The year is 1969. Gas is $0.35 and
the average monthly rent is $135.00. Astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon
and Woodstock took place on a farm in New York. Come September 26th, the first
episode of the blended family sitcom, The Brady Bunch, airs, setting
a precedence of the great American family comedy.
“It's very rare that a writer knows
exactly where his ideas come from,” producer Sherwood
Schwartz once said. “However, in the case of The
Brady Bunch, I know exactly what inspired that show. It was just a
four-line filler piece in the Los Angeles Times. It said that in 1965
thirty-one percent of all marriages involved people who had a child or children
from a previous marriage.
It was just a statistic, but to me
it indicated a remarkable sociological change in our country. It gave Schwartz
an idea for a TV series called Yours and Mine. He shopped his script to
the three major networks but was turned down each time. Three years later,
United Artists released a film called Yours,
Mine and Ours, starring Lucille Ball and Henry
Fonda, which told the story of a widow with eight children who married a father
of 10. The film did well at the box office, and suddenly ABC was interested in
Schwartz’s script, which was then was called The Bradley Brood eventually became The Brady Bunch.
Schwartz created two families who
came together. Mike Brady (Robert Reed) is a widowed Architect with three sons,
Greg (Barry Williams), Peter (Christopher Knight) and Bobby (Mike Lookinland).
Carol Martin (Florence Henderson) is also single with her three daughters,
Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Jan (Eve Plumb) and Cindy (Susan Olsen). The
families combine and bring on Mike’s live-in housekeeper Alice (Ann B. Davis),
to make up the Brady Bunch.
Here’s the story of a lovely lady, a
man named Brady, six kids, and a housekeeper. The television show followed the
Brady kids and their preteen and teenage issues like sibling rivalries,
responsibility, and self-image, making it the perfect show to learn valuable
life lessons from. Here are interesting things you might not know about The
Brady Bunch.
1.
BARRY WILLIAMS
“WENT THROUGH A STAGE OF EXPERIMENTATION”-Like many teens in the 1970s, Williams—who played eldest
brother Greg—was known to occasionally partake in some illegal substances while
hanging out with his friends. After sparking up one afternoon on his day off,
Williams received a call from the studio that certain scenes of the “Law and
Disorder” episode needed to be re-shot. Barry dutifully reported to the set,
but it became obvious to all present that something was not quite right with
Greg Brady.
Aside from his stumbling
over nothing in the driveway,
there was a glazed look in his eyes and a stilted delivery of his few lines
regarding Dad’s purchase of a boat that tipped the producers off and caused
furious rewrites to reduce Greg’s part in this episode. “I went through a stage
of experimentation as a kid,” Williams wrote on
his blog. “I certainly never went to the set high again but I don’t like weed.
It makes me feel dumb, paranoid, and hungry.”
2.
CAROL BRADY WAS
SUPPOSED TO BE A DIVORCEE- While Mike
Brady was painted as a widower; Carol’s pre-Brady marital status was a bit of a
mystery. Sherwood Schwartz has said in several interviews that his intention
was for Carol to have been a divorcee (her maiden name was “Tyler” and her
married name was “Martin,” as revealed in the pilot episode).
But divorce was still considered to be taboo for primetime
television (especially for a family-friendly show), so the fate of Mr. Martin
was always left a mystery until recently. After nearly five decades of being
asked what happened to Carol Brady’s first husband, Florence Henderson told
interviewers that he was murdered.
3.
CHRISTOPHER
KNIGHT WASN’T BLESSED WITH MUSICAL ABILITY-Barry
Williams, Mike Lookinland, and Maureen McCormick were all excellent vocalists,
while Eve Plumb and Susan Olsen could both carry a reasonable tune. Christopher
Knight, on the other hand, is the first to admit that his pipes were a bit on
the rusty side. When asked to cite the most embarrassing thing he ever did on
the show by The Improper Bostonian, Knight
didn’t hesitate in responding:
“Singing, by far.
