RON MILLER 
MY HAPPY DAYS WITH
'HAPPY DAYS'
The 'Happy Days' cast in 1983:
Top, left to right: Henry "Fonzie" Winkler, Tom Bosley, Anson Williams, Marian Ross; Below, left to right:
Donny Most, Erin Moran, Ron Howard.
The 'HAPPY DAYS 30th REUNION SPECIAL' Premieres Thursday, Feb. 3, 8-10 p.m. on ABC (check local TV guides for exact time in your area.)
They really were a great
bunch of happy peopleBy RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Thursday night, Feb. 3, the ABC network will present a new two-hour special
celebrating the 30th anniversary of "Happy Days." The entire cast has been reassembled for the special, including the two actors who played Richie Cunningham's older brother "Chuck," who disappeared from the series after the first season. In celebration of this milestone, Ron Miller reminisces about the show he visited many times during its 10-years of production in Hollywood.Back in the late 1970s, the No. 1 show on American television was a silly sitcom called "Happy Days," which led off ABC's Tuesday night lineup, funnelling millions of cheerful fans into 'Laverne & Shirley," helping make it America's second most popular show.
Though I had to confess "Laverne & Shirley" was one of my all-time guilty pleasures--I rarely took my eyes off that big "L" on Penny Marshall's sweater--it required "special circumstances" for me to warm up to "Happy Days."
In those days, I made my living as a television critic for a newspaper in Northern California. If you were a critic, you got no respect if you liked "Happy Days," even though it was a hit show. I suppose down deep inside I knew that and maybe feared nobody would take me seriously when I wrote lavish praise for programs like "Roots" if they remembered I'd also praised "Happy Days." But then I wasn't being insincere since I really didn't like "Happy Days" anyway. Not at first.
You see, I'd always considered it a lame effort to cash in on the popularity of George Lucas' hit movie about teen nostalgia, "American Graffiti," which featured maturing juvenile player Ron Howard. Howard was also the star of "Happy Days," at least on paper. What's more, I thought Henry Winkler, who played a leather-jacketed dropout nicknamed "The Fonz," was just reprising his young hood role from another recent picture, "The Lords of Flatbush."
But that was before I was transferred to Los Angeles in order to write about television from a new vantage point--in the belly of the beast, you might say.
Since "Happy Days" was in production nearby and was TV's No. 1 show, facing its first serious ratings challenge from NBC's "The A-Team," I more or less felt I couldn't ignore it any longer. So I scheduled a day on the set and lined up interviews with everybody, including Garry Marshall, the show's executive producer. To prepare myself for the interviews, I watched maybe half a dozen episodes in advance.
Well, that was an eye-opener. I hadn't watched "Happy Days" much since its debut in 1974. I now realize that a situation comedy is always an evolving thing. Once the cast is assembled and the writers get to exploring the characters, the whole thrust of the show can change. That's what had happened with "Happy Days." I was surprised to discover "Happy Days" had found a new comic footing since Winkler's character had become the central focus of most scripts and Ron Howard's Richie Cunningham character had been written out of the series so Howard could start his directing career. When I sat down to purposely study the show, I actually enjoyed most of what I saw.
But I really began to appreciate "Happy Days" when I joined the company for a day--the first of many I would spend with the show over what turned out to be its 11th and final season. It was like being a fly on the wall at a college frat house. Clowning was epidemic and practical jokers were home free. Henry Winkler would snuggle up to Marion Ross and tease her--and she'd tease back, staying in character as the slightly ditsy Mrs. Cunningham. Donny Most and Anson Williams took turns throwing custard pies at each other one day--perhaps the ultimate in trying to break the other guy up during a rehearsal. Everybody seemed to be having as much fun as they could get away with--and with Jerry Paris directing, that meant they could get away with virtually anything.
You will not find Jerry Paris very high up in the ranks of great directors. In fact, he's probably buried in the small print somewhere because he directed the first two lowbrow sequels to the original "Police Academy" movie. But Jerry directed one of my favorite films of the 1970s--"The Grasshopper" with Jacqueline Bissett and Jim Brown--and directed almost every episode of "Happy Days" during its amazing 1974-84 run on ABC.
