Growing, Growing, Grown

FILMED July 1969

Are you wondering why Dr. Cliff Huxtable said he was Chester Kincaid? Are you confused because Theo and his three younger sisters are nowhere in sight? Don’t be. This isn’t THE COSBY SHOW. It’s THE BILL COSBY SHOW, which predated THE COSBY SHOW by fifteen years.

Stephen Bowie, when writing on THE CLASSIC TV HISTORY BLOG about THE BILL COSBY SHOW and THE COSBY SHOW, stated:

The latter is the mega-popular, audience-friendly family sitcom that kept NBC in business during the eighties. The former is the black sheep of the Cosby canon, a forgotten but far superior series in which the comedian took chances … It doesn’t look or feel like any other situation comedy from the time. There’s no laugh track, no ensemble of colorful sidekicks mugging for attention. … Many of the directors (Harvey Hart, Ralph Senensky, Seymour Robbie) had more experience working with dramatic material than with comedy.

I will insert here, I had more experience working with dramatic material than with FILM comedy.

In the aftermath of THE THOLIAN WEB firing on STAR TREK, an old associate from my days at CBS, someone with whom I had no ongoing contact, affected my current state of ongoing unemployment. Now working as an agency rep servicing a new Bill Cosby show, he recommended me to the producers, and I was booked to direct the current show under discussion.

THE BILL COSBY SHOW was filmed at the Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank. I was very familiar with the studio, having filmed eleven episodes of THE FBI there, so the butterflies-in-the-stomach feelings that still accompanied my start of the first show of a new series were somewhat allayed.

I had worked with Bill Cosby two years before when I directed an episode of I SPY. It had been filmed, as all episodes for that series were filmed, on location. The series was a trailblazer in television production, because rather than filming in Hollywood and relying on stock footage for its international travels, it filmed in Athens, Rome, Florence, Madrid, Venice, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Acapulco, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Morocco. And which of those exotic locations did I get to go to for my episode? None of them! I filmed at Big Bear Lake, California, located a scant 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

I equated directing many different series to what it must have been like as a contract director thirty years before at one of the major studios. The variety of genres for which I was booked was not unlike what those directors faced when they were assigned to whatever production received the go-ahead as they became available upon finishing their current assignment.

Twenty-one years later in 1990, Jerry Seinfeld on his successful nine-year-run SEINFELD series, established a precedent of scripts that were based on nothing. I submit that THE BILL COSBY SHOW was doing that in 1969. Or if its scripts were not quite based on nothing, they were sometimes based on such incompatible combinations that made creating a script based on nothing an absolute cakewalk. As an example: the current script that was based on a bite plate and a garbage truck.

There is a strange thing about my recall of this series. After GROWING, GROWING, GROWN I directed three more episodes, but I don’t remember any of the producers, I don’t remember any script conferences, any associations except those on the set. I take that back. I remember that one of the young members of the production staff was exuberantly excited and effusively vocal about the dailies of the school dance. He couldn’t hide his admiration and wonderment that a sequence so vividly contemporary had been directed by someone so “ancient”. I was forty-six years old at the time.

I have spoken many times about the depth of talent in the acting community, but the brutal fact is that there were not enough jobs to keep all of them employed. I had never met Danny Llorens before he played Norman in this production. I never saw him again after the two days he worked. In the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) I have now learned that GROWING, GROWING, GROWN was his first film. The following year he appeared in two more television episodes, and then disappeared from the profession, denied a career for which he had a talent and to which he obviously aspired. And there were so many Danny Llorens in Hollywood.

Although Samuel Goldwyn once said that messages should only be sent by Western Union, it was still au courant to include a message in even a half-hour comedy. I liked the subtle unobtrusive way an old gem from Dr. Seuss was delivered: “Be yourself, because those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.”

A question I deplore that I have been asked constantly in interviews is, “What was it like directing” … and a star was named? My problem with the question is that it assumes that the director is an auteur with a star obligated to obey his every command. I don’t happen to regard directing in that light. As that question related to the current show, it inferred that it must have been difficult giving directions to Bill Cosby. THE BILL COSBY SHOW had been developed with Cosby’s complete involvement; he was one of the three creators of the series, and Chester Kincaid was essentially the character Bill had created in his years as a stand-up comedian before his emergence as a film star in I SPY. It was not my job to come in and tell him how to play this role, to tell him how to play himself. My goal was to connect with the rhythm and tempo of his character and stage the scenes accordingly. I must have done something right. I was booked to return in October for three more episodes.

The Journey Continues