Earle Hagen - Archive Interview Part 4 of 10
In this segment of the Earle Hagen archive interview, Hagen recounts the technical and organizational realities of scoring early television sitcoms, focusing on The Danny Thomas Show and The Ray Bolger Show. He explains the transition from recording music onto film and acetate demo discs to magnetic tape and multitrack recording, describing his pioneering use of 24‑track overdubs. Hagen details the live‑audience, three‑camera production model pioneered by Bill Asher, the role of post‑scoring versus live on‑stage conducting, and the typical 12‑ to 14‑musician orchestra. He discusses his working relationship with producer‑director Sheldon Leonard, whose hands‑off, script‑focused management style allowed Hagen and arranger Herbie Spencer considerable creative autonomy. The interview also covers practical matters such as weekly scheduling, rights clearance challenges (e.g., the Ray Bolger Show’s Hungarian dance), and the discipline of delivering episodes on tight deadlines. Throughout, Hagen reflects on the collaborative dynamics with performers like Ray Bolger, the use of the public‑domain Londonderry Air as the Danny Thomas theme, and the evolution of audience‑recorded laughter versus later laugh‑track practices.
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Before we get into The Danny Thomas Show and television in 1953, I want to talk just briefly about recording mediums. You were recording on film during your Fox years.
Yeah.
The music was recorded onto film.
Well, there was a transition to tape somewhere toward the end of that—
Meaning in the early '50s?
Yeah, in the early '50s, because when we went into You were?
Yes.
Okay.
And a term you used earlier, acetate. What was an acetate?
An acetate was like a demo disc. It was a soft-coated disc, and they'd cut it with a needle. They didn't make a master to print it, but they could play it back immediately. But if you played it back 3 or 4 times, you'd wear it out, because acetate was soft. And I don't even know how they made them, but they made them, and you put them on the stage and played them right back.
So this was for if you were recording a cue, you could hear it back immediately.
Right.
Even though you were recording onto film, you were also able to hear it back.
Right. You couldn't hear the film.
Right.
Which brought up an interesting thing. We did a main title on a picture called Oh, You Beautiful Doll, which was the life of Freddie Fisher. And the way the main title was constructed, it was like a George Pal animation of a carousel, turn and little figures would come into view, like it would say Brill Building and there would be somebody hanging out the window singing, and there would be a peanut vendor on the sidewalk, and as this turned, different events would happen. And Al gave me the assignment and I said to him, I don't exactly know how I'm going to do this, but I sat and figured it out and I constructed it into 24 separate pieces that overlapped each And we had to record it on 24 separate tracks over a period of 2 days, and our dub-down facility in the dubbing room was 6 tracks. So while we were recording these pieces, and I had varying tempos, but the melody went straight through one way or another. And while we were recording this, Al said to me, I sure hope this works. And that was the first time I'd done multiple-track recording, and I said, I do too. And when we finally put it together, because we had to put it together 6 tracks at a time, it worked perfectly. And it was just a continuous blend going with this carousel turning of different combinations, different people, and different structure, but the tune kept— Oh You Beautiful Doll kept going right straight through it. So that was a mechanical trick that paid off for me from the early days with Leon Beranbaum. And it led me to— Do a closer examination of the mechanics so that when we did get into tape and we did get into recording and needed those kind of techniques, I always had them available. I Spy was a case in point, when we get to it, I used multiple techniques all the time.
Yeah, and we'll get to that. So both the Ray— in 1953, both the Ray Bolger Show and the Danny Thomas Show sold as pilots, meaning that networks picked them up for 13 weeks or more as a series?
I believe the format in those days was 32 weeks.
32 weeks.
And then we would do 7 repeats and then have a 13-week replacement show, summer replacement show. So we went under contract knowing we had 2 shows to go for a full season.
Who was in charge of The Danny Thomas Show?
The Danny Thomas Show, the producer was Louis Edelman. The director was Bill Asher, who was the I Love Lucy director, and he and Desi had developed a technique of using a flat cement floor and rolling the cameras and keeping the people in the set. So it was a 3-camera technique. The direction was done upstairs in a booth. And Bill— we were gonna do the Danny Thomas Show in front of an audience, and actually, we did the Bolger Show the same way the first year. And consequently, the people looked at it like a stage show. It was chronologically correct. You didn't film like you shoot scene 1 over here and then you shoot scene 201 in the same place because it had the same location. This was done like a stage show. The actors stayed put or did whatever they did in the set and the cameras would move. That was the beginning of it. And Bill directed the first 6 shows and then Sheldon took over.
