Like her more well-known contemporary T. E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia), Bell spent much of her life on location in early 20th century Arabia, where she met and built friendships with both nomadic and established tribes alike.

Although the intrepid, gender-defying explorer was recently the main subject of a narrative feature film, Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert (2015), which starred Nicole Kidman in the lead role, it’s in Letters From Baghdad that her important life’s work is more fully fleshed out.

Bell was many things: a writer, a world traveler, a likely British spy. But most importantly, she was an archaeologist who walked the walk and excavated ancient sites when the Arab sands were still virgin. In addition to her work mapping, excavating and preserving lost Arabian cities, she was also an instrumental figure in the formation of the Baghdad Archaeological Museum (since renamed the Iraqi Museum), and the right wing of the museum was even named in her honor shortly after her death.

Her extensive travels in Persia, Mesopotamia and Greater Syria resulted in several books and maps that were instrumental in dividing up the region into what is now Iran, Iraq, Syria and Jordan. The ultimate tragedy, however, was Bell’s part in drawing the borders of what is now Iraq at the end of WWI, as her altruistic stance was ultimately defeated by corporate interest.

Bell, along with T. E. Lawrence, supported Arab independence. But British colonialism — plus the desire to control the oil reserves of the area — put a dent in those plans. The effects of the British empire’s fateful decisions in this area are unfortunately still being felt to this day.

A famous photo from the era, that shows just how important and valued Bell was as a political agent of the British empire during her time spent in Arabia, shows a group of people on horses underneath The Sphinx in Cairo, Egypt. Under the head of The Sphinx, like three ducks sitting in a row, are Winston Churchill, Bell and Lawrence.

Much of the novelty of Letters From Baghdad comes from the substantial achievement of period re-creation through existing film shot during the era. The grainy black-and-white images show village life, life along rivers and desert views that are among archetypal images of such places.

The voice of Bell in the documentary is spoken by Tilda Swinton, and the text is taken from official records and personal writings and letters. Other participants in Bell’s life are dramatized by actors portraying people such as Lawrence; the wife of a diplomat; or even British officials who were complicit in undermining Bell’s efforts to unify the existing territories.

Bell died in Baghdad in 1926 at the age of 58 and remains buried there to this day. The museum she basically created — the same museum that was looted during the 2024 invasion of Iraq — housed many of the antiquities she helped discover.

The images of life in a simpler time, that were captured over a hundred years ago by film cameras, give Letters From Baghdad the requisite credibility to be a must-see on your film to-do list.

Letters From Baghdad unwinds exclusively at the River Oaks Theatre starting this weekend.

Separately the two have amassed numerous credits with Letteri currently working with James Cameron on no less than three Avatar sequels. As the senior special effects supervisor for the company WETA, Letteri has won five Academy Awards including one for technical achievement.

Serkis was acting in movies and television for a decade before the development of motion capture.

About his role in the 1999 Gilbert & Sullivan themed dramedy Topsy-Turvy Serkis noted to Free Press Houston in a phone interview: “Mike Leigh is a brilliant actor’s director. He allows you to investigate your character on a level, which up to that point I’d never experienced. You’re burying yourself in a character for months before you even shoot. That teaches you an awful lot.”

Serkis and Letteri are promoting the latest Apes movie War for the Planet of the Apes. “Matt [Reeves] really wanted to go wide on this film, working with the depth of field. He wanted the scope of a big exodus,” says Letteri about the director.

photo: Doane Gregory

Starting with an armed assault on the apes waterfall-protected lair by a renegade army squad led by The Colonel (Woody Harrelson), War for the Planet of the Apes subsequently turns into a prison escape movie. Caesar infiltrates the Colonel’s prison camp where other apes are forced to work as slave labor.

Virtual cinematography plays a large part in the filmmaking process although most of the prison is a practical set. “Virtual cinematography is synonymous with virtual production. You’re shooting a film that has visual effects and some component of it is not going to be real,” explains Letteri.

