DAYTON ALLEN: My book "Why Not!" did even better! I got an advance of $2500 and never saw another penny.
GEO: The book came out about the same time you created your own little syndicated TV program -- in 1960. It was a five-minute drop-in of you giving some sort of nonsensical lecture. How many of them did you make?
DAYTON ALLEN: 130. I had two partners: Stan Burns who was a writer on Steve Allen and another guy named Allen Sandler who had a film library. We'd lock ourselves in a hotel room and write a bunch of them and then go shoot them over at KCOP, the public broadcasting studio in Hollywood.
GEO: It seems odd that you were working so much in LA, but you continued to live in New York.
DAYTON ALLEN: Yeah it was something about my head, I couldn't do anything about it. It was just pure stupidity that just festered and grew until it became enlarged stupidness.
GEO: How many stations picked up the Dayton Allen Show?
DAYTON ALLEN: We were in 26 markets in the US and it was a big hit on the Armed Forces television.
1 comment:
Funny stuff. Allen used some of this schtick in doing the "Deputy Dawg" cartoons.
Burns & Sandler, BTW, made up 2/3 of the production team that worked with Allen on "Lancelot Link" 10 years later. Now, if only this could be available via public domain DVD......
Post a Comment