Original subtitles

Our dear friend, Arthur Marks, began as an assistant director on the show and

became not only a great director, but also our producer.

At the time, I was doing the 20th Century Fox Hour show as a first AD.

And as a first AD, along comes somebody on the lot, which was Fox Western

Studios, which is not the main lot.

And somebody said they're going to shoot a pilot of some kind named Perry Mason.

So I happened to be off of my show for about three weeks.

And a friend of mine was becoming the AD on the pilot of Perry Mason.

And he was a fellow that I had worked with for many years at Columbia Studios,

the premier Western first AD in the world. And he was very good to me when I

first started, and he taught me a lot and so on. So I tried to help him as

as I could.

And my second assistant got ill, which I was going to give to him to work with

him. So I became his second assistant.

And that was my first.

days on the perry mason ted post was the director and he did a very good job on

that pilot art side who was the film editor uh cut a beautiful pilot uh fan

dancers horse was the uh was the pilot so uh as a second assistant on the show

it was a waltz it was easy so uh it was over and then about three months later

um gail came up to me gail jackson and asked if i would like to be on the

series, Perry Mason, because she said that we're going to do a television

series. This is 1957.

And I agreed to it.

So I became one of two assistant directors on the show.

And that was the beginning.

Well, the producing was an element of sort of an evolution.

And the evolution of being a producer started as a director.

Because during the first season, I was an AD on about eight shows.

And both Ray Burr and Gail called me and asked if I would like to direct some

shows. So I directed the Perry Mason show for two years before I became a

producer. And I became an associate producer first, in charge of production,

and I ran the show as the associate producer.

And then I became the producer the fourth year.

Absolutely. First time I've ever directed.

My ambition was not to be a director. It was really in production, and that's

what I was schooled in. So I was really interested in becoming rather a producer

rather than a director.

I didn't know that I could direct.

I never had directed before.

I was good with people. I understood the film business.

I knew editing as good as anybody.

And when I was assistant director on the show, I would watch directors who are

directing the show and see the pitfalls they fall into and try to help them out

of it. And this brought me to the attention probably of Ray Burr and Gail

Jackson. And then, of course, the directing started.

Ray was involved 100 % in the show. He didn't write the scripts.

He didn't produce the scripts.

His spirit and his feelings for the show permeated through the whole cast and

crew.

He was very much involved in law. He wanted law to be correct on the show,

it was.

We had technicians. We had judges.

We had court bailiffs. We had people to refer.

We sent scripts down there many times.

And we also had Earl Stanley Gardner, and we sent him a script for his view,

his feeling about the story, and the whodunit aspects of whether it worked.

it was great to have a genius like that.

Earl read every script, and he would send back sometimes a 25 -page comment

that script.

Sometimes he hated it, sometimes he loved it, and sometimes we had to

him how wonderful that show was going to be.

Earl looked at it as nuts and bolts.

He never looked at it as the dramatics because he really didn't understand

dramatics. So we tried to explain to him, when you have five suspects and a

that you're playing and all the things that we're doing, we're really copying

his invention.

But we're adding things to it that aren't in the book, meaning actors,

directors, sets.

See, none of those exists in his mind.

They're all, in a sense, real places.

I think a couple did not, but we usually took two or three books sometimes and

put them together as one story, one script.

All of the books didn't work.

They were either dated, or they were either not fulfilled as the whodunit,

in a sense, it was not a good book.

But most of them worked. But we would combine stories.

So we would take a little from that book and a little from this book and put the

two together.

It was a game show.

And as a game show, it was important that you be a participant in the game

And as a participant in the game show, it's like, who killed Cock Robin?

And you as an audience, are you smarter than Raymond Burr, meaning Perry Mason?

And do you come to the conclusion before he does?

Or do you meet at the courtroom end before the man says, I did it?

So he looked at it. It was really, in a sense, a challenge for the audience.

And any time we deviated from a game show, it was not a good show.

That was a simple thing. It was not a complex thing. It was really, in a

play the game.

Every year, somebody would come up and say, why don't you make it more

Why is it more like Defenders?

Why isn't it more this, more that, and so on? We never changed an ounce, not a

word.

We'd have a meeting at the beginning of every season, and we'd have it in the

corner office of CBS with the big executives, you know, and so on. And

sit there and listen to them, and they'd say, well, how can we cut the budget

and get more excitement in the show?

And so on and so on. Of course, we would say, well, we would certainly do all of

those things. And, of course, we never did.

Well, intelligence is number one.

Number two, he believed in what he was doing.

Number three, his acting ability was unparalleled. We talk about using, we

used...