“Anything that can be created in front of a camera we overlay on top of that. The set is built. We scan the set and build it in the computer. Because when we go to photograph our characters, even if the set is live action, we need to know what the interaction is. So when Caesar puts his arm through some bars that are physically built we need to know what’s there.

“We need to record the lighting that Michael Seresin [Director of Photography] did for any live action components, which goes to the lighting of Caesar as a character.

“The big aspect is you’re trying to match everything including the photography and at some point you have to branch out from what is there. There are shots that are completely digital shots. The characters may have been captured using very rudimentary props.

“For example, the battle at the end of Dawn [of the Planet of the Apes], the big fight between Caesar and Koba that happens on top of the tower — that was done on a virtual stage. It’s the same technique we developed for Avatar where the director can look into the camera and see the world and the action through the viewfinder. But there is no physical world there,” says Letteri.

About the prison set built by James Chinlund [Production Designer] and his crew, “The place was a hellhole actually,” says Serkis.

“It was as you might imagine complete with the bars and the cages, the train tracks, the trains. We were shooting this thing during the Canadian winter. The actors playing human can dress with layers of coats. But I didn’t get a break because I was wearing a Lycra body suit.”

“One time we’re shooting in the rain and Matt says ‘We need more rain,’ and so they dump even more rain on the actors,” adds Letteri.

As the third film in the current Apes franchise, War for the Planet of the Apes takes Caesar from a chimp to a full grown adult. “For me this part of Caesar’s journey was physically easier in the sense that I was not quadrapedding as much as the young Caesar. I wasn’t using that part of my body. Caesar is brutalized quite a lot in this movie. Everyday I’m thrown into a cage or getting scrapped up, so you want to be fit.

“If you look at the journey of Caesar over the three movies, first Caesar was a young chimpanzee so that’s how I played him as an infant. High energy, lot of swinging, hanging on things.

“In Dawn, Caesar becomes more human. More bipedal. I used to wear weights to make my boy a little heavier. For War I used quite heavy weights. It gives you the sense of the weight on his shoulders,” says Serkis. “The point of performance capture technology is that it captures all the subtle facial movements, breaths, and the words that you say.”

A pivotal scene in the middle of War finds Caesar face to face with his nemesis The Colonel in the latter’s office in the prison camp. “Caesar at the beginning of this movie is the empathetic leader. This ape knows there are no winners in war,” says Serkis.

“His personal loss at the beginning of the movie catapults him on this journey of revenge and hatred, specifically towards Woody’s character. Both species are hanging on for dear life, and that scene shows there are no good guys or bad guys. We as an audience no longer see The Colonel as a despot but as a human being who also has undergone huge sacrifices, and personal loss.

Serkis adds director to his resume with the film Breathe, a true story about a young man struck down with polio, set for an October release and starring Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy. “It’s about triumph over adversity, but not told in a mawkish sentimental disability manner,” says Serkis.

Breathe will actually be Serkis’ sophomore directorial feature. Serkis previous directed an all-star version of The Jungle Book, set for release next year with a cast that includes Serkis, Cate Blanchett, Benedict Cumberbatch and Christian Bale.

“We are in post-production as we speak. Ours is very different than the Disney version. A lot darker, it’s a Mowgli-centric story. And it’s shot on location.”

War for the Planet of the Apes opens wide starting Wednesday night.

Although Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians – The Mohammed Afkhami Collection fills only three small galleries with twenty-seven items, the exhibit intrigues the viewer, possibly to the point they’re likely to spend as much time looking at it as a much larger display.

Items run the gamut of mixed media, paintings, photography and sculpture. Subjects include gender, politics and religion. Several of the artists represented live outside Iran in Europe or North America.

The entrance to the show, across from the museum’s café, has flying carpets lying on the ground. Farhad Moshiri’s “Flying Carpet” (2007) is made from thirty-two stacked carpets with the imprint of a jet aircraft carved in the middle of each.

