When 4:30 PM rolled around on Wednesday, we’d perform our second network run-through, then head home. We were home in time for prime time, so, in case you’re wondering, here’s what was available for our viewing pleasure on Wednesday nights starting at 8 PM, circa 1990: on ABC: The Wonder Years (with that douche, Fred Savage), Growing Pains, Doogie Howser, M.D. (with Ed Alonzo’s magical tickle-buddy, Neil Patrick Harris), Married People, and Cop Rock; on CBS: Lenny, Doctor Doctor, Jake and the Fatman, and WIOU; and, on NBC: Unsolved Mysteries, The Fanelli Brothers, Dear John, and Hunter.
Years later on Wednesdays, after our run-throughs, the producers would buy a bunch of pizzas and set up a screening room where we could watch the upcoming episodes after they’d been edited together, but before they were broadcast on television.
“MUST-SEE” THURSDAY
On Thursdays, I woke around 5:00 AM for my hour-and-a-half commute north because on this day, things began a bit earlier than usual. This was a high-energy day. It was when the crew finalized its camera blocking. This was also the day that all the extras were on set, officially known as “Ladies Day.” There were also a number of male extras who I enjoyed hanging with. It was like TGIF a day early when my buddies would show up to joke around, then we’d all go play pretend. We spent Thursday blocking all the physical action in each scene, ad nauseam, until we knew it by rote.
This was the day when the cast would visit wardrobe for any final touches on special costuming that the script required. Like the dream sequence where Screech has to wear a Robocop-style outfit. Wardrobe had to hunt down all those materials and fashion the costume so that it both fit me properly and met the approval of the producers, writers, and network suits.
Thursday ran very similarly to Tuesday and Wednesday, only now we were rehearsing “live” with people in the booth. The booth was the hub of the show, the control center where all the monitors were located and where the director, producers, and writers sat. SBTB was a four-camera show. That meant there were a lot of shots that needed to be timed and called perfectly by the director in the booth. Each camera—just the top camera part and not even all the mobile apparatus that comprised the base—was worth over $250,000. The cost of each camera total was in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. When they set up shots, there would be one camera for wide shots, one for close ups, and one each for two shots or three shots (where there are two or three actors in frame). Then there were cross shots. Cross shots were necessary if, say, Zack was on the far left, Kelly was on the far right, and the rest of the gang was arranged side by side, facing front, in a sort of police line up (because you never want to show your back to the audience). That held true even if you were seated in a booth at The Max. You always wanted to have your body half-turned towards wherever the camera was located so it could get the most “coverage.” For instance, if Zack and Kelly were seated at The Max and Zack was on the left, his camera would be located on the far right, shooting across, to get his half of the coverage in the back-and-forth of the conversation between the two characters. It would be the same, only opposite, set-up for Kelly.
Remember, this was being taped before a live audience, so it made for high drama inside the booth. The director would have to anticipate camera changes and call for a new shot the instant it occurred in the natural flow of the scene, which wasn’t easy. The director would call for a shot, then ready the next shot, calling for the cut with a snap of his fingers.
For example, take the scene of that conversation between Zack and Kelly in their usual table at The Max. The director has cameras one and four trained on the actors in the scene. Camera one is up on Zack while camera four is ready on Kelly. Then you have a variety of different angles and shots blocked out for cameras two and three. From the booth, the director communicates through headsets with the camera operators, calling out a sequence such as, “One ready, four (snap). Four ready, three (snap). Three ready, one (snap). One ready, four (snap).” And on and on. In fact, I can’t watch a television show to this day without counting the snaps in my head—sometimes scenes with as many as twenty-five cuts or more. “Wow,” I’ll think. “That scene had a buttload of snaps.”
Let’s say camera one has Zack, but Zack has to leave. That means the director instructs camera two to be ready to take the wide shot, picking up Zack’s movement through the set as he exits. Now camera one has to cut over to someone else, say, standing by the jukebox. Camera one has to spin around, zoom in on the jukebox, and be ready for the next shot when the director calls, “Two ready, one (snap).” Sometimes these camera guys had to move like lightning to get the shots.
In addition to the cameramen, you had crew members moving yards of loose and coiled cables as thick as nautical rope. Then there were the booms—long sticks that hovered over the action with a microphone dangling from it. The main booms (there were two) were not entirely operated by hand; they were each a crane with a platform attached to a sturdy metal base that was basically a three-wheeled vehicle with a chair and steering mechanism on the back. This tool had its own tangle of wires running from it, adding to the off-camera pasta bowl of cables we were all constantly stepping over. If you decided to wander around between your scenes to where the cameras were in play, you were taking your life in your own hands. We didn’t use wireless microphone packs like you’d find on the set of a feature film, so sometimes, very rarely, we would also have microphones coming up from below the floor of the set—a sound tech with a mike pack and a smaller, hand-held boom. This was all done at breakneck speed to maintain the flow of a live production and to offer the maximum entertainment experience to the studio audience.
