INT: You know, one of the things that you were just talking about which I think is really important. You’re defining style musically. You were so identified through your career with music and how to cut music, how to shoot music live, how to give a sense of feeling of that, you know, flow that can happen improvisationaly from, we don't know what's going to happen next. Now jazz is an improvisational medium. There are, in fact, breaks that you can, you know, you know. But if you know music, whether you've studied music or you know music. You've got a sense that in jazz, the group plays together and then solos break out, and it breaks out for so any bars, and then you've got to sense when that solo's coming back. Sometimes it's long, sometimes it's short. But you've got to know that you're gonna come back to this moment before someone else solos. And how did you work this out? I mean having twenty-six shows sounds like your own little laboratory to discover and find ways to shoot music?
SB: JAZZ SCENE USA was unique in as much as I didn't know I had a feel for jazz, other than I like listening to it. We had no money to do any rehearsing so there was no blocking and taping or any of that. We had to go onstage, shoot three half hours in one day, one right after the other basically with different jazz artists and I had to do homework. I had to prep it. So what I basically did is when I had the opportunity, I bought their records of songs and at home, literally sat down at my desk and turned on a tape recorder, whatever, and listened, or record player, and listened to their music.

SB: Jimmy Baker and myself on Sundays or Saturdays or whenever, before we were scheduled to shoot - those artists that were in Los Angeles, that lived here, you know, or were staying some place - we went and met with them, and we went to great barbecues in Compton, we went all over the city basically to where they were and started talking about, you know, what songs are you going to play, you know, how long, you know, how many bars. I mean Jimmy taught me, basically, bar counts. Which meant, as you listen to music without even a formal music education, there's definitely patterns based on tempos and bars. So in jazz, in most music you're dealing in four-four time. You know? One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, etcetera. But in jazz, it goes all over the place. It's two-four, it's, you know. I remember listening to a Dave Brubeck [David Warren Brubeck] record, which was, you know, really hard for me to tap my foot and figure out when, you know, when the piano cuts out and the bass comes in, and so forth. And basically I was learning as I was going along, but I did have an instinctive sense in my brain, subconsciously, where I would kind of instinctively feel when an instrument was ending and another instrument was - even though they were all playing together there were certain solos that were happening among the trios, quartets and so forth. And the big training lesson is to let your camera crew know that even though you may not be on the shot you thought you were going to be on, you're live on the air. Always have in your head, don't whip away, don't go out of focus, whatever. I may be forced to use you because I may not, you know, if Shorty Rogers [Milton “Shorty” Rogers] is in my head and we talk about him doing thirty two bars of a trumpet solo but he decides for whatever reason to go sixty four bars I may have to stay on him, you know. And I learned a lesson that I love to see reaction shots almost more than action. In a drama, certainly, and in music it's the same way. So in jazz, it was a case of where I felt it was, I use a lot of dissolves in jazz so that I can avoid train crashes of camera cuts and if you montage so you're half a bar late getting to the next instrument, you can overlap your picture and it doesn't look like a mistake. Certain, you know, when I'd do these shows, I've never seen these shows. I think I've seen one or two.

INT: Do they exist?
