My favorite game show is…well, if you go way back, it would be something like I’ve Got a Secret or What’s My Line? that gave witty people a chance to be witty, usually on live, anything-can-happen television. If we get into more recent ones — polished, edited, taped five or more a day — I really liked the original daytime version of Press Your Luck. It ran on CBS from 1983 to 1986 and was hosted and hosted well by Peter Tomarken. It was was a game that was cleverly crafted to create frequent moments of Sudden Death and contestants going head-to-head. Unlike a lot of game shows, there was some genuine strategy involved. If you wanted to win, that is.
The current prime-time version hosted by Elizabeth Banks is okay but it does feel a little overproduced to me, like someone always has their finger on an APPLAUSE button and all the contestants are receiving a constant intravenous solution of pure glucose. The video below consists of moments from the original daytime version. This is what’s called a Sizzle Reel — a collection of highlights that someone makes up to sell the show to some potential buyer or something. Since the series had been on the air a while before this was made, I’m not sure who they were trying to sell with it. Perhaps it was to entice buyers in other countries to buy the rights to do a version of the program for their local markets. There were a number of them.
Whatever the purpose, this reel shows off the excitement of the original show well. Beginning around the 4:35 mark, there’s an excerpt of a spin-passing battle between two ladies and it actually went on a lot longer than what is shown here. I remember seeing the whole thing when it aired and thinking that when this occurred in the studio, one of the creators of this game — like, say, Bill Carruthers, whom I’d met — turned to someone and said, “See? That’s exactly what this game was configured to make happen sometimes!”
The main thing folks remember of the original series is that a man named Michael Larson figured out a way to “beat” the game board, got on the show and hit them for a then-staggering $110,237. That would be three-to-four times as much in today’s money but it would still be only mid-range impressive when many game shows offer a shot at a million and up. Still, Larson’s take-home pay was Game Show History at the time and it’s still a very rare example of a turn of events on a game show that its producers did not anticipate.
The exact outcome of a game show is not pre-determined. They don’t know in advance who’ll win or what they’ll win but the result is always something they knew could and would occur, Michael Larson being one of the rare exceptions. If you have the time, you might enjoy this documentary that was made a few years later that explains what happened, how it happened and what happened afterwards to Larson. One of the “talking heads” you’ll see interviewed in there is a friend of mine, Bob Boden, who has worked in every corner of the game show world for many years now, including time at CBS (when Mr. Larson worked his Whammy-avoidance wizardry ) and helping found the Game Show Network, for which he caused this documentary to be made…
As you saw if you watched it, or can guess if you didn’t, it’s a fascinating story and there were several attempts made to dramatize it into a motion picture. I think the first person who tried it was me. I had a friend other than Bob who worked on the show then and she called me the evening of that fateful tape day and told me what had transpired. She was still in a state of semi-shock.
What intrigued me about the story was the panic and uncertainty that transpired offstage and especially in the control room. After Larson passed $20,000 or $25,000, they got to worrying: Was the game board broken? Had someone tampered with it? Someone who was in collusion with Larsen? There was the obvious concern about how much dough he might be taking away but CBS had that much in petty cash. Some folks behind-the-scenes were more worried about the show being damaged, perhaps irreparably, by whatever the hell it was that was happening on that stage.
There was also a big worry about getting an airable show out of whatever resulted. The half-hour format for Press Your Luck allowed for one game per episode. In the past, they’d always over-taped the host chit-chatting with the contestants so they could fill out the time if a game was short. If the game ran long, they could do judicious editing and trim a minute or so. But the way things were going with Michael Larson, the show would run too long to edit down to thirty minutes.
A (slight) sigh of relief was exhaled when his run seemed to be lasting long enough that they could cut it into two shows. But then there was the “When will he stop?” worry that he’d keep going for a million or more. He finally stopped shortly after reaching the $100,000 mark. Worry over? No because he still had four spins and he had some mystical way of never hitting a Whammy and always landing on a square that gave him moola plus a free spin. If he had hit a Whammy and gone down to zero, he could have started building the total up again…and again…and again. They could have wound up with a round that ran for hours.
And if this guy wound up hitting record amounts and then crashing and going home with a case of Turtle Wax…well, that wouldn’t have been a pleasant thing to broadcast, would it?
