'the Brady Bunch Exposed' documentary PART FOUR

the exception was Robert Reid, who had some trouble doing comedy. Reid had started at the Royal British Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and performed Shakespeare on Broadway in the fifties and early sixties, when I was very young and stupid. He wanted to be the best classical actor in the world and then, a few years later, I thought: well, I just like being a good classical actor, no, it's all changes. Director John Rich and his co-star NBD Davis picked up on Reid's discomfort because he was coming off a pretty wonderful series called The Defenders with, say, Marshall and he was the young lawyer and they had done some serious work.

I think he was looking for that and made the mistake of taking on the role. Don't you like it here anymore? No, sir, not as much as I used to. Don't worry, you know, when a person is not happy where they are, they have every right to look for a place where they can be happier, you know, what surprises me is how wrong we were, we all love you, we thought you loved us. Also oh, I do, okay, I better go. I thought you would be angry. Why do you listen? You wouldn't want me to stay if I didn't want to.

Would you have to do it? You are the father. That's very true. He wasn't a happy man on that set because, on the one hand, he didn't want to do the pilot, it was a contractual thing that he had to do the pilot and I don't think he was disappointed that he sold it, I mean, he had enough. He was classically trained and I really don't think that working on a children's show was his idea of ​​where he wanted to go with his career and so you know there was that tension from the beginning in public, although Reid realized that everything was fine.

Good shoot, he was doing a play in New York at the same time he was doing the defenders and I do comedy at night and drama during the day. First of all, I think it's represented when you're doing something that's supposed to be fun. you can't wait, I mean, you come off stage and you're serious or if you're doing something that's serious, you can't wait to give a joke when you get off, I think that's an easy transition to make, but in the state of the tribe Brady Reid was not so calm. His frustration over the role of Mike Brady led to frequent open discussions with bridges to Sherwood Schwartz.

Reed threatened to quit several times during the first season. There were several times he came to my office and I just said, I have to get out of this and how did you convince me to do it? I can't deal with this man and a couple of times he threatened to hold press conferences and do things that he just wasn't a happy camper about. On our show I tried to quit him at least three times in the first year and it was a constant fight for him the entire time, although Reid never followed through on his threats to quit, he continued to fight with Sholde Schwartz, his son Lloyd and anyone else.

In power, Reid's main complaints revolved around scripts that he thought were juvenile and full of factual errors. He wanted better scripts. He wanted better scripts. And I say, Bob, we're not going to do Shakespeare here. Remember this is a sitcom, you know, the underlined word is comedy. and sometimes he found it difficult, you know, I think he really wanted to do Shakespeare and bigger things. He once walked off the stage because this script had the wrong population for Poughkeepsie instead of the desired one and 30,000 was 480,000. I said good. the writer probably used the above, you know, you make excuses, it was a lunatic choice, you know, he's not talking about the drama, he's not talking about the comedy, he's talking about simple facts that she can look up in an encyclopedia that he used to make for By the end of the first season in the spring of 1970, The Brady Bunch was drawing modest ratings and the show's lead actor was constantly threatening to retire.

The outlook didn't look good, but things were about to change now, if anything Americans do. really good, it's making money and that goes double for Americans on TV after all, they invented it, so when the Bradys turned the corner and started growing in popularity, the network bigwigs realized that They had a real money spinner, the only people who didn't share the profits with the smart ones, even though their popularity increased, their paychecks didn't budge an inch in the third season in 1972, the Brady Bunch challenged the critics by placing in the top 20 in ratings and winning the Friday night time slot, but while the network was making millions.

In advertising revenue, the people who played the Bradys were basically salaried employees to capitalize on their fame and make some money. The younger members of the cast formed a musical group. The Brady Bunch kids on stage were a cheerful critic, but backstage no one was singing a happy tune. It divided our group and fractured it almost irreparably when the Brady Bunch gained a following in the early 1970s. Episode budgets began to grow. New stories require location shooting in the Grand Canyon and Hawaii. The Hawaiian episodes we filmed were in some ways built around me surfing and growing up in California.

The only thing he had been longer than Brady was a surfer. Celebrities were also frequent guests. Bobby threw a ball with football great Joe Namath. Greg Racine. Pitching tips from baseball star Don Drysdale. Daisy came to greet me for the first time the first time I went on the show and I was Davy Jones instead of an actor, you know, playing a role that I was playing myself, so I thought, "Hey, me." I've made it, you know, the children's musical group Brady Bunch formed shortly after David Jones' appearance on the show. He made several albums that year and in the spring of 1973 they joined me.

Everything began to fall a

part

in the group, he demanded that some of the musical numbers. will be worked on in future episodes of The Brady Bunch, they also asked for more money, the Brady kids were feeling their oats and we had ideas about directions we could take that would be in our best interests, whether or not they were in the best interest of the show. o Whether or not they were following Sherwood's wishes, the executive producer showed that Schwartz was furious with his greedy cast and told them what they could do with their demands for a pay rise.

They signed certain contracts. I said I signed a contract when the rating goes up. I do not run. to Paramount and say it's already up I want to up I said when I sign something I sign difficult negotiations with show Schwartz were too much pressure for Susan Allison and Eve plum they just got tough they left the musical group Maureen McCormick soon followed and in August 1973 The Brady Bunch Boys They were history, we were really starting to become popular and I think it could have gone other places if we hadn't had this breakup, this split, that's the kind of thing you normally see immediately on a show, you know?

