I drove out to Burbank yesterday to have lunch with my pal Wally Wingert. You hear Wally's voice all over the place. He does the voiceovers on the Old Navy commercials. He's the robotic voice you hear when you call U.S. Airways on the phone. He's on a dozen cartoon shows, including The Garfield Show for which he plays Garfield's putative owner, Jon. And he's the announcer on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, along with being heard throughout the show on various comedy bits. Other voiceover guys envy Wally those gigs but do not begrudge him as he's very good and he's worked very hard to get where he is.
I used to write shows that taped at NBC but long before that, I was known to roam its hallways without authorization. In 1970, I began doing a lot of freelance jobs for Disney Studios, which is two blocks away. I'd take the bus out to Burbank (I didn't drive then) and spend the morning and lunch hour at Disney, handing in assignments, getting new ones and just talking with the folks out there. Then I'd hike over to NBC…and the security then was nothing like the security now. Today, I had to show I.D. and go past guard after guard and be buzzed through doors. Back then, you just had to have someone inside leave your name at the front desk. That got you in and after that, you had the run of the facility. My first two times there, I was there on business and with actual passes. But after that, I learned I could get in by walking like I knew where I was going, waving to the guys at the front desk and carrying a copy of that day's Variety. They'd seen me there before so they figured I worked there…which I didn't. Back then.
1970-1972 was a great time to be roaming the halls of NBC. Laugh-In was in Stage 3 and when they weren't, Bob Hope or someone else was in there taping a special. Neither Hope nor Laugh-In usually had a formal studio audience (except Bob did for his monologues) but there were bleachers where you could sit and just watch. So I sat and just watched. Flip Wilson and Dean Martin taped farther down the hall and there were game shows aplenty and specials. As related here, I spent one memorable afternoon with Gene Kelly when he was taping a short-lived series on the premises.
Johnny Carson was still based in New York then but his show often came to "Hollywood" (Burbank, actually) for two or three weeks. He worked in Stage 1 which shared a common hallway with Stage 3 — same make-up and wardrobe rooms, same bank of dressing rooms. If I could, I'd stick around and watch Johnny tape at 5:30. There was a little area where the staff stood or sat during the taping and no one ever minded if I walked in and stood there about 20 feet from Johnny's desk.
From there, you could see him come into the studio and head around to the back while the band played the theme and Ed McMahon did the opening announce. He was escorted by his director and a uniformed Burbank police officer, though the cop would drop back a few paces so he was close but ignorable. When Ed did his "Herrrrre's Johnny," the director would cue Johnny through the curtain, the audience would explode and…well, I've only felt a few particularly tingly moments in TV studios but Johnny's entrance was one of them. So was hearing that band live. When I worked there, I'd try to get away and be outside Stage 1 when the Tonight Show band practiced. As good as they sounded on my TV at home, that was nothing compared to how they sounded in person. It was my second-favorite thing in the building after going down to where The Dean Martin Show was done to watch Golddiggers rehearse.
Leno tapes on the other side of the lot so Wally wasn't all that familiar with Stage 1. After we lunched at the NBC Commissary, we hiked over and I gave him a tour of the other part of the campus, including Johnny's stage. I showed him where Johnny stood for the monologue, where the desk was, where Ed stood, etc. We roamed through whatever wasn't locked and I recalled so much about being there. The studio was alive in the seventies when I trespassed and also in the eighties when I did variety shows there. Now, there's about a fifth or less of the excitement and activity. Production is done all over the city and I doubt there's any building or lot where you could go from soundstage to soundstage and see as much happening as I did there, once upon a time.
Lunch at the commissary was fine. I had the London Broil and Wally had a tuna melt. He showed me through the Tonight Show operation though we couldn't get on the stage. It was occupied with an elaborate rehearsal for a sketch they were doing that night involving the Twelve Days of Christmas. They had twelve drummers drumming, eleven pipers piping, etc. At the end for the Partridge in a Pear Tree, they rolled out a fake tree with Shirley Jones seated under it. On our way out, Ron Paul (a guest for that evening) was walking in with a small entourage. Ron Paul supporters were packing the studio audience and they were out with signs at all the driveways and entrances into NBC.
Before I left, I used my iPad to snag a photo of Jay's parking space and what he drove to work that day. Once upon a time, Johnny Carson's parking space was darn near the high point of the NBC Tour. That was back when the studio had enough activity to even have an NBC Tour. I suspect that when Leno now selects which of his nine zillion vehicles he'll drive to work each day, one small consideration is to give folks (tourists, crew members) something interesting to look at. I further suspect that when it was decided where to locate Jay's parking spot, someone had that in mind. I was only around it for about ten minutes but during that time, passers-by took around eight photos of what came out of Jay's Garage yesterday. If there was an NBC Tour, it would still be the highlight.