So then you met Sheldon 6 weeks into the run of the Danny Thomas Show.
Yeah.
Do you recall anything about your first meeting with Sheldon Leonard?
Yeah, you bet. I came in because I used to come in and cover the set final rehearsal day. Wally Popp, who was Danny's accompanist, would give us the layout of the arrangements, And Herbie would make the arrangements while I scored the first show that we did. And we had a peculiar setup because we would bring the band in at 6 o'clock and I would score. I'd do the bridges and cues because that's mostly what they were, to a stopwatch in whatever set was available. Sometimes we'd be in a bathroom, sometimes we'd be in the kitchen. Wherever they set the band up while the company was having dinner, I would score.
Let me stop you there. Meaning, you would play the music that would be later heard on the show?
Right.
Okay. And have it recorded?
I was doing post-scoring. And then Danny would come in about 7 o'clock, or 7:30, and I'd rehearse his numbers. And then we would move on stage, and we shot it live. All the numbers were recorded live, and I conducted live on stage. We were off camera. Unless it was a saloon scene, and in which case the band was the backstop. The show was done instantaneously because if Danny made a goof or if I got lost or whatever, we'd stop, we'd start over, and we'd have to do the number over again in its entirety. So it was a live post-scoring technique where we were doing today's show and recording 2 shows from 2 weeks ago. Sheldon— I came in one day to cover the set and Bill Asher said to me, do you know the new director? And I said, what's the matter with the old director? And he said, the old director is going back to I Love Lucy. So I said, no, who's the director? And he said, Sheldon Leonard, do you know him? I said, no, I know who he is and I've seen him on the set. I thought he was gonna— He was a writer.
So you knew Sheldon from his career as an actor?
From his career as an actor, yes.
But you didn't know him personally?
I did not know him personally. And he said, well, he is gonna do some acting. He's gonna play Danny's agent, but he's going to direct the show. He said, you ought to meet him. He's a great guy. So he took me over and introduced me to Sheldon, and I made him a stock speech. I said, my partner, Herbie Spencer, and I are at service. Whatever you need, give us a holler. He said, Do you know your business? And I said, yes, I do. He said, good, you will never hear from me. Now, I worked for him 17 years. He never ran a show with me, never came to a recording, never second-guessed me. And it wasn't that he wasn't interested in what you did because there were other areas where he had hired somebody under the same circumstances. Do your job. You won't— I will not second-guess you. Yes, you are. I won't bother you, you know, in parentheses. And if they didn't do their job, he fired them and got somebody to do the job. But he didn't micromanage people. He concentrated all of his career on script and cast. And one day we were, you know, we traveled together, we became very close friends, and we were sitting with our feet up on a rail somewhere having a And I said to him, how come you're not really interested in, in the technical aspect of what I do? And he said, look, you're the musician. I worry about scripts and cast, and I depend upon you to take care of what you do, and so don't bother me. I don't want to learn how to do that, because if I did, then I'd have to ask you. I'd know I'd be asking you to do something impossible in not enough time. And it was a great philosophy because everybody who worked for him revered him because he didn't micromanage them. That didn't mean he didn't have an opinion about what you were doing, but in my particular case with music, that one he left alone. Script, casting, that was a different thing.
There was no period of sort of building up a level of trust on his part, or do you think he just heard what you did immediately, liked it, and— And let it go?
That's a really hard question to answer. I think it probably— I probably think he started out saying, that guy knows his business, let me see what he can do. And once he found out that he didn't have to worry about you, he didn't worry about you. It's a chicken and the egg kind of thing. When he had— if he had an Aaron Rubin producing The Andy Griffith Show. He knew Aaron, was a producer/writer. Don't forget, in our structure of all of the T&L shows, Thomas Leonard shows, and we had a post-production company, we used to sit down and book our stages a season in advance, and if a show was supposed to be turned over on Thursday by a producer, it was turned over on Thursday, and there were no committees because the producer, Aaron Rubin, In the case of Griffith, was the producer-writer, story consultant. Carl Reiner was the producer-story consultant. Freakin' fine with the producer-story consultants.
On these various Thomas Leonard shows.
Yeah. So his operation, when he was the executive producer, he had final script approval, and he used to spend his weekends making the changes on the scripts and doing the casting, but he trusted his producers, and you never wasted time. If you wanted to do something, I'd go talk to whoever was the producer and say, look, I think we ought to do such and such, or he would ask me, what should we do? And I'd say, let's do this, and that was the end of it. You didn't have to get 19 people together to discuss something.
So, things could be scheduled that far in advance.
Yes.
