stories. You have to have something else going.] Very often, very often we did. [INT: One of your five points.] We’d have, at least a couple… Well, the five story points is the same story moving forward. But we also had what we called “double curve”, sometimes a “triple curve”. The photographer would have a story, Lou would have a story and maybe Billie, Linda Kelsey, would have a story, so we'd have two or three stories weaving in and out. At any rate, the nature of LOU GRANT was different from MARY TYLER MOORE. And when people first saw it, because it was LOU GRANT, it was Ed Asner, the same character, they expected MARY TYLER MOORE. They didn't get it. They were a little uncomfortable, but then they got it, then they accepted it.

GR: With Ed Asner, [on LOU GRANT] he's a very durable star, he's a very amenable star, he's not difficult at all. He's a very decent guy and he's very, very good to work with. I found that, as an Actor, he was somebody that you had to help, you had to watch, you had to keep him moving. Keep him--[INT: How do you mean to watch? In what way?] I had to watch for his own sake, that he doesn't get too slow that he doesn't get too dramatic, that he doesn't stretch. One of those things, one of those Actors that will tend to do that, and… [INT: How do you, did you kick him up into pace, for example? How did you approach that?] Well, I mean I would go in there and try to give him more motivation, more incentive. And also I would point to him, I said, “It gets very boring in here. Pick that up and pick this up. And when she says this, how do you respond to that? I would come back at her with that. And this she’ll think is kind of funny and throw that away,” and so forth. You would really kind of give him, motivate him, give him motivation and so forth. Linda Kelsey was a marvelous Actress. And of course Mason Adams and the rest of the cast were excellent. [INT: Who was the head of the newspaper?] Head of the newspaper. [INT: The woman, I can’t think of her name [Nancy Marchand]. She's was on, wasn’t she on SOPRANOS.] She’s on SOPRANOS. [INT: A wonderful Actress and I can’t think of her name for some reason.] I'll think of it as soon as I leave here today. No, I’ll think of it and we’ll be talking about something else and it’ll come. [INT: But she was great.] Yeah, beautiful. Beautiful person too.

INT: Going back to M*A*S*H, for example, or do you want to go a little further back? [GR: We should go further back.] We’ll go further back. So let's talk about 222 [ROOM 222].
GR: Or even further than that. I was doing freelance directing--[INT: That’s where we were.] I was freelance directing all over town, doing one camera, half-hour film. [INT: Did you ever do multiple cameras?] Yes, I did. I did some pilots, I did some multiple cameras, but not a great deal. And I wish that I had immersed myself in that, but at the time that multiple camera was really kind of exploding. When they really swung from one camera film to multiple camera, I was asked to do the pilot of THE GHOST & MRS. MUIR. [INT: What a wonderful show. I didn’t know that.] Yeah, so I shot that pilot at Fox [20th Century Fox]. That was a very good experience. That was a case of working with a Writer and kind of coming to, having a script that really needed some help. And I went to Bill Self [William Self] and I asked for some money to bring in Artie Julian [Arthur Julian] with whom I worked on HOGAN'S. We've skipped HOGAN'S HEROES; we've skipped a lot of stuff. [INT: We’ll go back.] We'll go back. But at any rate, it was very hard to get the money, and I actually supplemented what Artie Julian was paid with money from my own pocket. Artie said, “That's no good. That's ridiculous.” I said, “What can I do for you?” He says, "There's a painting at Saks [Saks Fifth Avenue], a small painting at Saks." I said, “You got it.” So I think I bought him that painting. And so he said, “Come up to the house nine o'clock tomorrow morning.” He says, “I'm going to the races; we'll work until noon.” He had a young lady up there, who was a marvelous stenographer. So we went through the script. We got through halfway through the script, it was noon, he says, “Goodbye.” I said, “So long. Good luck.” I saw him the next morning, we worked for two half days and he did wonders for that script. That pilot script should have said, “Written by Jean Holloway and Artie Julian.” But he gave us some wonderful jokes all the way through it. And I think it was responsible, although it was a beautiful pilot, but it was so helped by that relief, that comic relief that was within it, that Artie helped us with. Later on I had another very good pilot to shoot for Fox, very interesting story, called ANDERSON AND COMPANY, with Fred Gwynne and Abby Dalton. And it was a period piece about a department store in the old days, 1910 or whatever. And I asked for Artie Julian again, but they did not give me the money and they did not sell the pilot. [INT: Now what year was that?] 1906. No, what year was that? That was somewhere in the ‘70s [1970s]. [INT: Oh, in the ‘70s.] In the ‘70s, yeah. Somewhere in the ‘70s. It was while I was doing, I think it was during the--I think I did ROOM 222 that same--[INT: That’s the one.] I did that pilot the same year that I did ANDERSON AND COMPANY. I did ROOM 222 first. That’s an interesting story.

