While searching my cluttered hard drive for some info on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for a post here the other day, I came across a JPG of this newspaper clipping…
Some of you may be thinking, "Jackie Mason? Barbara Heller? I don't recall either of them in the movie!" That might because they weren't in the movie. Jackie Mason was originally signed to play one of the gas station attendants but it turned out that his schedule was so full of club dates and bookings that they couldn't know if they'd have him when they needed him. I got the impression from Stanley Kramer that he thought Mason's agent had misled them about his availability. Anyway, Mason was replaced.
Originally, the two gas station attendants were to have been Mr. Mason and Joe Besser but Besser was then a regular on The Joey Bishop Show, a sitcom at the time. Mr. Bishop would not allow Mr. Besser the necessary days off to be in Mad World so he was out. I think the way it worked was that Arnold Stang was hired to replace Besser and then a little later, Marvin Kaplan was hired to replace Mason.
Rumor has it that Ms. Heller was signed to play the wife of Ben Blue, who played the airline pilot…a role ultimately played by Bobo Lewis. But there were a lot of scenes cut from Mad World — some filmed, some not — and she might have been in or intended for one of them.
And speaking of people who were cut from the film: When I showed you the Jack Davis poster in this posting here, I meant to point out the officer on the ground below the car driven by Milton Berle. That was Allen Jenkins, a character actor probably best known for voicing the character of Officer Dibble in the cartoon show Top Cat…which also featured voices by Stang and Kaplan. A photo of Mr. Jenkins was in the souvenir book for Mad World sold at the roadshow engagements but he was cut from the movie just before its release. He apparently played a policeman or sheriff.
And I haven't figured out where Herbie Faye might have been in the movie. Faye, seen above with his long-time friend Phil Silvers on Sgt. Bilko, is in several stills taken during the desert scenes in Mad World. It's unlikely he would have schlepped out there in 105° heat just to say hi to Phil. Whatever he did never made it into the movie. He had to be content to guest star on just about every sitcom of the sixties and about half of the funny movies made in that decade. In show biz, he went back to the days of burlesque when he was First Banana (lead comic) and Phil Silvers was Second Banana (supporting comic).
There were others who didn't make it in…and before someone asks, as people seem to do hourly on Facebook, about Don Rickles: Don Rickles was never going to be in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and the reason he was never going to be in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is that when the film was casting, he was still an unknown, especially in the comedy world. He didn't even appear on The Tonight Show until 1965.