Questions and Answers With Norman Lear

Norman Lear almost didn’t change the face of North American television.

Comedy on television in the ‘60s was either of the but-honey-the-PTA-is-coming-tonight variety or the my-daughter-is-a-reincarnated-Egyptian-cat type. Lear took an idea that wasn’t his, modified it for the U.S., then had trouble selling it.

Of course, we’re talking about All in the Family.

When Lear failed to sell a couple of pilots for the show, he considered another venue, as we learn in this syndicated story from July 11, 1969.

British TV Series Thence Of New Film
By FRED RUSSELL
NEW YORK (Special) – Producer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin have announced "These Were The Days" as their next project for United Artists release. Their most recent film was "The Night They Raided Minsky's, a Norman Lear-Bud Yorkin Production which was one of UA's most successful films of 1968.
Lear and Yorkin are currently at work on "Cold Turkey," starring Dick Van Dyke, which will start filming this summer as a joint venture of their Tandem Productions and Dyke's DFI Productions. This film also is for United Artists.
“Those Were The Days” originated as a British television series called, "Till Death Do Us Part." Underscoring the generation gap, it concerned a bigoted mother and father and their two liberal children. Lear states, "Just about every subject in the book including sex, race, and religion was treated with frankness rarely seen on the tube."
Setting of the motion picture is being switched from Britain to Brooklyn and the people caught up in the proceedings include the father, mother, and their daughters. Also involved is the girl's boy friend, who is a member of the S.D.S. [Students For a Democratic Society]
Shooting will begin in Brooklyn's Besenhurt [sic] area this fall.
Lear and Yorkin joined forces in 1959 to form Tandem Productions and their association resulted in various aspects of writing, producing and directing many important motion pictures such as "Come Blow Your Horn," "Never Too Late" and "Divorce American Style," In addition, they have been active on TV both with specials and series.

Another pilot was shot, CBS bought it, put it on the schedule in January 1971 and then saw ratings climb as audiences learning began to learn it was a comedy that didn’t involve a wife with a slapstick vacuum cleaner or an office Joe with a pet dog that could turn into a human at inopportune times. Lear wanted his comedy real.

This Q & A session was picked up by the Windsor Star and published August 5, 1972.