INT: Yea, let's talk about 222 [ROOM 222] for awhile because that was a kind of breakthrough show in its own way, wasn't it?

GR: After THE GHOST & MRS. MUIR, I went under contract to Fox [20th Century Fox]. I did not want to produce; I wanted to be a Director. And so I shot the first three shows of THE GHOST & MRS. MUIR, and then I went to my office and they said, “Come up with a premise for a half-hour.” I grew up around here, at least from 10 on and so forth. I used to go to Poinsettia Playground, which is very near here. And there was an instructor named Borelli [Ralph Borelli] who really worked with the kids. He was a wonderful guy. He was there for all seasons--he had been an Olympic athlete, a gymnast. At any rate, I thought, what if I did a playground show about a guy like Borelli, who really worked with kids, a real humane guy? And then I thought, well a playground is just too thin and so forth, maybe it's high school. And then I thought, maybe he’s not Borelli, Italian. Maybe he's African America. [INT: Very good.] And ABC, of course, said to me, “Well, can't we have a white teacher? Maybe it could be a woman.” I said, “Maybe it couldn't.” I wanted it to be in an integrated school. They actually came to me, actually made a big pitch to me saying, “We have a wonderful idea. This could be a girl like UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS, whatever, a woman teacher,” and so forth. And I said to them, “African Americans, at this point, want to look to their own leadership. They don’t want to look up to a white teacher and so forth. I don’t think that’s the right statement.” And they said, “Oh, well we didn't know that.” I love that line, “We didn’t know that.” So I said, “Now you know.” At any rate, the big deal was getting the right Writer. And when you’re first producing, you don't know a lot of Writers and you don’t know where the body is buried. And Bill Persky, I’m forever indebted to a wonderful guy named Bill Persky, whom you know. [INT: Very well.] Bill Persky says to me, “There's a young Writer doing some show for us, Jim Brooks [James L. Brooks]. So I met Jim and I was halfway through the pitch, he says, “I like it,” and he started to make suggestions. At any rate, Jim came on board. We sat down in an office at Fox, both of us had been out of high school too long, so we realized we're just kind of conjuring, we’re looking out the window. We didn’t know, we didn’t have a real honest approach. So I said, “Let's go to LA High [Los Angeles High School].” LA High was a landmark school in Los Angeles. It had trained or schooled a great many of the doctors and lawyers that were now the establishment of Los Angeles. I said, “It's a wonderful school. It’s integrated. It’s maybe 50, 60 percent Black.” And I said, “Let's go there and see what the hell is going on.” So it turned out that the principal was a guy named Mel, I forget his last name. He knew me from Poinsettia Playground. “I remember you, kid,” he said. And he said, “Where do you wanna go?” He let us sit in classrooms, in the detention room, we met the counselors and we stayed there for a week. We got a lot of stories, a lot of stories. And then we came back to Fox and yelled at each other for a couple of days and finally came up with the pilot story, which Jim wrote beautifully, and I shot.

