Episode 427 - Monty Hall
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Pow!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:It's time for WTF?
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:With Mark Maron.
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fuck a Barry Fins?
Marc:What the fuck will Barry Fins?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:How is everybody?
Marc:This is Mark Marin.
Marc:This is WTF, the podcast of your choosing.
Marc:Thank you for joining me.
Marc:Interesting guest today, considering I was in Canada, Mr. Monty Hall.
Marc:is on the show today.
Marc:Monty Hall, as in let's make a deal, Monty Hall.
Marc:How did you find him, Mark?
Marc:How did that come up that you would interview Monty Hall?
Marc:Well, I will tell you that story.
Marc:I will tell you in a few minutes.
Marc:The last time I talked to you was Monday.
Marc:I had not gone to...
Marc:to rochester new york which i did go to rochester new york me and nate bargetsy uh did the rochester fringe festival we had a great time god damn it it's good working with somebody you like to watch working with somebody you enjoy hanging out with that is one of the fun things about being a comedian so here's what happens in rochester
Marc:I tell you, people's kids and people's grandkids have been contacting me and hooking me up with people in odd ways.
Marc:And a kid who listens to my show, he's in a band.
Marc:And this kid, Josh Netsky, who is a fan of my show, his dad... This is going to get convoluted.
Marc:At some point during my ramblings here on the show, I talked about Lighthouse Arts and Music Camp, which I went to in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, when I was like 14 and 15 years old.
Marc:So this kid, Josh...
Marc:Heard me talk about it.
Marc:And he told his dad, Ron, who used to be a teacher at the camp, whose twin brother, Ron's twin brother, Steven Netsky, was my guitar teacher at Lighthouse Arts and Music Camp.
Marc:And I remember them because they were twins.
Marc:And Steven, who taught me guitar, was a really kind of chipper, sweet guy.
Marc:And Ron was just brooding around all the time.
Marc:And then there's an older brother named Hankis who went on to become this amazing klezmer musician.
Marc:This was this little camp outside of Philly.
Marc:All I remember about the Lighthouse Arts and Music Camp was that we smoked cigarettes there.
Marc:I remember that.
Marc:I remember that we were allowed or that they just turned a blind eye, so it was great.
Marc:I was like 14 or 15 years old, smoking cigarettes, playing guitar all day, and just hanging out.
Marc:And that was also the site of my tremendous failure as a musician that plagued me for the rest of my life.
Marc:That's the Johnny B. Goode story.
Marc:I've told it before.
Marc:I don't need to tell it again.
Marc:But it crumbled me and my ability to play music in front of people until a few years ago.
Marc:And some of you were with me through that whole journey.
Marc:So Josh Netsky, who's band Maybird, kind of a groovy band, kind of George Harrison-y, kind of ethereal, nice band.
Marc:Hooks me up with his dad who lives in Rochester.
Marc:His dad, Ron, drives me around, takes me to House of Guitars.
Marc:We start talking about old times.
Marc:It's amazing that you can jog the memory.
Marc:There were certain people that made an impact on you in your life.
Marc:I'm not being nostalgic here, but that place had a profound impact on my life.
Marc:And then there was this connection with this kid who told his dad and then we caught up.
Marc:And then another girl I know named Dragon.
Marc:who I knew in San Francisco when I first got sober the first time.
Marc:She was up in Rochester.
Marc:She hooked up with me.
Marc:We spent like four hours together just talking about relationships, talking about, you know, just the shit, man.
Marc:But I really appreciated seeing this girl dragon.
Marc:And the thing about it is this woman, Jesus Christ, man.
Marc:The thing about it is if you start getting your mind in the right place and you keep your mind open and you get your heart in the right place, things happen that transcend coincidence.
Marc:It's not mystical.
Marc:You're just open to them and all of a sudden it's like the pieces start to fall into place.
Marc:Why the hell did I just, why did she live up there?
Marc:Why did Ron?
Marc:Why did I connect my heart to back when I was a kid and I loved playing guitar and all I wanted to do was be an artist?
Marc:Why did I run into Dragon when things are very difficult for me at home and we were able to process so much of it for four hours?
Marc:Because my mind was open to it.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Some of you logic heads are probably out there saying like, no, I mean, you know, proportionately or, you know, if you really crunch the numbers on that, you know, it doesn't it's not unusual.
Marc:No, it is unusual.
Marc:Why did I answer the email?
Marc:There's all different factors.
Marc:I'm not saying it's mystical.
Marc:I'm not saying that there's some sort of, you know, beneficial conspiracy that is designed universally to cater to my needs as opposed to the other kind of conspiracy that I'm talking about, the benevolent conspiracy of spirituality.
Marc:But I will say that, man, I fucking needed to see those people.
Marc:So after Rochester, I went to Toronto, Canada.
Marc:Toronto, Canada.
Marc:What a place.
Marc:What a place.
Marc:A lot of memories there.
Marc:A lot of memories there.
Marc:God, you know, it's so weird to be walking around Toronto, worrying about the status of my current relationship, the strain that's going on there.
Marc:And also knowing that at another point in my life, you know, back in maybe 1999, when I was considering leaving my wife, you know, for another woman, you know, I did that.
Marc:Toronto was the place that I went to with the other woman to see if we could be together.
Marc:You know, we'd fallen in love, but we'd never really spent any time together, and I had to work up there, so I took her to Toronto.
Marc:We had this amazing three days.
Marc:It changed everything.
Marc:It changed the future of my life.
Marc:Not because of love, and I probably told this story before, I don't know, but because for some reason Air Canada, I bought her ticket with my American Express, and Air Canada sent a receipt with her name on it to the place I was living with my wife, who, you know, I was leaving,
Marc:And that sealed the deal, that envelope.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:That envelope sealed the deal.
Marc:I still have it somewhere.
Marc:Not for nostalgia reasons.
Marc:I hold on to weird stuff.
Marc:I don't look at it occasionally.
Marc:But that's a Toronto memory.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yes, it is.
Marc:But this time I did the JFL 42 and it was great.
Marc:And it's weird when you live in the United States, you know, there's all this chaos going all the time.
Marc:There's a sort of a kind of high frequency of panic, anger, just menace.
Marc:There's a there's a bit of menace in the air and it kind of keeps you uplifted.
Marc:I was surprised walking around Toronto.
Marc:There was a tremendous lack of menace and panic, and there was a lack of hostility and anger in the streets, at least the streets I was walking down.
Marc:I actually had a moment where I was walking to the comedy club, the comedy bar, and it was at night.
Marc:It was like 10 at night, and I saw a woman riding her bicycle, and my first thought was like, what the fuck is that about?
Marc:What is she thinking?
Marc:And I saw another person just sitting on a park bench, not doing anything in particular.
Marc:I'm like, what's going on here?
Marc:Why are these people comfortable?
Marc:They don't seem to be urgently doing anything, nor do they seem frightened or panicked.
Marc:And I got to be honest with you, it made me a little heavy hearted.
Marc:The pleasantness got me down in a way.
Marc:Because I was like, wow, this is how life can be without all that fucking freaky shit going on.
Marc:All the beautiful and sometimes dark intensity of untethered capitalism and desperation that we know and love here as American citizens.
Marc:And I found out something about myself is that...
Marc:There's some part of me that really seeks judgment, that seeks negative attention.
Marc:If I'm in the right state of mind, if I'm feeling heavy hearted and there's one tweet that says, yeah, I hope Marc Maron's funny tonight.
Marc:I'm like, oh my God, I'm probably not going to be funny tonight because of that tweet, because of that expectation.
Marc:What is that?
Marc:Why do I project that idea that I'm going to disappoint people?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Let's call my parents.
Marc:Monty Hall is on the show because his son, no, his grandson, Aaron Gleason, reached out to me and said, you got to talk to my grandpa, Monty Hall.
Marc:He's got some good stories.
Marc:I'm thinking, Monty Hall, he's a game show host.
Marc:But it was the game show.
Marc:I mean, Let's Make a Deal was infused into the cultural zeitgeist or memory or collective unconscious.
Marc:And it's still there.
Marc:It was, you know, it was a huge deal.
Marc:And I thought, well, all right, that'd be interesting.
Marc:And his mom is also Joanna Gleason, who's an amazing actress.
Marc:But he was like, he pestered me.
Marc:He's like, come on, man, go talk to my grandpa, Monty Hall.
Marc:So I did.
Marc:But I didn't know what I was going to get.
Marc:I didn't know what his history in show business was.
Marc:And it turns out, Canada, what the fucking ucks?
Marc:uh that uh his history goes back to winnipeg it in in winnipeg in my memory it was one of the it was a very harsh city it's a it's a it's a very sweet city but it's it's on the tundra and it gets beat up pretty badly and i all i could think about is winnipeg is that they maybe get a month or two of sun but uh so look i went over to monty hall's house and i talked to him so why don't we go there now and enjoy
Marc:Hello, sir.
Marc:Mr. Hall, I'm Mark Maron.
