Robert Rowe sent me this question about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World…
Some Internet search results say Bob Hope was unable to appear in the film because a studio he was under contract to forbid it. Is that also your understanding?
I could give you a short answer but I don't do that when I can give a long, wandering answer. What I know about this and how I know it is buried deep within the following. But first, I need to post another one of these…
Now then: In 1980, I left (on good terms and not forever), my long-term employment with Sid and Marty Krofft. I turned down writing their new series, Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters and took a job on a non-Krofft series done at a different studio. I wasn't away from them for long. They decided, not because of me, to tape the Mandrell show at the studio where I was now working and moved into offices just down the hall from mine. Suddenly, I was writing on my new gig and also helping out unofficially on the Mandrell series…all this while also story-editing and writing Richie Rich cartoons for Hanna-Barbera and whatever I was then doing in comics.
So one day, Marty Krofft walks into my office and says, "Mark, I need you to help me out with something. Can you come with me?" Marty was a hard guy to say "no" to and saying "yes" had usually turned out to be the right answer. So I went with him and as we walked, he explained that they had a guest star who was there that moment to tape a spot with Barbara Mandrell and also one for another show the Kroffts were producing concurrently — a series of syndicated specials for the Oral Roberts Foundation.
Things were running behind on the stage where both shows were taping and this guest star was waiting in his dressing room, getting impatient. Marty said, "I need you to baby-sit him for a half-hour or so…just keep him company." But he didn't tell me what star I was going to be baby-sitting.
Then he took me into the dressing room and said, "Bob, this is my head writer, Mark Evanier. He's one of your biggest fans and he knows absolutely everything you've ever done." I shook hands with the star and he said, "Great! If the writing business doesn't work out, he can make a good living as a blackmailer."
And then Marty left me there with Bob Hope.
This was not the first time someone had done this to me. Marty did it to me once with Jerry Lewis and another time with Sid Caesar. And both Marty and my friend Susan Buckner did it to me on separate occasions with Milton Berle. Oh — and a producer I worked with named Bonny Dore did it to me with Dick Clark and later, Dick did it to me with Henny Youngman and James Coburn and I could probably think of other instances.
I wound up talking with Mr. Hope for about twenty minutes — about his movies, about his co-stars, about whatever came to mind. I told him how I used to sneak in to watch him tape his specials at NBC Burbank. Every time Hope got a line wrong, he'd yell at his cue card guy, Barney McNulty, like it was Barney's fault. When I mentioned that, he said to me, "We paid Barney real well to take the blame because I never learned how to read." Then he told me some affectionate stories about Barney.
I asked him about the Bob Hope comic book that DC Comics published for eighteen years and he told me he had a complete collection and someday, might get around to reading one of them. And of course, I asked him about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and why he wasn't in it. His reply went roughly like this…
Yeah, they really wanted me in it. Stanley Kramer must've called me a half-dozen times and I wanted to do it. All my friends were in it. The trouble was I was under contract to a movie studio at the time. I owed them a picture and I kept turning down these terrible scripts they sent me and they were getting impatient. So when I went to them and asked if I could do a bit part in Stanley's picture, they said, "Not until you commit to a start date on that picture you owe us" and I wasn't about to say yes to one of those lousy scripts.
I also asked him if he had any idea what he would have done in the film if he had been in it. He had no idea. I'm fairly certain it would have been a quick cameo that would have been written expressly for him. He would not have played a part that someone else played in the movie.
That was all I got out of him and his answer raised some questions I was not prepared to ask at that moment. Mad World began filming on April 26, 1962. At the time, Hope was filming Critic's Choice for Warner Brothers and then the next film he made was Call Me Bwana, which began filming in September of that year. Call Me Bwana was made for a company called Danjaq that made a lot of the early James Bond films and released its movies through United Artists — the same company that released It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
I can't quite figure this out. Why would Hope sign to do a picture with Danjaq if they didn't have a script he wanted to do? Or if the company he owed a picture to was United Artists, why wouldn't they let him do a cameo in a film they were distributing? At the time he officially committed to Call Me Bwana, Mad World was still in production…so I don't get it. Maybe Hope was committed to yet another company, they refused his request to do Mad World and later that deal was canceled…but then he still would have had time to do a day on Mad World before he started. Or maybe…
Never mind. I give up. This might be a time to fall back on the simplest explanation which would be that what Hope told me wasn't the truth or at least the whole truth…but that's what he said and he apparently said it to others who asked. Make of it what you will. People do sometimes make up simple explanations when they don't want to give you the complicated or embarrassing real one. I suspect some contractual commitment prevented him doing the cameo but it's a lot more complicated than we could imagine from afar.
Lastly, before someone writes to ask what Bob Hope was like in our somewhat-brief encounter: He was very much like the way Dave Thomas played him in "Play It Again, Bob." That was (in my opinion) the most brilliant of the many brilliant sketches on the old SCTV show and it really nailed the Hope I met. A very clever writer I knew named Jeffrey Barron — who wrote for SCTV and also for Hope — told me he worked on the sketch but he was not a credited writer on the program at that time. Someone familiar with the off-stage Hope had to have written it.
I'll post a link to the sketch here for you but first, I need to insert one of these…
That said, I've embedded the entire episode of SCTV below but the link is configured so on most browsers, it should start playing with the sketch in question. "Play It Again, Bob" is in two parts with a commercial break in the middle but stick with it through that. And if you want to watch the entire episode, move the little slider back to the beginning. Thanks to Robert Rowe for jogging me into telling a story I've never told here before. Amazingly, I still have some…