The Point Radio: What Would Mary Ann Do?

It may have been almost half a century since she landed on that island, but Mary Ann is as delightful as ever! GILLIGAN ISLAND’s Dawn Welles talks about her time as a castaway and how the show almost never made it on the air. Plus actress Tracey Birdsall shares some peeks into her busy career including her latest film, WHO’S JENNA?

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Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Raub. We get to sit down with Mary Ann Dawn Wells from Gilligan's Island. Talks about some of the cool things that happened on TV back in the day. And you recognize her instantly when you see her from a ton of TV and movie roles.

She's Tracy Bernsall and she's got a sneak peek at her latest project called Who's Jenna. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point. The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio.

It's been half a century since Gilligan's Island debuted on television. And we met the girl next door, Mary Ann, played by actress Dawn Wells. So I was curious about how she got that part in the first place. Well, I was working pretty much pretty steady as an ingenue, so to speak. I did all the guest stuff, you know, the Mavericks and Rawhide and all that kind of stuff.

And the original pilot was made with three other characters. And they bought the show but said, let's rewrite, make the characters more interesting. So they created a movie star, a Mary Ann and a professor. And they were casting all of those people. So I went up for an audition with Mr. Schwartz, sat in his office, talked to him a little while.

And then they came, they were going to test and put everybody on camera. And they decided they weren't going to test me the first go around. He thought I was too smart to play Mary Ann. And my agent said, you either test her first go around or you don't test her at all. So they tested me.

And I knew the character. I knew what she'd wear. I knew how she'd wear her hair. I knew the character inside and out. So it was really, I don't know, I tested for a week. I didn't know. They had to match us up, you know, with a professor and a ginger and all of that. And it's just luck. I mean, I was capable of doing it.

But I think you physically have to fit it. You physically have to fit with the other people. There were other characters. I think they talked about Carol O'Connor as the skipper. They talked about Jerry Van Dyke one point, to be Gilligan. I mean, you know, the casting was they look at everybody and they managed to get just the right magic for the seven of us, I think. So how long did it take the series to catch on?

Well, I think in our producer show, which was said we probably won't get anything more than one episode. I mean, one year we were in black and white. We said, you think we probably won't get more than one year. We went to the top 10 right away. We went right away with the highest audience reaction when they did the pilot ever.

And we were in the top 10 right away. At any point in time, did you ever think that you'd still be talking about this role half a century later? No, no. We didn't think we would have any rerun capabilities and stop and think about it. We didn't get a dime either. I could be rolling in millions of dollars.

Look what the friends people are getting just for rerunning. We didn't get anything. Sherwood Schwartz, according to a thing I did for CBS, Sherwood Schwartz, our producer, made $90 million on the reruns of Gilligan's Island alone. Wow. We didn't get a nickel.

Well, I'm sorry. Maybe we made my $1,500 a week the first year or something. Wow. No, we didn't. But you can't be bitter about that.

It didn't exist. Yep, absolutely. I was the one that said if you want to play it again, pay it. How about a favorite episode? Well, and I do watch.

I watch me TV all the time. I love it. I love to be able because when you're working, you didn't get a chance to see half those shows. You were working at night. You know, you didn't get home till nine or ten o'clock.

So a lot of the shows, I'm catching up on the reruns. Well, there's one and one incident with the lion, with Bob Denver, who was going to protect himself against this huge beast. But that wasn't the plot as much as it was going on backstage. I don't…I guess I can't say a favorite episode. We love the guest stars.

We love to do something other than just the seven of us. Mm-hmm. They make me laugh today. They're so ridiculous. It just makes you laugh.

Right now, Dawn is involved with MeTV. Well, MeTV, it's all those favorite shows that you've always, always loved. And you can find them again, all the classic TV shows, you know, that you kind of wonder whatever happened to them. Well, MeTV has them all. I mean, it has Rifleman and What a Dead or Alive and Laverde and Shirley and Gomer Pyle and Gilly

and all the wonderful classic television shows that we wish were still on the air, and they are. So I guess you just go to MeTV.com and you can find out on your local station what you got. It's the summer of me and Dawn is also serving as the network's ambassador. Well, I'm the ambassador because I'm traveling around and visiting some of the stations and done some of the promos for them. And the fact that I'm still alive.

