Maria Ferrari is a staff writer on "The Bill Engvall Show." She is a graduate of Northwestern University.

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Episode 207 – Snoop, Dog

At last, America and my parents get what they’ve been waiting for, my very first episode of “The Bill Engvall Show.” This episode was a lot of fun to write and to shoot. For one thing, it featured Brian Doyle-Murray as Mr. Faulkner, who is just a joy to write for. He’s got perfect comic timing, a really distinctive voice, and is willing to spend most of a scene in a giant cloud of bug spray if you have to do a bit of product placement. It also featured what might be our coolest set of the year, the crawlspace under Mr. Faulkner’s house.

The crawlspace set was built three feet off the ground so that it would be at camera height. Every time we did a take, the set had to be re-dressed with new cobwebs, which come in a spray can. There was a hole in the roof of the set for Raffles to be dropped straight down into the corner where he would be hiding, and a space for his trainer to sit across from him offscreen. We were worried that the crawlspace might freak him out, but it turns out Raffles is an extremely sedate dog. Whatever hand gesture the trainer uses to mean “keep on sitting there for another hour or so, not moving and not really that interested in what’s going on…” he’s got that one down.

While Bill was in the crawlspace, we followed him with a lipstick camera poked through another hole in the set, which was a new addition to our usual four cameras. The effect was great, so it was disappointing when we discovered about an hour into shooting that the lipstick camera wasn’t recording. Apparently it was someone’s job to push that camera back and forth but not to turn it off and on. (What can I say? It’s a union town.) Luckily we caught it before we’d started to take the crawlspace set apart, and Bill was extremely cool about having to get cleaned up and crawl back in there for yet another take. I have to give him props… they let me climb in the set after we were done, and it was actually pretty creepy in there.


The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer/speaker and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Turner Entertainment Networks, Inc.”