Hour 3 | Doug McIntyre talks Happy Days with Brian Levant & Fred Fox Jr.

Life Span hits a plateau/O.C. porch pirate takes a new approach... He waits in front of home, signs for package and walks off with Apple laptop. O.C. Porch Pirate Takeover with package stealing to a new level/ Macy’s says employee hid up to $154 million in expenses, delaying Q3 earnings. Guest: Brian Levant and Fred Fox Jr.  co-authors of “50 Years of Happy Days: A visual history of an American Television Classic”. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's KFI AM six forty and you're listening to the
Conway Show on demand on the iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
App six six. Doug mcentere in for Tim Conway Junior
right here at k I AM six forty live everywhere
on the iHeartRadio app. O'Kelly at seven o'clock. I'll be
back tomorrow on Wednesday as well. Timmy is out there
recharging his bat Reese and he will be back in
the satell after Thanksgiving, and we're happy to have you

(00:27):
with us. Later this hour, we're gonna talk Happy Days,
the fiftieth anniversary of that landmark television series. Brian Levant
and Fred Fox Junior will be with us. They were
writers on the show and they've got a brand new
book called fifty Years of Happy Days, of visual history
of an American television classic. Tomorrow, we're gonna talk Zeppo
as a new biography. If you're a Marx Brothers fan,
there's a biography of Zeppo. Got to talk to the

(00:50):
author of that. And by the way, on Wednesday, Shemp
of the Three Stooges. Yes, this is literature, ladies and gentlemen.
The people have a right to know. I'll get into
all of that. But I saw this story and I
saved it for a talk radio opportunity because I think
it's pretty interesting. We are constantly hectored about living healthy

(01:14):
lives so we can live longer, and the whole thing is,
you know, you get to be dead for a very
very long time, so you know, most people try to
delay that inevitability as much as possible. And I think
one of the things that we tend to say as
younger people. I'm no longer one of them, but when

(01:35):
you're younger, people say, oh, man, who gets to the
point where you're an adult diapers and you're in a
nursing home, please somebody just shoot me. The number of
times that I said it, and I've heard people say it,
and I hear people say it. But you know what
you don't hear that said is in a nursing home,
people wearing adult diapers don't say shoot me. So we
want to live. The yearning, the desire to live longer

(01:59):
is really strong, and we've made incredible strides despite the
fact that for every step forward science comes up with,
we seem to do our best to undo it by saying, yeah,
put some bacon on that, put some cheese in the
pizza crust cheese stuffed crust pizza. Oh boy, you know,
I mean, we really just keep loading on the lard. So,

(02:22):
you know, we find ways to offer ourselves. But science
keeps pushing up life expectancy, which is a great accomplishment.
Women continue to live longer than men. Life expectancy improvements
are still occurring. The researchers found in nineteen ninety the
average amount of improvement was about two and a half
years per decade, and in the twenty tens it was
one and a half year and almost zero in the US. Now,

(02:45):
this is what we're getting to. The new study comes
out this guy sh j Olshansky, University of Illinois, Chicago,
researcher in the journal Nature Aging said that we may
have reached a plateau in human laws longevity. In other words, yes,
more people are making it to one hundred years of age,

(03:06):
but that doesn't mean that we're on the road to
one hundred and twenty five. Now, I remember the first
time I was invited to a ninety year old's birthday party.
This has got to be I don't know, twenty years ago. Now,
I was invited to a ninety year old's birthday party,
and I went and they had a tablecloth, paper hats,

(03:29):
paper plates, and napkins that said Happy ninetieth that were
commercially produced. And you know, I'm not in party stores
a lot. You know, every day of my life as
a party. But I don't need to go to a
store for that. But then I was curious and I
went to I asked them as oh, yeah, they make
this stuff. I went to one of these party supply stores,

(03:51):
and they make stuff for people or one hundred. There's
enough people who are making it to ninety three, ninety four,
ninety five, ninety six, ninety seven, all the way to
one hundred. I don't know if they go beyond one hundred.
I don't remember that. But you can get napkins and
paper plates and party supplies for Uncle Carl's hundredth birthday.

