Rob Dow, who lives in Toronto, sent me this in a message with the subject line, "The Greatest TV Show Ever"…
Mr. Evanier, I have been obsessed with The Dick Van Dyke Show for a very long time and would enjoy any recollections from your stint as a member of the audience (which is incredible to me, how a person only 10 years older than I saw something happen that seems like ancient history, although it isn't…much like it seems impossible that my neighbor saw The Beatles in the Cavern Club and there are living people who remember when WW2 ended).
Where was it taped? How long did it take (were there long gaps between scenes?) Were only friends and family invited or could schmucks walk in if the street? How many attended? Was it shocking to see the actors and sets in color and not black and white? Did the actors acknowledge the audience? Did you know that you were watching something that would endure the test of time or would you have felt the same watching another show?
(You may very well have previously provided an analysis of this subject and if so I will enjoy it as I devour your blog which I only recently discovered thanks to the Gottfried podcast. )
If you've been stumbling around this site, you've probably found this article that I wrote back in 1995. It answers some of your questions but since I've received a number of requests to go into greater detail about that very important evening in my life, here we go. And first off, I'll mention that the episode my parents and I saw filmed was this one…
It was filmed (not taped) on February 2, 1965 at Desilu Cahuenga Studios, which was located at 846 N. Cahuenga Blvd. That building has gone through many names and owners since then and is now called Red Studios and a lot of different shows and videos are made there. The last time I was in that complex was a few years ago when we recorded songs — not scripts, just songs — there for The Garfield Show. One of the folks who did voices in an episode and came in there to record a song was Rose Marie, who had many conflicting memories of the building.
And I should mention: One thing I learned early in my days working in television was that a good way to piss off the crew is to talk about "taping" when the show is filmed or "filming" when the show is taped.
We were there between two and three hours. The filming was "hosted" by Carl Reiner who was doing the warm-up and chatting with the audience between scenes because Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam weren't in that episode. If they had been, they would have been doing what he was doing.
Mr. Reiner was, it will not surprise you to hear, a very good host…very friendly, very funny. At one point, he offered the prize of one dollar right out of his own wallet to the person in the audience with the oddest last name. Amazingly, "Evanier" did not win. Mel Brooks was also in the audience and they did a little bantering. The gaps between scenes were not long although at one point, there was a delay because a special effect did not go off — an ironing board was rigged to fall out of a cabinet on cue — and it had to be re-rigged.
The episode was about Rob and Laura buying their house and there was a business card which the actor playing the realtor had given Rob Petrie. Mr. Van Dyke used the delay to demonstrate how he could back-palm that card and make it vanish and reappear. I thought that was one of the neatest things I'd ever seen and I found a book in the public library (remember public libraries?) and taught myself how to do that.
I interacted twice with the folks on stage. At one point, the stage manager (or someone) "slated" for the cameras by calling out, "DVD, Episode number [some number]" and then they had to stop for tech reasons. Mr. Reiner told the audience, "We're the only show with the initials 'D.V.D.'" and I called out "What about Death Valley Days?" Everyone laughed and there was a brief discussion on the floor about how no one had ever thought of that before.
A bit later, Dick Van Dyke was taking some questions from the audience and someone asked about his well-known love of Laurel and Hardy. As part of his reply, he asked if there were Laurel and Hardy fans in the house. We were sitting in the front row of the bleachers and I waved my hand so enthusiastically that Dick asked me what my favorite one of their films was. I think he was expecting that the thirteen-year-old kid there would say something like, "Oh, I liked the one where they were pushing the piano up all those stairs." He seemed pleasantly startled when I started ticking off the names of "the boys'" best films.
I answered your other questions in the above-linked piece so I'll just wrap this up by answering the one where you asked, "Did you know that you were watching something that would endure the test of time or would you have felt the same watching another show?" I saw other shows being taped or filmed and I was always thrilled to see how the magic happened. But this one was really special. I wasn't thinking, "Boy, I'll bet people will be watching these in reruns forever." I was too busy thinking, "I wanna be a TV writer."
(And also: "I didn't realize that anything on this planet could look as good as Mary Tyler Moore in color, in makeup and in person.")
