The Addams Family: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little loan fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music and more. We are your two Da Da da Dat of the Deep Dive. I'm Alex Heigel Incredible and I'm Jordan run Talk and I can't compete with that. Well, you went overboard with some of the actual language, so I figured I had to make it a like a multimedia one like that exact exactly and Jordan's Today we're talking about one of the most curiously deathless franchises in American culture, the family that has transcended both the printed page and screens big and small for nearly a century. That's right, we're talking about the Adams Family, with Wednesday apparently one of the most watched Netflix properties of all time. At this point, we hear it too much Information To help, we take a fond look back down cemetery Lane for an overview of the original weirdos from their origins is missingthropic New Yorker cartoons to mid century TV stars, nineties movie stars, and now Zoomer beloved streaming icons. We weren't recording, but I went on a long ran about how much I love The Cramps. So I'm sure everyone and their mother has seen that general ortego Wednesday dance scene on YouTube or TikTok or whatever. But just go listen to the p s A. Everyone, go listen to the Cramps. I was like the exact right age to get into Adams Family when those movies came out, I would have been five or six, and I think the reruns were probably on TV Land or one of those places, Like I definitely remember seeing those the black and white reruns because I had a big old crush on Carolin Jones who plays Mortisha, and then an even bigger crush on Christina Ricci as Wednesday. And it's not creepy for me to say that because I was five and she was twelve, so it would have worked and she was in Casper. Such a crush on Christina Ricci still do. Don't tell my wife. She doesn't listen to these, but my father in law does. Jordan's I'm gonna go ahead and take a wild swing, and as with a lot of these, bet that Adams Family is not your wheelhouse, right your Gilligan's Island family, aren't you you Gilligan silence, Yeah, we we were. We were in NiCoT Night household as opposed to a TV Land household and nick A Knight. I don't think had the Adams Family. Uh no, you're right. My crushes in this era are indicative of my media consumption habits. They are in order. Madeline, the little red headed French orphan. That's my first crush. Uh. Second crush was the woman on the Mandarin Ora's unless she'll season these tea box not the bear, not not the bear. Third crush was Penny from the Inspector Gadget cartoon. And finally, after graduating from animated characters to actual humans, Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years. And I will stand by that one. Oh yeah, um but yeah, you know, the Adams Family was never really uh on I think or I lived, I don't remember ever seeing it on TV. And uh I never really had the horror Bug. So the movies never appealed to me when we were kids. I think, I I don't really were they less like I remember them being pretty big actually yeah right, but soon just never for you know, I just creepy things frightened me. I was an easily scared kid, and yeah, I just I that energy, Uh didn't appeal to me. I was too busy watching my National geographic Titanic documentaries. Um, I wasn't learning about frozen bodies being pulled from the Atlantic. But you were like women with black hair. No, I'm trying. Yeah, it was more like fantasy stuff or like like Alison Wonderland type of things, which kind of my It was kind of my thing. So yeah, this is a total blind spot for me. Um. I also think I had more exposures to the monsters in this era, so I think I always thought of them as the original mistakenly. So it's like the old led Zeppelin versus the whole situation. Who got to me first? So my allegiance was with them, and then I always thought led Zeppelin kind of seemed like imitators. Um. In this analogy, I guess the monsters of the Who, which what do you think of that comparison? The monsters like, yeah, yeah, the Who are a little bit more cartoonish, you know, uh, and and a little bit less sinister. Um. You know, Jimmy Page did a lot of heroin and bought Alistair Crowley's mansion and was probably a statutory allegedly a statutory rapist. Uh So, I just that makes him more of a Charles Adams character than a then a recycled Universal Monsters archetype. I do like the Monsters. I just think they were so like like, the sensibility is just so different. And I think we'll talk about this, but like those original Charles Adams cartoons are some of them are very dark. We'll talk about the one he never got published. Um of Edward Gory a little bit. Yes, very much, so, very much so well, from the real life cartoonists brief time dating Jackie Oh, to the battle between the beloved nineteen sixties TV show and the pale imitators of the Monsters, and to how director Barry Soddenfeld escape dealing with Nightmare producer Scott Ruden for movie. Here is everything you didn't know about the Adams family. Charles Samuel Adams was born in Westfield, New Jersey, on January seventh, nineteen twelve. Oh, should you just turn a hundred last year? The son of Charles Huey Adams, a piano company executive, and Grace M. Spear. He was distantly related to John Adams and John Quincy Adams, despite the different spellings of their last name, and Suffragette Jane Adams, which is funny. There's a lot. There's a biography of him called A Cartoonist's Life that just that came out a few years back, is really really in depth. So there you go. Charles Adams has roots in the actual founding of the country. The Adams family are America. The real America is the Adams family. Fascinated by the Macabra. Early on, a young Charles Adams spent a lot of time visiting the Presbyterian Cemetery on Mountain av in Westfield. He also enjoyed pranking and scaring people. He recalled an interview once, we had a dumb waiter in our house, and I'd get inside on the ground floor, and then very quietly, I'd haul myself up to grandmother's floor, and then I'd knocked on the door, and when she came to open the door, I jump out and scare the wits out of her. At the age of eight, he was caught breaking into a Victorian mansion near his home, and when America entered World War One, a young Charles Adams began drawing pictures of Kaiser Wilhelm the second being stabbed, shot, run over by a train, or boiled in oil. He loves boiling people in oil, he sure does. And trains, isn't That's like something like Jeffrey Dahmer would do. Barry Snenfeld is his director. Cameo in the first movie is as a passenger on one of the trains that Gomez crashes from almost the time he could hold a crayon in his chubby baby hand. Charlie had begun drawing with a happy vengeance. Linda H. Davis writes in the biography I just mentioned, Uh, he was encouraged by his father to draw, and a young Charles did cartoons for the Westfield High School paper before going on to study at a succession of schools, Colgate University, then University of Pennsylvania, and then the Grand Central School of Art in New York, which yes was located a top Grand Central station. Um And as soon as he saw the New Yorker, supposedly he thought, that's the magazine that I want to work for. But he deed toured getting there via the pulp magazine True Detective, which is where the show gets its name. His job there entailed lightning bloodstains and using x IS to mark the locations of bodies in crime scene photos and illustrations, which is so appropriate. But he was relatively unfulfilled by that gig and left that mag after selling a few cartoons to The New Yorker. Supposedly, his very first cartoon for The New Yorker was in February of two, a sketch of a window washer, which he made seven fifty, which seems like a lot. His most famous one for the magazine is definitely a nineteen cartoon which is getting into the full's air end of describing a visual medium in podcasting, But it's the famous one where you see there's one skier looking down a hill and he sees another guy who has just gone down the same hill, and the tracks of this second man's skis go round a tree, and it's just like such a neat little visual gag that you just like go, you kind of do a double take of it, almost like a mad magazine thing kind of Yeah yeah, but it um that generated more reprint requests for The New Yorker than any other that year. Um it's his most famous work for them. Uh. Supposedly, two months after it was published, he got a letter from a psychologist in Illinois who told him that she had been using this image to determine the intelligence of people that she was evaluating. She would ask them why the image was funny, and if they didn't get it, she said, you are not as smart as a nine year old child, So that's just a psychiatry. In the first half of the twentie century, Folks friend of the pod archaic psychiatric evaluations, um Abbot Costello film hit the Ice recreated it as a visual gag. So very funny. Just a series of of of visual lineage of that particular New Yorker cartoon that is great. The first Adams Family cartoon appeared in ninety eight and featured only Mortitia and Lurch being pitched by a clearly out of his depth vacuum cleaner salesman. The characters were not named at the time and only got names once the television show hit the air in nineteen sixty four. I didn't realize that Adams preferred Repelli, a pay on repellent, instead of Gomez, and he originally suggested the name Pubert instead of Pugsley. Which didn't pass network sensors, but they did use it as the name of the baby and Adams Family values, so it did maybe in there after all. Yeah, it's such a gross sounding word. Yeah, he named Wednesday after the nursery rhyme Monday's Child, which includes the line Wednesday's Child is full of woe. And according to a longtime New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff, Adams only drew about two dozen Adams family cartoons, very few, if any, of which feature all family members. Wait, he only drew like twenty four. Well, that's what I'm not sure about. I was trusting the New Yorker because this was from the New Yorkers, from their cartoon editor. I would believe him. But Mancoff might actually be referring to the number that we're actually published in the New Yorker. And Charles Adams was a New Yorker contributor for like decades, but he didn't always his cartoons weren't always starring his family. They would just be other like weird little one off site gags or whatever. And he drew a bunch of covers for them, sixty eight something, and he published between twelve and cartoons of the New Yorker. But I have only seen I've seen the total number of Adams Family cartoons UH pegged from like fifty eight to a hundred and fifty I think so. But he published books of them like so and collections, so