(04:14):
That there's enough people that it is economically feasible desirable
to have products on a store shelf. The people will
come in and say, yeah, I need that. You know,
we're having a party for somebody who just turned on.
In fact, I have a friend of mine, Terry Gibbs,
great jazz, great jazz musician, The vibraphonists who just turned
one hundred in October, and he's doing unbelievable. If I

(04:36):
could be a hundred like Terry Gibbs is one hundred,
give me the pen. I'll sign that deal right now,
because he is living life. Hey, you know, he beat
the system. He's totally beat the system. He's a winner
in the game of life for every reason, but specifically
in terms of health and cognitive ability and creativity and
fun and all that good stuff. You know, if you're

(04:57):
drooling and your you know, zombie, no people, you know,
most people would say no, please, it's a cruelty to
just keep essentially respiration going. But again, I don't see
a lot of people volunteering to climb in that suicide
machine they have over in Switzerland. Meanwhile, all of these

(05:17):
efforts to extend human existence scientists believe may have a
cat because eventually living things die. Everything eventually croaks, even
those gigantic sequoia trees and redwood trees, or you know,
there's a shark that they keep showing. I see it

(05:37):
on the internet. They say that swims are on greenland
that's four hundred years old. You know, it goes back
to the time of Shakespeare. I don't know how they
know that the shark is four hundred years old, but
they seem to know that the shark is four hundred
years old. And I've seen pictures of it and it
does look like an old shark. I think it has
to gum you to death because it's teeth or in

(05:58):
a glass on the nights. But anyway, human beings have
a life expectancy, and this is one of the conceits
of our time that we live longer than they did.
For instance, in the age of George Washington, and George
Washington was sixty seven when he died, but John Adams

(06:20):
was ninety and Thomas Jefferson was eighty seven, and I
think Ben Franklin was around that as well. So lots
of people in the seventeen hundreds would live into their
eighties and nineties if they made it past their twenties,
because there were lots of things that could kill you,
especially women, between childbirth, which was incredibly lethal, and then

(06:41):
the other cause of death was hearth fires. When cooking
was done over the open flame in a fireplace, women's
dresses burst into flames, caught on fire, and it killed them.
It was a terrible, gruesome way to go. So there
were lots of things that could kill you. If you
broke your leg and it got infected, had a wound,
they didn't have antibiotics, they didn't have any of that stuff,

(07:03):
so you died early. But the species of human beings,
the life expectancy of a healthy man or a healthy
woman who survives all of the infancy issues and the
dumb things that guys do, especially when we're in our
teens and twenties. Boy, we kill ourselves in stupid ways,

(07:25):
doing stupid things. And just look at your average TikTok
video and you can see where this is headed. But
if you survive all of that stuff, then life expectancy
is really pretty much the same as it's always been.
Now there are parts of the world because of socioeconomic
conditions where there's been amazing strides. For instance, in Sub

(07:49):
Saharan Africa, where people routinely the life expectancy was embarrassingly
was shockingly low. We've added twenty five years to life
expectancy in the life last twenty five years because of
the introduction of modern medicines and health, a better drinking
water and some real sanitation, some real you know, you know,

(08:13):
life one on one stuff that we take for granted
that in parts of the world are still astonishing luxuries.
But given that you have access to basic stuff, the
human being can live into the routinely live into the
eighties and nineties and even one hundred. And that's what

(08:35):
people have always done. It's just that more people can
reach that mark now because more people live under better
conditions and more people have access to medicines that were
unthinkable in earlier times. But if you're planning on being
one of those people that lives to be one hundred
and fifty, you may well have to re examined. By

(08:55):
the way, I don't want to have to call my
financial planner and say, hey, Peter, just talking to Penny,
and we think we want to we're going to try
to make a shot at living to one hundred and fifty.
He's gonna say, listen, dope, we got you penciled out
to run an out of money around ninety eight. So
I don't know what you're gonna do for those last

(09:16):
fifty one years fifty two years, but you may have
to go get an orange Apron and see if they're
hiring one hundred and three year olds at home depot.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
And coming up in just a bit on the after
the bottom of the hour news, we're gonna yack with
Fred Fox Junior as well as with Brian Levant. They've
got a new book, fifty Years of Happy Days, of
visual history of an American television classic. They were writers
on the show, and we'll get into all of that.
I saw this story in the La Daily News. It's

