Dallas | The Inside Story from Larry Hagman, Linda Gray, Patrick Duffy and more

let me tell you the history of dallas is much more interesting than the history of dallas i mean they have families down here that just make our show look like cream of wheat well it's kind of interesting because the people that produce dallas produce the waltons which was a sweet show about nice family and so forth and it was a real real departure from their usual and yeah i don't know it was it was just fun and it developed um i mean we i always considered it a cartoon it's and i was thought of dallas as kind of funny because it was kind of funny but it was a human funny uh i don't know really where it falls drama or cartoonish or whatever but it carved a place in history that's for sure well one of the producers had been a producer on i dream of genie at one time and so he remembered me for that and i don't know why he wanted me for that role but it turned out pretty pretty good for me i had just come off a television show called the man from atlantis and it had just literally been canceled they knew they were going to cancel it so my agent was finding scripts and i had five scripts i can only remember four of them but dallas was one i was going to be the father of lassie that was the other one speaking of pioneers the title of this show there was a pilot for a show called young pioneers with linda pearl and i was going to be the husband on that or i was going to read for the husband on that all of these were potential and dallas and i can't remember the fifth one but my wife and i literally read all of them and thought well lassie's a slam dunk cinch because everybody loves lassie and it's always done i thought maybe i could do lassie and thing and we just it really was like a pinwheel and go oh dallas let's try dallas and that was it it wasn't based on isn't this going to be wonderful and isn't the character bobby whatever it was i was panicked because i'd been out of work for a week and literally and i just wanted to make a choice and we relied on our good great fortune and picked dallas and then you know we got the script reading at warner brothers and i met larry and linda and jim davis and barbara belgettis and steve connelly and charlene tilton and i said these are the best people in the world at the very first time we met and it turned out to be magic casting and the most fundamentally important decision i ever made other than marrying my wife that first audition um i remember very very clearly because i was doing a series with norman lear called all the glitters and ruth comfort who was the casting lady um was asked to cast these very small characters on a new series called dallas and she called them about me and she said i'd like linda gray to come in and they were like who we don't know and we have someone else in mind and we already were kind of very close to making an offer she said well before you do please please please please see her so i got an audition at five o'clock on friday which is death you know you know going up five o'clock nobody's interested they're all looking at their watches they want to go home so um there was no dialogue for sue helen so they wrote me an audition um phone call and it was zuellen's side of a phone conversation jr was calling her to tell her that he was so sorry he couldn't be home for john ross's birthday party because he was busy at the office well we know about j.r he wasn't at the office anyway so um i did this monologue one-way conversation and the most interesting thing was i knew in that room i knew that i got that job and oddly enough it was my friend who was they were considering for the role it was mary fran who ended up being above newhart's wife thank god you know i love mary mary and i were dear friends i didn't really know it at the time that she was the one but um there i was and i i was walking to my car and i thought i've got this job it was odd it was the oddest feeling it was a woman's intuition it was something but i felt it it was palpable and i knew and i walked to the car and i thought wow this is really interesting but i have this job and then it wasn't too long after that i got the phone call that i did actually have it when i read the first description of the character of lucy ewing i just knew i had to play that part it was in a magazine called dramalog which is now backstage west and they put out casting notices and i read the summary of dallas it was a mini-series i read the list of characters j.r bobby pam lucy ewing she was a manipulative sex pot raised with a silver spoon and had everything she wanted and it said but her mother and father were kicked off the ranch and i just knew i said she doesn't have everything she wants she doesn't have love she doesn't have acceptance i just said there's something to that character that there's a vulnerability about her there's something more than just meets the eye on the surface and barbara miller was casting and barbara miller had put me on eight is enough code red a couple of little guest star parts and she said nope they want somebody a little older somebody with more experience so i would go sneak into the studio and you can't do this now at all but back then security wasn't as tight and i was able to sneak onto the studio lot if there was a truck driving by or something i'd run along or just act like i knew where i was going and i would go to barbara miller's office and her assistant irene mariano was there and i was able to to sneak in and i would go every day please let me come in and read please no no no you're not right you're not right i go yes i am finally they said come back tomorrow at 5. i said yay can i have