All of the works date from 1998 to the present and represent three generations of Iranian artists. It’s not surprising to see Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s “Untitled” from his 2024 series Snow White. The minimalistic triptych, a photographic print on canvas, shows the countryside buried under snow. Kiarostami, who died in 2024, remains the most important film director from Iran.

Your attention immediately focuses on Ali Banisadr’s oil on linen “We Haven’t Landed on Earth Yet” from 2024 in the first gallery. Using Bosch type imagery we gaze upon a huge canvas (82 x 120 inches) of blue figures colliding into one another against a swirling blue background. There’s an element of chaos to the piece that demands introspection.

Two works that present subliminal themes dominate the second and third galleries. This is a culture where a satellite dish is a typical banned item.

Afruz Amighi designed “Angels in Combat I” out of woven polyethylene, which is also used to make tents found in UN refugee camps. At first “Angels” looks like a series of textures and whirling figures. Closer examination reveals angels wielding machine guns and images of snakes twirled around medical staffs. A tree of life dominates the center of the all white composition.

Parastou Forouhar mounts a huge chromogenic photo in four panels on aluminum. Each of the panels measures approximately 60 x 33 inches.

“Friday” depicts swaths of dark heavy fabric across the four frames. Friday is the Iranian day of rest and prayer. The smallest amount of flesh can be seen in one panel. While certainly a hand, or more precisely the fold between a thumb and forefinger, the image also suggests a sense of the forbidden.

The more you gaze at the art on display the more the meanings change.

“Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians – The Mohammed Afkhami Collection” will be on exhibit at the Millennium Galleries in the Audrey Jones Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston until September 24, 2024.

The Lion King started out as an animated movie, then morphed into a hit Broadway musical, currently on tour and stopping in Houston this month, and will be re-imagined as a computer animated feature film helmed by The Jungle Book director Jon Favreau where the animals will still be cute but photo realistic. Disney also used this template most recently for Beauty and the Beast.

The best example of Disney cosmology occurs in this stage production of The Lion King when one character belts out a couple of lines of the award winning song “Let it Go” from Frozen. It’s a happy coexistence of intellectual properties where the pieces of the puzzle are interchangeable.

Many of the songs were written specifically for the musical as well as taken from the stand-alone CD soundtrack-sequel Rhythm of the Pride Lands. As one character quips, “That wasn’t in the cartoon.”

Perhaps not oddly the most celebrated songs from the movie, “Hakuna Matata” and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” are the least interesting in terms of staging and overall impact. The opening medley of “Circle of Life” and “Nants’ Ingonyama” literally blasts forth with performers on stage and in the top boxes lining the auditorium while down the aisles march actors operating puppets of animals from elephants to antelopes. The costume design as well as the stage direction are courtesy of Julie Taymor’s original staging. To date, The Lion King is the top grossing musical of all time.

The sequences I found most brilliantly realized were segue ways between jungle and night scenes under the stars near the end. The stage, and by extension the auditorium, become a canopy of starlight against a blackened sky. Then foliage descends and different hues of jungle light flood the stage. Another clever scenic effect has Timon and the infectiously cute yet nonchalant Meer cat hanging on the edge of a waterfall high above the stage floor.

The songs are not the average legit stage warbling’s but full of Mbube styled vocal runs and inflections. Many of the visual gags are aimed solidly at kids.

The Lion King continues its run at the Sarofim Hall at Hobby Center until July 23.

A couple of films available this week could very well put the viewer in a dream state.

The Beguiled beckons those seeking a gothic psychodrama while Okja literally defies easy description. One film will be available to Houston audiences at select theatrical venues while the other will be streaming on the interweb.

It’s not likely that the average adventurous moviegoer has seen the 1971 version of the Civil War drama The Beguiled, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood. While a cult film in its own right it’s not classic in the sense of Eastwood’s iconic roles from that period. Sofia Coppola has made a version of The Beguiled that immerses itself into the mood and texture of the story.

Siegel’s version remains superior mainly because Eastwood dominates the film in a way no actor working today could possibly hope to emulate. Despite the typical studio hard lighting used throughout the film, Siegel finds ways to ratchet up the suspense that aren’t present in the contemporary remake.

