Chapter 9
Get Smart
Anne and I were seeing each other every day and every night. I knew I wanted to marry her, but couldn't think seriously about it because I was not earning enough money to support her. Not only in the style to which she was accustomed, but frankly, in any style.
And then in 1964—a stroke of luck!
I was called by one of the partners of a successful showbiz company called Talent Associates. His name was Danny Melnick. He ran the company with David Susskind, the well-known host of The David Susskind Show. I went to their offices on Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street in the Newsweek Building. They said, "We need a show and we want you to write it. Inspector Clouseau and James Bond are the biggest things in the world now. Got any ideas?"
They then asked if I would like to write it with anybody. They suggested a list of names. One of the names on the list was Buck Henry. I liked Buck Henry a lot, and admired his talent. He would later go on to write The Graduate and Heaven Can Wait.
He could also shoot pool, and Talent Associates had taken out their conference room table and replaced it with a pool table. What a perfect partner.
This was the year of the secret agent, both in film and television. Sean Connery was James Bond in the recent megahit Goldfinger, and Robert Vaughn and David McCallum were in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of piece about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about a CIA agent who was also an imbecile. I decided to be the first. I called it Get Smart, based on the leading character's name, Maxwell Smart.
Buck was very intelligent and extremely witty. The more we worked on the pilot, the funnier and more insightful we got. Another stroke of luck was getting Alfa-Betty Olsen, a friend of mine at the time, to be our recording secretary. She nailed down every thought and every crazy joke and brushstroke of madness we threw out. Nothing escaped her.
(Later, when I was doing The Producers she became my right-hand gal and was invaluable in the forging of that script.)
It took Buck and me about three and a half months to write the pilot script. We could have done it in a couple of weeks, but we loved playing pool. We would also play against the various guests who would visit the offices. If we thought we could beat them we'd place bets and we'd make a little money on the side. Every once in a while, Peter Falk would stop by. He was a pool shark. He would always beat us and take our money. I think Peter Falk had one real eye and one glass eye, and having one eye was probably better for shooting pool than having two.
The only person we wanted to beat and never could was David Susskind. He was a terrible pool player, but he was our boss—so we'd always lose. Who needed that trouble?
Maxwell Smart needed to be stupid and innocent, but also a noble and heroic character. Don Adams was absolutely perfect in the leading role. I knew I was going to name the main character Max, because at that point I had named all of my main characters Max. The Producers had Max Bialystock. My father's name was Max, his grandfather's name was Max, and later I named my youngest son Max. It made sense to use Smart as a second name because of the cliché "get smart." As in "don't get too smart," and "wise up." Also, everybody was chasing Maxwell Smart. Ergo, Get Smart. And it worked, and it still works.
Max was Secret Agent 86. I came up with using the number 86 because when I worked as a busboy whenever we were out of anything that was ordered, somebody in the kitchen would yell, "Eighty-six on the rye bread; eighty-six on the cream cheese, and eighty-six pickled herring."
Which was restaurant shorthand for "we're out of it." At critical moments in the story, sometimes Max was completely out of brains. So I thought that "86" was an apt number for him.
Max worked for a fictional government spy agency called CONTROL, and its ever-present archenemy was KAOS, an evil organization determined to rule the world. Max had a remarkable lack of insight, but since he was our hero, he would always win—despite his inefficiency. Buck and I saw Max as earnest and innocent. He was noble and he believed in justice. He was incorruptible, so the naïveté worked for him. He was always wrong, but always came out on top. He never played the joke and never shared with the audience that he was aware that what he was doing was funny. It was very real, character-driven comedy.
Buck and I created a lot of signature pieces and gadgets. Spies who would hide in lockers in the bus station. Sunglasses that became binoculars. Cuff links that had mirrors so you could see behind you. The "Inflato-coat," a trench coat that inflated, lifting the wearer off the ground, as well as a coat with fake arms so that Max could easily escape being restrained.
Like I said before, Buck was absolutely brilliant. He came up with "the Cone of Silence." The Cone of Silence was a Plexiglas dome that would descend from the ceiling over the Chief and Max to keep their top-secret conversations from being overheard. There was only one small problem with it…they couldn't hear each other.
I created the shoe-phone that Max used to field calls. One day, every phone in my office started ringing. I took off my shoe and pretended to answer it. I thought the most bizarre place to put a secret telephone would be in the heel of your shoe, and I thought we could have a lot of fun with that. If you got a very important call, you had to stop and take off your shoe. One wrong step and the phone breaks. For years afterward, Don couldn't eat in restaurants without grateful patrons taking off their shoes and saluting him with them like they were toasting him with wine.
