The Waltons - Eric Scott Interview - Behind the Scenes with Judy Norton

welcome back to another segment of behind the scenes of the waltons today i'm going to be speaking with another one of my cast mates my brother ben played by the wonderful eric scott if you're enjoying these please do hit like and subscribe thank you so much for agreeing to come talk to me and um and all of our loyal viewers well judy before we even say that i've been watching yours and they come out twice a week and you have done such a good job um of just re first of all taking the energy and the time to learn uh relearn what we've been doing all those years and and really telling people what we were doing and it's it's it's a lot of work that you've been doing and and i'm very impressed by them and uh i want to thank you because it's something that i my kids will be able to look at for years to come and it was all the stories that we were doing every week but we never put the time to talk about them because we were just doing them yeah i wish at the time we were filming we didn't have iphones and stuff like that so i very rarely had a camera on set so i don't have really pictures and stuff of the set particularly or the people so i just occasionally will come across something or find something or something that one of you have and it was work even now you go to work you don't take pictures of everything that's at work it was our work so just because everyone in the world wants to see what we were doing at work every day that's not what we were doing yeah we were just going to work we were showing up at the time we're supposed to start the day we we got into makeup we got into wardrobe we went on the set and we did our job and at the end of the day we washed up and went home so we didn't think that people would be asking us 50 years later um that tuesday that you were filming um what was it like working with that person so we just didn't think of that and we certainly didn't think of taking our little cameras that we had and take pictures um you know if one of us had a birthday maybe our parents were there and they took a picture of that day but day in day out we didn't have that kind of uh need or desire absolutely yeah i i don't know if you got to see the segment i did where i had found some home movies that my mom shot yes oh that was amazing i had no idea because i passed away i ended up with all these different things that she had she had all these little old school reels and i was like ah what do i do with this and i think it was some your cindy that said oh i had talked about you guys sending some things to be converted but there was a lot of them and i didn't know what they were and and and if they charge by the minute and i'm like i could end up with who knows what but that one said something about studio and so i said oh well let me print this up and see what it is so that was so fun well those were little gems that you found and then i had to figure out how to narrate it because there was no sound on it for the editor i literally like ran when i had it as in a digital form i ran it on the screen and i shot it so that i could narrate what was happening at the same time you could see what was happening so then the editor could know that that's a good idea so yeah yeah i use i use very um very old school techniques to do a lot of things because that's all i know i'm old school well we we call it crystal you call it old school i call it primitive yes well we although some of our primitive things by today's standards were being able to shoot on film on 35 millimeter film yes which was such a gift yeah yeah yeah although you never knew what you had until you saw it well that's right but uh we sure saw it later on after it was edited and music was added and what what beautiful beautiful stuff we put together back then huh absolutely yeah and i i'm fascinated now by the types of questions that people ask uh and sometimes they're things that wouldn't have occurred to me sometimes they're things that we completely take for granted because it was just normal for us you know people asking about not realizing that you shoot out of order right so you know me trying to explain why that was practical maybe wasn't easy for as easy for the actors although i think it's easier in a series because you really know your character so i think it's easier to track the arc of your character in in an episode i just didn't really think that much about it you know and i also found on the series that i wouldn't say that our directors always trusted us to know our character so i wouldn't say that i felt that most directors gave us a lot of input about our characters or our motivation in scenes no um you know maybe they had a an idea that um they maybe didn't see all the shows that we had done so they weren't up on maybe one that we had done so there might be a correction that we might even tell them that well that isn't consistent with this episode that we did two weeks earlier that they didn't direct so i think we had a better grasp of our characters than maybe even they did i remember harry one time wanted me to say a line a particular way and i said harry i just wouldn't say it that way and um he came back to me no you got to do it you got to do it and i said harry i i just can't do it so i did it my way and probably four months later it was on the air and he came to me the next morning and said my wife saw it and you were right so so sometimes it worked that way and it was just a silly little line but i knew that my character would not have said it a certain way yeah the informations were wrong so yeah we knew our characters pretty pretty well um so it was it was just usually just fine-tuning but sometimes the directors would would guide us in something that we maybe weren't