SB: Oh yeah. In fact Bill Allen, Steve’s [Steve Allen] son, has everything Steve Allen ever recorded in his life. He has complete libraries and they're very well cataloged and so forth. [INT: They're like kinescopes, then?] Yeah, and probably transferred later to DVDs or whatever. [INT: I mean the thing is you had ART BLAKELY AND HIS JAZZ MESSENGERS on there, which is one of my favorite jazz groups ever, you know? I'm so jealous of having, you know, I mean that’s bebop jazz, you know, when it was really popping?] Yeah, oh absolutely. And these were all young people I mean they weren't old jazz stars, they were at the beginning and the height of their careers. You know, we had Joe Pass [Joseph Anthony, Jacobi Passalaqua] from Synanon who put together a trio who was going through drug rehabilitation problems but he put a great jazz group together. I remember we had booked on the show, to tell you how improvisational it was from beginning to end, is, we had booked Anita O’Day who was coming in from New York to do the show-- [INT: Great singer.] and she was famous for her Stan Kenton [Stanley Newcomb “Stan” Kenton] years and she called up saying she missed her airplane so we had, instead of three shows, we had two shows. And somebody said, "There's this kid who lives close by in, you know, Crenshaw area or something, and he's just starting out but maybe he's got enough songs where he could do a half hour and we won't waste the camera time." So we called Lou Rawls [Louis Allen “Lou” Rawls], and Lou Rawls came from his house, in fact he wasn't showered or anything, and came over and we did a half hour Lou Rawls show, you know? [INT: Who just died. Lou Rawls just died.] Just in the last couple of weeks as a matter of fact. But I remember there was a club in Los Angeles called The Purple Onion, and Lou and I became friends after we did that show and he invited me to come over to this club to hear him sing. He came out and he wanted me to critique him. And, you know, we were in early twenties at the time and I said, “Lou, you know, you've got this incredible voice but you're not singing with soul.” I'm telling Lou Rawls he's not singing with soul. But I said, “Pay attention to those words, you know? The words are the story.”

INT: Well, it's interesting to say that because, you know, Sam Cooke [Samuel Cook] and Lou Rawls [Louis Allen “Lou” Rawls] grew up in Chicago and they're both, you know, gospel singers. Now, they define soul. They know absolutely everything about the black experience and being able to communicate it, but they came to Hollywood, they wanted to do mainstream. You know, you listen to Sam Cooke and there's just nobody better than Sam Cooke, but he wanted to do, you know, kind of mainstream, Frank Sinatra type stuff and you listen to somebody take probably the greatest soulful voice and then turn it around and do these kind of mainstream, kind of show biz type things, you know?
SB: There are a lot of stories that the record companies also were always going for the commercial dollar and forcing these artists to sing what they didn't really want to sing, and I think Sam Cooke was a good example. [INT: And Lou [Lou Rawls]. Lou too. So Steve Allen’s backing the show, you're doing these jazz things, which you're learning a great deal about spontaneity. What happens next?] I'm in about my fourth week of the show so we were around twelve shows in, we're shooting every weekend, every week, until we finish the twenty six half hours. And Steve calls me up and he said, "Steve, I have great news." And I said, "Yes?" And I thought he was calling about JAZZ SCENE [JAZZ SCENE USA]. He said "I just signed a contract with Westinghouse and we're going to do a late night show on Vine Street, next to the Hollywood Ranch Market." And I said "Yeah?" And he said, "I want you to direct it." And I mean whatever comes out of my mouth it’s, I don't think a lot about it. It's just whatever my feelings are at the time. And I said, "Steve, I can't. I'm doing JAZZ SCENE USA and I'm, you know, I’m up to my ass in alligators." And so there's a hesitation and Steve says, "Okay, I'll tell you what to do. Start my show, we're going to do a week of test shows, and I'll replace you once we're up and running." And I, you know, thought about it a minute and I said, you know, "As long as you know I'm doing your other show and, you know, it sounds okay to me." So two and a half years later I, you know, JAZZ SCENE finished their twenty six, I stayed on as the director of THE STEVE ALLEN WESTINGHOUSE SHOW--

INT: Well it wasn’t as, you know, not a problem for you, you're used to doing multiple shows in a day anyway?
