Obituary: Alden Schwimmer (1925-2023)

“If I had to pick the three people who had the most to do with getting Star Trek into reality, they would be Gene Roddenberry, myself, and an agent at Ashley named Alden Schwimmer,” Oscar Katz, a Desilu vice president, once said. A prominent ten-percenter for above-the-line, behind-the-camera talent during television’s Golden Age, Schwimmer turns up in the origin stories not only of Star Trek but of The Twilight Zone, The Defenders, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, and Mission: Impossible. It’s a claim to fame that’s almost certainly unique, and Schwimmer, when he died on April 22 of last year at 97, had outlived nearly everyone else who had anything to do with putting those shows on the air.

The few surviving colleagues I could find remembered him with unqualified praise. “Alden was a very bright guy, very strong-minded. He certainly knew the agency business, knew how to judge character, knew how to make a deal,” said Jerry Leider, who joined the Ashley-Famous Agency in 1962. “He was an extraordinary agent. He was able to look after his own clients and also to run the agency.” Sandy Wernick, a veteran agent and manager who worked for Schwimmer at AFA in Los Angeles in the sixties, added in a statement: “What I remember most about Alden, who I consider to be one of my mentors, was his quiet strength and incredible sense of humor. He taught me all the basics of creating and packaging quality television.”

Born in Brooklyn on May 25, 1925, to a dentist and a homemaker, Schwimmer earned a purple heart in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest and worked as a disc jockey while attending New York University on the G.I. Bill. He entered the agency business as a client, sort of. An aspiring quipster, he persuaded the William Morris Agency to hire him as a messenger while, at the same time, repping him as a comedy writer. That hustle may have hinted at his true talents; although Schwimmer got at least one early job writing dubbing dialogue for foreign films acquired for US distribution, and saw a handful of his ideas and scripts bought and produced during and after his days as an agent, the money side of the business won out. He started at WMA as its “kinescope librarian” (where did that library end up?!) and in October 1952 became an agent in the syndication department.  Schwimmer’s name surfaces in the trade papers during that period as a “script editor” for Foreign Intrigue, an independently produced, syndicated espionage drama with European location shooting as its selling point. It was an indication of how blurred the lines were between agency representation and production in early television, an overlap that emerges as the through-line in Schwimmer’s career.

In 1955 Schwimmer moved from the gargantuan WMA to the boutique Ashley-Steiner agency, to run a department repping television writers, directors, and producers. He replaced, and inherited some clients from, Jerome Hellman, at 26 an even younger wunderkind who was promoted to A-S’s packaging department. Hellman would soon leave to run his own agency for a few years before becoming a major producer (Midnight Cowboy; Coming Home; The Mosquito Coast) and a minor director. That path was one that Schwimmer would emulate – or try to.

Ashley-Steiner was a new company founded by a dynamic young insider, Ted Ashley, a nephew of a senior William Morris executive. Ashley, who had anglicized his name from Theodore Assofsky, was only three years older than Schwimmer. Ashley-Steiner’s first clients included some of the early stars of live television, among them Gertrude Berg and Mike Wallace. When Schwimmer started at A-S, mid-tier writers (Alvin Sapinsley; Loring Mandel) and directors (Robert Stevens; Paul Stanley) were the agency’s bread and butter. The most lucrative clients for Schwimmer’s department became those television writers who had enough name recognition to be a commodity. Ashley-Steiner’s strategy was to move those names away from one-off teleplays and into, first, exclusive network contracts (principally at CBS), then lucrative screenwriting gigs and ongoing series, which promised weekly licensing fees and maybe a pot of gold at the end of the syndication rainbow. The top writers at Ashley-Steiner were turned into brands – an early iteration of the modern idea of the television showrunner/auteur.

For Reginald Rose, Ashley-Steiner negotiated fifty percent ownership (shared with CBS) of his show The Defenders, a jaw-droppingly favorable split in an industry that was still scheming to keep “created by” credits off of ongoing series in order to deprive pilot writers of big royalties. It was Schwimmer who suggested “The Defender,” a two-part live Studio One about father-and-son lawyers, as a salable premise from Rose’s back catalog. Even the independent company that made The Defenders, Herbert Brodkin’s Plautus Productions, didn’t make out on the show as well Rose did – although Ashley-Steiner also repped Brodkin, and cleaned up for him, too, unloading Plautus’s rather uncommercial back catalog on Paramount for the equivalent of $20 million in stock shares.  The Defenders, though it’s semi-forgotten today, was critical to Ashley-Steiner’s success in television – a multiple Emmy-winner as well as a minor hit, it established the agency’s credibility with the talent as well as the money men.

At some point Reginald Rose gently pointed out to Rod Serling that he had outgrown his agent, Blanche Gaines. Serling was picking up checks and reimbursing Gaines for long-distance calls: quit being a chump, Rose told him. Ashley-Steiner poached Serling and quickly put him together with William Dozier at CBS, which then bought an idea Serling had been floating for a while, without any takers. This was The Twilight Zone, and Serling, too, kept half the copyright to his creation. Later, Serling famously expiated his guilt over dumping Gaines in a Playhouse 90. It was Ashley and Steiner (or maybe Ashley and Schwimmer?) that Serling savagely fictionalized in “The Velvet Alley” as the corporate agents (played by Alexander Scourby and David White) who mock the Serling surrogate’s small-time ambitions. They tell him: “In this town, you’re either a giant or a midget.” A giant makes a quarter of a million dollars a year, and his agents want to make a giant of Ernie Pandish. The quotes that Schwimmer later gave to Serling biographer Joel Engel hardly sound any different from Serling’s dialogue in that scene: “He left Blanche because he needed a full-service shop – more than a mom and pop agency. That was the bullshit we gave him … I’m afraid that little lady in New York didn’t know how to do that, to package television shows and sell them and operate them after they’re on.”

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I should interrupt myself for a moment to explain the “package deal,” a term originally coined by the flashy super-agent Charles Feldman (back to him in a second), and a tactic perfected by Lew Wasserman’s MCA. Unlike poor, discarded Blanche Gaines, a large talent agency representing clients in different but complementary fields has the leverage to bundle the services of those clients in take-it-or-leave-it packages. Often the agency doing the packaging would take a commission on the deal on top of its 10% of the artists’ fees; Ashley-Famous, for instance, received 5% of the licensing fee paid from networks to studios to produce TV shows in the sixties. This was, obviously, a conflict of interest, but since it was an avenue for bringing clients into the financial big-time, artists tolerated it. Historians tend to ascribe credit for the origins of a show or movie to the creative people whose names appear on screen, or more loosely to the studio or network that distributed the finished product. Agents – who by the sixties usually practiced a Wasserman-derived ethos of maintaining a low profile in the press – are often omitted or marginalized in the creation myths. But, in many cases, they were pulling the strings.

When the Department of Justice forced the goliath MCA out of the agency business in the early sixties – MCA had been flagrantly self-dealing for a decade with its television production company Revue, and finally triggered an anti-trust investigation after it bought a movie studio (Universal) and a record label (Decca) – a seismic wave rolled through the talent side of the business. Ashley-Steiner was the major beneficiary. Ashley, who had already started buying up smaller agencies, picked up some twenty former MCA agents and about 300 of their clients, and soon merged with Feldman’s company Famous Artists. As its name promised, Famous added the last ingredient needed to elevate Ashley’s enterprise into the top rank – movie stars, including John Wayne, Ingrid Bergman, and William Holden, as well as film directors like Howard Hawks and George Stevens. Feldman soon sought a buyout to produce movies, leaving Ashley, barely 40, atop the third-largest talent empire in the industry.

Alden Schwimmer went west, young man, just prior to the merger, in 1961. Ashley dispatched him to Los Angeles to work under Steiner, who ended up being the major casualty of the reshuffling. In 1964 Steiner left with the agency with the usual consolation prize, a producing shingle, and Schwimmer was promoted to run the Hollywood office: Ashley’s top man on the Coast. While Ashley was often depicted in the press as the next big media mogul (a prophecy that came true), Schwimmer rolled his eyes at the trappings of show biz and kept a much lower profile (which makes it difficult, now, to document which pies he did or did not have a finger in). He complemented his boss. As Schwimmer’s son John put it, referencing a distinction made in L.A. Law-type legal firms, Ashley was the “finder” and Schwimmer was the “minder and grinder.”  

(A parenthetical parting wave to Ira Steiner, who started as a band booker in the thirties, like Lew Wasserman, and may have been to Ted Ashley what Jules Stein was to Wasserman, or Al Levy to David Susskind – the long-suffering mentor figure, cast aside or kicked upstairs by the protege. He ended up with only a single producing credit, on the Burt Lancaster western Valdez Is Coming, and died in 1985.)