It was traumatic.” Knight was encouraged to lip-synch while
the other kids sang in the musical episodes. It was decided, however, that his
lack of vocal prowess could be played for laughs in the “Dough-Re-Mi” episode;
Peter’s voice had begun to change, and Greg incorporated his cracking and
squeaking into the song “Time to Change.” But poor Chris couldn’t even manage
to hit the wrong notes properly, and his lines in the song were actually
dubbed by producer Howard Leeds. “That whole episode where my voice changing
was them just pointing out that I couldn’t sing,” said Knight. “My first
experience with depression was that week.”
4.
FLORENCE
HENDERSON WASN’T THE FIRST CAROL BRADY-comedic actress
Joyce Bulifant was so close to being Mrs. Brady that she was used in most of
the screen tests with the various child actors for their auditions. In fact,
one of the reasons Eve Plumb landed the role of Jan was because of her physical resemblance to Bulifant. Originally, Schwartz envisioned Mrs. Brady as a wacky
mom-type, much like Lucille Ball in Yours, Mine and Ours.
But the cast dynamics changed when Emmy Award-winning
actress Ann B. Davis signed on to play housekeeper Alice. Davis’ Alice would
more than fulfill the wackiness quotient, and a more grounded, down-to-earth
mother was required to maintain a balance. Texas-born musical theater star
Florence Henderson got the job, and Joyce Bulifant went on to a successful
career of her own, including playing Murray’s wife on The Mary Tyler Moore
Show.
5.
GENE HACKMAN
WAS IN LINE TO PLAY MIKE BRADY-For the role of
Mike Brady (the family’s surname had changed by this time from Bradley), “there
were a number of men I wanted to interview, including Gene Hackman,” recalled Schwartz
in Brady, Brady, Brady. “Paramount wouldn’t even okay Gene Hackman for
an interview because he had a very low TVQ. (TVQ is a survey that executives
use to determine the audience’s familiarity with performances. TV executives
have don’t admit to the existence of TVQs, but it is commonly employed in
casting.)”
They finally chose Reed because he was already under
contract to Paramount, and he had a certain amount of marquee value because of
his co-starring role on the popular legal drama series The
Defenders. “The year after The Brady Bunch
debuted, unknown Gene Hackman with no TVQ starred in The French Connection
and won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and has been a major star ever
since,” added Schwartz.
6.
HENDERSON WASN’T
AROUND WHEN FILMING BEGAN ON THE FIRST SIX EPISODES-Florence
Henderson, who wore a wig during the first season of the show because her hair
had been cropped short for her recent starring role in an off-Broadway revival
of South Pacific, was wrapping up filming on Song of Norway in
Denmark when she received word that The Brady Bunch pilot had sold. “And
so they started the show without me,” Henderson told NPR
in 2014. “They did six episodes without me and then I filled in when I got back
to the States.”
7.
MANY FLUBS WERE
NEVER CORRECTED-Like most shows of that era, no one who worked on The
Brady Bunch thought that the show would still be airing regularly over 40
years later after it had been cancelled. Sometimes little mistakes were left
unfixed in the name of finishing an episode on schedule. After all, the show
aired in the days before every home had a VCR, so who would notice something
like the family leaving the house in a convertible and returning from the same errand in a station wagon?
Jan’s
hair mysteriously switching from a
ponytail to loose around her shoulders repeatedly while the kids were building
a house of cards? Those flubs and others—like a tired Susan Olsen sticking her
tongue out as she exited a scene, thinking it was still a rehearsal—have become
part of the show’s legend thanks to syndication, DVRs, and viewers with too
much time on their hands.
8.
SIX KIDS SHARED
ONE BATHROOM WITH NO TOILET-Eagle-eyed
viewers may have noticed something odd about the Jack and Jill bathroom the
Brady kids shared: It was missing a toilet. Television networks still had
strict rules about showing a porcelain toilet bowl onscreen during the Brady years. In order to avoid
costly tricky camera angles, the producers opted to forego a commode altogether
in the bathroom shared by the kids. (The tank portion of the toilet was
acceptable as seen on the “Captain Jack” episode of Leave It To Beaver
in 1957.)