Oh — and what if one of those worries about a game board malfunction or collusion turned out to be true? Would they have to void the game and not award the money? What kind of legal mess would that create? What kind of bad publicity? Would CBS find some reason to cancel the show because of this? The panic went in so many directions that it sounded like a great movie or (more likely) TV movie to me…or maybe a book.
With my friend’s help, I visited the set of the show on its next tape date. I think I was more curious to find out how the show was done than I was to turn the story into a writing gig. I talked to Peter Tomarken (the host), Rod Roddy (the announcer) and others who were there. The stagehands had the most intriguing tales to tell…but then they always do.
Soon after, I had a meeting with Bill Carruthers, the head guy behind the program. With his blessing, I showed an edited version of the incident to a major producer of TV movies as part of a “pitch.” He pitched it in turn to buyers (including CBS) and for a while there, it looked like it might turn into a TV movie and he even had a great idea as to who he wanted to have play Michael Larson: Mickey Rooney. I had an idea as to who should play Peter Tomarken. I wanted to use the actual video footage of Peter Tomarken from the show.
But like many things in Hollywood, the TV movie never materialized. We got as far as my agent and the producer negotiating what we’d demand the network pay me for a script if any network had enough interest to commission a script. Alas as it turned out, there were those at CBS who wanted to pretend the whole thing never happened. They began, I was told, arguing with the division that was considering buying it. I was also told that at this point, CBS still had private detectives investigating Michael Larson to determine if there was anything more to his story than just some guy on his own finding a loophole in the way a game board worked.
Meanwhile, the other networks weren’t sure they wanted to air a movie about a rival network’s program. They weren’t sure they did and they weren’t sure they didn’t. Also, Larson was still alive and sounding very litigious and/or demanding, especially after (as you saw if you watched the doc) he lost all the money he’d won on the show. There were other hurdles so it didn’t happen for a while…and then it didn’t happen for a longer while…and then a longer while still…
…and that’s the way a lot of projects in show business don’t happen. There’s never a moment when anyone says it’s off. It just percolates for so long without going forward that everyone just kind of forgets about it. I forgot about it…though there were occasional reminders and occasional attempts by others who had the same idea. At one point, a movie was reportedly in the works with Nicholas Cage attached not as its star but as one of its producers. They had Bill Murray, they claimed, lined up to play Michael Larson. Bill Murray might have been a real good idea but again, it didn’t happen for a while…and then it didn’t happen for a longer while…
Recently, someone actually did make such a movie. It’s called The Luckiest Man in America and it was directed and co-written by Samir Oliveros and, according to IMDB, shot partly in the U.S., partly in Colombia, partly in Canada and partly in Chile. Here’s the trailer for it…
You can probably catch it streaming somewhere but I don’t recommend it. I saw it and it’s one of those films — and I could name many — when filmmakers fictionalized too much of a true story where the truth would have been more interesting. They made Peter Tomarken (a helluva nice guy) and many of the behind-the-scenes people look like clueless boobs.
Mostly, they invented scenes…like in the middle of the taping, when Larsen still hadn’t won all that money and could still have lost every dime, they had him wandering off the set and onto a nearby stage where he somehow became a guest on a live-in-progress talk show hosted by a Tom Snyder type. They also had the producers, in mid-taping, find out via some detective-type work what Larsen was up to, whereas in reality, they had no idea.
There are other departures from reality that I think make the whole thing sound unreal. It’s like in that recent Saturday Night movie, they had Lorne Michaels — minutes before the show we now call Saturday Night Live was going to go live with its debut episode — wander out of the studio. He wound up in a bar where he watched a bad stand-up comedian and hireds the guy’s writer to add jokes to the show they were minutes from broadcasting. Or the decision to air the show being made one second before they did. Or the whole thing with Milton Berle.
No one was expecting a documentary but there were many moments when that film ventured into “That could never have happened like that” territory. I do understand that a true story must sometimes speculate and fictionalize, and some of my favorite movies did. But I don’t think it’s always the right way to go.
Then again, you might see The Luckiest Man in America and love it, especially if you aren’t familiar with the real story that they chose to sort of tell. If you aren’t and you might someday see the movie, maybe you shouldn’t watch that documentary that I recommended you watch thirteen paragraphs ago.
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