I'm at 417 Pensdale road,
and I'm surrounded by aliens.
I need to talk to the president of the united states.
Lithgow: I got a call from my agent saying,
"bonnie and Terry turner, your dear friends,
want to have breakfast with you."
And I thought, "how nice."
I showed up for breakfast and there were bonnie and Terry
and tom and Marcy and Caryn,
the whole carsey-Werner gang,
and I realized I'd been completely ambushed into a pitch.
And Terry started in
describing this series.
Well, it's about a family of four aliens.
I remember the conscious thought,
"what is the nicest and quickest way
I can say no and get out of here?"
And five minutes later, I had decided to do this series.
I realized that these people
who really did understand my comedy and my humor
had written it just for me.
I mean, the show is such a wild leap of faith.
- Police and secure the perimeter. - All: what?
- Lock the doors! - Oh, yeah.
Lithgow: our show, it was a theater piece.
All of us are theater actors. We played the comedy.
It was almost sketch comedy.
Death is only moments away.
- What? - Tonight's meal may be my last,
and you know what that means--
Mexican night!
Lithgow: Dick Solomon is...
he's like, uh...
a little boy who hasn't learned any manners yet.
I'm going to press "cancel." Is that what you want?
- 'Cause I'll do it. I'll press it.
- Damn you. Damn you!
I'm going to beat you with your own toner cartridge!
Lithgow: he has a very immediate response to everything.
Everything just comes out of him unedited.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!
You're a winner.
Gobble, gobble, gobble!
Lithgow: he's inhabiting the body
of this brilliant, uh... adult
with a scientific mind
and knowledge of all sorts of things.
And that's the stuff of great, great comedy
because he's doing what nobody would dare to do.
He's an alien.
I am red freakin' hot!
And I'm a loud, destructive, irritating pain in the butt.
Pull yourself together, man!
Kristen is basically a male in a gorgeous woman's body.
- I'm not the perfect woman? - I mean, really, just look at yourself.
What?
Those comically long legs,
that blindingly shiny hair, those unruly breasts.
All right, I get the picture!
This is Sally. She is just...
big and bold and fearless,
and almost as tall as I am.
It's the role of her career.
There was nobody but her to play Sally.
It's like those sneaker ads say, just do her.
Our first hotel room!
Wow! Why do I suddenly have
the urge to trash it?
Joey Gordon-Levitt grew up with us. He was 13 years old.
We sort of brought him up. We were like his extra three parents.
Tommy!
I feel like Tommy longstocking.
He's such a great actor. I mean, at 13,
he'd already done more movies than I had.
The first scene is critical.
We have to hook the viewers with something exciting.
How about a picnic?
Maybe we should start with a fight.
Ooh! I bet that might just work.
Hi. My name is Harry Solomon.
My turn-ons are sunshine, beach houses,
and baking bread with my blouse off.
Lithgow: when French came in and auditioned...
he basically threw out the role of Harry
as they had conceived it and made it French.
- You could never handle my job. - I could do it with my eyes closed.
You do everything with your eyes closed.
The great thing about French is,
he is a brilliant physical comedian.
- Invisible box? - Yeah.
He was a great fan and scholar
of buster Keaton and Chaplin
and arbuckle and laurel and hardy.
Spiders are more afraid of us than we are of them.
- There's a spider on your neck. - Get it off!
Get it off.
Lithgow: Dick Solomon is this tennis ball,
and he needs a hard surface, or he won't bounce.
Hello? Hello--
Lithgow: and Dr. Albright became this tough,
combative opposite to Dick.
What's funnier?
This...
or this?
Jane has one of the great deadpans in the business.
Of course, everyone remembers Jane sitting next to Chevy chase
on "Saturday night live," just the great stone face.
But when the great stone face cracks,
she falls right off the mountain.
For one thing, the make-up goes all to hell
'cause both of us are crying with laughter.
From now on, I'm just going to slide things under the door.
Very hardest of all was
the episode where I was in such despair
that all the romance had gone out of our relationship.
And in the last scene...
Lithgow: she breaks wind while eating Chinese food,
and I discover-- this is so wonderful.
Do you realize what this means?
Beef and broccoli?
Yes, but so much more.
Don't you see? It didn't bother you, and it didn't bother me.
Good, 'cause there's another one on the way.
Mary just farted, and I didn't mind.
- How romantic is that?
It's always fun to play your own evil twin.
I've done it about five times in my career.
Evil Dick was only one of them.
Well, well, well,
if it isn't the former high commander.
It seems that I've underestimated
your... stupidity.
That was your first mistake.
He was a very, very funny character. I just loved it.
I had the opportunity to play opposite my favorite actor.
As the season went on, we realized
there was more and more we could get away with.
The writers came up with the wildest things for me to do.
- Why did we want to be like humans, anyway? - ♪ Fa-la-la la-la-la ♪
♪ la la la troll the ancient-- ♪
Carolers: ow! Ow! Ow!
In one, I became a crazed football fan
and painted myself red.
I just feel tingly all over,
and that's not just the lead paint talking.
- You really went all out, didn't you? - Yeah.
It goes all the way down, you know.
The physical comedy, it sometimes took its toll.
- Dick! - Harry!
Both: oh!
Ow, ow, ow.
It was brutal. We hurt each other a lot.
- Look over there! - Where?
There was a fight that I had with myself.
It was Dick and evil Dick actually having physical combat
behind the couch.
One would pop up, and the other one-- that kind of nonsense.
And I banged my head down
on the corner of the couch
and opened up-- it was like
a half-dollar-sized hole in my cheek.
Maybe if you looked very, very carefully,
you could see the sort of surgical reparation.
We didn't actually ever improvise anything.
You'd be amazed at how often I'm asked that question.
Everybody assumed we made it all up as we went along.
- Oh, guys.
I'm convinced that that's why our writers,
who I consider the very best comedy writers
in Tv during that period,
were never nominated for a single writing award.
One of the great injustices ' cause the writing was brilliant.
- We mustn't do this here. - Yes, we must do it.
- We can't. - We can-- I measured.
We absolutely had to have
a smart and devoted studio crowd.
We always prided ourselves
that we needed less sweetening
and canned laughter than any other show.
We really made them laugh.
Looks like he's plugging her pie hole.
We always thought it was great.
The writing was always so great , and the concept was so great.
Your job is to sit back and just get overwhelmed by the whole process.
Okay.
It was just one of those amazing successes.
Well, all I can say is,
god bless television
and the many ways in which television
enriches our lives.
Dvd is a wonderful thing
'cause it brings it all back,
and we really do see what a classic show it is.
At our best, we were just the best there was.