- Welcome back to another segment
of "Behind the Scenes of The Waltons."
Today, I am doing a segment of "Ask Judy."
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Shawn asked the question:
"I was curious about the sitting arrangement
around the kitchen table.
Everyone had a spot and for the most part sat in that spot.
Is there a story behind that?"
I don't know if there's a story behind it.
But early on in Season one,
clearly at some point, we were either assigned spots,
or they just said, "Go take a seat,"
and so we ended up in particular places.
And then I think there might had been
a bit of moving around in Season one,
but very early on, we sort of established places we sat.
And then I know in my own home growing up,
I always sat in the same place at the table,
and I think that was true for the rest of the kids.
So we just felt like that was our spot,
and that was where we always sat.
And occasionally, we would have directors come in,
and because of the sequence of lines in a scene,
they might want to be able to move the camera, you know,
down from one person to the next to the next
to capture the dialogue in a particular order,
make it faster.
So they would say,
"Great, I want you to sit here and you to sit here,"
and we'd be like, "No, no, this is where I sit.
I don't sit over there," you know.
That would be very strange and just, you know,
reiterating that aspect that we have the places that we sit.
And so I think there was many a director
that may have been a little frustrated
by our insistence that we had our spots,
and then they had to rethink how they shot something,
but it was something we as a cast felt strongly about.
So I think we won that one.
Marie said one of her favorite scenes
is in The Conflict with the Moonshine and the way
in which, although there was a whole conversation going on,
so much of what you're getting
is about the reactions of Olivia to John
and then John-Boy and then Grandpa,
everybody drinking, the men drinking the Moonshine,
and her and Grandma's disapproval of this.
So there's sort of a scene within a scene.
So she found that, she said,
"I can't even remember what the dialogue was about.
The looks between Olivia, John, and John-Boy
were the real story."
So she said, "Can I reflect on these types of scenes
where there's an entire conversation going on,
but the focus is clearly placed on the drinking?"
I know there are scenes
where it's not necessarily about the drinking,
but it is sometimes about the undercurrents in a story.
And this is sort of common in good writing and good acting,
where the sort of subtext of a scene
is really what we as an audience get,
that it isn't so much the literal meaning
of the words being said
but the undercurrents.
So that would have been a combination of good writing
and then the fact that we knew these characters so well
and how they would react to these circumstances.
So some of that was the actors' choices
and understanding of their own character,
and then sometimes there was the director's choices
about what they shot.
And then in the editing,
what they chose to show at different times
also tell us a story.
So definitely a combination of all of those things
would bring about that final result.
And then she says, "How many times
would this scene have been shot to get all the angles?"
In that case,
each time you see an angle you haven't seen before,
that would have been a new shot.
So you would have had what we call the master,
the big wide shot.
Most of the time,
and particularly since our Director Ralph Senensky talked
about how little time they had to shoot this entire episode,
he would have been trying to minimize the number of times
they had to move the camera and change lights.
So there may have been one sort of panning shot
that followed that jug of Moonshine.
There would have been sometimes shots
that combined more than one person,
so you might not have
just close-up single, is what we call them,
which would be one person,
or you give it a two-shot, which was two people.
And sometimes it was a three-shot.
And then sometimes if it was a whole bunch of people,
we'd call it a raking shot
because the camera just sort of raked the whole site.
That happened a lot at the kitchen table
where we'd be on one side and you'd see the whole side.
And if there wasn't something significant
about an individual character
where we needed to get just them,
they just grab all the additional lines
through a single shot like that.
And sometimes when we had a lot of extra guests
around the kitchen table
where we joke about, "Oh, it's a raking 14-shot,"
you know, because you had so many people.
It was always challenging to shoot "The Waltons"
because there were 11 regular cast members.
So much of the time,
we had scenes that the entire cast was in
plus then if we had guest stars
or we had other, if Ike and Corabeth were there,
or the Baldwin sisters were there,
or, you know, some of the other members of the community.
We can have a lot of people in shot,
so it was potentially a lot of extra camera shots to get.
So directors were always having to be creative
in how they set up the shooting
so that they could minimize the number of times
the camera had to move
and the number of times things had to be relit.