And there would be no hemming and hawing or multiple committee decisions.
No, and that's a habit. It's just as easy, I would think, for A writer to say, I have to have this script in a certain time, and get used to the idea that that was the time he had to have the script in. He couldn't call up and say, listen, I need another week. They'd say, we're gonna be on the air before that. We need it now when you promised it. And it becomes a habit. It's a discipline that I think is missing in the industry today, and I think it's been a direct factor in the rising costs.
In 1953, how big a power was Danny Thomas? Was he a co-owner of the show? And was he someone you reported to?
Yes. No, he wasn't active in that sense. Danny, early on, the show was, when it was a success, he sold a strip version of it, or they, William Morris Agency, sold a strip, the daytime stripping of it, 5 days a week, and he picked up something like $7.5 million. And he became the bank because you could do a pilot in those days for $35,000. The hooker was that you had to have 13 shows in the can before you went on the air and somebody had to pay for it. And that wasn't all that big a burden either because if you had a contract for the sale of a show and you had people insured, you could go to the bank and get the rest of the money. Danny wound up as a Producing entity owning half, as I understand, I'm not sure of the percentages, Griffith, Dick Van Dyke, The Real McCoys, My Favorite Martian, Wyatt Earp, and all of these productions that the William Morris Agency was using him as a bank.
That's interesting.
But as far as being an active party in the picture, Danny was not really very visible. He was busy doing his show.
And on his show, did you discuss, to what degree would you discuss musical matters with Danny?
Probably never. Wally Popp, who was a dear man, was his accompanist, and he was on the stage every day, and then we'd get together, either Herbie or I would get together, and we'd take the routine. A lot of the things started with Danny at the piano, Wally'd be playing offstage, and the orchestra would sneak in. And occasionally we'd do something piano only, and Lou Edelman or Danny would say, why don't we add the orchestra to that? And we would. We'd do it with a record because we were recording on stage. We had no facilities. But didn't— for 11 years, I never saw Danny unless we were in a saloon background or something where I'd conduct visibly with him.
So were you on screen much?
Well, we did— he probably did, out of 39 shows, he might have done 8 in the nightclub.
Which was— he was a nightclub singer in the show?
Well, he was a nightclub entertainer, comic, and he would sing a number, and the band would be the backstop. That was the prop.
And you'd be on—
I'd be on stage conducting, yeah.
Okay. How big was the band?
12.
And that would be not only for whatever numbers the nightclub was For his scoring too, yeah. Who came up with the notion of using Danny Boy as the theme for the series?
I— either Herbie or I, and it's always been a mystery to me how we got away with that because we classified it as London Derry Air, which is public domain, and Danny Boy is not, I don't think.
How interesting. So then, Londonderry Air is officially—
Londonderry Air is the piece of thematic material that we use, which is in the original version of it. I guess it must be public domain long ago. It was a Welsh air, I think, or an English air, and we used Londonderry Air. Just happened to sound like Danny Boy.
Yeah, of course. I understand Sheldon had a philosophy about scoring every show of his. It seems to me that in that period of time, the '50s and certainly into the '60s, you could score a certain number of television shows in a series, but you could also track the rest of the series, meaning use material, musical material, that was composed originally for an earlier show.
Right.
But use it later. Did Sheldon have a philosophy about reusing musical material?
He did, yes. Actually, you could use track for every show, because it came about as a strike, as a result of a strike, and track libraries sprang up everywhere, mostly recorded in Europe and brought back over here. A show like Danny Thomas, a show like I Love Lucy, we're kind of stuck with using live music. because Desi performed and Danny performed.
Right.
And we had many people on the show who also performed. And Sheldon liked the idea that the music was tailored for the show. While most of it were bridges and cues, there were times when we had 2 and 3-minute sequences that we scored. His philosophy was track was kind of like wearing somebody else's underwear. He wasn't comfortable with it. And Sheldon was always a class act. I mean, if there was a point to be gained by having something better than the next guy, he wanted that point. He invested it in actors, he invested it in writers, he invested it in music. And of course, once he got into the habit of it, it became— that was the status quo of the Sheldon Leonard show. It was scored.
I want to also clarify something I'm not clear about. When you would have the band, would you do the Danny Thomas Show like on a Friday night in front of a live audience? Do you recall?
I've forgotten what night it was. Yes, it was done in front of a 300-person live audience.
Do you recall where?