a script no they wouldn't give me a script or any sides material to read so the next day at one o'clock when i knew they were at lunch i snuck into the studio and into their office and went through their desk and i stole well borrowed a copy of the script and went to my acting coach jeff corey at the time and worked with him and came back in time for my audition at five and i was fortunate enough to get the part i think on dallas i'm not going to say it was melodramatic but they had categories what was kind of wonderful in the overwatch were the guys were guys and you know they were cowboys and the women were gorgeous dallas ladies you know all of them gorgeous looked like former miss dallas every single one of them including the one that was my daughter lucy charlene tilton they were all miss something miss fort worth ms dallas i don't know laredo all those cities in the south but they were so it was very not stereotypical but it might have started out that way with the villain jr the best villain ever on tv i think god bless larry hagman but uh they had all those kind of stereotypes and um i think that that was one of the most establishing things about dallas and uh made it kind of in a category all by itself originally the show was romeo and juliet it was bobby and pam montagues and capulets and all the big if that would have been the follow-through premise we'd have been down in two years you know the dallas was never intended to be j.r ewing this you know evil man you love to hate and hate to love and all of that stuff that was purely accidental but once leonard katzman saw it then they wrote to it and that's when the ratings just went through the roof well you know when you're starting anything new you're feeling out everybody and they're getting to know each other and so forth and um mr katzman who was the producer was a wonderful guy and he and i struck up a friendship and he he recognized that that i knew a lot about texas i mean i was uh born in fort worth and brought up in a town called weatherford which is on the other side of uh fort worth about 60 miles west of dallas and so i knew the vernacular and the mindset and so forth and i modeled my character after a gentleman who just passed away recently jess hall jr and he was the aquinas quintessential jr and i just took his character and lived it bobby was going to die at the end of the fifth episode and then it was going to be the character of pam living in the south fork ranch with all of her arch enemies etc etc and in a meeting at the networks leonard sat there and he's old school producer and he listened to everybody talking and he he said very quietly why does she stay in the house they said well because he said you go she just inherited like a hundred million dollars why is she living upstairs in a bedroom there was silence and somebody in the room said maybe bobby doesn't die and there was my career quite literally is exactly how it happened because i was going to be out after five episodes that was before i ever found any of this out by the time we had the five episodes it was a continuing story with bobby in it but originally he was going to die had it not been for leonard when we first started larry hagman was the ringleader and he brought us all together with champagne and put us in his this car we called the armored car that he had in dallas and it was freezing cold it was snowing and we were staying in a little hotel with little tiny rooms with cockroaches were crawling all over and it was larry brought us together and we bonded and this is not something that you can force to make happen there is a chemistry and a camaraderie that happened off the screen that translated to the screen in dallas so it's a gift barbara miller was a brilliant casting director our producer leonard katzman was an amazing producer so they knew what they were doing but they did a great job in assembling the cast that they did well you know it's those are the things that are hard to explain to verbalize they really are um but there was there's an instant chemistry that we had um i i you know i can't describe it it's uh it's it's magical i remember walking into the first reading and i had my western uh garb that i always wore anyhow and i had a case of champagne and a big leather sack with ice in it so that's what lightning is i walked in the door and she said ah i'm your wife i'm sue allen and i said hello darla and that was right there i knew that woman was just just the best leading lady i'd ever have larry walked in cowboy hat slung over his shoulder he had carved leather saddle bags over filled with ice and two bottles of champagne big big creature that walked in i mean it's an awesome awesome sight and he looked at me and he went hello darling i thought well this is major nelson major nelson and the man from atlantis i said what the hell is it's a sitcom honey no it's what is this where am i the only one for me that had any substance was barbara bell getting thought okay all right there's hope here um but that's what happened and uh then we had our first scene together in um in dallas and uh we started bickering and honestly to this day to this day we do that he'll say miss gray where did you get that sweater and i'll say something whatever i bought it and oh well do you get it on sale or you know just he just does it and i do it right back and then people i mean whenever if i haven't seen him for a while and we're together in the same room he will both start start with something and people around go oh boy this is like a real jr swelling scene and you can feel them kind of start backing away it's like i'm going to throw a bottle at him or something weird's going to