[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: All right, Latif. If you can rewind your mind back to a time when your life wasn't dominated by Allen Funt and Candid Camera, like, how did—how did this start?

LATIF NASSER: So I first, I did—unlike a lot of people, I did not grow up watching Candid Camera. I had never heard of Candid Camera when I was a kid.

ROBERT KRULWICH: You had never heard?

JAD: You had never heard of Candid Camera?

LATIF: No. No.

JAD: Wait. How old ...?

ROBERT: Have you heard of the Declaration of Independence? That ring any bell?

LATIF: Did Allen Funt write that?

ROBERT: No, but he's up there with—it's a very noticeable ...

LATIF: Oh, he's in it. Okay. Okay, cool.

JAD: He is actually, no BS, a Founding Father in a way.

LATIF: Of a different sort.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: When you least expect it, you're expected, you're the one today.

JAD: [laughs] Okay, just to set that up, so there used to be a time in our media history where, like, the line between show and life was really clear. Then along came a guy named Allen Funt who muddied that line in a way that was fascinating, would bite him in the butt. In fact, spiritually speaking I think those bite marks are on all of our butts, so check your tush.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And listen to this story from our producer Latif Nasser.

LATIF: So I first heard about Candid Camera a few years ago, and I—when I did, I just dove in deep! Like, I just binged all of—I watched every single clip I could get my hands on. And then that's around the time when I found out that it started as a radio show, which was even more interesting to me because I was like, a radio show? I was like, how does that even make sense? What does that even—what would that be? So I called up one of the few people who have studied this.

JACOB SMITH: That's right. So I'm Jacob Smith.

LATIF: An associate professor at Northwestern University's School of Communication.

JACOB SMITH: And the director of Northwestern's masters in sound arts and industries.

LATIF: And it turns out there's this kind of wonderful, kind of creepy backstory.

LATIF: Do you just want to start with World War II?

JACOB SMITH: Yeah, so during World War II, Allen Funt was working in the Signal Corps.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Signal Corps is known as the nerves of the army.]

JACOB SMITH: The kind of communications arm for the armed forces at the time.

LATIF: So Funt, he's a few years out of college by this point. He is stationed in Oklahoma at Camp Gruber. And his job there is to make radio shows.

JACOB SMITH: For the armed forces radio.

LATIF: One of these shows is called The Gripe Booth.

ROBERT: The gripe? G-R-I-P-E?

LATIF: The Gripe Booth.

ROBERT: Yeah.

LATIF: Basically the show worked like this: Funt would get a soldier stationed at the camp to come into his studio.

JACOB SMITH: And talk about their gripes.

LATIF: About, like, their barracks, and about the food and about, you know, their girlfriend is cheating on them back home or whatever.

JACOB SMITH: You know, things that were bothering them.

JAD: That's not a very good idea for morale.

ROBERT: Oh, I think it's a great idea for morale.

JAD: Really? I would imagine it would bring the soldiers down.

LATIF: It would bring them down, but maybe it would bring them together.

JAD: Fair enough.

LATIF: Anyhow, so he's bringing these soldiers into his little recording studio.

JACOB SMITH: And one of the things that he found was that as soon as the red light would go on to indicate that recording was going on, they'd clam up.

LATIF: They would get ...

JACOB SMITH: Tongue tied.

LATIF: This idea was actually called "mic fright."

JAD: Mic fright?

LATIF: Mic fright.

JACOB SMITH: And he tells these stories about how it was amazing to see these soldiers who would go out into battle without maybe blinking an eye, but break into a cold sweat at the thought of sitting in front of a microphone.

ROBERT: So what does he do?

JACOB SMITH: Well, so his solution was to disconnect the red light and record them secretly.

LATIF: So basically he'd bring them in and say, "Okay, let's just do a practice round. Let's just talk over the things—the kinds of things you will talk about. Just for practice." And then when finally they were ready to start, he'd be like, "No, no, I already got it."

JACOB SMITH: He would get better material when they didn't know they were being recorded.

ROBERT: Would they be okay with that?

LATIF: Well, he would get permission afterwards.

JAD: So is that a lie? No, I don't think it's a lie anymore.

LATIF: It's a sort of truth deferred, you might say.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: But according to Jacob Smith, Funt was like, "This is a great trick!"