Michael asks, "During the filming,
were there times any of the actors called each other
by our real names instead of our character names?"
So, you know, I think it happened occasionally.
I believe people have commented
that they may be caught somewhere
where it slipped by editing, where, you know,
somebody called another member of the family
by their real name.
Chances are if it slipped by
and ended up in the final episode,
it was because they didn't have an alternate option
that they could use.
And so they were kinda like, "Well, hopefully,
this will just slide by and nobody will notice."
Or somebody just really didn't notice.
If we noticed, or one of us noticed,
we'd say, "Oh, hey," you know,
"you called Eric, Eric instead of Ben."
But we kept pretty used to just flipping that switch
and then when we're on cameras
our characters just falling into that.
Subsequently, someone else asked, "With the small children,
like the twins playing John Curtis,
how were they able to keep their character names
and own names straight
and respond to the correct name?"
That's a really good question.
I never really thought about that one.
I worked a lot with Michael and Marshall Reed.
And I think that they were never necessarily required
to specifically respond to their name and like turn.
Or maybe they just responded because they heard a voice
and turned to respond to the voice.
But I think, overall, it probably just slid right by them,
and they just sort of paid attention
to what was going on around them,
and we assumed they were responding
to their character names.
Or they would do the editing
in such a way that you might see me
or someone else call them by their name,
and then by the time you cut to them,
they were already turning,
so we might have been able to off camera, you know, go,
"Michael, Michael or Marshall, Marshall,"
and then when they turn that the edit was done in that way.
So there's a lot of ways to get around that,
but good questions.
I have mentioned at times about Will Geer not driving.
And I didn't necessarily know the history of that,
or if he never drove,
or just as he was getting older chose not to.
But sometimes you think you see Grandpa driving,
but usually you're just seeing inside the cab,
and so that would have been those - what we call process shots
that were done on the sound stage,
where it is footage of the country roads behind them
and someone in the crew rocking the car
and branches going by lights to feel like we're moving.
So those sort of process shots,
obviously, Grandpa could look like he was driving.
You might have seen him get into the truck at times
and then supposedly take off,
but it was a wider shot,
and you wouldn't have necessarily identified
that it wasn't Will driving.
Or if you really had to see him enter a shot or exit a shot,
they may have put a rope on the truck and pulled it in.
Or you might have been,
there might have been people pushing it
so that you could see him land from inside the truck.
But then, our frequent director Ralph Senensky
added to that, having seen me talking about this,
and he shared this with all of you:
"Hi, Judy, you mentioned you did not know
if Will drove the truck in one shot.
I've an interesting Will Geer story for you,
and I think he was the one who told me about it.
It was in 1949, and Will was cast in "Intruder in the Dust,"
an MGM film directed by Clarence Brown.
The film was being shot on location in Oxford, Mississippi.
The company was well into production
when Will arrived at the location.
Early in the morning on his first day of filming,
the assistant director explained to Will
the long, complicated shot that director Brown had planned.
Will was to drive a truck quite a long distance
and stop on a definite mark, get out of the vehicle,
and move into a dialogue scene.
Will told the assistant director that he didn't drive.
The assistant panicked.
He knew Mr. Brown had planned the sequence
without any coverage,"
coverage being additional, you know,
close-ups and things like that.
"He had planned the sequence without any coverage
and would not be happy with the turn of events.
Someone was found immediately to give Will driving lessons
so that he would be ready
by the time filming of the scene began.
Well, you can guess the outcome.
The dialogue scene was rehearsed
with the truck in the spot it was supposed to arrive at.
The lighting crew did their work. It was time to film.
The truck was driven to its starting position.
Will got into the truck, Mr. Brown called, 'Action,'
and Will came driving down the road.
He not only missed stopping the truck
on the designated mark.
He drove it right into something,
either a fence or building.
Mr. Brown did not get his scene all in one shot." (laughs)
So, yeah, fun story about Will.
So keep an eye out and see if you can catch somebody else
doing the driving for Will.
That's what I have for you for this segment
of "Behind the Scenes of The Waltons: Ask Judy."
I hope you'll join me again
for more 'Behind the Scenes' and more "Ask Judy."
Thanks for watching.