You'll remember Jerry Paris best as an actor. He was Jerry Helper, Rob Petrie's next-door neighbor on "The Dick Van Dyke Show." During his time on that show, Paris also wrote and directed episodes and learned all about situation comedy from two of the real masters--Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke. If you ask Ron Howard today, I'm sure he'll tell you he learned a tremendous lot about directing from Jerry Paris, who knew TV comedy inside and out.
One of the first things I noticed was Jerry's willingness to let the actors improvise their lines. In the first scene I watched them rehearse, Scott Baio, who played "Chachi," made up a line that got a laugh from everybody on the set. Oh, there was a little discussion with Paris about breaking away from the script, but Jerry said, "It got a laugh. Leave it in."
I was up in the bleachers where the audience usually sat when they taped the show on Friday nights. Sitting nearby was Lowell Ganz, a veteran comedy writer with the show who had become one of the producers and that day was serving as the story consultant. I asked him about the high degree of improv I was beginning to see.
"It's different from a play or a film because producers and writers come and go," he explained. "But these people (the actors) have been here 10 years. They're the last line of defense on their characters--and we make the assumption they know them better than anyone else."
Coming from Ganz, I knew that attitude had to be rooted in experience--and a confidence in the show's players and their ability to know what would and wouldn't work for their characters. (Ganz today one of Hollywood's top producers and is old "Happy Days" pal Ron Howard's partner in Imagine, the company they formed to produce movies and television shows.) I also believe the cast knew their opinions were respected by the writers and producers.Each Monday morning, the cast would sit down with Jerry Paris, the producers and the writers and read through the week's script. Everybody made their suggestions for changes, which were incorporated during rehearsals the following day. On Wednesday, there was a "run-through" with the writers and wholesale changes were made in the script. On Thursday, the show was rehearsed (blocked) for the cameras, so that every camera movement was set. The script wasn't final until the Friday dress rehearsal, done before a live audience. A second performance was done Friday night, also in front of a live crowd. That was the show that went on the air, although the editors were free to use "takes" of scenes from the earlier dress rehearsal, too.
The more times I visited the set, the more I appreciated "Happy Days." For one thing, I got rid of some preconceived notions. The show wasn't a ripoff of "American Graffiti" after all. It sprang from an idea producer Thomas Miller pitched to Michael Eisner during a coast to coast flight. Eisner then was president of ABC Entertainment. (He's now the retiring president of Disney Corp,, which owns ABC) That pitch came in 1971. "American Graffiti" came out in 1973.
Miller and his partner, Ed Milkis, told me they saw it as "a good old-fashioned family show" that might be just what America needed as it extracted itself from the Vietnam war. They wanted Garry Marshall to write it, but Marshall wanted to do it as a 1950s show;, which he thought would remove the teen characters from the angst of the Vietnam war era and put them in a benign time period when America was more mellow.
ABC wasn't keen on the idea, but agreed to let Miller and Miklis do a pilot version of the concept if they could do it as an episode of their popular series "Love, American-style." They did it as an episode called "Love and the Happy Day," which cast Ron Howard as Richie, Anson Williams as his friend, Potsie, and Harold Gould and Marion Ross as Richie's parents. The "backdoor" pilot didn't sell.
Miklis told me he thought it was too soft a show then--without the edginess that came with the Fonzie character. Ironically, though, George Lucas and the producers of "American Graffiti" looked at the pilot film in order to assess Ron Howard as the possible star of their movie, which was about to go into production. They liked what they saw and cast Howard in their film.
That also helped sell ABC on doing the series. Miller and Miklis told Michael Eisner they were sure the Lucas film would be a big hit, so why not sign Ronny Howard for their series and go with it? Eisner bought it and the producers hurriedly signed all the actors from the pilot except Gould, who wasn't available. To replace him, they hired Tom Bosley, who was fresh from "The Sandy Duncan Show."
