|
|
|
"World War II with a LAUGH TRACK" With an improbable premise and an unlikely star, "Hogan's Heroes' is marching to TV popularity TV Guide November 27, 1965 - December 3, 1965 By Leslie Raddatz Pages 22-24
The sweet smell of success is a heady aroma which, almost from the start, pervaded the otherwise drab confines of the set of Hogan's Heroes, a CBS entry which the smart money picked early on as a hit of the new television season, and which later justified this confidence turning up as the top-rated new show in the season's first national Nielsens. The program, which concerns hilarious goings-on in a German prisoner-of-war camp - "World War II with a laugh track," according to a quipster - was dubbed "one of the sleepers of the next semester" by Daily variety. Last summer, when CBS brought managers of its affiliated stations to Hollywood for wining , dining and viewing the new shows , they seemed to like Hogan's Heroes better than anything else they saw. And from Madison Avenue to Vine Street, the talk around the trade was similar in tone to that which preceded the premieres of such hits as The Beverly Hillbillies and Gomer Pyle, USMC. "It has a good feeling," says Bob Crane erstwhile Dr. David Kelsey of the Donna Reed Show and now Col. Robert Hogan of Hogan's Heroes. "Once when I appeared on the Dick Van Dyke Show, I said to myself, "this is a team!" That's the way this show is - there's a rhythm." The character of Colonel Hogan is a sort of upgraded Sergeant Bilko working behind the enemy lines, but Bilko is never mentioned as a precursor of Hogan's Heroes, any more than "Stalag 17" is. Rather Crane says, "It's halfway between Combat! and McHale's Navy - with a little bit of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. thrown in." When asked to do a bit of comedy business which he objects to, he says contemptuously, "That's McHale's" and the bit is dropped. Later he says, "They never want me to fall into a comedy style like Joe. Flynn or Tim Conway of McHale's. Then if there's any romance, it's believable. I'm not Joe Buffoon. The lines have to mean something. But I was always the nut in my neighborhood - the wise guy. That's Colonel Hogan." Crane's neighborhood was Connecticut - Waterbury, where he was born; then Stamford, where he went to school and started out to be a professional musician; and finally Bridgeport, where he really got started in radio as a disc jockey. He still remembers the names - and recites them - of the competing disc jockeys on the New York radio stations when he worked in Bridgeport, and those on the Los Angeles stations when he went West nine years ago. Crane himself has never liked to be known as a disc jockey - he prefers "radio personality." Wise guy he may be, but he admits, "I'm thin-skinned." He remembers, and again recites word for word, things once written about him in a magazine which he considered unkind - that he is "a not-too-young 26," that he olives "in a nice but hardly fashionable part of town" called Tarzana. But particularly he remembers the quoted remarks of Tony Owen, producer of The Donna Reed Show and husband of the star, who indicated that he dropped Crane from the cast when, in fact, it was Crane who decided to pull out. There is nothing of the wise guy in Crane's voice as he says, "I thought Tony was my friend - he was like a father to me. When I called him up about the things he says, he told me, "That's this business - you'll have to get used to it.'"
When Crane cam to California, he moved to Tarzana because his old barber from Bridgeport had a shop there. Now he patronizes a Hollywood hair stylist at $10 a throw - a move suggested by Tony Owen. "That's one thing I can thank him for," says Crane. Continuing as a "radio personality" on KNX Los Angeles, through most of the past summer (he no longer does the show), Crane got up before 5 every morning, was at the radio station by 6, spent two hours taping his program for release at 8 A.M., arrived at Desilu Studios, where Hogan's Heroes is filmed, at 8:15, worked until after 7 in the evening, had his dinner in town and then went home to his wife and three kids in Tarzana, where he studied his lines for the next day until he fell asleep. Sometimes Crane didn't know his lines very well, but nobody seemed to mind. It's a happy set. "You hear about those other shows where they're having trouble," says Crane. "But it's not like that here." Which is all part of the sweet smell of success. The only tacit connection between Hogan's Heroes and Sergeant Bilko is in the person of one of Hogan's creators, Bernard Fein. As an actor, Fein played the part of Private Gomez for four years with Phil Silvers' merry men. It took him that long to sell Hogan's Heroes, which, in its original concept, did not take place in a military or overseas setting but in an American penitentiary. "I tried for four years to sell the show," says Fein. "Finally I gave up and decided to leave the business. I got on a plane for New York. Sitting next to me was a guy reading 'Von Ryan's Express.' The minute I saw it, I said to myself, "That's it!" I didn't even leave the airport when I got to New York - I bought a ticket back to Hollywood on the next plane. Albert Ruddy and I turned out a new script with the German POW camp locale, and four days after we finished it, it was sold." Producer's doubts vanish The immediate success of the program relieved some anxieties of its producer, Edward H. Feldman, who had some nagging doubts, not because of the nature of Hogan's Heroes ("It's something fresh"), but because of his own traumatic experience with a short-lived show called Fair Exchange a few seasons back. "Everybody predicted it would be a hit," says Feldman. "When it went on the air, the reviews were all raves - I still have them. Even today people tell me how great it was. They just didn't watch it." Or, to be a bit more specific, several rating services said they didn't watch it.... One day four gentleman from the CBS executives suite arrived on the Hogan set for a brief visit - the present of the TV network, in from New York, with three vice presidents in tow. Bob Crane and other members of the cast gathered around them. There was much laughter. Strangely, though, is was not the executives laughing at the comedians. It was the comedians laughing at the remarks of the executives, most of which were not even intended to be funny, and the executives looked a trifle puzzled. After they had gone, actor Werner Klemperer, who co-stars in Hogan's Heroes as the prison-camp commandant, said, "Do they often come en masse like that? It's rather frightening." Comedy for a change Klemperer, son of Otto, the world-famed symphony conductor, has made a career of playing villains of various nationalities, likes playing comedy for a change. "It's the sort of acting I prefer," he says. "It's a tremendous relief." He would like to forget some of the non-comic Nazis he has portrayed, particularly Adolf Eichmann in a quickie production called Operation Eichmann." Klemperer's co-star, John Banner, who plays the comic Sgt. Hans Schultz, agrees. Banner fled Europe when the Nazis invaded his native Austria, but now he says, "It's wonderful to be able to laugh again. A program like this shows that the mind is stronger than all the weapons in the world - that even in a totalitarian country individualism sneaks through." He pauses. "Just so people don't get prisoners-of-war camps mixed up with concentration camps. You can't make fun of a concentration camp." Click on the image to see a larger version.
Last Modified : Fri 16 May 2008 8:08 AM
|