(09:51):
in the OC Register as well, and thought, you know,
you don't hear about horse thieves much anymore because we're
not using as many horses for everyday life as we
once did. But we're sure you use an Amazon Prime
and we're using ups. And the porch pirates are out
there and they're dashing grab but you know, uh, the

(10:12):
old rule is that if you build a better mouse trap,
you just get smarter mice. And with ring doorbells and
all the security cameras that everybody's got everywhere, so people
are trying to find new ways of grabbing packages and dashing,
and this guy certainly came up with an original method.
This is in somewhere in Irvine. In a neighborhood there,

(10:34):
a man was seen waiting in front of a house,
and when the UPS guy showed up, the man showed
the UPS driver a driver's license and he signed for
the package, which is what they asked you to do,
because he's my d Yeah, okay, he signs for it
and it contained an Apple MacBook Pro. And then the

(10:56):
guy gets into a grace of the and when no
license plate and takes off. So the guy just waited
until the UPS guy shows up and then signed for
the package and split. Now, you know, I'm not sure
if he knew that for somehow he knew that this
whoever was the proper owner of the package, had ordered

(11:18):
an eye a MacBook Pro. And I don't know what
was on the driver's license that made the UPS guy says,
all right, I guess it's okay to give you the package.
I just know that every time you have a new
way of doing something, somebody immediately tries to find the
soft underbelly. There was a famous story in New Jersey.
It's got to be fifty years ago. Gotta be fifty

(11:39):
years ago before ATM machines were popular, and there was
a guy in New Jersey when they had night deposit
you could make Retailers could make night deposits to their banks.
So they'd have a key to a metal vault on
the outside of the building and you'd open in the

(12:00):
key and you could put in your cash receipts and
it would be secure in the bank, and then in
the morning they would process it. Well, some crook put
a sign out in front of the bank that said,
pardon our dust while we remodel used the temporary night
deposit box, and they just had a metal box under
the wooden sign. And the guy would put this thing

(12:20):
out every night when the bank was closed and pick
it up at like five in the morning before anybody
in the bank would show up. And it'd be thousands
of dollars thrown in there, just in canvas bags by
people who were used to using the night deposit box.
And then they finally figured out a where'd the money go?
And then they waited and they caught them. But anyway,
this guy's got a new scam. Apparently. This happened on

(12:42):
November eighteenth. The video from a ring doorbell camera captures
the scene, including a blurry image of the man's face,
white shirt and dark pants. He's now wanted for theft.
According to Irvine Police, he first intercepted the truck some
blocks away attempted to sign for the package at that point.
An Irvine Police spokesman said that the driver reportedly told
the man that the package had to be delivered and

(13:02):
signed for at the home. So he went to that
house and then he waited for the truck to show up,
and the victim told police that the ups driver said
the man showed an ID with the residence name on it. Now,
the cops haven't confirmed they yet. He obviously knew that
the MacBook was on the truck. Well, we hear there's
a lot of questions about how this happened. We're not

(13:24):
quite sure yet how any of that adds up. All right,
ladies and gentlemen, remind you that the holidays are here.
The Disneyland Resort and KFI wants to give you the
chance to enjoy the wonder joy and magic of the season.
Experience the World of Color, Season of Light and Nighttime
Spectacular at Disney California Adventure Park and over at Disneyland Park.
Rediscover the holiday classics like a Christmas Fantasy Parade, and

(13:47):
so much more. Keep listening to KFI for your chance
to win a four pack of one day, one park
tickets to Disneyland Park or California Adventure Park. This story
fascinates me as well. And here's another story that sure
looks like there's something crooked going on, but so far
no one really knows what it is. Andrew, you had

(14:08):
this story about the Macy's employee apparently who for three
years hid one hundred and fifty four million dollars in expenses,
and they don't know why. This person is no longer
part of the accounting department. The department store chain, which
also operates Bloomingdale's and Blue Mercury Cosmetics chain in addition