SB: But I also very, you know, where most Directors take a lot of jobs, especially in the freelance, specials area, somehow they kind of sneak in, if not double, triple the amount of shows that I could do in a year. I mean I'm famous for only doing two shows a year and, you know, major specials because they take me four to six months to do the one show, or used to anyway, in the way I used to work in the old days. But the Westinghouse experience was, it’s what set me up from really deciding I want to stay in this business, I love it. I passionately love it. Can't think of waking up in the morning and not going to work and never looked at my watch ever since I've been in this business to sitting here with you, Taylor. Never been in the business of saying, "What time do I get off so I can enjoy my life?" This is my life, I love it. And Steve [Steve Allen], because we were in a time in which Westinghouse was launching two shows. They were doing Mike Donahue [refers to THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW], I think it was out of Cleveland and they were doing THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW in Hollywood. And Johnny Carson was working for ABC doing a game show and when NBC hired him to come on and do THE TONIGHT SHOW for NBC, ABC wouldn't let him out of his contract. So we opened with the Westinghouse show in a window of time where we're the only game in town. And that had a lot to do with being, you know, we exploded when we went on the air. We were incredibly successful. We had people, you know, waiting in line to, you know, try and get tickets to the show to be there live. And there was such power in the show and it was so much fun to go to work and do, and Steve controlled the audience in the palm of his hand. I mean he asked, we had a, we were in a little theater on Vine Street that was used before we went in there as a film studio. Groucho Marx [Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx] did YOU BET YOUR LIFE from there and one of the great shocks of my life is when I went into the theater it was getting pretty run down because his show had been out of there for awhile and it was kind of, you know, up for rentals. I found cue cards for Groucho Marx meaning, I was told he'd never ad-libbed anything. It was all written by writers and he made it sound like they were all funny jokes that he'd thought off the top of his head--

INT: How big was this theater?
SB: I'd say we were about a hundred and twenty five seats, something like that. It was a very small theater. And we were forced at the time, because it was heavily unionized for film, we were forced to use the Cinematographer's, Director, DP, Director Photography, we were forced to use their crew, their roll call. And we were of course a three camera, multiple camera shoot. And when I walked into the studio and we started, you know, refurnishing it and replenishing, getting ready to do our test shows, there were these gigantic, you know, 10K’s [10K Lamps] hanging from the rafters, etcetera. And it was just, it was a disaster. There were shadows everywhere. And we went through a period of about three weeks where we kept firing their DP [Director of Photography] from the union and, you know, they'd send us another one, and I was all the time lobbying to bring in a television Lighting Director. And it took us about three weeks until every DP [Director of Photography] that came from the union threw their hands up and said, "We can't do this show." and finally the union said, "Okay, we'll let your TV guy, Del Jack, come in and, you know, and light the show." But it was a real hassle when we began. The next thing, in the theater itself was, it was a case of - we wanted to be totally flexible. We wanted to be out on the street, we wanted to be in the Hollywood Ranch Market, at the apartment building across the street. And Steve [Steve Allen] made a pact with me that, you know, "If you want me to do these stunts at the beginning of the show..." you know, we threw him into Jell-O, a swimming pool of Jell-O-- [INT: I remember. I watched that show. One of the most incredible, in the parking lot of the Hollywood Ranch Market, right? Wasn't it where he jumped into the big thing of Jell-O?] No, it was, in between the Hollywood Ranch Market and our little theater on Vine Street was a little street called La Mirada. [INT: Right, right.] And that’s was our, that was definitely one of our major locations was La Mirada. [INT: That’s where it was.] And then across the street there was an apartment building and they had an Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio up there and we used to go, put him on a crane and have him go up and talk to the dancers through the windows from the outside of the building and it just became, you know, just a --

INT: I think the thing that's important that people understand is that this show was such a pioneering show with the spontaneity, it was live. I mean it was really live. You saw mistakes and all, you saw everything happening there. And the sense that it was free; it moved from the studio out into the street. You know, when you look at Letterman [may refer to LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN] today, you know, you look at various things that go on. You know, you used to put a camera out, and just put the camera on the street and let people walk by and Steve [Steve Allen] would narrate, you know, with such spontaneity and such influential things that are still used in television today. You should talk about that.
