Rewrites and Rehearsals: A Typical ‘Blossom’ Day

Mayim Bialik laughs at the sound of testosterone pouring in through the window of her office at the Sunset-Gower studios. In the parking lot below, football legend and “Blossom” guest-star Terry Bradshaw is airing out a football with a series of Hail Mary passes, which the show’s cast and crew members are mainly dropping.

“Jenna (von Oy) and I are the only two females in the cast, and the guys are always reciting stupid lines from obscure movies and talking about sports,” she explains. “It’s not too socially exciting. They play football every chance they get.”

Bialik’s next sentence is interrupted by an anguished grunt from outside her window, prompting her to laugh again. “They get violent out there.”

Largely outside the glare of the entertainment media, which finds itself more fascinated with the more prurient, less wholesome television, “Blossom” has watched its popularity quietly, steadily increase over the past four seasons. It ranks in the Top 40 this year, and is one of the most popular shows among teens.

Eighteen-year-old Bialik, who before “Blossom” was best known only for a brief but scene-stealing role in the tear-jerker “Beaches,” has, thanks to her quick wit and her character’s funky wardrobe, become an unlikely success story. A recent TV Guide story reported that she’s the second-most-popular actress among teen-age girls, behind only Julia Roberts.

Even as the show improved in the ratings this season, it weathered many behind-the-scenes tragedies (including the death of director Bill Bixby) and the loss of several writers to “The John Larroquette Show” (both series were created by Don Reo), and, like many programs, lost valuable time to the earthquake. In this, the last week of production, the cast and crew must tape not only the season finale, but a couple of scenes from another episode and introductions to a retrospective program composed of old clips.

Despite the time crunch--Bialik has to leave town the following week to appear in Woody Allen’s TV movie, “Don’t Drink the Water”--she maintains an even, sunny disposition, and a precociously bemused outlook toward the quixotic nature of network TV production.

In the episode at hand, Joey (Joey Lawrence) and Vinnie (David Lascher), Blossom’s brother and boyfriend, respectively, graduate from high school; Vinnie announces his intentions to attend Princeton. This, of course, portends big changes in the series next season concerning Blossom’s love life.

“I think the writers wanted Blossom single for her senior year,” Bialik says. “Being single is a totally different way of looking at your life, especially in high school.”

And unlike previous seasons, “Blossom” this year won’t end with a cliffhanger. “We usually have cliffhangers, which I think is kind of fun, but I guess this year there was nothing to hang,” she says with a laugh. “I’m kind of surprised they didn’t end on, ‘We can’t get engaged,’ and pick that up next year. But I’m not a writer, so what do I know?”

Though she has graduated from high school and no longer needs the services of studio-appointed tutors, Bialik still comes in most mornings at 8 to study calculus. (She’s still trying to decide whether to attend Harvard, where she has been accepted.) At 10 a.m., the cast rehearses until lunch, when Bialik meets again with a tutor.

Each script undergoes major rewrites through the week. “We come in on Monday and read the script, and get rewrites all day,” Bialik says. “If there’s going to be a lot of rewrites, they send us home and we get a script at night. Tuesday, we’ll do a run-through for producers, and get rewrites after that. Wednesday, we get a brand-new script with rewrites, but they don’t want to run out of colors for pages (differently colored pages indicate on which draft of a script a particular rewrite came in), so Wednesday we get a white script.” Bialik laughs at the idea of the reams of paper expended on the script--and only half-way through the week.

“We get (rewritten) pages Wednesday night, we get pages Thursday night, and sometimes we even get pages in the middle of the day Friday.”

Today, there are two scenes to rehearse before the general run-through. “One is a huge family scene, the scenes that we dread, where they put every cast member and a couple of guest stars in one little room,” Bialik says. “Sometimes the writers don’t think about specific actors, they just think about the scene in general. So what you’ll have are these nine-page scenes, which are brutal for us, and one character will have one joke on the first page and then five pages will go by where they don’t have anything to say. So we end up saying, ‘OK, since I don’t have any lines, I’m going to exit the room for a drink and I’ll be back for my joke.’ Bernard Hughes (who plays Blossom’s grandfather) has literally one line, ‘This calls for a drink,’ and he leaves the room.”

Things go pretty much as Bialik predicts, with the performers-- daisy-fresh after their romp in the parking lot--struggling to find some way to pass the time while they’re off-camera. Director Peter Baldwin tries to find some bits of business for each of the performers, handing Bialik a party prop. “I’ll have something to do now--I’ll hold cheese,” Bialik says wryly, to no one in particular.

“The other scene is a redo,” Bialik explains. “When we got changes last night--the script was really long, so they made all these cuts. But this is the last scene of the show, where Blossom and Vinnie decide to sever the relationship. So they made all these cuts, and the breakup goes like this: I say, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ He says, ‘What?’ and I say, ‘We can’t get engaged.’ And that was basically the scene.”

She laughs at such minimalism, as well as such an anti-climactic climax. “So we talked to the director, we talked to the producer, and said, ‘You’ve got to put in some more lines.’ So we got rewrites in the middle of the day, which is kind of rare when they’ve already made cuts. Hopefully, there’ll be a little more explanation.”

The scene is indeed expanded, with Blossom and Vinnie co-opting lines from “Casablanca” for their farewell.

Speeding things along for the production is the fact that in recent months, the program has not been taped before a live audience. “We’ve been doing shows in bits and pieces, which wouldn’t make sense to the audience anyway,” Bialik explains. “The audience doesn’t really help us if they don’t understand the sequence of the plot. Since their purpose is to come in and laugh, if they don’t understand a reference, then they won’t laugh and it’ll just be uncomfortable for the actors. Right now, the audience is better off just watching the whole thing at home with a beer.”

Which means, Bialik sheepishly admits, the producers are using a laugh track. “They do, and it’s always too loud and too long. I was outside the room (where the laugh track is added), and every once in a while, I heard, (mimicking maniacal laughter), ‘Ah, hahahahaha!”’

After taping is over, though, Bialik says she doesn’t pay much attention to the final product--and not just because of the cheesy laugh track. “It’s hard for me to watch the show, because I remember cuts and shots and stuff, so it bothers me when someone is cut in the middle of a line, and it’s a bad cut,” she says. She has the episodes on video, however: “I’d love my grandkids to see what I did when I was young.”

Maybe by then she can muster up the wherewithal to watch the show. Right now, though, she says, “I think I sound funny, and I think I look funny.”

* “Blossom” airs tonight at 8 on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39), then moves to Mondays at 8:30 p.m. on May 2. The season finale is scheduled for May 23.