that it's like a weird situation of like how many actually made it into the archives. Also, they were never called the Adams family. That was like a thing that came up when the show came on, Like they were never never named any of them that it wasn't like it didn't come up in the New Yorker as like next from the Adams Family, like they were just one off cartoons. Wow, that is so interesting. I didn't realize how much of the identity of the Adams family was from the TV show. I thought a lot of that was in place for the cartoons. The character of Gomez was Charles Adams attack on Thomas E. Dewey, who was then the Republican governor of New York, while the family member added the last uncle, Fester, was the one he later said he related to the most. Thomas E. Dewey. That was the guy who was supposed to who was slated to beat Harry Truman. Truman right, and if you look up pictures of him, he has the Gomez mustache. Oh I didn't realize that. Yeah, there's that really doesn't know. There's that famous picture of Harry Truman standing victorious on the podium after the election of He's holding an early edition of some local paper that's mistakenly printed Dewey beats Truman, because I guess no one thought he'd win. The family got up to all sorts of misanthropic shenanigans. They poured boiling oil on Christmas carollers, They asked their neighbors for a cup of cyanide, and their idea of child's play. It was the role holders onto passing cars. William Shawn New Yorkers second editors said of Charles Adams cartoons, he translates something which is already fairly frightening into something almost cozy, which, yeah, that's fair. Man Coff and other New Yorker editor added to Charles Adams quote tapped into that vein of American Gothic that has a touch of paranoia about it, seeing behind every comforting facade the uncomfortable truth about the duality of human nature. But where Gothic literature usually combined these themes with romance. Adams made the horror hilarious, disturbing, but at the same time friendly, identifiable, and acceptable. So he worked for the Signal Corps during World War Two making like propaganda, cartoons and animation. One of his co workers was a pre Marvel comics Stan Lee in New York. Uh so, yes, there is a world in which Stanley and Charles Adams like hung out. Um. But he never stopped working as a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and as his celebrity grew, sort of played up a lot of the bits about him. Alfred Hitchcock was a fan who showed up his place in Manhattan. He owned two original the cartoons. And there's a name drops Charles Adams in north By Northwest. I think it's care Grant. He says something like the two of you sitting there, that's a that's an image that only Charles Adams could have come up with. Their friendship makes so much sense to me, especially like the TV show Hitchcock did like that dour dry, like turning to face the camera with like an axe in his head and stuff like that. I guess some purpose yeah, Yeah, Rumors about his eccentricities abounded. Much of the decoration of the Adams home in the TV show was basically pulled from his apartment. He decorated his apartment with suits of armor. He had a huge collection of medieval weaponry like spears and swords, flintlock rifles, working crossbows. He had a coffee table made from a Civil War era embalming table. Uh. He had a human thigh bone lying around. This is just a grab bag of stuff I read from a bunch of our magazine articles about him. I didn't realize that he was this much of like an eccentric character or like a known character. Like he seems like he was like almost a society figure. Yeah, he apparently he was quite the like schmoozer and bond vivante like he was. Really, it's so weird to think of like the Adams family guy being this like John John cheeversque, like mid century Frannie and Zoe New York high society guy. But he was very much like a man about town. That is wild. Wow. But he did play up some of his eccentric reputation. He'd respond to fan mail on letterhead inscribed the Gotham Rest Home for mental defectives. He wore flaming red pajamas or knights templar robes to parties, and he dressed as a Lincoln for an awards ceremony that was not a costumed event, but his biographer Linda Davis said that it was tremendously difficult to find anyone had anything bad to say about him, and by all accounts, Charles Adams was a very lovely man. I just love this. He's a claustrophobic who was afraid of snakes for all of his spooky, ooky gooey stuff or whatever the words are in the song, uh didn't like snakes having Indiana Jones. Charles Adams once told James Thurber's fellow New Yorker cartoonist, I've gotten a lot of letters about my work, most of them from criminals and subhumans who wants to sell me ideas. Some of the worst ideas come from a minister in Georgia. And incidentally, there was one Adams cartoon that supposedly didn't make it to The New Yorker. A nurse handing a swaddled baby over to a sinister person in an alleyway with the caption don't wrap it. I'll eat it on the way home. That's incredible. That is incredible. According to the Adams Chronicles by Stephen Cox, another Adam's biography, Adams repeatedly submitted this cartoon to the New Yorker magazine and was turned down every single time. Supposedly it was like a bellweather of like how his mental health was doing at any point, Like basically colleagues would like start talking about, like Charles was in a bad place again he submitted the Baby's cartoon. This would just go happen repeatedly, but in cycles. Um, yeah, I don't want to dwelt too much longer on him, but I would like to talk about his love life. There's very interesting stuff there. He was his big car aficionado and in fact died behind the wheel of his car in Manhattan. And he his big date thing was to take women on drives down into Pennsylvania and and beyond from New York, doing like eighty on the highway. And he was linked to Hollywood stars like Greta Garbo and Joan Fontaine and incredibly, a post assassination, Jackie Kennedy Linda Davis talked about it a bit. There was this sense that like they knew it was never going to let go anywhere, but they did date repeatedly, and there was this funny story where they were at a party. They had been invited to someone's house to stay over him because the sixties, and her husband had just been shut in my head publicly. Um, there was spoiler alert, spoilers sixties. Um. They were supposed to be in separate bedrooms, and uh, someone like came into their their Jackie's room, and Charles Adams was like sitting on the bed in like full nineteen sixties old man like pajamas and a smoking jacket, like fully clothed. Nothing. They weren't caught like in flagrante or anything, but they was still like oh goodness. And they left and Jackie's supposedly turned to him was like, well, I'll be invited back, but you won't. Um. It has long been rumored that his first wife was a woman named Barbara Geane. Dave was the basis for Mortisia, but I think it was kind of a chicken or the egg situation, Like I think he just liked women with dark hair. And then after the Adams family blew up his wives just started to dress like that, like to play everything up. His second wife, though, a woman named is Stell b Barb, who I think later married into like becoming like actual royalty or like one of those weird like inbred twelve generations down the line like royalty and name only Habsburg situation. Uh. He married her nineteen and she was a little more Lady Macbeth than more Tisha. She was a practicing lawyer and faked a pregnancy to get Charles Adams to marry her, and then faked a miscarriage Uh, and proceeded to convince him to sign away his rights to a lot of his work and repeatedly physically abused him. She threw one of his African spears at him. She hit him with a high heel over the head and sent him to the hospital for stitches. Uh wound up in control of the rights to the Adams family, his portion of the Adams family like TV rights, and even conned him into signing over houses to him and taking out a one hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy on himself that would pay out to her. UM. Linda Davis quotes his lawyer a letter his lawyer wrote to him. Uh, the said I told him. The last time I had word of such a move was in the picture Double Indemnity, which stars Barbara Standwick as a woman plotting to murder her husband for the insurance money. But M. Davis writes a lot about how she was just shocked by how much, how much this was like a textbook abusive relationship, Like she really put him through the ringer, and he was just like okay, like I just like he remained in touch with her after all of this. Yeah, so she's uh. But but his third wife, Maryland, whose nickname is Tuh, they married in a pet cemetery in In five they moved out of New York, although he kept his Manhattan apartment uh to Saga Ponic, which I assume is in Long Island with that name um, where they lived the rest of their lives. Charles Adams loved dogs and never had or wanted children, which is the reason his first marriage broke up. There's a Washington Post profile two that had a great anecdote about a dog he adopted. The dog's current owner said, I'll tell you the truth, Mr Adams, this dog detests children, and Charles Adams said, I'll take it. Uh, he got the rights to his work back, and before she died in two thousand two, she established the teen Charles Adams Foundation that is dedicated to, you know, preserving and archiving his work. And the ashes of those two Tea and Charles and all of their pets are interred at the Pet cemetery at the Swamp, the Saga Ponic property, which is just such an adorable little coda to his life that at the end of it, he was happily married for eight years and his wife got all of his rights back, and he's he's buried with all of his dogs in his Saga Ponic. I can't stop saying that word has such a great mouth. Feel well, Uh, since I already went on an unprompted rant talking about the rise of monster culture in the fifties and sixties and our Monster Mash episode, I would like to look at the bizarre coincidence of having both the Adams Family and the Monsters on air within weeks of each other through the lens of the other sitcoms airing at the time. Obviously, you know, you can just say, okay, yeah, monster culture, like that's why we got those shows. But there's another interesting trend in sitcoms at the time, which was the period following World War Two, gave rise to the birth of these domestic sitcoms. Right, you're thinking, father knows best, leave it to beaver Assie and Harriet Donna reed that we're kind of these combination of advertisements for all kinds of household stuff and etiquette manuals and like how to raise your kid basically just like playing on the whole man in the Great Flannel Suit, American post