CHILD OF TELEVISION: Universal Studios Tour

Showing posts with label Universal Studios Tour. Show all posts

Friday, December 19, 2025

This Week in TV History - The Day I Spent with Rob Reiner

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Rob Reiner

The most important thing is that you be a good person and you live by the golden rule of do unto others.

If you live by that, that's all I care about.

-Rob Reiner

Robert Norman Reiner

March 6, 1947 – December 14, 2025

On December 14, 2025, the Los Angeles Fire Department reported finding two deceased persons—a 78-year-old male and a 68-year-old female—inside Reiner and Singer's home in Brentwood, Los Angeles around 3:30 p.m. The identities of the bodies were not immediately reported. At the time I am writing this there are conflicting reports.

One of the most memorable days working as a VIP tour guide at Universal Studios was the day that I got to take around Rob Reiner, his wife, his kids and some of their close friends. Imagine everywhere we went somebody would shout, “Have fun storming the castle” or somebody would get close to me and ask very softly, “Is that meathead?” He was cool with that.

There were two highlights of the day.

The first one was when I pointed out the house from the movie The thrill of it all he asked the driver of our trolley to stop. He points at the house and he says to his kids my dad… Grandpa directed a movie that was set in that house. Then he looked at me and asked do I know about that movie and I said, “Yeah your dad directed it when he was on hiatus from The Dick Van Dyke Show and he looked at me and went “No… wait yes, you're right he was on hiatus from The Dick Van Dyke Show. He was just so proud and so thrilled to share that moment with his kids.

The other highlight was in the Back to the Future gift shop, and this gift shop happened to be selling lava lamps. While we were chatting I mentioned that I share a birthday with the lava lamp and he was fascinated by that. He wanted to know how'd you come to find out that I share a birthday with the lava lamp. I said that one morning I was listening to the radio and the DJ's said if you were born on this day, you share a birthday with Ronald Reagan, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mike Farrell and if you were born on this day in 1965 you share a birthday with the lava lamp. Rob started reminiscing about the 60s. I asked if that was when he was working with The Smothers Brothers. He told me that came a little later but one of the adults in his group asked, “You worked with the The Smothers Brothers and in the middle of this gift shop he started reenacting sketches he wrote, singing songs that were written for the brothers. He talked about how back in those days they were smoking a lot of pot, dropped a lot of acid and fought with the suits. It was just amazing to hear these stories first hand. Coincidentally today someone asked me of all the famous people I've taken around who was the nicest and I'm still having trouble picking just one person but I can say Rob Reiner was the most entertaining.

Good Night Meathead. "Have fun storming the castle"

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

Silence in the face of authoritarianism is complicity.

Speaking out is a patriotic act.

Democracy doesn’t defend itself.

It requires participation, vigilance, and courage from ordinary people.

-Rob Reiner

Monday, July 15, 2024

This Week in Television History: July 2024 PART III

July 15, 1964
The Universal Studio Tour opened.
The Tour is the signature attraction at the park, and goes into a working movie studio, with various film and Television sets on the lot. In recent years, guests have sat in multi-car trams for the duration of the ride. The Tour lasts about 45–50 minutes and is led by a live tour guide who can be seen throughout the tram on video screens. It travels through the Front Lot, Backlot and various attractions, passing sets and props from movies along the way.
From the beginning, Universal had offered tours of its studio. After Carl Laemmle opened Universal City on March 14, 1915, he would later invite the general public to see all the action for an admission fee of just $0.05, which also included a lunch box containing chicken inside. There was also a chance to buy fresh produce, since then-rural Universal City was still in part a working farm. This original tour was discontinued in around 1930, due to the advent of sound films coming to Universal.
Ironically, the modern Universal Studio Tour was initially reborn as a way to sell more lunches in the Studio Commissary. The late 50’s and early 60’s were a difficult time for Hollywood studios. The arrival of television had weakened movie attendance and more and more productions were going on location to save costs. The grand old movie back lots were quickly becoming a thing of the past. In the mid 1950’s, Universal began letting bus companies drive on to the property (the same bus companies that offered guided tours of the homes of Hollywood stars) as a way to increase revenues. The studio charged the bus companies a small fee and also benefited from the extra lunches they could sell to the tourists in the Studio Commissary. The bus drivers were given a hand-typed script to read that highlighted the studio facilities as well as hyped upcoming Universal releases like Bonzo Goes to College and Monster on the Campus.
When MCA purchased Universal in the late 1950’s, they began to look for a way to revive the old Studio Tour as part of a new image for Universal City Studios. In 1963 legendary movie mogul Lew Wasserman, then president of MCA/Universal, asked Vice President Al Dorskind to look into the feasibility of creating a permanent tour.
The modern tour was established to include a series of dressing room walk-throughs, peeks at actual production, and later, staged events. This grew over the years into a full-blown theme park.