Politics and it took five years for that to develop on our show, but it happened that the split cars returned for the fifth season of The Brady Bunch in the fall of 1973. The atmosphere became more stressful during the filming of the first episode filmed in an amusement park in Ohio, eager fans overwhelmed the Bradys both at the park and at their hotel, they had no security so we had people watching in our rooms following us to our rooms hanging out in the lobby. No, I'm a very private person, which is a really bad feeling. Tensions continued to persist after the amusement park fiasco while the rest of the country was being torn a

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by social changes and the Vietnam War.

The Bradys lived in a time warp. The actors. They became increasingly frustrated with what they considered outdated Dialogues and Stories. I was bothered by the fact that we didn't get into trouble on the show and, you know, I also thought it was vapid and mean-spirited and, you know, not representative of the life of a child back then, I became more aware that Cindy was supposed to be very adorable and very cute when I started growing up and I was very aware that I wasn't that adorable and I wasn't that cute and I was getting more and more uncomfortable. and the scripts didn't really change.

At times I felt very frustrated because we were, you know, connecting more normally as parents, you know, raising our voices and showing frustration and you know everything you go through anguish as a parent. It was all very overlooked. The creator showed Schwartz still hope. The Brady Tribe would be renewed for a sixth season. Bob and Sherwood were like two little umpires and a little league team and they were both absolutely convinced they were right, it was just a series of protracted fights that the duo saved. The biggest battle for the finale was discussed during rehearsals for the final show of the fifth season.

Reed thought the script about the miracle hair tonic that Bobby sells was so stupid that they refused to say his lines. Schwartz responded by removing him from the episode, but an angry reading refused to leave the set he won't go to his dressing room insists on staying on stage and then Parma told me we'll send two guards and take him off the stage if that's the only way to get him off the set. scenario, I said No way, not in front of those kids. I don't want to see mr. Sir. father mr. Brady was escorted off the set by two uniformed police officers.

The interesting thing about this is that Bob didn't leave, he sat in the back and watched, he is a very complex man. Reed eventually left the set alone and did not appear in the episode in a rage. Schwartz told studio executives that he was fed up with Reed's antics and suggested that the Mike Brady character be eliminated or recast if the show was picked up for a sixth season; the constant bickering along with declining ratings were more than enough for the network to Out of nowhere, I think it was a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon. I got a call from a gentleman on the network and he called me and said it was his nasty job.

Well, first he said, I'm sitting here, Berry, with a Bob, now I'm out of a bottle of bourbon, and I said, well, it sounds like you're having an amazing afternoon, and he said yeah, but not that nice. I have been given the task of informing the cast that the series has been canceled and there will be no more new shows and I don't want to hear another word about it. Oh, The Brady Bunch was canceled in May 1974. The sitcom's demise was a blessing for the cast. I could have done it for a few more years. I would.

I wouldn't have minded all of it I enjoyed that I like people I like people on camera like people off camera I would have enjoyed sticking it just for Claire I had bought it a bit and had gotten used to some adulation so say goodbye that wasn't going to be an easy thing to do, but I still had another impulse of, you know, I just want to throw it all away the last year I was there. I was ready to go. I think they saw me like 15. They have been. Five years, you know, um, so I might be ready to go anyway.

I have to move this program. I'll call you back and I can find a rewrite and a redo. I haven't seen what the return is. The Brady Bunch is an embarrassing return to television. No one was more excited about the cancellation than Robert Reed, who finally got the chance to pursue the serious roles he had always wanted for 1975, a 43-year-old actor and his first Emmy nomination for his portrayal of a father and husband who is became transsexual. In the drama Medical Center he added a second nomination that same year for his portrayal of decadent millionaire Teddy Boyland in the popular miniseries Rich Man Poor Man Reads.

His obsession with shedding his Brady Bunch image didn't carry over to co-star Florence Henderson. She embraced his motherly personality and in 1975 began a 25-year career as a cooking oil spokesperson, the chickens got his suitor, Where's the T and B Mail? Davis had no worries about being typecast, she had already worked in television for more than 20 years. years, but when the Brady Bunch went off the air, the 50-year-old performer found few acting roles that she liked, Davis became so disillusioned that she decided to make a complete change, you know, for many years I lived in Los Angeles and worked. the business, I knew what it was like, I'd had time to play, I'd been to premieres and you know, all this kind of stuff that you get caught up in and, frankly, it wasn't very fun, and then, when, when this?

A new life began to happen for me. I was delighted. In 1976, Davis sold her home and moved to Denver to be part of a religious commune. She spent her time studying the Bible, working in the community, and volunteering at a homeless shelter. We went down twice a week just to do laundry, I mean now you guys came in from the streets, we had showers for them and we would take their dirty clothes and give them clean clothes, we would wash their dirty clothes and give them to someone. Additionally, while Davis found peace in the post-Brady Bunch days, her younger co-stars weren't having as much luck;

In fact, Hollywood producers and casting directors gave the Brady children a very cold reception and did not wanthire someone with my previous image. and I couldn't help but understand that though, I was very frustrated with the fact that I had this mold on me and I didn't think it was fair. Olsen decided to wait and renew her acting career after the Brady Bunch. should become a distant memory the wait would be long