By 1962, the bulked-up A-S-F roster read like a who’s who of television: Bob Banner (Omnibus; The Dinah Shore Chevy Show), David Dortort (Bonanza), Herbert B. Leonard (Route 66 and Naked City), William Self (Peyton Place and Batman). Ashley’s agents took over packaging The Ed Sullivan Show, talked Danny Kaye into doing television on a hit CBS variety hour, and rebooted that network’s faltering The Garry Moore Show by attaching Banner as its new showrunner. It was rumored that Ashley had helped to engineer James T. Aubrey’s ascent to the presidency of CBS, and that the network in turn favored his clients.

In Los Angeles, Schwimmer’s key client during this period was Norman Felton. British-born Felton, the longtime producer-director of the live Robert Montgomery Presents, had moved to Los Angeles, set up shop under the banner Arena Productions, and landed the job of reviving a dusty old MGM doctor movie franchise for television. Thanks largely to its hunky star, Richard Chamberlain, Dr. Kildare was a hit.

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On paper an indie outfit headed by a prominent creative, Felton’s Arena Productions can be better understood as a sort of front for Ashley-Famous. This was a common arrangment after MCA got trust-busted; Danny Thomas Productions and Dick Powell’s Four Star Productions, for instance, were not truly independent companies so much as they were packaging structures operated by the William Morris Agency. Bing Crosby Productions was operated in practice by the crooner’s agency, a relatively small one run by George Rosenberg, whose wife Meta – the prime mover in the company – even wrangled the creator credit on one BCP show, Breaking Point. It was that world in which AFA sought to gain ground.

At the beginning of the 1963-64 season, Ashley-Famous claimed credit for packaging ten prime-time series, out of fewer than 100. And the agency wasn’t just peddling flesh; as Albert R. Kroeger explained in a 1963 Television article: 

Selling shows is only one function of a big agency like A-S-F. It often creates the basic concept of a series, adds the elements of a writer, producer, director, performers, acts in business areas of ad agencies, sponsors, networks.  When a show is on, it services it, books talent, takes care of the many problems that can crop up.

For a dozen or more hit shows in the sixties, it was Schwimmer who did the servicing. The earliest ones came out of Arena. For NBC’s peacetime military drama The Lieutenant, Schwimmer put his client Gene Roddenberry, a writer of some good Highway Patrol and Have Gun – Will Travel episodes, together with Felton. Ashley-Famous also represented The Lieutenant’s star, Gary Lockwood, and the pilot director, Buzz Kulik: a typical package deal. Schwimmer also first hatched the idea, the week after Dr. No opened in theaters, of acquiring an Ian Fleming property for Felton to produce for American television. The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s creation story is convoluted – the initial Schwimmer pitch, a Fleming travelogue still in galleys called Thrilling Cities, appealed to no one, and Ashley and Jerry Leider from the New York office ended up as the Fleming whisperers for a thin premise (Solo) that Felton hired writer Sam Rolfe to developed into the U.N.C.L.E. series. 

Arena was Schwimmer’s first foray into television-indie sockpuppetry, and Ashley-Famous took credit for packaging its subsequent shows, the spinoffs The Eleventh Hour and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. and the World War II actioner Jericho. None of those were hits and Felton’s empire crumbled; his credits were undistinguished after the mid-sixties. Soon a bigger indie would prove more useful for the agency: Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions.

Run with some skill in its early days by Desi Arnaz, Desilu foundered after Ball divorced and ousted her abusive, alcoholic spouse and partner. Ball and her next spouse and partner, comedian Gary Morton, had no aptitude for developing projects, and stocked the company’s board and executive ranks with useless flunkies (including Ball’s brother Fred); by default, the primary decision-maker was Ball’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin. Desilu got by on studio space rentals to outside companies and a $600,000 slush fund from CBS, used to develop increasingly unsellable new shows. Apart from Ball’s eponymous sitcom, Desilu hadn’t launched a hit since The Untouchables in 1959, and didn’t sell a single pilot for the 1964-65 season. To a certain extent CBS was willing to throw money away to stay in the Lucy business, but some changes were in order.

On April 1, 1964, Variety reported that Oscar Katz, a loyal but expendable executive who had spent 26 years at CBS and been passed over for the top programming job by both Hubbell Robinson and Michael Dann, was leaving the network for a new job as Desilu’s executive vice president in charge of production. He also got a seat on Lucy’s board. Two weeks later, it was reported that Desilu had switched agencies, dropping General Artists Corporation (GAC) to become a client of Ashley-Famous.

At least that’s how the trade press characterized those moves for public consumption. Here’s how Alden Schwimmer explained it two decades later, in Patrick J. White’s The Mission: Impossible Dossier:

We needed a figurehead …. We never expected Oscar Katz to be a creative genius and he wasn’t.  He was a decent, honorable, intelligent man who knew what he could and could not do.  We brought Oscar in because we wanted a free hand there.  I didn’t want anybody as the head of Desilu who was going to give me trouble and tell me he didn’t like the project.

Schwimmer set up his own office at Desilu (perhaps only briefly; this may have been going a bit too far) and began spending that sweet, sweet CBS money on long-term contracts for AFA clients. Pink Panther producer Martin Jurow, comedy writers Cynthia Lindsay and Hal Goodman & Larry Klein, and all-purpose writer/producers Robert Blees, Allen H. Miner, and Norman Lessing, among others, signed to develop three pilots apiece, for a fee of $50,000 to $60,000. The purpose of the spring hiring spree seemed to be the August 18 Desilu shareholders meeting, at which Katz bragged that the company had 22 pilots in the works, five of which were being produced “in association” with one of the three networks. That implied an upfront investment and a likelier commitment to buy, but of the projects Katz mentioned by name only one – something Variety typo’d as “Tar Trek,” partly financed by NBC – would get on the air.

Herbert F. Solow, a Desilu executive who moved in on Katz’s territory and would replace him in 1966, liked “Schwim,” called him a “warm, intelligent, fair-minded New Yorker with a very urbane sense of humor,” but in his book Inside Star Trek Solow was very clear about what was going on here: Schwimmer was steering more lucrative jobs to the star clients (Solow called them “superwriters,” mentioning Rose, Serling, Howard Rodman, and sketch comedy guru Tony Webster as examples) and sticking Desilu with journeymen writers who could use a career boost.

Schwimmer, interviewed by White in the eighties, was also pretty frank about where the actual power resided:

There was a giant conflict of interest which had to be handled very delicately. If you represent one side of the deal (the writer), you want to get the best deal for him; if you also represent the buyer, you want to buy for as cheap as you can. You had to be a diplomat and know how to make everyone content that it was a fair deal for all parties …. It is very rare that an agent has the power to give his clients wonderful deals. That’s what I had, this Desilu money to spend on my clients. Obviously, the ultimate responsibility was to make something good come out of it, which I did, but it was a hell of a thing which I had going.

The good that came out of it began with Star Trek, an idea that had its origins during the period when Roddenberry and Felton were working on The Lieutenant at MGM. Roddenberry pitched a premise about a dirigible exploring the United States in the late 1800s, and Schwimmer has been credited with revamping the concept as science fiction, on the theory that the topicality of the Space Race would make it more commercial. Star Trek sold to NBC and limped along for three seasons – albeit with an afterlife that Schwimmer no doubt took pride in. But at the time, Ashley-Famous’s more obvious success was with another mid-level writer whose deal with Desilu, curiously, was never touted in the trades like the others: Bruce Geller.

Geller – a would-be musical-comedy lyricist; no wonder he and Schwimmer clicked – had been an Ashley-Famous client since 1958, a young writer who won some awards for experimental (by network TV standards) dramas he wrote or produced at Four Star in the early sixties. But he hit an infamous speedbump when CBS fired Geller two thirds of the way through a truly weird season of Rawhide; Schwimmer probably parked him at Desilu right after that career nadir, in early 1965. By the end of the year the cameras were turning on Geller’s first project there. At the height of Bondmania “spy stuff sells” may not have been an insight of towering genius, but someone had to make it, and so Schwimmer prodded a reluctant Geller (who knew those convoluted caper plots would be a chore to write) to dust off a last-days-of-Four Star outline called Briggs’ Squad that he’d conceived in imitation of the heist movie Topkapi. The retitled Mission: Impossible ran for seven seasons, and then Geller topped it with the following season’s private eye drama Mannix, which lasted for eight. Though it had a premise devised by credited creators William Link and Richard Levinson, Mannix likely rose from the ashes of The Outsider, a Geller/Mike Connors/Talent Associates package that AFA had nearly sold to CBS just before the Rawhide kerfuffle.

Though no one involved with the original Star Trek or Mission: Impossible could have imagined it at the time, the two franchises that are keeping Paramount in business during the present century have their origins at Desilu in 1966. And it’s not much of a stretch to say that Schwimmer sold both of those shows to himself. All roads lead to Alden: It was Schwimmer who found discarded bottom drawer ideas in Roddenberry’s and Geller’s files, and Schwimmer who hand-picked the executive who greenlit them at Desilu. Throughout the run of Star Trek, Schwimmer enjoyed “instant access” to Roddenberry. Schwimmer tweaked the initial premise of Star Trek, suggested its proposed spinoff “Assignment: Earth,” and when Roddenberry decided to cut his losses ahead of the show’s lame-duck third season, it was Schwimmer who engineered his exit, bringing in another client, Fred Freiberger, to take over hands-on production. Why, then, is Schwimmer a peripheral figure rather than a central one in every history of Star Trek?

