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:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)