J. Maine wrote to ask your obedient blogger…
I love the Sgt. Bilko episodes you've been linking to. Every word and gesture from Phil Silvers is funny. He's really a great example of a TV star who carries every scene he's in, not that the writing needs that kind of help. I don't recall laughing out loud at many situation comedies the way I laugh at Bilko and the audience sure seems to love it. Is that a live audience? It sure sounds like one. They did this with a three-camera set-up, right?
I don't know how many cameras they used and given how complex some episodes were, it's possible it varied. "Three-camera" became kind of a generic term in the industry for any show filmed with multiple cameras at the same time. There were shows that used four cameras that were referred to as "three camera" shows the same way that if two people opened a show talking to the audience, à la The Smothers Brothers or Sonny & Cher, it was sometimes still called a "monologue."
You're mostly hearing a live audience on these shows. Even shows that boast as to being "filmed in front of a live studio audience" sometimes have to dub in canned laughter here and there for editing purposes. But the audience for The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt. Bilko, aka You'll Never Get Rich) was sometimes not present in the studio when they were laughing. I explained this once before here on the blog so here's some of it again. For the first season and most of the second, they filmed each episode in sequence in front of a live audience. Then…
In the middle of their second season, show #60 of 143 was called "Bilko Goes Around the World." It was inspired by the then-current movie, Around the World in 80 Days and it featured scenes with that film's well-known producer, Mike Todd. In the midst of rehearsal, Mr. Todd suddenly announced that he couldn't stay until the scheduled filming night; that pressing business elsewhere beckoned and he had to go. The producers made the decision to just film the show a few days earlier, sans audience. It was still done multi-camera but with no one in the bleachers…and it turned out fine.
I'm not sure if it was immediately after Show #61 or if it happened a little later but the Todd episode convinced them that a live audience was a needless expense. Phil Silvers thought it even made the show better. Without one, they could do retakes easier so it wasn't necessary to rehearse every line and move in every scene to within an inch of its life. Silvers felt free to improvise more and to do each scene a few times, plus they could film when he and the director thought they were ready, not when the audience was scheduled. They could film scenes out of sequence if that seemed appropriate. The writers could write scripts with scene and wardrobe changes without worrying about how fast they could be accomplished. The mood on the set got looser because the actors could cuss and ad-lib and screw up without an audience there.
They could also edit out mistakes or reshoot more easily. If you watch the first season and a half of Bilko, you'll see a lot of them left in. There are places where actors (especially Paul Ford) forget what they're supposed to say and Silvers ad-libs around this or prompts them. Because so much of TV then was broadcast live and those moments happened so often on those programs, there was a tendency to not do much editing on film done in front of an audience.
When an audience-free episode had been cut to time, it would be taken and shown to warm bodies…often at some sort of military facility. A cast member — one of the supporting players — would go along to welcome and "warm up" the house before it was shown. Legendary was the one time they sent Joe E. Ross, who played Sgt. Rupert Ritzik. Ross was a burlesque comic with a very raunchy act and virtually no sense of judgment about what was appropriate to say before a given audience. He got up in front of a room full of elderly women and even a few nuns and launched into jokes about hookers and rapists. Enough people walked out that it was necessary to schedule another "sweetening" screening of the episode he was hosting…and they did not send Ross out with it or any other one.
Anyway, the recorded laughs of those audiences were layered onto the shows and according to Mr. Silvers, "Nobody could ever tell the difference." If you watch them, you probably won't. Once in a while, a laugh continues over someone's line and it's obvious the actor speaking that line wasn't hearing that laugh so you may figure it out. Interestingly, the performer in such a situation is almost never Silvers, even though he had close to half the dialogue in some episodes. He just had such a good sense of timing that he knew how long the pauses for laughter should be. I'm not sure you could do that with most situation comedy actors today.
That's what I wrote before but as I read it over now, there are a few things I can add. First, I thought of a reason why Michael Todd might have had to leave town and not stay for the schedule filming date. Around this time, Mr. Todd participated in the popular fad of marrying Elizabeth Taylor so that may have had something to do with it.
Also worth mentioning is that Larry Gelbart told me there was a discussion about doing M*A*S*H, filming without an audience and then showing the edited episode to one to record laughter. They didn't because the studio decided it was just easier and maybe cheaper to go with normal canned laughter. He also said that when you're putting all the laughs in in post-production, there's just too much temptation to add in laughs that didn't come from a live audience so you might as well go all-canned.