9.
THE SHOW ATTEMPTED
A BACKDOOR PILOT- During the final season of The Brady Bunch, the
Brady family generously relinquished most of a 30-minute episode in order to
introduce their neighbors, Ken and Kathy Kelly (portrayed by Ken Berry and
Brooke Bundy). The Kellys had adopted three boys—Matt, Dwayne, and Steve—who’d
been best friends at the local orphanage.
The twist was that one of the boys was white (and was also
Mike Lookinland’s real-life brother), one was African-American, and one was
Asian-American. Sherwood Schwartz had hoped that this backdoor pilot would be
picked up as a series, since the networks had recently announced that they were
pushing “prime time” forward half an hour to begin at 7:30 p.m. and they would
be in need of some family-friendly programs. But Kelly's Kids didn't
happen.
10.
THE SHOW WAS
NEVER A HUGE HIT-The Brady Bunch
was never a huge Nielsen hit during its original run; in fact, it never managed
to crack the Top 30 shows. But it did well enough to run for five seasons,
which gave Paramount enough episodes to sell as a package for syndication.
The syndicated reruns were often shown in the late
afternoon, which gave it more exposure to a younger audience. As a result, the
show’s fan base grew enormously after
it had ceased production, and continues to grow today as each younger
generation discovers it.
11.
THERE WAS SOME
ROMANCE ON THE SET-In his book, Growing up Brady, Barry Williams wrote that he and Maureen McCormick shared
their first kiss while in Hawaii filming a three-episode story arc during the
show’s fourth season. Their relationship was at its hottest and heaviest around
the time they filmed the final episode of that season, “A Room at the Top.” The
scene where Marcia and Greg were sitting on her bed together arguing over who
should get the attic room took hours to film, as the director kept having to
yell “cut” due to the actors getting too cozy on camera.
Lloyd Schwartz finally had each actor make a fist and place
it between them as they sat on the bed and instructed them to maintain that
amount of distance from each other at all times during the scene. In Brady, Brady, Brady, Lloyd Schwartz mentions that he tried to cool things down
between Barry and Maureen mainly because on-the-job romances rarely worked
especially between teenagers. If they had a traumatic breakup, how would they
be able to continue to work together? Part of his strategy was to appeal to
Barry’s vanity and flatter him telling him that he was too young and too
good-looking to limit himself to one girl.
12.
TIGER MET A
TRAGIC ENDING-One evening after filming had finished for the day of the
episode entitled “Katchoo” (in which Jan appears to be allergic to the family
dog); Tiger’s trainer let the pooch out on the Paramount lot for his daily
exercise. Unfortunately, a careless driver didn’t see the dog and Tiger was hit and killed.
The frantic trainer spent the rest of the night scouring
animal shelters looking for a reasonable facsimile of the shaggy canine, since
he still had several scenes left to film. The replacement dog looked enough
like Tiger to fool the cast and production staff, but the jig was up when he
wouldn’t follow directions and was frightened by the noise and lights. The only
way the director got Fake Tiger to hold stay in place during the emotional
scene where the boys were bidding him a tearful farewell was to nail his collar
to the floor.
“I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and in spite of what most
people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was
like one long episode of The Brady Bunch. Despite whatever barriers were in my
way, I imagined myself as Marcia Brady skating down the street saying “hi” to
everyone, whether they knew me or not.” (Marlee Matlin) [i]
[i] Sources used:
·
“16 Things You Might Not Know About The Brady
Bunch” BY Kara Kovalchik
·
Marsha, Marsha, Marsha: 10 Life Lessons I Learned
From ‘The Brady Bunch’ by Lyndsay Burginger
No comments:
Post a Comment