Why the Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture by Rosanne Welch

Author:Rosanne Welch [Welch, Rosanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Television, General, music, Social Science, popular culture
ISBN: 9781476626024
Google: JXKQDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-07-19T23:51:54.737748+00:00

Seven

We Were Made for Each Other, the Sequel

Television Aesthetic Technique

While metatextuality is largely the work of the writers and actors, the examples in the previous chapter also represent the work of many of the other creative craft departments involved in producing a television show, beginning with directors, editors, properties masters and costumers, all hand-picked by producers Schneider and Rafelson.

The show even involved detailed work from the transportation department in the form of the design and creation of the Monkeemobile by Dean Jeffries, who had already created the Mantaray for Bikini Beach and Black Beauty for The Green Hornet.

All craft people relied on each other in a show with this much innovation. Directors might ask for actors to perform at a faster pace but then it was through working together with the editor(s) that they were able to speed up those scenes by judicial cutting and, in the case of The Monkees, often the insertion of humorous old film footage such as crumbling buildings or exploding volcanoes to match a moment of dialogue. Likewise, writers detailed some of the crazy props the actors could find on set, yet when they asked for a collection of odd kitchen gadgets, it fell to the prop master to decide exactly what those gadgets were, making prop masters key contributors to the creative potential of the production. Similarly, actors can make all the funny faces they like to the camera for comedic effect, but the clothes the costume designers made for them helped add to the hilarity. Special effects being what they were in the days before CGI, they were used less frequently and mostly came in the form of on-screen graphics of light bulbs drawn over Micky’s head to suggest a new idea (which happened both in “Your Friendly Neighborhood Kidnappers” and “Monkees in a Ghost Town”). In these and many other ways the craft departments contributed to the metatextual menagerie. This chapter will detail those contributions.

After the writers who created much of the chaos on the page, the directors were necessary for providing a comfortable and safe surrounding for the actors to practice the brand of improvisation taught to them by actor and first time director, James Frawley (who would win the Emmy for Directing the first season and be nominated three more times in his career for The Monkees, Ally McBeal and Ed). Frawley trained the actors in similar ways that other comedy troops learn improvisation and then budgeted time on the set for them to create some new physical and verbal comic bits that could be blocked into the actual filming. Peter Tork, reflecting on directing the episode “Monkees Mind Their Manor” on his Facebook post of November 4, 2014, remembered, “We almost never improvised on camera. We would improvise in rehearsals and if it worked we’d repeat it for the camera.”

Even more than working with actors, the directors spent time with the editors who brought the next level of metatextuality to the show by cutting in old studio footage and

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