Max: Looks like I’ve messed everything up.
99: Don’t feel badly, Max. You’ve messed things up before and you’ll mess things up again.
Max: You’re just saying that to make me feel good.
* * *
—
We were also fortunate to get Ed Platt, a serious and talented actor, to play the Chief of CONTROL. He was another great foil for Max:
Chief: Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Max: No, Chief. I’m thinking what I’m thinking.
The Chief was stability. In a gang comedy, you need someone to do the reaction takes. When someone does something funny, the audience doesn’t laugh unless another character on the screen does the “take.” The Chief couldn’t believe what Max was saying, and then he would shake his head and continue to deal with this idiot.
Chief: Max, I don’t know what I’m going to do about you. You bungle assignment after assignment.
Max: I resent that, Chief.
Chief: Do you deny it?
Max: No, but I resent it.
* * *
—
We spent a lot more money on production as a single-camera show than other three-camera in-studio situation comedies. We were actually making a mini movie every week. We shot on location. It would have been a lot easier to set up three TV cameras and shoot it like I Love Lucy. But it wouldn’t have captured the great production quality that Get Smart showed every week.
We rehearsed for two weeks. I told everybody: “Get everything out in terms of ideas and suggestions during rehearsals. Let’s not waste time and ad-lib during the actual shooting.”
That axiomatic way of rehearsing stayed with me through all of my movies: fun, insanity, creativity, total chaos during rehearsal, but total discipline during shooting.
Our producer was Jay Sandrich, who had worked on The Andy Griffith Show and then later on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. His father, Mark Sandrich, worked at RKO Studios and directed great movie musicals including Shall We Dance, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Holiday Inn, with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.
Leonard Stern, who had worked for Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, and Steve Allen, was brought in as our show runner. He came up with the opening and closing sequences that framed the show and became a visual signature and great way to remember it. The entrance to the secret headquarters of CONTROL is a long corridor, divided by a series of steel doors. An agent dials a number in a phone booth, and a trap door opens and drops him into headquarters. He came up with the closing sequence as well and kept coming up with great innovations.
The pilot episode opens with a voiceover narration:
This is Washington, D.C. Somewhere in this city is the headquarters of a top-secret organization known as CONTROL. Its business is counterespionage. This is Symphony Hall in Washington. Somewhere in this audience is one of CONTROL’s top employees, a man who lives a life of danger and intrigue. A man who’s been carefully trained never to disclose the fact that he is a secret agent.
The concert is interrupted by a phone ringing, as Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent 86, excuses himself amid the confused and disturbed patrons to answer his shoe-phone.
That was the first time that a phone rang in an audience during a public event. We were prescient. We knew that one day the audience would abound with shoe-phones interrupting public gatherings, or as they are now called, cellphones.
Originally, we did the pilot for ABC, which we shot in black and white. When they saw it, they said, “We pass.” I don’t know whether it was that they thought the production budget would be too high, or if they simply didn’t go for it.
That turned out to be lucky for us because we had some really good friends at NBC. I ran into Grant Tinker, who was running NBC at the time, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He asked, “Do you have anything that fell on the floor from the Sid Caesar shows that you didn’t use? We’re always looking for new funny shows.”
I said, “It so happens that we have a brand-new funny show that’s just been passed on by ABC.”
He said, “Great! I’d love to see it!”
Without wasting a moment, we sent the pilot over to Grant Tinker’s team and they loved what we had done and bought the show immediately.
The same thing happened to me almost ten years later with Columbia Pictures and Young Frankenstein. They were tough on the budget, and when I told them I wanted to shoot it in black and white they went crazy and said, “Never!” We then took it to Alan Ladd, Jr., at Twentieth Century Fox. The rest is not only history; it’s also explained in a later chapter.
For the first season of Get Smart, a few teams of writers were hired, all of whom were friends of ours. Buck was the script supervisor. There were three people responsible for the quality of the show: Don, Buck, and Lenny Stern.