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What Robert Morse needs right now is for Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney to knock on his door and exclaim: “Gosh, mister! We want to put on a show. If we pay you $ 15,000 a day for your big new studio, will you give us a chance to prove what we can do?”
Paramount’s original idea was to shoot Ferris Bueller in front of an audience, and Studio A is configured to accommodate one–halfway up one wall are doors that now lead to midair, but one day the public will parade through them to its seats. Paramount eventually dropped the live-audience idea, but state-of-the-art Studio A continued to look attractive. Paramount’s other idea was to set up shop in shuttered New Trier West High School in Northfield. Then everything fell through. If Ferris Bueller the TV series is ever done at all, it’ll almost certainly be done in Hollywood.
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But there’s no looking back! Two NBC: producers are trying to cook up talk shows, variety shows, whatever, for Studio A. “Wrestling and boxing crossed my mind, too,” says Morse.
“I still think it’s a valid point of view,” says Newman. “I hear secondhand there’s been a lot of debate.”
It’s a wonderful space and we’re sure he’s right. But if you find yourself on the planning committee of the junior-senior prom, you might give him a call.
“Obviously, it can’t be my vision for Chicago Times magazine,” Skelly went on. “I’ll use stuff assigned by someone else or I’ll make assignments that can be done in a week, assignments to writers available this instant. It’s not a normal situation.”