Guest:Mark, it's been waiting to meet you for a long time.
Guest:It's great to meet you.
Guest:This is radio, right?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I don't have to get dressed for this.
Marc:No, you don't have to get dressed.
Guest:I'm glad you're dressed, but... Let's go into the den here.
Marc:Okay, very good.
Guest:I used the original RCA mics 60 years ago.
Marc:The long one.
Marc:You almost had to hold it down by your waist, right?
Guest:The long, thin one.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So, Monty Hall, I'm in your house.
Marc:And I'm ready to talk.
Marc:Are you ready to talk?
Guest:I'm ready to listen and to talk.
Marc:Now, what happened last night?
Marc:You won the Lifetime Achievement Awards for the Daytime Emmys.
Marc:This is a big deal.
Guest:Well, I guess it's a big deal.
Guest:Of course, a Lifetime Award is a very good award to receive, Lifetime Recognition.
Guest:The only trouble was that there was a reel that had to precede my presentation.
Guest:Not a long one, maybe one or two minutes later.
Guest:which was narrated by my daughter, Joanna Gleason.
Guest:Great actress.
Guest:Yeah, and it had the pilot of Let's Make a Deal that I did 50 years ago, but it also had excerpts from my comedy appearances on The Odd Couple and my special singing and so on.
Guest:It had a quick montage and all the great famous people that I met while I was doing my charity work when I raised a billion dollars.
Guest:A billion dollars.
Guest:Wonderful story, wonderful thrill.
Guest:The people from the Peck Academy who wrote it were thrilled last night.
Guest:Wayne Brady gets up to present me with the award, and he says, I'm not going to follow the script.
Guest:I want to speak for my heart.
Guest:And he went on too long, and the director...
Guest:instead of cutting him off right cut out my film just decided not to play my my film that's ridiculous it was a shock it's a lifetime achievement award yeah make an exception this is not going to happen again oh my god mark i'm telling you you should have seen the people especially the lady who wrote the script was sitting beside me at the next table she was in tears oh my goodness
Marc:So what now you just printed out a bunch of Twitter backlash.
Marc:You know, it's amazing to me about this is that this means that you you were able to download about 50 pages here of Twitter reaction to the lack of the film because did they set up the film on the show?
Marc:Did they set it up?
Guest:I have no idea.
Marc:So how did people know that it didn't play?
Guest:Because I mentioned, I said, if they had played this thing, it was narrated by my daughter.
Guest:And I just said that one line.
Guest:See if they played the reel.
Guest:I just passed it in passing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But everybody picked it up.
Marc:Well, it's interesting to me.
Marc:But this tells me that there's plenty of people that the older generation has arrived at Twitter.
Marc:That's what I... We're no longer hiding from our parents on Twitter.
Marc:They're there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I didn't realize that you did as much comedy work as you did.
Guest:Well, you know, comedy is a sideline with me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I've done a thousand banquets, and I write my own monologues.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so that's part of my comedy there in writing monologues.
Guest:I'm not a comic.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I do funny things.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I say things cleverly.
Guest:You have good timing.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:You've got the timing.
Guest:And I appeared twice on the Odd Couple show.
Guest:I had two wonderful episodes there on the Flip Wilson show.
Guest:I had a lot of these guests about us.
Marc:You remember those guys, huh?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I just talked to you, I told you, I've talked to Dick Van Dyke, I've talked to Mel Brooks, I've talked to Carl Reiner, and you said you were just with them.
Marc:So is this your crew?
Marc:Are these the guys, do all you guys who are, thank God that you're still alive and you're still kicking?
Marc:Is there a crew of you that hangs out?
Guest:And we hang out at Sid Caesar's place.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's sort of a tribute to Sid that we come to him.
Guest:Right, sure.
Guest:And he's not too well.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it's not convenient for him to get out and appear with us anywhere else.
Guest:As a matter of fact, he's part of a lunching group I have, and he hasn't been coming recently.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So what we do is about once a month, we all go over there and have dinner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And sit around and tell stories and tell jokes and have a wonderful time, and he enjoys it.
Guest:And Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks are there all the time.
Guest:And Dick Van Dyke appeared once or twice.
Guest:So these are great guys.
Guest:How did you know Sid?
Guest:How far back do you go with him?
Guest:I met Sid not in New York.
Guest:I met him on the West Coast many, many years ago.
Guest:I think, I can't recall when, but probably doing some benefits that we started many years ago.
Guest:I remember I was on the Dinah Shore show with him way back, about 30, 40 years ago.
Guest:And he and I were on the same show with Dinah.
Guest:And at that time, I said to him, I know all your routines, and especially the professor, the German professor.
Guest:And I said to him,
Guest:if you want to do it with me, I said, I'll be the straight man for you.
Guest:And he did it all over again.
Guest:You know, the one where he's teaching me how to fly.
Guest:You know that routine?
Guest:I don't.
Guest:He says, well, you climb up the mountain, you know, and you climb very slowly up the mountain, or you get to the top of the mountain, you stand there and you start to flap your hands like wings, you see?
Guest:Or you flap your wings, or you jump off the air and you flap your wings all the way down.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this broke me up.
Guest:And he did it for me on the Dinah Shore.
Guest:That sort of became friends.
Marc:And did you do that?
Marc:Was it the Carl Reiner part?
Marc:Who was the straight guy originally?
Guest:Carl Reiner.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Straight guys are sort of unsung heroes in the comedy industry.
Guest:Well, Carl Reiner was a marvelous straight man for him.
Marc:The best.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But he also was a straight man for Mel Brooks.
Marc:Carl Reiner has been on the other side of a lot of charismatic.
Guest:And the interesting thing is that Carl himself is a great comedian.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, he doesn't have to play straight.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But he does.
Guest:He does it for all these people.
Guest:And he's marvelous.
Yeah.
Marc:so you come from canada originally yeah winnipeg canada wait now this is the baffling to me i spent time in winnipeg canada there's nothing that i can recall and when i was there for a like a week one day very yeah exactly it's a very harsh terrain it was very flat it seemed like the city was it was you know uh tired from the weather i mean how did you end up there
Guest:I was born there.
Guest:That's how I ended up there.
Guest:So your folks were there.
Guest:And my folks were there.
Guest:And this is the way you live.
Guest:You live the life that the prairie gives you.
Guest:It's flat.
Guest:It's cold.
Guest:It's murderously cold in the winter.
Guest:It gets hot in the summertime.
Marc:But you're from a Jewish family.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:I'm a Jew as well.
Marc:And I'm always fascinated with that because I'm like, how did Jews get there?
Guest:Well, we'll take my mother's and father's family.
Guest:Both came over from the Ukraine.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And my mother's family came over in 1901 to Canada.
Guest:My grandfather got a visa and he came over and he came to Winnipeg and they helped him in the community.
Guest:And they bought him a push cart and told him how to say fruit, fruit, fruit.
Guest:And he was up and down the streets of Winnipeg selling fruit.
Guest:That's how it started with him.
Guest:My father's father, who'd been in the cattle business in the old country, came over in 1905 and immediately started in the cattle business in Winnipeg.
Guest:And those two families got together.
Guest:And my mother and father met each other when they were 12.
Guest:And they got married when they were 21.
Guest:And I came along a year later.
Guest:And they were Orthodox?
Yeah.
Guest:Everybody was orthodox in those days.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:There was no.
Guest:But as the years went by, they changed.
Guest:A lot of people wanted to escape orthodoxy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a lot of them became reform and conservative.
Guest:I've been all three.
Guest:And, you know, I do benefits for everybody.
Guest:I even do it for Sephardics, you know.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you've got a lot of different yarmulkes.
Marc:You've got the small one, the big one, maybe none at all.
Marc:Have keep up, will travel.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what kind of business was your father in?
Guest:My father was a butcher.
Guest:My father originally was, when he finished high school, he was a bookkeeper.
Guest:And after working as a bookkeeper for a couple of years, his eyesight was going on him because of working with the figures and so on.
Guest:And the doctor told him that he'd better retire from that business.
Guest:So he went to work in the stockyards with his father and brother.
Guest:At the age of 22, he was married.
Guest:I had a one-year-old son.
Guest:You.
Guest:And my grandfather fired him.
Guest:That's a beautiful thing to say.
Guest:The head of the temple fired his son.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Because the older brother didn't want him in the business.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he went to try to start wholesaling meat himself and picking it up in stockyards and selling it to butcher shops.
Guest:And eventually he ended up having nothing and found out there was a butcher's counter available in the back of a delicatessen.
Guest:And they taught him how to cut meat and he became a butcher and I became the delivery boy.
Marc:So you remember going and delivering meat and going to the deli and doing that whole thing?
Guest:I was a delivery boy in Winnipeg, 40 degrees below zero, taking a bicycle with a carrier and all those parcels in the big carton in front and traveled all over the city for two or three hours delivering everything from a pound of liver to whatever it was.
Guest:To people's homes?
