TV Blueprints
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TV Blueprints
August 16, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: This week the New York Times reported on a great opportunity for some TV fans -- access to the suburban mansion of The Soprano Family on CD-rom. Cable TV's mob family drama has an important place in some 14 million American homes. Now the viewers can view Tony's home, all 6,000 square feet of it, with floor plans, elevations and shots of the lawn and the pool. But TV house-envy is nothing new. A few years back Brooke reported on a man so obsessed with his sitcom companions that he drew blueprints of their homes! And this was without a VCR. His encyclopedic knowledge of their living spaces emerged from thousands of hours of viewing that pushed nearly everything else out of his life. Oh, and by the way, Brooke had a cold when she recorded this so-- it may sound a little weird. [TAPE OF INTERVIEW PLAYS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The story begins in August of 1995 in the stylish enclave of Santa Monica near L.A. where often amateur artists hang their work in bars. Art dealer Christopher Ford entered one with some friends and absently noted some architectural blueprints on the walls.
CHRISTOPHER FORD: I looked across the bar and I saw one of the blueprints and it said "Home of Mary Richards" -- and I went wait a minute! I know Mary Richards! Suddenly there was all this emotion just like pouring out of the wall at me. I looked to my right and there was the Addams Family. I looked to the left -- there was the space ship from Lost in Space and I had this incredible epiphany and I ran back to the bar and I said -- which is this guy?!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The artist was Mark Bennett, a Beverly Hills mail carrier. He started his series of blueprints as a child of working parents in Chattanooga, Tennessee -- a solitary kid who cut school for sitcoms, seduced by the tidy sidewalks of neighborhoods that flickered just out of reach.
MARK BENNETT: My parents were very busy; I was always fearful; and this was a way to - for me to become very, very safe. [MUSIC FROM TV SITCOM PLAYS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Enthralled by the blissful domesticity, the seemingly intractable problems resolved in 22 minutes, he withdrew from his own life into TV Land. But though he sat hour after hour in front of the small screen, he could never penetrate beyond it.
MARK BENNETT: It started to hit me that if I could compile all the information about these shows, whether it be their license plate number on their car, where the dishwasher was, where the doorbell was or the mailbox, then they'd become mine, and they'd become my family. And that's what I set out to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:He started to draw his blueprints, first of the Cleaver home on 513 Grant Avenue, and then again when Beaver moved to 211 Pine Street. He drew the Anderson home of Father Knows Best, noting the insurance papers in Jim's desk. He knew where Donna Reed's son Jeff kept his bows and arrows. He noted the phone number of Mr. Ed's owner, Wilbur Post. He knew the layout of the Ricardos' New York City apartment and their home in Connecticut and even of their Beverly Palms Hotel suite where they stayed less than a year. He knew the Addams and the Munsters, the Bradys and the Bunkers, the Cunninghams, the Clampetts and the Cramdens. He knew that Rob Petrie drove a Tarantula sports car and that Samantha Stevens drove a Chevy Malibu. It's all in the blueprints.
BRONWYN KEENAN: He has a date book, his little black book, lists all of these names, their addresses and their phone numbers, just along with like my name, my address and my phone number. I mean we're all in there, and so are all these characters.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Bronwyn Keenan owns a gallery in Manhattan's Soho district, now showing 4 of Bennett's blueprints in which an arrow marks where Laverne kept her monogrammed sweaters and where the Robinsons, lost in space, stored their velour turtlenecks.
BRONWYN KEENAN: This is what he paid attention to. He wanted to know where they slept, what they did with their stuff, you know? How they accessed their turtlenecks. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Seeking to have their memories confirmed, gallery-goers gaze at the works as if they are family snapshots.
BRONWYN KEENAN:They're looking for the facts. You know? They're happy to see that somebody was able to sit down and put Dick Van Dyke's ottoman right there where it should be. You know? That makes people really happy! [LAUGHS] [CLIP FROM DICK VAN DYKE SHOW PLAYS]
DICK VAN DYKE AS ROB PETRIE: Ooo! Ow! Oh! Mmm! Ah! [LAUGHTER] Oh, darn! Darn ottoman!
MARY TYLER MOORE AS LAURA PETRIE: Well you don't have to bark at me! The ottoman's been in this room for years, Mr. Astaire!
