- Welcome back to another segment
of "Behind the Scenes of 'The Waltons'".
Today, I'm going to be talking about the episode
from Season 3, "The Marathon",
where John Boy spends numerous days
dancing with Daisy in order to win prize money.
Most of the episode takes place at this dance hall
where John Boy and Daisy
have entered this dance competition.
He originally meets Daisy when he goes into,
just, you know, kind of a regular little store
to get some supplies for school.
He has a week off from school,
so he gets intrigued about this dance competition
and, you know, thinks Daisy's cute.
So he agrees to sign up,
not really knowing what he's getting himself into.
Mama is not happy about this at all.
She thinks it's, you know,
it's just low-class and you know,
that he's making a spectacle of himself,
and she's not at all comfortable with this activity,
but he's like, I promised; I'm going.
Our daddy doesn't seem to feel the same way.
He thinks, you know, he's now 18
and he can make his own decisions.
I had a fun subplot piece in this episode,
along with Ben, who's building a sort of crystal radio set
and the rest of the kids are helping him with that.
And ultimately, we're able to listen to a bit of the radio
broadcast of the dance marathon.
But there's a point where, I've talked about, I think that,
you know, I'm not crazy about heights.
This was probably one of the most intimidating things
I had to do was when I had to be up on the roof
of the house.
So up on the second story of the Walton house set
on the back lot,
walking down the roof and then leaning over the side
to drop a wire down to the window
that's supposed to go into the boys' bedroom.
So, that was, that did not make me real comfortable,
but I think I managed to make it look like
it was no big deal, which for Mary-Ellen,
it probably was no big deal.
Our director, Ralph Senensky,
did a whole blog on his website
about directing this episode and experiences he had.
And so, he said I was welcome to share it with you.
So I'm going to share a lot of that.
And I really appreciate it.
If you haven't read Ralph's blog,
he talks about all the various different shows
he has directed over the years.
So, well worth the read.
I'll put the link into the section below here
and you can check it out.
So, he shared that our producer, Robert Jacks,
who was our producer over the first few seasons
of "The Waltons", that he at one point
had screened for Ralph, the movie, "They Shoot Horses,
Don't They", and had talked about how he had an interest
in trying to get the rights for that novel
and wasn't able to.
But the subsequent season,
when Ralph was invited to direct another show
and he was handed the script for "The Marathon",
he realized that it was "The Waltons"
version of "They Shoot Horses, Don't They", which, you know,
revolves around a dance marathon.
And the fact that it's equally about the Depression
in the 1930s in a town.
So, Ralph saw the parallels between these two stories.
As a ten-year-old growing up in Mason City, Iowa,
Ralph said that his family would, on Friday nights,
he would go with his parents to the local Armory,
where they had these dance marathons.
And he said they did go on and on for days and days,
weeks even, because they raised money.
You know, the more people got involved
with the people who were involved, the people dancing,
the more they would spend.
And so it was a real moneymaker during the Depression.
So, he was able to bring a lot of that knowledge
to his perspective as a director on it.
Specifically, one of the things that Ralph Senensky,
said about this episode that struck me
was, "What I especially admired about Nigel's script,"
that's Nigel McKeand, who wrote this script
for "The Marathon",
"was the way it didn't treat John Boy's
entering the marathon merely as an adventure,
a youthful escapade.
It broadened it into a drama
about a mother's having to accept her son's growing up.
I remember reading a review of this production
when it aired that commented on John Boy's rebellion.
That it was unusual, but nice to see this darker tone
in the series."
I agree; it was one of the first times
I really saw John Boy argue with his mother
about something she didn't want him to do
and showed that he was growing up,
and then everything he went through in the experience
of this week-long dance marathon,
and as you saw the toll that it took on all of the dancers.
You know, he looked disheveled as it went on.
They hadn't really slept, they were tired, they were dirty.
They were physically
and emotionally drained by the experience.
And it really gave that sense
of the desperation of the times.
