- Welcome back to another segment
of Behind the Scenes of "The Waltons".
Today I'm talking about the two part episode
in Season 4, "The Burn Out".
I touched on this episode a little bit
way back in the beginning of my YouTube channel,
but I thought I would expand upon it a bit more
since it's a couple years later
and I'm sort of moving along in sequence on the seasons now.
So, let's do this.
This was an episode we shot as if it were
all one episode as opposed to two parts.
Now, I think it originally aired as a two hour episode,
but then sometimes nowadays with reruns
it will air as two separate, part one and part two.
But both parts, the entire script
was written by John McGreevey
and the entire episode was shot by Harry Harris.
Early in the episode we see Erin
and she is primping in front of the mirror
with her new dress and being oh so vain about it,
which of course plays a main story point within this,
where her vanity becomes one of the things
that impacts the fact that
John Boy's book burns in the fire.
Also, part of the setup, we see John Boy
and he pulls out a pipe and fills it and lights it.
And I love how we go around and we see the reactions
to the various different adults in the family.
And this is the one and only time
that I remember seeing John Boy
have a pipe in the entire series.
I think very early in the series
maybe one time we saw John with a pipe
and he may have spoken about it at some other point.
But yeah, smoking pipes was not something we really saw
in "The Waltons", within the family particularly.
We also early on established the fact that
Grandpa has a habit of forgetting
to unplug electrical appliances.
At first, he doesn't unplug the heating pad
that he has been using by the radio.
And then later on, of course, he gets in the bathtub.
He has the heater on in the bathroom
and when he leaves the bathroom
he does not unplug the heater.
So now we have two different
potential sources for that fire.
John Boy's pipe we actually see as a potential fire starter
when he is in his room writing.
He has lit the pipe, he hears a sound,
he goes into the hallway and he sees Elizabeth there.
So he goes to put his pipe down on a little table
in the hallway, it falls off and lands on the carpet.
And as we know it was a lit pipe.
We are then into the whole fire sequence,
which was all incredibly intense stuff to shoot,
because we did have real flames
and they were sort of gas jets that they
put up along the base of the floors in that hallway,
but that was not a particularly wide hallway.
So to have gas jets and flames
going up the walls in that hallway.
And then for the men who were having to hit at the flames
with towels and blankets and things like that.
I mean, there was real fire flying around there.
We were all wearing fireproof,
I mean flannel nightgowns for heaven's sake, and long hair.
So they did fireproof our pajamas, thank goodness
and did damp down our hair,
but there was a lot of scurrying up in that upper hallway.
And then into the bedroom.
We mostly saw smoke in the bedrooms at first
and you do see us throwing clothes out the window
which comes back into play later on
when I'm like, how did we have clothes to wear?
Well, this is certainly how the girls
and we see the boys throwing clothes out the window.
So all of that was happening very quickly.
This was, you know, the inter-cutting
between the inside set and the outside set.
But when you see the girls throwing clothes
out the window from the outside of the house,
you see that we are throwing clothes
out of the center window.
Someone had asked a question about the windows and stuff.
So in this case, the girls are throwing clothes
out of that center window, whereas the boys
we don't really see them throwing the clothes out,
which would say to me that the boys' bedroom
was not on the front of the house, their window.
And I do recall that at one point
when I was there on the exterior lot
when we were shooting the exterior stuff
and we were up there throwing things out the window
and sticking your head out the window to throw things out,
the two windows next to ours had
big sort of sheet metal sort of enclosures
that they put on the backside of those two side windows.
And then they blew those out so that the flame went out
and was just visible in the window
and did not shoot fire back inside
the structure of the house there.
So, they were able to contain that a bit,
but it was a little daunting to be out there
and throwing something out
and have something sort of explode out next to you.
I wasn't injured or anything,
but it was just, it was startling for sure.
And then of course we shot all of that upstairs stuff
in those hallways and I mean the sequence,
I mean Mary had to fall down in the hallway amidst,
and of course the flames were not as close
to people always as it might have looked like,
but still, it was a tight contained area.
So for her to have to fall on the ground
and lie there amongst that
and for Richard and Ralph to have to be in there
and dealing around the flames was quite something.
So they chose places to put the flames where
I think they showed well for the camera,
but kept us as safe as possible.
We were also barefoot, so keep that in mind.
That was not ideal either.
But we did have fire marshals on the set at all times.
There were safety crews.
They did everything they could
to keep everybody as safe as possible.
So appreciated that.
Of course, then we have the exterior back lot aspect
of filming the fire, and that was all shot one Friday night
and it was quite something.
Obviously word had gotten around on the studio lot
that we were going to be burning the Walton house
and we had I don't know how many spectators,
people from around the studio
that came out to watch this shoot.
And that's pretty unusual to have people
that work in the industry show up
to watch something like this.
I just remember there being a lot of people,
but I just again, remember how real
and how intense it all felt.
And it was very easy to play those scenes
and play the emotions of the scenes
because it was easy to play make believe and what if
and you see Ralph go running back
into what looks like a burning house
and you see him bring back out,
us waiting to see are John Boy and Erin
and Daddy gonna make it back out
and looking at the house with flames visible
and stuff like that was, yeah, it was very emotional,
but fortunately we shot all of it and nobody was injured.
And that was the good news.
In the story, shortly after that,
you see John with the fire crew working to put the fire out
and I thought it was interesting
that he now had pants and shoes on.
I'm not quite sure where these pants
and shoes were supposed to have come from,
but it makes perfect sense that he was indeed.
I think it would've been distracting to see John
in his long john's still putting out a fire and barefoot.
It would've made no sense.
So, we're taking a leap of faith there that somehow
clothes of his were tossed out onto the roof as well
and we were able to get those.
When we're into the barn
and everybody's in the shock, the aftermath of the fire.
And we start up in the loft.
I love this shot of Harry Harris's,
the boys up in the hay loft
and then it comes down
and you see just Erin and Mary Ellen just sort of in shock.
And then the fact that I, Mary Ellen turns her head
and that allows the camera to follow where my head went
and that takes us over to where Mama
and Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa are, and Elizabeth.
So, those are more cases of the types of things
that directors do to motivate the movement
of the camera at times.
In terms of the set dressing and all of that
they obviously did not burn the house.
They brought in charred lumber and things like that
and in the outside we saw the scorched parts of the house
and we got more of the sense of the damage
when we went into the interior sets.
And evidently our art director, Ed Graves,
who I've spoken about, he arranged to get charred,
real charred wood and from real fires
and just gathered up all of this debris,
put 'em into the living room and they put soot,
whatever it was that they put on the walls
to make the walls in the house
look like they had been charred and burnt.
So all of that was brought in when we went in
to shoot those sequences of the house.
Again, interesting to me that the kids were barefoot
when we walked through the house
supposedly the morning after
and somebody said something about, "Oh, be careful.
Don't touch things, things are still hot."
And yet we're walking around barefoot in there.
So that to me, made no sense.
If things were supposed to be hot, then yes
I think our feet would have been protected
or they would've just not had
the children go inside the house,
but they wanted that for the story.
That's what I have for you for part one
about the two hour episode, "The Burn Out".
I'll be back to wrap up
the rest of the story of "The Burn Out" next time.
So, I'll see you then.
Thanks for watching.