JACOB SMITH: Yes. You know, the red light goes off in the gripe booth, but a red light goes on in Funt's mind. And so after the war, he pitches this idea as "Candid Microphone."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: The Candid Microphone.]

JACOB SMITH: Which goes on the air on ABC in 1947.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: The program that brings you the secretly-recorded conversations of all kinds of people as they react in real life to all kinds of situations. No one ever knows when he's talking into the candid microphone.]

SONNY FOX: Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Mm. No. Oh.

LATIF: All right. So this is Sonny Fox, and he was one of the original guys to work with Allen on Candid Microphone. And it just so happened when he came into our studio, we managed to catch him on our candid microphone.

LATIF: Can you hear me?

SONNY FOX: I can. That is tepid water.

LATIF: Tepid water? I'm sorry the water's not ...

SONNY FOX: You know, not to my liking.

LATIF: ... up to snuff.

SONNY FOX: Yeah. And my standards. Why is my throat so tight?

LATIF: See? That's the tepid water. Now all of a sudden it's not so ...

SONNY FOX: [clears throat] Bourbon would've helped.

LATIF: [laughs] All right. Okay. We're here to talk about much more exciting things, I think. So when you were working with Allen on Candid Microphone, what was he like? Like, how did you see him?

SONNY FOX: Allen was a very able, very bright young guy. He had a face of an every man.

LATIF: These big chipmunk cheeks.

SONNY FOX: Rather short and a little plump. Probably was about 5'10". And he could charm you when he wanted to, charm you right out of your shoes. Or he could be this wildly maniacal, overwrought person. I mean, he had this huge temper.

LATIF: Sonny says when they were just starting the show, sometimes Allen would get so mad ...

SONNY FOX: ... that he would throw things sometimes.

LATIF: Like fling pencils at other producers.

SONNY FOX: Well, there were only four of us and the secretary. That was it. That was the core of what we did. And we all had to do everything. I mean Allen ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: The man with the hidden microphone may even get around to you someday.]

LATIF: That man was Allen.

SONNY FOX: Allen was the arbiter obviously of whether we did something or didn't do something.

LATIF: So what was—like, what was the goal for the show?

SONNY FOX: The goal was to reflect people as they are in their unguarded moments.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: We try to bring you the real McCoy on Candid Microphone.]

JACOB SMITH: That's what fascinated Funt: the beauty of everyday conversation.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: We go out of the studio into the world.]

JACOB SMITH: Everyday life.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Capture our candid glimpses of people like you.]

JACOB SMITH: What the sociologist Erving Goffman calls bugging the backstage, right?

SONNY FOX: So what we would do is ...

LATIF: Every day, Sonny and crew would go to their office in Manhattan.

SONNY FOX: This two-room office.

LATIF: And sit down at their desks.

SONNY FOX: And think up ideas. Separately scratching our heads and say to Allen, "What about this?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: I gotta shave every day. If I don't shave, my wife gets right after me.]

LATIF: Like, what if we bugged a barbershop or a magazine stand?

SONNY FOX: Oh, maybe that's something we could—you know?

ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: Did you see those green shoes?]

SONNY FOX: Or ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: Green!]

SONNY FOX: ... a restaurant or a shoe store.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: I don't know where she gets the taste.]

LATIF: So what they do is they'd take this big ...

JACOB SMITH: ... clunky ...

LATIF: ... portable recorder.

JACOB SMITH: It was like a suitcase.

SONNY FOX: It weighed I think maybe 60 pounds, but they put a handle on top and said it's portable.

LATIF: [laughs]

LATIF: He says that they would lug around this massive suitcase to wherever it was they were recording, and they'd try to hide it so that no one would see it so they could record this tape. Which they did in all these different locations, including the women's bathroom.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: I don't know what to say to him. I really don't.]

LATIF: But by and large, the tape they gathered ...

JACOB SMITH: Funt was disappointed to discover that it was the most uninteresting garbage you could imagine.

SONNY FOX: Yeah, it was frustrating.

JACOB SMITH: It doesn't have, you know, the nice shape, the rise and fall, the climax that is gonna keep listeners hooked.

SONNY FOX: Now that presented us with a neat problem.

LATIF: They had a half-hour show ...

SONNY FOX: Prime time.

LATIF: ... that they needed to fill.

SONNY FOX: Here's how desperate I was: I was having a date, my first date with a young woman.