war prosperities, suburbia tropes, etcetera, etcetera. Of the four hundred sitcoms aired between nineteen and nineteen, over half of them were these like domestic situations. So that is the milieu that was just slightly in the review mirror when the Adams Family Monsters came out, because as just as quickly as that was sort of the dominant culture, you do get the kind of beat nick proto hippie uh backlash to that, like um that people are like, oh, you know Squaresville man like moving into the suburbs, death and I like jazz and I'm gonna do a bunch of speed and write bad novels. Um, that's my Jack caroract impression, have troublesome views on race. That's my normal mail or impression. Um, So TV sitcoms. Where I'm getting at with all this is that at some point TV sitcoms, uh start portraying this like influence of the counterculture coming at the suburbs, but they do it in the most off kilter, in bizarre way where they have all of these outsider characters, like coded outsiders just move into the suburbs and be wacky, so like not have yeah, green Acres, the monsters in the Adams Family where they are literal either like goth missing thropes or actual literal movie monsters. And then you have Witched and I dream of Genie with Witchcraft, Beverly Hill Billies again, and then alien literal aliens my favorite Martian or Lost in Space, which is like the Atomic Family transplanted into space, and also my mother of the Car. Yeah, but um yeah, it's just that's that's what's just so funny about it to me is that they were like, well, rather than directly critique these things, let's have a father who's a Frankenstein and a mother's who is a Dracula, and a child who's Awarewolf as one of my favorite Simpsons quotes when they have Eddie from the Munsters on The Simpsons, and Who's like, if your mother was a Dracula and your father was a Frankenstein, why were you awarewolf? Doesn't make sense? Um. The Adams Family beat The Munsters to air by six days in September of sixty four, But the concept for the Munsters is like very hotly debated. It might have actually originated as early as the mid fourties, when a guy named Bob Clampett, who was like a big Looney Tunes animator, He pitched an idea called the Monster Family, in which the dad was a Frankenstein's Monster character and the mother was a vampire, and supposedly um according to a book by Donald F. Glutt called The Frankenstein Archive, that got as far as a pilot which went to an unnamed major studio but never went anywhere. So then about two decades later, Chris Hayward and Alan Burns, who are working on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show in Nie, come up with their version of that exact same thing. So I don't know if it's a case of intellectual property theft by an untoward studio or just a lazy pitching. But Burns, who also then went on to the Mary Tyler Moore Show, UM probably his bigger success. Uh said in this book Funny, you should ask the oral histories of classic sitcom storytellers by guy named Scott Luin, Chris and I came up with the idea of something called Meet the Monsters. We envisioned this family of very weird people. And here's the underlined part. We sort of stole the idea from Charles Adams and his New Yorker cartoons about these weird looking people who lived in this house, and we're just bizarre. So Burns explained that he and Hayward were pitching this agent named Les Colodney, who in turn took their pages and fed them to two writers at Universal, normally Mean and Ed Hoss. Those writers did not know that they were not this guy's ideas, so he was basically stealing ideas, passing them off as his own, and got this greenlit. And because Universal owned the rights to Frankenstein and Dracula, they were like, well, let's make these characters instead of these weird instead of like Charles Adams archetypes, Let's make them Uh, you know Frankenstein's Monster and the Bride of Dracula. Uh, And that infuriated Burns and Hayteward. They took it to the Writer's Guild and it became this whole thing where they ultimately wound up with a credit like created by credit on the show and chunk of the merchandise in cash. So there's all this drama around the monsters. Anyway, NBC executive David Levy, who became vice president of Programming in nine and sickly turned the network around at the time, but it shows like Dr Kilderry and Bonanza and brought Johnny Carson to the Tonight Show. Uh. He was walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan when he saw a copy of the collected Adams cartoon Homebodies in a bookstore window, which he bought and basically just got in contact with Charles Adams through the New Yorker, set up some meetings with him about adapting the cartoons into a TV show. Was like, hey, can you get me names a couple more sketches of characters, and was like okay. And then in the Adams Chronicles that book, Levy told the author Stephen Cox, Adams never had much further input or feedback after those first meetings. Uh, Charles didn't even want his name on the show. They they were literally like I think it got as far as them being like, well, like what should we call it? Like they have to have names, right, And he was like, I don't care. I'm like, all right, we're gonna call the Adams family. And he was like fine, and he went back to sleeping with JACKIEO, a bereaved Jackie O. Which who among us commercial break. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. The first casting choice for the Adams family was John Aston, father of Seawan Aston, star of the Goonies and various lord of the Rings Things and a personal favorite of mine. Why do you love John Aston? I love Shawn Aston because the Goonies John Auston. I like him as the dad in the original Freaky Friday with Joy Foster. Um. I don't know, it just seems cool. I like his suits and I like his gum mess suits, uh asbestos line go mess suits. He's cool and he's still alive, which, yeah, out live pretty cool. The other personalities in this John Aston to Whole authors Stephen Cox, that during the first meeting you had with the team behind the show, producer Marty Ransohoff told him that they wanted to build the series around the character of the Butler, whom they wanted John Aston to play. But NBC executive David Levy found John Aston after that initial meeting and I guess coral Leman for another meeting, where he told John Aston that he wanted him as Gomez, explaining that he quote really saw the show as father knows best with different people. In an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, John Aston said the producers gave him a lot of leeway in terms of shaping the character of Gomez, which is where the character's Spanish Latin roots came from. But he did battle the network over wanting to shave his hair to resemble the cartoon, and I love this. The pockets of his Gomez suit wereligned with asbestos to safeguard against this habit of constantly putting his lit cigars into them. John Aston told author Stephen Cox, we never wanted Gomez to use a short cigar. It wasn't elegant if we got to take two three or four and the cigar ash was getting too long, I would have to light up another cigar. And probably it's not a coincidence that one of the show's sponsors was cigar brand Dutch Masters. Despite having the highly kercinogenic asbestos in his pocket, which is rumored to have killed fellow Spook enthusiast Warn Zevon, John Austen has at age nine two outlived nearly everyone else from the show, including Ken Weatherwax, who played Pugsley and his successor as Gomez, and the Adams Family Movies Raoul Julia, who died after wrapping the sequel to the first film, Adams Family Values. Um Caroline Jones uh Mortisia, the original Mortia she was then married to and in the process of divorcing Aaron Spelling. U was not the first choice to but to play Morticia. Levy initially wanted Joan Huntington, who was an actress who would later pivot to writing, including appropriately a documentary on Charles Manson, but Caroline Jones, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for a movie called The Bachelor Party. A couple of Golden Globes. She was the network's choice because she was more of a known quantity um. She split with Aaron Spelling before the show premiered. There was a New York Times report on their divorce from August of sixty four that explained the reason in charmingly vague pr terms. Mr Spelling stayed out late at night without explanation. I bet he did. Uh, Funnily enough, Carolin Jones had actually already met Charles Adams on a film set once, which was an occasion marked when her poodle Contessa bait him. After she agreed to do the series, Charles Adams sent her a telegram that read, I know you will make a Darling Mortisia, but please leave Contessa at home. John Aston has said that he and Caroline Jones were instantly attracted to each other, but managed to keep things professional, which made their electrifying on screen chemistry so true to life and such a definable part of the franchise moving forward, such a degree that I actually just sort of assumed whom they had an affair because or we're actually together, because they just act like a pouly couple we used to do. Right. Oh yeah, no, I mean that's like the big thing about this is that they were like the first television couple to like actually be physically affectionate with each other and and you know, yeah, they're the couple on the other side of the bar like one of my they we like your vibe, um, John Aston said. We used to do joke promos for the show where I'd say my wife and I are the best adjusted couple on television him talking to the Baltimore Sun, which is kind of true. But the fact that gum as a Mortisia got obviously excited about one another was something the studio got letters on, which was kind of stupid. He added, it smells I'm worth noting that the two characters never get into a fight on screen, so yeah, again, he's kind of right. Aston told author Stephen Cox. Both of us, meaning Caroline Jones and himself, had an idealistic attitude towards marriage. Caroline had a marriage that wasn't working out, and I too had some marrible problems. Both of us really wanted a good marriage, and both of us really loved our mates. At the time, each of us probably wished we could have a marriage free of problems, and both of us played that out in the show Work Spouse Goals. I know, it's so cute, and it's like there's something about them show because this show was only two seasons, right, so there's just something about them getting this little like short oasis of time where their marriages were crumbling and then just sublimating their mutual attraction into making like one of the most adorable on screen couples of all time. Custom designer Nolan Miller said that Martitious outfit was the most difficult one he ever had the design because it was so tight, especially around