Scared Silly: How ‘The Ghost and Mr. Chicken’ Turned Don Knotts into a Movie Star

In 1964, Don Knotts was looking for a new gig. He was approaching the fifth season of what was intended to be a five-year run on The Andy Griffith Show, the series that had made him famous and earned him three consecutive Primetime Emmys for his portrayal of the bumbling but soft-hearted Deputy Barney Fife. (Two more statuettes would follow in 1966 and 1967 for guest appearances on the show.) But Knotts knew his time in Mayberry was ending. He dreamed of being a movie star, and in 1966, he got his first genuine box-office hit with The Ghost and Mr. Chicken—with more than a bit of help from his Mayberry cohorts. 

No Time for Deputies 

In February 1960, Knotts was nearing the end of a stint on the original Steve Allen Show when he watched the debut of Sheriff Andy Taylor, played by Knotts’s No Time for Sergeants costar Andy Griffith, in a backdoor pilot episode of The Danny Thomas Show.

Knotts called Griffith the next day and suggested that Sheriff Taylor needed a deputy. In his book Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show, author Daniel de Visé speculates that, in Knotts, Griffith saw an opportunity to offload some of the qualities he didn’t like about the original version of Sheriff Taylor—namely the character’s country-bumpkin persona—onto a different character, allowing him to shape Taylor into something more in line with his own vision. Knotts was soon hired, becoming the fourth long-term cast member to sign on, behind Griffith, Ron Howard (Opie Taylor), and Frances Bavier (Aunt Bee). 

The show was a hit early on, and it stayed one for the entirety of its eight-year run, never leaving Nielsen’s top 10. But according to Knotts’s 1999 autobiography Barney Fife and Other Characters I Have Known, Griffith’s plan had always been to exit the show after five years, and Knotts assumed that would be the end of his Mayberry residency, too. There were also other factors at play, including financial ones. Knotts reportedly earned less than $100,000 a year for his work on the show; legend has it that when he once asked for a raise, he was bluntly reminded that he was not the star of the series. 

So, Knotts looked elsewhere. He was, in his own words, “pretty hot at the time,” and he fielded several lucrative offers for other television series. But Knotts had his sights set on a career in the movies. “Remember,” the actor wrote, “there was no such thing as television when I was growing up. Motion pictures were my dream.”

Knotts Landing

He’d get a shot at that dream courtesy of Lew Wasserman, the Universal Studios president who would one day help launch Jaws into the box-office stratosphere. Wasserman had been impressed by Knotts’s 1964 feature The Incredible Mr. Limpet, and he had seen latent, big-screen star power in Knotts that he wanted to develop.

Wasserman offered to set Knotts up at Universal with a deal that would let him choose his own projects, right down to hiring the writers he wanted to work with. Griffith made Knotts’s decision a little tougher when he opted to stay on The Andy Griffith Show for three more years thanks to a $1 million annual salary offer from CBS. The network supposedly offered Knotts a raise, as well—to about $150,000 per year, or a mere 15 percent of what they were willing to pay Griffith. But Knotts saw Wasserman’s offer for what it was: a chance at movie stardom, on his own terms, that might never come his way again.  

But his departure from Mayberry, it turns out, wouldn’t be such a clean break: Once ensconced at Universal, Knotts needed a movie to make. His thoughts turned to a Season 4 episode of The Andy Griffith Show, “The Haunted House,” which first aired on October 7, 1963. In it, Opie knocks a baseball into the supposedly haunted Rimshaw house. Barney and Gomer (Jim Nabors) try to retrieve it, only to be scared silly by what appear to be ghostly phenomena. The house is, in fact, inhabited by shady figures—town drunk Otis Campbell (Hal Smith) and a local bootlegger, who have engineered the haunting to keep anyone from finding the moonshine still they’re operating in the cellar.

The episode features several hallmarks that would later appear in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, including secret passageways, seemingly haunted paintings, and lots of frightened mugging by the rubber-faced Knotts. 