The Universal Studio Tour at that time consisted of two trams and a handful of eager young tour guides; including John Ford III (grandson of famous western director John Ford) and Dan Milland (son of Academy Award winning actor Ray Milland). The early tour was 90 minutes and included a stop off at the studio commissary for lunch and a make-up show (presented by Mike Westmore of the famous Westmore family of make-up artists) held in the commissary basement. 38,184 guests rode the Universal Studio Tour in its first year.

July 19, 1989
Rebecca Shaeffer (age 21) is murdered at her Los Angeles home by Robert John Bardo, a mentally unstable man who had been stalking her. Schaeffer’s death helped lead to the passage in California of legislation aimed at preventing stalking.
Schaeffer was born November 6, 1967, in Eugene, Oregon. She worked as a teenage model and had a short stint on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live, but was best known for co-starring with Pam Dawber in the television sitcom My Sister Sam. Bardo, born in 1970, had written Schaeffer letters and unsuccessfully tried to gain access to the set of My Sister Sam, before showing up at her apartment on July 19, 1989. The obsessed fan had reportedly obtained the actress’s home address through a detective agency, which located it through records at the California Department of Motor Vehicles. On the day of the murder, Schaeffer reportedly complied with Bardo’s request for an autograph when he appeared at her home and then asked him to leave. He returned a short time later and the actress, who reportedly was waiting for someone to deliver a script, answered the door again. Bardo then shot and killed her.
Arrested the next day in Tucson, Arizona, Bardo was later prosecuted by the Los Angeles County district attorney Marcia Clark, who later became famous as a prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial. In 1991, Bardo was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In 1994, California passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which prevented the Department of Motor Vehicles from releasing private addresses.

The 2002 film Moonlight Mile, loosely inspired by Schaeffer’s story, was written and directed by Brad Silberling, who had been dating the young actress at the time of her death.
July 20, 1969

Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to land on the Moon.
The first steps by humans on another planetary body were taken by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The astronauts also returned to Earth the first samples from another planetary body. Apollo 11 achieved its primary mission - to perform a manned lunar landing and return the mission safely to Earth - and paved the way for the Apollo lunar landing missions to follow.

July 21, 1924
Jesse Donald "Don" Knotts is born.
The comedic actor best known for his portrayal of Barney Fife on the 1960s television sitcom The Andy Griffith Show (a role which earned him five Emmy Awards), and as landlord Ralph Furley on the television sitcom Three’s Company in the 1980.

In Solidarity

Tony Figueroa

Thursday, May 13, 2021

Norman Lloyd

I imagine I was supposed to become a lawyer or something. But this was the Depression; the lawyers I saw were all driving cabs. So I thought, 'Well, if I'm going to be badly off anyway, I might as well be badly off in the theater, where you get used to it.'

