My Days by Marion Ross

Author:Marion Ross [Ross, Marion]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

My “Lovely” Big Break

The role Millie was looking to fill was that of an all-American-type 1950s mother and housewife for a pilot that had been written and was being produced and directed by a man by the name of Garry Marshall. Garry, I would quickly learn, had been a joke writer for various comedians, including Joey Bishop and Phil Foster. He had also been a writer for The Jack Paar Tonight Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Joey Bishop Show, The Danny Thomas Show and The Lucy Show.

A few years earlier, he had created and produced a sitcom for NBC called Hey, Landlord, which starred Will Hutchins, who was best known for the role of lawyer Tom Brewster in the popular Warner Bros. Western television series Sugarfoot, which aired on ABC from 1957 to 1961. In Hey, Landlord, Hutchins played a man who inherited from his uncle an apartment building filled with colorful tenants, and while the show lasted only for one season, it set Garry up for what would be his first major success: the ABC television series The Odd Couple, which starred Tony Randall and Jack Klugman and was adapted from Neil Simon’s play by the same name. As a 1968 feature film, The Odd Couple had been a box office hit for Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.

Enjoying the success of The Odd Couple, Garry knew the iron was hot to strike with another show, and with the turbulent 1960s behind us and the United States still embroiled in the very contentious Vietnam War, he reasoned Americans were primed for a show that would take them back to the simpler times of the 1950s. The new show he created, which Millie was casting the mother for, was called New Family in Town. Garry was green-lighted to do a pilot of the show, with its idealized vision of life during the Eisenhower administration, for Paramount. Millie and Garry obviously thought I had the wholesome maternal look they were searching for, and I was cast in the role of Marion, the mother of a Midwestern family known as the Cunninghams.

After finishing my work in Airport, I was still in desperate need of work and continued to get small roles in various television series until Garry was finally ready to shoot the pilot for New Family in Town. Along with me, the cast included Harold Gould, in the role of my husband, Howard; Ron Howard and Ric Carrott as my sons, Richie and Chuck; Susan Neher as my daughter, Joanie; and Anson Williams as Richie’s best friend, “Potsie.”

I knew of Gould’s work, which paralleled mine: extensive work in theater and a string of small roles in films and television shows. I was also well aware of Ron, who had been a fixture on television since he was five years old and had played the part of the little boy with the lisp in the 1962 film version of The Music Man and, of course, Opie Taylor in the hit CBS sitcom The Andy Griffith Show.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.