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It’s hard to get one’s arms around just how many TV, and to a lesser extent film, projects Schwimmer touched during the sixties. AFA’s Beverly Hills office packaged the Lee Mendelson/Bill Melendez Peanuts specials and NBC’s Ron Ely-starring Tarzan series; indeed, Schwimmer, repping the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, secured Roddenberry’s first post-Star Trek paycheck for a Tarzan feature script that wasn’t produced. “Superwriter” Tony Webster was the original head writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and Ashley-Famous had a role in putting together The Carol Burnett Show and The Doris Day Show, too.

Finally there was Talent Associates. (Itself an agency that had shifted focus to TV production! It’s turtles all the way down.) This was initially a New York account; TA’s principal, David Susskind, had been with Ashley since the mid-fifties. But the demise of the anthology drama, and Jim Aubrey’s execution of East Side/West Side, Susskind’s expensive bid for Defenders-style prestige, left the company on the brink of bankruptcy.  Then – provocatively, also in April 1964, the same month Schwimmer installed Oscar Katz at Desilu – the comedy writer-producer Leonard Stern joined Talent Associates as a full partner and set up a beachhead on the West Coast. Stern launched two big hits right out of the gate – Supermarket Sweep (which mortified Susskind) and Get Smart – and turned Talent Associates around overnight. The subsequent sitcoms Stern created – Run Buddy Run, The Hero, The Good Guys, and the critically acclaimed He & She – were not hits, but at least the networks were buying them, and TA was viable enough by 1968 for the partners to sell the company (to Norton Simon), which was probably the goal all along. The pattern looks strikingly the same as with Desilu – infusion of new blood, revival, sale (for Desilu, too, was sold, to Paramount, around the same time, as soon as the Roddenberry and Geller shows got going). The trade papers did describe Run Buddy Run and The Hero as Ashley-Famous packages, and Alden Schwimmer and Leonard Stern were neighbors; their sons hung out together, often at tapings of Stern’s shows. But I can’t find a smoking gun to confirm my hunch that it was chiefly Schwimmer who rescued Talent Associates.

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Though he could have inherited many of Feldman’s celebrity clients if he’d wanted to, Schwimmer seems to have preferred his original wheelhouse, television, and left the starfucking to the former Famous agents. It’s easy to understand the appeal of television – it was comparatively less glamorous, but a bigger department and greater profit source for AFA than features. And Schwimmer, the hopeful gag writer, may have preferred the company of the agency’s more cerebral clients. He consistently turns up in books about his writers and their shows as a hands-on ally. Schwimmer was the sounding board for their gripes and their Mr. Fix-It for major and minor messes; Rod Serling, for instance, had trouble telling anyone no, so Schwimmer dutifully followed behind, undoing the verbal writing and speaking commitments that Rod let himself get dragged into at parties. He played practical jokes on Serling, bought Gene Roddenberry’s rock-tumbling equipment when Roddenberry tired of the hobby (or needed some quick cash), and owned a twin-engine airplane with Bruce Geller and another Ashley-Famous agent, Joel Cohen. By the time Geller crashed the Cessna and died in it, Schwimmer had sold his interest in the plane, but it still fell to him to call Jinny Geller and tell her she was a widow.

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The trajectory of Lew Wasserman was so propulsively toward studio moguldom that it was probably inevitable his closest imitator and successor would take the same path. In 1967 Ted Ashley sold his agency to Kinney National Service, a voracious media conglomerate recently born out of a mobbed-up parking lot franchise. Then he persuaded Kinney’s CEO, Steve Ross, to buy him a movie studio to run: Warner Bros. Like MCA, Ashley had to get out of the talent business, and he unloaded the agency on a big-time small-timer named Marvin Josephson (who would eventually merge the remnants of AFA into the mega-agency ICM). Ashley took Jerry Leider with him to Warners, and many assumed that Schwimmer would go too – Variety even announced it. But instead Schwimmer cashed out. The reasons why remained opaque to Leider, and even to Schwimmer’s son, although Leider agreed with my guess that Schwimmer must have had some sort of falling out with either Ashley or Ross during the transition. In any case, he entered the seventies with a lot of dough but little power and not enough to do.

Like most high-level agents or executives who lose out at corporate musical chairs, Schwimmer launched his own company, Cinema Video Communications, Inc., together with a pair of reliable creative hyphenates, Bruce Geller and Pink Panther auteur Blake Edwards, and a wild card: Harold Robbins, the vulgarian celebrity author of highly filmable hack novels. Robbins should have been a cash register, but his partners had trouble getting any work out of him. “Robbins was basically lazy and was interested in having fun,” Schwimmer told the novelist’s biographer. CVC announced a diverse slate of upcoming projects in the trades: three pilots for ABC, including the “family western” Kentucky Belle and a science fiction item called The Guardians; features adapted from David Chandler’s novel Huelga! (about Chicano migrant workers), Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man, and Cornelius Ryan’s The Peacemaker. That last one didn’t exist, and never would: Ryan, the author of The Longest Day, was a close pal of Robbins’s who was dying of prostate cancer.

The make-or-break property for the company was another unwritten book, Robbins’s forthcoming The Betsy, which CVC sold to Warner Bros. on favorable terms. But when the novel came out the reviews were scathing, even by Robbins’s standards, and Warners quickly canceled the deal, officially because CVC’s $4 million budget was too high. (Unofficially: Was it really because the book was crummy, which tended not to trouble Robbins’s target audience, or did Ted Ashley have some reason for sticking it to his old right-hand man?) Robbins blamed his partners and left the company. Edwards had already pulled out the year before. That left Schwimmer and Geller, who set up an original script by a pair of Mission: Impossible writers at United Artists, with James Coburn attached to play a professional pickpocket. Harry in Your Pocket was to be Schwimmer’s only producing credit, Geller’s only feature as director, and CVC’s last gasp. As a producer Schwimmer was to be an Ira Steiner, not a Jerome Hellman.

After that Schwimmer took a sharp turn so unusual that the Los Angeles Times ran a puff piece about it: “He Gives Up Show Biz For Life in a Courtroom.” Schwimmer went to law school in 1973, and spent much of the late seventies and early eighties as a practicing attorney – not negotiating entertainment contracts, as one might have expected, but prosecuting criminal cases for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. After that, he pursued his hobbies – boats, planes, sports, gadgets – with the drive of the dealmaker he’d once been, and still flirted with another Hollywood comeback. Along with penning a few scripts, Schwimmer took a job for an old client, Danny Arnold, as a producer on the Peter Boyle comedy Joe Bash (his daughter worked on the show, too). Had the series lasted for more than six episodes, Schwimmer might have spent his later years on studio lots.

One other project from his (semi-)retirement merits a mention: In 1980 Schwimmer and his wife Nina, an interior decorator, bought a plot of undeveloped land far up in the hills of Benedict Canyon and commissioned John Lautner to design a residence there. It’s a snazzy house, but it’s also kind of a shame that it’s almost all that comes up on the internet when you search Alden Schwimmer’s name.

Above: Alden Schwimmer is standing on the right; Ted Ashley is seated in the center; Hume Cronyn (of course) is holding the pipe; and is that Jerome Hellman at the top left? If so, the photo is likely from 1955-57. Alden Schwimmer portrait at the top is by (I think; it’s hard to read) Marquet, Forest Hills, N.Y. Photos courtesy John Schwimmer, who also supplied most of the biographical details about his father’s life before and after Alden Schwimmer’s agency career.

Playhouse 90 Redux

It’s time to fix something that’s been bothering me for (exactly!) ten years.

Presented below is the “writer’s cut” of a piece from 2014 that was mangled badly during the editing process.  If you had the misfortune to come across it in its bastardized form, then I hope enough time has passed so that the essay which appears below will seem fresh.

Between 2013-2016 I wrote sixteen feature articles for The A.V. Club, plus a handful of capsules for “listicles” by multiple contributors.  Before I throw anyone any further under the bus, I should clarify that my experience with the editing process was either positive or neutral on all but one of those full-length stories; and that overall I held the editorial staff in high regard (especially Emily St. James, who recruited me to write for AVC, and was not responsible for the revisions I objected to in this instance).  I left something cringeworthy in one of the “Random Roles” interviews and a junior editor did me a favor by taking it out.  My infamous Breaking Bad takedown was a contentious edit, with extensive notes from multiple staffers and a publication delay, but a ultimately a productive one.  Emily shielded me from the office politics (I found out later that one of the editors-in-chief was a Breaking Bad superfan who wanted to kill the piece entirely) and wrote something that made me realize the flaw that was setting people off was in the tone, not the content.  So I did a pass to soften any phrasing that was harsh or sarcastic, making the contrarian argument as neutrally as I could manage in the hope that readers would be more open to it that way.  Thanks to that note, the final draft was much better than the one I handed in, which is how it’s supposed to work.