Guest:To people's homes all through the city.
Guest:And one of the great stories I like to tell is the fact that one time, delivering many miles away from the butcher shop, I found a drugstore where I could come in and warm up because it's 40 below zero.
Guest:It's kind of cold.
Guest:No matter how you're bundled down.
Guest:So I went to this place called Harmon's Pharmacy, and Mr. Harmon took a look at me, and he said, my goodness, he says, look at you.
Guest:You look terrible.
Guest:You're cold.
Guest:He says, what are you doing?
Guest:I said, well, I'm delivering meat for my father.
Guest:And he says, what's your father's name?
Guest:and i gave him the name and he called my father's butcher shop he says i've got your son here and he's frozen half to death what shall i do with him my father said thaw him out and put him back on the bicycle no time for sympathy so now how did your life become like i just it's hard for me to imagine winnipeg what what what did you set out to do so you work in the butcher shop were you going to be a butcher
Guest:No, no, because I could save my father $6 a week, which he was paying a delivery boy.
Marc:But you had no passion for the meat.
Guest:So I went to school, came home at lunch hour, delivered the parcels, went back to school.
Guest:Four o'clock, came back to the butcher shop.
Guest:Saturday night, worked all through the night.
Guest:Sunday, got on the bicycle, went to all these same customers, getting a dollar on account or something so I'd have enough money to open the butcher shop Monday.
Guest:I mean, that was it.
Guest:When I finished high school, I'd been very ill when I was young, very ill.
Guest:Which was what?
Guest:Well, I was scalded in an accident, and then I had double pneumonia.
Guest:And anyhow, the doctor said to my parents after recovering from the double pneumonia, he said, little Monty is so beaten up by these two diseases and accidents that he won't live a long life.
Guest:He won't live to be 20 years old.
Guest:He's just, look at him, he's 40 pounds, and he's eight years old, you know.
Guest:So on my 20th birthday, I called the doctor, but he was dead.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you're, what are you, 93?
Guest:I'm 91.
Guest:I'm going to be 92 in August.
Marc:That's amazing.
Marc:He was so wrong.
Marc:He couldn't have been more wrong.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Every decade I think about him.
Guest:Do you?
Guest:When I got through 20, 30, 40, 50.
Guest:So when I finished high school, I was 14 years old because my mother had homeschooled me.
Guest:So I was way ahead of everybody.
Guest:They kept accelerating me in class.
Guest:I was in high school.
Guest:I was the smallest kid in the school where you see a class picture.
Guest:You see all these people and the little guy at the end.
Guest:That's me.
Guest:So I'm 14 years old and we don't have any money to go to college.
Guest:So I went to work full time at the butcher shop.
Marc:Did you learn how to cut meat?
Guest:My father took a vacation once, and I didn't cut anybody.
Guest:I knew how to do certain things, but it was not my ambition, believe me.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And eventually, a great thing happened.
Guest:I got enough money from my customers to go back to school for one year when I was 17.
Guest:To college?
Guest:To college, University of Manitoba.
Guest:Then I dropped out after a year, no more money.
Guest:What were you studying?
Guest:Well, in the first year, it's just general study.
Guest:It doesn't matter, right.
Guest:Then it became science.
Guest:In the second year, I dropped out and I worked at a clothing wholesale.
Guest:And one day, a young man from across the road who owned a manufacturing company, an inheritance from his father, came and he was 29.
Guest:By this time, I'm 19 years old.
Guest:And he saw me washing the floors.
Guest:And I didn't know him, but he thought he recognized me.
Guest:So he saw my father later in the day at a pinnacle club.
Guest:He said, I think I saw your son, Monty, washing floors at a wholesale.
Guest:Is that him?
Guest:He said, that's him.
Guest:Why isn't he at school?
Guest:Well, ran out of money.
Guest:He said, would he like to go back to college?
Guest:If so, I'll finance him.
Guest:Send him up to meet me.
Guest:29 years old.
Guest:I went up to meet with him, and he had a talk with me, and he laid down the rules.
Guest:He said, I will pay you the money for your books, your tuition, for everything, but you've got to follow my rules.
Guest:You've got to be a B-plus or better average, because I'm not going to send a dilettante to college.
Guest:He said, you must never tell anybody where the money came from.
Guest:You're going to promise to do this for somebody else someday.
Guest:Report to me with your report cards every month.
Guest:How do you like these rules for a 29-year-old guy who was a man about town at that time?
Guest:Why did he choose you, do you think?
Guest:Years and years later, I said to him, his name is Max Fried.
Guest:And years and years later, I said to Max, why did you do this for me?
Guest:And he said, I don't know, maybe I saw something in you that could have been me at that age.
Guest:Whatever it was, I wanted to help somebody.
Guest:And it was just you doing this manual labor.
Guest:He didn't even know me.
Guest:But he knew your father?
Marc:To say hello to, that's all.
Marc:That's very interesting.
Marc:Did it have a profound effect on you?
Marc:Did you do that outside of your charity work?
Marc:Obviously, you've raised a lot of money for charities.
Marc:Was that the incentive?
Guest:He said, you've got to do this for somebody else someday.
Guest:Well, Mark, I put a lot of people through college, which shows you what the difference one man can make.
Guest:His interest in me has ended up in countless people going to college and a billion dollars that I've raised for charity.
Guest:Now, that's an investment worth making, and he did it.
Guest:And that was what changed your heart about it.
Guest:It changed everything.
Guest:It changed my life.
Guest:But it also is an example of what people can do.
Guest:One person changed my life, and it extrapolated into these great things that I could do.
Marc:So you graduated college?
Guest:I went back to college.
Guest:I got a bachelor of science degree.
Guest:I had a wonderful college career.
Guest:I was president of the student body.
Guest:What were you studying?
Guest:I was studying, well, I was studying chemistry and zoology.
Guest:I was a major in chemistry, minor in zoology.
Guest:And, of course, I use it every day of my life.
Guest:Sure, of course.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:When you pour some tea.
Guest:When I do the New York Times crossword puzzle.
Yeah.
Marc:How'd you get into entertainment then?
Guest:Well, while I was going to college, I was in a college production, a musical comedy.
Guest:And the director of the musical comedy also was on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation directing drama.
Guest:So he recruited me to do drama at the CBC.
Guest:And I did that.
Guest:Radio plays.
Guest:Radio.
Guest:This is before television.
Marc:What year was this?
Guest:So you were doing... I'm talking about 1940, 1940.
Marc:So it was all scripted dramas, like a daily thing?
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And then I got a job at a radio station, a CKRC in Winnipeg, working nights and weekends.
Guest:And work at the radio station in those days meant that you did the news, you did the cowboy pictures, whatever it was, you did the cowboy shows.
Guest:I had a singing program.
Guest:I had a sports program.
Guest:And on Sundays, on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd go on the road with the Army show and perform for the Army camps.
Marc:So wait, now let me get this straight.
Marc:So if you're working nights, they just give you scripts every hour.
Marc:You had news on the hour, I imagine.
Guest:Well, at the radio station, whatever was on the schedule, whatever was on the schedule, you broadcast the news, and then you did a singing program.
Guest:But you would sing.
Guest:And I sang.
Guest:I sang during the army shows and so on.
Guest:I sang professionally for a while.
Guest:And then you do a cowboy script?
Guest:And then do a cowboy picture.
Guest:Were you doing voices and everything?
Guest:Not really.
Guest:I just, you know, there's a cowboy store called Monty Hale.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, they always thought I was Monty Hale.
Guest:No, I did everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you cleaned up afterwards.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And what were these army shows like when you go out on the road?
Guest:Well, that was the best.
Guest:That was the best training.
Guest:Like they talk about the comics getting their training in the Borscht Belt.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:The army shows were my Borscht Belt because you went from one army camp to another.
Guest:And at the army camp, before 1,000 soldiers,
Guest:You emceed the show.
Guest:You did the burlesque bits.
Guest:You sang the patriotic songs.
Guest:You did all these things.
Guest:And then you went and did another show for the officers.
Guest:And you got on the bus and came home at 3 in the morning.
Guest:And these were the best audiences in the world.
Guest:You know how they appreciate that.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:They're just happier there.
Guest:And so that was great training for me.
Guest:Then after I graduated, I went to work at the radio station full time.
Guest:And then about nine months later, the boss called me in.
Guest:And this is so interesting.
Guest:He opened up his desk drawer and he handed me a map of Toronto.
Guest:This is in Winnipeg, Roger.
Guest:Winnipeg's in the middle of the country.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And I said, why are you giving me this map?
Guest:He said, open up the map of Toronto.
Guest:And I marked with a pencil where all the radio stations are.
Guest:I said, what does that mean?
Guest:He says, you should go.
Guest:Get out of here.
Guest:You should go.
Guest:If you stay here, you'll end up like all these old guys here.
Guest:And they're not going anywhere.
Guest:And you are going somewhere.
Guest:But you've got to do it, not here.
