Word: yorkin
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...Eventually Yorkin's engineering background landed him a job as a cameraman at NBC. Zealously he sent executives a steady stream of critiques on the programs he transmitted. They were never answered. He moved up anyway first to stage manager and then to the control booth, where producers and directors sit. There Lear spotted him and prevailed upon Martin and Lewis to make him their director...
...Unicycles. Yorkin and Lear's flourishing careers over the next eight years defied geometry, being two parallel lines that finally intersected. In1959, well after Lear had drifted apart from Simmons (now a script developer at Universal Studios), the new partnership of Tandem Productions was founded. The first joint venture was the movie "Come Blow Your Horn," adapted from a play by former Lear Assistant Neil Simon, which everybody agreed would be a perfect vehicle for Frank Sinatra...
...Yorkin and Lear grew up in such a milieu ? poor but not depressing ? and both reach back to early days for authentic touches to bring their shows home to viewers. Lear's salesman father, though a second-generation Russian Jew, was almost as much of a source for Archie as Alf Garnett was. He used to call Norman "the laziest white kid I ever saw" and order his wife to "stifle" ? both expressions that were to become Archie's. The family shifted restlessly from New Haven, Conn., where Norman was born, to nearby Hartford, then to Boston and New York...
...time Yorkin and Lear crossed paths on the Martin and Lewis show two years later, the Lear-Simmons partnership was doing so well that it had to farm out some of its work to the younger team of Neil Simon, the future Broadway playwright, and his brother Danny. "To me Norman was big-time," recalls Yorkin, who was then a lowly assistant director. "He lived at the Waldorf and moved in a different world from...
...Yorkin was born and raised in the coal-mining town of Washington, Pa., where his father, a women's wear merchant, was part of a tiny and somewhat beleaguered Jewish community. Anomalously armed with a degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Tech, he went to New York in 1946 with the intention of becoming a theater director. A daytime job as a TV repair man supported his night classes in English literature at Columbia University. "My partner and I used to find excuses to fix sets in good restaurants so we could get free meals from the waiters," he says...