Yeah, it was at Motion Picture Center on, I guess it's Coing and Willoughby. Eventually we wound up with I think all the stages ahead, and we moved over, part of the operation moved over to what became Desilu Studios when it got too big for Motion Picture Center. The idea of the live audience actually was started, I think, by Lucy, was that the audience were recorded, their reactions, their laughs, their applause, and so forth. Recorded. And the actors playing in front of a live audience, like actors, would spread themselves. They didn't want to step on applause. They didn't want to step on a laugh, so they would spread themselves. So it was naturally just like you were viewing it on stage with an audience response. And then if you figure that it probably was a 27-minute script to start with, and if you had 4 or 5 minutes of spread from audience reaction, and then narrowed it back down to 26.5 minutes, which I think is what we delivered to the network. The audience told you which one of those, which of those 5 minutes didn't work, so that by the time you got it narrowed down in editing, you had 26.5 minutes of dynamite show. In the case of the Van Dyke Show, there were episodes where it ran 35, 36 minutes. with audience spread, and some of the early Danny Thomas shows too, or some of the later ones also. If you had a show rolling, it rolled, and then when you edited it down, you had the opportunity to tighten it down to those things which worked. So that concept was good, and of course it was later picked up by Norman Lear and others who did shows like Sanford and Son, and— I'm not so sure about Sanford and Son, but All in the Family was done live. And a lot of shows are still done live in that same area of saying, let me let the audience tell me how good it is. Today, most of the time, they sweeten it with laugh tracks and kind of overdo it.
When it was the night to record, the Danny Thomas Show was filmed, was it not?
It was filmed.
Not videotaped?
No, it was filmed. There was no videotape at that time.
Okay. Would you play— would the band play warm-up for the audience?
Yes.
Would you come in and sort of play kind of dance numbers?
Yeah, we did. We'd start at 6 o'clock and do our thing with the scoring and rehearsing Danny, and then we'd move over on the stage, and at 7:30, they would start the show. And the way Sheldon handled it, too, was that if there were some goofs with the actors, or the camera missed a move or something like that, he'd go on and complete Complete the show. So that we did a half-hour show, we would be out of there by 9 o'clock. We would play fanfares and music to introduce— Danny would come out and warm the audience up and introduce Jeanie Hagen or Angela Cartwright or whoever was the guest star. And we would play them on, and then when they would break to change set or change the cameras into another set, we'd play some kind of dance music or something to keep it alive. And at 9 o'clock, we'd go home. We had a 3-hour session. Start at 6 and end at 9.
So it was almost a theatrical experience for the people coming to see it, the show?
Yeah, it was. And we did the same thing with Dick Van Dyke. That show was also shot in front of a live audience.
How much time did you spend during the week working on The Danny Thomas Show? And I guess The Barry Boldrige Show, I guess the same consistency.
Yeah, The Barry Boldrige Show, which had more production numbers. Ray was a dancer, singer, and the sponsors of the show, which I think were American Tobacco Company, they wanted music. They didn't care too much about stories. So we did some very elaborate production numbers in front of an audience, and then we had a stage on wheels so that we could roll it into opposite wherever the set was that they were shooting. We had it in front of an audience. And then the second year, it became impractical for Ray, and we wound up doing single camera the second year. But the live audience was always fun.
I'm curious to know how much time during the week you had to spend on arrangements, on composing any bridges or musical material.
It varied week to week, John. The way I had it set up was that with the union, I went to the union and said, we're gonna score every show live, but there's a limit to practicality. We're gonna be recording on the stage. We obviously can't score that show, and the film won't be ready for the week before. So I want the provision to be able to post-score 2 shows and score the one show. Then the following week, I will take the second show and I'll post-score that. And record live for the next one, you know, and we had these things overlap. So we would spend— it took 2 of us, I would say, 5 days a week to do the 2 shows, sometimes more. Bojor was pretty much last minute, and we might have to bring other arrangers in to get the production out.
And would Herbie usually function as an arranger and you would function as a composer on these shows?
That was kind of our pre-designated roles, but we didn't hesitate to cross over to each other. You know, if he— if we had a Bolger show and they had 3 things, 3 dance routines they were going to do, that meant there would probably be that much less scoring, so I'd pick up some of the slack there. And if we had nothing to do but maybe a vocal or something, then Herbie would help me on the scoring. So we kind of traded off on it.
What was Ray Bolger like to work with?
Ray was an unusual character. He'd come in and we would run a number down and he would say, it's all wrong. I'd say, all wrong? There's none of it that's any good? This was the second year when we were doing single camera, so we prerecorded. He'd say, it's all wrong. I'm going to have to Re-choreograph it. And we would play what we recorded. I'd give the orchestra 10, they'd go play cards, because we'd be an hour while he learned the number. And then he would say, I'll tell you what, let's just do it the way we recorded it first of all, and I'll adapt to it. We did that every week.