That being said, Coppola envisions a moody environment where natural light plays a part in the proceedings. The Spanish moss hanging off the trees illuminated by shafts of sunlight and the shadowy interiors makes the story more complicated than it is.

Union soldier Corporal McBurney (Colin Farrell), wounded and wandering in the forest in enemy territory, takes refuge at an academy for young women. At first their Southern allegiance dictates that they turn him over to Rebel troops. But since his injuries require extended medical care, a bond forms.

Nicole Kidman (Miss Martha) runs that academy with help from Kirsten Dunst, sharing time with other co-stars like student Elle Fanning. During the arc of the story McBurney interacts with all of the women while he’s healing.

Whose room McBurney chooses to visit at night when he becomes well enough to walk forms the basis for the revenge thriller that follows.

There’s so much attention to atmosphere and costumes that it may be hard to notice that much of the life has been sucked out of the story.

The Beguiled opens at area theaters including The River Oaks on Friday.

Okja plays like a kid’s film that’s made for adults. South Korean director Bong Joon-ho shows a visionary insight into the relation between human and animal.

A nefarious corporation has bred superpigs at locations around the world. In the forest of Korea a young girl Mija (An Seo Hyun) grows up with one of these massive beasts, affectionately named Okja, which matures to the size of an Asian elephant.

Much of the interaction uses puppetry and the cute aspect of the girl and her pet pig reminds one of the German fantasy film The Neverending Story (1984). That tone changes when Joon-ho shifts the story to New York and elements of Fast Food Nation take over.

Tilda Swinton plays sisters who run the multi-national company that owns the superpigs. A strong supporting cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal playing a wacky scientist and members of the Animal Liberation Front who have their own agenda for Okja. Co-stars include Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood), Lily Collins (Rules Don’t Apply) and Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead).

Joon-ho finds clever ways to weave social commentary and satire together. Okja also uses John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” in a most sardonic way.

Okja is available to watch through Netflix.

When Baby Driver had its world premiere at SXSW a few months ago, Wright autographed over a thousand mini posters for the movie that were handed out to the exiting crowd at the Paramount Theater. “I sat down at my house and autographed 1,200 posters,” Wright tells Free Press Houston in a phone interview. “It took about four hours.”

Wright reunited with many of his regular collaborators for Baby Driver. “My crew is generally the people I’ve worked with several times: my producers Nira Park and Eric Fellner, my production designer Marcus Rowland. For Steven Price, the composer, it’s the second film we’ve worked on. And it’s the third time I’ve worked with [Director of Photography] Bill Pope.

“He’s done everything in his career once before, I like him because of his visual style but he also thinks about the heart of the story. The characters and what they’re thinking. Bill’s not just thinking about what it looks like, he’s thinking about what it feels like,” says Wright.

Director Edgar Wright (left) and Ansel Elgort on the set of TriStar Pictures’ Baby Driver.

Editors Jonathan Amos and Paul Machliss, also alumni of previous Wright films, were working on the movie before principal photography. Many of the sequences are timed to specific rock songs and as such required advance planning.

“What’s interesting is we did some editing before we even started. We had the songs locked down – those were written into the script,” says Wright. So before we even start shooting we were editing the sequences with storyboards in animation. Then you start rehearsing with the actors. And then you start the film for real.

Ansel Elgort plays Baby, a heist car driver who constantly listens to music to drown out tinnitus caused by a childhood trauma. Jon Bernthal, Jon Hamm, Eiza González, Lily James, Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx co-star.

“Anytime there was a two-shot of Jamie and Kevin I would whisper to Bill ‘Oscar shot,’” laughs Wright. “But there’s another Oscar winner in the film, Paul Williams who has a small role won an award for Best Original Song.”

Wright literally composes action scenes in tempo to songs like Queen’s “Brighton Beach,” and “Hocus Pocus” by Focus.

