We're all familiar with the 1959 movie Some Like It Hot starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. But how many of you know that in 1961, there was an attempt to turn it into a weekly situation comedy for NBC? I sure didn't but recently, my assistant Jane Plunkett called it to my attention. Even weirder is the fact that as a favor to its producer Walter Mirisch, Lemmon and Curtis made a cameo appearance in the pilot and…
Well, here's where it gets real weird. As you may recall, the movie directed by Billy Wilder was about two musicians — Jerry (played by Mr. Lemmon) and Joe (played by Mr. Curtis) on the lam from The Mob. In the pilot, they're still on the lam so what do they do? They get plastic surgery and it not only changes their appearances, it turns them into two completely different actors! After the surgery, Jerry is played by actor-comedian Dick Patterson and Joe is played by the singer Vic Damone.
Thereafter, Patterson and Damone played Jerry and Joe for the rest of the pilot and for all episodes thereafter. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — there were no other episodes. No sponsor picked it up nor did NBC. The character of Sugar Kane Kowalczyk — played so memorably in the film by Marilyn Monroe did not appear in the pilot but Tina Louise, later of Gilligan's Island fame, played a similar type of lady named Candy Collins.
And Sweet Sue, played in the movie by Joan Shawlee, did reappear in the sitcom version. She was played by — wait for it — Joan Shawlee.
Dick Patterson was another one of those actors who appeared in bit parts in almost TV show of the sixties…and the seventies and the eighties. He was part of the troupe of performers who appeared in Billy Barnes revues in the early sixties so he turned up once on The Dick Van Dyke Show. He played talk show host Stevie Parsons there before Richard Schaal took over the role. Patterson was later a frequent sketch player on The Carol Burnett Show when they needed an extra man. He had performed on Broadway with Burnett in Fade Out, Fade In. Dick Patterson passed away in 1999.
Vic Damone was, of course, a popular singer of popular music. He also turned up on The Dick Van Dyke Show and I remember a fun little "summer replacement" show he did in 1961 and again in 1962 on NBC. It was called The Lively Ones — the same name as a hit song he recorded — and I've never seen a trace of it since it originally aired. Mr. Damone left us in 2018.
So now you're probably wondering: How was the Some Like It Hot sitcom pilot? I'm wondering that too. I've never seen it and didn't even know of its existence until just the other day. Maybe someone reading this knows where there's a copy. I wouldn't get my hopes up for a masterpiece, considering the icy response it seems to have gotten from the network and potential sponsor. But it might be interesting to see…especially the sequence in which Lemmon and Curtis turn into two other actors.
Television has adapted (or tried to adapt) a lot of movies and I wonder if anyone ever thought of that. Somehow, I don't think when they were prepping the TV version of M*A*S*H, anyone said, "Hey, what if we got Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould to appear and in one scene, Hawkeye and Trapper John were severely injured in a shelling and after extensive plastic surgery, they turned into Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers?"