Guest:You've got to go to the big city.
Marc:Isn't that interesting that that's their version of like, you've got to go to New York, kid.
Guest:You've got to go to Toronto.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:I went to Toronto.
Marc:Did you know the old timers he was talking about?
Marc:Could you see it?
Marc:Because it's hard for me to imagine.
Marc:I imagine with radio, there were those guys that you just knew were not going anywhere.
Guest:Well, they were there since Marconi, you know.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Anyhow, I went to Toronto, and I didn't have a job.
Guest:Can you imagine me going home for dinner that night saying to my folks, I'm going to Toronto, and they said, do you have a job?
Guest:No.
Guest:Well, how can you just get up and leave?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:to a strange city and so on.
Guest:I said, my boss told me to go, so I'm going.
Marc:What was your father's, what was their reaction to you getting into this business at all?
Marc:I mean, after college?
Guest:Well, they wanted me to be a doctor, naturally.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:The funny thing is that when I applied, I couldn't get into medicine because there was a quota system, you know, very bad quota system.
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:How did that work?
Guest:Two Ukrainians, two Jews, one Chinese, and two women got into the freshman class.
Marc:And that was the way it worked.
Marc:That's the way it worked.
Marc:And what about the fellow that put you through college?
Marc:Did he know you were going into entertainment?
Guest:Well, he followed my career.
Guest:And when I didn't get into medicine, he was disappointed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he didn't say anything about that.
Guest:He was very proud of me, but especially later on when I got to be more successful.
Guest:He vicariously lived his life through me, all the successes I had.
Guest:And we kept in touch with each other, although he lived in Winnipeg and Florida.
Guest:I only saw him twice over the next, I guess, 50, 55, 60 years.
Guest:But I met him on two or three occasions.
Guest:The last one was two years ago.
Guest:Two years ago?
Guest:He was at that time 99 years old.
Guest:He was practically blind and practically deaf.
Guest:He was living in an assisted living home.
Guest:And I went to see him and we sat down and talked to each other nose to nose that close because he could hardly, he couldn't see and he couldn't hear.
Guest:So we're standing, sitting, talking to each other in very loud voices and
Guest:And I reminisced about all the things that happened over the years and how much we did.
Guest:And then I said to him, Max, you gave me a life.
Guest:And he said, no, Monty, you gave me a life.
Guest:Because he lived vicariously through everything that I did.
Guest:And he enjoyed it more than my parents did.
Guest:That's beautiful.
Guest:When he died, I found that he had a son.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I got the phone number and I called his son.
Yeah.
Guest:And we talked, and he said to me, you know, I really believe that sometimes I believe that my father loved you more than he loved me.
Guest:But he followed your career every day, every week, every year.
Guest:You gave him a lot of joy.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:Because, I mean, by the time, I don't want to skip over anything, but let's make a deal.
Marc:How many times a week was that on originally?
Guest:Five days a week.
Guest:Five days a week.
Guest:And not too long after it started, we went on evenings in syndication.
Marc:Yeah, well, let's not jump there yet.
Marc:So you're in Toronto, and this is where things start to open up a little bit.
Marc:Was it the big city?
Marc:Was it a big opportunity?
Guest:It was a big city, and I got a couple of offers to do very happily.
Guest:I got two offers from radio stations in Toronto.
Guest:So I decided, well, I'll go to Montreal.
Guest:I'll see what it's like in Montreal.
Marc:Was that considered a bigger market?
Guest:Well, I had a friend there, so I went to see what Montreal was like.
Guest:I got two offers in Montreal.
Guest:I said, well, if this is the way it's going to be, I'm going to New York.
Guest:So I went to New York, and they let me know right off that they didn't care much for Canadians at that time.
Guest:I remember I went to see one producer, and he said to me, kid, what do you do?
Guest:I said, well, I do radio.
Guest:I'm an emcee.
Guest:He said, kid, if I need an emcee, I can call Bob Hope.
Yeah.
Guest:And I knew where I stood there.
Guest:And I went back to Toronto, accepted a job, met Marilyn, got married, and my life began.
Marc:And what were the first radio gigs?
Marc:What were you primarily doing?
Guest:I was doing a Man on the Street broadcast and an afternoon variety show, as well as the usual stuff that you do at a radio station, the newscasts.
Guest:And so you ripped the news right off the wire and read it, you know.
Marc:What's a Man on the Street show?
Marc:How'd that work?
Guest:that was great there was a show called what do you think on the streets of toronto where i'm standing in front of the city hall and i had a guy who was bringing people up to the microphone right you know right and i'd give the topic of the day and we discussed the topic of the day and this fellow who was getting the feeding me the people kept feeling me drunks and so on
Guest:Drunk guys would come up?
Guest:He would get drunk and he says, so what do you think about the steel strike in Hamilton?
Guest:And it was wonderful because you couldn't walk away from it.
Guest:Was it live?
Guest:This is live.
Guest:And you had to live your way out of it.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:And as you walk away from the drunk, he followed you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's interesting to me that media has really, like TV and radio, it's not that much different.
Marc:You know, in terms of engaging the public.
Marc:Like, I mean, to do a man on the street thing, I mean, they do that now.
Marc:I mean, reality TV on some level is a little more intrusive, but it's not that different.
Guest:I like spontaneous programs.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I like ad libbing.
Guest:I did Let's Make a Deal.
Guest:As if it were a live show, even though it was on tape.
Guest:We did it as live.
Guest:We didn't stop for anything.
Guest:If things went wrong, if Jay dropped the tray, we kept on going.
Guest:If the curtain didn't open, we kept on going.
Guest:We made mistakes.
Guest:I laughed about the mistakes.
Guest:I once asked a woman, she wanted what's behind the curtain.
Guest:And while she was making up her mind, the stagehands accidentally opened up the curtain to show the car.
Guest:And I said, she said, do you mean, do I want that car?
Guest:And you bet your life I want that car.
Guest:And we gave her the car.
Guest:It was our mistake.
Guest:I love things that happen like that.
Guest:I love things.
Guest:When things went wrong, I adored those moments.
Guest:Well, it makes you feel alive.
Guest:I mean, you're in it.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:And there's no script.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you're making up the script and I've just enjoyed it.
Marc:So when you're in Toronto, so you're doing all these other things.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:So do you get popular?
Marc:I mean, do people know Monty Hall yet?
Guest:Well, not that great.
Guest:Not that great.
Guest:You know, I had a show, one show after another, and then I finally got a network show.
Guest:But they didn't make big stars in Canada.
Guest:A network show on television?
Marc:You were there when the transition to television happened?
Guest:Yes, in 1952.
Guest:I went there in 46, 52 television stars.
Marc:Was that a big deal, though?
Marc:I mean, you were doing radio, and now this new machine comes.
Guest:And there was one network.
Guest:The CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Guest:Is there only one network now in Canada, or is there two?
Guest:No, now they have three or four.
Guest:But they had one.
Guest:And the first year that it opened, it was my medium.
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:I got three shows right off the bat.
Guest:I had a show called Nightclub.
Guest:We worked in a nightclub.
Guest:I had another.
Guest:It was a game show.
Guest:Another one was an afternoon ladies show with another woman and I doing the whole hour show.
Guest:That was fantastic.
Guest:And I'm also doing my radio show on the side.
Guest:It's all live.
Guest:All of this is live.
Guest:It's all live.
Guest:I'm having the time of my life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Over the summer, all three shows were canceled.
Guest:Why?
Guest:When you're at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
Guest:They own the candy store, and they don't have to apologize to anybody.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:They just get the next shows on the air.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So for the next year, I walked around pounding on the doors at this one network saying, you know, what's next?
Guest:What can I do?
Guest:And they kept saying, I don't know.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Maybe somebody upstairs doesn't like you.
Guest:And then maybe you go upstairs and say, maybe somebody downstairs doesn't like you.
Guest:And you couldn't get an answer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was left with my little radio show.
Guest:But I thought, there's no future for me doing a little radio show in this day and age.
Guest:i should be on television yeah so i'm going to go to i'm going to go to new york at this time i married to maryland with two little children and they were five and three and maryland said you go i'll look after the two kids i'll be the mother and the father to these two kids you go to new york and see what can happen i went down there for a
Marc:Couldn't get in anywhere.
Marc:Where'd you go?
Marc:NBC, CBS?
Guest:All the networks, production houses and so on.
Guest:And then in the fall, I went back to Toronto and I started commuting.
Guest:One week in Toronto, one week in New York, one week in Toronto, one in New York.
Guest:That's rough.
Guest:And I would write a little thing called a memo from Monty.
Guest:a one-sheeter that I sent to all the people I couldn't get in to see in New York.
Guest:It was a little stick figure with me holding a microphone.
Guest:And all the things that happened to me that week in New York, on the plane, funny stories.
Marc:So you're working for a living in Toronto and going to New York trying to get a bigger gig.
Marc:Yeah, and you're writing this memo.