LATIF: Yeah.

SONNY FOX: I bugged my car and tried to see how she would sound on a first date. She found out about that, was not amused and that was the last date.

LATIF: How did it go, though?

SONNY FOX: It was not very interesting.

LATIF: [laughs]

SONNY FOX: You got to that point where anything was—you were so desperate to get stuff that you did unlikely things like that.

LATIF: So here they had this show that was supposed to be about real people, real talk.

JACOB SMITH: Everyday conversation.

LATIF: But turned out that sucked. So then the question became ...

JACOB SMITH: How can we mix it up? How can we stir it up? How can we change this into something more spectacular?

LATIF: And that's when Allen Funt added a little wrinkle. It's something that Jacob Smith has called ...

JACOB SMITH: I was calling it the rile.

LATIF: So the basic idea of the rile is that instead of just letting people yammer on, which didn't seem to work, you gotta get in there, you gotta juice the action to get that right shape.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: The man with the hidden mic had a good one when he dropped into a tailor shop.]

LATIF: What you started to hear in Candid Mic is, like, these strange situations. Like, he would go into a tailor shop with a microphone up his sleeve, and he would ask the guy ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: I have to have a suit of clothes made up for a kangaroo.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, clerk: A kangaroo?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: That's right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, clerk: For heaven's sake.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Oh, you can handle that?]

LATIF: Like, here's another one.

SONNY FOX: Play the moaning trunk.

LATIF: This is Sonny's favorite. He says that one day they called a mover to come over to their office to move this trunk.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Be real careful with it now.]

LATIF: And inside the trunk—the mover didn't know this—was a guy.

SONNY FOX: And his job was to sound eerie.

LATIF: To basically moan every time the mover tried to move that trunk.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Just be very gentle with it, will you?]

[moaning]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: What is it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Never mind. Just take it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: But it makes that noise. I want to know ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: No, that's nothing. Just forget about it.]

LATIF: [laughs] I'm laughing now.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: We've been trying to get rid of this thing since last night.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: But what is it? I don't know what it is.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Never mind. Deliver it to 108 ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: Give us a slip.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: What do you mean a slip? I want to have a signature when it's delivered there. I want to have signature sign for this.]

[moaning]

SONNY FOX: [laughs] Phil got off such great moans. The classic format that worked for Alan was getting people into situations ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: Tell us what it is.]

SONNY FOX: ... where they were frustrated.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: No, it's none of your business what's in the trunk.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: Yeah, but it makes that kind of noise.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: There's no noise. You don't hear anything.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: What do you mean I don't hear anything?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Come on, fella. We've been waiting since last night. Let's get this thing out of here.]

JACOB SMITH: And it just keeps going and going and going.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: It's giving me the creeps just handling it, because I don't know what it is.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Oh, come on. Don't be silly. Never mind what it is.]

JACOB SMITH: Just driving them nuts.

LATIF: Until finally ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: Here's your $20 to look for another truck man.]

JACOB SMITH: ... they lose their temper, and we get, "Cue the music!" And that's the climax. That's the closure.

LATIF: Now the whole thing has a shape. It starts slow and then crescendo, crescendo, crescendo, boom!

JACOB SMITH: He's inventing this new kind—a new format of entertainment.

LATIF: It sounds totally obvious, but this is basically like reality TV in a nutshell. Like, this is one of the first times where you have that familiar hybrid of this highly artificial and constructed situation. But then inside of it ...

SONNY FOX: A snippet of life. We've all been there: situations where we've been frustrated, where we don't understand what's going on, situations where we're bewildered.

LATIF: So Funt would start pushing this format.

JACOB SMITH: Tweaking it, changing it.

LATIF: Trying out new permutations.

JACOB SMITH: And sometimes it's very much like a fly on the wall, you know, they're these—these kind of poignant segments of listening to ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Tom? Tom, it's time to get up.]

JACOB SMITH: ... a wife trying to wake up her husband.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Uh ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Darling, the clock rang 15 minutes ago.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: All right, honey. I'll be right up.]

MATT KIELTY: You know, that one's kind of beautiful.

JAD: That's our producer Matt Kielty.

MATT: It's so intimate is what's so incredible.

JACOB SMITH: Right.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: You've got a lot to do today. You're supposed to be in early.]

