During Your Show of Shows, Max Liebman usually assigned me to assist our guest star celebrities and make sure they were familiar with the workings of TV and specifically that they showed up to rehearsal and learned their lines. Often when making their movies, they would only have to learn a few lines of dialogue before the director said cut. On live television, it was very different. There was no room for mistakes, and they had to memorize the entire script.
The concept for My Favorite Year revolved around a big Hollywood actor who is a guest star on a weekly live TV comedy variety show, much like Your Show of Shows, and the young writer assigned to “ride herd” on him. In Norman’s script, with a little help from me, this particular guest star, Alan Swann, turns out to be more than just a handful to manage. He is full of unpredictable behavior and crazy antics that drive Benjy, the young writer inspired by me and played so wonderfully by Mark Linn-Baker, up the wall.
Once again, as was my dangerous habit, together with our producer Mike Gruskoff, I hired a director who had never directed a motion picture before. Richard Benjamin was a well-known actor who I felt was ready to make the move to the other side of the camera. I wasn’t wrong; Richard was absolutely up to the task.
Richard, together with Mike and me, decided on Peter O’Toole to play the “you never know what he’ll do next” guest star, Alan Swann. At that point in his career Peter O’Toole had already garnered six Oscar nominations, among them for his performances in Lawrence of Arabia （1962）， The Lion in Winter （1968）， Becket （1964）， and The Ruling Class （1972）。 And he was nominated once again for his magnificent turn in our film, My Favorite Year, which he would have and should have won for if he hadn’t been up against Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. （Let’s face it—anytime you play Gandhi, you have a good chance of winning an Academy Award.）
There were some wonderful back-and-forths between Benjy and Peter O’Toole’s Alan Swann:
Benjy Stone: Our audiences are great.
Alan Swann: Audience? What audience? Audience?
Benjy Stone: You knew there was an audience. What did you think those seats were for?
Alan Swann: I haven’t performed in front of an audience for twenty-eight years! Audience? I played a butler. I had one line! I forgot it.
Benjy Stone: Don’t worry, this is gonna be easy.
Alan Swann: For you, maybe. Not for me. I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!
Another one of my favorite bits from Peter O’Toole’s dialogue was:
Alan Swann: Comedy is such a mystery to me. I feel the way Edmund Kean did.
Benjy Stone: The great English actor?
Alan Swann: Mmm, yes. On his deathbed, Kean was asked how he felt. He answered, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
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Also notable in the cast, playing the “Sid Caesar” role of King Kaiser, was Joe Bologna, who did a remarkable job of capturing the larger-than-life behavior of Caesar. Norman filled the script with wonderful lines for King Kaiser like when thinking about a present for a valued associate, he tells his assistant, Casey, “I think I went a little too far with Sy just now. I really hurt his feelings. I gotta get him something. Here’s a hundred bucks. Get him something. Tires are nice. Get him a set of tires. Call my brother in the Bronx. He’ll tell you where. Casey, whitewalls.”
Another scene that Norman wrote that I really enjoyed was when Benjy takes Alan Swann all the way to Brooklyn to meet his mother, played perfectly by Lainie Kazan, and his aunt Sadie （named after my own aunt Sadie）， played by Annette Robyns. This big Hollywood star warmly greets them and couldn’t have been nicer, especially complimenting Aunt Sadie on her beautiful white wedding dress, replete with veil and train.
Aunt Sadie responds with, “You like it? I only wore it once.”
Another wonderful thing that helped set the mood for My Favorite Year was the music under the opening credits. We decided that we would open with “Stardust,” the great Hoagy Carmichael song with lyrics by Mitchell Parish, only we wouldn’t go into the song itself but instead use just the intro or the verse that precedes the song. It’s a haunting and beautiful refrain that captures the feeling of that period perfectly. It’s sung by the incomparable Nat King Cole and it definitely creates the magical feeling that surrounds the movie’s story, which takes place in 1954.
There’s a cute story that occurred in the middle of making My Favorite Year. It so happened that Richard Benjamin came to me and said, “I’m running short of money. I’ll need about another two hundred thousand dollars to finish the film.” He added, “We should go to David Begelman’s office together and ask him for the additional funds.”