Eve Plumb in ‘The Brady Bunch’ in 1972.Photo:Alamy
Alamy
But at least one teenage indignity foisted upon the character came as a relief for actressEve Plumb: Jan’s glasses.
On the most recent episode of theirBrady Bunchrewatch podcastThe Real Brady Bros, costarsBarry WilliamsandChristopher Knightrevealed that the show’s creative team wrote a season 3 episode about Jan needing glasses so that Plumb could wear her own real specs in the series.
“Was she wearing glasses in the first two seasons that she wasn’t allowed to wear because the character didn’t have them, and it finally got to the point where she really needed to wear glasses to perform, to see her way down the stairs?” Knight, 67, asked. “I don’t even know the answer to this. I’m gonna have to ask you.”
Maureen McCormick and Eve Plumb in ‘The Brady Bunch’ in 1972.Alamy
Willams, 70, couldn’t remember whether Plumb wore contact lenses in early season or simply did without her glasses. He compared allowing Plumb to wear glasses as her character to the show’s other younger cast members wearing their real-life braces onscreen. But Williams pointed out that theBrady Bunchwriters only ever built an episode’s storyline aroundMaureen McCormick’s character, Marcia, getting braces — despite the fact that McCormick never actually had to get braces in real life.
“In this case, it’s a real article,” Knight said. “Eve wore glasses. And I gotta believe it was easier for her to wear those glasses as the character.”
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He went on to point out that the actress’ real glasses were likely something of a burden for the show’s cinematographer. “Because lighting on glasses bounces,” Knight explained. “If they have somebody who’s scripted, like Clark Kent wearing glasses, you know, back in the day, they’d just have frames. No glass inside of those frames to make it look like they had glasses.”
Eve Plumb and Maureen McCormick in ‘The Brady Bunch’ in 1970.Everett
Everett
“Clearly, Eve needed glasses. So, you know, as troubling as that might have been for the cinematographers with the lack of time that we had in setting up shots, they had to go for it,” he continued. “So, I don’t know what kind of conversations happened between the Plumbs and [series creator Sherwood Schwartz] leading up to this and how far in advance it was that they signaled, you know, ‘Eve is suffering from not being able to [wear] glasses as her character.’ Maybe that was in the second season so that they were prepared for this in the third season.”
In their recap of the episode, Williams said that Plumb “looked terrific” in the first shot of Jan wearing her new glasses.
“The glasses were, like, perfect, I thought,” he said. “They weren’t goofy at all. They really just looked like, ‘Oh, okay. Yeah. Stylish.’ ”
“Those were her glasses. Those are the glasses that she wore,” Knight added. “She looked good in them. You know, they didn’t need to change anything there. And she could see through her own glasses, so might as well use them.”
source: people.com
