page_title: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
section_title: Production
hierarchical_section_title: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis / Production
caption_attribution_description: English: A copy of Auguste Rodin's The Thinker at the Kyoto National Museum in Kyoto, Japan. Deutsch: Nachbildung der Statue Der Denker in Kyoto. Français&#160;: Copie du Penseur de Rodin située au Musée national de Kyōto, Japon. - La sculpture est associée au principe de Descartes&#160;: Cogito ergo sum.[réf.&#160;nécessaire]. Brezhoneg: Kopienn Dezevour Rodin loet e Mirdi riezel Kyōto, Japan. - Ar c'hizelladur zo kevret gant pennaenn Descartes&#160;: Cogito ergo sum. Íslenska: Hugsuðurinn eftir Auguste Rodin. Hugsuðurinn eftir Auguste Rodin. Hugsuðurinn eftir Auguste Rodin. Hugsuðurinn eftir Auguste Rodin.
context_page_description: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis is an American sitcom that aired on CBS from September 29, 1959, to June 5, 1963. The series and several episode scripts were adapted from the "Dobie Gillis" short stories written by Max Shulman since 1945, and first collected in 1951 under the same title as the subsequent TV series. Shulman also wrote a feature film adaptation of his "Dobie Gillis" stories for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1953, entitled The Affairs of Dobie Gillis which featured Bobby Van in the title role.
  Dobie Gillis is significant as the first American television program produced for a major network to feature teenagers as leading characters. In other series, such as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, teenagers were portrayed as supporting characters in a family story. An even earlier 1954 series, Meet Corliss Archer, featured teenagers in leading roles and aired in syndication. Dobie Gillis broke ground by depicting elements of the current counterculture, particularly the Beat Generation, primarily embodied in a stereotypical version of the "beatnik".
context_section_description: Max Shulman's first Dobie Gillis short stories were printed in 1945, and a short story compilation, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was published in 1951. These stories were originally published in such magazines as Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post.
  A follow-up collection, I Was a Teen-age Dwarf, appeared in 1959. The titular character appeared at various ages in these stories, all of which are set in St. Paul, Minnesota, though the majority of the stories centered on his college years at the University of Minnesota. Aside from Dobie and his parents, Zelda Gilroy was the only other character from the books directly adapted to the series as a regular or recurring character.
  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced the first media adaptation of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis in 1953 as The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, a black-and-white musical film starring Debbie Reynolds, Bob Fosse, and Bobby Van as Dobie Gillis. Following its release, Shulman set about attempting to bring Dobie Gillis to television. An initial pilot was produced by veteran comedian and producer George Burns in 1957, with his son Ronnie Burns starring as Dobie.
  After this pilot did not sell, Shulman took Dobie Gillis to 20th Century Fox Television, run at the time by Martin Manulis. Manulis asked Shulman to reduce the Dobie character's age from 19 to 17, making him a high-school student instead of a college student and an age peer of Ricky Nelson from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Wally Cleaver (Tony Dow) from Leave It to Beaver. Shulman agreed to the change after negotiating employment for himself on the series as show runner. The Fox pilot, "Caper at the Bijou", featured Dwayne Hickman as Dobie, Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus as his parents, newcomer Bob Denver as a new character, Dobie's beatnik best friend Maynard G. Krebs, and Tuesday Weld as Dobie's unattainable love interest Thalia Menninger.
  First pitched to and rejected by NBC, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was greenlit for series by CBS. Phillip Morris' Marlboro was the program's primary sponsor, and it sold a week-to-week alternating co-sponsorship to Pillsbury Company for the first two seasons, with Dwayne Hickman appearing in one of the Pillsbury commercials. Colgate-Palmolive replaced Pillsbury as the alternate sponsor in season three.
  While the pilot for The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was shot at the main 20th Century Fox lot in Century City, California, principal photography and production for the series proper took place at the original Fox Film Corporation studio at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue (next to the headquarters of DeLuxe) in Hollywood. Dobie Gillis was filmed with two cameras, a method that producer and director Rod Amateau had learned while working on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. Fox turned out one episode of Dobie Gillis a week, working from May to December of each year. Dwayne Hickman's fourth-wall-breaking monologues were saved for the end of the production of each episode; their length resulted in Hickman requesting and getting a teleprompter from which to read them for season two forward.
  The show was not filmed before a live studio audience; during the first season, a live audience viewed each episode and provided its laugh track. Subsequent seasons used a standard laugh track provided by technician Charles Douglass.
  Creator Max Shulman served as the show runner for and an uncredited producer of Dobie Gillis. He contributed scripts for episodes of the show during all four seasons, with several stories – including "Love is a Science" (season 1, episode 3), "Love is a Fallacy" (season 1, episode 22), and "Parlez-Vous English" (season 2, episode 11) – directly adapted by Shulman from his original Dobie Gillis short stories.
  During its fourth season, the show, by then known as Max Shulman's Dobie Gillis, suffered both from competition with NBC's color Western The Virginian and from the growing inattention from Max Shulman. Shulman began spending increasing amounts of time at his home in Westport, Connecticut while the show was in 
caption: Auguste Rodin's statue of The Thinker
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