Teleprompters last three seasons with him.

And his workload was so big that Ray used to get up at 3 and 4 o 'clock in

morning to study. On a courtroom day, he had 10, 15, sometimes 15 pages of

dialogue to remember.

But nobody ever used a teleprompter better than he did. His eyes were

on that actor, you believed. His eyes never read anything.

His confidence was just extreme.

So what made him a good Perry Mason?

got into the part because he was trained to.

He was a trained actor. And he's paid his dues in playhouses and all over the

country. So as far as he was concerned, this was what he wanted to be.

And an actor has to want to be that part in order to be the success that he was.

$172 ,000.

And that was complete.

And we never went over budget.

Well, we did. We did go over budget because my philosophy was to go over

for the first eight shows of the season.

Spend all the money because that's the shows that are rated.

Those are the shows that are criticized, and those are the shows that win the

Arbitrons and the other rating races.

So for the first eight weeks of release, these were very important shows to us.

And then we cut back little by little by little.

So set to run 10 ,000, we'd do it for five, and so on. So we whittled it down,

but we never, in the years that I produced the show, ever came in over

We shot more locations.

We actually added more cast.

We had more extras.

We did a little more with music.

Maybe we got two or three more important actors.

Not necessarily so if they fit the parts, but normally we would get five

actors in every episode.

Because as I think I said before, we cast some 30 ,000 actors over these

Well, they were running 400 ,000, 500 ,000, 600 ,000, nothing over a million.

I think Bonanza at that time was six -something, you know.

Gunsmoke was about three -something.

But we were consistently at 172.

That was the mark we shot for.

And, of course, in those days, you know, you didn't have the overheads that you

had, and the cost factor was less. You didn't pay 6 ,000 a day for a location.

You paid.

500, you know, or 300.

So you got away with a lot of things today they just don't get away with.

permits that you get from the city are a pain in the neck.

But in those days, we would just hop and shoot.

The structure was very important, and the instructions to the writing staff

everybody is that we don't deviate.

We're not writing Defenders. We're not writing wonderful drama, Playhouse 90s,

or so on. We are writing a very solid show with five suspects who have to

compete with Perry Mason.

And by competing, they each have to have the stature that Perry Mason has.

And by having that stature, they are equal. So when they get to the

he's got an adversary.

And each of those adversaries come up.

during the course of the show in their individual scenes.

So we used a three - or four -page scene of five minutes each during the show or

something like that in order to give them the stature that they needed for

end. And so when the end came, you remembered those people.

You remembered what he did in those scenes because in those scenes he was

equal of our hero.

And that was the basic formula.

Sure, we window -dressed it with all kinds of things and so on.

But the locations were really, in a sense, only to move the whodunit.

It wasn't just to get production. That wasn't really the story because

production came easily.

It was really to sell the show, the whodunit.

So if it was an exterior house and so on, the camera had to be moved in such a

way that it sold mystery and so on.

No. As far as the courtroom was concerned, we tried to, in a sense,

picture, meaning resolve the case in a courtroom.

But no, it happened in other places occasionally.

That wasn't a lock.

It wasn't a lock. If we went out of town, sometimes it took place in a

Sometimes it took place whatever.

But we tried to vary about every fifth or sixth show to try to get a variance

some kind.

Because I was the producer, what do you mean?

No, nine years.

As a matter of fact, it didn't surprise us.

The ratings were quite good always, except towards the end. And it got to be

only because we got moved around a little by air. I mean, Saturday night to

Sunday night to whatever, and I thought that hurt the show.

We were opposite shows that were very hot at one time, and we blew them out of

the sky because of the early days of popularity.

It just became a little tired, a little quieter, and people had seen it for nine

or ten years, and they've had it.

So as far as CBS is concerned, it could have gone on for two or three more years

easily. And if they weren't seeking ratings for commercial reasons,

but as far as the show was concerned, I think it would have held up, no problem.

Well, I had to get Barbara new dresses, new clothes.

Well, what do you do differently?

You do color.

You do walls a little differently. You do sets a little differently.

Costumes have to blend in to a certain point, so you become more conscious of

those things.

Lighting is more of a factor.

Hotter lights for color, which means a couple extra electricians, and so on and

so on. But as far as the shooting outdoors and the movement and the camera

all that, there's no change.

Well, we didn't shoot it in bright, what you call brightly lit color. We tried

to subdue it a bit by doing more night shooting in color because we did a lot

downtown shooting. We did a lot of Angels Flight shooting. We did all over

place. So by having night involved in the lighting of it, it brought it down

that so -called Neuer feeling.

