Q&A with cast of the Designing Women

[Music] hey guys it's jim halterman from tv guide magazine that pilot read was so much fun i have such great memories of designing women not just because it made me laugh but it also really made me think the way they hit on so many different topics and we all love a good julia sugar baker rant um there's a great one in the pilot that kyra sedgwick did so we have more to talk about with some of the people from the show uh first off we'll start with creator and executive producer of the series linda bloodworth thomason hi hi linda hello everybody and then she played mary jo shively please welcome annie potts and of course she plays charlie and fraser stillfield please welcome gene smart hi everybody so it's been a while since this pilot was shot since it aired when was the last time any of you actually looked at the script i know the episodes are running on hulu so you might have checked them out but actually like looking at the script and reading those lines again linda start with you just revisiting this like last night we couldn't find it we couldn't find it we're obviously not hoarders um and and we just hit the mother lode we found uh my husband posted on facebook and we heard from a producer on our show and he had the entire i'm going to send it to you uh annie and jean he had the entire motherload of designing women he had all he had wow like 167 scripts or something when we did this did were there were computers invented i mean was there more than an electric typewriter seriously the warner service yeah runner typing service did it and uh wow we we did it we were really almost live i mean i wrote the script every weekend and we uh put it we read it on monday put it up we you know staged it on tuesday shot it on thursday and had a couple of days to send it back out and then start it over so it was like it was the wild west um gene how was it for you to revisit charlene in this manner as far as the pilot oh i mean it was just instant deja vu i mean i could just hear everybody's lines and the way they read that i mean it was just so much fun and and then of course i noticed some of the little things that ended up getting cut probably for time because and i know we've said this before about linda but i mean she's like a she's like a writing machine you know and she would write these things in longhand on a legal pad and they were and on top of that all by herself and on top of that they were long so we would just con throughout the week having to trim it down and turn it down it was it was amazing annie how about you uh so i hadn't seen it in 35 years or whatever but i i mean i have to say it's the best script i've read in a while i was like my god you know this this thing is fantastic so i don't know i i mean really it should it it should be on again um uh because we need these women saying the things that we were able to say and to tackle the subjects that we were able to and i gene i tell you you know there's a there's a there's a saying that you know you can't play stupider than you are an actor can't gene smart disproves that utterly because gene is brilliant but that character is stupid i mean she's compensating for my last name wow just fabulous i just prefer that's so hard trusting she's a very trusting soul was it to do this was it easy for you to get back into the character i mean was it easy for you to kind of find the voice again kind of i could just hear it you know yeah i could take it yeah it was it was i'm going to interrupt gene because i want to say what the director said about gene and annie um she said linda i've never seen anything in my life like that as soon as we started to read the script because she'd been familiar with the show as a kid she said jean and annie it was like they had just finished the last show the day before and then i thought i thought kyra and wendy did a beautiful job oh they did that well we we did spend a big chunk of our life doing this you know i mean seven years is a long time to do anything well linda talk to me about getting this show just off the ground because i look back to see what was on tv in like 85 and 86 before the show launched and it was like you know miami vice was big in dallas and the golden girls and cheers what was it like selling this show to cbs well it was different i think than any other story i've heard i i knew what i wanted to do because i had met all four of these women while doing other shows but never put them together i knew i wanted to put them together and the woman who really brought designing women together and has never gotten the credit is a casting director by the name of fran bascom and she was so brilliant and her magical genius uh that's the thing that brought annie putz and jean smart together in a show we did with robert wagner they were in jail together in amsterdam and they were so brilliantly and i had met dixie and delta on a show called filthy rich and fallen in love with them and fran had the good sense to want to put them together and she and i yearned for it so i just called up cbs and i said you know what i just want to write for four women i know and i don't care what they do for a living i just want to write for them and i want to put them in the south because it's never been a smart southern show it's always beverly hillbillies and dukes of hazard and i want i want to talk about the smart sophisticated progressive sound and i said and i didn't have them at all annie and i kind of talked about it but i didn't have any of them james smart delta burke and dixie carter i've got them all and they said you've got them you've talked to them and they're willing to do this and i said absolutely and he said we'll shoot that show got in my car called him up said i sold you a pilot and you're all in it will you please do it and of course they all said yes and the rest is history but it was so exciting it'll never happen that way again right gene and annie do you remember that like is that how the process went for you as far as being cast in the show well that's what i that's been yeah i mean annie and i did a guest spot on linda's show called lime street and it was two very funny sisters southern sisters who were diamond thieves and just loopy we were grifters yes and i thought also too hey two two weeks in amsterdam i'm sure i'm there and we just had a blast and uh this i mean i would love to watch that episode i don't know how i could get a copy that episode london let's go for some reason i don't remember my characters now but your character's name was lanark that's a street where i go to goodwill on van i've been there i've been to that one many times i don't remember my character's first name anyway i know i wanted to keep that name for the mary jo i just loved it so much so annie what do you remember about the show getting off the ground are you getting the role of mary jo well uh i remember hearing that uh that linda had done that had gone it was like who does that really they said yes based on that and uh i mean it wasn't like there was anything on paper and i know i do i don't always