(14:33):
to of course, all the Macy's stores, said that it
identified an issue related to delivery expenses in one of
its actuarial accounts. Earlier this month, an independent investigation and
forensics analysis found that a single employee with responsibility for
small package delivery expense accounting intentionally made erroneous accounting at

(14:55):
Cruel Entries to hide roughly one hundred and thirty two
million dollars to one hundred ndred and fifty four million
of expenses from the fourth quarter of twenty twenty one
through the fiscal quarter ending on November second. Yeah, it
is pretty interesting, Like it's a very odd thing to do,
Like the purpose is really like why they don't think
that this guy skimmed whoever this person is, skimmed any

(15:18):
of the money, So then why would they do this?
By the way, these numbers are staggering. There's four point
three six billion dollars of delivery expenses from the Macy's company.
So I guess this is what they're they are ordering
stuff or they're sending stuff out on how do you
run up? Again? This is one quarter they're talking about.

(15:42):
They're talking about a quarter that ends in November second
of anywhere up to one hundred and fifty four million
dollars of small packaged deliveries expenses. So you know, if
you're wondering why Macy's having financial trouble, maybe it's not
just the internet shopping. Maybe you gotta look at how
much they're sped to get this stuff sent in and
out of this store. As a man, that's a ton

(16:04):
of dough. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we've got some headlines.
When we come back. We're gonna talk happy days. We
could use a little Happy Days, right man. You look
at the headlines, it's very depressing. But meanwhile, things will
get better.

Speaker 3 (16:17):
I guess you're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand
from KFI AM six forty.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
KIM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app Doug
McIntyre info Tim Conway Junior and that theme song dominated
the TV landscape for ten years, nineteen seventy four to
nineteen eighty four, two hundred and fifty five half hour
episodes of one of the most beloved TV series in history,
Happy Days of Course, Arthur Fonzarelli, the Fons, and the

(16:46):
whole Cunningham Family, the whole Gang. There's a brand new
book out celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of this landmark series.
It is written by two of the writer producers on
that series, Brian Levant and Fred Fox Junior. The book
is called Happy Days Fifty Years of Happy Days, a
Visual History of an American television classic. Welcome to the show,

(17:08):
Brian Levant, Brian, how are you wonderful?

Speaker 4 (17:11):
So happy to be here?

Speaker 2 (17:12):
And Fred Fox Junior, Welcome aboard. How are you?

Speaker 4 (17:16):
Thanks so much?

Speaker 5 (17:16):
Yeah, great, great that you're having us. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, it's fun. Like everybody in America, I clocked my
Happy Day's time, and you know, now, I first had
to get over the shock that the show is fifty
years old, because it was it was sort of a
kind of a fantasy version of the nineteen fifties. And

(17:39):
now it's fifty years old. We're going to have to
have a nineteen seventy four nostalgia.

Speaker 4 (17:46):
That's what the seventies show is.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah, that's right, these years of filowing up. Let's start
with you. Guys. You worked on the show when you
were Brian, when you were on Happy Days. Did you
have any idea that this thing was going to have
the life that it has had?

Speaker 6 (18:03):
Oh?

Speaker 7 (18:03):
Well, you know I was in college when the show began,
and I was walking out the door actually for my
fourth date with now my wife of forty nine years,
and my mom said, Hey, there's a new show you
might like from Gary Marshall, you know, from the Dick

(18:23):
Van Dt Show.

Speaker 4 (18:25):
It's set in the fifties.

Speaker 7 (18:26):
And I watched it and I enjoyed it, and I
watched as it struggled in its first two seasons and
then exploded in its third season, and I was very
fortunate to have wrangled a story meeting with Gary Marshall
based on my performance. It is Saturday morning basketball game.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Is a jump shot, And luckily.

Speaker 7 (18:55):
I climbed those twenty nine steps to k Building when
I was twenty three, and last time I came down,
I was thirty one, and Fred was there even longer.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Now, Fred, you really kind of grew up in the
business because your dad was a Bob Hope writer for
many many years, wrote for George Burns and many others.
But when you joined tell us about your early days
when you joined the Happy Day staff. I mean, was
it already a hit or was it also still in
those struggling Were you there during the early years when
it was just still trying to find itself.