This man created your favorite bigot
By DIGBY DIEHL
Washington Post News Service
CENTURY CITY, Calif.—"A Hebe Hollywood egghead" is probably what Archie Bunker would call his creator, TV writer-producer Norman Lear.
Archie and All in the Family won seven Emmys at this year's awards presentation, which Johnny Carson dubbed The Norman Lear Show. Earlier this year Sanford and Son, produced by Lear's and Bud Yorkin's Tandem Productions, made its debut and bounced up to second place in the ratings—just below All in the Family. This fall yet another Lear outrage will be unleashed upon the television-watching public—Maude, a spinoff from All in the Family about an upper-middle-class, suburban New Jersey housewife, a cousin of Archie Bunker's wife Edith.
But the names Norman Lear, Bud Yorkin and Tandem Productions were well known in Hollywood before 1971. The team created and produced such television shows as Another Evening with Fred Astaire, The Many Sides of Don Rickles, An Evening with Carol Charming and the original Andy Williams Show. They were responsible for such films as Come Blow Your Horn, The Night They Raided Minsky's, Start the Revolution Without Me and Divorce American Style, for which Lear, as writer, received an Academy Award nomination.
Even before joining forces with Yorkin, Norman Lear had been active in television production. Born in 1922 in New Haven, Conn., Lear was a college dropout, an air force pilot and a theatrical publicist before he became co-writer of The Ford Star Revue, a weekly one-hour variety show on NBC starring Jack Haley, in 1950. Three months later, Lear and his collaborator, Ed Simmons, went to work for the Colgate Comedy Hour. Their task was to introduce a new young comedy team, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. After succeeding admirably, Lear doubled as a writer on the team's radio show and on some of their movies. Later, Lear directed and co-wrote (with Simmons) a series of one-hour live musicals starring Martha Raye for the 1954-55 television season. Later still, Lear directed and wrote the third and fourth years of the George Gobel Show on NBC.
Lear does his creating in a Century City office decorated with All in the Family memorabilia. Once seated before a tape recorder, the monarch of the boob tube is gently articulate and expresses a concern that an interview about his genius and his triumphs might sound self-serving. He's a rarity in television: A civilized, educated and thoughtful man who refuses to believe that the television set is just some new form of electronic billboard.
QUESTION: We've heard for years that the TV audience has a 12-year-old mentality. Evidently you don't agree.
LEAR: No, I think we've labelled the audience that way. But they're smarter than that. All of us have to remember that because we're better educated and have a higher income level, we have very definite attitudes about the people who have less education, and sometimes the attitudes are a little prejudiced. I try to watch it very carefully in myself I'm aware of it, anyway.
Q: Why do you think, then, that so much of what we see on television is disappointing?
LEAR: A lot of it has to do with network management. The people who think for big business really don't get out there wherever it's at and find out what the hell the public wants. Writers do, because they listen to people, and they care, and they read. Even watching television, writers are watching in another way. But I hate to isolate television from the rest of American business. I don't want to condemn management without remembering that Volkswagen sales went up, up, up for a long time before the American motor companies looked at each other and said, 'Hey, we'd better build a small car.' Well, television makes those mistakes, too. They don't give enough new things a chance.
Q: It had been some years since you'd worked in television when All in the Family came along. What was the genesis of that series?
LEAR: We were living in New York at the time. I was completing a long editing process on The Night They Raided Minsky's, and I read a little squib I forget in what publication about the English series, Till Death Do Us Part. It simply said that the series was a sensation over there and that it was about a cockney father with his son-in-law; they're living together, and it was about all the issues of the day. I was transported to my youth and I thought, My God, if that could happen on American television. I grew up on that. My father and I fought all of those battles. I had a ready image of the man, of a boy, of a girl and of her mother; the whole thing was there. So I was getting the rights to the series before I'd ever seen an episode. Later, much later, I saw one. If you're looking for where All in the Family began in American life, though, it began with Lenny Bruce. He really was a prophet. And I think he would have adored the success of the show, because it proves a lot of what he said.
Q: When you created the first pilot of All in the Family for ABC in 1965 [sic], how was it received?
LEAR: They commissioned the pilot, they laughed at it when they saw it, and said they loved it—but they didn't schedule it. It's really as simple as that. Then, when their option was about to lapse, they asked for another pilot. That's the only way they had of holding it a little while longer. Then CBS picked it up and we made a third pilot.
Q: How did you cast the show?
LEAR: Well, Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton were people whose careers I had watched and I brought them in. Jean is brilliant, and Carroll is wonderful, and they were right. It was very important for Archie to have a likable face because, you know, I've never known a bigot I didn't like. They were all relatives and friends.
Q: There must have been times when you've had unfavorable audience reactions to something you've attempted?
LEAR: Strong reactions mean a few letters, out of millions of weekly viewers. But there are two areas of great sensitivity: God—not denominational religion—and sex. We hear from nuns all the time who adore the show, and Archie has been very vocally anti-Catholic. We hear from all minorities, and we've heard from leaders in all religions. But on our Christmas show last year, Archie and Mike had an argument about the existence of God. That argument—and it was in joke form—caused a flood of letters. That flood of letters, I might add, was 50 or 60 letters. But that's a great number of letters on a particular show. The other subject on which we have had as many as 50 letters on one specific subject was the area of sex. One show dealt with menopause. It was perhaps our most popular show, but it brought a spate of letters.
Q: Have you any theories of your own about why the show has been so successful?
LEAR: Well, television's always used the same things. Even Father Knows Best. All the humor, basically, is based on conflict. The conflict in a great many shows for a great many years was whether dad would give the kid the keys to the car, or whether the dinner would be ready in time for the boss to come over for dinner. We deal in conflicts that are more serious than that. The more serious those conflicts are, the funnier we can make the comedy, because the more people you touch with reality. I'm sure that its greatest appeal, though, is that audiences recognize their humanity—the realness of the characters. We ask you to believe, by virtue of what we're doing, that the Bunkers exist. That's what is hard for a lot of people to take. We're saying that we want you to believe that this lovable bigot is real.
People says [sic] to me, do you believe the show will have any effect? But what they do is make an unfair equation, in both directions. They say in terms of bigotry, let's say either the show reinforces racial stereotypes, or the show does good and will have some effect. I don't think either is true. How much could I expect to happen from my silly little half-hour television show, when the entire Judeo-Christian ethic for some 2,000 years hasn't budged in the area of race relations? I don't think there's much impact.
Q: I've been struck repeatedly as we've talked, by the fact that somehow you seem to associate writing and communication with a sense of conscience. You seem to have a sense of artistic duty, which I find unusual in television.
LEAR: No, not artistic duty. I would say that it's not possible to be 49 years old and live in this world with all its problems and not want to assume some responsibility. It seems to me that any fully grown, mature adult would have a desire to help where he can in a world that needs so very much, that threatens us so very much. Now, I write basically for television and I'm doing comedy; that desire for responsibility has to come out in whatever I do. I'm not altruistic in making an artistic contribution. It's a human response.

All in the Family lived for nine seasons, then morphed into Archie Bunker’s Place for another four. Viewers and critics debate how many of those seasons the show was running on fumes, but Carroll O’Connor did win an Emmy in Family’s final year. They also debate if the show would ever air if it were proposed today. I’ll, um, stifle my own thoughts on that matter, other than to say that television—and society—needs insightful social satire, if for no reason other than to point out our own failings.