You know, there aren't many people from the classic television era that are embracing it as much as I am. I think MeTV is a phenomenal experience to have as a family because today I think there's so much junk that's on that you have to monitor what everybody's watching today. You don't have to monitor anybody when you're watching MeTV. You have all those classic, wonderful classic shows. So all in all, once you go off the island, where did Mary Ann end up?

I wrote a book this year called What Would Mary Ann Do? What would Mary Ann do? Because birth control wasn't even invented when we went on the island. It was a Vietnam War. It was all of that stuff.

Nowadays, what would she be doing? Would she come home and have six children? Would she be the mayor of Kansas? Who knows? I think she'd have gone on and done something.

I think Mary Ann was kind of the rudder of the show, and I think when she got back to civilization, I think she did. She'd have married, I think, but if she might have been a mayor, she might have… I don't know. I don't know. I have to read my book.

What would she do? Gilligan's Island and so many more memories on MeTV. To find MeTV in your area, go to meTV.com. That is our galactic ahead into the movies, but which version? We'll answer that and more as we look at what's going on in pop culture.

Everybody who's headed to Comic Con is scrambling to get tickets to DC's Killing Joke premiere. However, there's a chance to see it for the rest of us as well. Fathom Events will be having a special screening of Killing Joke. In select theaters around the country, it'll take place just a couple of days after the premiere in San Diego. If you'd like to get tickets and get more information, head to fathomevents.com.

Taking exactly the opposite stance, Warner Brothers has now announced that when Suicide Squad hits theaters in a few weeks, it'll have a PG-13 rating, unlike Deadpool, that came along with an R rating a few months back. Of course, that doesn't prevent the studio from releasing an R-rated version on DVD later on. Suicide Squad hits theaters on the 5th of August. National Lampoon may be back, well at least in a way.

A&E Studios is developing a scripted series based on the documentary Drunk, Stone, Brilliant and Dead, which was done a couple of years ago and produced by History Films. It's not more documentary, a spokesman for A&E said that this one would be strictly fictionalized. Dozy TV is celebrating Father's Day coming up in a couple of weeks with a mini marathon of the $6 million man. It'll kick off on Sunday, the 19th of June at 12 noon and then the show will air regularly on the network Wednesdays at 9.

Looks like Battlestar Galactica might be headed to the big screen, at least at the Glenn Larson TV version of it. It's been a property that has been, well, bandied about for quite a while, including having Bryan Singer, who's been attached to it since way back in 2001, Singers moved on. And now it looks like Frances Lawrence, who directed three of the Hunger Game films, may be the director. Comedy Central has launched a new digital site that offers both fans and newcomers a treasure trove of comedy from the beloved series Key and Peel.

The new site is complete with over 300 sketches, including 176 that have never been released digitally before. There's all sorts of extra content, too. It's available online at cc.com and also on the Comedy Central app. Josie and the Pussycats are getting the Riverdale reboot at Archie. There'll be a new series featuring the characters that will debut in the fall and it'll be along the lines of the other Archie reality titles like Archie and Jugget that began a few months back. Of course, it all ties in nicely to the debut of Riverdale on the CW network that will take place early in the new year.

The point, the point. You know, we're instantly from some of the most diverse and challenging roles in film and television. It's actress Tracy Birdsall and her latest project is Who's Jenna? It's a comedy. I mean, it's a loud raunchy guy comedy, I would say. It's really quite hilarious.

When I first got the script, I was reading it and I got to like page three and I was laughing and I was still laughing at page 80. So, of course, I took the part that it's a story about a woman who meets, you know, meets a guy, of course, played Jonathan, played by Bill Servino and she's an attorney. And Bill Servino's best friend, Andy, played by Joe DiNafrio, thinks that he's got this like little thing for porn stars. He thinks they're like these great actresses. And so the whole comedy is wrapped around him thinking that she looks like one of these actresses.

And he's always trying to prove himself and stuff like that. But, you know, I think what really makes that film is the cast and the script. I mean, it's just, it's really fantastic. So, a glance at Tracy's acting resume shows that she pretty much divides her time between comedy. Is that planned? You know, it's actually, it's a conscious decision to not get stuck in a genre. It's, I try, you know, because as an actress, what you want to do is you want to always exercise the different muscles.

So comedy and science fiction and, you know, action and drama and everything. You want to make sure that you keep going between them. And I actually had a week off between these two films, believe it or not. Wow. So did Tracy grow up as the funny kid on the block or was she a pageant girl?

