Tim Conway was a little different from the rest. He was always in the back of the studio building something with the prop man, rewriting his lines, or plotting our demise.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Conway Twitty was always our local hero while I was growing up. He had a series of good bands. I wanted to sit in, if Conway would let me. And he did a couple of times.
Michael Landon was the biggest influence. As a child, I watched him write, direct, star, and produce a TV show every week. He showed me what was possible.
I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.
My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.
I've never been typed. John Wayne played 'that guy' all the time - mostly because that's all he could do. Gable played Gable parts, and Bob Taylor played Bob Taylor parts, whether he was in armor or a full-dress suit. I resisted that.
Tom Snyder was big enough to fill the night with talk and his own persona. The Snyder we saw on TV was not a replica of the real guy; it was the real guy.
I joined the Actors Studio and began to work with Lee Strasberg, and that changed my work.
Dwayne McDuffie was one of my favorite writers. When I was growing up, he was one of the few African Americans working in American comics.
When you're talking about Tim Burton, you're talking about a guy that has such a visual sense, an aesthetic, a storytelling style. It's like he's got his own genre.
If there's anybody who knew how to play in a studio, it was Duane Allman.