Presenting Your Show of Shows was a herculean task. The weekly script, with music, dancing, and six original comedy spots, had to be finished by Wednesday to air on Saturday night. Time needed to be allotted for the mimeograph machines to crank out duplicate scripts for orchestration, props, scenery, costumes, makeup, and sound effects to be readied by performance time. Not to mention the fact that we first had to work on the actual show run-throughs, rewriting, blocking, and rehearsals.
Thursday was the most creative day of the week and also the most stressful. Nothing was complete yet. We had the page, now we had to get it on the stage. We all got together in a big rehearsal room and put the whole show up on the stage, taking the ideas and fleshing them out. We’d add things to the script, cut things out, and make changes on the spot. It was also at this time that I was getting my first experiences as a director when Max Liebman asked me to help out by putting the comedy sketches on their feet and running them a couple of times.
We gave the sketches room to breathe. As soon as Sid, Imogene, Carl, and Howie were comfortable with the script, there would be a loose blocking. They would then rehearse all the places they’d have to hit onstage. There were black lines, blue lines, red lines, yellow lines, green lines, purple lines, which all corresponded to different scenes, where the scenery had to be put and where the camera had to focus.
By the time we got to the live show on Saturday night, we had been through four rehearsals. The first time there was a loose blocking, which was followed by a tighter blocking. Friday was a complete run-through with a few stops for the technical people. The cameramen studied the shots; the costumes and props were tested and altered as necessary. On Saturday we’d have a full-dress rehearsal, and then we’d go out live at nine o’clock that night.
We never thought about the following week’s show. We were still writing the current week’s installment right up to curtain time! The writers were there, watching, making suggestions, and contributing additional dialogue. We stayed there right through the actual live broadcast, watching from the green room and often making changes right up through to the time the sketch was performed live. We were an extremely dedicated and passionate group.
Believe it or not, even with all that tireless preparation mistakes and blunders still sometimes happened during the live performance. For instance, on one show, Sid’s dresser got the running order of the sketches mixed up. Sid entered a board-meeting sketch, filled with men in business suits, wearing a Roman costume topped with a Roman helmet and carrying a sword. Everybody was shocked, but Sid carried it off brilliantly. “Sorry I’m late,” Sid said, “but I just came from an all-night costume party. Let’s get on with the business.”
Amazing! We were absolutely petrified and then incredibly relieved. We all collapsed in a heap of hysterical laughter.
Another time was when we satirized the movie High Noon in which Gary Cooper has to face the bad guys all alone after the townspeople desert him. Sid was playing the Gary Cooper sheriff character, and we made a lot of the townspeople deputy sheriffs. To punctuate their quitting, they pinned their badges on Sid’s chest over his own badge. Sid was supposed to have a sponge inside his shirt to protect him from the pins. But in his haste, the dresser forgot to put the sponge in during the quick change. We were amazed at how realistically Sid yowled when one by one they pinned the badges on him.
Sid and Imogene were great at going with the flow, but once in a while, it got to be a bit much. The audience never knew if anything was wrong. For instance, we were doing a satire on From Here to Eternity, which became “From Here to Obscurity.” Sid and Imogene were in the classic Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr scene where they are falling in love on the beach while the waves break over them. Off camera, there were five or six stagehands with big buckets of water hurling them at Sid and Imogene. I don’t know how they did it, they were practically drowning, spitting water like human fountains all over the place. But they never broke up and the audience laughed their heads off, never knowing what Sid and Imogene were going through.
Sid had an incessant nervous cough. It was nothing more than that. But he learned to use it to his advantage. He had an enormous amount of material to memorize and the cough gave him momentary pause to remember exactly where a line or situation fit. Occasionally, I would even write in the cough to give him time to swallow what was coming. He got a kick out of seeing “cough, cough” in the script.
And to be perfectly truthful, not all the jokes worked. I had an idea for an interview with the German Professor in a zoo. He is walking by the reptile house and he hears a tapping on the window. It’s a snake tapping his teeth against the glass, trying to get his attention.