Guest:Now, after doing this for several months, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, I remember making the usual calls in December, and I called Steve Krantz at NBC, and his secretary said, hold on, he wants to talk to you.
Guest:Wow, somebody's going to really talk to me.
Guest:He's a big shot.
Guest:And it's the first person who would talk to me at the network, the program manager.
Guest:And he gets on the phone.
Guest:He said, Monty, I didn't get the memo from Monty this week.
Guest:What happened?
Guest:I said, you mean you read it?
Guest:He said, I look forward to it.
Guest:I said, I stopped writing it last week because I didn't think anybody read it.
Guest:He says, no, it's wonderful.
Guest:I look forward.
Guest:He says, listen, what are you doing for lunch?
Guest:Just like that.
Guest:He took me down to lunch at the bottom of the RCA building.
Guest:And he eventually gave me a job doing a show called Sky's the Limit, which I started in December of 1955.
Guest:And during 1956...
Guest:when I was still commuting back and forth on weekends to see my family, I said to my wife, sell the house.
Guest:We had a little house.
Guest:Sell the house.
Guest:I rented a home in Mount Vernon, which is 30, 40 minutes outside of New York City.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she sold the house.
Guest:And in May, I guess in May of that year, I went to JFK to pick them up, my wife and the two kids.
Guest:And I brought them back to Mount Vernon.
Guest:And as we stood outside this home on 241 Pennsylvania Avenue, I said, kids, this is your new home in your new country, the United States of America.
Guest:And we go inside and the phone is ringing.
Guest:It's NBC.
Guest:Your show is canceled.
Yeah.
Guest:I kinda knew something was gonna happen.
Guest:Now I'm in a new country with my family and I'm unemployed.
Guest:Was that, now did you yell, did you scream?
Guest:No, you know what I did?
Guest:What?
Guest:I said, Marilyn, I saved up a couple of thousand dollars
Guest:We're going to Miami on a vacation.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And I picked up and my friend said, how can you go?
Guest:You're unemployed.
Guest:I said, I was unemployed before.
Guest:I'll be unemployed again.
Guest:But I'll come back.
Guest:We'll start all over again.
Guest:But we're going to have our vacation.
Marc:And did you have a good time?
Guest:Oh, I'm sure we had a good time.
Guest:We went to Florida, got sunburned, and came back and started all over again.
Marc:Oh, boy.
Marc:All right, so now you come back and you start all over.
Marc:And what does that look like?
Marc:So the opportunity you had was hosting a game show.
Guest:Yeah, it was for a game show.
Guest:But by now, I was doing... I got a job doing monitor radio.
Guest:What is that?
Guest:The weekend radio show.
Guest:NBC had a weekend radio show.
Guest:It started Saturday morning until Sunday night.
Guest:And every four hours, another team of two people were the hosts.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I got Saturday afternoon.
Guest:I got a cowboy theater on television Saturday mornings, wearing a checkered shirt like you're wearing now.
Guest:And...
Guest:and and what you just were you were hosting basically hosting i did all the hosting and uh we went from one to the other you know it's a it's a period of up and down up and down you get a show you lose a show you get a show you lose a show but eventually i got a show replacing jack barry on 21 after that after the scandal during this before the scandal yeah
Guest:The scandal broke while I was hosting the show.
Guest:He was on a nightclub tour, and I took over the show, and after four weeks on the show, I got a call from the advertising agency.
Guest:He said, there'll be no show for you this week, young man, because have you seen the World Telegram headline?
Guest:No.
Guest:Herb Stemple goes to the DA that the show was fixed, that he was fixed, and they said, you better come in and talk to us.
Marc:So you were guest hosting when all that happened?
Guest:That's right.
Guest:I went into New York to meet with the ad agency, and they said, you know, this is a terrible thing that's happened here.
Guest:It was a scandal, and you can't host a show this week.
Guest:Jack Barry, wherever he is in Chicago doing a nightclub, he's got to back and front the show.
Guest:This is his show, and he's got to front it this week.
Guest:He's got to take the hit.
Guest:He's got to take the hit.
Guest:And that was the end of my career with that show.
Guest:Thank God.
Guest:Then I got another show at the same time called Keep Talking,
Guest:I was hosting another comedy show, and they didn't get ratings.
Guest:And I remember the guy at CBS saying to a reporter, they let me go.
Guest:He said, well, he with his Canadian accent.
Guest:That was the reason they fired me.
Guest:He with his Canadian accent.
Guest:I mean, if you watch television today, everybody's got an English accent.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But a Canadian accent?
Yeah.
Marc:Did you have more of a defined Canadian accent?
Guest:No.
Marc:Because I don't hear it.
Marc:I don't hear it.
Guest:No, I did a little trace here and there, but that was a shock.
Guest:They replaced me with Jackie Cooper.
Guest:Two weeks later, he was fired.
Guest:They replaced me with Carl Reiner.
Guest:Four weeks later, they canceled the show altogether.
Marc:so because the medium was so young they could just do that everything was live they just throw something up for a couple weeks and if it didn't go to hell with it and we and it's like that today too yeah a bit you know but it seemed like it the costs were probably a little less than you know you just got to throw people up in the studio it's in real time people were expendable you know and uh the the suits as we call them the people they always they take a look at the ratings and it's not what you expect get rid of them get the next guy and did it were you getting bitter at all
Guest:What can you do?
Guest:It's a way of life.
Guest:You have to live with these things.
Guest:It's sad.
Guest:You've got a wife and two kids, and you don't have a show.
Marc:Were there other guys that you were friends with at the time that were going through the same ranks?
Marc:Were you friends with Carl at that time?
Guest:No, I wasn't friendly with these people at all.
Guest:I had my own little group of friends from Canada and so on that lived in New York.
Guest:But...
Guest:They were harsh times.
Guest:Competitive.
Guest:They weren't really.
Guest:And that's why I kept doing everything.
Guest:I was doing the New York Rangers color for the New York Ranger hockey team.
Guest:So I was doing sports casting.
Guest:I did wrestling from Sunnyside Gardens.
Guest:You did wrestling?
Guest:I did international soccer from the pool grounds.
Guest:I did Monitor on NBC Radio.
Guest:I was picking up a dollar here and a dollar there and a dollar here and a dollar there.
Guest:Those were radio gigs though, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And were you a hockey fan?
No.
Guest:Well, don't forget I come from Winnipeg.
Guest:Everybody's a hockey fan from Winnipeg.
Marc:But you were a sports announcer.
Marc:You've got to love this stuff.
Marc:You've got to be on top.
Guest:I love sportscasting more than anything.
Guest:And I came close to it because while I was in New York, I got the international soccer from the Polo Grounds because I was the only buddy in America who knew how to broadcast soccer in those days.
Guest:And then I got a call from Rune Arledge, who was head of ABC Sports in those days.
Guest:And he said, we're going to carry the Wembley Cup final from London.
Guest:That is the Super Bowl of all soccer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we want you to go and do it.
Guest:At the same time he did that, I got Video Village.
Guest:I was signed to do Video Village, a game show on CBS.
Guest:Now, on the one hand, I'm going to do a one-shot for the Wembley Stadium as opposed to a regular series.
Guest:I picked the regular series, and that's why it was game shows and not sportscasting.
Marc:But sportscasting you like because of the immediacy?
Marc:Because everything was happening in the moment?
Guest:I like that.
Guest:I liked doing the color because I like to build a situation.
Guest:In the finals of the soccer match, in international soccer, it was between Yugoslavia and Scotland.
Guest:And as I'm broadcasting the game, the warm-up...
Guest:The teams are on the field at opposite ends, just warming up, kicking the ball around.
Guest:And all of a sudden, the loudspeaker starts to play, God save the Queen.
Guest:The Scottish team stops in their tracks and stands at attention until it's over.
Guest:When it's over, they go back to kicking the ball.
Guest:Now they start to play the Yugoslavia national anthem, but they don't stop.
Guest:They keep kicking the ball back and forth.
Guest:And I, covering this, said, I can only assume that the reason that I haven't stopped is that we're playing the Mihailovic version of the national anthem instead of the Tito version, which was exactly what happened.
Guest:And Q magazine the next week said, what sportscaster in America would know the difference between the two national anthems in Yugoslavia?
Guest:So that was exciting.
Guest:You see, I love the situation in a hockey game when things happen and there's a
Guest:An injury in your head, 15 minutes to fill, and so on.
Guest:I love that.
Guest:That's ad-libbing.
Guest:Create the situation.
Guest:That's why Vin Scully in baseball is such a great broadcaster.
Guest:It's not because he gives you the play-by-play.
Guest:It's the stuff that he gives you the picture at all times.
Marc:And you've got to know a little something about a lot of stuff.
Guest:Of course, of course.
Guest:But he paints a picture.
Guest:I like to paint the picture.