the feet, which also made it hard for actress Caroline Jones to walk. They made dozens of identical versions of the dress for her, which took Jones twenty minutes to get in and out of, and I guess her wig and makeup took another hour and a half, Yeah, two hours to get into Mortitia's look. And they they just velcroder in and out of it um, which is a tradition that they not the velcro, but the incredibly restrictive stuff that they continued with Angelica Houston in the which we'll get into later. Jackie Coogan, I had no idea he was in this. Yeah, It's so funny too, because like when you look at that, like Christopher Lloyd plays the character completely differently, like Jackie Coogan has actually very off putting, high pitched voice. But it's crazier that Jackie Coogan was like a child star alongside Charlie Chaplin. He was in the Kid and he was like one of the earliest richest children child He was basically mcaulay Culkin. He was the first kid star. I can't think of a young of like a more famous child star, and made like an ungodly amount of money, like adjusted for inflation, like fifty million dollars, which his parents squandered. Sued his mother and stepfather Um over their mismanagement of his career, resulting in the creation of a of the legislation called the California Child Actor's Bill. He really wanted to play Uncle Fester. He was a fan of the Adams cartoons. Um his daughter told Cox in the Adams Chronicles book. Jack went in and wasn't offered the part. He went home, gott in a costume, shaved his whole head, did his makeup the way he pictured it would be, went in with the high pitched voice, the makeup the costume all on his own. The producers sent everyone else home. I love all of these stories about actors who are like, I'm getting this part and yeah yeah uh. Director Sydney Landfield got into an argument with Jackie Coogan at one point in an early episode and Coogan yelled, don't with me. Sydney, I sued my own mother. Um. Jackie Coogan had a wild, wildlife even after the child star stuff man he um he enlisted in World War Two and demanded to be put in the front lines. Became the first glider pilot to land Allied troops behind ye Japanese lines during the Burma campaign. Um so, like Jimmy Stewart, he got into the war and was like, none of this propaganda stuff put me in combat and this is insane. One of his buddies was a guy named Brooke Hart who was the sort of wealthy kid in San Jose. And this kid was kidnapped and murder It was like a Lindbergh baby situation, and an enormous mob thousands of people went to the jail where the kidnapper and murderers were being carcerated, took them out of the jail and murdered them in the streets. They lynched them, and Jackie Coogan was there and involved, supposedly, so oh, and I forgot about this. He survived a car crash in Mexico that killed his father and his father's best friend. So Jackie Coogan, Um, I saw a lot of combat pilot, murderer, car crash survivor, and your uncle Fester. He was so cute as a kid. Wow, And then he was Uncle Fester as for the kids in the show. Ken Weatherwax, who played Pugsley, had barely acted before. The biggest thing on his resume was a series of toothpaste commercials. But his uncle by marriage was Al Jolson and his half brother was in the first three seasons of Lassie. And his uncle's were two guys named Frank and Rudd weather Wax, who were Lassie's trainers and the owners of the first dog to play the role. So uh yeah, Lassie Adams family connection. There you go. Very nice. Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday Toll NBC executive David Levy at the audition, I don't read and handed in the script back and he thought she was being a diva much like Leonardo DiCaprio during auditions with James Cameron for Titanic. Turned out she actually literally could not read because she was six years old. So Levy read all of her lines out to her and she repeated them back. It worked. Louren would later say that she was discouraged from smiling on set to keep her character consistent. Yeah, she and Carolyn Jones got very close. She had a sad life. She um, I guess it's turned out well. Her mother was like an alcoholic and she had a kid at sixteen. Um, she married, Uh, she had a bunch of She basically married a porn star and who she met while doing makeup on one of his movies. She did had her own struggles with drugs and alcohol. It was bad. She had a but but you know, they divorced and she is I guess turned her life around. Uh sorry, Okay. The six ft nine pound Ted Cassidy played Lurch, being cast with virtually no professional acting experience. Oh wait, he was the guy that was in the opening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Yeah, he was always playing like the heavy um in in like in Brown Face Sundance. When this is over, if he's dead, you can stay sundance. I don't want to be a poor loser. But when this is over, if I'm dead, kill him love to. That's a great scene. Casside was an accomplished keyboardist, and his hand he was the thing. He was the disembodied hand thing that is always popping out. Yeah, that's his hand. He would swap right in left hands just to sometimes to see if anyone would notice. No one ever did. Um, that's great. Yeah, but he was actually kind of sadly like typecast by this and just haunted by it. Um. John Aston called him the giant who wanted to play Hamlet, which will be the title of my memoirs, the saddest children's book ever. Yeah, exactly. Um. He wasn't supposed to speak at all, but he ad libbed the line you rang in in his audition and they were like, that's hilarious and started writing lines for him. He moved into voice over work in the seventies. He voiced the Hulk in seventies six episodes of The Lufer ignoble Xby show. He died ninety nine, and he was cremated and buried in the backyard of his Woodland Hills home he shared with his girlfriend, and then she moved and his cremains went missing. They were either not relocated and found after the fact or or according to the guys in the Daily Departed podcast, which I haven't been able to verify, some groundskeepers were like doing yard work and like found the urn and and made off with it or something. I go I was surging around in a few years back. There was a um a go fund me to like get him a proper resting place or fine, it did not reach completion. So that's that's very sad. So they don't know where Lurch his ashes are. But another fun Monster Mash connection in Cassidy as Lurch cut a pop record with Gary S. Paxson, the absolutely insane producer of Monster Mash, called the lurch uh and he did it on Shin Dig with um No that was was that the episode that he did with with Boris Karloff. Yes, that is the same episode. It is in which Boris Karloff does Monster Mash and then they all do the lurch. Do you know how to do the lurch? I assume it's like the holly Gully or the Twist. Let's actually listen to this. I didn't listen to the frog, the frug, the first fruit, the fruit, the bird. We already said the bird, the trash. I'm just naming things, naming things that make you feel happy, birds, trash, mashed potatoes. That's poor guy, knowing that he had his aspirations to play Hamlet. This is so much work. That's got more votown vibes than I would have thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um. Someone who did not get his own novelty dance was cousin It. Actor Felix Sillah said of the role, a producer dreamed it up in some nightmare, which is also the title of my memoirs. They over duped the voice. Later I think it was actually might have been David Levy someone There was a producer who just overdone and then they like double timed out with tape for the um. That was incredible. I wow, I just I was not expecting that to come out of you, my cousin in voice. Yeah. And they would just walk around on set in a full length wig. But that was real human hair, which was a problem because it was super heavy and super flammable, and because this was the sixties and everyone was smoking all of the time. They eventually changed it to synthetic care, probably dipped an asbestos. In the movie, it's the kid from the Creepy Kid from Children of the Horn who play yeah, which is so much more terrifying. You pull off the cousin in hair and it's the It's the kid from Tonal of the Corn. We have your woman outlanda um okay. By March of the show's pilot had been filmed at a mildly redressed set left over from The Unsinkable Molly Brown Friend Pod The Unsinkable Molly Brown. While the family's fictional address was zero zero one Cemetery Lane, the Monsters was mocking Bird Lane for those of you in the bar trivia circuit. The house scene in the show was located at twenty one Chester Place in Los Angeles, Originally built in seven for Henry Gregory new Hall of the gold Rush rich new Hall family. The home was eventually sold to Los Angeles oil tycoons and philanthropists Edward and Estelle Doheni. You will possibly recognize that name because they rented out the Chester Place apartment and lived in what is today the Doheny Mansion down the street. Grace Stone Manor, which is the mansion that David Lynch lived in while completing a racer Heads owned by the a f I, and uh Doheny was the guy who There Will Be Blood is somewhat based on I believe they may have filmed it in that mansion's bowling alley, like the climactic scene of The Will Be Blood might actually be filmed there. Anyway. When as Sildoheny died in Night, she willed all the land in Chester Place to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who made it a new satellite campus of Mount St. Mary's in ninety two. The Adams Family Mansion was a part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I don't know if that's appropriate or counterintuitive. I'm surprised they didn't burst in the flames right well. For the show, production composited the lower half of the house with some Gothic touches for the exterior shots. For this also meant there was no reason to use the house ever again, and by nineteen seven Mount St. Mary's incorporated many of chester Places historic homes into the college, but the Adams Family House didn't make the cut and it was demolished and paved to put up a parking lot. S were punching Joni Mitchell doing Big Yellow Taxi the Fakess laugh and recorded music You're I'm talking about right, of course, of course I do, sir, Julia Roberts laugh. Oh man, remember and Counting Crows covered that song. Yeah, but they'll laugh, they admitted to laugh. Yes, it needs to be a new recurring bit on the show. We punch in Joni Mitchell's big yellow Taxi laugh. Yeah. I mean that's because we should have been in Titanic when they just destroyed the grand staircase and just scrapped it. Anytime something that's like it just gets callously destroyed. This recurring segment another in the Big Yellow Taxi corner of the show. Uh. Since the nineteen eighties, the