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TV Guide : May 13-19, 1972 : Article by Dick Adler
What were some of NBC's top executives doing skulking through the back corridors of CBS in Hollywood last August? They had come to watch a black night-club comedian with about 20 minutes' acting experience run through the first act of a pilot script. It was an American version of a British comedy series about a father-and-son team of junk-men.
Before you wonder at this seeming breakdown in broadcasting protocol, consider the fact that the pilot was the brain child of producers Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, whose All in the Family on CBS was even then starting to soar up in the ratings. Network executives are like dice players: they tend to stick with winners. So when Bud Yorkin calls and asks if they'd like to come over to the All in the Family rehearsal room and watch Redd Foxx go through the first act of the Sanford and Son pilot, even vice presidents in charge of programming say, "You bet!".
Which is not to suggest that NBC's hot new Friday night show coasted into its berth smoothly in the wake of All in the Family. It took Yorkin and Lear three years to get the Archie Bunker saga on the home screens, and various people have been wrestling with the Sanford and Son concept even longer than that. The original, called Steptoe and Son and featuring two superb actors named Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett, has been running in England for 10 years, on and off. An early American version, starring Lee Tracy and Aldo Ray, never got past the pilot stage. Screen Gems, which owned the rights for a while, didn't even make a pilot. And the current team (Yorkin, Lear and writer-producer Aaron Ruben) put together a test episode with veteran actor Barnard Hughes and New York-based Paul Sorvino which didn't sell. It wasn't until they thought of making the junk dealer and his son black that the pieces really began to fall into place.
"I knew right from the start that we should go the ethnic route," says Ruben, who produced The Andy Griffith Show; created its offspring, Gomer Pyle, USMC; and was commissioned to write the Sanford pilot. "We tried one version where the father was Irish and the son took after his Italian mother; it didn't come off. Then we began to think of casting black actors--the timing just seemed right for it.
"In New York, we talked to Cleavon Little, who said, 'you know who you ought to get for the old man? Redd Foxx!' It hadn't really occurred to us; the father is supposed to be 65 and Redd is only 49. Then we saw him in the film 'Cotton Comes to Harlem'-- playing an old junkman, as it happens--and we knew he'd be perfect."
NBC, which up to this point had been biding its collective time and waiting to see what the team produced, began to perk up its ears when Foxx was added to the pot. "They said, 'Now you're getting someplace; Foxx is a known personality with a big following from his night-club work and his records.'" Ruben goes on. "To play the son, we picked an actor named Demond Wilson, who has been in films like 'The Organization' and 'Dealing' and who did a marvelous All in the Family with Cleavon Little -- they played two burglars who break into Archie's house.
"The day after we signed him, Demond and I flew to Las Vegas, where Redd lives, to get the pilot script in shape."
"We sat in Redd's recreation room, with his seven dogs running in and out, changing and rewriting anything Redd or Demond thought was awkward or out of character."
In between Redd's two shows a night at the Las Vegas Hilton, Ruben began to rehearse the first act of the pilot -- just the father and son together, letting the audience in on the rather special love / hate relationship between the querulous but contented old man and his hapless son who still harbors dreams of a better life. "In the English version, the father is very caustic, even vicious," says Ruben. "For a lot of reasons, we just didn't feel that attitude was right for Redd, so we made his gentler." (In much the same way, Archie Bunker is a considerably paler shadow of venom and bigotry than his English counterpart, Alf Garnett.) The show's American name came from Foxx, who was born John Sanford and has a brother named Fred. The son's name, Lamont, came from a long-time friend of Redd's. With most of the key elements in place, Ruben felt they were ready to show Yorkin and Lear what they had.
"On Tuesday, which was Redd's day off from the Hilton," Ruben said, "we all flew back to Los Angeles and did that run-through at CBS. One of the first things the NBC people said was, "Do you think we can go in January?" I had to give up my honeymoon at the Connaught Hotel in London, a place I have been trying to get into for years, but I think it was worth it." Luckily Ruben's bride -- actress Maureen Arthur -- agreed. Also luckily, he had 38 original Steptoe scripts which he could adapt for the new series. "Those scripts -- all by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson -- are the best examples of television-comedy writing I've come across in 20 years in the business," Ruben says. "Of course, they only did seven shows a year in England, so we'll soon have to come up with new scripts of our own."
Beginning in midseason doesn't seem to bother Bud Yorkin, who directed the first few episodes of Sanford and Son and serves as executive producer for the series. After all, it was at the same time a year earlier that an unknown quantity called All in the Family premiered. Yorkin, who realizes that comparisons between the two shows are inevitable, makes a strong point of stressing the differences. "Fred Sanford is not a black Archie Bunker," he says. "The old man isn't bigoted -- he's simply honest. In one of our first shows we had his son take him to a fancy bar full of mostly white people, for his birthday. The son says, 'This isn't one of your honky-tonk saloons, Pop.' And Sanford answers, 'Sure looks like a lot of honkies to me!' That's a comedy line, of course, but it's also something completely out of character.
