Question: I could swear Andy Taylor was a jack-of-all-trades and had several jobs on The Andy Griffith Show, but a coworker says I'm nuts and that he was always just the sheriff. Who's right? There's no bet riding on this, just pride. Thanks.
Answer: You've got a respectable memory there, Jim. (Don't get any ideas, though — there's only room for one Televisionary in this town.) Feel free to claim a good chunk of your office mate's pride because you're right on this one.
When The Andy Griffith Show first launched as a spin-off of The Danny Thomas Show and began its eight-year run on CBS in October 1960, Sheriff Andy Taylor (Matlock's Andy Griffith) not only enforced the law in Mayberry while raising you
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Question: My wife and I were having dinner recently at an Italian restaurant and the background music was Dean Martin singing songs from Guys and Dolls. We agreed that Martin would have been much better than Marlon Brando in the movie — was Martin too new on the Hollywood scene to be considered, or was the studio pushing Brando?
Answer: Producer Sam Goldman wanted Gene Kelly to play Sky Masterson in the movie version of the Broadway hit Guys and Dolls (1955), but Kelly couldn't get released from his MGM contract. (Though MGM stands for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sam Goldwyn was only part of the studio, which was formed by merging three existing companies, for a couple of years; in 1923, he formed his own Samuel Goldwyn Productions. MGM kept the
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