GARRY MARSHALL. Born in New York City, New York, U.S.A., 13 November 1934. Educated at Northwestern University, B.S. in journalism, 1956. Married: Barbara: children: one son, two daughters. Served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, writing for Stars and Stripes and serving as a production chief for the Armed Forces Radio Network. Worked as a copy boy, and briefly as a reporter, for the New York Daily News, 1956-59; wrote comedy material for Phil Foster and Joey Bishop; drummer in his own jazz band; successful stand-up comedian and playwright; in television from late 1950s, starting as writer for The Jack Paar Show; prolific television writer through 1960s, creator-executive producer for various television series from 1974; also active creatively in films and stage.

TELEVISION SERIES

1959-61 The Jack Paar Show (writer)
1961-65 The Joey Bishop Show (writer)
1961-64 The Danny Thomas Show (writer)
1961-66 The Dick Van Dyke Show (writer)
1962-68 The Lucy Show (writer)
1965-68 I Spy (writer)
1966-67 Hey Landlord (creator, writer, director)
1970-75 The Odd Couple (executive producer, writer,                                        director)
1972-74 The Little People (The Brian Keith Show)                                (creator, executive producer)
1974-84 Happy Days (creator, executive producer)
1976-83 Laverne and Shirley (creator, executive producer) 1974     Blansky's Beauties (creator, executive producer) 1978     Who's Watching the Kids? (creator, executive                                                  producer)
1978-82 Mork and Mindy (creator, executive producer) 1979-80 Angie (creator, executive producer)
1982-83 Joanie Loves Chachi (creator, executive                                               producer)
1982-83 The New Odd Couple (executive producer)
1994-     Murphy Brown (actor)

MADE-FOR-TELEVISION MOVIE

1972 Evil Roy Slade (creator, executive producer)

TELEVISION SPECIAL

1979 Sitcom: The Adventures of Garry Marshall

FILMS (as writer-producer)

How Sweet It Is, 1968; The Grasshopper, 1970; (as director) Young Doctors In Love (also executive producer), 1982; The Flamingo Kid (and co-writer), 1984; Nothing In Common, 1986; Overboard, 1987; Beaches, 1988; Pretty Woman, 1990; Frankie and Johnnie, 1991; (as actor) Psych-Out, 1968; Lost In America, 1985; Jumpin' Jack Flash, 1986; Soapdish, 1991; A League of Their Own, 1992; Hocus Pocus, 1993.

STAGE

The Roost (writer, with Jerry Belson), 1980; Wrong Turn at Lungfish (writer, with Lowell Ganz; also director, actor), 1992.

Garry Marshall was the executive producer of a string of sitcoms that helped ABC win the ratings race for the first time in the network's history in the late 1970s. While Norman Lear's Tandem Productions and Grant Tinker's MTM Enterprises had put CBS on top in the early part of the decade, by the end of the 1978-79 season, four of the five highest-rated shows of the year were Marshall's.

Marshall became a comedy writer during the last years of television's "golden age." He started out as an itinerant joke writer for an assortment of TV comics and eventually secured a staff writing position on The Joey Bishop Show. There he met Jerry Belson, with whom he would go on to write two feature films, a Broadway play, and episodes for a variety of TV series including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Lucy Show, and I Spy. The last project Marshall and Belson did together was the most successful of their partnership. The Odd Couple, a series they adapted from the Neil Simon play in 1970, would run for five seasons and have a major impact on Marshall's comic style.

Rather than forming his own independent production company, which had become standard procedure for producers at the time, Marshall remained at Paramount to make a succession of hit situation comedies for ABC. Happy Days debuted as a series in January of 1974, and by the 1976-77 season it was the most popular show on TV. Set in Milwaukee in the 1950s and centered around a teenager (Ron Howard), his family, and his friends, Happy Days generated three spin-offs, all of which Marshall supervised. Laverne and Shirley featured two working-class women (Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams) whose antic schemes were reminiscent of those portrayed on The Lucy Show. Viewers were introduced to the frenetic young comic Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy, a series about an alien (Williams) who comes to Earth to study human behavior by moving in with an all-American young woman (Pam Dawber). Joannie Loves Chachi followed two of the younger characters from Happy Days, as they struggled to make it as rock 'n' roll musicians.

While Norman Lear had used shows like All In the Family and Maude to explore contemporary social issues like racism, the women's movement, and the war in Vietnam, Marshall's shows were usually more concerned with less timely personal issues like blind dates, making out, and breaking up. Lear, Tinker, and others had attracted young audiences with "relevant" programming earlier in the decade; Marshall attracted even younger ones with lighter, more escapist fare, most of it set in the supposedly simpler historic past. In an interview reprinted in American Television Genres (1985), Marshall recalled that, after producing the adult-oriented Odd Couple, he had been anxious to make shows "that both kids and their parents could watch." When he gave a speech upon accepting the Lifetime Achievement Prize given at the American Comedy Awards in 1990, Marshall said that "If television is the education of the American people, then I am recess." Not surprisingly, four of Marshall's sitcoms were adapted into Saturday morning cartoons.

Marshall continued to borrow from The Odd Couple throughout his career. Over and over again he employed the comic device of coupling two distinctly different characters: the hip and the square on Happy Days, the earthling and the Orkan on Mork and Mindy, the rich and the poor on Angie, and, later, the businessman and the prostitute in the movie Pretty Woman. In 1982, he brought a short-lived remake of The Odd Couple to ABC, this time with African-Americans Ron Glass and Demond Wilson playing the parts of Felix and Oscar.

By the mid-1980s, Marshall had turned his attention to directing, producing, and occasionally writing feature films, including Young Doctors in Love (1982), The Flamingo Kid (1984), Nothing In Common (1986), Overboard (1987), Beaches (1989), Pretty Woman (1990), and Frankie and Johnny (1991). He also began appearing on screen occasionally, most recently in a recurring role on Murphy Brown.

Marshall's television tradition was carried on by Thomas L. Miller and Robert L. Boyett, two alumni of Marshall's production staff. Their youth-oriented series like Perfect Strangers, Full House, and Family Matters became staples of ABC's Friday night lineup in the later 1980s and arly 1990s.

-Robert J. Thompson