LATIF: In this one, Funt got the wife to be in on the gag.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Come on, darling. You can't keep this up. Don't stall anymore.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: All right, I'm up. I'm up.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Well, if you're up why are you ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: All right. Listen, I'll be up. Just leave me alone, will you please?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Would you please get up?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Please go away and lose yourself.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Tom, I think if you take a shower you'll feel good.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: I think if you go get lost, I'd feel better, honey.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: I don't like you talking to me that way. Once and for all I insist that you get up out of this bed.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: All right then, I'm up. I'm awake.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Well, let's see you move. It's very late. It's nine o'clock.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Nine o'clock?]

JACOB SMITH: So, you know, you get this beautiful backstage glimpse of everyday life, but where do we stop? And obviously, it did prompt letters.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: A few hisses and cat calls.]

JACOB SMITH: Have you heard the one where—I was just listening to it the other day, where a listener writes in to complain about that one?

JAD: Yeah. Yeah, that was actually really cool.

LATIF: Yeah, tell us. Tell us about it.

JACOB SMITH: Well, so ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: One lady took us at our word and wrote us a few well-chosen ones that really made our ears burn.]

JACOB SMITH: ... she's writing in to complain that this was, you know, crossing a line.

LATIF: So what Funt does is he goes up to her door to talk to her, but he goes with a hidden mic.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: I'm with the American Broadcasting Company, and I wonder if I could have just a couple of minutes of your time. Is that all right?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: You wrote us a letter the other day about one of our programs called The Candid Microphone. And I gathered from your letter that you don't like it very much.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: No, I don't.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Well, why? What are some of the things you find objectionable about it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Well, I don't like it because I think it's snooping. Out and out snooping.]

LATIF: Out and out snooping.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Is that right?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Mm-hmm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: In your letter, you said it a little more strongly. You said you thought we were a bunch of dirty, sneaking spies.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Well, I suppose at the time when I was listening to the program, I felt that way. You get these people in their homes extemporaneously. I heard that one program about the—what was it? You went into some man's bedroom?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Oh, you mean the one where the wife awakened the husband?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Awakened the husband, and there was the poor fellow. He didn't know he was talking for—speaking for the public. It sort of put him in a bad light, don't you think?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Well, you may have something there, but don't you think it's funny the sounds a man makes when he awakens?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yes, they're funny. But they're only for him though in his own bedroom, and I'm sure he doesn't enjoy having the whole world know about it. Do you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Well ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Would you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Don't you think most people are nervous and self conscious in front of a microphone?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Not anymore. I think most people take to a microphone very nicely.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Do you feel you'd talk this about the same way if you know—you knew you were talking into a microphone right now?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yes, I would.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: There'd be no difference whatsoever?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: No difference.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Well, now look, let me show you. This is a microphone, and what you just said is—is ready to go out from coast to coast. Does that make any difference to you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Then I suppose ... [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Do you mind us coming in here and talking to you this way? Do you think we took an unfair advantage of you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: I think so at the moment.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: This conversation may not be worth a nickel, but would you like to have it on the air?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: You would?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Of course I would, because I want the whole world to know of my opinion on this question.]

JAD: Oh my God, that's amazing. She just switched!

LATIF: Exactly! And—and you can hear in her voice this weird tension, right? I have this one advisor, her name is Jill Lepore. She has this idea—I'm bastardizing it, but to put it crudely, like, we all kind of have these two drives: one drive for privacy, we don't want people in our bedrooms listening to us. That is the height of creepiness. And then on the other hand, we have this drive for publicity. It's exciting to be the star, and it's exciting to have people pay attention to you. And these two drives, the drive for privacy and the drive for publicity are sort of competing in us.

JAD: So coming up, that tension ...

ROBERT: Well, it just takes off.

LATIF: Literally! Actually, literally it takes off.

JAD: Yeah, and it gets super interesting.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: That's after the break. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Stay with us.

[LISTENER: This is Joshua Rush calling from Los Angeles. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org]

[JAD: Science reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Let's get back to our story from our producer Latif Nasser about Allen Funt, the man with the hidden microphone. Where we left off, he had just made a radio show called Candid Mic.

ROBERT: Well, did in fact people like this program? Was it a hit?

LATIF: Oh yeah.

JACOB SMITH: Yeah, it moves pretty quickly to television.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Candid Camera, with Allen Funt.]

