Anyone Ever Been An Audience Member During a Show's Production? (1 Viewer)

[Garrett Adams]

Was a live show, not taped. I was in the audience of a radio braodcast originaing from San Francisco. It was a detective show called "Pat Novak for Hire". The star and writer was a guy named Jack Webb. He later went on to do television work in the same genre. :b

 

[Ted Lee]

john kilroy summed it up very nicely. i highly recommend you follow his advice...especially #3.

i used to be a page at paramount studios. so i worked all the shows there (arsenio hall, cheers, wings, etc.) plus shows on other lots (in living color, fresh prince, etc.) plus i gave tours of the studios.

watching a show is pretty fun if you've never seen it before. i got burned pretty quickly, but it was always fun to see the famous people. arsenio hall was really fun for that because it was always different people and the show was taped live, so it never lasted more than an hour.

if you get to paramount studios, you can try to get tickets for the show, or you can even do a tour - at least you could while i was there. the ticket area is located on Gower Street - which is the left-hand side of the studio if you're facing it.

or call them - http://www.paramount.com/studio/seeashow.htm

 

[DeathStar1]

I saw Letterman. Was waiting for a friend outside the Ed Sullivan Theater, and a guy came up to us and asked if we wanted to see Letterman that day. We got some cancellation tickets or something. It was interesting… not necessarily something I’d want to repeat unless it was on a whim like that. >>

Saw Letterman in 1995. I used to know the exact date and had it written down somewhere, have to go refind the show. Unfortunatly, none of the guests where people I had heard of before. That's the only problem with going to a talk show. At home you can flip once the comedy is over. If you go 'live', you have to stick around for guests you don't care for.

I also went to the Rocky Allen Showgram held in the same Letterman studio. Not the same thing, but fun none the less .

Other shows? Spin City for one. As others have stated, takes a long time to film a TV Show, so we where there for a few hours, and only saw part of the show filmed. But it was interesting to see Michael using different lines during the various takes. Some I wish actually made it on the air instead of what was used . It was great seeing Fox and Lloyd work together since his BTTF co-star was a guset .

I think that was it. For some reason I think I'm forgetting something, but I guess not. My DREAM show is to go see Price before Bob keels over and dies. I've been watching that since the early 80's.

Speaking o' gameshows, anyone attend a taping of the original Press Your Luck? Was that as fun as it seemed?

 

[Rob W]

Years ago I sat in on a taping of GOLDEN GIRLS. It wasn't even a show I watched more than a few times, but I was really interested in how the process went. Many shows actually do two audience run-throughs. In our case, I believe we were the test audience to see how things played before the official taping later that same night. I don't recall it taking much more than an hour, but my memory's kinda fuzzy about that.

My real thrill was sitting in twice for tapings of THE TONIGHT SHOW when Johnny Carson was still the host. Of course, it tapes in pretty much real time and lasted the standard one hour with musical interludes when they were paused for the commercial breaks. I recall Walter Cronkite was a guest on one of the two shows I saw. The second time I was there, they asked the audience to remain seated after the show . Then, Bob Hope came out and taped his monologue for his Christmas special that was set to air the following week. A very nice bonus !

And everyone's right - the studios are inevitably smaller than you would have expected !