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Cheap n’ Fast, Addendum

The Larry Sanders complete set drops tomorrow, and I noticed that this Los Angeles Times article has a quote from Judd Apatow that sort of confirms what I wrote in last week’s post, about the show being shot very fast:

Apatow, who first directed on “Sanders,” recalled, “They would shoot the entire show in two days. It was a ridiculously hard schedule — they’d be shooting a new scene every hour, with three cameras rolling at a time, sometimes one cameraman on roller blades.” (It was their budget version of a Steadicam.)

That’s even more grueling than single-camera comedies from the ’60s, which tended to have three days. The fast schedule means that certain production values go by the wayside; in the ’60s, Barbara Eden once sighed to the same newspaper that it was tough to look as good as she wanted to when every episode had to be filmed so fast. But the speed has compensating factors, which I won’t go into again since I already covered them last week. But Larry Sanders was a really fast shoot, that much is certain.

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