land where the Adams family home used to be has been the track and field for Frank D. Lanternman High School, and today the only original piece of the home still standing is the six globe street lamp built in front of the homes driveway back in nineteen o three m Most of the other props sourced for the show, like the children's playroom where they had like a guillotine and stuff. That was the work of the set decorator Ruby Levitt, who did the sound of music and Chinatown Um. The Massive Bear, though, has a funny story in it that was found by production manager Herb Brower, who told Cox that he to get that bear. He got ahold of a guy who was a multi millionaire hunter who hunted polar bears. He had a bear in storage in Seattle. It was the largest bear ever shot in Alaska up until that time. The only reason we got that bear was the hunter had shot a slightly bigger bear, so this one was now superfluous. That is all he cared about having the biggest bear. And funnily enough, despite the show's reputation as the your text for goths everywhere, the walls of the Adams House were bright pink. If you look up color set photos of it, it's this hideous, garish interior. It's like incredibly gaudy. They were also the first sitcom family to own a home computer, which is a big Univax style piece of machinery that was named Wizzo and Uh and appeared in two episodes predicting the results of horse races and an upcoming election, and supposedly the wicker chair that Mortitius sits in was from From Here to Eternity, which I was yeah, because that was partially filmed in Was it in Hawaii or California? It was the same beach where they did the opening of Greece, right, yes, But so the the whole vogue in in your decoration at the time was these was retan and so they had that big, big plume backed retan chair. Anyway, I guess they gave it to Caroline Jones afterwards and she kept it in her house for the rest of her life. When the show was canceled, people just descended on the on the set and basically rated everything that wasn't bolted down, like Teed Cassie took, like the thing box and it's just a bunch of ships like that. I'm looking at the color photos of the set and it looks like Peewee's Playhouse, Like it's so weird looking. It's not the you know, black and browns that I thought, Yeah, funny, you should mention that. Because Tim Burton was supposed to one of the people that was approached to do the Adams Family movie and he turned it down to do Batman Returns. He chose equally yeah, um, other than maybe Wednesday now at this point, in arguably the most famous thing about the Adams Family is Vic Mizzy's all time banger of a theme song, supposedly the first TV show to feature a harpsichord, which tracks like why would you have a harpsich or not? Well, you know it's funny too because he he also did the theme to Green Acres, and Green Acres has like fuzz guitar on very early as far as having that effect actually on electric guitar in like on purpose. You know, this is still at the stage when people are like like cutting speaker CoNb and stuff to get David Yeah, Dave Davies. Uh he or it was link Ray who stabbed it with a pencil to get that. Um. The Monster's theme also kind of whips. The Monster's theme does whip? Was that sampled in like some fall Up Boys song or something? Ah, yes You're right a song called Uma Thurman. Yeah I hate that. Oh. The Monster's Theme was nominated for Grammy Good as it should have been. Um. Vic Busy was born in Brooklyn. He took organ lessons when he was just twelve, had a couple of World War Two era hits recorded by like Doris Day, Dinah Shore, the Andrews Sisters, Louis Prima uh and then Broken a television circa nine. He did the music for Shirley Temple's storybook, the themes for a bunch of shows I've Never heard of called Moment of Fear, Klondike, Kentucky Jones, and also the Don Rickles show Friend of the Pod Don Rickles. Originally film Ways was going to film Ways. The production company was going to use canned music, Mizzy told Stephen Cox under deadline. Mizzy composed the theme, which he debuted live at the studio in front of all the executives, uh, snapping his fingers at the appropriate time, which is apparently they just rolled this piano out of a closet and he was like, uh, like there you go. Um. Film Ways was too cheap to give him background singers, So all the voices on that are him and his music editor overdubbing themselves, singing repeatedly, and also Ted Gassidy the voice of Lurch saying neat, sweet petite, that's what he says in that That's weird. I don't know, I don't like that. Uh. Also, he supposed to coined the word ki you know for the rhyme for spooky. Um. Mizzy also stage directed the show's opening sequence with the cast. It was just not very bizarre for a composer to do. He came out of the set and had them all he brought a metronome onto the set and had them all snap in time for it for the opening credits. I mean, I guess the court would be able to get people to snap in time, but I guess we actors. He said they didn't about one take, so um. He held onto ownership of the song's publishing rights, which it proved very lucrative for him later because it's become like a sporting event thing, which I completely always forget until I the Blue Moons when I do take in the sporting airs. Uh why, I don't know. It's like seven Nation Army dude. It's like gets played at baseball games all the time, and people were just like, yeah, but yeah, I don't know. It just he made so much stamp to this. Yeah, well it really but he apparently made a boatload of money just from that, more than like the actual themes thing. He said an interview years later, That's why I'm living in bel Air two finger snaps and you live in bel Air. Uh. In addition to writing the theme of The Adams Family, Vic Mizzy produced the full LP of the original Adams Family soundtrack music, which was released in nineteen six five. That same year, Sonny Bono, of all people, expanded on the Thing, musical cue from the show. I basically expanded it into an entire instrumental song, which Vick Missy then successfully sued to have blocked from being released. Sonny Bono talked about this. He said, Vic Mizzy got pissed. He was called the Thing, and I did it with Charlie and Brian, my two managers. We thought it was gonna be a hit. I liked the song, it was fun. We recorded it, but I don't think it got pressed up. And later Sonny Bono, with members of the famous Wrecking Crew session musicians, including iconic drummer how Blaine, who's played with Everybody, played with Everybody, did the famous opening from the Ronets be My Baby, Brian Wilson, Beach Boys, Pet Sounds stuff. Uh. They built themselves as the themes and released a version of the theme song from the Adams Family under the title thank You Thing, published by Phil Specter's mother, Bertha Music That's Swings. I know well how Blaine Baby Mizzy was upset that he wasn't tapped to do the Adams Family movie soundtracks in the es, but he never stopped working. Released a compilation of his works with the excellent title Songs for the Jogging Crowd on his own label, Vixta Records as recently as two thousand three, and they died in two thousand nine. We salute you for your service, even though I will begrudgingly concede that the Munster's theme song is better. The Adams Family did well in the ratings and occasionally even beat out Bob Hope's NBC show, but it was canceled after just two seasons, and part of the problem was the public's fatigue with horror adjacent spooky culture stuff. And one of the other problems was that for a lot of the public it was easy to confuse the Adams Family with the Munsters, and there was a cartoon in Family Circus in nineteen sixty six where there's a middle aged couple squinting at a TV set with the caption. It looks like we tuned into either The Munsters, the Adams Family or Phillis Diller. Oh that's mean, I mean that that sounds like a Charles Adams cartoon, though it sort of does. That's like oddly mean for family circus. Wow. Bill Keane Savage must have been in his drinking years. Yeah, or he just hated Charles Adams or John Aston told The Capital Times in nine five how much he hated seeing the two shows lumped in the same category. He said, you see, the Monsters are monsters on the outside, but perfectly normal people in every other respect. The Adams Family, on the other hand, are not monsters at all, but terribly daffy in almost every respect. Like the Adams cartoons are shows an attack on the cliches of life, a reverse joke. That's an interesting way of putting in a reverse joke. John Aston loved being in the Adams Family, you like he loved being with Caroline Jones. Yeah, I know, that's so cute. But ultimately, both the Adams Family and The Monsters were defeated by completely different competitors rather than each other. ABC's newly launched Batman soundly beat CBS is the Monsters and the Ratings, and CBS is New World War Two comedy. Hogan's heroes defeated ABC's Adams Family when they went up against each other in their respective time slots in James Pliance by biography of Caroline Jones in Mortissa's Shadow, he quoted the actress as hanging the cancelation of on the firing of ABC executive Edgar J. Sherrick. It would be one of the people instrumental and getting the show on the air, as the networks president, she says in the book the minute he had been fired, all his shows were taken off and we went off the air with the thirty two share, which I believe is very high. I have no idea. I found all these quotes about them being canceled, and they were using a lot of TV terms that I didn't understand. Um. For example, Jackie Coogan in the nine interview for Cinema Texas, a publication from the Communication Arts Department at the University of Texas at Austin, he said, we had a good show going, but the president's wife of ABC had one favorite in show business. His name was Milton Burrow. So she begged her husband to hire Milton Burrow. Our show was canceled with an eighteen and a half rating, and they brought Milton Burrow in, so blame Batman and Milton Borough is huge. Is famously anaconda. As he called this, thirty two means that having a thirty two share means that of all television consumption was on the Adams Family, which sounds like a lot, but I guess considering there were three television networks plus maybe PVS or a local channel, I guess that's a part of course. But these days people would kill for probably a ten share. Right. Batman had come on opposite the Monsters. John Aston told the Television Academy a lot of programming people thought about Adams and Monsters is the same kind of show. Batman came on with a big rush. It was a storm and tough to go up against. I think there was some thinking that the Adams Family would go away, but he actually appeared in Batman as the Riddler. Uh and Ted Cassidy also made a