SB: When we began THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW, Steve, by that time we'd gotten to know each other well because of the jazz show and Steve basically said, "I'll do anything you want me to do providing you do it first." So everything you saw Steve Allen do whether it was, you know, when we went to Las Vegas to do the show and there was an old Dunes Hotel that used to have a big sultan that was maybe twenty feet tall on top of the hotel - you know - casino, and the wind was forty miles an hour, you know, I had to get on the crane, we hired the...I think we hired the electric department to loan us or rent us one of their big swinging cranes. I had to go up there to do the bit before Steve did and I gotta tell you, it was scary as hell. But it just became a routine. The only stunt we ever did was they had a, in the apartment building across the street on Vine Street was an Olympic sized swimming pool. We used to go over there and do some stunts in the swimming pool, in the water. And one guy, in a particular evening, said he built a catapult that would catapult Steve with these giant rubber bands, etcetera, into the swimming pool. And Steve said to me in the morning, "I'm not doin' that." And I said, “Steve, you know, it sounds like it’d be a lot of fun," and so forth. He says, "I'm not doin' that." It was the only time he refused to do it. So, we decided not to blow the bit, we would have the guy who built it do it. And he broke his leg. He landed on the other side of the water and hit the cement, you know? So, but it was tremendous in terms of being able to experiment. My cameramen, John Braislin in particular, was always fooling around in his garage with lenses. And one day he came to me and he had a, basically a magnifying glass on a lens so you could really see, it was probably-- [INT: Macro focus?] Exactly. And he had hand-tooled it, etcetera. You know, just like before filters I was famous for using real Vaseline on a piece of glass and putting it in front of the lens for mood shots in ballads and so forth. And John [John Braislin] came to me and he said, "I've got this incredible lens, you know, let me put it on my camera and I’ll show you." And I forget whether it was a dollar bill or a coin or something like that, and it was amazing to look through this and he'd fudge around trying to get focus and so forth, and put the bill or the coin at a certain distance from the lens and the lens itself was probably a 135[mm] or something like that. And I just was fascinated with it 'cuz I’d never seen anything, you know, like that up that close. It was like looking through a tele-- [INT: Microscope?] Microscope. And so I went to Steve and I said, you know, "We should try this one time." And Steve said, "Well, let's do it tonight." So we did it. Now out of the bit, which was ten minutes of screams from the audience; they loved it, right? Is I'd say out of ten minutes maybe five minutes was out of focus, but we still aired it live. And audiences demanded we keep doing it because we had a flea circus one time, guy, eccentric, came on the show and he had spent his life building this little matchbox flea circus and he had a bride and groom, and he had a, you know, a waiter, and I forget all the characters he had. Well, I thought a flea circus was just someone's imagination or, you know? And now we put it under this, you know, telescope, microscope, and you could see fleas that were all dressed up in there and so forth and things like that. But Steve was willing, and the audiences were willing, to go along with, you know, so it wasn't technically perfect. And I found, in experimenting on this show, it taught me incredible lessons. It taught me one thing is never stop rolling tape. If some action is going on, you know, this served me well over the years, where a lot of times the best thing that could possibly happen in comedy or whatever is cut off because the Director says, "Cut."

INT: 'Cause he thinks there’s a screw up?
SB: There's a boom shadow, there’s a, you know, you can see the scenery off the set, and things like that. And I've always, always said, you know, I mean, we have a proscenium situation, we have a scrim, we have a curtain, we have scenery within the proscenium stage and so forth, and we start out that way but it doesn't mean we have to end that way. You don't have to clean it up so it's perfect for the technicians. And when you're directing you have to realize the artist is only focused on the artist, you know, and making sure they're not being upstaged by an extra in the background or whatever. The Art Director is only looking at the set that he designed, or she designed. The Costume Designer is only looking at the costumes. The make up people are looking at the make up. The only person - possibly the Producer too - the only person who really looks at the big picture is the Director. And that is your responsibility, in a sense. And I have felt comedy possibly is, even though, you know, we have zillions of comedy shows on the air, the golden era of comedy for me is when things didn't go as scripted or as planned. If I use the example of a carpenter for real, accidentally nailed a door on the CAROL BURNETT [THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW] set and it was time for her to make an exit on the stage and she walks over to the door and she pulls it, it's something that Bush [George W. Bush] just happened in the Senate or something where he tried to get out the door and he found out that somebody had locked the door. Well, her brilliance came from having to think on her feet, react to that situation, and, you know, it wasn't stop let's do it over because the door was shut, let's take the nail out. [INT: It ends up being five times as funny.] Yeah. And a lot of Producers make editorial decisions and throw the best take on the floor because there was a technical flaw in it, instead of saying what's the funniest, what is, if it's drama, what is the most emotional thing for the audience watching? And it’s, you know, when I did Central Park in the rainstorm with Diana Ross [referring to DIANA ROSS WORLDWIDE FROM NEW YORK: FOR ONE AND ALL]-- [INT: Wait, we'll get to that.] Okay, but basically it was my lesson from Steve Allen. Everybody was saying, "It's raining, stop, you know? She’s, take her off the stage," and so forth. I just, from Steve Allen training, said, “Let's keep going until she walks off that stage. I'm not stopping.”