Originally, the Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli character was to be a comic relief dropout type, put there for comic contrast to the whitebread Richie and his pals. He was a tall, lanky guy, but when Henry Winkler blew everybody away at his reading, they decided to cut Fonzie down to Henry's size. Ultimately, Winkler molded the character around himself and everybody, including Ron Howard, realized this would be the show's "breakout" character.
Still, "Happy Days" premiered to negative reviews and only mediocre ratings. It limped into a second season because ABC didn't have much else to put on. Garry Marshall, who moved up to executive producer, was frustrated because he saw there was great comic potential, especially after Fonzie entered the picture. Yet ABC warned them all that the show wouldn't go past a second season if it didn't start performing better.
That's when director Paris came up with the idea of doing it as a three-camera comedy in front of a live audience.
Paris, who used to play poker with some of the gang during lunch breaks, told me the pace was off and what the cast needed was an audience.
"You want to stay ahead of your audience," he told me, explaining that it's much easier for the actors to bring that feeling to their scenes if they're actually in front of an audience that will react to them.
They got ABC to agree to doing a three-camera episode at the end of the second season and everybody agreed it made a world of difference. By the third season, "Happy Days" broke into the top 10 and the producers sold the network a spinoff called "Laverne & Shirley." Once both shows linked up, ABC had a ratings blockbuster on its hands.
Meanwhile, Ron Howard acknowledged he might be the star of 'Happy Days" on paper, but Henry Winkler owned the show. The Fonz had become enormously popular and the writers began to write most of the episodes about him. Marion Ross told me Ron had confessed to her that there were times when he became deeply depressed about what he thought might be a dropoff in his popularity--but he never let it show to Winkler.
"Ron graciously, quietly stepped aside as Henry put the show in his pocket," she told me. "That was a period of concentrated graciousness on Ron's part."
Howard and Winkler are two of the finest people you will ever meet in show business--and they've remained close friends ever since "Happy Days." Henry has never forgotten how decently Ron handled what must have been an awkward situation. Henry himself, in the final years of the show, began to step aside to permit young Scott Baio to emerge as the show's new sensation. He was mindful this is what Ron did for him.
"We're a lot like each other because we both care about the work," Winkler told me back then. "There was never any talk" about who was getting the most fan mail.In those days, "Happy Days" was indeed a half-hour of geniality every Tuesday night at 8. You could feel the warmth and affection the players had for each other. They were a family on and off the air.
"The National Enquirer used to call, looking for dirt," producer Miklis said. "They even sent spies. They thought we couldn't all love each other that much."
But there wasn't any dirt to find. The program had developed into a crucible in which some of Hollywood's best writing talent passed through, learning from the experienced pros. Winkler and Howard both diverted their career paths toward work behind the camera. Winkler is now one of TV's most respected producers and Howard, who won his first Academy award as a director for "A Beautiful Mind" (2001), is at the top of his game as a feature film producer-director. What the scandal sheets failed to notice is that "Happy Days" employed serious, thoughtful people--despite all the pranks, pratfalls and practical jokes.
Today "Happy Days" continues to expand its audience on the TV Land cable network, where reruns unreel steadily, and on home video, where the first season has just come out in a boxed DVD set.
Will I always regard "Happy Days" as one of the great TV sitcoms? No, not really. I don't think it was in the league of "Cheers" or "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" or "The Dick Van Dyke Show." But I certainly will always respect it as a solid situation comedy that definitely had an influence on a generation of youngsters who grew up watching it and absorbing the pro-social lessons that Winkler and the writers built into the Fonzie character, so negative in its original concept, but so positive by the time the show finally stopped production in 1984.
Most of all, though, I'll always remember it as a happy place to visit, where cast and crew welcomed me--a TV critic, of all things--and seemed respectful enough to never hit me with a custard pie, though I'm sure there must have been times when they were sorely tempted.
©2005 by Ron Miller. The "Happy Days" photo is courtesy of TV Land.
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