LATIF: In the spring of 1949, the show premieres on NBC.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Welcome to the Candid Camera program.]

LATIF: And the show, it's the exact same premise: set up weird or frustrating situations, try and catch people's reactions. But when the show goes out on TV ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: And here's the man who someday may ...]

LATIF: ... according to Jacob Smith, it just doesn't catch on.

JACOB SMITH: A lot of viewers think that it's mean-spirited, that the subjects are being somehow mistreated.

LATIF: There were critics who were very unnerved and upset by it. There were people certainly, but ...

JAD: Well, what did the critics say?

LATIF: Oh man, I made a list here of—of a whole bunch of the criticisms from the '40s and '50s. [laughs] And they're great! They're like—no, like, they're so sweeping. Okay, so there was this one guy in the New Yorker, this is in 1950, who said—and I love this, I love this—"For my money, Candid Camera is sadistic, poisonous, anti-human and sneaky."

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: Wait, there was another—hold on, there was another kind of great string of adjectives. Let me just find it. There’s so many of these. Here. Another guy, different guy from the New Yorker, he found Allen Funt "Coarse, nagging, suspicious and misanthropic, and to make matters worst, zestfully so."

ROBERT: [laughs] Wow!

JACOB SMITH: But I mean, I think that becomes kind of the PR problem that he has to fix.

LATIF: And according to Jacob Smith, it was not a small problem.

JACOB SMITH: No.

LATIF: When it first aired, and even all through the '50s, the show ...

JACOB SMITH: It's on and off.

LATIF: ... doesn't really get its audience.

JACOB SMITH: It moves around different networks.

LATIF: And all the while ...

JACOB SMITH: He's tweaking it and changing it, adapting it.

LATIF: And in the early '60s he hits on something, a second little tweak that would make all the difference.

JACOB SMITH: Funt's term was "The reveal." The reveal.

LATIF: Now he'd done it here and there, but by 1962 he locks it in. You start to see this thing happen over and over at the end of segments. It's so commonplace now that it seems crazy someone even had to invent it. Classic reveal is let's say the gag is in a diner and they're serving this guy a tiny little tea cup.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Hey, what is this? Get me a cup of coffee, will you?]

LATIF: And he wanted a big coffee mug and they serve him this tiny little tea cup.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Oh, come on!]

LATIF: And he's like, "What? What's going on?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Is this your idea of a cup of coffee?]

LATIF: So this guy gets pissed off. And previously, Funt would have let that keep going. But now, right as the guy is about to blow, Funt either walks out himself or he sends someone out and they kind of grab the guy and they're like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: See the camera in there?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: [laughs]]

LATIF: They show him the hidden camera on camera. And as he's looking at that hidden camera, and he's like, "Huh?" the camera zooms in on his face. And Jacob Smith says that sometimes Funt would even actually have to hold people in place for that very moment.

JACOB SMITH: Because one of their first reactions are to turn away or to cover their face. So he would sometimes have to physically restrain them and turn them towards the camera so that they can capture that one fleeting moment.

LATIF: And in that moment you see so much on their face. They're angry, they're embarrassed, they're ashamed, they're confused. They don't know how to feel. And then right at that moment, Funt says the magic words, "Smile. You're on Candid Camera!" And it's all—everything's absolved all of a sudden.

JAD: Everything is made okay in that moment.

LATIF: Everything is made okay.

ROBERT: And then the chorus goes, "When you least expect it, you're the star today. Smile, you're on Candid Camera!"

LATIF: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Here I am on television!]

LATIF: "Something, something, hocus pocus. You're in focus. It's your lucky day!"

ROBERT: It's your lucky day.

JAD: That's interesting. So it went from being like, "Ooh, you've been creeping on ..."

ROBERT: "I hate you, Allen Funt!"

JAD: To, like, "Oh, thank you, Allen Funt."

ROBERT: And this works much better I take it?

LATIF: Yeah, it was hugely successful. It was one of the top-ranked shows for basically all of the early 1960s. Millions, if not tens of millions of people watched it. And I think part of the reason why was that without that sort of meanness, they'd bled out the meanness, and people could now sort of freely see it as what it really was, which were these kind of little peepholes into human nature. Like, the first one I ever saw was the elevator sketch. Do you know the elevator sketch?

