It worked well because Don Murray didn't want to be on Knots anymore.
Clint Eastwood is aging beautifully. But someone like Burt Reynolds and others are practically destroying their faces in the amount of work they have.
If you watch Cheers, in 12 years they didn't age a day.
Writers are not always right however, but then again, I've been on shows where the actors have complete control and change everything and it's terrible.
When you go to a movie, it's about what's not being said. I tried to bring that to Greg Sumner. It was always about what's not being said.
I like working fast, but I got to the age where the real difference between television and the movies is, I'm not smart enough to be in the movies. It's a very political world. In all modesty, I can say that I'm a much better actor, but that doesn't matter.
There's a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes.
Joey, my older brother, had his own TV show in the '50s, along with Cathy Callahan.
I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.
I don't play polo anymore because I am too old. But we still have a half a dozen horses - a couple of young horses we are teaching how to play polo and older horses that are real trustworthy when you get them up in the mountains.
Even though shows like NYPD Blue are soaps in my opinion, but they're individualized to an extent that you can still follow what's going on if you miss a week.
I'm an Irish-American, and I grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood.
At one time, whenever the hell it was, they wanted a character to come in and stir up the pot. They brought me in for 8-10 episodes and said we'll try it for that.
What I would have liked to do on that show was play a secretary of state who has huge personal business interests throughout the world. That, to me, seems to be more in synch with reality.
I'm trying to find a character that's my age and I can sustain week after week. I'd like to do a series.
I didn't care about that because I'm not a diplomatic person to begin with. I just went along with things and did what I wanted to do because I knew they had to shoot their 12 pages a day. And when they realized that I didn't alter the text they really didn't mind what I did.
I knew with The West Wing that that wasn't going to be for very long, that I was just the red herring.
I live out in the desert, in farm country. I'm around a lot of farmers, guys with packing houses, that sort of thing. Half the time, these guys are in their pajamas or in their slippers. It's their place.
And all of Laura's stuff, what they wrote originally wasn't as good and Constance wound up doing that herself. That was all her stuff, reading to the child, because she had children herself and that's what she would have done.
Networks don't want a show with a continuing story. There's no backend potential.