conduct my career in that way just saying yeah sure i'll what you're just assigning me a character wait a minute um but uh you know they were they were designed very well for all of us your characters had romances on the show there were some romances that developed on the show and then blood into real life gene do you want to talk about that a little bit because that's where you met richard correct true it was episode five but who's counting episode five august 20th um yeah i mean i walked into the building where we did our our uh our table reads and i looked up the splat of stairs i hadn't headed up yet and i saw this actress in there he looked familiar to me so i'd known i'd seen him in some things so i didn't know that he was going to be on our show i just thought it was an actor that i recognized in the building and i don't know we we were i mean we were never apart from that day and we didn't literally howler were already married and were i mean we're one of the most romantic couples i've ever seen and dixie was the the oldest member of the cast but she was by far the youngest person on the set she was like a teenager she always acted like a teenager and the two of them acted like teenagers in love together i mean they were the cutest couple to watch they were so in love they were newly married harry and i had only been married for three years when i picked richard to be annie's boyfriend you know annie needed somebody who had a lot of masculinity but was also very sensitive kind of like my husband i always say if you want a good man you know you need to you try a jock who cries easily and reads poetry and loves mama and you can't go wrong there especially being southern and richard filled all that bill when he played you know a georgia man who was like that linda was was uh psychic because she married off my character the week i found out i was pregnant just under the wire because i thought this is the baptist girl you can't have being an unwed mother on this show it was tova blexi again um and she married the fabulous doug barr on the show and that was as jean said they just sat around each other and looked at each other so yeah there was a lot of love on that stage and we also infused it into the scripts because one of the big things for me was not just to uh tout the new south but to also establish that we were men loving feminists and i really wanted to embrace that you know because yeah you know we're feminists and we wanted to get some things off our chest but we loved our men uh and we loved them on and off the stage and you know i think that kind of was made us distinguished us from other uh happy hour comedies you don't see a lot of love and sexual innuendo that's real on a sitcom but on our show it came naturally one of our favorite shows all of us is reservations for eight because all the men are in it and they go away together and they get into a big talk about the sexes and we list all the crimes that have been through the centuries and then at the end hal hobrick gets mad and says well let me tell you something about women and dixie says yeah go ahead and he says they're always late and so we sort of weighed that properly but also too linda what i thought was so brilliant was you didn't make all four of us feminists i mean suzanne and charlie were pretty pathetic in some ways you know we had our moments we were you know we had our moments we would you know when push came to shove but um it was a great balance between you know mary jo and dick well that was our that was kind of our hat trick is that uh and i think that's why we're a good show for today um and even for this reading because you know we're we're divided country right now and we let all the opinions be heard on our show even though no question we knew it was going to end on the side of progressive thinking that you know every voice got hurt and therefore we were able to attract liberals and lgbtq people as well as we got awards from angel awards from the christian community you know i have citation from mitch mcconnell and the eleanor roosevelt award you know i know nick even the mitch mcconnell uh you know that was that was our neat hat trick and i think it held us in good stead and it's actually a reason that we're bringing designing women to the stage when the pandemic is over you know we hope to take it to broadway and uh starting at theater square in fayetteville arkansas and then going on to broadway as our dream because we think they're that show you know where you can sit next to someone you can't stand and you know laugh your ass off but if you're streaming on hulu some of our other favorites too were big hustle little falsies where andy decided to have a big chest and it changed her entire personality um i mean which we almost read for this but i'm so glad we read the pilot listen the great thing about our show really it was besides having great producers my husband directed most of the really award-winning ones at harry thomason and doug jackson and the late tommy thompson you know we were surrounded by a lot of great men who made designing women a success but it was weird because the men at cbs they were the ones the new ones who came in jeff sagansky howard stringer they were the ones who really gave us you know our free range card they never gave me notes they said leave those ladies alone they came to the shows they applauded and cheered and bravo and if we wanted to do clarence thomas that week if we wanted to do domestic violence if we wanted to do you know anything that was controversial we did you know uh reproductive rights um gun control um as i've said domestic violence what else i don't think we well we did a pandemic we did aids and that was a big yeah we were the first show to address aids and they said yes to all of it i don't think it'll ever happen that way again for anybody so linda they couldn't have done that if you hadn't written them the way you did because back then so many sitcoms were doing you know they do you know this week on whatever a very special episode and they would suddenly sort of be silly all the time and all of a sudden they would try to do a real topical serious episode and it never worked and it just was self-conscious and but for some reason it was able to that's right do that and just pull it off i didn't invent all these characters you know by myself i mean i took so much from each woman because i knew them and so it was you know it was a great marriage of uh writing and actually knowing the people who were going to play it i love it what tell me a little bit more about some celebrity people you heard of during the run or maybe after like people you wouldn't have expected to sit down and watch the show but did who were coming up to you and talking to you well our first telegram because this i know that makes it sound like we're all 90 years old i don't know for some reason oprah was still using a telegram but that was her family a line she loved in the show oh that's great he was our first person to really catch on to us invite us to come to chicago it never happened for some reason