DUMB ADAMS' SCREEN TEST

DON ADAMS' SCREEN TEST
1975-1976, SYNDICATED

DUMB ADAMS' SCREEN TEST
Sick #112, October 1976
w: Jim Simon
a: Jerry Grandenetti

Kind of like Star Search or American Idol. Contestants were picked from the studio audience to re-enact scenes from a famous Hollywood movie with movie stars, and the winner was picked by a director to have a part as an extra in a movie.

The contestant plays opposite Clint Eastwood, though the show would never have actors of that caliber.

This was TV/comics writer Mark Evanier's description of how the show came about:
"He had one other series which almost no one remembers and which is not in any of the obits I've seen. In the early seventies, Adams made the rounds of talk shows and often brought out-takes from Get Smart, mostly of him and Don Rickles. They were hilarious and the reception gave him the idea to do a whole series showing out-takes…or bloopers, as they're sometimes called in a quasi-trademarked way. When he tried to put it together, he discovered that the union contracts made it prohibitive; that he'd have to pay or negotiate with dozens of people for each 30-second clip. In fact, the Screen Actors Guild told him that he technically shouldn't have been airing the Get Smart footage without paying actors, directors, writers, etc. Years later, the union rules were changed in a way that made the Dick Clark "Bloopers" shows do-able but at the time, it killed Adams's plan. Trying to figure out a way around it, he came up with the only possible solution: Create new out-takes just for the show! So in 1975, he hosted Don Adams' Screen Test, a kind of talent competition where the idea was to get aspiring actors, pair them in scenes with established stars and then have a lot of things go wrong. It didn't last long because, I suspect, the out-takes just didn't seem real. Which they weren't."
UPDATE:
from Sick#46, August 1966

Every single one of these shows was or will be covered on this blog. From Sick #46, August 1966. Founding Sick writer Dee Caruso was one of the main writers of Get Smart.