But everything bad that can happen on a freelance assignment happened to poor Playhouse 90.  There were cuts for length that were probably justified, but still damaged the piece structurally; a short section was rewritten to alter its meaning, over my vehement objection; my own revision in response to those changes was submitted ahead of an agreed-upon deadline, but nonetheless ignored without explanation; and the “fact-checking” process introduced at least one embarrassing Wikipedia-sourced howler.  Although it was routine to request corrections post-publication, that error remains in the piece as published at AVC (See if you can spot it! Actually, don’t.), just because I was so livid that I didn’t trust myself to contact anyone on the staff for a month or so.

Because of the unsanctioned changes to the text, I effectively disowned the piece, opting not to promote it on social media or participate in the comments section (which was encouraged by AVC staff, and which I enjoyed).  I did acknowledge its existence obliquely, and buried a link to it, on this blog, only because I had prepared two sidebars (a listicle of parentheticals and footnotes that couldn’t fit into the main piece, and a brief interview with Playhouse 90 story consultant Joy Munnecke) that I was too vain to spike.

To give credit where it’s due, some of the editorial input was beneficial.  This version is therefore not my original draft; it’s a hybrid that reverses the unwelcome deletions and rewrites, but also incorporates some of my second-draft revisions.  I had no complaint with the headline The A.V. Club ran it under (I think the change was just to reduce the character count, which had a design-imposed limit), but the title below is what I submitted.

The 2014 version is still out there, albeit minus the embedded video clips and rendered partially into gibberish due to the sad, Spanfeller-era neglect of AVC’s archives, but my strong preference is that citations refer to this post instead.

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The super-sized dramatic anthology Playhouse 90 was an elegy for live television

by Stephen Bowie

More than any other single series, Playhouse 90 has come to represent the legacy of live anthology drama. Although most of its 134 episodes are frustratingly out of circulation, three of them have been revived over the years on PBS and home video, most recently as part of a Criterion DVD box. Rod Serling’s “Requiem For a Heavyweight,” which swept the 1957 Emmy Awards and put Playhouse 90 on the map in terms of critical acclaim, examines the aftermath of a punchy boxer’s last fight. Although it’s set in scuzzy gyms and bars, Serling finds a soft center: the heart of the story is the tentative romance between Mountain McClintock (Jack Palance) and the employment counselor (Kim Hunter) who tries to help him find dignity and purpose. Their scenes together, in which Palance reveals that the brutish-looking Mountain has a shy, sensitive soul, channel the emotional delicacy of Paddy Chayefsky’s Philco Television Playhouse segment “Marty,” which prior to the arrival of Playhouse 90 was widely acknowledged as the high-water mark of live television.

“The Comedian,” Serling’s adaptation of an Ernest Lehman story, stars Mickey Rooney in a terrifying, unhinged performance as the kind of nakedly narcissistic star (think Milton Berle or Jackie Gleason) that the new medium had minted in its formative years.  JP Miller’s “Days of Wine and Roses” was The Lost Weekend as a duet, a harrowing take on alcoholism in which heavy-drinking lovers (Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie) are torn apart as one gets sober and the other cannot. “Days of Wine and Roses” was eventually remade as a very good movie, as were “Requiem” and several other segments, including “The Miracle Worker” and “Judgment at Nuremberg.” The film versions have displaced the abandoned-in-the-vaults originals in our cultural memory, but Playhouse 90 came first.

“We had some stinkers,” said the author Dominick Dunne, who worked as a production coordinator on the series. “But when it was good, it was great.”

Act One: Program X

Playhouse 90 began as a pitch by Dr. Frank Stanton, CBS chairman William S. Paley’s formidable, forward-thinking right-hand man, during a brainstorming session for program ideas. But the project was developed by Hubbell Robinson, a CBS vice president who received no screen credit on Playhouse 90 but is often described as its creator.  Along with NBC’s Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, Robinson was one of the most vocal early advocates for quality television. The idea that the medium should aspire to some cultural significance, apart from its primary function as a source of revenue, became increasingly embattled in the late fifties, as popular cookie-cutter Westerns and situation comedies appeared to affirm an audience craving for unchallenging fare. With a wearying regularity, Playhouse 90 became the front line on that battlefield of culture versus commerce.

Developed under the placeholder title Program X, Playhouse 90 was an outgrowth of the ninety-minute and two-hour “spectaculars” that had been a fixation of Weaver’s at NBC.  Stuffed with all-star casts and often broadcast in color, the spectaculars were part of an ongoing arms race with the movies. Hollywood, its profits threatened by television, had rolled out CinemaScope and stereo sound, and now television was countering with bigger and better reasons to stay home. Both networks had created weekly series comprised of spectaculars (NBC’s Producers’ Showcase and CBS’s Ford Star Jubilee), but the material was usually light in nature: comedies, musicals, festivals of opera or jazz. It was Robinson’s inspiration to combine the scale of these programs with the gritty, “kitchen drama” aesthetic of the dramatic anthologies.

Robinson put out the welcome mat for underpaid artists. Teleplays would fetch $7500, and top directors who had been earning $400 a week could command $10,000 for a single Playhouse 90 segment. The show’s widely publicized, $100,000-per-episode budget was high enough that CBS had to enroll three or more sponsors, which necessitated a whopping nine commercial breaks. Episodes of Playhouse 90 feel choppy even by the  standards of modern network television’s forty-minute hour. Robinson and his newly-hired producer, Martin Manulis, had to break it to the writers that their three-act plays were about to become six-act plays, with a surfeit of artificial climaxes.

A sophisticated veteran of the New York theater, Manulis had a rare ability to earn the confidence of both the creative types and the network suits. Two years earlier, Manulis and his star director, John Frankenheimer, had rescued the live anthology Climax from a creative downward spiral that, er, climaxed with a broadcast in which an actor playing a corpse stood up and walked off the soundstage in full view of the camera. (CBS fired the original producer the next day.) It was Manulis who made Playhouse 90 a hit.

Act Two: Television City

Climax was the first major prime-time anthology broadcast live from Los Angeles, rather than New York City, from the beginning to the end of its network run. Playhouse 90 became the second and last. Although many of the “Golden Age” writers and directors looked down on the West Coast as the place where artists went to sell out, Los Angeles was a fait accompli. One of the reasons CBS had mounted the project in the first place was to get some use out of Television City, a new complex at Beverly and Fairfax that still stood mostly empty in 1956. For technophiles like Frankenheimer, the new studio was a kid’s toy box: a huge, state-of-the-art facility that could accommodate bigger sets and more cameras (four became the norm for Playhouse 90, but some episodes deployed as many as seven) than any television studio in New York.

Manulis set out to court the best of the newly famous television writers – and indeed all of them, save for Chayefsky and Gore Vidal, would eventually contribute to Playhouse 90 – and paid homage to them with an unprecedented “audio credit.”  (“Written especially for Playhouse 90!” the show’s announcer bellowed, even when a script hadn’t been.)  But the scale of the endeavor meant that the true auteurs of Playhouse 90 were the directors.  

Manulis gave Frankenheimer every third episode, and first choice of scripts. Alternating with him were another CBS contractee, Vincent J. Donehue, and freelancers Arthur Penn and Ralph Nelson, each hired for six segments.  Later Franklin Schaffner became the most prolific director after Frankenheimer, and George Roy Hill, Fielder Cook, Delbert Mann, Robert Mulligan, and Sidney Lumet joined the rotation. Most of these men leapt immediately from Playhouse 90 into feature film careers, and they would direct some of the best American movies of the following decade: The Manchurian Candidate, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Pawnbroker, Bonnie and Clyde, Planet of the Apes, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  If the “kitchen” school of television writing peaked somewhere around “Marty” (1953) or Serling’s “Patterns” (1955), live television as a visual medium did not reach its full potential until it moved into Television City.

Each director had his own hand-picked technical crew and, atypically for television, Manulis allowed the directors to select much of their own material.  Frankenheimer went on a literary kick and turned his favorite modern classics by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Odets, and Faulkner into Playhouse 90s.  “The Miracle Worker,” about Helen Keller and her teacher, was a passion project that Arthur Penn had tried to get made on earlier anthologies. In “Invitation to a Gunfighter,” a “Western without horses” (because, as story editor Del Reisman pointed out, horses had a habit of relieving themselves on camera), and “Portrait of a Murderer,” about the real-life killer Donald Bashor, Penn tries out innovative themes and approaches that would recur in his first film, The Left-Handed Gun, and Bonnie and Clyde.  “Portrait of a Murderer” makes extensive use of Bashor’s actual statements and a first-person camera to create a faux-documentary style that was decades ahead of its time.  Penn marveled at the “improvisatory aspect” of Tab Hunter’s performance as Bashor, citing an unplanned moment in which Hunter stops to pick up a basket of spilled laundry just after his character has committed murder.  It was a textbook case of how the immediacy of live television was meant to work.