DICK VAN DYKE AS ROB PETRIE: I wasn't barking at you, Ginger, I was talking to the ottoman! [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: When art dealer Christopher Ford called Bennett from that Santa Monica bar, he told the mail carrier to stop selling his drawings for 25 dollars a pop. Instead the Mark Moore Gallery brought out a limited edition of lithographs and sold them for several hundred dollars each. The original drawings went for thousands. He found that Bennett's obsessive precision exerted a kind of fascination -- drawing different people to different blueprints.
CHRISTOPHER FORD: Most of the work that I sold, I sold to men, but the one print that I sold to the most women was Gilligan's Island. Men go for the Clampett mansion. Attorneys go for Perry Mason's office. And basically married couples across the board, their primary interest and it was the first one of the lithographs to sell out, it was Rob and Laura Petrie's house in New Rochelle.
ERNEST PASCUCCI: Hell, I grew up with this stuff, and on some [LAUGHS] very basic level it's very reassuring to know somebody else was walking through those houses too.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Ernest Pascucci is an architecture critic and senior editor of the magazine ANY -- Architecture New York. Pascucci marvels at how Bennett manages to come up with floor plans for TV layouts that make no architectural sense, like that of the Bradys' house. But especially he values he artist's effort to explore the meaning and the impact of television.
ERNEST PASCUCCI: If I consider art part of a cultural dialogue, I want to see the things I grew up with processed a little bit more, thought about a little bit more. This is one of those steps to thinking about it. That makes this very heady and conceptual, yet very everyday.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Terry Fulton is the curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, which will mount an exhibit of Bennett's work in June. She says his work is part of a long tradition that makes use of symbols current during the artist's lifetime. Vermeer did it, says Fulton. So did some notable artists of the 1960s.
TERRY FULTON: It's very pop. It's very much coming out of the tradition of Andy Warhol in particular or Roy Lichtenstein who appropriated the images out of the Dell Comics and blew them up and made paintings out of them. They're looking for a way to establish a universal language.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:A universal language for a dialogue between artist and spectator. Bennett told Fulton that all he ever wanted to be was Wally Cleaver. Fulton sees Bennett's blueprints as his way of breaking out of his isolation -- a passage back into real life. Again, art dealer Christopher Ford.
CHRISTOPHER FORD: A lot of Mark's personal life is marked by addictions. What was interesting about this particular body of work is that this was a cultural addiction. Television became an American addiction in the late 1950s.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: For Mark Bennett it became a personal affliction.
MARK BENNETT:When I had hit my bottom, I knew I was dying, and I went to a therapist and she said you're an alcoholic; you should go to, to get, you know, help. And-- 12 step programs are very good for that. And I said I can't go, and she said why not, and I said because I watch Dick Van Dyke reruns every night.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Bennett came to realize that he'd skipped his teenage years, having lived Wally's instead. And he found that his passion for television had left him unprepared for life in the world.
MARK BENNETT: It wasn't till I became an adult that I realized there was a lot that I had missed. Doesn't really help on a job application that you know where June Cleaver is from. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:A book of Bennett's drawings has just come out. It's called TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes, dedicated to Wally Cleaver. It includes the landmarks mentioned in the story as well as the animated homes of the Jetsons and the Flintstones and Flipper's family and Gidget's, Oscar's and Felix, Patty and Cathy and the M*A*S*H unit of Hawkeye Pierce. Bennett's blueprints may have helped him put those characters back in the box.
