Free Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition by Barry Williams;Chris Kreski Page A

a deal with the hotel's owner. He
agreed to let her go to Hollywood and shoot her pilot and she
agreed to return at a later date. They shook on it, and a year later,
Florence Henderson-now a genuine TV star-went back and
completed her run. She was a smash.

     

    e started shooting the pilot episode of "The Brady
Bunch" on my fourteenth birthday, and six months
later, much to my delight (and Robert Reed's horror),
ABC bought it! Then we got really busy. The show
was set to premiere in September of 1969, and by midsummer we
were filming at an absolutely furious pace. It was hot, grueling
work, and all I can say is that I was in heaven.
    One of our first
cast photos.
(© Paramount
Pictures)

    Brady Bunch
Sound Stage 5
(Barry Williams)
    For me, there was always an air of excitement about going to
the studio. Despite the long hours and hard work, I looked forward to each day on the Paramount Stage 5 with a real sense of
anticipation. To me, it was even more exciting than Disneyland.
Who needs Frontierland or Adventureland when you have the
"Star Trek," "Mission Impossible," "Bonanza," "Odd Couple,"
"Love, American Style," and "Happy Days" sets to play on?
    I loved it so much that I'd usually have my mom get us there
early. I'd hang out, bother the assistant directors, say hi to Mrs.
Whitfield, our welfare worker/teacher, ask the tech guys about
nine hundred questions, and then sneak out for my all-important
first cigarette. After I'd sufficiently blackened my lungs and stimulated my brain, I'd head back to the set, check in with wardrobe
and makeup, and be in place, ready to go, all before my official
eight A.M. call time. Such was my morning routine, day after day,
season after season.
    Scripts were handed out, and each Brady would take time to go
over the script, and offer (generally) constructive input. Mostly
we'd ask for minor line changes-things like avoiding a scriptwriter's "neat-o" where a "groovy" or "far out" belonged. Pretty funny
in retrospect, but I can remember taking that duty very seriously. To our producers' credit, our suggestions almost always met with a
positive response.

    Then it was time to bring the script to life as we began to
rehearse and shoot. That sounds like two separate processes, but
in our case the two were always mixed together. Ours was a onecamera, filmed sitcom, as opposed to the three-camera, live-ontape shows that are popular today. It's a more difficult and timeconsuming shooting process because we couldn't simply run
through the show in front of a studio audience. Instead, it had to
be pieced together, one scene at a time.
    It's a tedious method, but Lloyd Schwartz tells me that we
endured it for a very definite reason. "Three-camera shows suffer
in terms of kids, because it's very hard for them to sustain their
concentration level for a full thirty minutes. From day one we
knew that there were gonna be kids all over our set, and that the
best way to shoot `The Brady Bunch' would be to take our time
with it, shoot it with just one camera, mostly in close-ups that we'd
knock off a couple of lines at a time.
    "Nowadays they throw these kids in front of a live studio
audience and expect them to perform. Watch any kid on a threecamera sitcom and you'll find that it almost never works. In a bestcase scenario they seem plastic and artificial, and at their worst they
can be just plain unwatchable. So what we did was proper, I think,
and really made the Brady kids much more believable as kids".
    Studio time is ridiculously expensive. Even in 1972, it cost over
$100,000 to produce each "Brady Bunch" episode. With that in
mind, our producers left nothing to chance. Each evening, a call
sheet was posted listing in detail the scenes that we'd film the fol lowing day, the order in which they'd be shot, which characters
would appear in each, and what time we were expected to report.
For the cast and crew of "The Brady Bunch", this was a very important