You know, I would say that I was the opposite of a pageant girl because I was a really nerdy, geeky kid. And, but I was a dancer. My mom took me to dance classes and I was a singer. So the first time I was on stage in front of over a thousand people, I was five doing a solo. And so it's like, I just, I was, I was always thrilled by that idea of entertaining people. And so it's like, it kind of kind of grew with me, but my mom didn't want me to be an actress.

She's like, well, you can do that, but you don't have to do that. This is when I was a little kid. And so I did, you know, musicals and I did everything in school that I could. And then I did my first professional job. I did a commercial at the age of 15, but it was always what I was.

It was just, you know, when I got the ability and the time to be able to express it. A career started in commercials and then migrated into acting roles. But was it easy to make that move and be taken seriously? You know, it was, I think because they used to call me the P&G girl. I mean, you were Proctor Gamble's face.

It was like really easy to market things. But I think that I had to become a better actress than most people. I think that I had to study harder and work harder because I had that, you know, that face that sells products. And so, so I think to be taken seriously, I had to work really, really hard. I mean, I actually spent a decade in my 20s where I dyed my hair dark brown just to set me apart.

And I always studied and I always coached and I always worked really, really hard because, you know, there were a lot of people in California that looked like me. So to set myself apart, yeah, I think I had to work a lot harder than most people. In movies, Tracy's made a home for herself in independent films. Are these more challenging than big screen blockbusters?

Well, who wants to do something without an arc in it is kind of the way I look at it. I'd much rather do something where my character had a journey. I had a journey. I had to work really, really hard on it for a year in order to prepare for it. Then I would go in and say, you know, who dropped the gun?

You know what I mean? It's like so I think smaller parts, of course, is no small part. But doing something in a huge studio feature that would be small would be no, would not be as rewarding as doing these huge roles in the indie films. There's such a, you know, such a market out there for them.

Tracy's onscreen characters are always complex and intriguing, but they're also likable. Any interest in playing a bad girl? Oh, of course. I mean, we'd all like to do that. But I do have to tell you, and at the edge of time, I have a character, Dion, who's a bit of a terrorist.

I mean, and, you know, blows things up and stuff. And even though she thinks that what she's doing is right, you know, when you look at her, you think of, you know, terrorists. She's trying to put an end to somebody who has a messiah complex and is trying to rewrite history. But really, when you look at what she's doing from the outside, you know, she seems kind of like a terrorist. Of course.

I mean, of course I want to do something that's dark and distant. And some of my characters go on journeys where you don't like them sometimes, but everybody wants to play something that's dark. You know what I mean? One project down the road is a movie called Diary of a Fat Man, where Tracy plays yourself. I am. It's kind of funny.

I play. I play. He has a dream sequence where, you know, it's about me. So it's kind of funny where he's always having these dreams where he's with me and then he wakes up. So that's kind of what the comedy is.

And then so of all the roles she's done, is there anyone you'd like to pick back up again and take a little farther? Well, you know, it's fun because with Rogue Warrior, Robot Fighter, the role of CNI, I mean, it's definitely the most multifaceted, deepest character I've played with them with the most arcs. And we are planning to be series off of it. We've been approached on that. So that will get to take its journey further.

And I would say definitely that one because it's the hardest thing I've ever played. And you always want to work your hardest. You always want to be challenged as an actress because that's what it's all about. And as far as the dream role goes? Maybe something inside Star Wars, like a lead role in Star Wars.

I mean, definitely. I mean, we're all Star Wars fanatics. But I want a character that challenges me. You know, I want something that goes to dark places, that goes to great places. I like the arcs.

Anything where I'm extremely, extremely challenged, both mentally, physically and character wise. Sketch up with Tracy Birdsall's latest. It's Who's Jenna? Available right now in iTunes and Digital Under Band. That's it for right now.

But there's a lot coming up, including a talk with John Cohen, the guy who took Angry Birds from the iPhone to the big screen. We'll talk about what's ahead for family film animation in the next few months. You'll find all that and more on websites like ComicMix.com, getthepointradio.com, directvnews.com, and of course popcultureupload.com. And we're still at home in the iTunes podcast directory as well.

On Instagram and Twitter, we're PC upload and we're pop culture upload on Facebook. Hope to see you there and right back here in a few days. Get the point, radio.com. You