But Frankenheimer set the style of Playhouse 90 more than anyone else.  Only twenty-six when the series debuted, Frankenheimer was a decade younger than most of the other directors.  He projected a total confidence that tended to win back many collaborators initially alienated by his brusque demeanor. “There was very little discussion, or leeway, with him,” said Reisman.  “That can be very effective, particularly for actors who are thinking, ‘Well, I’m not quite sure of this.’  Veteran actors accepted his direction.”

Frankenheimer projected himself into the work, literally. He composed shots by moving through rehearsals in place of the camera, so that actors were often startled to turn and find his face inches from their own. While Frankenheimer was justly lauded for his rich imagery – which favored wide-angle lenses and a blend of both long takes and complex cutting – in Playhouse 90 he also displayed a command of performance that was at best intermittent in his subsequent film career. The love scenes in “Winter Dreams,” a rich girl-poor boy romance adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, have a fervid delicacy; the last ten minutes consist of just the stars, John Cassavetes and Dana Wynter, murmuring to each other in front of a fireplace. Sterling Hayden, playing desensitized brutes awakened by love in two of Frankenheimer’s best episodes (“Old Man” and the visually dazzling science fiction piece “A Sound Of Different Drummers”), and Robert Cummings, totally unsympathetic as a cruel Air Force officer in “Bomber’s Moon,” created fearless critiques of masculine stoicism. And in the squalid motel-room set of “Days Of Wine And Roses,” Piper Laurie performed the screen’s definitive drunk scene, finessing precise notes of anger, seductiveness, self-pity, self-hatred, and a dozen other emotions.

The married Frankenheimer had brief but passionate affairs with Laurie during “Days” and with Janice Rule (memorably ferocious as a brilliant manic-depressive) while making the group therapy drama “Journey To The Day,” and at least an infatuation with Wynter (“perhaps the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen”), the star of “Winter Dreams” and another Frankenheimer segment, “The Violent Heart.” During rehearsals the author of “Days,” JP Miller, complained that Frankenheimer was neglecting Laurie’s co-star, Cliff Robertson, in order to fine-tune her drunk scenes, prompting producer Fred Coe to offer the director a witty critique: “You’ve got the wine, now see if you can get the roses.” But Laurie’s excellence in the broadcast affirmed the aptness of her director’s focus. Romances between great directors and their leading ladies (or men) are a cliche of the cinema, but the corporatized two- and five-day schedules of early television production rarely permitted them. That Frankenheimer and his actresses ended up channeling off-screen intimacy so productively into their work was a consequence of the artist-indulgent environment of Playhouse 90, which permitted directors and actors to spend weeks or even months preparing each segment. In many ways beyond its extended length, Playhouse 90 emulated the methods and the creative aspirations of feature filmmaking, bridging a gap between mediums that were much farther apart in the fifties than they are today.

As gripping as his best projects were, Frankenheimer also ended up directing treacly family fare like “The Family Nobody Wanted” and “Eloise” (based on the children’s book). If the main emphasis was on the “Marty” school of quality television, CBS still hedged its bets by insisting on occasional comedies and specials, like a color broadcast of George Balanchine’s ballet The Nutcracker for Christmas 1958 and, indefensibly, a “party” to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the film Around the World in 80 Days. (Who took home that payola?) Even though he felt the “excitement” was in original scripts, Manulis had no compunction about dusting off an old chestnut or two. “I tried to balance all the hifalutin stuff with Johnny Carson and Carol Channing doing Three Men on a Horse,” he said.

Ostensibly to give the live crews a rest, but probably to break up the challenging dramas with something more traditional (and cheap), CBS hired Screen Gems (and later Filmaster and Universal) to film some westerns and melodramas that would run about every fourth week. “They were dreadful,” said production supervisor Ralph Senensky. Most of the live Playhouse 90 staff tried to pretend the filmed shows didn’t exist, and CBS discontinued them after the second season.

Act Three: Summer Stock in an Iron Lung

For CBS, another part of the allure of Los Angeles was access to movie stars.  Stunt casting was a network mandate from the start, even inspiring the visual motif of the opening titles and interstitials: sponsors’ products, the rotating hosts (usually one or more stars of the following week’s episode, then in rehearsals), and sometimes even the principal actors themselves were introduced against a black backdrop surrounded by chintzy papier-mache stars dangling from above.

Playhouse 90’s casting director, Ethel Winant, was one of the most influential women behind the camera in early television; although she never received credit as such, Winant was in effect Playhouse 90’s “invisible producer” (in John Houseman’s words), advising on matters outside of casting and functioning as a liaison to the network. Winant mitigated the celebrity decree somewhat by casting against type as often as possible. “Ethel was really good about finding the other side of somebody,” said Manulis.

Stunt casting yielded some unexpected gems, like matinee idol Hunter (fortunately filling in for first choice Robert Wagner, whom Twentieth Century-Fox declined to loan out) in “Portrait of a Murderer,” oily sitcom star Cummings in “Bomber’s Moon,” singer Mel Torme as “The Comedian”’s spineless brother, and horror icon Boris Karloff as Kurtz in “The Heart of Darkness.” But just as many Playhouse 90s were sunk by a star shoehorned into the wrong part: comedic actor Tony Randall as a Gatsby-ish social climber in “The Second Happiest Day,” the veddy British Charles Laughton as a Polish rabbi in “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” and Jack Palance as a frail Jewish movie mogul in “The Last Tycoon” and a Spanish bullfighter in “The Death of Manolete.” Somehow Winant came up with smarmy musical comedy star Jack Carson for the role of a career military officer in “The Long March,” adapted from the William Styron novel. In an early scene Carson stumbled over the tongue-twister line “tank tactics,” and for the rest of the show he stammered constantly, looking like a deer caught in headlights and throwing off the other actors’ concentration.  

“The Long March” was one of Playhouse 90’s legendary on-air disasters, of which there were more than a few. “The Death of Manolete” was the most famous, thanks to Frankenheimer’s dubious judgment that a bullfight could be simulated with a pair of antlers mounted on a cart. The funniest occurred during “In Lonely Expectation,” a ensemble piece about the limited options faced by young women in a home for unwed mothers. At the climax, when one of the women decides to keep her baby and leave the home, the actress (Susan Harrison) tripped and dropped the “baby” (a doll, fortunately), which tumbled halfway down a tall staircase: thud, thud, thud. After an endless moment of stunned silence, someone picked up the doll and handed it to Harrison, and the actors tried to carry on as if nothing had happened. “Well, there goes the rerun,” quipped the technical director.

The pressure involved in mounting a show under those conditions was, of course, enormous. The analogy everyone loved to use – Frankenheimer attributed it to the character actor Sidney Blackmer – was “summer stock in an iron lung.” Only adrenaline junkies thrived making Playhouse 90. It’s no coincidence that the generation that came of age in live television was also the generation that had fought World War II – Serling had been a paratrooper, Penn a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, Hill a bomber pilot who liked to compare the television control room to a cockpit. The war was Playhouse 90’s favorite subject: at least fifteen segments were set during World War II or its immediate aftermath. Even “The Comedian” (one of many episodes about Playhouse 90’s second favorite subject, television itself) has the war buried deep inside: its protagonist, a surrogate for Serling, is an insecure comedy writer who plagiarizes a script left behind by a buddy killed in combat.

Act Four: Target For Three

Martin Manulis burned out after two years. Playhouse 90 was a seven-day-a-week job, in which Sunday afternoon story conferences around Manulis’s pool were the closest thing to a respite. After Manulis quit in 1958, he would always brag that it took three men to replace him.

Those three men were superstars of live television: Fred Coe, who had pioneered the idea of commissioning original dramas for television on The Philco Television Playhouse; John Houseman, a founder of the Mercury Theatre, later famous in his acting role as The Paper Chase’s Professor Kingsfield; and Herbert Brodkin, an iron-willed up-and-comer who would go on to produce Emmy winners like The Defenders and Holocaust. Coe and Houseman were contracted to handle half a dozen segments each of Playhouse 90’s third season. The bulk fell to Brodkin, augmented with contributions by a handful of one-shot guest producers.

Manulis predicted that, under split authority, Playhouse 90 would lose some of its variety, as the three producers competed to produce the most significant, serious episodes. That’s precisely what happened – and, if anything, it made the series even better. All three of the new producers were New Yorkers who had produced “kitchen drama” anthologies as well as spectaculars, and to a certain extent they shifted the series back toward a model of small-scaled, character-driven works. Reginald Rose contributed “A Marriage of Strangers,” his answer to “Marty,” in which a fortyish man and woman (Red Buttons and Diana Lynn) marry just because they’re afraid of growing old alone. Steven Gethers’s keenly observed “Free Weekend” found a cross-section of middle-aged regret in the unlikely occasion of a summer camp parents’ visit. Some of Brodkin’s segments were so intimate that they were dwarfed by the size of the Playhouse 90 format – but even that, in a perverse way, served as a defiant tribute to a fading mode of television drama.  