But in courtrooms or whatever, we just kept the light a little softer than hot.

But not much, not much.

Well, usually we throw the writer in a pit and burn them. But as far as the

script was concerned, it normally came into the story consultant if it was the

first draft.

But normally before the first draft was ever written, we had a pretty good idea

what that script would be because we would meet with the story consultant or

story editor.

Art Seid and I, and we would talk about the story. Is it different from Dancer?

Is it different from this? Is it different from whatever shows are coming

whatever. So we tried to get a different attack.

Are the characters different? And so on.

Is the cat a different kind of cat?

So by the time we were through, we had a feeling about that script, which we

hoped would be a shootable script.

So the writer went home and he did a draft.

And he turned his draft in, and in some cases it was wonderful, and in some

cases it was a disaster, which meant a total rewrite of our staff who did it.

But as far as us knowing what the script was, we knew ahead of time because we

had the writers give us a synopsis and an outline before it was ever written or

as he wrote it. So we could plan ahead the production of it, the scheme of it,

and even the casting in some cases.

But we didn't go ahead. We just knew where we were going.

To be true to the story, to be true to the script, to be true to the actors

involved. Because they knew their parts, they knew who they were.

Raymond Burr, Barbara, all the people there had it down pat.

So you didn't have to direct them to a great deal. It was only to get a mood or

a tempo or something simple so that it was, in a sense, keeping in line.

It wasn't a question of character.

But as far as the new people were concerned.

They were most important to us because they were, as I mentioned before, they

were the battle arm.

They were the armaments. They were the people who were going to take rate of

task. They were going to beat our hero.

So we concentrated a great deal on that.

There were many, many funny stories. There's a time that Ray Beer put mice in

the defense table and Barbara, which was Della Street's table, and she opened

the door and I heard a scream all the way to La Brea.

And there were others where the balloons filled her dressing room. Ray was a

great prankster, a terrific mind.

And you never, in a sense, months would go by, but he would get back at you.

Months, I'm talking maybe a year.

But suddenly one day, there he attacks.

No, we had fun. We had a great deal of fun.

I might say that the people, meaning hairdressers and wardrobe and the

were all so good at their craft that they made it fun to come to work.

They were that good. So you didn't have to instruct, instruct, and teach or

anything like that. So we had a good company.

I knew Ray Collins before Perry Mason.

I had worked at MGM in the production office during the days of Gable and Gene

Kelly's and all these things. And Ray Collins was under contract to MGM. And

MGM had 60 actors under contract.

And a great many of them were character actors.

And Ray Collins, of course, was one of them. And, of course, you know, he goes

back to the great pictures of all time, Citizen Kane's or whatever.

So it was fun to talk to people like Ray. And I was a kid.

And to hear the stories of the Mercury Playhouse and all the other things that

he did.

So when he became Trag and became Perry Mason, it was a delight to see him

again. And, obviously, he's now getting to be an older man. And he had

difficulty with lines sometimes.

But we never got on his back. We never gave him.

pressure, we gave him respect because he was that fine an actor.

Bill Tallman, I didn't know too well.

Bill Tallman liked to be a star and he was a hell of a good actor.

I mean, he played Berger as Berger really should be played and so on. But

whenever Ray Burr left the set, Bill Tallman wanted to be the star.

So every so often I would say to Bill, I said, Bill, You're not the star of the

show. You are the best actor I know, but don't be the star. But he was terrific.

He was lovable and fun and a good sense of humor and always knew his lines. He

never had a blow. Maybe he had a blow on a line while I'm in, but as far as he

was concerned, he was right on.

Hopper. Hopper was a big kid.

Hopper was a wonderful, wonderful man.

Hedda Hopper, in those days, was a famous columnist, Hollywood columnist in

downtown. And she wrote for one of the newspapers or whatever.

And I had met Bill before the Perry Mason show, as I did many of the actors

it. In fact, Bill Hopper did a show for her. I did a pilot of Warner Brothers

called Casablanca.

It was a remake of the famous picture.

And it was the first time that Warner Brothers had ever gone into television.

And I was the assistant director on that show.

And Bill Hopper was cast for Marino Sullivan in a love story in Casablanca.

here is this galloping guy and this very sedate Sullivan.

But he was wonderful.

And so we got to be good friends then. And then he did Bad Sea, did Warner

Brothers, which he got quite a bit of critical acclaim.

And I didn't see him for a few years. And then, of course, I'm a...

I was delighted to be with him on the pairing maze. He was a good friend of

mine. I loved him dearly.