as comfortable with or or we always did so you know they were they were there to help us yeah and it was it was nice when i always enjoyed when they gave me a perspective that i hadn't thought of yet that was that was a good one and added something to you know to the performance but also they they in in a way we were we were younger than sometimes my character was much younger than i was as a as an as a person as myself but um but they had been doing things that my life was not there yet you know i was getting married before i was you know before i was 20 um on the show so i had kids before i was even 21 22 um on the show so i was experiencing things that i really couldn't relate to um as well as my i couldn't tap into my own personal experiences on some of these so you know it was nice to have a director on the set that could sometimes give you a little no that's not right so that's not how it goes what's your take on ben how do you see him how did you see that character evolve i know with with someone like john playing jason because john was so musical himself they made that a real part of his character as jason developed so with you how did all of that work for you and how did you see it and did you bring things that were really useful i i you know when because it was such a large cast i i feel that a lot of times they really had the the adults well established grandma and grandpa's characters um but they added that whole salt and pepper uh relationship between the two of them um as the years progressed and and with ralph and michael they just you saw the magic they did with richard they they had a clear defined for us they waited to really get to know us a little bit ben at the very first year i remember that you know the first big episode i had of a subplot was the star and i had the little spelling bee thing and i remember going on the set and we were on the in little school room and that was like the first time it was centered around my character and it was very sweet and and he was just one of the little boys and and it was just a very sweet little tidbit of an episode and by the end of the year i think it was a scene couple scenes i had with michael and the easter story that i just loved but they really didn't know what to do with ben yet um and i think that they found that i was probably a little more feisty they could have tapped into a little bit more of that energy that i had as a as a human being um and it makes for good drama and i think they ran with that a lot more with ben um they made him into a little bit more aggressive than i would have but you know we just had fun with it because it was a fun character to play some people talk about why would you want to play a serial killer because it's fun to do um and and ben not that he was anything like that but he he was definitely he would uh he was a he was a pain his pain sometimes he wouldn't listen he wouldn't uh he was a little bit of a um he wasn't very nice sometimes but you know being the the younger brother or the older brother it was a lot of fun to do those kind of things and be teased tease the siblings a little bit more than than i would normally and i didn't mind doing that so we had fun with that um and then as ben got older um they saw the business side of mine my life uh and i think they got ben into a little bit more of that and fortunately i i saw an episode you just did about mary ellen being shifted off into having her own world away from walton's mountain unfortunately ben was not going to leave the mountain you know they they put the shed set the shed up as he got older and got married and made a walton and son and uh the mill so i had full intention that i was never gonna leave the mountain because if i was off the mountain i'd be in less scenes um but but that brings me to when ben went to the war later on and um i loved doing that that work it was so different for me uh it was interesting because it wasn't like other shows that i had done that weren't that were very it was it was ben but in a different position yeah so it was a beautiful work like in the last 10 days i just you know every time i see that yeah i just i think you're working that episode some of those things were just wonderful so beautiful oh thank you it was it was very different to do it was hard to not think of as being in the back lot and using the jungle and using drusilla's pond as the uh the point of the of the pow camp but um yeah you said they drained it and used to still respond yeah yeah they drained the pond and they just built it on the bottom of the of the the concrete jungle that we had over there um and you know they just amazing how they changed things there was always a little bamboo there that could they could use and stuff like that that they would grow that were indigenous to the area so it was a it was a pretty easy fit for them but we never looked at the the plant species to figure out whether it was virginia or if it was south pacific or europe neither none of the above it was strictly warner brothers burbank studios that's right i want to thank eric for joining me today i will be back with more behind the scenes of the waltons more ask judy and more with eric scott thanks for watching

Channel: Judy Norton

Views: 57,510

Keywords: The Waltons, Judy Norton, Judy Norton behind the scenes, Waltons full episodes, Ask Judy Norton Taylor, Eric Scott, Ben Walton, Richard Thomas, John Boy Walton, Michael Learned, Olivia Walton, Ralph Waite, John Walton, Will Geer, Ellen Corby, Mary Ellen Walton, Kami Cotler, Elizabeth Walton, Mary McDonough, Jon Walmsley, David Harper, Walton House, Grandpa Walton, Grandma Walton, youtube, 70’s TV, Classic TV, goodnight John Boy, The Earl Hamner Jr, Ask Judy

Id: cVcOzCcKU38

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022