Speaker 5 (19:28):
No, they kind of prefaced that, as you said, my
brother's in business, very successful, very funny man. Growing up,
I thought it was so neat dad was a writer.
Never entered my mind that I would do it. In
nineteen seventy four, I took a comedy extension class at
UCLA as a gentleman there who's an advertising business, and

(19:51):
we hit it off and we wrote a speck all
in the family together. Didn't hear it? Back for a
couple of months, and then we got a letter saying, hey,
you guys are very funny, but we're through for the year.
The tilman I wrote it with was Gary Shanley.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Uh what if if they came to him?

Speaker 5 (20:06):
Huh yeah, I know it sure sad, but sort of.
I got a call from Cindy Williams and New Year's
Eve in nineteen seventy five, Sindy and I went to
the high school together. She said, Fred, I'm doing the
show called Leverne Shirley but could be a flop, but
if you want to be my go for assistant, you
could have to rehear so he could go to the

(20:28):
writer's room. So she got me a meeting with Gary Marshall.
I walked in the door. He said, so you're Freddie
Fox's kid. And when Gary and Jerry Belton came out
to be writers, one of the first shows they were
on The Joy Bishop Show, and fortunate Dad was very
encouraging to him and Gary said, now, Fred, I know

(20:48):
you want to write, and I almost want really, but
he said, right now, I just needed someone. If Sydy
needs her dry cleaning picked up for a car wash,
you know I do that so she can concentrate on
the show. And I'm very lucky. I got an assignment
to write an episode that Ron Howard and Anson Williams
a guest starred, and fortunately went very well. And Gary
asked me if I had to go to Happy Days.

Speaker 7 (21:09):
So yeah, I started and was there for over two
hundred episodes.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, Well that's that's it's. You know, there's a lot
of roads into show There's there's actually more roads out
of show business that are into them, but and I
found all of them. We're talking about Brian Levant, who
had a great career as both a writer and a director,
including the Flintstones movie, in Beethoven and you know, snow

(21:34):
Dogs and a whole bunch of stuff. And as well
as Fred Fox Junior worked on Family Matters and a
bunch of big hit shows. So talk to us guys
if you can't about the book about fifty years of
Happy Days of visual history. I saw it. I was
at Diesel Books over in Brentwood yesterday and I saw

(21:55):
copies of it there. It's beautiful, it's lots of pictures.
So what about how did this come about?

Speaker 7 (22:01):
Well that you know, after I did my first book
of all my intersection and my career and collections looking
for another challenge, and we and I'm talking to Fred,
and we realized that nobody had ever done a book.

Speaker 8 (22:15):
On Happy Days. Incredibly, you know, every every major show
if you go to Amazon, there is bisn't a big
show that doesn't have a history. And so we decided
that we were going to do it.

Speaker 7 (22:28):
And it was a long difficult road in getting Paramount
to come aboard and finding a publisher who would agree
to let me design the book. And we wanted to
tell an insider story because most books about TV shows
are written by outsiders, I would.

Speaker 4 (22:48):
Say all of them, basically.

Speaker 7 (22:51):
And the difference here is that we were there for
so much of the history, and our relationship with the cast,
with the various showrunners over the decade the show was
in production allowed us to really recreate the era before
we were involved, and allowed us to surf on their

(23:15):
success and the sacrifices and the difficulties that led to
becoming an international once in a decade phenomena.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
And it really was. I mean, there's a famous picture
of John Lennon on the set of Happy Days pausing
with I mean, because he and Julian Julian was a
huge Happy Days fan. So John Lennon is there with Phonsie.
I mean, everybody wanted them peace and the cast still.

Speaker 4 (23:39):
Can't believe it.

Speaker 7 (23:40):
But the best part of that is twenty years later,
Julian's recording of doing a video for his first album Volatte,
and he knocks on Henry Winkler's office door, pops his
head and goes, remember me.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, Fred was life like you know shows can. I've
had my own years as a TV writer producer, and
I worked in some terrible shows that were really great
jobs because the atmosphere of the cast the writer's room
was a lot of laughs. You always wish the show
could be better. And then I've worked on really good

(24:18):
shows where it was hell on Earth. It was the
Batan death March of comedy, and I just couldn't You
can't believe it was this difficult to do this thing.
In fact, Laverne and Surely kind of famously had a
very very contentious It was a contentious atmosphere and I'm
being polite there, but but what was the general tenor
of Happy Days?