MARK BENNETT: I've been clean and [LAUGHS] sober from television for about 3 years now.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Some critics have observed that the family sitcoms of the '50s and the early '60s may have contributed to the excesses of the youth culture a few years later; that the programs may have fomented rage at a world where problems aren't solved between commercials. Now those Boomers are settling down in front of the TV with their own kids, watching the same sunny, seductive shows. It may be that between Nick at Nite and the Cartoon Network, the symbolic language of Bennett's blueprints will stay current -- for as long as a hat tossed in the air in Minneapolis means independence and a pratfall over an ottoman says all's right with the world. [DICK VAN DYKE SHOW THEME UP & UNDER] 58:00
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers and Sean Landis; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Irene Trudel and George Edwards, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Cheryl Rogers and Dan Bobkoff. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large, Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG] [FUNDING CREDITS]
August 16, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: This week the New York Times reported on a great opportunity for some TV fans -- access to the suburban mansion of The Soprano Family on CD-rom. Cable TV's mob family drama has an important place in some 14 million American homes. Now the viewers can view Tony's home, all 6,000 square feet of it, with floor plans, elevations and shots of the lawn and the pool. But TV house-envy is nothing new. A few years back Brooke reported on a man so obsessed with his sitcom companions that he drew blueprints of their homes! And this was without a VCR. His encyclopedic knowledge of their living spaces emerged from thousands of hours of viewing that pushed nearly everything else out of his life. Oh, and by the way, Brooke had a cold when she recorded this so-- it may sound a little weird. [TAPE OF INTERVIEW PLAYS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The story begins in August of 1995 in the stylish enclave of Santa Monica near L.A. where often amateur artists hang their work in bars. Art dealer Christopher Ford entered one with some friends and absently noted some architectural blueprints on the walls.
CHRISTOPHER FORD: I looked across the bar and I saw one of the blueprints and it said "Home of Mary Richards" -- and I went wait a minute! I know Mary Richards! Suddenly there was all this emotion just like pouring out of the wall at me. I looked to my right and there was the Addams Family. I looked to the left -- there was the space ship from Lost in Space and I had this incredible epiphany and I ran back to the bar and I said -- which is this guy?!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The artist was Mark Bennett, a Beverly Hills mail carrier. He started his series of blueprints as a child of working parents in Chattanooga, Tennessee -- a solitary kid who cut school for sitcoms, seduced by the tidy sidewalks of neighborhoods that flickered just out of reach.
MARK BENNETT: My parents were very busy; I was always fearful; and this was a way to - for me to become very, very safe. [MUSIC FROM TV SITCOM PLAYS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Enthralled by the blissful domesticity, the seemingly intractable problems resolved in 22 minutes, he withdrew from his own life into TV Land. But though he sat hour after hour in front of the small screen, he could never penetrate beyond it.
MARK BENNETT: It started to hit me that if I could compile all the information about these shows, whether it be their license plate number on their car, where the dishwasher was, where the doorbell was or the mailbox, then they'd become mine, and they'd become my family. And that's what I set out to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:He started to draw his blueprints, first of the Cleaver home on 513 Grant Avenue, and then again when Beaver moved to 211 Pine Street. He drew the Anderson home of Father Knows Best, noting the insurance papers in Jim's desk. He knew where Donna Reed's son Jeff kept his bows and arrows. He noted the phone number of Mr. Ed's owner, Wilbur Post. He knew the layout of the Ricardos' New York City apartment and their home in Connecticut and even of their Beverly Palms Hotel suite where they stayed less than a year. He knew the Addams and the Munsters, the Bradys and the Bunkers, the Cunninghams, the Clampetts and the Cramdens. He knew that Rob Petrie drove a Tarantula sports car and that Samantha Stevens drove a Chevy Malibu. It's all in the blueprints.
BRONWYN KEENAN: He has a date book, his little black book, lists all of these names, their addresses and their phone numbers, just along with like my name, my address and my phone number. I mean we're all in there, and so are all these characters.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Bronwyn Keenan owns a gallery in Manhattan's Soho district, now showing 4 of Bennett's blueprints in which an arrow marks where Laverne kept her monogrammed sweaters and where the Robinsons, lost in space, stored their velour turtlenecks.
BRONWYN KEENAN: This is what he paid attention to. He wanted to know where they slept, what they did with their stuff, you know? How they accessed their turtlenecks. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Seeking to have their memories confirmed, gallery-goers gaze at the works as if they are family snapshots.
BRONWYN KEENAN:They're looking for the facts. You know? They're happy to see that somebody was able to sit down and put Dick Van Dyke's ottoman right there where it should be. You know? That makes people really happy! [LAUGHS] [CLIP FROM DICK VAN DYKE SHOW PLAYS]
DICK VAN DYKE AS ROB PETRIE: Ooo! Ow! Oh! Mmm! Ah! [LAUGHTER] Oh, darn! Darn ottoman!
MARY TYLER MOORE AS LAURA PETRIE: Well you don't have to bark at me! The ottoman's been in this room for years, Mr. Astaire!