GR: I had a lot of 'help', in quotes, from ABC and the casting [of ROOM 222]. I went to New York and I brought back a young lady named Denise Nicholas. Brooks [James L. Brooks] had suggested Michael Constantine and he was perfect for the principal. [INT: Wonderful Actor.] Wonderful Actor. I had a hell of a time finding--and Jim had written this wonderful--conceived this wonderful part--he's great for coming up with these characters, of the apprentice teacher, the young girl teacher, the naive, which is a great comic character, lovable but naive and not too smart and so forth. Well, I looked at hundreds of girls and they just didn’t have that young comedienne. I called up Bill Brademan. He says there was a girl who mimed records, she mimed records and she won the Teenage America Contest for comedy or whatever, Karen Valentine. So she came in; she read one page and I said, “That's it.” [INT: That’s it, yeah.] She just had it. And I said to her, “You go home,” I said, “Be careful driving.” [INT: [LAUGHS]] I knew I had a little gem there. As far as the lead goes, we eventually ended up with a very handsome guy, not a very good Actor, Lloyd Haynes. But I brought out from New York a guy that one of the great minds at ABC said, “He's not funny, he’s not” whatever, Billy Dee Williams. [INT: Oh my goodness.] And they threw him out. [INT: How did you find Billy Dee Williams?] Well, Billy Dee Williams is a young Actor in New York, a young Actor in New York, but he was not big. He had some big--[INT: I know, but still…] He had done some big things that… He worked in LAST ANGRY MAN at the age of 15. Billy Dee was a wonderful Actor. [INT: Yes he was.] Wonderful man. And I really wanted him, and then ABC… some guy from ABC, a big shot, I won’t mention his name, he came in and said, “He’s not funny. I saw some tests.” At any rate...

GR: So the ROOM 222 experience was notable for me in the area of research. I kept going back to LA High [Los Angeles High School] and getting these stories. And I got some very, very good stories. In those days, high schools was a very interesting place. There was a Black revolution [Black Power movement] in the country. There was a revolution in education. There was a lot of experimentation: team teaching, and changing the shape of the room, and role-playing, and so forth; a lot of experimentation, which we played with. And also, it was a kind of a youth revolution in those days: dress codes and long hair and so forth. So we had all that stuff, all that stuff to work with, so we got some great shows. And at the end of two years, ABC fired me. [INT: On what basis?] On the basis the show wasn't funny enough. [INT: Come on. Well, why do I say come on? I mean we’ve all been there.] Yeah. “The show’s not funny enough.” And so I remember Mike Eisner [Michael Eisner] saying, “ROOM 222 should be like WELCOME BACK, KOTTER.” Remember WELCOME BACK, KOTTER? When WELCOME BACK, KOTTER came on, he said, “That’s what ROOM 222 should have been.” At any rate, we won the Writers Guild Award, each year, when I was on it, for two years in a row, and the Actors won awards and so forth. And when I went off the show that vanished. [INT: So depressing to have that kind of network interference, isn’t it?] Yes, it is.

INT: Can you talk about that in general, by the way, the network?

GR: In general, the people who have a lot more authority than they do have taste and experience, have had that power, that responsibility. They are people most of whom have come from sales or from god knows where--polishing doorknobs. [INT: MBAs.] I guess now they're MBAs. In those days, I mean, they were guys who had, not necessarily master… They were from business, they were from the sales, they were from god knows where. But they were not from theater. [INT: They were not show people.] They were not show people. They were not people that understood story. That understood--that had a romance with theater. They loved movies, I guess, and they were into television, but it was all unfortunately not coming from a serious source, a source that really cherishes the story, that appreciates an Actor, not just a personality that's going to catch on, and that they look at a show from the point of view of is this show quality? Is this show--does this show touch me or is it got numbers? Is this going to appeal? Is this going to kind of grab an audience? Because you can grab an audience in the first two minutes and lose them in the fifth, five minutes in and you lose them, which is what they do all the time. They say, “Well this, we'll cast this person and that person, and that'll get an audience.” So the audience shows up and they drop out after five minutes because the show isn't working. The play isn’t working. I know there are instances of that where stars have been cast in the wrong roles and the show doesn't, for some reason, the second hour dies, and they can't quite figure it out.