Advice from an Old Guy: 5 Lessons I learned from directing The Dick Van Dyke Show

This old guy had but one piece of advice for writers:

“Write what you know about! Yourself! If you are a mystery to you, find another occupation.”

The 5 lessons I learned from “The Dick Van Dyke Show” are simple:

Gifted and attractive actors, serviced by empathetic directors, and having ample rehearsals to interpret very, very, vert well written scripts, will more than likely produce a multiple Emmy award winning TV hit!`

An episode I had written entitled, “It May Look Like a Walnut.” featured an unrehearsed scene that was performed before a live audience. In it Dick playing Rob Petrie opened a closet door and was greeted by an avalanche of walnuts, 500 pounds of them pouring out and flooding the living room floor! Five hundred pounds of walnuts that our budget could ill afford. Rob’s wife, Laura, rode in on the crest of this 500 pound avalanche of cascading nuts! It was unrehearsed, because there was no way to dump the nuts it and have time to redress the stage for that night’s show.  A weary gang of grousing stage hands spent half that night bagging the quarter ton of vagrant walnuts that blanketed the floor of  Desi-Lu’s Studio # 1.