Marc:because like i'm not a big sports guy but i but you know i know that people that love sports and that you know are engaged with it that the backstory and the things that happen in between and the speculation and the commentary speculation good idea yeah hockey yeah the montreal canadians are playing the new york rangers jacques plant was their goaltender in those days they did not wear a mask yeah
Guest:In the warm-up, he's wearing a mask in the warm-up, but as soon as the game starts, he takes the mask off.
Guest:They never wore a mask.
Guest:About three minutes into the game, a cup hits him.
Guest:He's bleeding profusely.
Guest:They didn't carry a second goaltender in those days.
Guest:They've taken him in to stitch him up.
Guest:I'm left with 20 minutes to fill.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As I'm filling it, I said, it would not surprise me
Guest:That when he comes back on the ice, he'll wear that mask that's never been worn before in hockey.
Guest:20 minutes later, he skates back on the ice and he's wearing the mask.
Guest:And 15,000 people at Madison Square Garden goes to their feet and booed him.
Guest:Really?
Guest:They booed him because it wasn't macho.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Can you imagine?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Take the hit.
Guest:Show us your scar.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:I predicted it would happen.
Guest:It happened.
Marc:And that's the kind of stuff I love.
Marc:But when they booed him, were you like, it's amazing.
Marc:Like, look at what is happening.
Marc:Were you able to assess it critically in that moment?
Guest:I didn't make any comment about the audience.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I just said, he's wearing the mask.
Guest:And now, ladies and gentlemen, it's the first time in National Hockey League history that a goaltender's wearing a mask.
Guest:I just went on with the game.
Marc:Did they start wearing masks from that point on?
Marc:He was the first.
Marc:And you were there that night?
Marc:And I was there.
Marc:And it was only because probably they didn't want him to get knocked out twice because they didn't have a backup.
Guest:No backup.
Guest:Today they carry two goaltenders.
Marc:But they probably instructed him, you better put the mask on because if you get a hit again, we got nothing.
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I can see how that would have been compelling.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:So what's this video village show?
Marc:I'm fascinated with these old game shows.
Guest:Video Village was a show where the studio was laid out in the streets.
Guest:And people rolled dice and they took so many steps.
Guest:And each step was a candy store or a zonk or whatever it was.
Guest:And the way I got that show is fascinating.
Guest:You know, life is so strange the way things happen.
Guest:I'm working casually a little bit here and a little bit there.
Guest:I'm out at the golf course in Saxon Woods in Westchester.
Guest:As my friend and I finished the round of golf and we're going back to New Rochelle, I see my car on the other side of the freeway going the other direction.
Guest:I recognize my car and my wife driving it.
Guest:Now, I go home, and it takes her about a half an hour before she comes back.
Guest:She says, I raced up to the golf course to find you because Merrill Heater, the producer of Video Village, is trying desperately to get a hold of you.
Guest:I get home.
Guest:I call him.
Guest:I say, what is his money?
Guest:He says, I can't explain it right now, but Jack Nars, who's the emcee of the show, has left the show.
Guest:What happened is that his wife was in California, and she threatened him with divorce if he didn't come home.
Guest:So he left the show live.
Guest:No chance for nothing.
Guest:The show was finished.
Guest:He said, I need you desperately to come in here and learn the show tonight and go on the air live tomorrow.
Guest:I went to New York City.
Guest:They taught me the game that night.
Guest:I went on live the next day, and I inherited the show.
Marc:And did it run for a while?
Guest:It ran for a few months there.
Guest:They moved the show out to the West Coast, and we ran for two years.
Marc:So that's why you came out to the West Coast?
Guest:That brought me to the West Coast.
Marc:Video Village show.
Marc:So now, okay, so now the business, I've got to assume, is changing a bit.
Marc:I imagine some people are getting followings and America's getting used to television.
Marc:They're enjoying game shows.
Marc:People are understanding how TV works.
Marc:So did you see opportunity when you got out here or did you still feel like you were a job-to-job guy?
Guest:Well, no, I came out with a show, so I got a national show.
Guest:And while I'm here, I sell NBC, my first show, Your First Impression.
Guest:It was a psychological quiz show.
Guest:So I'm working on CBS as an emcee, and I got a show at NBC as a producer.
Guest:What was the angle of that show?
Guest:It was to determine who was sitting behind the screen by virtue of a free association game.
Guest:You had five pictures of five different people, and you played this free association game with the guy behind the screen, and based on his answers, you had to determine which of the five was the real one.
Guest:It was a nice show.
Guest:It lasted two and a half years.
Marc:Were you thinking about game shows all the time?
Guest:All the time.
Marc:I started with the game shows, you know.
Marc:And was there money involved in that show?
Marc:I got a good salary.
Marc:No, but I mean like for the players.
Marc:Like if they guessed the right guy, or was it strictly for entertainment?
Marc:I mean, did people win money?
Guest:They won money.
Guest:At the beginning, it was small amounts, but as the time went by, you try to seduce the audience by giving more money, more money, more making it bigger and bigger, the million dollars, the five million.
Guest:And how much that works, sometimes it works a little bit, but you have to have a pretty good show to go along with it.
Marc:So that was your first show that you pitched and sold?
Guest:That I sold was First Depression.
Guest:The second show was Let's Make a Deal.
Guest:Where did the idea for that come from?
Guest:Because I was doing Video Village on one network, I had to hire somebody to produce the show at NBC.
Guest:So I hired Steve Hados because First Depression replaced the show he had.
Guest:And he was at Liberty, and he came highly recommended.
Guest:So I partnered up with him and made him the producer of First Impressions.
Guest:And we'd meet for lunch from time to time discussing...
Guest:our shows, and we came up with this idea together.
Guest:It was not an easy sell because in those days, can you imagine you sell no pre-selected audiences, just do it from the audience, pick people, they make choices and so on.
Guest:How do you show a demonstration of that show?
Guest:What we did is we got clubs and we called them and said, when you have your meeting...
Guest:Let us be your entertainment.
Guest:When your meeting is over, we'll put on a half-hour show, and we'll come with little envelopes, little slips of paper that say refrigerator, television set, and a rubber chicken, which is the zonk, and the three doors that we... And we played it for these people, and no matter where we played it, we got a terrific response.
Guest:The most unusual was...
Guest:A quilting bee with 10 women of the Latter-day Saints in way out West Valley.
Guest:They said, would you come play for us?
Guest:10 women and a quilting bee.
Guest:We went out there and we played it with them the same as we played with them.
Marc:So this was just to try the thing out.
Guest:Just to see how it worked.
Guest:And they loved the idea of the unknown and the gambling and the risking and so on.
Guest:So now we stage a full stage run through in the studio.
Guest:And ABC is invited to come.
Guest:We have an audience of 250 people.
Guest:We still only have envelopes and stuff.
Guest:We don't have the real prizes.
Guest:But in their imagination, they can see it.
Guest:The show is over.
Guest:I'm getting a standing ovation.
Guest:I go back to the green room where my partner's there with my agent and the ABC people.
Guest:And I walk in and I expect them to be throwing babies in the air, long faces.
Guest:I said, what's wrong here?
Guest:And my partner says, the guy at ABC doesn't like it.
Guest:I said, you've got to be kidding me.
Guest:They're still screaming out there.
Guest:The audience is still screaming out there.
Guest:He says, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:He says, I know it's good for one day.
Guest:Wouldn't do the second day.
Guest:What kind of response is this?
Guest:What did he do the second day?
Guest:More of the same.
Guest:He didn't buy the show.
Guest:Three weeks later, we did it for NBC.
Guest:They didn't buy it.
Marc:But there's no costumes at this time or anything.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:So it's just people coming out of the audience.
Guest:Just people coming and playing.
Guest:Now, NBC turns it down.
Guest:But the NBC guy who came out had an assistant with him.
Guest:And whether the NBC guy wanted to buy it, he left shortly thereafter to work for Goodson Todman, so maybe that was why he didn't buy my show.
Guest:Speculation.
Guest:But his assistant went back to New York and said, I love the show.
Guest:We've got to make a pilot.
Guest:We've got to make a pilot.
Guest:So his boss said, all right, make the pilot.
Guest:We made the pilot in April, didn't hear a word.
Guest:May, June, July, August, nothing.
Guest:October, I get a call from this assistant.
Guest:He said, we have a time period.
Guest:We're 13 weeks and out, 13 weeks and out.
Guest:No show can make it.
Guest:You want the term period?
Guest:You can have it.
Guest:I said, we'll grab it.
Marc:What time was it?
Guest:It was like 1230 in the afternoon and station option time, whatever it was.
Guest:Immediate hit.
Yeah.