INT: Part of it's having such a brilliant mind, such a brilliant improvisational person. I mean Steve Allen just had that ability to, you know, build on happenstance situations. I mean I will remember, this is a great, great show. The personalities, the regulars you had on. Whether it was Louis Nye, you know, who created a certain thing. Wasn't Poston [Tom Poston] on that show too? Was he on that one?
SB: Seldom. He came as a guest star. All those old guys who work on the New York show or the primetime show came on as guests. [INT: They came on, but then you have Gypsy Boots [Robert Bootzin]. You know, now, Gypsy Boots is a fixture in Hollywood. He's still around, I think.] No, no. He passed away actually. [INT: Oh, did he really? You know, I did a, when I was with, at KCET, I did a short film with Gypsy Boots years and years later. I mean still absolutely bonkers, but still in his own way I mean, but I went home with him and found he had a family, had kids.] He always told us that he lived in Griffith Park in a tree house. [INT: Well, he did spend time outside, you know, but he was just a true Hollywood eccentric.] Nature Boy. [INT: Steve Allen found him and he was a, he worked on the show, didn't he? I mean--] No, he was on the show as almost a semi-regular. [INT: Yeah, that's what I'm saying when I say "worked." When Steve Allen had him on the audience loved him.] Absolutely. He was filled with energy and he was such a character. We attracted characters. I mean that was, you didn't have to go book them they came and found us, you know? And there was a-- [INT: “Professor” Irwin Corey.] He was brilliant, yeah. And never knew what was going to happen. There was an old guy with a long white beard and he never talked but he used to show up and his bit was he would tie a rope to a bus, not turn the engine on, and pull the bus up Vine Street. That was his bit. And we used to, whenever he'd show up in Hollywood he'd walk in, we'd say, "You're on tonight." , you know? And we'd have him do his rope-pulling bit. But it was, you know, we also had the advantage with the Hollywood Ranch Market. I used to put cameras behind the hidden glass so nobody knew we were filming in there. Then we'd do stunts by sending people into the Ranch Market. But there were so many characters in the Ranch Market that people didn't know, they didn’t see anything unusual happening which turned out to be even funnier than trying to make something funny happen, you know? One of the bits was sending Louis Nye into the market and his assignment was he could never shop with taking anything off the shelves. He had to shop from other people's shopping carts. So he'd roll up alongside some woman who had a pile of stuff and he'd reach over and take her milk out and put it in his, you know? Going through the market. Not one word of protest. You know, nothing happened other than he filled his shopping bag with other people's, you know, marketing.

INT: I think that one of the great losses, you know, we know about Los Angeles and Hollywood, there's never a sense of history. You know, I was fortunate when I started my television career to work at the ABC Vine Theater [Linwood Dunn Theatre]. That's where KCET was and the Hollywood Ranch Market was still there. I mean, totally unique experience. The Hollywood Ranch Market was open twenty-four hours a day and it was filled, as you were saying, with freaks. I mean unbelievable.
