Gidget - The Gidget/Bewitched Connection

The Gidget/Bewitched Connection

The 1959 Columbia Pictures' Gidget filmed on location at a real home in Santa Monica (at 267 18th Street) as seen in the film. The blueprint design of this home was later reversed and replicated as a house facade attached to an existing garage on the backlot of Columbia's Ranch. The reversed Gidget house was primarily used on the Columbia/Screen Gems hit television show Bewitched which premiered in 1964. This facade (still standing) was built right next door to a much older house facade used as the home of Gidget in the TV series from 1965-66. The patio and living room interior sets seen in Columbia's Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) were soon adapted for the permanent Bewitched interior house set for 1964. In the TV series from 1965–66, Gidget (played by Sally Field) is often shown with a "Samantha" doll in her bedroom (a merchandise cross promotion for the other Columbia TV show), and in 1986's The New Gidget (produced by Columbia executive and producer Harry Ackerman) the facade used in shots for her home is the reversed Gidget house (better known by TV audiences from those subsequent decades of reruns as Samantha's home on Bewitched).

There are other examples of Screen Gems reusing resources from different productions. For instance, the exterior and kitchen sets of the 1965 television series starring Sally Field had been previously employed in the Screen Gems' sitcom Hazel starring Shirley Booth.