Guest:so what did it run an hour and a half no no our show yeah half hour that was it let's make a deal it was a half hour they put us up against as the world turns and all these very and we were hit immediately and we just celebrated our 50th anniversary it's unbelievable so you were the reason why it was a dead time period was it was up against soaps
Guest:no matter what it was the show the previous shows were dying why we had something different we had something that attracted the audience and it was immediate immediate hit it didn't take months to do it and the pitch was really let's make a deal was like you pitch people in the audience say come up and you have your mic and you say whatever you see and the beauty of the show is that you pick people at random because I always believed that anybody makes a good contestant
Guest:and what did how the costumes evolved i'll tell you that too so now we go on we do we go on the air yeah people are dressed in suits and dresses sure i come down the aisle about the second or third show and a woman holds up a sign and on the sign there's a poem
Guest:roses are red violets are blue i came here to deal with you and i laughed and i picked her as a contestant next week everybody had a sign and then came the funny costumes and the phyllis diller lookalikes and sailors and pirates and the nbc called us and said look there are 500 people waiting to come in your show downstairs and it's just like halloween what are you going to do about it
Guest:And I said, nothing.
Guest:This is television.
Guest:This is pictorial.
Guest:This gives color to a show.
Guest:And although we never selected the people for what they were wearing, because then it would just become a costume show, but we didn't discourage them from dressing up, but just added a flavor.
Marc:So it evolved on its own that one woman brings a thing and you pick her and they're like, well, we're going to do something to get his attention.
Guest:That's exactly right.
Marc:And because I remember vaguely when I was a kid, you know, watching it, I just remember you standing there, you know, looking together and dressed nice, just surrounded by this chaotic.
Guest:Chaotically.
Guest:And I loved it.
Guest:And I loved it.
Guest:Of course, when it's chaotic and these people didn't know what they're, you know, no preselection.
Guest:So when you walked on there and you picked a person,
Guest:They didn't even know what their name was at that time.
Guest:They were so nervous and excited.
Guest:And the reactions of people jumping on you excitedly and so on.
Guest:I recall there was a grandmother from Nebraska.
Guest:I think she was a linebacker.
Guest:She was so excited, she put her arms around my legs and picked me up and threw me over her shoulder.
Guest:And I'm dangling on the other side of her shoulder.
Marc:You got the mic?
Yeah.
Guest:And I'm hanging out.
Guest:And I've had a lot of people, the reactions of a lot of people jumping and hit me.
Guest:They don't know that they're wearing a box with pins sticking out of it.
Guest:And things, I got hit, I got bruised.
Guest:I even got kissed by men.
Marc:But the whole picture of the show is you pick somebody and you'd have some envelopes, right?
Marc:And you give them money or you'd say, you want to take this or you want to choose the door.
Marc:And that was it, right?
Guest:That was it.
Guest:It is a matter of not keeping them off base, but always letting them make a decision.
Guest:You just didn't give them something.
Guest:You said you can have this or you can have that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was always a this or that.
Guest:One of them was good and one of them was not.
Guest:And that was the whole base of the show and getting them to decide whether they, and especially when it came to the end of the show for the big deal.
Guest:Let's say that you already won $2,000 worth of merchandise.
Guest:Behind one of the doors is something worth $6,000 or $8,000 or $10,000.
Guest:Behind the other two doors, not so good.
Guest:Do you want to risk giving up your thing that you got for the possibility of getting the car or possibly?
Guest:But you have to give this up.
Guest:That's the beauty.
Guest:The difference between greed and gambling.
Guest:Greed, you want everything.
Guest:In gambling, you've got to give up what you've got.
Guest:You've got to risk it.
Guest:And that's the whole trick.
Guest:Should you give it?
Guest:And when we had a motivational research team from General Motors came down to our studio once to find out what motivates people to make the choice.
Guest:And we never could convince them that we knew what we were doing.
Guest:It was also from Yale.
Guest:A psychology team came down from Yale again to figure out psychology.
Guest:Why do people make these choices?
Guest:And I said, the choice is this.
Guest:You just won yourself a television set.
Guest:He offers you a door.
Guest:Behind one of the doors, there may be a car, maybe a trip around the road, maybe something.
Guest:But you've got to give up that television set.
Guest:Why do you trade in the television set?
Guest:One, because I already own a television set.
Guest:Number two, this is my chance for the big one.
Guest:And whatever happens, I've got this opportunity.
Guest:And that's the motivational thing.
Guest:And these newspaper columnists used to rip me apart with the greed shows, greed, greed, greed, until I got on the phone with these people.
Guest:I'd phone a columnist in any city at all who wrote a terrible column.
Guest:I'd pick those guys particularly.
Guest:And I'd say, Bill, do you ever go to the racetrack?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Why?
Guest:You bet?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Oh, I'd like to win.
Guest:Oh, you'd like to win.
Guest:Did you ever buy a raffle ticket?
Guest:Did you ever play the lottery?
Guest:Everybody wants to win something.
Guest:This is a show where people come on with nothing and could end up with a car.
Guest:that's it well what was the greed uh criticism that it was as soon as people win prizes jumping up and down to win a prize right i had there's a party at a night at a private club here yeah it's a perfect example and at my table was rosalind russell do you remember rosalind russell movies actress yeah
Guest:It was a beautiful dressy affair.
Guest:In the middle of the affair, the emcee or the host of the meeting announces that they have a man coming out with a big gondola festooned with prizes.
Guest:He said, we're gonna give away lucky prizes.
Guest:These people are all rich people sitting in the audience.
Guest:What do they need with prizes?
Guest:Well, they were winning compacts and stuff like that worth maybe a couple hundred dollars and jumping up and down.
Guest:Crazy rich people jumping up and down.
Guest:At one point, Rosalyn Russell turns to me and she says, and they make fun of your contestants?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And if they pick my number, I'll jump higher than they are.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Everybody loves the excitement of winning.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Two free manicures.
Guest:Whatever, yeah.
Guest:That's the nature of people.
Guest:Yeah, they want to get the deal.
Guest:And the columnist never understood that.
Marc:Well, they're just looking for controversy.
Marc:They're just looking for... And now it's even worse because there's so many outlets and none of them mean anything.
Marc:And everybody's looking for controversy.
Marc:Everybody wants some juice.
Marc:There's not enough juice to go around, so they make trouble.
Marc:So when you were doing that, because I have fairly distinct memories of there being livestock behind doors occasionally.
Guest:Yeah, we don't do that anymore because we had too many protests from PETA.
Guest:oh really but you weren't hurting the we weren't but they said it's not you you're embarrassing the animals oh not the guy dressed in a garbage bag that all the humans are willing to embarrass themselves but that's right that's true but but you know but i didn't want to offend anybody so i talked over the network and said all right we won't use the animals but they were funny on the show sometimes yeah sure
Marc:I just remember there was like little, it was like almost like a vignette.
Marc:You'd have a guy dressed in it.
Guest:Always the songs were always these crazy.
Guest:And Jay Stewart behind the curtain with these people.
Guest:We created very funny stuff.
Guest:And it ended another facet of the show.
Guest:Whereas when they lost, it was a funny thing.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:It was a humiliation, but it was almost a shtick.
Guest:It's a shtick.
Marc:And they knew it was coming.
Marc:It wasn't like anybody was going to... I mean, they were upset, but they knew that that was the possibility.
Guest:The thing points, when they got zonked and didn't win the car, they kissed me.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Because they had a good time.
Marc:It was a party.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So what was some of the... Carol Merrill, that was her name, right?
Guest:Carol Merrill, that's right, the model.
Guest:She was with me all those years.
Guest:Is she still around?
No.
Guest:Carol Merrill lives in Hawaii now.
Guest:As a matter of fact, she was in town recently, and we had lunch with she and her husband.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:We stay in touch.
Marc:That's sweet.
Guest:And how about like... Jay Stewart was the announcer, but he died many years ago.
Marc:How many years did your original show run?
Guest:My version ran for...
Guest:27 years unbelievable and then no and then i i quit doing the show and i had other people doing it for another several years but the one hour version started two years ago with wayne brady and you're producing it well i'm the owner right so you just i don't produce i just collect the checks yeah yeah yeah and how's that doing excellent yeah yeah well he's quite a talented guy yeah what are they doing differently anything
Guest:Not too much different.
Guest:Not too much different.
Guest:The people love the show.
Guest:They line up to get tickets forever.
Guest:It's always worked.
Guest:It's worked out for 50 years.
Guest:There must be something rude about it.
Marc:When you first started doing it and you realized it was a hit and you were a made guy, you were a TV star.
Marc:I mean, you felt that, right?
Guest:For the first time, I felt it, yes.
Guest:Not for the other shows that led up to then.
Guest:But this was such a hit that I thought to myself, finally, I'm riding the horse that could win the Kentucky Derby.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you were also, you become a household name.
Marc:The show became a household name.
Marc:I mean, everybody knows who Monty Hall is.
Marc:You were referenced in other cultural things.
Marc:The idea of the show became a basis for other kinds of shtick.
Marc:It became an institution.
Guest:Headlines from newspapers around the world.
Guest:I remember Pierre Trudeau was the Premier of Canada.
Guest:I remember the headline, Pierre Trudeau plays Let's Make a Deal with the cabinet.
Guest:Ministers uses their sermons.
Guest:Let's make a deal for life.
Guest:And everybody used Let's Make a Deal.
