My Husband Is Not a Drunk
The Dick Van Dyke Show

Carl Reiner describes the comedy writer’s plight, when the bell rings he’s down for the count, in the bag, tanked, a pushover, ring him again and he’s a nine-to-five man.

Buddy isn’t Pavlovian, though he can act the part for a gag.

The sponsor might go either way, in the end he’s amused, to be sure.

Just a cocktail party joke with a friend who’s a hypnotist.

Ski Party

Teen life is a joy while the madness is on, the girls are fabulous, harmony and rhythm captivate the moment, it’s a scene. Between songs, girls want conversation, Italian films make them giggle, the teen idol is cynosure and president of the college Ski Club.

Boys and girls are separated at the lodge by a neurotic receiving psychiatric treatment through the mail. The boys receive instruction from a German who remembers Stalingrad, the girls have an easier time of it. Two boys, anxious to break the stalemate by learning to ski, join the girls as English exchange students (they have seen Some Like It Hot).

One wins the Ski Jump Championship by wearing a wet suit filled with helium, it malfunctions and the other shoots him down with the neurotic’s functioning starter pistol, breaking a leg. The champ limps miles in the snow for his prize of spin the bottle with a Swedish girl, but she wants to talk like an American.

The other English girl wins the love of the teen idol, who pursues her back to Santa Monica and swims to Japan after her, on the advice of her masculine alter ego. The girls repent of their schemes against the boys, discussed in late-night sessions overheard by their new English friends.

The sham sophistication of the New York Times review had no idea what it was missing. Avalon’s resemblance to Mastroianni is providential. The idol, whose name is Freddie, reads Casanova on skis and asks, “what good is a book like this without pictures?” Robert Q. Lewis has a Freudian slip twixt pistol and microphone before the championship.

Off to Hollywood
The Andy Griffith Show

A real movie studio sends Sheriff Taylor a $1000 check in payment for his likeness and representation in a film based on the magazine article about him, “Sheriff Without a Gun”, not the “studio” that used the article as a pretext for trying to rob the Mayberry bank.

This is the first of three parts describing a trip to Hollywood by Taylor, Aunt Bee and Opie, which build from the merciless quiet humor of Vic ‘n Sade through a demonstration of filming to the lightning of Darlene Mason, movie star.

Goober exhibits the check to the townsfolk as a wonder, coming all the way from Belmont Film Studios and signed by Art Spiegel. Aunt Bee wants to spend the money, but the sheriff prefers to know where it is, in the bank. Helen Crump sides with Aunt Bee, and suggests they travel. The usual places are discussed, Raleigh paramount among them, but Aunt Bee says, “Hollywood!”

In a scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, Sheriff Taylor is given a suitcase by a shop proprietor, who has in his family a little bundle of talent Hollywood’s been waiting for. The sheriff thanks him for the suitcase.

The town band in red uniforms sees them off at the bus depot. Warren, who began things by explaining to Goober that “when you’ve spent 16 weeks at the Sheriff’s Academy, as I have, you know what is important and what is not important,” hurls their suitcases up and over the bus.

Taylors in Hollywood
The Andy Griffith Show

A.J. Considine, the director of Sheriff Without a Gun, uses two cameras to film a scene continuously, on a corner set of two walls exactly as in Antonioni’s La Signora senza camelie, for example, and this is seen both from the vantage point of the Taylors sitting in VIP chairs for the filming and from the two cameras, very effectively.

This is after a sightseeing trip to Cesar Romero’s front lawn, where a paperboy drops the news and the Taylors stand in awe, until a maid gently urges them off because the lawn has just been reseeded.

The Taylors ride down Sunset Boulevard past Scandia and Dino’s Lodge, the newer Schwab’s Pharmacy and the Whisky a Go Go.

The Piedmont Hotel’s bellboy is a hardened professional who becomes so flustered when he’s asked to have his picture taken with them that he steps on a coffee table as he exits the room.

Gavin MacLeod as the actor Bryan Bender playing Sheriff Taylor in the film is shockingly bald off-camera, even in costume, but no toupee can assuage Aunt Bee’s displeasure at his histrionics during the exploits of the hero against the armed Calhoun boys, though the real sheriff is rapt with enjoyment. The actress playing Aunt Bee is blonde and heroic, using a rifle despite her nephew’s reticence, and this saves the day.

The Hollywood Party
The Andy Griffith Show

Belmont Pictures wants some publicity shots of Sheriff Taylor and the actress who plays his love interest in Sheriff Without a Gun, Darlene Mason. Sid Melton makes this request as the publicity man with a silent photographer in tow, and this is where Rafkin’s style of deadpan right down to the floor prepares the revelation of a Hollywood star who even in her makeup robe is attentive and easy with a man on first acquaintance. After a quick change, a photo is quickly achieved on her dressing-room sofa of nuzzling smiles, which the publicity man observes “will make the papers” and does, in Mayberry, where Helen Crump sees it and is discomfited greatly.

Sheriff Taylor has to straighten things out at the Hollywood Marquis, where Darlene Mason keeps an apartment she decorated herself. She wears a sparkling pink cocktail dress as they go out to dinner, the sheriff in a dark suit and the blonde whose work he’s not familiar with (Opie asks him if she’s as pretty as Miss Crump, and is told, “she must be, she’s a movie star”).

Smiling, kind and professional like everyone the Taylors meet at Belmont, the movie star sets things right with a phone call, and kisses Sheriff Taylor on the cheek. “What was that,” asks Helen on the other end. The sheriff, holding the phone, says, “Miss Mason just opened a bottle of pop.”

How to Frame a Figg

This letter from home on the Universal lot is filmed directly in the manner of Barney Fife in Raleigh, and concerns a City Hall accountant who uncovers misappropriation and is dealt with accordingly. Vic Mizzy’s score recalls his work on The Busy Body, and the computer theme relates this to The Thief Who Came to Dinner, by way of a device from 2001: A Space Odyssey (LEO: Large-capacity Enumerative Officinator).

The specific reality of the coda is prepared by a Pop explanation of gizmoness.