JAD: No, walk me through it.

LATIF: Oh, the elevator sketch, it's just really simple. It's really simple and it's so beautiful.

 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: The gentleman in the elevator now is a candid star.]

LATIF: Basic setup is: guy walks into an elevator, there's a hidden camera. He doesn't know it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Here's a fella with his hat on in the elevator.]

LATIF: He is like everybody else wearing his overcoat and a hat. And he stands in the middle of the elevator and then all of the other people in the elevator, who we later learn are confederates, they ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: They take off their hats.]

LATIF: ... take off their hats and ...

ROBERT: One by one by one, one hat off, two hats off, five hats off.

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: You're watching him through the open elevator door, and he's just sort of standing there awkwardly, and then he just sort of ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Little by little ...]

LATIF: ... hesitantly he just takes off his hat and then holds it in front of his chest.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: And now, do you think we could reverse the procedure? Watch.]

LATIF: Then all of the people around him, they put their hats back on.

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: And then he sort of is looking around and, like, it's almost—it's happening at this—it's somewhere between conscious and subconscious level, and then he sort of just puts his hat back on. It's really funny. It's really, really funny.

JAD: And this guy wasn't in on it?

ROBERT: No, no.

LATIF: He was not in it. He clearly just was trying to fit in in this weird way.

JAD: It's interesting though, I never watched the TV show when I was young, but it's weird, like, when I was seven, we still—we would say all the time, like, "Smile, you're on Candid Camera." Even though I'd never seen the show. So it was like the idea of the show was in a way, way bigger than the actual show.

LATIF: Yeah. It kind of became a meme, but it was less about kind of investigating human behavior and more about vanity in this weird way. It was like this idea that you—this tiny sliver of your private life could be excised and then broadcast to the world. And that idea, that idea would get away from Allen Funt, and it would go all over the world and then it would come right back and bite him in the butt in this really funny and strange way.

JAD: What happened?

LATIF: Okay, it starts like this.

MARILYN FUNT: Hi there.

LATIF: Hi, how are you?

MARILYN FUNT: Good. Come on in.

LATIF: We'll start the story with this woman.

MARILYN FUNT: Oh, are we on now?

LATIF: Marilyn Funt.

MARILYN FUNT: The ex-wife of Allen Funt. And we're on—do you want me to start where we're on the plane? Okay.

LATIF: So it's February 3, 1969.

JULIET FUNT: New York airport.

LATIF: That's Marilyn Funt's daughter, Allen Funt's daughter, Juliet Funt.

JULIET FUNT: My mom, my dad, my baby brother and I are on a flight.

MARILYN FUNT: Straight flight to Miami.

JULIET FUNT: And I'm about one and a half, so me, I don't have any personal recollection of it.

LATIF: But she says she knows this story because it's like family lore.

JULIET FUNT: So ...

MARILYN FUNT: We were in first class, and we were on the flight.

JULIET FUNT: A largely uneventful flight for about the first 20 minutes.

LATIF: Maybe an hour, who knows? They're about a hundred miles or so offshore and, you know, they get their meals, they go to the bathroom.

JULIET FUNT: And ...

MARILYN FUNT: All of a sudden ...

JULIET FUNT: ... a man stood up in the back of the flight, and he took out a knife and he put it to the throat of one of the flight attendants, and he walked her all the way down the center aisle and into the cockpit, passing every passenger on the flight.

FRED WEAVER: I did hear noises which were a little bit different in the back.

LATIF: That's Fred Weaver.

FRED WEAVER: Retired Eastern Airlines pilot.

LATIF: He was one of the flight crew. And next to him ...

LOWELL MILLER: Yes, sir.

LATIF: Co-pilot Lowell Miller. They were expecting breakfast.

FRED WEAVER: You know, I hear the knock on the door and I just opened the door.

LOWELL MILLER: And I turned around to see who it was.

FRED WEAVER: There she is.

LOWELL MILLER: The flight attendant.

FRED WEAVER: With the hijacker behind her with the knife up against her throat.

LOWELL MILLER: He was agitated, saying "Cuba, Cuba!" He also was saying that his friend had a bomb in the back of the airplane.

FRED WEAVER: I knew right then. I said, "Uh oh, here we go."

JIM ZACK: The stewardess was walking around talking with all the passengers, asking them if anybody knew how to speak Spanish.