Guest:It became part of the language.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:That must have been flattering.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Of course, when you stand in an office building and you're waiting for the elevator, invariably somebody will come up to you and say, do you want another elevator one, elevator two, or elevator three?
Guest:Well, you've got to deal with that, don't you?
Guest:That's okay.
Marc:That's just part of being a celebrity.
Guest:Listen, it happens in bathrooms too.
Guest:Do you want a urinal one, urinal two, urinal three?
Guest:I mean, it became part of the language.
Marc:So at that time, so now that you've got this successful show and you're in Hollywood and you probably lived here for a long time, right?
Marc:In this neighborhood?
Guest:This house you're in, we've been here for exactly 50 years.
Marc:And this is a very old neighborhood.
Marc:I mean, Carl Reiner was a few blocks away because I was at his house.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:And now when this community sort of started to happen, when you started to see your celebrity rise, you know, who were the guys you hung out with?
Marc:Were you hanging out with other talk show guy?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:My social circle does not include the show business people.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, well, they all had their own shows, their own studios and so on.
Guest:And we had our social group that... The same people who were friends of mine 50 years ago are my friends today.
Guest:And occasionally, we would see each other at the Sid Caesar's house.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Something like that.
Guest:And occasionally, I'd have lunch with...
Guest:the various people yeah um but the but the close friends are not show business people that's probably better off right no it just it just happens that way yeah now tell me a little bit about the charities before we finish up i mean what were your you know over the years you say well i i grew into charity very early because as i told you at the very beginning we didn't have very much yeah but my mother was out there raising money
Guest:She was the national vice president of Hadassah.
Guest:And as such, she toured Canada making speeches to raise money for the children to bring them into what was Palestine and then became Israel later on.
Guest:And she worked for nothing, no salary.
Guest:But I remember saying to her, why do you do so much?
Guest:You're always on the road flying somewhere.
Guest:Why?
Guest:She said, because it's the right thing to do.
Guest:But my mother had a great sense of humor.
Guest:She was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, making a speech the same time that my show, Who Am I?, the radio show was on in Canada.
Guest:So it played in Halifax.
Guest:So my mother gets off the plane and the press is there to meet anybody who's coming in to speak, as you know.
Guest:And one reporter said, Mrs. Halperin, because that was my maiden name, we understand you're Monty Hall's mother.
Guest:She says, young man, where I come from, he's still known as Rose Halpern's son.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So now do you have favorite causes?
Guest:Well, so she introduced me to what was going on in Winnipeg.
Guest:When I got to Toronto, I was immediately recruited to do work for what was then the Red Feather, the United Way.
Guest:So I worked for the United Way, and then I joined the Variety Club because my father-in-law...
Guest:was a charter member of the variety club what was that and he that was an organization of entertainment people working for children and he took me out to dinner shortly after married he said join the variety club you'll love it it's people in your business raising money for children what could be better i plunged in with both feet and at the very beginning i remember maryl and i
Guest:We had the blue laws in Canada.
Guest:Everything was closed on Sunday.
Guest:Everything's wrapped up tight.
Guest:But you could open up a theater in a small town if you didn't charge admission.
Guest:So I would take a can of film, a first-run film,
Guest:A tap dancer, an accordion player, and Marilyn and I would get in a car, and we'd take, we'd go to some town 100 miles away, 200 miles away from Toronto.
Guest:We'd play to all the small towns.
Guest:We'd go to the theater.
Guest:People would come for nothing, so they'd fill the theater.
Guest:I'd start the film, and halfway through the film, I'd stop the film.
Guest:I'd go out, and I'd sing a couple of songs, and tell them about the Variety Club, and how we're building these places for children, and so on.
Guest:And then past the hat,
Guest:Pick up the money, play the second half of the film, pick up the film, the tap dance to the recording player, and go back to Toronto.
Guest:Pick up $1,000 here, $900 here, $1,400 here.
Guest:I did it every week.
Guest:That was such a joy for us.
Guest:We were young, and to be able to pick up all this money for charity at a young age was exhilarating.
Guest:And then later on when I went to New York, I stayed with the Variety Club, and I came out to the West Coast.
Guest:I became very heavily involved.
Guest:Then I became the local president, then an ambassador, the vice president, then the president, chairman of the board.
Guest:And when I had to step down, when my term was over, they gave me a title, International Chairman for Life.
Guest:And I've been doing that for the last, oh my goodness, 30 years as the Institute of House of Sherman.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:And your whole family's in show business.
Guest:They're all very successful.
Marc:Your daughter's a genius.
Marc:She's a great actress.
Guest:No, she's great.
Guest:She's great.
Marc:and she was in the uh she lives in connecticut and works in new york right she was in the uh the the crimes and misdemeanors as uh woody allen's wife right yeah it's great and she was great in that she's always good very she won the tony award you know in broadway she's on 12 broadway shows 14 broadway shows and she won the tony award for into the woods oh best actress in a musical um
Marc:She played Mark Wahlberg's mother in Boogie Nights.
Marc:She did that too, yes.
Marc:That was insane.
Marc:She's very good at being heavy.
Marc:I mean, she's like... She's done it all.
Guest:From light to heavy.
Marc:And her son's in a rock band, right?
Marc:Well, I think he's going to give up the rock band.
Marc:Because he's the one who reached out to me.
Marc:So you've got to talk to my grandfather.
Marc:And he wants to come out and play with me, too.
Marc:He wants to play some music.
Guest:Well, he plays the guitar and so on.
Guest:But I think he's moving into the acting field.
Guest:Because recently he did an acting field.
Guest:He hasn't played yet.
Guest:He'll play, I think, on the Discovery of the History Channel.
Guest:He went in for an audition.
Guest:And he got a job as an Irishman in New York during the rebellion days.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:and he got a job, and he went home, and two days later, they called him and said, you're coming back.
Guest:You're going to play the lead.
Guest:We love what you did.
Marc:Is this the new show about the gangs in New York thing?
Guest:Yeah, something like that.
Marc:I think I saw posters for it.
Guest:Anyhow, whatever it is, he got that role, and that kind of excited him and thrilled him.
Guest:He had been taking some acting lessons, and he's been auditioning since then.
Guest:I think he picked up one or two other things, and I think it's better for him than music is a tough industry.
Guest:it's tough racket yeah and uh and your son's also in film my son is a producer he does all these reality shows that you see on television he lives out here he lives out here he uh he's done he's done a lot of these reality shows from the amazing race to god knows what else and my daughter joanna she's the star and then my third child is sharon and she's the president of elcon television what do they do it's
Guest:Produced television shows.
Guest:She was with Sony as the executive VP.
Guest:They started up a new division at Alcon, the movie company, a television division.
Guest:They hired her as the president.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:And your wife won the Emmy for... And my wife won an Emmy for Do You Remember Love?
Guest:First picture on television about Alzheimer's with Joanne Woodward and Richard Kiley.
Guest:And she got that Emmy.
Marc:And she was in it or she produced it?
Guest:She produced it.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:And she's done a few other things.
Guest:She did the story of Golda Meir with Ingrid Bergman.
Guest:I remember that.
Guest:She was one of the producers of that.
Guest:She did The Ginger Tree, a four-hour masterpiece theater.
Guest:She's done quite a few things.
Guest:And now you have matching Emmys.
Guest:And now we have matching Emmys.
Guest:Do you love show business?
Guest:Well, it's nature with me.
Guest:I was a performer when I was young, and I've always been a performer.
Guest:But now I do most of my performing in charity.
Guest:I do a banquet.
Guest:I do the monologue.
Guest:I do these things.
Guest:It becomes inherent with you.
Guest:This is what I do.
Guest:I'm not a comic.
Guest:I'm not a comedian.
Guest:But I'm a guy who can do and write funny things.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also carry a show.
Marc:And carry a show.
Marc:And looking back on the whole thing, what's your highest moment?
Marc:Was it the other night?
Marc:Was it last night?
Guest:No.
Marc:They screwed that up.
Guest:No.
Guest:Last night was okay.
Yeah.
Guest:I think the highlights of my life are more personal.
Guest:Getting married to Marilyn, being married to her for 65 years.
Guest:What could be better than that?
Guest:With your best friend.
Guest:Outstanding children.
Guest:Grandchildren that are beautiful.
Guest:That's life.
Guest:That means more to me than anything.
Guest:My charity comes next.
Guest:And television comes third.
Marc:Show business comes third.
Marc:I'm glad you have your priorities right.
Marc:That's what it is.
Marc:Thank you, Mr. Hall.
Guest:Thank you, Mark.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:I thought Monty Hall was an amazing story, actually, and I wouldn't have never thought of it.
Marc:Everyone's got a story, man, and I was very surprised and engaged with Monty's, the whole process.
Marc:It was a different element, a different area of show business than I was familiar with, but some of it was very similar.
Marc:Broadcasting, radio, but Canadian.
Marc:All right, well, I just hope you dug it.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all you WTFPod needs.
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