Every week.
It was just a routine with Ray. He was a slower study, and the tremendous pressure of the weekly dance routine was was really a burden. I don't care who, who was in that spot, that was a tough burden. And he just, he used our recording time really to rehearse the number. But outside of that, he was, he was okay. He was a good guy to work with.
What was the production company that did the Ray Bolger Show? Who did you work for on that?
I've forgotten the name of the company. Gwen Bolger was vice president of it. I guess Ray owned, you know, a big chunk of it. And we got off on the wrong foot right away. They had been rehearsing for 6 weeks to do a presentation number for the pilot, and I came in and I listened to what they were playing. They were using Defiled, and I said to— I've forgotten who the AD was— I said, have you got a clearance on this? And he said, what's a clearance? I said, Well, that music is published, and if I'm not mistaken, it's published by either Ricordi or some other European company, and they're tough.
In other words, you needed the rights to clear that.
You have to have the rights to use that. Oh, he said, well, I don't see that's a problem. I said, well, maybe it isn't, but it might be. And I called up the William Morris Agency and I said, have you got a clearance? And they said, you know, what's a clearance? And we went around and around. Finally, we got a— wired the publisher in Europe, and they wired back and said, absolutely not. There's no way you're going to do a comedy dance to this. Forget it. And I had to come in and tell Ray about that. He said, we've been working 6 weeks on it. I said, Ray, you're not going to put it on film. So we wound up using a PD Hungarian dance. They had to spend a lot of time doing it over again. But that was lack of knowledge on the part of the Production companies, that's, you know, you're talking early television.
It didn't occur to them that they needed to clear things?
Never occurred to anybody. We ran— I ran into it much later on too in other ways where we would all of a sudden find out they were whistling some tune that they hadn't cleared or somebody sitting down playing piano hadn't cleared.
You can't do that. During the era of Ray Bolger and Danny Thomas, now Ray lasted 2 seasons?
Way less, too.
Could you and Herbie split the work up enough that you could work a 5-day week, or were you working a lot around the clock, 7 days? Was it that intense a work schedule?
It didn't, it didn't really group out that way, John. There would be times when we'd have 2, 3 days off, and then we would just crash it for 4 days, because especially if we were doing production numbers, we wouldn't have the production numbers. And they wouldn't have them finished. And once we had a profile of what we had to do, we'd go to work. Well, if we'd lost 3 days in front, then we just had to make it up in back. So it was pretty much last minute.
Yeah.
And there was never really any way around it.
When you were doing heavy-duty musical numbers, who would you work with, in terms of calling the shots, making the decisions about what numbers to use, how to stage them, That kind of thing?
Well, Ray and Gwen called the shots on what numbers they were going to do. He had 2 people. He had a choreographer, a girl by the name of Sylvia Lewis, who was a wonderful dancer, and a male dancer who was a great dancer by the name of Maurice Kelly. And Sylvia and Maurice would stage the number, and we had a rehearsal piano player on, and the rehearsal piano player would take down what they were doing while they were doing it, and then eventually we'd meet with Sylvia and Maury and the piano player, and we would work out what the routine was, and we'd go to work and do it. And then the first time Ray heard it was when it was in the orchestra, outside of the rehearsal piano.
How big was the orchestra on Red Vulture?
We had 12 men, but we had a different 12. On the Danny Thomas Show, I was using 3 brass, 3 saxes, 3 violins. We dispensed with that and we had a little bit more brass. It was about a 12 to 14 piece orchestra. It varied from week to week.
Okay.
But we did the same format the first year, which was to score the shows beforehand.
We're talking about Danny Thomas now?
No, we're talking about Ray Bolger. Ray Bolger, okay. We used the same format that we did on on Danny, and then we moved over to the stage and played them on, and then we did the numbers live on our rolling bandstand. And when it came to single camera, then we prerecorded the numbers, and we were no longer present on the stage.
When the cameras were rolling and you were shooting, was there a high level of energy and sort of maybe pressure and excitement associated with Doing this and committing it to film, and the thought being, let's try to get this right the first time?
Yeah, I think, I think everybody responds to an audience. Having the audience there and doing something that's accepted, and you hear applause and you hear laughter, and it just kicks the energy level up. Everybody starts to respond to it, and I think the performances are better, both in music and in the acting.
So you felt that as a the conductor, and do you think the musicians felt it too?
Yes, I do.
Okay, we have to change tapes, I guess, at this point.