LATIF: That's Jim Zack. He was back in coach. He was 11 years old at the time.

JIM ZACK: I didn't think much of it until the announcement came on the loudspeaker.

MARILYN FUNT: The pilot gets on and says ...

JULIET FUNT: Ladies and gentlemen ...

JIM ZACK: Ladies and gentlemen, we have some gentlemen up here that want to go to Cuba, so we're going to Havana.

JULIET FUNT: And then came the part of the story that I've been told was the waiting, the frozen, silent, staring at each other, waiting portion. But then this one woman ...

LATIF: A few rows away.

JULIET FUNT: ... began to recognize my father. And she began to look, and look back and forth to other folks and point a little bit. And there was this slow building of her certainty. And then ...

LATIF: All of a sudden she bolted up.

JULIET FUNT: And said ...

LATIF: "Wait a second ..."

JULIET FUNT: "We are not being hijacked. It's a Candid Camera stunt!"

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: I'm quoting him. "The plane went absolutely crazy."

MARILYN FUNT: Everyone started laughing.

LATIF: People began cheering.

MARILYN FUNT: "Oh, and look who's here! He's pulling one of his stunts!"

LATIF: Stamping their feet.

JULIET FUNT: And the tension dripped off of them.

LATIF: Everyone's so relieved.

JULIET FUNT: People were lined up with their air sickness bags to get autographs from my father.

LATIF: [laughs]

MARILYN FUNT: So then they relaxed.

JULIET FUNT: And through all of this, my dad is begging.

MARILYN FUNT: "No. No, it's not me. I'm not involved. We are being hijacked!" And they said, "Come on, Allen. We know it's you."

LATIF: So Allen Funt is trying to persuade people. He's not getting any purchase. He sees—behind him he sees a priest.

JULIET FUNT: [laughs] Right.

LATIF: He runs over to the priest ...

JULIET FUNT: And said, "Father, will you please help me convince these people?"

LATIF: "Tell them this is no joke."

JULIET FUNT: "This is not a stunt."

LATIF: "That maniac is for real."

JAD: And what does the guy say?

JULIET FUNT: "You can't get me, Allen Funt!"

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: "Oh, no you don't."

ROBERT: I see a guy with a cleric, with a little collar and everything. "Oh, no you don't, Allen Funt."

LATIF: Right, right, right.

ROBERT: Meanwhile, where is the hijacker?

JULIET FUNT: Terrifying people up in the cockpit.

FRED WEAVER: Oh yeah. He stayed in the cockpit.

LATIF: But eventually at some point, he hears this kind of commotion from first class.

JULIET FUNT: And so he does open the door ...

LATIF: And he pokes his head out ...

JULIET FUNT: ... and everybody begins to applaud and applaud and applaud.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: We're not totally sure about that last detail—it might be an embellishment. But what seems clear is that around this time, Allen Funt is starting to feel kind of trapped. He'd been so successful at bugging the backstage, at mussing up the line between private and public and real life and show biz that he couldn't—when he needed to, he couldn't reassert that clear line.

MARILYN FUNT: I was worried that he was gonna come up with some idea to try to mitigate the situation and deal with it.

LATIF: Actually, what she says ended up happening was he got so frustrated that he decided to just deal with the hijackers himself.

JULIET FUNT: Yes.

LATIF: So he starts formulating a plan ...

JULIET FUNT: To grab the guy and knock him to the floor. And my mother's saying ...

MARILYN FUNT: Don't you do anything!

JULIET FUNT: "You idiot, I have two babies on this plane."

MARILYN FUNT: Leave it alone!

JULIET FUNT: "Sit down!"

ROBERT: Oh, so he's gonna be like Zorro?

JULIET FUNT: Yes.

LATIF: Apparently, the flight attendants had to tell him to sit down.

ROBERT: Like, what happens now? Well, you took it to the point where now the plane is landing in what I guess the people in the plane think is Florida. The people in the front of the plane know it's Cuba.

JULIET FUNT: Right. No, it's Cuba. Correct.

LOWELL MILLER: When we taxied into the terminal ...

JULIET FUNT: We're greeted as the plane is opened by Cuban military officers.

JIM ZACK: I saw a Cuban soldier. He had a gun in his hand, and he had bandoliers, you know, with lots of bullets on it.