Brodkin’s preoccupation with the holocaust led to two bold, sprawling anti-fascist dramas, both starring Maximilian Schell and directed unsparingly by George Roy Hill: “Judgment at Nuremberg” and the lesser-known, but superior, “Child of Our Time,” a parable about a boy who wanders Europe during the war, neglected or abused by institutions of authority (the nazis, the communists, the church) as they occupy themselves with the “adult” business of genocide. Houseman produced the similarly allegorical “Target For Three,” a suspenseful assassination story notable for presenting Latin American revolutionaries in a heroic light during the same year that Castro seized Cuba, and the amazing “Seven Against the Wall,” a docudrama about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Boasting a cast of fifty speaking parts (last-billed, as “Pete’s girl”: Louise Fletcher) and spilling over into a second studio, it was the ideal project for Franklin Schaffner, an uneven director whose skill for taming massively-scaled shows anticipated the best films he would go on to direct, Planet of the Apes and Patton.

Act Five: Gas

The network interference began in the first episode, “Forbidden Area,” a pulpy Cold War story adapted by Serling from a Pat Frank novel. CBS compelled Manulis to recast the voice of the U.S. president, because the original actor sounded too much like Adlai Stevenson, then a candidate for the office. Actually, it started even before that: “Requiem For a Heavyweight,” unmistakably a better script than “Forbidden Area,” was slotted as the series’ opener until a CBS executive decided it was too depressing. Censorship had always dogged the live dramatists who pushed the envelope, but Playhouse 90 was a bigger target than ever before. The executives watched rehearsals on video monitors in their offices. “It was a very Big Brother kind of thing,” said Frankenheimer. “A network executive’d come down with notes, and you did what they said.  You fought up to a degree, but when you lost, you lost.”

Manulis had hoped to play the multiple sponsors against each other and keep any one of them from exercising too much control over the show, but the opposite happened. “They ganged up on us,” he said. “They chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer.” “It” in that instance was Serling’s “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” a confrontational fictionalization of the death of Emmett Till, the black Mississippi teen who was murdered after he (allegedly) whistled at a white woman. The sponsors’ objections forced Serling to change an interracial romance to a flirtation, the lynching victim to a Latino, and the setting of the story to the Old West. Only four days before airtime, one sponsor, Allstate, delivered another blow: as insurance companies were unenthusiastic about people, even bad ones, offing themselves, the climactic suicide of the killer (Rod Steiger) had to be eliminated. “A script has turned to dust,” Serling punned.

The most troublesome sponsor was the American Gas Association (a trade organization for regional household natural gas suppliers, which in the ad segments billed itself not by name but, presumptuously, as “Your Gas Company”). During the second season the AGA had wanted Donald Bashor’s climactic trip to the gas chamber excised from “Portrait of a Murderer.” In that confrontation, Manulis prevailed. But “Judgment at Nuremberg” contained multiple references to the gas chambers used to murder Jews in the concentration camps, and the utility balked. Perhaps the phrase “death chamber” could be used instead? Brodkin and Hill refused to make the change, and the network countered by threatening to mute the word “gas” every time it was spoken on the air. Anyone else would have compromised at that point, but Brodkin – whose stubbornness and contempt for authority were legendary – let them do it. Although Hill was scapegoated and never directed Playhouse 90 again, Brodkin won a Pyrrhic victory. The deletion of the word was so obvious that the press took note, and raked CBS over the coals for what stands as perhaps the most craven and notorious incident of fifties television censorship.   

Act Six: Old Man

In the fall of 1958, Frankenheimer began rehearsing Horton Foote’s adaptation of the William Faulkner story “Old Man.” The old man of the title was the Mississippi River, which Frankenheimer set out to recreate indoors. A gigantic water tank was constructed on Stage 43 for the scenes in which the river overflowed its banks and sent the main characters, a chain gang laborer (Sterling Hayden) and a pregnant woman (Geraldine Page), on a waterlogged odyssey. The tank was so heavy it cracked the foundation of the studio. “We’ll drown the actors,” worried Frankenheimer. The solution: cancel the live broadcast and shoot it all on videotape. 

Although tape had already supplanted kinescopes as the method for recording the show’s live episodes for posterity, the difficulty of editing videotape had prevented it from being used to pre-record episodes. “Old Man” broke that barrier. “I made the first splice ever done on tape,” Frankenheimer recalled. “We had no instruments to cut it; we cut the master with a single-edged razor blade.” Instantly, everything changed. It helped that “Old Man” was triumphant, the quintessential Frankenheimer show. The director’s bold compositions concealed the artifice of the studio-bound tempest and zeroed in on the vulnerable performances at the center of the chaos. Most of Frankenheimer’s remaining episodes, as well as others from the third season and nearly all of the fourth, were pre-taped.

The “liveness” of Playhouse 90 had always been fungible; most episodes made use of filmed or taped inserts of scenes that couldn’t be staged live. The first season’s “The Comedian” contained forty such cues. But the directors quickly realized that shooting entirely on tape, although superficially similar to a live staging, removed all the urgency. Composer Jerry Goldsmith, who scored the many of the live episodes by conducting an eighteen-piece orchestra on an adjacent soundstage, said, “I felt the energy drop out of the performances, and it’s never been back.” Videotape was like the atom bomb – someone would have made it eventually – and during the sixties and seventies it would provide a lifeline for Playhouse 90’s few close successors, dramatic showcases like CBS Playhouse and PBS’s Visions, niche projects that would’ve been too expensive to do on film. But, just as J. Robert Oppenheimer had some second thoughts about his contributions to that other endeavor, Frankenheimer and Foote often lamented, in interviews over the years, their role in killing the medium they loved.

Playhouse 90, in any case, was after three years dying an actual death as well as an aesthetic one. The ratings had declined over time and, with $4 million of ad time left unsold, cancellation after the third season seemed certain. Hubbell Robinson engineered a fourth-season reprieve, but that was truncated at the end of 1959, after James Aubrey assumed the presidency of CBS and forced Robinson out. Aubrey, an especially rapacious and cutthroat executive, programmed shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and openly scorned anything highbrow. Immediately, Playhouse 90 was deprived of its regular timeslot, the episode order was cut, and the taped shows already in the can were rescheduled as occasional “specials.”

“Networks destroy things, you know,” said Herbert Brodkin. “It couldn’t be allowed to go unscathed. Too good for television. It had to be destroyed.”

A handful of hour-long anthologies – The U.S. Steel Hour; Armstrong Circle Theatre – limped into the early sixties, but when Playhouse 90 ended everyone knew the party was over. Critics rightly celebrate the series as a pinnacle; they less often notice that it was also an elegy. As it assembled the best and brightest of live drama, Playhouse 90 gradually undercut – or outgrew – what made their work unique. In its lavish budgets, its emphasis on celebrity, its cinematic aspirations, its shift away from liveness, the show sowed the seeds of its own obsolescence. After Playhouse 90, live television had nowhere left to go.

2023 Reading Roundup

The best new teevee-related book that I read last year was Patrick Stewart’s Making It So: A Memoir.  Wince-inducing title notwithstanding, it’s about as far from the anecdote-after-anecdote, ghost-written-plot-summary-padded celebrity victory lap that I expect by default whenever I pick up a big star’s autobiography.  Stewart writes about his real-life adversities, from his abusive, alcoholic father to the affair with a Star Trek guest star (Jennifer Hetrick, who recurred as a love interest for Captain Picard) that broke up his family, with a thoughtfulness that makes those stories as compelling as good fiction.  Writing about yourself with candor and insight isn’t that hard – any glib egomaniac can entertain a reader that way for a few hours – but what Stewart pulls off here, a rich, literary evocation of the time and place that produced him, is much rarer.  The actor was an avid, if not always humble, learner, genuinely curious about art and other people, and his prose exudes that quality in an infectious way.

Out of the hundreds of television professionals I’ve interviewed, maybe only three (Norman Lloyd, Del Reisman, and Ralph Senensky, for the record) have had what seemed like total recall, and Stewart might belong in that company.  His evocation of the nondescript Yorkshire town where he grew up in poverty – he devoured the classics in an outhouse, the only place he could find any peace and quiet – was so vivid and flavorful that I plugged the address of the Stewart family’s modest row house, 17 Camm Lane (still there), into Google Maps and spent a bit of time wandering virtually through the streets of Mirfield, which appear almost unchanged since the teenaged Patrick roamed them.  Reading Making It So is like walking around in a vintage Ealing or Rank movie, or maybe even one of Terence Davies’s trapped-in-amber recreations of the past.  The poetry of Davies may not be on these pages, but the descriptive clarity certainly is.  I was sad to see Mirfield recede into the past as Stewart launched upon his career, thinking we’d inevitably end up in more familiar territory, but no: his journey through regional, touring, and finally the most prestigious of Shakespeare companies supplies an equally fascinating glimpse inside an unfamiliar world.  Even if this account were written by someone you’d never heard of before, you’d want to read it.

