John Rich directed a number of popular U.S. TV shows throughout his career, among them The Brady Bunch, Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island and The Jeffersons, and he won two Emmy Awards for episodes of All in the Family and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
John Rich also directed Elvis in two movies, Roustabout and Easy Come, Easy Go.
ROUSTABOUT (1964)
John Rich about the Memphis Mafia:
“I’m not one for fraternizing too much with the group that are around the players, but they were around quite a bit and you couldn’t ignore them.
One thing that comes to mind that really troubled me somewhere in the middle of the picture I was in the editing room looking over the cuts and Elvis dropped by and started looking over my shoulder.
I was working over the Moviola with my editor, and he became so fascinated with what I was doing that I showed him how far we go from a long shot to a close-up or why I was cutting something around something.
He said ‘Can I come and look at this more often? ‘
And then the guys said, ‘Aw, come on, this is nonsense.’
Only they didn’t say nonsense.
And they took him away and he never came back to the cutting room after that.”
Quotes From John Rich:
“I didn’t know too much about the musical theatre and I knew nothing about Elvis,
I said, “Why me?’ I had visions of doing rather grandiose pictures like
Becket but I was going to do the very best I could and try to catch up as quickly as possible.”
John Rich was not the easy-going director Elvis was used to working with such as Norman Taurog.
The atmosphere on the set of Roustabout was quite different.
John Rich about Elvis doing his own stunts:
“He came to me and said, ‘Could he please do the stunt himself?”
I said, ‘ My God, no. What happens if you get hurt?’
He said, ‘I’m not going to get hurt.
I really know how to do this stuff.
You see, I’m a black belt in Karate.
‘I said, ‘Well, congratulations, I think that’s wonderful, I suppose that’s good in life, but this is a movie.
And God forbid that you get hit in some way.’
He said “I won’t I know these people and they know me.
I really want to do this.
‘He begged. He really did.
And finally, he said
‘I’ll be totally responsible for this if anything happens.’
Well, what do you say in a situation like that?
I finally gave up and said Okay.
7TH December 1964 –
But it was a mistake because he got clipped severely in the head, and it was like ‘Oh, God there goes my life in the theater.’
To tell Hal Wallis that I allowed the star to do a fight.
I thought this was not going to go down well.
Of course we had to stop shooting and I sent him off to the hospital, and he had four or five stitches in his forehead but fortunately I had a way out.
The script called for Elvis as a motorcycle rider to be run off the road, by Life Erickson in an early scene and I thought there’s no reason we can’t put a Band-Aid over Elvis’ eye.
Wallis was quite pleased.
He thought it was a damn good idea as long as I could keep shooting.
And Elvis was alright when he got back.
He was a little subdued having caused all this trouble.
And he was so apologetic.
But once I told him what I’d like to do he said,
‘Oh, that’s great because we can keep shooting.
‘He was just afraid we’d have to shut down.”
