I decided to round out the week with another Sidney Sheldon quote. Along with his best-selling novels, his Tony award, and his Oscar award, he was also the producer and creator of I Dream Of Jeannie. While it may not be the pinnacle of TV production, it’s still is a fan favorite more than forty years after the show’s five-year run ended. But more importantly, the reason I chose to end on this program is the setting for the show was the area I just moved to—Florida’s Space Coast.
While most of the production took place in California, Sheldon visited the area and sometimes they shot in the Cocoa Beach/Cape Kennedy where the Larry Hagman character lived and worked. In fact, there is a remnant of the show just a few miles up state road A1A from where I live. In Cocoa Beach there’s a short road named I Dream of Jeanie Lane. Actually, not far from the Kelly Slater statue I wrote about last summer.
Notice in the video above of the show’s first episode that it only took Sheldon a couple of minutes to set up the show. In 1967, Sheldon did receive an Emmy-nomination for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy.
“To create comedy you have to have a conflict. If he’d played the part of a salesman who’d found a Jeannie there’s no conflict, it’s not funny. But to have the master as someone who’s in the military and has to subscribe to certain rules, and can’t be seen as doing anything outrageous without being thrown out of the service—that becomes funny. So I made him a member of NASA. They’re very strict. And we shot some of the scenes, some of the backgrounds in Cocoa Beach. The astronauts were big fans of the show—some of them came to the wedding in the fifth year…I had so many credits—it was created by Sidney Sheldon, a Sidney Sheldon production, copyrighted by Sidney Sheldon, written by Sidney Sheldon, I was embassesment—usually in Hollywood you fight for credit, I was fighting to get some of my credits off the screen.”
Sidney Sheldon
Archive of American Television
P.S. Am I only one who thinks a young Larry Hagman looks like New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady?