“All of the action set-ups were difficult in their own right. Anytime cars were involved it got very tricky because of the precision and the timing. The safety aspect means that everything has to be worked out.

“A lot of times the actors are driving on actual roads. The entire affair becomes a ballet of teamwork,” says Wright. “Other factors include how exhausted you are on a particular day. We were shooting the finale during the middle of the schedule, things like that where you’re going from day to night and day again are punishing.

“With a lot of the key action set pieces in the movie I would literally have the idea for the movie based on the song. Some of the songs you mention like ‘Hocus Pocus’ or ‘Bellbottoms’ [Jon Spencer Blues Explosion] or ‘Neat Neat Neat’ by The Damned — I would listen to the song and imagine the scene. I always wanted to use ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus, and I love the idea of it starting and stopping.”

Baby is running away from a botched robbery during the opening of the “Hocus Pocus” sequence. “But then there is the yodeling interlude and a character is hiding behind a tree and then the guitar kicks in and Baby starts running again. Then later there’s gunfire in time to the track. When it all comes together in the editing — that’s what I intended to do with the movie.”

For the use of “Brighton Rock,” the film mixes car engine sounds into the song. “In the mix we tuned the car sounds so they would be in the same key as the song,” says Wright.

Some of Wright’s previous films include Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The World’s End.

Free Press Houston asks Wright if he would ever consider doing a sequel to one of his films, like Hot Fuzz?

“Yes and no. Have we ever thought about it? Yes. The tricky thing is I make a movie every three years, I’d like to do it quicker sometimes, but the idea of spending three years in the same world — that’s the less appealing part to it.

“I agree you can do something more with those characters. It would have to be something really special. I’m really proud of Hot Fuzz,” says Wright. “Oddly it’s a personal film for me because it was shot in my hometown in Somerset, England.

“I wouldn’t do it just for the paycheck, that’s for sure.”

Baby Driver is currently unwinding in area theaters.

In many ways the life of Coltrane mirrors the rise of jazz since WWII. Bebop gives way to experimental and free form styles of jazz. Drugs pop up and are kicked. The exploration of sonic sounds leads to a spiritual awakening. “A Love Supreme” becomes an anthem of purity as well Trane’s most accomplished album release. Coltrane visits the site of an atomic bomb memorial in Japan, which subsequently inspires him to even greater insights.

The talking heads range from McCoy Turner to Carlos Santana to Bill Clinton. Denzel Washington narrates Coltrane’s voice with text taken from his writings and album notes.

Chasing Trane plays at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston this weekend on Saturday June 24 at 7 pm., and Sunday June 25 at 5 pm.

Most post-apocalyptic thrillers paint a bleak picture. The Bad Batch is bleaker than most.

The second feature film from Ana Lily Amirpour immediately gets your attention. In the opening minutes the protag Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) finds herself kidnapped by desert cannibals who chain her up, drug her and saw off one leg and one arm.

Left confined like an animal, Arlen hides a piece of rebar that she uses to overcome one of her captors. A skateboard becomes her vehicle for escape as she literally drags herself through the desert. A mute desert scavenger finds her and delivers Arlen to a desert town of odd and sundry survivors. The makeshift community is like an all year version of Burning Man.

Some cool characters thrive in the unrelenting heat, not the least of which is an at-first-unrecognizable Jim Carrey under layers of clothes and whiskers. Keanu Reeves rocks a 1970s-style ‘stache as the leader of the town looking like the older brother of Paul Rudd’s character in Anchorman.

Perhaps the most conflicted character is only known by his chest tattoo that reads Miami Man. MM leads the cannibal tribe but elicits sympathy when his young daughter is kidnapped by Arlen, who herself has turned into a vengeance machine. Miami Man doesn’t kill people for pleasure but for food for his nuclear unit. MM is tidy, and also has talent as an artist. You almost start to admire his pragmatic stance when he carves up his latest victim and wastes nothing.

The Bad Batch portrays society at its basic survival-of-the-fittest level. What brief rays of hope the characters experience are merely drug visions or the memories of how things used to exist.

