Dan Tanna Spenser
NOSTALGIE NERD
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TV SERIEN JUNKIE
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« am: 19. Februar 2010, 15:36:56 » |
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Dieses ist von 2007
Robert Vaughn: Hello, Will, and how are you doing today?
Bullz-Eye: I am doing good, sir, how are you?
RV: “It was a delight for me to reduce my workload by half by having David (McCallum) do the show, but, more importantly, it could have been awful if we didn’t like each other. But we were very fond of each other, had a lot of fun doing the show, and loved doing it.
”RV: Excellent.
BE: Pleasure to talk to you.
RV: Thank you.
BE: I regularly see your commercials for the law firm of Kalfus & Nachman here in my area.
RV: Alright. Where in the country is that?
BE: It’s the Norfolk -- Virginia Beach area.
RV: Norfolk, Virginia, near the beach.
BE: Yes. Well, I’ve only watched the promotional disc for the “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” set thus far, but that alone has given me quite a few great flashbacks. I’m sure the experience of putting together this set has given you plenty of those yourself.
RV: Yes, absolutely.
BE: Did you enjoy being able to sit down with David (McCallum) and discuss your shared experiences, or are you someone who is kind of reticent to revisit the past?
RV: No, no, no. I am never reticent about sitting down and talking about myself with anyone who wants to. (laughs) No, David and I were great friends during the show, and we remain friends. We live very close to each other, geographically; he’s in New York City, and I’m about an hour north of New York City, in Connecticut. His wife and my wife both are interior designers, so… (trails off) The last time I saw him, I ran into him accidentally in Valencia, right where the big fires are going right now. He does his show (“NCIS.”) there at the Santa Clarita Studios, and I was doing a pilot for ABC and we both happened to run into each other at the bar one night, quite to each others’ surprise.
BE: I had the pleasure of meeting him in July at the Television Critics Association tour.
RV: Ah, yes. BE: You know, I didn’t realize that Ian Fleming had had a hand in the creation of “U.N.C.L.E.,” albeit a small one.
RV: Yes. Fleming and Norman knew each other, and that was the beginning of…I’ve never really been able to nail down how it all happened, but, generally speaking, it came as a result of their friendship and their desire to do a version of James Bond on television, and after that it got into a lot of legal, angry…well, in other words, it went on and on, and, eventually, the show was originally called “Solo” when I got the script. And then, because of lawyers, MGM, NBC, Norman Felton, all those people changed it to "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.," and at some point, as we were filming, I believe Ian Fleming died…somewhere in that immediate area…and I guess there was a cease and desist to do anything further until money had been put out for lawyers.
BE: How long had it been since you’d seen the original “Solo” pilot before this set was put together?
RV: I haven’t seen it.
BE: Oh, really? It’s on the promo disc. It’s very interesting to see the different dynamic there.
RV: Well, I know that after we did the pilot, which was, I think, about…well, I don’t know how long, but it took a lot more days devoted to the pilot than are normally devoted to a pilot, and I didn’t realize why at the time. But now I know that their intention was always to release it as a movie overseas and add some hot women and sell it around the world. And they did that; Sandra Berger being one of the hot women, and Luciana Paluzzi being another.
BE: I know it is mentioned in one of the featurettes that when you and David first started working together, you didn’t necessarily share a lot in common on a personal level. How quickly did it take for you all to find a rapport with the onscreen relationship?
RV: Well, the…as I recall, David only appeared in the pilot film for…I don’t know whether they added some scenes for the movie, but for 70 or 80 seconds or something. Then, because of his big fan response when the pilot was shown on television, they began to build up his role, which, for me, was wonderful, because I had a lot of good friends, particularly David Janssen, who never had any life at all they were just doing television series and doing publicity about television series and that was it. He was the sole star of the shows that he did. And so it was a delight for me to reduce my workload by half by having David do the show, but, more importantly, it could have been awful if we didn’t like each other. But we were very fond of each other, had a lot of fun doing the show, and loved doing it.
BE: Was there ever any kind of critical backlash along the lines of, “Oh, well, it’s just a James Bond rip-off,” or did the show just take off so quickly with fans that it didn’t even have a chance to…
RV: It didn’t take off quickly, as a matter of fact. In fact, in today’s market, it would have been canceled. It went on the air in September, and they moved it around. I think they went on Tuesday originally, then they moved to Monday, and then they went to Friday, but, anyway, what happened was…well, among other things, but one of the things being the ascent of David in terms of the fan response. The fact was that during the Christmas holidays of 1964, all the college students returned home and took over the television sets, the ones that were around at night time. And they had been watching the show and having “U.N.C.L.E” parties at various dormitories and fraternities. So as a result of that, we went from 63rd in the rating to about, I think, number 12 in about six weeks, and that’s how the show really took off; that combined with other things. Suddenly, the show which was about to be canceled was in the top 10 in the ratings.
BE: How bizarre was it to be treated like such a rock star?
RV: Well, no question, both David and I were very serious actors. He had done Judas in “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” and he had done “Freud” on film, and I had done “The Magnificent Seven,” and “Hamlet” on stage several times. So we were both in our early 30s, and we fancied ourselves as very serious actors, and to be treated like rock stars, which was a lot of fun, I must admit, it somewhat dimmed our view of ourselves as serious actors. But we both enjoyed the rock stardom for as long as it lasted.
BE: How was Leo G. Carroll to work with? He always looked like a kind but slightly befuddled uncle type.
RV: Well, he was never befuddled, but he certainly acted like that. He was only selling his story. He was the dearest, sweetest man, and I think I mention it in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Book” that, as far as I was concerned, he was the real class of the show. He had been on Broadway in a play called “The Green Bay Tree” in 1933. He wasn’t the leading man in the play; he was practically a juvenile when he did the play, but he played the manservant to the lead, whose name was Laurence Olivier.
BE: Wow.
RV: Yeah. But he had a long theatrical history, both in motion pictures, and Alfred Hitchcock mentioned in one of the biographies about him…about Hitchcock…that Leo G. was the perfect screen actor; he just was so on the money in terms of reality and simplicity that he found him the best screen actor. And, of course, he worked with…I mean, Hitchcock worked with everybody from Cary Grant to Ray Milland, so to single out Leo G. as the best is quite a compliment.
BE: Absolutely. Were there any guest stars who had been on the show that you had forgotten about until you started going through the archives for the set?
RV: No, I pretty much remembered all of the movie stars because, usually, the way they came to do the show was one of their children or grandchildren said, “Why don’t you get on that show? We want to see you on that show!” So Joan Crawford signed on, and Jack Palance, Janet Leigh, and so on. That’s how they came to do the show. The ones that did multiple visits were Vincent Price and George Sanders, and I had a good time with both of them. Sanders was a little gloomy; he announced sometime around the time he did the “U.N.C.L.E” show that he was going to kill himself when he was 65 because he was bored, and he indeed followed through and did kill himself when he was 65, having been, I guess, still bored when he got there. But he was odd. He had it in his contract that there should be a piano on the stage, and then he had a fellow who worked as an extra or a stand-in for him…and I have forgotten his name, but he used to hand George a little Pepsi or Coke with a little splash of vodka as George rippled his fingers over the keys. Joan Crawford also had that happen: a little bit of vodka in her Pepsi-Cola. Always Pepsi, since she, of course, was married to the Pepsi-Cola people.
BE: Oh, well, there you go: she always had it at hand. Do you have a favorite parody of the show? Because there have been plenty of them over the years.
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