“I thought to myself, people seem to enjoy the idea of seeing me get scared,” Knotts wrote. “So a picture built around a haunted house ought to be right down my alley.”

Sheriff Taylor to the Rescue

Because The Andy Griffith Show was about to go on hiatus, Knotts recruited two of its writers, Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, to essentially turn “The Haunted House” into a feature-length star vehicle for him. (The pair wrote several now-classic Mayberry episodes, including “Convicts-at-large,” “Barney’s First Car,” and “Citizen’s Arrest”—but not, incidentally, “The Haunted House.”)

Producer Ed Montagne warned the trio that straddling the line between comedy and mystery would be difficult and that they’d need to “carefully construct” the story to make it work. Knotts immediately thought of someone who could help: Andy Griffith, a gifted storyteller who had honed his already intuitive grasp of plot mechanics over five seasons of his hit sitcom. Griffith agreed to help his friend and co-star iron out the story’s wrinkles, and Universal put him on the payroll. 

For two weeks, Griffith joined Knotts, Montagne, Fritzell, and Greenbaum in a basement office on the Universal lot to develop what would become The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. The Rimshaw house became the Simmons mansion, the supposedly haunted site of a notorious murder-suicide. Knotts would portray Luther Heggs, a small-town newspaper typesetter who agrees to spend the night in the house and report on his experiences. 

Griffith continued to drop in on Knotts and his team while they were working on the script. The writers hewed closely to the outline Griffith had helped them produce, and they valued his input. In fact, it was Griffith who suggested that the movie’s most famous line—“Attaboy, Luther!”—be a running gag rather than a one-off throwaway. 

Once the script got the green light, Knotts helped scout locations, consulted with the set designer, and sat in on casting interviews. When he realized Universal was only giving them 17 days to shoot the film, he suggested they call in another Andy Griffith Show veteran, Alan Rafkin, to direct, citing Rafkin’s speed and efficiency on set. Universal complied, and principal photography began on July 7, 1965.

Attaboy, Don!

Knotts wasn’t quite sure what to think of the film when he watched the final print in a Universal screening room with Montagne and Rafkin. He described watching it “in deafening silence” and having no idea what to say to his colleagues when it was over. Would his gamble pay off, or had he left one of the most popular sitcoms on television to make a bomb? A positive test screening somewhat allayed his fears, but a paying audience would be the true test.  

Knotts got his answer in January 1966, when he traveled to New Orleans for an installment of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken’s roadshow rollout. At one point during the screening, the audience laughed so loudly that Knotts had to ask the projectionist to turn up the sound. By August 1966, Montagne predicted the film would earn five times its $670,000 budget.

By October, Universal had signed Knotts to a five-year contract, agreeing to bankroll at least one movie per year for him. The New York Times’s legendary film critic Vincent Canby reported that The Ghost and Mr. Chicken was one of Universal’s most profitable films of 1966 (though Canby couldn’t resist pointing out that the movie was “probably unknown to most New Yorkers” and racked up most of its ticket sales in the American Midwest and South).

At the age of 42, Don Knotts was finally a movie star. 

Though he continued to make movies with Universal until 1971, when How to Frame a Figg completed his contract, the studio declined to renew it. By then, his star power was waning, and it wouldn’t be revived until he joined the cast of Three’s Company as Ralph Furley in 1979. But for a few years in the 1960s, Knotts was the big-screen leading man he’d long dreamed of being, and it was all thanks to the contributions of some of The Andy Griffith Show’s key on- and off-screen talent. 

Even at the height of his theatrical stardom, Knotts never really left Mayberry behind. He continued to guest star on the show, and he and Griffith remained close friends until Knotts’s death in 2012 at the age of 81. “You guys don’t need anybody else,” Sammy Davis Jr. once told the pair in 1966 when they appeared together on his show and mostly kept to themselves while Davis and his friends socialized. “You’ve got each other.”

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