happen i don't know what it is it's magic it's that damn twinkle in those blue eyes that gets me every time dallas wouldn't have survived 13 years if jr was a cardboard cutout larry hagman because of the consummate actor he is and his talent kept jr so alive so multifaceted um that's why they call him you know that's why they said the villain you love to hate him because if he was just if he just played it the way you know a lot of actors would have played the way it was written it wouldn't have you wouldn't have cared about j.r you wouldn't have cared about his family or anything and i think that um that larry led the you know led he was our ringleader on the show but all of the actors i mean i haven't seen the show in forever and um i had to put on a dvd to watch something to answer some questions for somebody and i said to larry after i watched like a couple of episodes i said damn this was good i really get what all the hub hub is about this it still holds up yeah we have really big hair dripping lip gloss and shoulder pads but outside of that i mean the show holds up and he said little niecy good right and good acting will stand the test of time and it really does larry's the pied piper and he always has been that long before dallas and long after dallas and now here dallas again um he has always been the marker by which we all know how far to go how far not to go how to pull back how to always do your work we can have as much fun especially larry and myself we can have as much fun as two people can possibly have as long as the minute the company needed the camera to roll we could play our parts the way we're supposed to and that doesn't happen all the time sometimes people can't gather it back together and he was instrumental in establishing that i don't call these things with larry his idiot sequence idiosyncrasies i think of them as um larry's a for a force of nature so back in the day you can't now but people would smoke on the sound stage and larry was uh an ex-smoker one of those vicious ex-smokers that just will blow it right back in your face and he always had those little portable fans that would blow it back in your face he went through a period of time that he did not speak on sundays and i think the rest of us kind of liked it and he knows we did now i got a call one morning early sunday it's like eight o'clock in the morning in dallas hello hello larry put my on the phone that's larry's wife my guess on the phone what does uncle larry want he wants to go get chili he wants you to go get chili with him i said well when she said now i go it's eight in the morning where i don't know he wants to go find some chili hot enough to suit him so i said all right i'll be there in half an hour and we went and spent the day i said there's not gonna be anything open larry his son preston and myself we ended up just going from place to place sampling chili all over dallas and then went smokey and then banned it and he didn't talk the whole day it was a sunday we had a great time he was basically a comedy actor at that point you know until he did dallas i don't think people really thought of him as a dramatic actor um he was just really first of all very talented and second of all just so much fun you know i mean you know there's the famous things about the days that he didn't talk out of malibu and we'd all go out to malibu and go marching down the beach and his wife mai had created a spa in their house jacuzzi kind of thing and we'd all sit around in there i mean it was you know again here i am you know just new to california green as anything and i'm out in malibu you know with with these great people it was uh it was pretty amazing that was a big deal that was a big deal i think 390 million people saw it i think that's conservative too but i know that during that period of time restaurants would shut down if they didn't have a big television set nobody go out to dinner and then people were having parties dallas parties and so forth dallas was even popular before the who shot jr to the extent that the networks kept coming back to the company mid season and saying could we have two more episodes could we have three more four more episodes because they were making so much money on the show so leonard had scripted dallas for that year i think it was the end of the second year that he got shot i'm very bad at this but whatever year that was that he got shot they had scripted up to and let's say it was 24 episodes and they knew the big cliffhanger at 24 was going to be something and then the network said we need two more episodes and they went ah you know you can imagine they've done this whole bible of plot and everything and they had to figure out what how to extend and have a cliffhanger in two more episodes and that's when somebody in the room again said well let's shoot somebody and the obvious choice was let's shoot jr everybody wants to do it anyway and that's how it happened so they shot jr he collapses on the floor that iconic shot of him lying on the floor freeze frame we had three months hiatus and then the actors went on strike so the whole audience worldwide was counting on in three months knowing who shot jr does he live or die it really wasn't who shot jr it was does he live or die that was the real premise of the cliffhanger the who shot happened after we started the following season and then we i think went about five episodes before we discovered who did it but the real cliffhanger was does he live or die so actors went on strike the hiatus instead of three months was six months it was a huge it was over a 90-day strike very very unfortunate thing for the business very fortunate for dallas um and on top of