Backstage there was a special TV rack fashioned with a cube of monitors and a larger monitor divided into four smaller screenshots on which you could view the angle from each camera. There were makeup tables, quick-change rooms, and curtains just off set as well as cast members and extras waiting for their cues. In all that controlled chaos, our crew never tangled cords or crossed cables to the detriment of the performers on stage. That’s why camera guys never stop working. A show gets cancelled, they just go camera another show. Many of our guys worked over on DOOL (Days of Our Lives) or The Tonight Show every day while we were rehearsing for tape day—and they kept on working the four months we were all on hiatus. Those guys worked all over NBC. No doubt, camera guys have steadier jobs than most actors. It was a highly coordinated ballet, performed each week by masters of their crafts. A dance I took completely for granted.
There is a second language the makers of a television show speak fluently. It’s an industry-wide language of acronyms and pidgin English that every veteran actor eventually has ingrained into his or her psyche. Cheating, for instance, is not only what Tiffani was doing on her boyfriend Eddie Garcia during the filming of the “No Hope Dope” episode, it is also a term for rotating your body towards the camera for maximum coverage in a shot. The direction will be, “Okay, Dustin, we need you to cheat to camera. Open up left to camera.” This evokes another set of terms, this time directional. There’s stage left and stage right, and camera left and camera right. The camera’s left and right are from the perspective of the audience either in the studio or at home, the actor’s left or right is from his own perspective on stage, looking out at the audience. So, an instruction for me to cheat left is an instruction to cheat camera left (known as house left in the theater), which means to my right, or stage right (sometimes also referred to as actor’s right). This sounds confusing (especially for kids), but after complete immersion in this world for many years, this backwards, cryptic style of communication is wholly unremarkable. In fact, after a while, the direction would simply be, “Cheat a little bit.” The presumption was that the actor now knew where his camera was and which direction he needed to turn.
An actor must always be conscious of where the camera is because on television you don’t converse with people like you would in the real world. From an observer’s perspective in real life, one participant in a conver
sation might be turned fully to the side or have her back to the observer. On TV, both actors must cheat toward the front. Encountering this style of communication for the first time, a visitor to the set might presume we were all windtalking. Try this one if you’re scoring at home: “Okay, the gang enters sans Belding. Dustin, we need you go up-stage a bit. You’re gonna cheat then pull a POV TTC.” Translation: Screech, Zack, Kelly, Slater, Jess, and Lisa enter without Mr. Belding. Screech needs to walk away from the camera (to the rear of the stage, making the front of the stage down-stage) then turn so we get a Point Of View Towards The Camera. Easy, right?
Another Thursday process was to get the monitors upstairs “color keyed.” I never knew much about this mysterious procedure. All I did know was that for all the years I was on SBTB, there was a woman upstairs in an office whose only job was to make sure that certain patterns and colors were avoided so they didn’t strobe or clash on television. There’s probably some elaborate technical reason for this effect occurring, but I have no idea what that undoubtedly excellent reason might be. She probably had a tough job making sure Screech’s ridiculously loud outfits didn’t fuck up the color palette, or whatever.
We wouldn’t always go to the NBC commissary when we broke for lunch. Sometimes we’d walk to Johnny Carson Park, which is located right across the street from the studio in Burbank. For us, it was a lovely haven from the hectic confines of the production studio: shaded trees, a babbling brook, nature. Another benefit was that most of your fellow park wanderers were also fellow actors, so there was no one bugging you. It was just a nice place to relax for an hour. In the first years of the show, the network and producers made a deal to publish SBTB books, one of which featured a photo of Screech sitting on the limb of a tree wearing his rainbow-colored pants and all that other crazy shit they used to make me wear. Come to think of it, that’s the same outfit they used to dress the Screech doll. In the photo, Screech is pulling down his glasses, looking over them. That picture was taken in Johnny Carson Park. Many of our press and promotional photos taken out in a natural setting were taken there.
Back in the studio on Thursday evenings, depending on the earlier call time for the underage kids (i.e., me), we would do a 6:30 PM run-through on camera that would typically last about an hour. This was a dress rehearsal. We were not in full hair and makeup, but we would all be in wardrobe, including the incorporation of our quick changes backstage. By the way, here’s another tip if you ever star in your own television show: don’t wear a ball cap on the day you’re in wardrobe without having your hair done in character, especially if you have a curly bird’s nest like mine crowning your melon. You’ll have all-day hat hair worse than a drifter’s.
We referred to the Thursday run-through as “camera day” because everybody got to see how things looked on monitors in preparation for “tape day,” Friday’s big performance in front of the audience. Tape day was for all the marbles. The director and crew paid close attention to how all the business went off on camera day in case they needed to make any last minute adjustments. Some episodes called for much more business than others. Was everything working the way it was supposed to? Sometimes we wouldn’t even see the business in action until this late Thursday run-through. The carpenters would have been instructed on Monday or Tuesday that such-and-such a prop needed to be constructed to do such-and-such then they’d disappear to construct the business required for that week’s episode.