The Bad Batch unwinds exclusively at the Alamo Drafthouse Mason Park.

In television primetime comedy you have benchmarks that include shows like The Ernie Kovacs Show in the 1950s (which at one time or another was on four different television networks), That Was the Week That Was (1964-1965, itself a remake of an English series), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969 – 1974) and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (1967 – 1973).

The current go-to irreverent comedy skit show Saturday Night Live, which in many ways amalgamates elements from all the previous shows mentioned, while not actually in prime time, uses subliminal social and overt political humor to achieve its laughs.

One thing is certain — all of these shows were cut from a unique bolt of cloth that eludes the majority of television shows comedy or otherwise.

George Schlatter was the executive producer and producer (and wrote the pilot) on over 140 episodes of Laugh-In. Schlatter’s previous producer credits included variety shows like The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (1960-1962) and The Judy Garland Show (1963).

“It was a different time; one year there were seventeen variety shows,” says Schlatter during a phone interview with Free Press Houston.

Laugh-In launched on January 22, 1968 on the Peacock Channel. The comedy revue was a Monday night replacement for NBC’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and was up against CBS war-horses Gunsmoke and The Lucy Show.

“NBC put Laugh-In against them because it was cheap and they didn’t have anything else. It took them fourteen weeks to develop a replacement. We were cannon fodder against Lucy and Gunsmoke,” says Schlatter.

Somehow Laugh-In caught the zeitgeist of that tumultuous era. Think about all the events that formed 1968, whether it was the Vietnam War, Chicago election riots or the assassinations of Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy. Almost immediately Laugh-In was catapulted to the number one show of that year.

“We appealed to little kids with the colors and the old guys with the content, but in the middle was your group who knew we were saying something,” Schlatter says when I tell him Laugh-In was a staple of my then 12-year old existence.

Laugh-In coined what became catch phrases like “Sock it to me” and “Here comes the judge.”

“We had Sammy Davis, Jr. and when he came up with ‘Here Comes the Judge’ we immediately put it in the next show. The following day, when the Supreme Court justices walked in, someone in the back yelled out ‘Here Comes the Judge,’ and the whole room cracked up. It was the first laugh the Supreme Court ever got,” says Schlatter.

The show mainly used one-liners at His Girl Friday-speed and as such the editing was equally rapid fire, another first for television at the time. Laugh-In would be perfect for a re-launch in the current era of one sentence social media interaction.

“There was a woman named Carolyn Raskin who developed many of the editing techniques we had. We didn’t even have time code then, we had to physically splice everything,” says Schlatter about some of the transitions that had multiple images per second. “It was an adventure technically as well as creatively.”

Guest stars like John Wayne, Cher, Carol Channing or Johnny Carson would appear in the studio for one episode but could be edited into numerous episodes. “Some of them we grabbed off the hallway,” says Schlatter referring to another Laugh-In catch phrase: “From NBC Studios in beautiful downtown Burbank.”

Here’s another typical joke that was delivered by Cher: “I’ve heard of all the great Hollywood marriages. Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens.”

You like that? Here’s another Cher zinger: “Sonny and I are totally compatible. Anytime there’s a problem his psychiatrist contacts my psychiatrist and they work it out.”

While the heart of the show was slipping in sly drug references and double entendre, the show became such a hit that it attracted conservative faces like Dr. Billy Graham. Graham can be seen mugging for the camera saying, “The family that watches Laugh-In together really needs to pray together.”

“We had Barry Goldwater, we had Bill Buckley. Buckley, you know, was a conservative reporter. We wrote to him and he replied, ‘Not only do I refuse to appear, I resent having been asked,’” says Schlatter. “I responded that I would fly him to California in an airplane with two right wings, and he agreed to appear.”

Laugh-In also debuted talent like Goldie Hawn, Flip Wilson, Tiny Tim and Lily Tomlin, who herself didn’t appear until the third season. On Tomlin, Schlatter recalled: “The night after she did Ernestine, everyone was walking down the hall saying ‘One-ringee-dingee.’ In one show Lily would do seven characters, and nobody had seen anything like that before.”