that so you have cliffhanger hiatus actors on strike and larry says if it's ever going to happen i have to do it now and he decided to renegotiate his contract which takes a lot of nerve you're only two years into a show but he held out he didn't report to work dallas was a huge success and i thought well you know i'm playing i'm getting a secondary salary here so i thought it's a good time for me to ask for a little more well that was when they shot me and i figured well if i don't if i don't get the salary raise and they fire me i'll never work in the industry again so i have to go for it all the way and i did i asked for a huge amount and they didn't think it's going to last that long and that was like in the third year and so when they gave me that raise with the incremental weight rages down down the line i mean it lasted for what 10 years after that so it turned out to be a pretty good salary so i was the first guy to negotiate that so i figured all those kids out friends owe me at least 10 percent you know they were getting a million dollars each good for them i just want a little piece you know the world knew that he was holding out so if jr lives is it going to be jr is that they're going to recast it built up such a groundswell of interest that by the time we started the season and he still wasn't at work he missed the first episode by the time he got back to work and we started to address the who shot him then the fact that he's alive the entire world wanted to know the answer and it took us to a level that most actors never get to experience the interesting thing to do dallas in and i came back i think in 87 it might have been i think so um there were minimal paparazzi there were minimal you know entertainment tonight shows people weren't hounding and skulking and stalking and all of that but there was enough interest in the fact that the press had come out that i was returning to the show of figuring out how so leonard had figured out that that it was going to be a dream that i had to come back he knew the premise of the shower scene etc but he knew that in one sense you can't trust anyone because you have to trust everyone and that's the impossible if there's one person that will spill the beans then you can't trust anyone so instead of doing the shower on the set at mgm studios and just deciding to do that they got a completely different crew the only people on the set that were from dallas was leonard katzman the producer and our unit production manager who was his nephew so that was the connection and myself and we hired a commercial production company in los angeles to shoot an irish spring commercial and we spent all day in the middle of a huge sound stage with a little tiny shower built right in the center and i was wet and lathering up for about eight hours and leonard knew because he had written the script that all he needed was for me to turn to camera which would be victoria turn to cameron go good morning but i would go good morning beat beat beat and you can have a good morning too if you wake up like the duffy family with irish and we do the whole commercial and then leonard who was directing it would say you know we didn't have enough foam on that they had to make it look like we were really shooting a commercial because if we just did one take and left somebody would go so we spent all day shooting a commercial for good morning dallas was uh was a forerunner uh we brought out issues bigger than life of course but we brought out issues when miscella had mastectomy and swelling had the drinking problem um it was betty ford started the betty ford clinic it was at a time where society was changing things were no longer pushed under the rug there were no 800 numbers at that time um where people could call and get help it was you know if you if you drank that was acceptable uh drugs weren't certainly not but people tried to do the best they could and instead of talking to a therapist if you went to a therapist you were considered crazy and uh so people just sort of quietly they didn't know what to do so women drank men drank a lot you saw a lot of that on dallas but um those issues were brought up on dallas which i found was absolutely fascinating that was my favorite storyline for lucy and i think it was only a three episode arc but lucy met and fell in love with a young man named kit main waring who was the other the son of the other powerful oil family in dallas the main wearings and he was good looking and he was nice and wealthy like on the surface a perfect match for lucy well come to find out poor kitten main wearing was struggling about being gay now back then we had we couldn't even use the word gay we had to say homosexual so this had never been done on television they handled it beautifully and j.r knew that kit was gay and was throwing the wedding for lucy he didn't care about poor lucy he just wanted the two rich families to join together so when kit main wearing sat lucy down and came out of the closet and had to admit i love you but i'm not in love with you i'm gay i'm a homosexual and lucy was devastated but she stood up to j.r she said no i'll handle jr he's not going to uh he's not going to blackmail you he's not going to hurt your family i'll take care of him it defies common sense logic as to why this show has the international appeal that it does whether it's dubbed in another language uh seems to make no difference whatsoever whether whether people even if it's not dubbed and they don't understand the language which has been in several cases where it's not dubbed in some foreign country a small foreign country so they watch it and they're just kind of trying to figure out who