When the Thursday camera run-through was complete, we were free to go home. When I was younger, that meant the long drive home with dad, dinner, TV, etc. When I got older, that meant it was time to reconnect with the ladies I’d chatted up all afternoon, go out, have some fun, maybe spread some Screech lovin’ around. Yeah, Thursdays were good days.
FRIDAY: SHOWTIME
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday … Meh. Thursday was full of life. But Friday … KA-POW!!! Friday was tape day. Friday was HUGE.
On Friday, the stage jumped to life: the camera guys, sound guys, lighting techs, grips, carpenters, all the friends you’ve made in the pool of extras, the ladies, all the network suits, the producers, director and assistant directors, stage managers, hair, makeup and wardrobe, the full cast, and a live studio audience.
But before we get to the action, one crucial aspect I have yet to discuss is “pages.” All week long, we would have been handed pages from the writers. These were ongoing writing changes to plot, dialogue, setting, business—you name it. Small changes in dialogue were also called “sides.” Sides is the common term for the scene an actor would be asked to read at an audition. It refers literally to the sides of conversation in the dialogue of the scene. More involved revisions to the script were known as pages. On the set, we would be notified that, “Pages were coming down.” New pages were color-coded. The annoying part of this process was that there was no industry standard for the color coding, making it difficult to keep track of which pages had been handed down to you when. Obviously this was critical, because you always had to be on the latest pages, not still memorizing lines that had already been cut or rewritten. I carried a three-ring binder that I clipped new pages into. For a long time white pages were our original script, first revisions were usually pink (revised lines had an asterisk next to them), followed by green, blue, yellow, orange, etc. I can’t remember the exact order anymore. You’d even start to get pages to replace your pages. So instead of just pink pages replacing the white pages from your original script, now you had green pages to replace the pink. You really had to keep your shit straight to be on the color of the day. Sometimes people would fuck up and not have their pages or be reading from the wrong script, but that was rare. For the most part things ran smoothly. Our line producer had production assistants who would walk around pushing a wheeled cart with extra scripts stored in the bottom. And if someone was delivering the wrong line, rehearsal stopped immediately, and the dipshit was handed the new pages. We were operating within the comfort of a pretty fail-safe system.
Pages were necessitated by gags that fell flat at the table read, business that didn’t come off in live action like it read on the page—any number of reasons, really. Writers would disappear into their room and, as a result, you could be handed down no pages, one page, twenty-eight pages, or anything in between. You never had any idea when changes might be called for. They could come down multiple times in one day; it was always a surprise. Here was an excellent guide: if St. Peter didn’t laugh at a joke, there were going to be pages. As actors, we just sucked it up, memorized the new lines, and moved on; it was all part of being a professional. Keep in mind, I was a professional actor from the time I was eight years old, working full time. Nobody was down my throat to make sure I was memorizing the correct color pages or that I had my lines down at all, even though, technically, I was just a little kid. It was simply expected of me. By the end of the week, our script binders resembled rainbows.
Friday was the confluence of all these disparate pieces coming together to create SBTB. Every single scene you see, whether on reruns or DVD, was filmed on a Friday. It’s worth noting that when viewers watched the character Screech in all the incarnations of SBTB over the course of a decade, they are watching the real-life Dustin Diamond grow up one Friday at a time.
Fridays usually began early, 7:30 or 8:00 AM, but sometimes, if our scenes began deeper into the first taping, we would receive a later call time. That was a nice treat, since I lived so far from the studio. I would look at the day’s breakdowns and see that the first scene to be taped called for Zack, Kelly, Jessie, and Slater, and I’d be fired up because it meant I could sleep in. Those odd moments were the source of perhaps one of Hollywood’s least known paradoxes: Actors looking forward to scenes they weren’t in.
Now, here’s something you probably didn’t know: Every Friday, we would film the entire show, front to back, twice: First on an empty sound stage and second in front of a live audience. The reason was for safety. We had to be certain we had each scene in the can befo
re taping live in front of an audience to hedge against mishaps, disasters and—not insignificantly, running long and coming up against child-labor laws. I believe the window for the live audience taping was from 5:00 to 7:30 PM. To make the early, audience-less, taping go faster, we would film the show out of order. If the script called for four scenes total in The Max, we would film all four scenes before moving on to the next set-up. In the live taping before the studio audience, we taped the show front to back in the correct chronology. The continuity benefitted the audience so they could follow along with the story, supplying appropriate responses to the plot as it unfolded. But no matter what happened during the live performance, the producers and editors knew they had every scene on tape and could cut the final broadcast together in post-production, if necessary.
We had to be very careful at lunch on Fridays not to get food stains on our wardrobe. Some people changed or wore a smock over their clothing. Den and I donned robes like the true men of leisure that we were. And we didn’t wander far from set to eat. Often, Friday meals were catered with a sit-down meal in a nearby rehearsal hall or studio, usually, in fact, the same rehearsal hall where our very first auditions for SBTB were held. Parents, friends, cast, guest stars, crew, producers—everyone—would eat together in the same space. We would end our meal with any last-minute notes from the director for the live taping and a little pep talk from him or St. Peter to keep our spirits and enthusiasm high.
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