Norman Lloyd

Norman Lloyd

November 8, 1914 – May 11, 2021

Norman Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter on November 8, 1914, in Jersey City, New Jersey. His family was Jewish and lived in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Max Perlmutter (1890–1945), was an accountant who later became a salesman and proprietor of a furniture store. His mother, Sadie Horowitz Perlmutter (1892–1987), was a bookkeeper and housewife. She had a good voice and a lifelong interest in the theatre, and she took her young son to singing and dancing lessons. He had two sisters, Ruth (1918–1962) and Janice (b. 1923). Lloyd became a child performer, appearing at vaudeville benefits and women's clubs, and was a professional by the age of nine.

Lloyd graduated from high school when he was 15 and began studies at New York University, but left at the end of his sophomore year. "All around me I could see the way the Depression was affecting everyone; for my family, for people in business like my father, it was a terrible time," he wrote. "I just wasn't going to stay in college, paying tuition to get a degree to be a lawyer, when I could see lawyers that had become taxi drivers." Lloyd's father died in 1945, at age 55, "broken by the world that he was living in."

In 1932, at age 17, Lloyd auditioned and became the youngest of the apprentices under the direction of May Sarton at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City. He then joined Sarton's Apprentice Theatre in New Hampshire, continuing his studies with her and her associate, Eleanor Flexner. The group rehearsed a total of ten modern European plays and performed at The New School for Social Research and in Boston. Members of the Harvard Dramatic Club saw Lloyd on stage and offered him the lead in a play directed by Joseph Losey. He rejoined Sarton's group, for whom Losey directed a Boston production of Gods of the Lightning. When Sarton was forced to give up her company, Losey suggested that Lloyd audition for a production of André Obey's Noah (1935). It was Lloyd's first Broadway show.

Through Losey, Lloyd became involved in the social theatre of the 1930s, beginning with an acting collective called The Theatre of Action. The group was preparing a production of Michael Blankfort's The Crime (1936), directed by Elia Kazan. One of the company members was actress Peggy Craven, who became Lloyd's wife.

Losey brought Lloyd into the Federal Theatre Project — which Lloyd called "one of the great theaters of all time"^]— and its Living Newspapers, which dramatized contemporary events. They initially prepared Ethiopia, about the Italian invasion, which was deemed too controversial and was terminated. The first completed presentation was Triple-A Plowed Under (1936), followed by Injunction Granted (1936) and Power (1937).

When Orson Welles and John Houseman left the Federal Theatre Project to form their own independent repertory theatre company, the Mercury Theatre, Lloyd was invited to become a charter member. He played a memorable role in its first stage production, Caesar (1937), Welles's modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar — streamlined into an anti-fascist tour- de-force. In a scene that became the fulcrum of the show, Cinna the Poet (Lloyd) dies at the hands not of a mob but of a secret police force. Lloyd called it "an extraordinary scene [that] gripped the audience in a way that the show stopped for about three minutes. The audience stopped it with applause. It showed the audience what fascism was; rather than an intellectual approach, you saw a physical one."

The Mercury prepared The Shoemaker's Holiday to go into repertory with Caesar beginning in January 1938. During the December 25 performance of Caesar — when the sets, lighting, and costumes for Shoemaker were ready but no previews had taken place — Welles asked the cast if they cared to present a surprise preview immediately after the show. He invited the audience to stay and watch the set changes, and the curtain rose at 1:15 a.m. Lloyd recalled it as "the wildest triumph imaginable. The show was a smash during its run — but never again did we have a performance like that one."

Lloyd played the role of Johnny Appleseed in Everywhere I Roam (1938), a play by Arnold Sundgaard that was developed by the Federal Theatre Project and staged on Broadway by Marc Connelly. "It was a lovely experience, although the play failed," Lloyd recalled. "For me, it was a success; in those days, before the Tony Awards, the critics' Ten Best Performers list at the end of the year was the greatest recognition. For my performance, I was selected to be on the list by the critics." Lloyd performed on the first of four releases in the Mercury Text Records series, phonographic recordings of Shakespeare plays adapted for educators by Welles and Roger Hill. The Merchant of Venice features Lloyd in the roles of Salanio and Launcelot Gobbo. Released on Columbia Masterworks Records in 1939, the recording was reissued on CD in 1998.