guest appearance. Sixties TV was a small place. Uh. The only expert nation I ever got from anybody at ABC, her Brower told Cox was quote demographics at the time the systems. I was just about to say, it's like plastics of the graduate. At this time, the system was just sprouting, and every other word was demographics. Show this at demographics, don't show this. It was demographics time. They felt the ratings had dropped and if they kept it on the air, they would continue to drop. Despite the show's central role in creating the popular image of the Adams family, there weren't that many material rewards and being in the show, even as it aired repeatedly in reruns. We've talked about this, I forget. We were just talking about this recently. People in those days were paid for the episodes they filmed, and that was kind of it. John Auston said, in those days, we got paid for five reruns and that was it. This also included series, you know, Nominalady series creator Charles Adams. He said to the Washington Post, they gave me money each week, but after the first runs ended, I didn't get anything, no residuals. That was a mistake made by the big old fat law firm I let represent me. I believe I had four percent of the gross. I remember seeing some document reporting one point something million dollars with a rundown like this, four thou dollars foreign sales, seven thousand dollars something else, etcetera, etcetera. Mr Adams Share Twitter and eighteen dollars and eleven cents. It was just a classic error, that's all not getting residuals. So it was a lesson for cartoonists. Yeah, lessons for all of the rabid subsection of t m I fans, professional cartoonists angling for a TV network. Yeah, as you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages, and now we must coome to the real monster of our story, producer Scott Rude. Um. The Adams family lay dormant for the next twenty years or so. Until Scott Ruden it was a very successful Hollywood and Broadway producer and a terrible awful human being allegedly, uh for legal reasons, although off the record not You can call someone a terrible person, and I think that's I think it's an opinion that falls under opinion. Okay, well, creative licensed. Scott Ruten is a tremendous piece of um. He was then at twentieth Century Fox, and he apparently was coming back from a screening with a bunch of other exacts. Um. He told the l A Times this Barry Diller, who was the studio chief at the time, Leonard Goldberg marketing chief Tom Shirek, and he said, when Tom's kids started singing the Adams Family theme and suddenly everyone in the van was singing the theme letter perfect note for note. So then the very next day he had lunch with Diller and Goldberg and was like, what's making Adams Family movie? And they were like, sure, why not? The problem was there that Orion Pictures, who was one of the most famous boom and bust stories in all of Hollywood. Um, at this point they were still riding high. They had done Amadeus four Platoon and Hannah and her sisters in six Mississippi Burning, and then like what, five years later, they wouldn't exist. Yeah. I don't know what happened to them, financial mismanagement, but they had the rights, they had bought the Film Ways Productions archives, and they were holding out hope of doing their own Adams Family reboot on TV. So that got hung up for a while, and Scott Reuten approached Barry Sonnenfeld, one of my favorite under the radar sort of directors. Barry Sondfeld does not get enough credit. Man, Well, I mean it was I think it was Wild Wells was what killed him. He did uh yeah, he did the Adams Family movies, he did the Men in Black movies, Blah blah blad West, and then he didn't get Shorty. You know, he was what about after Wild Wild West? Nine? Like? What did he do? RV with Robert Williams, oh Christ and Nine Lives? But Dave Barry adaptation starting Tim Allen called Big Trouble. I read that book. I loved Dave Barry. Dave Berry was like the five people that maybe want to be a writer. Nine Lives. Oh, man, god, this really did tank his career to this s yeah, because I always forget that he got his start with the Coen Brothers. He did Blood Simple and Raising Arizona. He did Big, he did when Harry met Sally, he did Miller's Crossing, he did Misery. He was cinematographer on all these incredible movies. Anyway, I think that's how Ruten knew him from Big and Raising Arizona. Uh. And he approached Barry Sonfield with the first draft of the script by Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson, who had written Edward Scissor Hands. One thing I do have to note about Barry Sonofeld he told sci Fi that he was more of a fan of the Adams cartoons and preferred the monsters, so he's not dead to me. But he didn't like the first draft of the script, and he told Scott Retten as much. Hollywood Reporter did oral history of the first Adams Family film, and um SnO Fel says, I tell Scott all the reasons why the script is no good, and he says, that's the reason you should direct, because you're right about all of those issues. He also told told various SnO felt that Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam had both already turned this project down, which is counterintuitive negotiation. In his memoirs, and Fell writes that Orion executives had one very specific hang up about this, which was the thing they were like. He said, this is him quoting them. Our first concern is we recently did a movie, The Hand with a disembodied hand in the lead, and we lost a lot of money on it. That movie cost six and a half million and we made two point four at the box office, and that didn't include Prince and advertising. It was a disaster here, but Scott Borden assuaged their fears about having a disembodied hand at the center of their picture, and the project moved into casting. Uh Senfeld told The Guardian in that Scott and I both agreed on Angelica Houston and Raoul Julia, who had been a big Broadway guide, and kissing the Spider Woman and some other stuff as more Titia and Gomez. The studio wanted share, but we felt that would unbalance the film. We didn't want it to be about stars. And then, hilariously, in that same article, Angelica Houston tells them Barry Sandenfield, Scott Routine and I met for lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They said, we'd really like you to play more Titia Adams. I said, if you don't mind me asking, why not share? This is right around when she was in um Mermaids with Christine with Christina Ricci. Yeah, and it's just so hilarious to me that people were like, oh, get sharing it. And then so with Angelica Houston says, I don't know what possessed me to suggest another actress, but they said, no, we'd like you to do it. She based the character on her friend Jerry hall Way of married to Tagger. Yes, she said, I've always seen Jerry as a perfect example of motherhood, although in the in the l a Times article from around the time in the making of the film, she said that she also based them on the Beals, who were the Kennedy or Bouvier I guess um extended Bouvier family, who are portrayed in the iconic documentary Grey Gardens, which makes the second appearance of of of the family family in the Charles Adams Extended Universe. Um, yeah, but this is crazy, she she talks in The Guardian Things. She said, I've never really liked looking normal, and I've always liked a faintly bleached outlook. So I was really happy about the way the cameraman lit me his more Tissha. The makeup was very intense. I had stickers attached to my temples, rubber bands that met behind my head, and then on top of that the wig, fake nails, eyelashes, and the corset. Individually they add up to something monumental. It was hard to move. There were certain things one could do with one's hands, but that was about it. Fortunately, I wanted to keep Mortisia very iconic and still I had a bonfire of the vanities at the end of the movie where I took all the fake stuff, made a pile and set it on fire. It holds a lot of sentimentality for me because I grew up reading Charles Adams in the Bathroom aged six, pretending I was Mortisia in the Mirror, which is so cute. She they said she could film for like a couple of hours and then she would have to go lay down because of this course in the dress that they put her in. But this is crazy. Another interview for comic book dot com, son And told told Uh. He said that the Mortisia's look at the film was not limited to make up or wardrobe. He said when he interviewed Owen Roisman, who was their cinematographer, he very specifically said to him, Uh, there's this thing called motivated light in film lighting, where if someone is standing and there's a window to their left, the left side of their face will be brighter. It's motivated from the window. Basically, you used light sources. That makes sense. And he said that when he interviewed Owen. He said, I want more Tissia to have her own motivated light. I don't care if she's standing right by a window her lighting even in the scene with other people in the scene, everyone can be lit from the window. But I want more Tissia to be lit totally differently, as if she has her own motivated light wherever she goes. And this guy, Owen Roisman said, I love that idea. He said that he one of his visual inspirations was a still photographer, like the old studio silent era black and white film photography, where he said, I wanted to look like she's always in a photograph where you darken the forehead and the chin and you accentuate their eyes and add filtration and butterfly effect. I think I think they called it. And he said, that's what Owen, that's what this guy did. And you know, I was watching clips from this movie. It's not gray like actually funnily enough and would get skipping ahead here. But the second movie, Adams Family Values, is better reviewed, Like people really did not like this movie that much. Roger Ebert gave her like two out of four stars. It only has like a sixty something and Rotten tomatoes, but holy crap, does it look beautiful the wardrobe, the interiors, the mansion, this lighting that they gave it, Like man, stuff from this era like not to show on Wednesday again, but like stuff from this era, like it just has it's it's shot on film, it's well lit. There's just like a baseline level of like tactile craft to this stuff that even when the plot and whatever it's all of all the other stuff doesn't necessarily add up to the best like masterpiece level, You're still just like, holy crap, that is a beautiful world that they built digression over it is I mean, but did you watch any eclipse of it? Oh man, it's just away from the movie. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought that Wednesday beautiful. That I mean, it's I'm sure it's fine, but it's just all like they just do everything digitally now and it's just like done in in this with this like all of these lighting effects, like you're they're just like get some non union animator to do it. After the fact, some guy dying of you know, lack of air circulation in a warehouse in Santa Barbara, Like get him to do it. Don't don't hire a cinematographer who knows the history of film lighting. Sorry, Grandpa's Grandpa's yelling at the clouds again. Well, now we got to talk about Gomez, who is played by Raoul Julia, who has done a big Broadway star Barry sona Felt told The Hollywood Reporter the character loves life, loves death, loves pain, loves joy, loves his family. The great thing about rules Gomez you can see the joy. Whether he's happy or angry or sad, he's still joyfully, full of life and friend of the pod. Dan Hideia is in Adams Family the first as family as well it hero Julie is a joy in this film. I mean he there's there's uh. He meets his lawyer, Dan Hidella Lewis Tully and and they have like a sword fight, and louis till he's like look behind you and then like throws his briefcase at him and actually just comes up and he's like dirty pool, old man. I love it. It's just it's such a such a zest for life in it. It's so great. You know, who doesn't have a zest for life in this? Christina Rishi has Wednesday. She was fresh off her star making turn in Mermaids. As I mentioned earlier, opposite share, and she impressed everyone at auditions and on the set, with Angelica Houston telling the Guardian, I felt like I was playing Christina's daughter most of the time. He was incredibly informed, smart arch and really knew how to stare and Sona felt continued to the Hollywood Reporter, whenever the cast had a problem, they would go to Christina Rishi because she was the most articulate and intellectually gifted of any cast. Just love that so much, and this reverence to Christina re she really came to bear and in an incident that occurred during the first table read, where the cast all decided that they hated the scripted ending in which it was revealed that Christopher Lloyd's uncle Fester is actually an impostor, though the family winds up adopting him anyway. In the movie, as it stands, he's introduced as an impostor, and then he gets his memory back at the end when he is struck by lightning. Just so, the cast all gathered in a circle and told Christina Rihi all the reasons why they thought this was a bad idea, and then they sent her to go talk to director Barry sonam Felt and Sonifeld said, give us a minute. So Scott Ruden's screenwriter Paul Rudnick and director Barry Sonifld what into the corner. Barry Sonifeld said, I think she's kind of right, and Rudnick and Ruden agreed. They asked Christopher Lloyd, who was playing Fester, you care if he's the real Fester or the fake Fester? And Christopher Lloyd's it man, I don't care. I don't care. So we rewrote the ending based on the cast disagreement. Uh. Speaking of Christopher Lloyd, sna Felt told Comic book dot com, I think the hardest role the cast was Fester. We started going down the road of dumpy rounder more fester looking actors. We talked to Robbie Coltrane for a little while, and there were some others. Robbie Coltrane played Hagrid. I believe in the Harry Potter movies and uh and the rest. The only other movie I can recall off him is he was in Nuns on the Run. I think with Eric Idol that is correct. But yes, most famous for playing Hagrid, Barry Sono Fell continued, Then we thought Christopher Lloyd would be really good. But Chris is tall and thin, and Fester is drawn very differently. We actually did a film test where we hired Chris and then we gave him these prosthetics to make his face round. We shot the test and we shot an actual scene with him and Elizabeth Wilson, and he looked terrible. He looked like he was from a different movie because no one else had prosthetics. Chris Is make up in prosthetics just looked all wrong. But Chris really wanted it. He really likes to hide behind the prosthetics to create a character. But we didn't want it. And Christopher Lloyd talked about his long standing love of the Adams Family and The Guardian, and he said, when I was a kid, I used to get this magazine full of cartoons and there was always an Adams Family strip, and I got really involved, get involved with the Adams Family's script. Okay if you're Christopher, yeah, And I got really involved when I was eight or nine. Of Uncle Fester. I just thought he was the best. He's slightly evil, he's funny to look at. He was a character. So when decades later, out of the Blue. Paul Rudnick, who was the screenwriter and of I think both Adams Family movies, asked me to be Uncle Fester in this movie. I just jumped on it. Kind of see him was like being related to Judge Doom. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It is so unnerving to see him with hair in the first scene of this movie, when he's introduced as the the impostor. There's this great anecdote that buries On and Felt tells um about the screen test when they had him do that with a prosthetics. He said, we called Chris to the screening room to show him the test, to show him that we didn't want to do it, And unfortunately Chris didn't know exactly what our issue was. When we came to the studio to look at the test, cinematographer Owen Roisman was interviewing stand ins for Fester and Chris had to go past all these people in the hallway who looked like Fester. So we get in and screen footage for Chris Lloyd and I say, well, what do you think and Chris says, well, I can do it better. Well what are you talking about? He goes, well, it was a test. I didn't know. It was like an audition. I said, no, Chris, what are you talking about? He goes, well, I saw all these actors in line. I said, no, we're not replacing you, we're looking for a stand in. Christopher Lloyd thought he was being marched in front of all of his over replacements. But Barry Sinfield told Sci Fi Chris did an amazing job. Between the time we would slate and say roll camera and be ready to shoot, which was four seconds, he would come out and lose two ft of height and gained fifty pounds of body weight, and his face went from narrow and thin to round just instantly. I don't know how he did it. I guess he scrunched his head into his shoulders, but he did an amazing job playing Fester, because he doesn't look anything like that. That is correct. He did just suck his neck into his into the wardrobe that they had, which went up to auction recently and didn't sell. Maybe not recently, but a while ago I found a Hollywood Heritage Heritage auctions. They sold a bunch of Adam's family stuff. Um. He's also apparently bending his knees slightly in every shot to appear shorter, which must have been agony and I've been unable to verify this fact, but I love it so much. The fat suit that he wears under the coat is supposedly the same one worn by Bruno Kirby and Godfather Part two, which I wasn't able Tomza Yes. Rounding out the family in this film is Canadian magician Christopher Hart as thing Um and in demand seven foot Dutch guy Carol Strukin, who is the tall Dutch dude in Twin Peaks as um what is it? I don't remember the kid's name who plays Pugsley, but it's my favorite bit of casting for him because they found him when his sister came into audition Wednesday. They just look out in the waiting room at presumably a sea of dark haired young women who are gonna play auditioning to play Wednesday, and they just see his kids sitting there reading magazine and they're like, yeah, you you're Pugsley. He's like me and his sisters like, am I Wednesday? And they're like, no, leave didn't that. I mean, that's a whole like listical of people who got roles in film because they went with somebody else that was like, somebody in Greece get one of the one of the t birds. I think, didn't somebody ending that? Oh it was Jackass, wasn't it. I don't have that dog, Handy jim Workman, Jimmy Workman was his name. Yeah, Pugsley the like the most forgettable memory of Adams Family. Oh wait, he's the older brother of Ariel Winter from Modern Family. I wonder if she was the one audition Yeah, wait, no, no, there's no way she's a yeah. The the eight year old Workman had accompanied his older sister, oh Chanel Uh to audition for the part of Wednesday Adamsachristina Rishi. Okay, so currently she's the voice of Wendy in Wendy's commercials. Oh this Jimmy Workman guy who played Pugsley was in as good as it gets too. Well. Also, according to Angelica Houston, the woman who played Grandmama in the first film as a German born actress named Judith Malina, she founded the radical political theater Troupe The Living Theater, which is in that's in West Village, right. Yeah, anyway, she was high on this whole thing, Like Houston said, she coped with the extensive makeup by smoking an endless series of joints. In her trailer, I was I believed to the Guardian Ah, and we return as the Ark of the Universe does to Scott Bruten's in Humanity to Man. The Adams Family movie was Barry sona Feld's directorial debut, and he did not have a good time making it. You put an exclamation in that on that sentence, which I've never seen you do, so you know it's serious. As Barry sona Felt told Empire Magazine back in I lost thirteen pounds in the first ten weeks alone, and the tension was just incredible. And in that same interview he mentioned passing out on the set and coming to weeping. While he did, he said, I remember Beggar so neurotic. His end quote in this is really my favorite. Sorry go ahead. I remember begging Scott Ruden, please let me get up and get going again. If we have to stop every time I faint or cry, we'll never get this movie done. And a fun prank Scott Ruden pulled was having a different director's name on Barry Sonofeld's chair every time a reporter came to the set. He put Tim Burton on the chair. He put Joe Dante's name on the chair. He put Terry Gilliam's name on the chair, and David Lynch's name on the chair. Seeing Rob Ryder's name on the chair, one day, Barry Sono Feld equipped to the reporter, Rob wouldn't have done this movie. He's not that crazy. And now, my friend, you gotta take this. Then set it up, Set me up, Set me up. Barry Sonfeld wrote in his memoir that Scott and I disagreed on many aspects of the cast, sets, props, and wardrobe. Ruden, screenwriter Paul Rudnick, and I would meet in his office and Scott would charmingly lie about everything we had opposing opinions about, or he would yell at me. So Barry Sono felt developed what is probably my all time favorite Hollywood coping mechanism to deal with with these moments. He said, the I realized, I think this is in his memoir. I realized the only because he's told this anecdote multiple times, which is what I love it that much. I realized the only way to deal with it was two out juvenile Scott. When he would start to scream at me, I would get off the couch and remove all the