and it was taylor liz taylor elizabeth taylor loved the show and became friends with bilta i forgot about her we heard from martina navratilova we heard hepburn who usually does not write fan letters um and even princess die um and so and we heard from all these people and that was you know but and i'm honored by that but i still love the fact that uh so many women from all strata you know social strata and economic backgrounds related to the show and race you know i i have many african-american women and uh latino women say that they loved it too and they weren't all represented on the show and meshech taylor was so brave when he came on because you know what would be an ex-con black man you know uh being sat down in the middle of these four white women in the south that was so brave of him and i didn't really think about it until later he he risked a lot and we didn't put him in we did put him in drag a few times that's right well what you know once the once the show dropped on hulu last i think it was last year because i think annie and i you were talking you and i were talking about young sheldon we ended up talking about designing women but did you start hearing hearing from people again because the show was back on this platform have you have they always talked to you about it when i'm in a situation where people get the opportunity to talk to me a little bit you know it it it often comes up and you know gay men gay men who are in their 40s now who sat on the couch with their mother and felt felt loved in that environment and was like you know i i like to tell a story uh about this this happened to me years ago at the time for whatever reason because you know when you when you get a hit like that all of a sudden you're you know you're three years in and you think is this really what i wanted to do like i was i had a kind of a you know film career going or whatever and it was just one of those days i was just feeling like well shoot maybe i'd wanted something else and i had to go to cedar sinai at a friend in the hospital there and it was evening and everybody had their tv on and i got down about three corridors when i realized that every one of those people all down the corridor they were all watching designing women and they were all laughing and i thought stupid this is this is why we do what we do because you know it lifts people up for all those people there it was making their night a little easier and that's a that is a wonderful thing to have on your resume yeah gene have you experienced kind of the same thing over the years no i i don't remember you ever telling me that story and it's amazing it's beautiful um i i remember the first time that you know we all started getting fan mail and everything you think you know i mean we've both done series before but or you're thinking whoa it actually works like that it goes on you do it and it goes on television it goes out there and people see it and then you know but no certainly to to do a fabulous comedy like that you know and particularly that was you know focused on these female characters i mean it is important i mean sometimes we i think downplay uh what i think actors downplay what they do sometimes and and maybe sometimes feel that it's not as important as what some other people do and and you know but in the scheme of things that it is it is important it is um good intelligent entertainment is really important and my god now we certainly need good smart comedies and things to laugh about and i mean that's it's it's that's huge i remember um somebody said and i quoted charlton heston and i don't normally you know live my life by what charlton heston you know believed in or not but um he he was asked about censorship one time and he said that he used to never believe in censorship at all and he said that he said but he said as an actor you know if you if you believe that what you do affects people in a positive way you have to also accept the fact that what you do can affect people in a negative way which i thought was a really interesting take on what we do but it is i mean it's to make people laugh is one of the most glorious gifts in the world comic relief that's why they call it comic relief yeah that's right and we feel like our gay um legacy if i may you know we don't take ourselves too seriously because believe me number one was making people laugh it always was and i think that's why we you know we're able to maintain a wide audience but you know because we could make the opinions go down with a spoonful of sugar uh but i can't tell you how many gay men have come up to me and said hey i was in my living room in kansas and only child didn't have the nerve to tell my parents during that age show mary jo when annie potts gave that speech i stood up and said to my parents hey i'm gay you don't like that's correct [Laughter] so much and so that really makes me happy in the end i think elevating the women across the country and eventually when it was syndicated around the world that's what meant the most to us and my favorite thing of all the shows that was said was in the rowdy girls which was said by my little niece to me after her mother died i picked her up at school and you know and i was worried about her confidence and everything but she was i saw her running at you know on the playground and everybody was surrounding her and she seemed like a leader to me she got in the car and i said gosh she seemed so popular you know um and what you know everybody seems to love you and she said well not everybody she said but but you know me and my friend she said we do okay we're the rowdy girls and i said well who are the rowdy girls and she said well you know we're the girls who at recess we run and we run till we fall down and our knees bleed but we don't care because we're the rowdy girls and she said and no matter how hard we try we're never going to be the stand around girls and i said who are they and she said hello the ones who stand around and say no thanks i might get my dress dirty and that's kind of what you know that was kind of my mantra all three designing women you know as i wanted all little girls to to feel that and i think these ladies you know were able to do that they heard the message and it worked yeah well i think a lot of people will be happy just having seen the reading and this chat's been really wonderful so thank you all for everything you've done and i can't wait till the pandemic's over so we can see more designing women welcome that opportunity thank you okay you got it thanks so much everybody you

Channel: Throw Back TV

Views: 21,296

Rating: 4.9198399 out of 5

Keywords: 80s fashion, 90’s sitcom, 90’s sitcoms, 90s nostalgia hub, 90s sitcom, 90s tv show, american sitcom, annie potts, comedy series, delta burke, design firm, designing women, designing women full episodes, designing women julia rants, dixie carter, feel good show, julia sugarbaker, laugh track, nostalgia tv, suzanne sugarbaker, tv family, tv office, tv show, tv show fashion, tv shows

Id: Hik7b5RurEA

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020