SB: And Rolls Royce’s with people in evening clothes coming in-- [INT: Yeah, people would come from late at night, yeah. It just was one of those unbelievable fixtures that people talk, I mean Hollywood Ranch Market was totally unique. It's no longer there. You know, and Hollywood always has this. It moved to the Hughes Market on Highland [Ave.] and Franklin [Ave.] and it was full of freaks, and then now it's the rock n' roll Ralph’s on Sunset. Hollywood breeds a certain kind of --] Eccentrics. [INT: Eccentric, and they will, when they're late at night, they go to these twenty-four hour supermarkets and it's happening, but the Hollywood Ranch Market was the original. And it was such a great place. And I discovered it through the Steve Allen show, it was like unbelievable. It was, there as you say, taking a real situation and turning it into a great entertainment experience.] One of my favorite...Steve Allen gave a quote to New Yorker Magazine early on when I was working with him and he said something to the effect that, "One of the great things about this young Director I'm working with is that he shoots from the hip and he reads my mind." And we had a rapport, either you have it or you don't, you know? It's like directing; I really feel strongly, you can go to all the directing classes you want to, but probably, you know, Dale Carnegie's HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE is probably the best textbook for directing you can read. You either have it or you don't. You're either, you know, you’re a duck thrown in the water and, you know, you can swim, or you can't. And there was something about Steve, which was a two-way street. I could put a camera out on Vine Street on the corner of La Mirada and just, you know, with the cameraman and I'm talking to him on my headset, pan over to the motorcycle that's coming down the street, and so forth and without having any communication with Steve, he’d be able to, he could do a five minute comedy bit on it or whatever it is that I went to and he said to me, "It's the same thing in reverse. By anticipating certain pictures, you're letting me get into your mind in terms of what you have in mind." And it was kind of this instinctive two-way street.

INT: When something like this show happens, and truly is historic in television - I really believe this show was historic - how long can it go? You know, you flash onto something that is truly spontaneous, everything's falling together, the stars align, it's a meeting of talent. And there's something just spectacular about it. How long before it becomes institutionalized? I believe there's a certain thing that happens, we all know how to keep things fresh. How long did this show last and when do you think it started to go downhill?
SB: The show lasted, I was there for almost two and a half years, and it lasted for I think about another four months after I left. I knew, like a light switch going on and off, when we lost it. And I came to the conclusion, and I think I could say this without offending, you know, the memory of Steve [Steve Allen], etcetera - and I did, you know, work for Steve even after the Westinghouse show again - when Steve was down, when he gets fired or he gets, you know, they don't renew his show or whatever, which is when I got Steve to work with, he was open, free to listen to suggestions, you know? He was in awe of the success that he was having, himself. Wasn't prepared for it, right? Just doing a syndicated late-night show that he wrote the book on. But all of a sudden when the show took off and exploded, we were a unit. We were a family, we were a team. Everybody came to work with this high, you know, attitude and, you know, feeling free and Steve was Steve. He was one of us. The more successful the show became, you know, the more the star became Steve and it eroded this family feeling. He basically started making decisions without consultation, his temperament in a way changed. And it all really happened...we were invited to go to the winter carnival in Minneapolis, Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota. And we were only allowed to take a very small, you know, cadre of our crew there because of expenses. We were going to spend a week in Minneapolis and St. Paul doing a show there. And we had not traveled the show before other than when we went to Las Vegas for a, to do a show at the Dunes Hotel and that was about it. We got to, part of the deal by the people who underwrote the expense to bring us to the winter carnival was that Steve was going to be the guest of honor or the, in the lead float in their winter carnival parade. He was gonna be the, I forget what they call it but like the Rose Bowl-- [INT: Grand Marshal?] Grand Marshal. Exactly. He was going to be the Grand Marshal. We got to St. Paul and the wind chill factor was 40 below zero. Literally.

INT: Those people back there know that. That's what they're used to.