everybody is but they love watching it it is again it's magic and i think we did have an influence sometimes not the best but always attractive we showed americans to be quite materialistic ruthless that pretty well describes larry's character but we also were able to show you know a moral compass a sense of right and wrong a sense of equilibrium and that was the victoria characters of pam and my character bobby so there was always a balance uh and if you only concentrate on one character you know it's all about goody two-shoes and you miss the dynamic of the other side of the human being so we did a lot of stuff in terms of uh i think the world's perception of a basic americana trait when i would have the opportunity to go to different countries dallas was um what the rest of the world perceived as the american way of life obviously a very small segment but the world perceived it like that and it was the 80s and it was greed and excess and money and power you know all that i i had a friend of mine from russia his name was konzelowski and his father was a great director and he was a director he used to come over to america and he would bring over big tins of caviar beluga caviar and i would trade him like 50 uh cassettes of dallas for a liter of well i mean it's a good deal for me and he'd take those cassettes back of dallas and clone them and to the extent that after about 10 of them you couldn't tell what it was could have been knots landing for that matter but my theory was the reason the soviet union fell down is is because they were seeing what we had here all the cars and beautiful clothes and the food and so forth because they didn't had any information about the western world over there you were not allowed to see anything uh like so i thought that maybe dallas was the downfall of the soviet union the episode of knott's landing that i did was i had a great time doing it and you know it was a soap opera then it became i think it became something else and they didn't even really talk about the ewings or daos it became its own entity which it's great it was very successful i think that knots more than any other of the if you want to call them soaps had their feet on the ground more than any of the others and they were all wonderful i mean i'd rather see the diamonds dripping and uh the furs uh falling off the sliding off their arms and uh throwing down the you know the drinks at the liquor cart or whatever the bar card but the truth was that knotts had characters and people that i think more people could actually relate to when we were real david jacobs used to say that dallas is about them and knots is about us one of the reasons knott's landing was so successful at the time was because we always had our finger and the on the pulse of what america was at any given time and we changed when society changed we went through five i think five presidents reagan bush clinton bush who am i missing someone but anyway we were coming out of uh reaganomics when dynasty dallas became this show that was about everything middle class kind of aspired or wanted to watch and see you know this this saga of people who could actually wear maybe jiaras and it was all about oil oil and get rich and knots landing wasn't about this elitist group knott's landing was about middle class america on any level you could find middle class we were the neighbors who were looking over the picket fence at life and community the audience i think would laugh with us there was an identification people embraced the characters as they would their friends we were we were in their homes we on knots landing we the characters are not slanting would be home watching dynasty in dallas if you want to take it literally we'd be watching those shows for the very reason our audience were watching the shows that was the difference between our show and theirs and of course you know i think that's why they identified so much of why knots landing was on for 14 years for the most part dallas and dynasty dealt with much wealthier people so that the average person out there watching television couldn't relate as much to them i mean they lived in dallas in this big huge mansion and you know knott's landing was a cul-de-sac in a suburb kind of you know it was it was the kind of house that people who were watching lived in um and dynasty the same thing it was all about and when i came on the show i was the sister of karen's husband and um worked in the used car lot i was the bookkeeper and and i did feel that with the show it needed a little bit of that glamour that it was i thought not a good idea to have people come home from work sit down watch television and watch people in a used car a lot just so i thought it needed a little bit more glamour so i pushed for my character to become successful in business and you know get more glamorous on that end so then the show had both it had the glamour but it had the reality everybody else lived in the cul-de-sac you know still so that it had the broad range had the base of the reality and had the glitz of the glamour

Channel: Pioneers of Television

Views: 79,928

Keywords: Entertainment, celebrity interviews, funny interviews, funny celebrity interviews, Pioneers of Television, Pioneers of Television interviews, celeb interviews, Larry Hagman Dallas, Linda Gray Dallas, Patrick Duffy Dallas, Charlene Tilton Dallas, Michele Lee Dallas, Joan Van Ark Dallas, Donna Mills Dallas, Larry Hagman, Linda Gray, Patrick Duffy, Charlene Tilton, Michele Lee, Joan Van Ark, Donna Mills, Dallas TV Show, Dallas TV Series, Dallas 1978 show, Dallas 1978 series

Id: 2dhIZGj5y-c

Length: 34min 2sec (2042 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022