Louise Lasser for starring as the neurotic, unhappy housewife Mary Hartman in the serialized satire "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" appearing on the covers of "Newsweek", "People", and "Rolling Stone" during the run of the show. "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" aired five nights a week for two seasons from 1976-1977. In his autobiography, producer Norman Lear says that the casting of Lasser took less than a minute after Charles H. Joffe told him there was only one actress to play the part of Mary Hartman and Lear met the former Mrs. Woody Allen. Lasser refused the role at first. Of the casting process,
Gas-s-s-s ahead, write something, just keep the title."" "Gas-s-s-s" was an idea of Corman's, about a world where everybody over thirty had died. Corman later said "my first thought was to do a science fiction film with allegorical overtones." Armitage remembers the concept just being "a sentence, and that's what we went with ... He let you make it your own, and I did." Corman said that although "there was some good work in" Armitage's first draft, "the points I was trying to make in the script either did not come through or came through too obviously different parts, and it