Speaker 5 (24:38):
It was just it was right. I describe it as
just a safe heaven. Gary said the tone. It was
a very comfortable environment. An example of that when I
my first week, I go to the writer's room and
at the time, the new guy couldn't just new guy
or girl couldn't just pitch a joke, so we're going

(25:00):
over if we're looking for a joke, I had to
write it down on a piece of paper and hand
it to a real writer, and if it bombed, they
wouldn't say, oh, the stupid new guy is not funny,
but it's got a big laugh and go hey, that
was Fred's. So then I was able to start, you know,
pitching myself and as they said, they you know, got
a script. It was just such an incredible environment and

(25:23):
very It was so different.

Speaker 7 (25:25):
From every other show we ever worked on Is You
had an incredible sense of security. The cast loved each other.
Ron Howard set the tone and tempo for behavior, for
for a work ethic, and everybody contributed and everybody bought

(25:49):
into this system.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Well, it's a unique situation because, as you point out, Gary,
the name Gary Marshall will keep coming up because he
was such a huge force, not just on that show,
but basically saved ABC back in the seventies.

Speaker 7 (26:03):
At one point he had four of the top five series.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
I think that I think they built the Commissary just
to feed his crews. I'm not kidding. But above beyond that,
above and rice cakes, but above, but above and beyond that.
He had an ethos of life is more important than
show business in Camp Marshall Mount and he actually nurtured
Gary gave so many new people their first job, and

(26:29):
more importantly, he gave a lot of older writers and
actors their last job. When people needed to make their
health insurance, he took care of that. And that that
does set a tone for the for the for everybody
else to follow. And the fact that Ron Howard grew
up literally he learned to write his learned his letters
so he could sign autographs as a four year old

(26:50):
on the Andy Rivers Show. That that changes things. So
we're talking about Brian Levan and Fred Fox Junior, who
we're gonna hang with us for another segment. The book
is called Fifty Years of Happy Days of Vision, Visual
history of an American television classic. It's in bookstores and
by the way on December thirteenth, at the Gary Marshall
Theater right on Riverside Drive, just a few miles from
here into Luca Lake. You're doing a book event at

(27:12):
the Gary Marshall Theater and folks want to check that
out too.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty Kay if I Am six.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Doug mcatarre in
for Tim Conway Junior, mo' kelly up at seven o'clock.
I'll be back tomorrow at four in the afternoon and
we'll try this again. Maybe tomorrow we'll get it right.
We're talking about Brian Levan and Fred Fox Junior. They
are the co authors of fifty Years of Happy Days,
of visual history of an American television classic. And the

(27:43):
book is out in bookstores and makes a great holiday
gift for all your Happy Days fans out there. And
you know, it's hard, it's hard to imagine, guys, that
someone will in the future we'll do a TV show
sort of waxing nostalgic about the twenty twenties. Remember COVID,
Remember Remember the pandemic, Remember drive by shootings. These kids

(28:08):
today don't know.

Speaker 4 (28:10):
Black lives matter, exact.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
Time Occupy Wall Street. Those were the days, the good
old Days. But you know, Happy Days was never really
about the fifties. It was about that family and it
was always about family just as But there was something
weird going on between American Graffiti. But Happy Days really
started as a sketch on love American style. Is that correct?

Speaker 7 (28:34):
It actually it actually was a pilot originally called New
Family in Town, then The Happy Days that starred Ron Howard,
Marion Ross, and Anson Williams, with different actors playing Howard
Cunningham and Jony Cunningham. There was no Fonsie and the pilot,

(28:55):
like seventy percent of all pilots made, it didn't sell.
They played it off on love American style, but that
is what casting director Fred Ruse showed his writer producer
director George Lucas, who was preparing to do American Graffiti,

(29:16):
in order to familiarize him with the grown up Ron Howard,
who eventually got the role Steve Bolander in Graffiti, which
turned out to be in today's dollars, well beyond a
billion dollars for a movie that costs then a pittance
under a million, with a double platinum album, and every
network was scrambling to find a retro youth project and

(29:40):
Gary Marshall.