"All in the Family opened lots of doors for us and every other show on television," Yorkin admits. "People are beginning to approach comedy with more realism and honestly than ever before; I know The New Dick Van Dyke Show is going after much more adult material. Sanford and Son is another good example. For years, TV networks and ad agencies said, 'We don't want to show anybody poor.' the theory being that people will be depressed if they see anyone lower down the economic ladder than themselves. Radio got away with it; there used to be many shows about poor ethnic groups. I guess seeing it in front of you is what makes the difference. One of the major concerns about Sanford and Son was not to make it look to grim. The Steptoe set in England was very dark and gloomy; we took great pains to make ours poor but not depressing."
Not depressing to be sure, but definitely a long way from the kind of opulent life style which television usually gives even hard-working, underpaid secretaries or teachers. Fred Sanford's living room, as seen at NBC's Studio 3 in Burbank, has furniture that looks as though people have actually been sitting on it, plus the odd objects that we all collect scattered about. It is so homey, in fact, that Redd Foxx in his ordinary rehearsal clothes -- small-brim Western hat, blue leather vest, blue checkered shirt with a gold medallion around the neck, cerulean-blue trousers, natty golf shoes -- almost looks out of place, more like a mod Dodge sheriff than a Watts junkman. His off-screen walk, that of a jaunty 49-year-old who is delighted to be working in television, is also at some remove from Fred Sanford's rheumatic shuffle.
"The hardest thing for me to adjust to," Redd says, "is sleeping at night again. I used to sleep all day when I working in Las Vegas; you meet a whole different class of people when you sleep at night." The actual work of acting, he says, is much less daunting than he thought it would be. (Although he has been on stage almost all his life, his small part in "Cotton Comes to Harlem" was his total acting experience before Sanford.) "The character I'm playing is a natural, pretty much like I'd be if I were 65. Being the kind of comedian I am, I always try to become a part of the story I'm telling anyway, so doing the show falls into the same area. It's really not a whole new thing for me -- but I didn't realize it until I'd done the first few shows."
Foxx thinks that the time is just about right for a series that shows the other side of the American dream. "If the time isn't right now, it never will be. Sure it's a side of life that television hasn't shown much, but don't forget there are more people like Fred Sanford in the country at home watching television than there are like the folks you see on most other shows. These people can relate to the warmth of our show, to the small things that we're happy with. I'm happy and content here in my room, next to my junkyard; I'm 65, I've got my own business, I don't need or want any help from anybody. The only message we've got, if we have one, is that this is the way people live."
A lot of performers have mixed feelings, at best, about doing a series that could tie them up for years. Not Redd Foxx. "I've been working for 35 years to get three or four years of steady work in a row," he says. "I used to work what we called the black night-club circuit -- Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago. If you were lucky, you'd get two weeks' work in Newark, then nothing for a while. It was only about 10 or 12 years ago that I began to get work in the white night clubs. So I hope this show goes on forever. Do you think I'll miss doing night clubs? Maybe. I'll probably go back to Las Vegas during breaks."
Demond Wilson, the younger half of Sanford and Son, has been an actor since he was 4 1/2, about 20 years ago, when he played on Broadway in "The Green Pastures." His change of character between real life and screen life is almost as dramatic as Redd's; Lamont Sanford is a downtrodden man in his mid-30's, hoping to break out of the junk business but knowing deep inside that he never will. ("We have to emphasize that Lamont is in his 30s," explains Aaron Ruben, "or else people might wonder why he doesn't retrain himself for a better job.") But Wilson is young and fill of energy, constantly breaking up after whispered consultations with his co-star. "Redd and I pick up from each other," he says. "He gets some little acting tricks from me, I get comedy timing from him. We do it without talking about it much, almost instinctively. People who watch us are sure that we've worked together a long time. But although Redd's been a hero of mine for years, we never met until we did the pilot."
Nobody connected with Sanford and Son was cocky at the outset; despite All in the Family, the record of shows starting in midseason is far from spectacular. And Sanford is an unusual show in many respects. There are just two basic characters, not the usual gallery of colorful types found in most series. "I think now our biggest problem is to introduce other people who will embellish Redd and Demond," says Bud Yorkin. "Steptoe and Son was primarily a two-man literary exercise, almost like the plays of Samuel Beckett. But, as you know, they only did seven shows a year. We're fooling around with other continuing characters: there's a friend of Redd's played by Slappy White. There's a predatory husband-hunter played by Lynn Hamilton. There are two policeman, one black and one white, who will continue. We'll experiment until we come up with a group of permanent characters that works."
Another element which the producers hope to add to the Sanford mix is black writers and directors. "We have several black writers working on script ideas right now," says Ruben, looking anxiously toward that time, midway through next season, when his supply of Steptoe scripts runs out.
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