Bill Bixby’s Quotes
On
– "The Courtship of Eddie’s Father":…….
"Comedy fathers usually turn out to be dummies, while mothers are portrayed as being great…And why are fathers always older men on television? Many of my friends are young fathers with young children. I want to play the contemporary father."
On the opening and closing segments of the show:
"The film for these is shot from a distance of 400 yards and we don’t know when the camera is on us. We do real things. Brandon Cruz is never told what to do for those filmings."
LOS ANGELES HERALD EXAMINER TV Weekly….. Sept or Oct (?) 1969
"An adult, family reality comedy is what is it is. We’re dealing with situations which, depending on your outlook, could be classified as controversial problems. For example, in one segment, I fall in love with a lady, but she’s not emotionally prepared for motherhood. And, because I have a son, we have to part. That’s a real problem for many people. Ours is a show dealing with ‘today’ and with love on many levels."
"…My attitude about this season is that ‘I get to go to work’, not ‘I have to go to work.’"
"Now I can play myself. What’s great is that Tom Corbett’s ideas and attitudes are those of Bill Bixby."
ST LOUIS GLOBE-DEMOCRAT TV Digest…..Aug. 2, 1969……added 6/5/03
"We’re not doing a remake of the movie and I’m not playing the role the way Glenn Ford did. I was asked to be myself—no portrayal of any character.
"You know, I’ve never played myself before, I’ve always portrayed some part. The thought scared hell out of me at first, but after three weeks of looking at the ‘daily rushes’ (samples of the day’s shooting) I decided I like THAT MAN."
"We’re very close friends; we’re warm and easy with each other…I’ve known him since before he could read. I didn’t do anything to force his friendship—I merely shared my time and he’s sharing his, back. I like him. He’s a good human being and we’re thoroughly honest with each other…We don’t have an actor-actor relationship—we have a human-human relationship. This show is based on the love between a father and his young son. I had to know Brandon six months before we started shooting the series, so that I could know what kind of human being he was and fall into the father-son relationship naturally."
"Brandon is more than a little actor. He’s a little human being who is getting wiser to the craft of acting.
"The amazing thing is that when we’re working in a scene together there’s never a thought of conscious acting. Our natural affection for one another—the reality of it—is what appeals to the audience.
"I’ll give you an example. The other day the script called for me to take off Brandon’s shoes. Just for the hell of it, he curled his toes up and I couldn’t get the shoes off. He just felt like doing it for fun. It was a typical thing a kid would do.
"Instead of stopping, I told him to uncurl his toes. Every parent who has ever removed a child’s shoes has had this happen. It’s great.
"One father told me his 8 year old son and he didn’t hit it off. Then along came our show. Every Wednesday night they go into the den, lock the door and watch the show together. Afterward they sit and talk about it, communicating like they never did before."
"Very often, we ad-lib scenes on camera and I’ve grown so much as an actor as a result of having this freedom…"
"{Brandon} is so quick to understand and interpret. And if there’s one expression he hates it’s, ‘Brandon you’re acting,’ because that is something he’s been taught never to accept."
…(added 4/24/09)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE……...May 27, 1972……(added 5/21/02)
"We never rehearsed on "Eddie’s Father" after Brandon learned how to read. If he knew the words, more often than not the mistakes he made were classic. So rather than weed out the mistakes and become artificial by rehearsing, we would keep in the mistakes, the natural boy-things."
GIRL TALK magazine ….June 1974
"There was a philosophy expressed on "Eddie’s Father": ‘You hold your child with open arms.’…You hold someone you love with by giving him or her as much freedom as possible, to be as much an individual person as possible…"
THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW (telecast MARCH 1972)
BILL BIXBY: …Eddie’s father is a part of me, a part that I happen to like. I didn’t know I had (it) until after I did the show. That was thanks to Brandon Cruz, because he’s not an actor. He’s a little boy. And you don’t act against that…
TV & MOVIE SCREEN……..Sept. 1970 (page 17)
"We make plenty of mistakes in the show but we keep them in. The relationship of a boy and his dad should be one of pure affection. I think we’ve achieved our goal.."
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ……Sept. 30, 1973 ….interview with Kay Gardella
"I cannot tell you how disappointed I was (when ‘Courtship’ was cancelled).I wanted that series to go on to the point when it came to the teen-age stage and we could deal with these problems in an honest contemporary way. But our time slot was changed so often we weren’t given a fighting chance. You can’t expect people to find you at home when you change your address so often."
NEW YORK POST ……March 1978
"-‘Eddie’s Father’ is singularly my favorite piece of material, at least emotionally. And ‘Steambath’ is, from an intellectual point of view. But ‘Eddie’s Father’ touched so many people, I think it was a unique idea for TV. It was very touching and loving."
"I knew the emotional potential of ‘Eddie’s Father’. It dealt with feelings. You’d laugh one minute and you were touched the next. But it wasn’t sugary. It was children relating to parents as well as parents dealing with children. It wasn’t perfect, but TV in a half hour format is an awesome challenge. We gave one answer; we didn’t preach."
The Arsenio Hall Show
…(telecast May (?) 1989)"Of all the shows I’ve done, that’s the one that I appreciate the most, because it really involved feeling and communication and instead of being funny by saying jokes, it had to do with…it came from the heart. And I really miss the show. I’d like to have more of that on the air now."
"The thing that touched me the most on the show was, I would get mail—a lot of mail, from mothers without a male figure in their relationship with their son. And they would—we called the opening and closing of the show the ‘Peanuts’, the little things that we’d do…and that came from the crew. Usually they’d come in and go, ‘You know what my kid said today?’ And we’d write it down and do it…. It’s the women without the image who would write and say, "Thank you", because they would do those ‘Peanuts’ after the show the next day. If we would climb a tree and talk, they would climb a tree with their son and talk and suddenly the relationship was there. And I was always very pleased to hear that and very touched by that."
/Goodnight Beantown//On Acting//On Directing// /On Television//On Public Recognition//Some Personal Thoughts/
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