Sometimes, I like to delight you with a complete, brilliantly-researched tale about one of my favourite comedy shows. Other times, all I can do is point to something weird and shrug.
Guess what today’s post is?
Take a look at this clip from Maude, “Maude’s Good Deed”, broadcast by CBS on the 6th March 1973.
What the bloody hell happens 22 seconds into that clip? The studio audience disappears, and Bea Arthur and Esther Rolle are saying their lines to no reaction whatsoever. Note the incredibly awkward pause after Rolle’s line “I wish it was, I could turn it off”, as though she’s waiting for a laugh which never comes.
The audience then returns 48 seconds in, with the tail end of a reaction from the previous line. Thoroughly bizarre. What’s going on?
We can at least get a little insight from the following interview with director Hal Cooper. This was published in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald on the 15th April 1973, under the misleading title “Comedy producer tells how”.1 From it, we get a general sense of how the production of Maude worked:
“We start out, on Monday, sitting around the table with two scripts, one a rough outline of next week’s show, and the other for this week.
And that ‘we’ is everyone – me, Norman (Lear, producer of “Maude” and “All in the Family,” which Cooper directed last season), Bea (Beatrice Arthur, “Maude’s” star), the writers – everyone.
We go over the scripts, toss out ideas, reject some, then next week’s script goes back to the writers, and we go to work on this week’s.
We spend the rest of the Monday, and Tuesday and Wednesday in a rehearsal hall. I block out the action, figure out who’s going to be where, that sort of thing. And we keep on fiddling with the script.
On Thursday we go into the studio (at CBS in Los Angeles), and go before the cameras where we go over all the details.
All the while, I’m being kind of an analyst… encouraging the performers to react certain ways… And being kind of a traffic cop, right, making sure the actors don’t bump into each other.
On Friday afternoon, we bring in a live audience, and tape a dress rehearsal. Then Friday night, we bring in a second audience, and do a take.
We take both tapes and pick the best from each and splice them together on Saturday, and I do more editing myself, to bring it down to the exact time. On Saturday, we may also reshoot some ‘interior’ shots, where, say, a person’s reaction was off – the kind of thing where we don’t need an audience.
Then on Sunday, I read the script for next week, and decide how I’m going to approach it, plan my camera shots and so forth.
So, you can see, it’s a seven-day-a-week job. We do this for four or five weeks, take a little time off, then come back. We shoot 24 shows for the season.”
From all this, we can take a guess as to what we’re seeing in the above clip. For some reason, the production wasn’t happy with the takes of the original scene done on Friday in front of the two separate audiences. So on the Saturday – or perhaps another Saturday before the show was due to air – they reshot this section of the scene and pasted it in.
Questions still abound, of course. Why exactly was this material reshot? Was it the performances they didn’t like, or did they have second thoughts about something in the script, and actually record brand new lines? And why did they not do a better job with the sound? Even in 1973, video editing was more advanced than that.
On that latter point, we can speculate further: did the episode even transmit in this form originally? Recently, I watched all 205 episodes of Normal Lear stablemate All in the Family, and not a single one of them had a sound issue as dodgy as that. It’s very easy to imagine that a correctly-made version of this edit aired in 1973, and then the wrong edit of the show was plucked off the shelf for the DVD release, in much the same way that iPlayer used the wrong edit of The Fast Show.
Sadly, I have no answers to any of these questions. I only know enough to annoy myself. Now I’ve probably managed to annoy you too. You’re welcome.
It feels odd that it was only in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, and I can’t help but feel this must be a syndicated piece, but I can’t find any other publications which ran it. ↩