Other performers who came and went over Laugh-In’s six seasons include Judy Carne, Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley, Henry Gibson, Arte Johnson, Alan Sues, Eileen Brennan, Chelsea Brown, Gary Owens, Teresa Graves, Pamela Graves, Larry Hovis and the list goes on and on.

Hawn won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1970 for Cactus Flower and left the show, but when she made a post-Oscar cameo the cast played it to the hilt like she was a princess and they were all trying to kiss her ass.

Every episode introduces serious performers goofing it up. Jack Lemmon’s son told him he couldn’t possibly be a movie star because he hadn’t been on Laugh-In. In its first year Laugh-In got a cameo from then Presidential candidate Richard Nixon.

“It might have been the reason he was elected,” says Schlatter. “I apologize for that.”

In one early episode Nixon says “Sock it to me,” phrased like a question. In fact it’s the same iteration that Alexander Waverly (Leo G. Carroll) uses in the debut episode. Carroll was the head of the show bearing the U.N.C.L.E. logo that Laugh-In replaced.

Tiny Tim was a longhaired fop that played songs from the 1920s on a ukulele and had never been on television prior to Laugh-In. “We brought him in what we called the new talent department. He sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” Schlatter recalled. “The network said ‘You can’t put him on, he’s a freak.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘He’s a big star.’ And they were like, ‘Okay.’” Perhaps not oddly, once Tiny Tim appeared on Laugh-In, he became a star.

As big of a success as Laugh-In was, Schlatter also produced a show on ABC the following year called Turn-On. It took the Laugh-In ethos yet made the tune-in-turn-on message more obvious. It was no problem for Schlatter to be running shows on two networks, in a time when there were three broadcast networks and PBS. Laugh-In gave him carte blanche.

“Well, I’m arrogant now, but with a fifty-share back then, c’mon,” says Schlatter. “The network was selling time for so much per commercial they pretty much looked the other way.”

The writer’s room, while atypical of the time, mirrors modern day writing groups. “There were maybe fifteen writers. But they were not the normal sitcom writers or the variety show writers,” says Schlatter. “These were rebels. One had been a professor of political science, and many of the others did not fit any categories.”

Schlatter realized early on that the way to get lines past the censors was the blindside them. “Every week they would send the script back full of paper clips. Sometimes we put things in we knew would purposely upset them so we could slip by other stuff. They didn’t have a way of handling us because there had never been anything like that on the air.”

Turn-On was greeted with a different response.

“It didn’t even last one episode; it lasted twenty minutes of the first episode,” recalls Schlatter. “Some stations literally pulled the show during the middle of the opening show.”

Another show Schlatter produced, Real People (1979), predated reality television by decades.

“That was another adventure,” says Schlatter. “An attempt to look at ordinary guys, the unsung hero, eccentrics. It was the first television show that saluted the little guy but without any guest stars.”

Just months after, another network had a copycat series called That’s Incredible.

Schlatter made a foray into feature film making with Norman … Is That You? in 1976, which revolved around Redd Foxx discovering his son is gay.

“At that time I could do anything I wanted to do on television, but to go on a movie lot and spend the time it takes to make a film took a year. Television was immediate. We’d write it down and it could be on the air the next day.

“We were freefall television. We touched on all sorts of issues but we never dwelt on them long. We were always off on something else but by the time you got the previous joke you would’ve realized we just said something revolutionary.

“Dan [Rowan] and Dick [Martin] did a sensational nightclub act. They were not friendly. When they left the stage they didn’t talk to each other until the next time they came back onstage. But it was one of the funniest nightclub acts ever.

“Timex said they wanted us to have hosts so we got Dan and Dick for our pilot. They wore tuxedos and craziness happened around them. It worked.”

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In – The Complete Series is available exclusively through TimeLife. The box set includes thirty-eight discs and will likely take you months to conquer.