Our video today is a complete episode of The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, this one from 2/8/75 with roastee Lucille Ball. I find these shows kinda fascinating for the cut-'n'-paste assembly methods. Greg Garrison, who produced and directed just about everything Dean did on TV for years, was a master of shooting a TV show rapidly and without all its performers present. Dean's regular series was full of clips spliced together from here and there, taped on different days. As a general rule of thumb, if you saw someone on that show do a stand-up routine or sing a song and you didn't see them in a shot with Dean, he wasn't on the premises when they taped that spot or song, and some of them never met him.
When the show went to its roast format, Garrison pulled all sorts of tricks to make it seem like he had a huge dais of celebrities but only rarely were they all present at the same time. In the opening of this episode, you see a whole bunch of 'em enter…
ENTERING FROM THE LEFT: Jack Benny, Don Rickles, Ginger Rogers, Totie Fields, Milton Berle, Nipsey Russell, Vivian Vance, Foster Brooks, Gale Gordon, Dean Martin.
ENTERING FROM THE RIGHT: Dan Rowan, Bob Hope, Dick Martin, Henry Fonda, Rich Little, Phyllis Diller, Lucille Ball.
You will notice that you almost never see any of these folks pass other dais members on their way to their seats. That's because a lot of them weren't there at the same time…or even in Las Vegas where the main portions of the episode were taped. As Lucy enters, she passes some empty seats, then Diller, Little, Fonda, Martin and Rowan. Bob Hope ain't there.
And then when they cut to the wide shot of the dais at 1:14, there are five people on the left (including Dino) and six on the right (including Lucy). Seventeen stars entered but suddenly there are only eleven. Later, Ruth Buzzi and Gary Morton join a dais making nineteen people allegedly at a table that seats about thirteen.
You can play a great game with these shows, trying to figure out who was there and who wasn't. Bob Hope was clearly not there. They cut in some shots of him laughing from his seat and you see him for a second with Dean — possibly a clip from some other roast they did — but he wasn't in Vegas where they shot most of this. There's no shot of him with anyone else there, not even the Guest of Honor. You can also tell because the video on him is sharper than it is on the people who were really in Las Vegas and Hope's timing makes it obvious there was no live audience there. He reads the cards, pauses for laughs and then they put in the laughs later.
Rickles was there. You see that shot above that shows him with Lucy? You don't see that shot of Jack Benny and Lucy, of Milton Berle and Lucy, not even of Vivian Vance and Lucy or Gale Gordon and Lucy. You see Benny walking past Ginger Rogers…but you don't see Ginger Rogers with Lucy. A lot of these folks finish their stints at the lectern by blowing the off-camera (and not present) Lucy a kiss.
They're there to show their love for Lucy. Why don't they hug her or kiss her? Because she wasn't there.
I haven't made a careful study but I would guess that when they taped at the MGM Grand in Vegas, they had Buzzi, Brooks, Russell, Fields, Rickles, Dean, Lucy, Rowan, Martin, Fonda, Little, Diller and Morton present. Everyone else was taped at another time, possibly while they were there taping a roast of someone else. And I'll guess Hope's main speech was taped on a set at NBC Burbank with just him there and not much more of the set than you see in the main shot of him. Since a lot of those people were on other roasts in the series and the men wear the same tuxedos in all of them, footage could have come from anywhere.