As far as dealing with the actual physical locations
of doing this dance hall, the set for this episode,
our art director, Ed Graves,
because TVworked on a tight budget,
much tighter than films,
he designed a set where there were no walls,
and he hung this large, black Cyclorama curtain
that was used to create sort of the boundaries of the set.
And then within that he erected set pieces.
The band stand and the bleachers and arches
and things like that, which then, and, you know,
because creating all the physical structure
would have cost much more.
Evidently in real life,
many of the people who participated in these dance marathons
had been former Vaudevillains.
And that aspect was represented in our script
through the characters of Spanky and Helen
played by Lennie Weinrib and Joyce Jameson,
who actually did have a history in Vaudeville for real.
And Ralph said he had worked with Lennie
on a production in the past,
and that he'd seen the two of them do
these Billy Barnes Revues in the Hollywood area,
which I guess were musical reviews back in the day.
Lennie and Joyce ended up doing a lot
of their own choreography,
which they did very well and was really highlighted
in some of these little spotlighted dance segments
that the two did during the marathon,
which was designed to get the audience really engaged
and behind them as a dance couple,
and then people would throw money onto the floor
for them if they liked what they were doing
And they shared that if sponsors
really latched onto a particular couple,
it could mean free things for the couple.
So, Spanky and Helen were constantly trying
to bring positive attention to them as a couple,
but they did do in real life,
a lot of their own choreography,
as did Richard and Dierdre,
Dierdre Lenahan, who played Daisy.
And of course with Richard
having had, both of his parents were dancers,
he came by this from early childhood.
His ability to dance.
And again, he just,
he looks very comfortable on the dance floor
and has a real style and flair to what he's doing,
which I always noticed about Richard.
I'll share with you what Ralph spoke about
in one of the key sequences.
He said, "A large part of the pre-production day
on the recording stage was spent recording the music
for our Jack Rabbit run, an elimination dance
that was another contribution out of my memory of the past.
I selected 'California, Here I Come'
as the music to be played
and we recorded it in several increasingly fast tempos.
Incidentally in Mason City,
the elimination run was staged every night.
That was the major way of eliminating contestants.
We spent at least a full half-day
doing this sequence with two cameras.
We photographed the runners in the increasingly fast tempos.
For each tempo of music, there was a wide master angle,
an angle on John Boy and Daisy,
one on Spanky and Helen, another on Steve and P.M.,
one on the master of ceremonies,
and one on Fred, his assistant on the floor.
And we ran at least four or five-minute runs
for each two camera set up."
So that was a lot of film for that one sequence.”
But as I watched the way it developed,
there was a great deal of tension in the building of it.
And it was edited brilliantly,
and it created this real sense of eerie, creepiness,
and desperation that ultimately culminated
in Spanky's collapse and the elimination
of Spanky and Helen from the competition.
And I found watching that, that, you know,
I was just like right in there with it
and horrified by what these people went through
and that desperation I spoke of,
you know, what they went through to try and get this money.
Ultimately, John Boy decides that he can't see a reason
to really continue on with this dance marathon.
Although, Daisy says she can't quit.
She's able to team up with another dancer
whose wife had to drop out, but John Boy, he's had enough.
And when mama and daddy come to visit him,
he decides it's time to just go back with them.
We never do hear, in this episode, the outcome for Daisy,
but I'd like to think that perhaps she stuck it out and won.
Another unusual set of good nights for this episode
where it's actually the morning and there, John Boy is back.
He's trying to sleep in and we have a series of good nights
and good mornings in the daylight.
So, the only time I remember us not having
a good night sequence where you see the lights go out
in the house,
but rather it's broad daylight.
Not only was this a favorite episode of Ralph Senensky's,
but he said that he heard our producer Bob Jacks,
of the 91 episodes that he produced for "The Waltons",
"The Marathon" was his favorite.
I wanna thank Ralph Senensky once again
for sharing his information of the filming
of the episode, "The Marathon"
That's what I have for you for this segment
of "Behind the Scenes of 'The Waltons'".
I will be back with more "Behind the Scenes"
and more "Ask Judy".
Thanks for watching.