In late summer 1939, Lloyd was invited to Hollywood, to join Welles and other Mercury Theatre members in the first film being prepared for RKO Pictures — Heart of Darkness. Given a six-week guarantee at $500 a week, he took part in a reading for the film, which was to be presented entirely through a first-person camera. After elaborate pre-production the project never reached production because Welles was unable to trim $50,000 from its budget, something RKO insisted upon as its revenue was declining sharply in Europe by autumn 1939. Welles asked the actors to stay a few more weeks as he put together another film project, but Lloyd was ill-advised by a member of the radio company and impulsively returned to New York. "Those who stayed did Citizen Kane," Lloyd wrote. "I have always regretted it.

"Lloyd later returned to Hollywood to play a Nazi spy in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), beginning a long friendship and professional association with Hitchcock. Three years later he was cast by French director Jean Renoir to portray the malicious, dull-witted character Finley in The Southerner, which was the fourth film of six productions that Renoir directed in the 1940s while living in the United States. After a few more villainous screen roles, Lloyd then worked behind the camera as an assistant on Lewis Milestone's Arch of Triumph (1948). A friend of John Garfield, Lloyd performed with him in the 1951 film noir crime drama He Ran All the Way, Garfield's last film before the Hollywood blacklist ended his film career.

A marginal victim of the Hollywood blacklist, Lloyd was rescued professionally by Hitchcock, who had previously cast the actor in Saboteur and Spellbound (1945). Hitchcock hired Lloyd as an associate producer and a director on his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1958. Previously, Lloyd directed the sponsored film A Word to the Wives (1955) with Marsha Hunt and Darren McGavin. He continued directing and producing episodic television throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He took an unusual role in the Night Gallery episode "A Feast of Blood" as the bearer of a cursed brooch, which he inflicts upon a hapless woman, played by Sondra Locke, who had spurned his romantic advances. In FM (1978), Lloyd has a small but pivotal role as the owner of a Los Angeles radio station that is undergoing a mutiny of sorts, due to a battle over advertising. Lloyd's character (Carl Billings) ends up playing the white hat role and keeping the station as is, to the delight of staff and fans.

In the 1980s, Lloyd played Dr. Daniel Auschlander in the television drama St. Elsewhere over its six-season run (1982–88). Originally scheduled for only four episodes, Lloyd became a regular for the rest of the series. In addition to Ed Flanders and William Daniels, St. Elsewhere included a roster of relative unknowns, including Ed Begley, Jr., Denzel Washington, Stephen Furst, Eric Laneuville, David Morse, and Howie Mandel.

Lloyd's first film role in nearly a decade was in Dead Poets Society (1989), playing Mr. Nolan, the authoritative headmaster of Welton Academy, opposite Robin Williams. Initially, Lloyd was hesitant when asked to audition, because he thought the director and producers could judge whether or not he was right for the part by watching his acting on St. Elsewhere. Director Peter Weir was living in Australia and had not seen St. Elsewhere. Lloyd agreed to audition for him after winning his daily tennis match.

From 1998 to 2001, he played Dr. Isaac Mentnor in the UPN science fiction drama Seven Days. His numerous television guest-star appearances include The Joseph Cotten Show; Murder, She Wrote; The Twilight Zone; Wiseguy; Star Trek: The Next Generation; Wings; The Practice; and Civil Wars.

He played in various radio plays for Peggy Webber's California Artists Radio Theater and Yuri Rasovsky's Hollywood Theater of the Ear. His last film role was in Trainwreck (2015) which he acted in at the age of 99, although he admitted he was slightly put off by the film's raunchy content. He is the subject of the documentary Who Is Norman Lloyd?, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on September 1, 2007. In 2010, he guest-starred in an episode of ABC's Modern Family. On December 5, 2010, he presented An Evening with Norman Lloyd at the Colony Theatre in Burbank, California, where he spoke about his career and answered questions from the audience.