Production
Dobie Gillis was filmed with two cameras, a method that producer and director Rod Amateau had learned while working with George Burns. The show was not filmed before a live studio audience, but a live audience viewed each episode and provided its laugh track.
Because Hickman had appeared for several years on the comedy Love That Bob as Bob Cumming's nephew, Chuck, he was asked to dye his hair blond for the role of Dobie in order to distance himself from that character in the public's mind. By the following year, however, Hickman was permitted to return to his natural brunette hair color.
During the first season, many of the episodes would begin and end with Dobie sitting on a Central City park bench posed à la Auguste Rodin's statue, "The Thinker", a reproduction of which stood behind him. Speaking directly to the audience, he would explain to the viewing audience his problem of the week (usually girls or money). The use of the statue was phased out in later episodes.
After filming the third episode, Bob Denver announced that he had received his draft notice and the character of Maynard was given an elaborate sendoff (he enlisted in the Army) in the show's next episode, Maynard's Farewell to the Troops. Stage actor Michael J. Pollard was brought out from New York to play Maynard's cousin, Jerome Krebs. Before Pollard had completed his first episode, however, Denver returned and announced that he had been designated 4F (unfit for service) because of a neck injury he had sustained some years earlier. Pollard appeared in only one more episode before being bought out of his contract. Pollard later appeared with his fellow Dobie Gillis co-star Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, and also appeared in other films, such as The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.
The actresses that played Dobie's love interests include Cheryl Holdridge, Michele Lee, Susan Watson, Marlo Thomas, Sally Kellerman, Ellen Burstyn (billed as Ellen McRae), Barbara Babcock, Sherry Jackson, Diana Millay and Barbara Bain. Yvonne Craig appeared in the opening credits and the closing sequence of the pilot film used to sell the series to CBS, but did not appear in the actual episode, "Caper at The Bijou", when it was broadcast. She would eventually play five different girl friends on the show, more than any other actress.
Read more about this topic: The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)