SB: Steve [Steve Allen], the second day we were there we all checked into our hotels, and so forth. Second day we were there Steve was to do the parade and I was spending all my time at a hockey arena where we're now going to do the show in front of twenty thousand, you know, fans of THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW. Well, we had enough equipment maybe for one hundred and fifty people, not twenty thousand. And I knew we were in deep trouble from get-go in terms of, you know, how many monitors could we put up so that people could see the video without having to bring, you know, telescopes to see the stage. And sound was horrendous. We had all kinds of sound problems, we didn't have a good PA system [Public Address System], and so forth. While I'm working, the next morning comes up and I pick up the paper and it says, "Steve Allen walks out of parade." What happened was he stepped outside of the hotel, I guess, at six o'clock in the morning, and it was sixty below, wind chill factor. He said, "I'm not going out there in the convertible. Get my dummy and put it in the car instead." Well, by the time we started the show there was already a feeling of you're not welcome, you know? This is, the show was secondary to the parade. [INT: Did the convertible go down with a dummy in it?] Yeah. [INT: Oh, that's great. That actually is pretty funny.] They had a photograph of it as a matter of fact on the front page. So, now we walk into the arena to do the show and we're gonna rehearse and we're having all kinds of technical problems. Feedback from the sound system, you know, everywhere we're having a lighting problem, we’re having, the audience can't see the stage except live and we have no projectors to be able to show them a big image and we're doing intimate comedy, you know, in some of the sketches. And what happens is that the very first day, and Steve and I had a really strong, close relationship, is that Steve wants to see me in the dressing room. Well, we hired a lot of the locals to work on the show who had no television experience whatsoever, and one of the people was "costume," you know. I can't call them a designer but he was the person in charge of the costumes and we didn't have costumes, we had business suits and dresses and things like that. Street clothes. And I walk into Steve's dressing room and the costume guy is crying. Literally. I mean he had to be thirty, forty years old or whatever and he’s bawling. And Steve says, "Did you tell him that I had to wear this tie?" And I said, "What?" Well it seemed like in the middle of a hundred and fifty other things that are going on, you know, cuz another thing Directors have to do is you've gotta be ready from the minute you hit the set to the time you leave, to answer thousands of questions, you know? Should I go here, should I do this? And so forth and so on. This guy came up to me and said, "Should Steve wear the blue tie or the red tie?" I assumed it was Steve asking me to ask him which tie to wear. So I looked at them and said, it doesn't make any difference to me, “The red tie." Well, when I got into Steve's dressing room it seems that on his own he had decided to decide which tie to wear. Steve wants to wear the blue tie and this costume guy's telling him he's gotta wear the red tie. Well, Steve was pissed and I said, "Steve, I don't care what tie you wear," you know, and so forth. "Well this guy's insisting that I wear, you know, the red tie." I said, "Wear the blue tie." So, I walk out back on stage and the vibes are this is not gonna be a fun shoot. Steve walks out and the first thing he says to the audience, "Can you hear me?" And the twenty thousand, or nineteen thousand five hundred people yell back, "No!" "Can you see me?" Nineteen thousand, you know, five hundred people, "No!" So he's pissed and you can tell, you know, the wall came down immediately. We struggled through a week of shows but it was not fun.

SB: We got back to LA and, you know, now the family's there waiting to greet us and so forth and Steve is just not the same Steve. So, and there's another counter thing to this that I should tell you about as well. Is that Steve's come back and now the show is not so much fun anymore. It just, you know, it’s, he's teaching the audience about Russia and he's, you know, less and less improvisational comedy, more and more taking himself seriously, you know, in these other areas that he's interested in. And little-by-little, I'm seeing the audience start yawning. Audiences were fanatic who came to the show. If Steve said, and did on many occasions, "Let's go out on Vine Street in the middle of the street and, you know, and do some crazy thing out there," the entire theater would get up and run out onto Vine Street with him marching out there, etcetera. And the audiences loved being participants and all of a sudden the audience was being shut out. They were no longer being asked to participate in a lot of the comedy on the show and so forth. And as a result I remember distinctly seeing the very first couple get up out of their seats in the middle of the show and walk out. I'd never seen that before and from then on it was all down hill. Now what happened at the same time was that Steve was having some marital things going on with Jayne [Jayne Meadows] and Jayne was lovely. I mean she, you know, I loved Jayne. But the minute he insisted that she start being co-host on the show she started coming everyday and participating in the show, etcetera, Steve was now the husband and not the hysterical improvisational, you know, artist that he is. And I used to see, you name the comic, you know, the greatest in the United States, sit next to Steve, be it Groucho Marx [Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx], be it, you know, Jerry Lewis, be it anybody, nobody could touch Steve when it came to improvisation. I mean, they needed a writer's hand in their material, you know? They could not compete with him on an improvisational basis. And Steve used to watch the tapes sometimes, or the kinescopes after the show, and basically laugh where you'd, as an observer you'd say, "What an egomaniac." but in reality he didn't even know he had said half the things he said and was laughing at this guy that looked like him on the television screen.