I read a sort of synopsis of cheers and sort of the evolution of the show through the years. In the article they talked about how towards the end of the show after shooting they would go behind the bar and find lines tapped up all over the place. It was a bit of a throw away article so I didn’t think too much about it.
But I was watching an episode on Netflix, “I’m OK, You’re Defective” and at 10:30 Lilith is flipping through some papers as she talks to Frazier. It shows the back of what are legal papers concerning Frazier’s will and such. It sure looks like those are lines on the back of the paper based on the orientation and the above information from that article.
Anyone ever see anything similar in other shows or even from other Cheers episodes?
Yes, like cue cards. It looks like the lines for the scene were pasted/printed on the back of the paper so Bebe Neuwirth could refer to them while filming.
Great episode. I see the writing, perhaps Bebe Neuwirth is reading her lines off the papers, doesn’t look like Grammer would be able to read the small writing well.
In language school, I was in a play where one of the actors, an older Norwegian guy, apparently had trouble memorizing his lines, even though he was absolutely fluent in Russian. Even after six weeks of rehearsal, he still kept the full text of the play spread out on a desk in front of him and read all his lines off it. I made the mistake of doing that at the start of the play when my character had to read out an official document, and it tripped me up at one point. I found it much easier to rely on my memory and didn’t flub again.
It’s important that in a weekly half-hour sitcom you don’t have a lot of rehearsal time. Two or three days to learn your lines at most, with a table read, blocking, dress rehearsal, and two tapings (from which the finished show is put together). I’m not surprised that cue cards were posted behind the bar and elsewhere.
Come to think of it, you don’t have a lot of rehearsal time in an hour-long show either. Those have to be done in six to seven days, or they fall behind schedule. (At least, that’s the way it used to be.)
It’s not uncommon, I believe, as terentii says, especially on a show that’s produced at such a pace. On the long-running UK soap Coronation Street, it was said that the reason why one character was always raising her eyes in seeming exasperation was that her lines were pasted up above the direct eyeline.
Brando had stage hands hold cue cards out of camera range when he played Jor-El in Superman, as was shown in a documentary about the making of the film. He said it was because (quoting from memory) “You never know what you’re going to say until you’ve said it, and this preserves the spontaneity of speech.”
His fee for appearing in that brief role was astronomical. IIRC, he was paid more than either Christopher Reeve or Margot Kidder.
Sometimes actors do hold their lines as a memory aid, but those lines are usually in the form of “sides.” Sides are small half-paper-size copies of the script. They are formatted just like the script. I.e., it’s not like someone’s lines and only their lines are typed out. It’s their script page(s) for that scene and may show not only their lines but other actors’ as well.
This is different from someone like Brando having cue cards written out for him. Not to say that no show ever has used typed-out lines for someone, but usually, when an actor is looking at his lines on paper or inside a book that is ostensibly part of the props or set decoration, those lines would be sides and would look like a script - the dialogue written with large margins, centered on the page with large paragraph spacing between characters; not as lines of text written out.
Set decorators and props people also often use any randomly printed-out papers on set; so if something appeared to be lines of text written out, it was probably the prop master’s junk mail or term papers, or they bought faked legal documents to use as props. It’s not clear from what the OP says about the article whether what was found behind the bar was sides or something else.