how hard could it be?

As his confidence grew, the writer soon moved from one-page play descriptions to three-page character studies....From there, it was just a matter of time before he started composing short stories.

[excerpt, The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book]

(One of the most memorable of them was "Fifteen Arthur Barringtons," a tale that concerned the anxieties of an actor named Arthur Barrington who finds himself sitting at a casting call with fourteen other young actors of his exact age, weight, and physical type....)

"...One day I said, 'Gee, I'm thirty-five years old.  I'd better do something with my life.'"  Though Carl Reiner could hardly have been described as lazy -- he'd just completed three seasons in the cast of Caesar's Hour -- the actor nonetheless felt himself trapped by a vague feeling of creative fatigue....
By the middle of August 1957, Reiner had completed Enter Laughing, his fictional memoir of one David Kokolovitz, a struggling actor trying to break into show business despite his family's insistence that he continue to pursue a trade in the millinery business.

...Reiner originally planned Enter Laughing as a far more encompassing work.  "I intended to record the life of a Bronx-born person like myself," the writer told a reporter in 1964, "from his entry into the theater at the age of 17 to his mature years as an actor and writer and husband and father."  But, Reiner notes, once he'd completed 250 typewritten pages and discovered that he'd barely covered a single year in his young protagonist's life, he "decided it was time to stop."

===================
"Variety shows were almost extinct," says Reiner today, "so I knew I had to find something else." 

Of course, the former Broadway star might have considered returning to the stage. 

And, in fact, it was around this time that the actor's old friend Neil Simon offered Reiner a lead role in the comedy that was set to be the playwright's first Broadway show, Come Blow Your Horn.  But despite Carl Reiner's abiding respect for his old crony from Your Show of Shows, he had little interest in making a return trip to the Great White Way. 

"I'd been on Broadway," says Reiner, "and I didn't want to go back.  Once you're in television, there's an everyday excitement to the work that's not there on Broadway, where you have to do the same thing three hundred and sixty-five days a year."

...His agent Harry Kalcheim had only to point to the careers of Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, and Danny Thomas, three situation-comedy headliners who, like Reiner, had each been long-established variety performers before they made the switch to situation comedy, and all of whom ended up getting very, very rich in the process. 

There was certainly no reason why, at the age of thirty-six, Carl Reiner couldn't make an equally successful transition to the half-hour form.  All Reiner had to do, suggested Kalcheim, was find a situation comedy vehicle that seemed reasonably well suited to his particular talents.  "Is that all?" Reiner remarked.  "Well, how hard could that be?"

The answer to that query would become painfully obvious almost as soon as Reiner opened the first in the small pile of proposed situation-comedy scripts his agent sent around for his approval.  To the actor's dismay, what he read in that first script gave him pause.  "It really wasn't very good," recalls Reiner. 

Nor did he find much to hold his interest in any of the subsequent half-dozen scripts that his agent submitted to him over the course of the next few days.  "None of them were any good," he says.  "Or, if they were good, they weren't for me."  Finally, just as the actor had begun to wonder if he'd ever find an appropriate vehicle to propel him to the next stage of his career, the answer came to him from a wholly unexpected source -- his wife.

Estelle Reiner finally picked up one of the scripts and began reading it herself.  A few minutes later, she set it down, satisfied that her husband's appraisals had not been far off the mark.  "You're right, these aren't very good," she volunteered, adding, quite matter-of-factly, "I'll bet you could write a better script than any one of those, yourself."

It was intended as a casual observation....After more than thirty-five years, Carl Reiner is still struck by the lasting impact...."My wife, in her infinite wisdom, said I could write better than that.  Of course, I'd never written a sitcom. 

But when your wife thinks you can -- you can."

..."I was influenced by the flavor of Father Knows Best," Carl Reiner explained.  "And Leave It to Beaver....And he created Rob and Laura Petrie at least partially as a response to the retrograde approach to domestic reality he had observed on I Love Lucy and a least a dozen other situation comedies from the era that immediately preceded his own series.  "The battle of the sexes was the big plot device," he explains.  "It's the easiest one to write -- you scream at me, I'll scream at you.  And a lot of people identified with that. ...

As for the immensely popular I Love Lucy, Carl Reiner confesses..."I didn't like their premise.  They were hilarious -- no doubt about it -- but it was always Lucy fooling Ricky.  Lucy and Desi made you wonder why they stayed together.  You'd say, 'How could they love each other?  He never caters to her, he always calls her a dope!'"  And so, when it came time to create his own series, Carl Reiner was determined to shoot for a different sort of truth -- one that was firmly rooted in a reality that he knew.

"My show was based on a mutually respecting husband and wife.  It was two against the world.  And even when it was one-against-one, it was the kind of one-against one you have in a family that loves each other.  I was trying to pattern it off a life that I knew."

--------------------------
{excerpts, The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book.  Vince Waldron.  Copyright, 1994, Hyperion, NY, NY.}

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