DICK VAN DYKE AS ROB PETRIE: I wasn't barking at you, Ginger, I was talking to the ottoman! [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: When art dealer Christopher Ford called Bennett from that Santa Monica bar, he told the mail carrier to stop selling his drawings for 25 dollars a pop. Instead the Mark Moore Gallery brought out a limited edition of lithographs and sold them for several hundred dollars each. The original drawings went for thousands. He found that Bennett's obsessive precision exerted a kind of fascination -- drawing different people to different blueprints.
CHRISTOPHER FORD: Most of the work that I sold, I sold to men, but the one print that I sold to the most women was Gilligan's Island. Men go for the Clampett mansion. Attorneys go for Perry Mason's office. And basically married couples across the board, their primary interest and it was the first one of the lithographs to sell out, it was Rob and Laura Petrie's house in New Rochelle.
ERNEST PASCUCCI: Hell, I grew up with this stuff, and on some [LAUGHS] very basic level it's very reassuring to know somebody else was walking through those houses too.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Ernest Pascucci is an architecture critic and senior editor of the magazine ANY -- Architecture New York. Pascucci marvels at how Bennett manages to come up with floor plans for TV layouts that make no architectural sense, like that of the Bradys' house. But especially he values he artist's effort to explore the meaning and the impact of television.
ERNEST PASCUCCI: If I consider art part of a cultural dialogue, I want to see the things I grew up with processed a little bit more, thought about a little bit more. This is one of those steps to thinking about it. That makes this very heady and conceptual, yet very everyday.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Terry Fulton is the curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, which will mount an exhibit of Bennett's work in June. She says his work is part of a long tradition that makes use of symbols current during the artist's lifetime. Vermeer did it, says Fulton. So did some notable artists of the 1960s.
TERRY FULTON: It's very pop. It's very much coming out of the tradition of Andy Warhol in particular or Roy Lichtenstein who appropriated the images out of the Dell Comics and blew them up and made paintings out of them. They're looking for a way to establish a universal language.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:A universal language for a dialogue between artist and spectator. Bennett told Fulton that all he ever wanted to be was Wally Cleaver. Fulton sees Bennett's blueprints as his way of breaking out of his isolation -- a passage back into real life. Again, art dealer Christopher Ford.
CHRISTOPHER FORD: A lot of Mark's personal life is marked by addictions. What was interesting about this particular body of work is that this was a cultural addiction. Television became an American addiction in the late 1950s.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: For Mark Bennett it became a personal affliction.
MARK BENNETT:When I had hit my bottom, I knew I was dying, and I went to a therapist and she said you're an alcoholic; you should go to, to get, you know, help. And-- 12 step programs are very good for that. And I said I can't go, and she said why not, and I said because I watch Dick Van Dyke reruns every night.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Bennett came to realize that he'd skipped his teenage years, having lived Wally's instead. And he found that his passion for television had left him unprepared for life in the world.
MARK BENNETT: It wasn't till I became an adult that I realized there was a lot that I had missed. Doesn't really help on a job application that you know where June Cleaver is from. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:A book of Bennett's drawings has just come out. It's called TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes, dedicated to Wally Cleaver. It includes the landmarks mentioned in the story as well as the animated homes of the Jetsons and the Flintstones and Flipper's family and Gidget's, Oscar's and Felix, Patty and Cathy and the M*A*S*H unit of Hawkeye Pierce. Bennett's blueprints may have helped him put those characters back in the box.
MARK BENNETT: I've been clean and [LAUGHS] sober from television for about 3 years now.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Some critics have observed that the family sitcoms of the '50s and the early '60s may have contributed to the excesses of the youth culture a few years later; that the programs may have fomented rage at a world where problems aren't solved between commercials. Now those Boomers are settling down in front of the TV with their own kids, watching the same sunny, seductive shows. It may be that between Nick at Nite and the Cartoon Network, the symbolic language of Bennett's blueprints will stay current -- for as long as a hat tossed in the air in Minneapolis means independence and a pratfall over an ottoman says all's right with the world. [DICK VAN DYKE SHOW THEME UP & UNDER] 58:00
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers and Sean Landis; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Irene Trudel and George Edwards, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Cheryl Rogers and Dan Bobkoff. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large, Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG] [FUNDING CREDITS]
Produced by WNYC Studios