Speaker 6 (29:41):
Called up, baby, you already made that show, but the
kid was in the movie, and they got another bite
at the Apple teamed up with with Rob Reiner and
his writing partner Phil Michigan to write a new pilot.

Speaker 7 (29:55):
Henry Winkler was added to the cast On Most was
added to the cast. Bosley Aaron Moran were added to
the cast and on January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four. The
show debuted to very strong numbers and remained very very powerful,
especially for ABC show through the first season.

Speaker 4 (30:16):
In the second season, the ratings crashed.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
Now why do I have this right? When it first
came on the air, it was a block and tape
show meeting. It was no audience. It was shot a.

Speaker 7 (30:30):
Movie style, right, a lot of atmosphere, a lot of music,
you know.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
But when the audience when when they brought in a
live audience, that's when the audience America told everybody, no,
the show is Phonsie. Phonsie's the heat here, because you
would enter and they'd go crazy for everyone.

Speaker 5 (30:53):
Actually, right, and very first episode finds the finally speaks.
It is maybe two two minutes left in the episode,
and then all of a sudden, just taste off and
fund the meane.

Speaker 7 (31:06):
Happened, right, and you know they took advantage of his
budding popularity, transformed the show into a three camera show
shot in from in front of an audience, and it
unleashed these people's personalities and the energy was just furious.
Now you worked on you again, right?

Speaker 5 (31:27):
Well?

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah, I worked with Klugman and actually Gary on.

Speaker 3 (31:31):
That, right.

Speaker 7 (31:32):
And was Jerry Paris involved in that?

Speaker 6 (31:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah he did. We in fact him the last two
episodes of his life exactly.

Speaker 7 (31:40):
But Jerry Paris was capable of infusing performances with an
energy that was virtually unseen in weekly television.

Speaker 4 (31:50):
That was his gift.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yeah, he knew how to move the actors.

Speaker 6 (31:54):
Uh the U.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
I have to really quickly squeak this in as we
run at a time. Sure, Fred, you wrote the famous
slash infamous Jumped the Shark episode of Happy Days, which
is sort of became an archetype for when something's gone
beyond the bowie or over its left. But the point
is the show ran for another four successful years after

(32:17):
it Jumped the Shark.

Speaker 7 (32:18):
Oh more than that exactly.

Speaker 5 (32:22):
Lee Margan, who high school friend, was with the La
Times for years and I think it was two thousand
and one. He asked me to write an article on
that whole Jump the Shark, and it's kind of known
in the sense of Jump the Shark because you know,
when it first happened, I thought I should wear a
scarlet f on my chest and you know, be shamed.

(32:44):
But as he said afterward, treated one hundred and sixty
four more episodes and some I think some of our
best episodes at all. And again that was nineteen seventy
eight when we did that episode, and then it went
till on there till eighty four.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
Well, we should all have those struggles, everybody. Right, let's
talk about December thirteenth. You're at the Gary Marshall Theater
and what time is that?

Speaker 4 (33:10):
I believe it begins at seven.

Speaker 7 (33:12):
We're going to be showing the original seventy four pilot
and then we're going to be joined on stage by
Lowell Ganz and William S. Bickley, the other surviving showrunners
of Happy Days, and we'll have exclusive video that we've
assembled for the event, and it will be moderated by

(33:34):
Gary Sun, the director and writer Scott Marshall.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
All right, so you don't want to miss that folks.
In the book Fifty Years of Happy Days of Visual
history of an American television classic is in bookstores and
that mister Besos would be happy to send it to
you or the recipient of your dreams. Guys, thanks so
much for being with us. Appreciate it. Brian Levant and
Fred Fox Junior, and my thanks to everybody here at KFI. Richie,

(33:58):
great job, Isabelle and Steph, thank you. And I'm going
to slide down the Dinosaur. I will be back tomorrow.

Speaker 1 (34:05):
Conway show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Now you
can always hear us live on KFI i AM six
forty four to seven pm Monday through Friday, and anytime
on demand on the iHeartRadio app.