Don Adams Articles
Don Gets Smart
With TV Brass
The Ottawa
Journal - October 9, 1971
UNIVERSAL CITY -- O.K., all you Don Adams fans. The erstwhile Maxwell Smart of "Get Smart" is back on TV because he was "tricked" into it.
He wouldn't mind pulling a trick of his own.
He had a deal with Universal Studios to create and write three pilots for them. One he liked particularly, "Good Luck, Ben Gunn." and he wrote it with himself in mind.
He also like "The Partners," but he didn't figure on being in it.
No one bought "Good Luck, Ben Gunn," but they did buy "The Partners," if Don would do it.
So now Don wouldn't mind at all if his fans wrote letters to Universal Studios and NBC and say they would like to see the other series.
It wasn't bought, Don feels because it was "far out and some of the comedy was sort of black." "The Partners" was bought because it was not far our and the comedy is sort of in the "Get Smart" vein, although Don insists his character, Detective Lennie Crooke, is not a caricature.
And for those who have fantastic ears, you've discovered that Don uses his own voice in "The Partners," whereas he used that comic voice and speech in "Get Smart".
Anyway, the series you won't be seeing, but which Don insists "I'll get on some day somehow, even if I have to make a feature," concerns a man who, at 15 and freshly innocent from a farm, enlisted in the service. He wound up lost in the South Pacific.
Now, as the series starts, he returns, 25 years later, to a world he can't begin to understand.
Don easily does 30 minutes on the script, and it is a funny, original, imaginative one with sharp jabs at all of the foibles of today and an unending source of material.
Don is a man of enthusiasms. But they occasionally change their directions. He was once the most ardent of golfers.
"But I gave that up for tennis, mainly because I bought a house with a tennis court. Tennis is fun. When you have a court, your tennis-playing friends come over and you have tournaments. Am I any good? I'm getting better. Singles are strenuous but doubles aren't. The trick is to get young kids as partners. I stand there and looked poised and occasionally shift my feet, but I always yell 'get it' to my partner. Particularly when the ball is hit to me."
Enough of socializing. Get pencils and paper ready and help send this boy to camp in the series he wants to be in.