FRED WEAVER: And they'd been circling the airplane.

LATIF: And it seems at this point everyone on the plane for maybe the first time was like, "Oh!"

JULIET FUNT: Everybody really got it. That it was a hijacking.

LATIF: That was finally the reveal—just really late. And the story goes when they're getting off the plane, when these Cuban soldiers are escorting them off the plane, he was standing at his seat ...

JULIET FUNT: And through a twisty aspect of human psychology ...

LATIF: ... all the passengers were filing down the aisle past him.

JULIET FUNT: ... they began to take their feelings out on him, and they became angry at him.

LATIF: And each one of them had sort of their own grab bag of curses for him.

JULIET FUNT: As if he had tricked them, as if he had set them up in some way.

LATIF: And the last person in that line ...

JULIET FUNT: Turned to my father ...

LATIF: ... and said ...

JULIET FUNT: ... "Smile, my ass."

MARILYN FUNT: [laughs] That did happen. "Smile, my ass" was the closing remark on the whole business.

LATIF: Smile, my ass.

ROBERT: To me, the meaning of this scene is that here's a man who he has helped create a situation where people in some kind of peril don't know that they're in peril, that they've been blinded by the device that he created. It suggests that's the beginning of something blurry which didn't used to be as much.

JAD: You know, it's funny, like, when I hear that plane scene, it's like I'm almost nostalgic for that kind of confusion because what we have now is, like, actually way more confusing, I think.

LATIF: Yeah, because we all have these cameras, so we're always taking these candid pictures of ourselves. But, like, obviously in theory they're candid but they're not really candid because we've taken, like, four of them and the one we choose we out a filter on.

MATT: Well, I think what's interesting nowadays is what Jacob Smith talks about as being interesting, which is that ...

JAD: That's producer Matt Kielty again. He was sort of off mic as we were hashing this out.

MATT: ... now what becomes fun to look at isn't looking for people in their—the faces they make when they find out that they're on camera. It's, like, poking and pulling apart people who know that they know that they're on camera. Like, what I do when I read people's Facebook pages and Twitter is I'm trying to figure out what they were thinking when they crafted that sentence, and how they were trying to represent themselves and present themselves to the world.

JAD: You're trying to figure out what part of that post is real.

MATT: Yeah, exactly.

ROBERT: Huh. Well, what he's really saying is that everyone becomes an Allen Funt and the people on the plane. Like, the confusion is very basic. Like, if you're going to go on Facebook, then you are a little bit of an Allen Funt. If you're gonna go on Twitter, if you're going to do that, then you're producing these shows. Then if you're actually trying to figure out how the other people are reacting to you or how you read them or how they're reading you ...

JAD: Yeah, then you're a little bit—like, you're stuck on the plane because you don't know what's real and what's show.

ROBERT: Yeah. In a way if you split Allen Funt in half as opposed to the showman and the audience, now everyone is a showman and the audience. Like, it's both parts.

JAD: Yeah.

LATIF: It's like I think we're Allen Funt-ing ourselves.

ROBERT: Yeah. 

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You're the star today. Smile, you're on Candid Camera.]

ROBERT: Enormous thanks to our producer, Latif Nasser.

JAD: Also co-producer Matt Kielty. And a special thanks to ...

ROBERT: The Funt family. They couldn't have been more accommodating and more generous.

JAD: Also Jim Zack and the Eastern Airlines Employee Association. And that's it. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]

[JULIET FUNT: Hey, this is Juliet Funt reading the credits.]

[JACOB SMITH: Hello, this is Jacob Smith from Northwestern University.]

[JIM ZACK: Hi. My name's Jim Zack, and I was asked to read you the credits text. So here we go.]

[JULIET FUNT: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Brenna Farrell, David Gebel ...]

[JACOB SMITH: ... Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty ...]

[JIM ZACK: ... Robert Krulwich, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser ...]

[JACOB SMITH: ... Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack ...]

[JULIET FUNT: ... Molly Webster, Soren Wheeler and Jamie York. With help from …]

[JACOB SMITH: Simon Adler, Alexandra Lee Young, Abigail Keele and Alexandra Brennan.]

[JIM ZACK: Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris.]

[JULIET FUNT: That's it!]

[JACOB SMITH: Okay! Smile, you're on Radiolab!]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.