A minor detail that stayed with me is that Stewart is a car buff – an amateur racer who was more impressed with Paul McCartney’s MG than with Paul himself when he met the Beatle in 1964, and who decades later tooled around L.A. in a vintage Jag, shaking his fist at the traffic, at a point when he’d had enough success to hire a driver if he wanted to.  Gene Roddenberry and Paramount’s colossal misread of Stewart wasn’t just cultural – the shiny pate as a signifier of middle age (I’m older, incidentally, than Stewart was during the first few months in which he played Picard); the intimidating RSC pedigree and the English accent, the populist aspects of the former and the Northern undertones of the latter both lost on your average American – it was a fundamental misunderstanding of his personality.  This was not a captain who was going to sit behind a desk, and if the producers hadn’t yielded and let the star’s alpha energy shape the character, I’ll bet Jean-Luc Picard wouldn’t have lasted much longer than Tasha Yar.

Stewart’s oft-repeated Star Trek: The Next Generation origin story of arrogant priggishness loosened up by his fun-loving castmates is front and center here and, as usual, it scans more as a subtle reassertion of who’s boss – leadership through grace rather than force – than the exercise in self-deprecation it pretends to be.  Also repeated from many an interview, and couched within a superficially respectful portrait, are the subtle digs at Roddenberry, more interested in talking about golf than Stewart’s problem of bringing his character to life; Sir Pat was a good fencer in Shakespeare school, and he’s still deft with the blade.  (And he validates my pet theory that golf is a great tell for exposing presumably interesting people – Sean Connery, Bill Murray, Barack Obama – as bores.)  Like most of us, Stewart is the hero of his own stories; he clearly enjoys stardom, and I suspect he craved fame, and sought the center of attention even before he had achieved it.  Yet somehow the modesty that is his default stance in Making It So doesn’t feel feigned.  I’d surmise this is because Stewart is the atypical actor who has his shit together, who figured out who he was as a person before he had success in his profession.  But then maybe that’s my fundamental misread; if I ever hang out with him (and frankly, I’d like to), I reserve the right to decide that he’s insufferable, and just cannier than most at playing a down-to-earth bloke.

As for the topics the fanboys will make a beeline for – Dune, Star Trek, the X-Men franchise – Making It So is candid but undeniably perfunctory.   At times, Stewart’s efforts to engage with his most famous credits are hilariously perfunctory, as when he settles in for a full ST:TNG marathon, inviting the reader to re-watch along with him, then gets bored after covering three or four episodes (including such milestones as “11001001”) and meanders, without ever getting back on track, into several affectionate pages on guest star David Warner, whose mid-sixties stage Hamlet had a huge influence on the future Sir Pat.  If your only reaction to this endearing book is to get mad about Stewart’s comparative disinterest in the projects that made him famous, well – look, when I watched William Shatner’s “Get a life” sketch on Saturday Night Live, I didn’t see the humor in it at all.  How dare Captain Kirk dismiss his legacy and his fans (meaning me) with such a thoughtless, self-indulgent gesture?  I was furious!  The thing is, though, I was ten years old.

At the other end of the celebrity memoir spectrum, and somehow bearing an even worse title, sits To the Temple of Tranquility … And Step on It!, by character actor Ed Begley, Jr., whose nearly sixty years in television stretch from My Three Sons to Better Call Saul.  First of all, I’m still processing the revelation that Ed Begley pere could, as they say, get it: that the growly character actor who looked 68 when he was 48 (his age when Ed, Jr. was born) was a serial philanderer who enjoyed longterm relationships with several much younger women.  One of them, an NBC page, was Ed’s mother, although nobody bothered to tell Junior this until he was a teenager and the woman was dead.  Juicy as that is, it’s all downhill from there, as Ed loses the thread of his perhaps-parental-trauma-triggered slide into addiction and undistinguished acting, both of which he overcame in the early eighties (via AA and some good teachers, respectively), for a series of self-indulgent forays into name-dropping and star-fucking.  Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando and Eve Babitz and Ed Ruscha and many more are in here, but Begley finds little of substance to say about them.  Begley’s laudable social and environmental activism presents itself mainly in the form of rueful “yeah, I’m THAT guy” quips; when Cesar Chavez turns up, all we learn about him is that Chavez somehow managed to tolerate the presence of Ed Begley, Jr.  The one insight I’ll retain from this book is that Victor Ehrlich – the talented but preening, glib, and unbearably obnoxious doctor Begley played with great verve on St. Elsewhere, his breakout success – barely existed on the page when Begley was cast; the writers assured him that they would build up the character in response to his performance.  Talk about telling on yourself.

Speaking of St. Elsewhere: Because it’s slim, badly copy-edited, and from a tiny publisher, I assumed Bonnie Bartlett Daniels’s Middle of the Rainbow would be just a footnote to her somewhat better-known husband William Daniels’s thorough and very entertaining 2017 autobiography, There I Go Again.  Call me sexist, then, because Bonnie’s account is just as vital as Bill’s.  It is legitimate, I think, to look at them as complementary, perhaps best read in tandem, and not just because Bartlett (unlike in her acting work) adds her married name to her byline.  I remember There I Go Again as a terrific read, honest and mature, but Bartlett is so unsparing in her depiction of her spouse – his emotional repression and unthinking sexism, his phony New England-ish accent (an affectation adopted off- as well as on-screen), the infidelity and alcoholism that led to their move to Los Angeles and the revival of her dormant screen career – that I felt the urge to go back and see how much of all that Daniels had fessed up to.  (I did check to see if Daniels mentioned the affair, with an unnamed Broadway producer, that almost split the couple up in the late sixties or early seventies.  It’s not in there, and in that and other instances, it’s hard to intuit whether Daniels was being discreet about details that might have embarrassed Bartlett, or if Bartlett is punishing Daniels for soft-pedaling his bad behavior in a way that cast her own choices in an unflattering light.)

Like Daniels, and pretty much every other performing artist active in the immediate post-war era, Bartlett spent a lot of time in analysis, and that experience informs her perspective on her personal life as well as, I suspect, her approach to her craft.  If Daniels’s domineering stage mother provided his foundational trauma, then Bartlett’s seems to have been a father who was inappropriately sexual around his kids.  In the family tradition, Bartlett herself teeters on the verge of oversharing on matters of intimacy, but her still-seething contempt for the various industry men who harassed her (and worse) feels earned and timely – even though, maddeningly, she opts in most cases not to divulge their identities, even of the Edge of Night co-star who raped her at the peak of her early stardom in television.  A shame that this fellow will go to his grave, or already has, with his legacy untarnished.

Julia Bricklin’s concise and very useful biography of Hannah Weinstein is the first new book in a while that belongs on your blacklist shelf – wait, you do have one, right?  My fellow blacklist nerds will recognize Weinstein as the impresario behind Sapphire Films, which kept many of the best blacklisted writers gainfully employed, amid a tangled thicket of noms-de-plume, on several action series made on the cheap in England between 1955 and 1960. Those shows, especially the first one, The Adventures of Robin Hood, were configured on purpose to incorporate some basic leftist tropes (steal from the rich, etc.) while remaining ideologically po-faced enough to sell to American networks.  I can’t attest to how much lefty propaganda Waldo Salt, Ian McLellan Hunter, Ring Lardner, Jr., and others may have smuggled into Weinstein’s quintet of derring-do half-hours; I hope it was a lot, but I confess I’ve been defeated by the talky, formulaic storytelling any time I’ve taken a whack at them.  Most recently it was the swashbuckler The Buccaneers, and I lasted exactly three episodes, even with pirate captain Robert Shaw on board.  (Get it?  “On board”?  Because boats.)  Four Just Men, the last Weinstein series to launch and the only one with a contemporary setting, remains untouched but close to hand, thanks to the DVD set from Network Distributing, the abrupt collapse of which – sorry for the digression, Hannah – was a major blow to anyone interested in British television history, and certainly the biggest bummer (even more than the end, apart from streaming, of Netflix) in a year of depressing milestones in the home video landscape.

Anyway: The handful of producers who stuck their necks out and succeeded in throwing work to starving leftist writers in the fifties and early sixties are a fascinating lot.  They’re often mentioned in the artists’ accounts of the era but none of them has been at the center of one until now.  Charles Russell, the failed Hollywood actor turned New York CBS staffer who kept a different constellation of writers (including Walter Bernstein and Abraham Polonsky) working in secret on live shows like Danger and You Are There, is probably more asterisk-famous than Weinstein, just because that tale was turned into a popular movie, Martin Ritt’s The Front.  I’d love to know more about the unlikely profile in courage that was Russell, who after his one great moral triumph slid into an epic personal and professional decline.  Yet Weinstein’s story may be even more compelling, if only because she did it backwards and in high heels.