bolsters and pillows. Using the back and bottom bolsters as building box, I would turn them into walls and build a fort on top of the couch. Crawling into one end I had left open, I'd stuff a pillow into the gap and yell, I can't hear you, I'm in the fort. The part of this that amazed Rudnick in me was that Ruden would never invade the sanctity of my fort. He'd bend over and scream at me, but he'd never remove a pillow. He also tells of one horrifying anecdote where his wife was his is His wife was hospitalized at the time. They thought she was very seriously ill, and they were shooting in New York, I think or he had to get on a plane to New York and they were shooting a film with a bunch of kids, and he's trying to wrap and he's like, okay, we're done, and Scovered's like, uh no, we're not done, and we need pick up shots of these kids crying, which is an amazing pool quote for his career. Scodrod needed children crying, and so he was like, I don't care how you do it make those children cry? And so Barry started if it went over to the kids and he was like, well, kids, good news is we're done filming. Bad news is you all have to get measles shots now. And he before he did this, he told this, He told the cameraman. He was like, I'm set up shots on each one of those kids face. I'm gonna go talk to them and then when they start crying and film them. So he whatever and told all of them that they had to get measles shots and the kids started crying and that is the take you see the movie. And then he went to visit his hospitalized wife. UM filming problems continued to mount. With three months left of filming, It's Owen Roisman, the afrementioned director photographer, quit to go on another film. A guy named Gail Tattersall, the new DP, came on to finish it and was hospitalized within a few weeks, and Sannenfeld had to take on director of photography duties and also direct Raoul Julia had to miss filming for several days when a blood vessel burst in his eye and then Oriyan, who was in its death spiral. At this point decided to sell the film but with however long left in production to Paramount Um, and didn't tell Rudden and sanenfeld They found it out from a Hollywood reporter, reporter named Andrea king Um. The budget for this film was not crazy. It only went up from what they told them from twenty five mil to thirty mile with a couple of rewrites. But what happened was that Hook was coming out in the holiday season and O Ryan was concerned that Hook was going to come out and steamroll everything else, and they basically thought they were going to take a huge loss on this and were decided to cut their losses and sold it to Paramount, which was a big dumb mistake and may have saved them, may have saved the studio had they hung onto it. Uh Sanenfeldt told sci Fi they sold the film halfway through to someone at Paramount. That person later that same day was fired for other reasons Hollywood. It's a magical industry. And the person that replaced them didn't like our movie, and we were still only halfway done shooting. And then this is funny. Once we finished it, and Barry London and Arthur Cohen, who were marketing and distribution guys at Paramount saw the movie. They loved it. They were the ones who said, we'll give you more money if you can get mc hammer to write a song for us, which is an incredibly to say, so, santon Felt continued, I knew he was a car collector, so I parked my nineteen two Lincoln Continental in front of the entrance where we were meeting him. And when the meeting was over, I walked to the elevator downstairs with him and I said how many cars do you have? He said eleven, and I said I think it's going to be twelve. And he said, wait, that's not your Lincoln, is it? And I said yeah, And I sold him my Lincoln in the elevator. The next day he came and paid cash for it. So Adams Groove, the second single from mc hammer to Legit Quit, his fifth and last top ten single in the US and the recipient of the Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Original Song at Razzies. Anyway, one last indignity for the film, Oh I'm sorry. The second to last indignity for the film. Uh Sneville wanted to drop this big, old fashioned musical number into it, and so he films a scene in which Fester and Gomez do this dance called the Mamushka that was written by Betty Kombden and Adolph Green, who are these actual Broadway legends who were involved in, among many other things, over decades, singing in the rain Mark Shaman is an oscar short of an egot. He wrote the music and co wrote the lyrics to hair Spray, So they wrote his musical number, they filmed it, and then test audiences didn't like it, so they hacked like it. Oh and then David Levi, David Levy who's still alive, uh, sued them as the show's TV show's original producer. Yes, he he sued them, I believe, kind of correctly, alleging that since so much of the show originated a lot of the concepts that you see in the movie, he was owed rights to it, and Paramount agreed. They settled out of court. But so that was the last hurdle of that finish line was being sued by the original creative team behind it. Well, despite its torture production, the Adams Family hauled in an impressive twenty four million dollars on its opening weekend doubling. It's already healthy projection. Titanic only did point six million in its opening weekend, so that's not bad. Barry sono Felt told The Hollywood Reporter there have been months and months of flops, and everyone thought the Adams family would do really well and open to twelve million. WHI was a really big opening. I should have enjoyed it more, he continued. I remember getting calls from famous people all weekend, mainly about the box office. I remember getting a call from any of the pod Jeffrey Katzenberg, who told me how great the movie was, and I kept saying, well, it's not my movie, it's Paramounts movie, and they did a great job of marketing and distributing it. Then Scott Rudin called me on Sunday night and said, what do you think? I said, paramount did a great job, and Scott interrupted me and said, Barry, if you can't be happy this weekend, your mother one. It is an all time quote. The film, unfortunately, wasn't a huge critical hit. Roger Ebert, as you mentioned earlier, only gave it two out of four stars, and it currently sits at sixty seven percent on Rotten Tomatoes. But It went on to make a hundred and ninety one point five million dollars worldwide, which pretty much guaranteed its sequel, Adams Family Values. Weirdly, as you also mentioned earlier, a much better reviewed film, though it made a lot less, Angelica Houston, was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress and the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Achievement in Cost of Design. Following the wave of interest in the franchise, animated television series notably saw John Aston reprised his role as Gomez, almost thirty years after his first appearance in the role. That was nominated for four Daytime Emmys, including one for Aston, while a much less well received directed video film, The Adams Family Reunion, which notably does start Tim Curry as Gomez, was released in but the family kept lumbering on. There was a Broadway and touring musical that was critically savaged but apparently very profitable in two thousand two thousand eleven, two animated films released in one and now, of course, Netflix is Wednesday, which is supposedly the streamers third most popular English language series of all time, and one last completely out of nowhere success story for the Adams Family. You're a pinball guy, I say, with nothing to back that up based on your love of the Who and analog era toys. Sure, yeah, the Bally Adams Family Pinball Machine is the best selling pinball machine of all time. Would you have guessed to that? Would you have guessed they were making pinball machines? They were because home video arcades were still doing really well. Home video consoles had not really taken over at this point in arcades. We're still doing big, big money units sold of that. And it's funny because it's one of these things that hits at such a bizarre nexus of cultural trends. Apparently, pinball technology was at an all time high in the early nineties, and there was a wave of nostalgia for mid century kitch. Right, Twilight Zone tales from the Crypt were also be pinball machine successes at the time. I got this from just reading like Popular Mechanics and Smithsonian mag about the Adams Family pinball Machine, which I had no idea about. Scott porches at Popular Mechanics right, The Adams Family pinball Machine featured plenty of next gen features, such as a moving mechanical thing that picked up the balls an enormous number of scoring modes. New dialogue recorded by the film stars specifically for the game, and he says virtually every pinball game since has taken design cues from it. So don't bet against James Cameron, don't bet against the Adams family. But the real legacy of the Adams Family was the pinball machine, didn't That's an m Night Shamalan worthy twist. Um, Yeah, you know, what what do you say about Adams family? Man, it's such a such a neat, weird property. People were like sort of Monday morning quarterbacking, like the success of Wednesday being like, of course it was going to be a huge hit. Like there's a TikTok dance scene in Jenna Ortega is super hot right now, But like, I don't actually think that there's any reason you could bet on this bizarre popularity of this franchise like it is. You could argue that in kind of a cynical way that it's sort of like Tim Burton hot topic, like goth Light, like it sort of has this veneer of counterculturalism without being particularly insidious. But it is so weird and so deeply specific and such a specific aesthetic to have clung on for a century, like nearly a century. The Adams Family has been in part of American culture. I love that John Aston will to go out one of his quotes and his Television Academy interview, which is like four hours long and incredible. You should look it up. What the Adams Family says is it doesn't matter what you're like outside, it's inside that counts. That's why people who are disowned by society like the show so much. Real values are there underneath. During the run of the show, psychiatrists wrote articles about how it was the healthiest show on the air and echoing what Barry Stenfield said about ral Julia as Gomez, Sean Aston calls the adit. John Aston calls the Adams Family an affirmation of life. I can't think of anything better to say about it, folks, Thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan Runtalg We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtalg and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcast on iHeart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows that that Man Want to Know. A back Pasty and