In the first season, The Odd Couple was filmed with one camera, like a movie or a drama, with a traditional laugh track added in later. The others I thought we gave our best shot.”īringing in a Live Studio Audience Changed Everything We did 114 episodes and I would say three or four were disappointing. But when we finally shot them, it was well worth it. Friends we had went home early from other shows. We worked very hard on the show, late hours, to maintain a certain level of quality. We finally convinced the network of that, and they left us alone. There was, however, a tendency at the time to do more women stories, but the show wasn’t women. “The characters that Neil wrote were so perfect,” Garry detailed, “that it wasn’t difficult to expand on them. And from there the scripts seemed to flow fairly easily. The network was eventually convinced, which meant that they would have Klugman and Randall, but then Garry had to convince his actors, which wasn’t such an easy thing to do - until they recognized that their potential co-star was guaranteeing it would be a class production. But to play Felix, that would be acting.’ I said, ‘Walter, do me a favor. I called Matthau and asked why he wanted to play Felix when he would not only be perfect as Oscar, but that he was Oscar. “It would have been the blunder heard ’round Shubert Alley. One problem, however: “He wanted to play Felix,” noted Neil. I turned to my wife and I said, ‘Well, I don’t care what the third act is like. I was doing a picture in Hollywood when I got the first two acts of The Odd Couple. I said, ‘When you have two acts finished, would you send them to me?’ And he said yes. “He said to me, ‘My name is Neil Simon and I’m writing a play for you.’ I said, ‘How many acts do you have?’ He said there were three acts. Next approached was Walter Matthau, who reflected in the production notes for The Odd Couple II that he first met Neil, who was a fledgling playwright at the time, at a party in New York.
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