I didn't realize it, but I might have just created the first cellphone. Had I patented it, I probably would've made so much money that I wouldn't have had to write this book.
A lot of comedy business came from Don Adams. He created "Would You Believe?" which was a sequence of exaggerations that kept getting smaller and smaller.
Maxwell Smart: And I happen to know that at this very minute, seven Coast Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe it, seven?
Mr. Big: I find that pretty hard to believe.
Maxwell Smart: Would you believe six?
Mr. Big: I don't think so.
Maxwell Smart: How about two cops in a rowboat?
It originally was part of Don Adams's stage act as a stand-up comedian. His act was based in part on an imitation of William Powell, who was a famous movie star. Powell played Nick Charles, who played against Myrna Loy's Nora in the successful Thin Man series. Don wrote a routine that was based on the end of every Thin Man movie, where the murder suspects were all gathered in a room and Nick would walk around and sum up the facts and expose the murderer in a very dynamic way. Prior to Get Smart, Don played Byron Glick, the house detective at a New York hotel where Bill Dana played bellhop Jose Jimenez on The Bill Dana Show. The jet energy, the motor behind Get Smart, was Don. He really believed in what he was doing. He was indefatigable.
We were also very lucky to get Barbara Feldon, a former model, to play Max's partner, the beautiful Agent 99 (we refused to give her a name). We cast Barbara early on. She was smart, good-looking, and could handle the subtle comedic material. Barbara and Don liked each other personally from the start. Agent 99 was an important foil. She legitimized Max. She was the wise and common-sensical George Burns to Max's naïve Gracie Allen. Agent 99 was the sane one. Very beautiful and very feminine, so you could see why Max would put up with being always corrected by her, which would have been humiliating to a lesser man:
Max: Looks like I've messed everything up.
99: Don't feel badly, Max. You've messed things up before and you'll mess things up again.
Max: You're just saying that to make me feel good.
We were also fortunate to get Ed Platt, a serious and talented actor, to play the Chief of CONTROL. He was another great foil for Max:
Chief: Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
Max: No, Chief. I'm thinking what I'm thinking.
The Chief was stability. In a gang comedy, you need someone to do the reaction takes. When someone does something funny, the audience doesn't laugh unless another character on the screen does the "take." The Chief couldn't believe what Max was saying, and then he would shake his head and continue to deal with this idiot.
Chief: Max, I don't know what I'm going to do about you. You bungle assignment after assignment.
Max: I resent that, Chief.
Chief: Do you deny it?
Max: No, but I resent it.
We spent a lot more money on production as a single-camera show than other three-camera in-studio situation comedies. We were actually making a mini movie every week. We shot on location. It would have been a lot easier to set up three TV cameras and shoot it like I Love Lucy. But it wouldn't have captured the great production quality that Get Smart showed every week.
We rehearsed for two weeks. I told everybody: "Get everything out in terms of ideas and suggestions during rehearsals. Let's not waste time and ad-lib during the actual shooting."
That axiomatic way of rehearsing stayed with me through all of my movies: fun, insanity, creativity, total chaos during rehearsal, but total discipline during shooting.
Our producer was Jay Sandrich, who had worked on The Andy Griffith Show and then later on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. His father, Mark Sandrich, worked at RKO Studios and directed great movie musicals including Shall We Dance, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Holiday Inn, with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.
Leonard Stern, who had worked for Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, and Steve Allen, was brought in as our show runner. He came up with the opening and closing sequences that framed the show and became a visual signature and great way to remember it. The entrance to the secret headquarters of CONTROL is a long corridor, divided by a series of steel doors. An agent dials a number in a phone booth, and a trap door opens and drops him into headquarters. He came up with the closing sequence as well and kept coming up with great innovations.
The pilot episode opens with a voiceover narration:
This is Washington, D.C. Somewhere in this city is the headquarters of a top-secret organization known as CONTROL. Its business is counterespionage. This is Symphony Hall in Washington. Somewhere in this audience is one of CONTROL's top employees, a man who lives a life of danger and intrigue. A man who's been carefully trained never to disclose the fact that he is a secret agent.
The concert is interrupted by a phone ringing, as Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent 86, excuses himself amid the confused and disturbed patrons to answer his shoe-phone.
That was the first time that a phone rang in an audience during a public event. We were prescient. We knew that one day the audience would abound with shoe-phones interrupting public gatherings, or as they are now called, cellphones.