If Weinstein has been unjustly neglected by blacklist historians, it’s probably less because of her sex than because she seemed to come out of nowhere.  Neither a Hollywood or a Broadway figure but a labor organizer and political operative, Weinstein fled the US with her three daughters (but not her husband, who bailed as soon as HUAC circled) and learned everything she needed to know about production by hanging around a few French film sets.  It wasn’t, but she certainly made her entry into television producton look easier than anyone else ever did.

At first Bricklin’s book is a little dry, at least relative to its hot-stuff title – Red Sapphire! – and part of that may be because she had no access to relatives or family accounts and thus confines herself to a uniformly external perspective on Weinstein and her work. (Indeed, if I’m interpreting a few cryptic asides correctly, Bricklin may have faced active opposition to a more authorized biography.  She even seems, and perhaps I’ve simply been infected the paranoia of the McCarthy era here, to have avoided mentioning Weinstein’s daughters by name as much as possible; one of them, Paula, whose fame as a movie producer has far eclipsed that of her mother’s, is listed in the index exactly once.)  This proves less of a handicap than you’d expect, although I think it’s at the root of my only major qualm about Red Sapphire, which is an inclination (signaled in the introduction by some wide-eyed and already dated asides on Trump and 1/6) to smooth over distinctions between Weinstein’s radical activism and the liberal mainstream.  In the maddening absence of sources charting Weinstein’s own intellectual evolution, Bricklin’s evident disapproval of Soviet communism (a position ultimately adopted by a majority of blacklistees, but by no means all of them) risks standing in for her subject’s point of view.  Who knows; Weinstein was a pragmatist, and she may well have joined the Vote Blue No Matter Who crowd had she been unfortunate enough to live into the current century.  But would she really have seconded Bricklin’s brief, dismissive assessment of Henry Wallace’s 1948 third-party presidential run – which, in her most high-profile pre-television job, Weinstein managed and may have been the real power behind – as having “suffered from ill-defined, or mixed, or even absent messaging”?  To my mind, the Wallace campaign is one of the most optimistic moments in American electoral politics.  But we simply don’t know what conclusions Weinstein chose to draw from its defeat.

Overall, Bricklin’s research is impressively thorough, and her assessments of her subject are cogent and even-handed (especially with regard to the perennial conundrum of the blacklist-breakers, that is, whether they were acting on principle or exploiting top talent at bargain rates).  The course she charts through the convoluted backstory of Weinstein’s unique operation clarified my previously vague understanding of how it came into being and worked in practice.  This was, after all, a British company making television for the American market, with British actors and crew, financed by British entrepreneurs and produced by an American, and written clandestinely by American writers.  Those writers were, in one of the book’s most compelling strands, creatively frustrated by their remoteness from the set and susceptible to paranoia and irritation over the labyrinthine process devised to protect their anonymity (and Sapphire’s foreign sales): every story memo and paycheck had to pass through an absurd Rube Goldberg relay of multiple intermediaries.  One source Bricklin and I shared, the writer Albert Ruben, who was a story editor at Sapphire early in his career, threw up his hands when I presented him with a list of Robin Hood’s pseudonymous credits and asked if he could decode them.  Bricklin was more tenacious with Ruben, and resourceful in response to the problem that nearly all of Weinstein’s other collaborators died before she began work.  Her solution was to track down the children of many of them and press them for second-hand memories, and she incorporates this material into her work more persuasively than I would have thought possible.  (Bricklin also makes excellent use of Weinstein’s FBI file.)  The story of Sapphire eventually turns into a colorful and dramatic one, worthy of screen treatment as a distaff The Front, in which our heroine finds an enchanted forest (actually a woodsy Surrey estate that Weinstein bought and turned into both a residence and a production center, so that she in fact lived among her rubber-armored knights and their flesh-and-blood horses for a time) and runs afoul of a most dastardly villain, who casts her out of it.  (I’m not going to “spoil” that last part.)

Although the Robin Hood section is detailed (even to excess; a ten-page chapter describing a press junket to the real Sherwood Forest seems to exist more because Bricklin found a thorough account of it than because of the event’s significance), there’s a bit of just-get-it-done fatigue following the collapse of Sapphire.  Weinstein’s portfolio as a film producer was modest but it includes a masterpiece, John Berry’s Claudine, and it’s a big disappointment to see that film summarized in a paragraph.  The next ten years of Weinstein’s life – comprising her only other film credits, a pair of Richard Pryor vehicles, and then her death in 1984 – receive only two paragraphs.  If a mother lode of the Weinstein family’s archives ever opens, I hope Bricklin will get the chance to revise and expand her chronicle.

And, some quick takes ….

• Sideways thumbs were verboten for Siskel and Ebert but they aren’t for me, and that’s where I landed on Matt Singer’s Opposable Thumbs.  Singer compiles a lot of funny anecdotes about the production of the show and a detailed account of its gradual evolution toward the argumentative format that seems inevitable only in retrospect.  But the rest feels a bit redundant if you’ve read Ebert’s excellent memoir Life Itself and recall the copious media tributes to both critics following their cruel deaths from cancer.  Instead of the exhaustive appendix of all the films the pair (p)reviewed that I was hoping for, the last 25 pages comprise foofy capsules of sleepers the boys thumbs-upped into prominence; it’s typical of the book’s not-quite-obsessive-enough approach.

• Joel Thurm is gay but his memoir Sex, Drugs, and Pilot Season still manages to be homophobic, as well as misogynistic and consistently crass.  The veteran casting director opens by insulting one of the stars he takes credit for discovering (David Hasselhoff), and describes sexual encounters with the likes of Rock Hudson and Robert Reed with leering romance-novel cliches.  Around the medium-spicy gossip, Thurm paints a comprehensive, convincing portrait of the studio and network politics around casting in the seventies and eighties, but it’s not worth hanging around inside this self-absorbed Hollywood striver’s head for that long.

• Late to the party and dripping with flop sweat, Peter Biskind’s Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV is at least the fifth book I’ve read about HBO and/or television’s 2000s “Golden Age.”  This endless, unfocused sheaf of trees that should still be alive follows exactly the same blueprint as its predecessors of mythologizing or de-mythologizing whichever toxic auteurs, anti-hero(ine) cable dramas, and self-aggrandizing studio execs are in or out of favor with a given author.  Enough already….

• Maureen Ryan’s appalling Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call For Change in Hollywood unearths some significant scoops about workplace harassment (and worse) on recent TV shows, but recounts them in a colloquial, almost jokey, tone, surrounded with frivolous first-person asides.  The sources who shared their trauma with this reporter should be furious that she chose to center herself in their narratives.

• I’ve never watched an episode of a post-Dark Shadows daytime soap and I probably never will, but my friend Tom Lisanti’s Ryan’s Hope: An Oral History is a very digestible primer on what it was like to work in TV’s most under-documented subculture during its heyday.

Sidebar: Robert Butler on Shane

When I was researching this piece on Shane in 2018, I reached out to the director of the first episode, Robert Butler, via my friends at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where Butler was a familiar presence at screenings.  At the time Butler was one of two surviving Shane directors – the other, Gary Nelson, died in 2021 – but his contributions to “The Distant Bell” were clearly of outsized import in setting the tone of the show.  Even though, as Bob explained, this assignment largely preceded Butler’s reputation as a go-to pilot director, and the Shane premiere wasn’t technically a pilot anyway.

My initial hope was that Butler would have a lot of stories to tell about his collaborators on Shane and the filming of “The Distant Bell,” but in fact he remembered little about the making of it.  What Bob did do, though, was pay a visit to UCLA to screen the film again in preparation for our interview.  As a result, our conversation became a fascinating exercise in which Butler critiqued his own work of more than fifty years ago.  Although they lack the detailed recall and juicy anecdotes of Butler’s comprehensive Archive of American Television oral history, I think his remarks are of some interest.

What were your thoughts after you watched your Shane episode again?

Well, they were mixed.  It was generally really high quality stuff.  It seemed a little too good, a little too classy, which would come from Brodkin, obviously, when I think about the traditional westerns.  Maybe a little too surprising for traditional television.  The western hits that were kind of dying at that time, I think of the Warner Bros. westerns, were pretty on the nose and pretty usual and pretty expected and unsurprising.  The exception being Gunsmoke, which was generally very fine.  I thought Shane – that single episode, because I don’t remember many of the others – my wife and I watched them kind of religiously, and we thought the stories were very classy, and I remember particularly an episode where a young senator woos the widow, which was an extremely good episode, I thought.  David Shaw was certainly a good guy, and I remember Denne Petitclerc as being a really creative guy.

Were you already well-known as a pilot director when you were hired to direct the first episode of Shane? Was Brodkin in essence hoping to give the premiere the feel of a pilot?

I don’t think quite yet.  I don’t know the dates on Hogan’s Heroes, which would have been the first pilot I actually directed.  The Defenders preceded Batman, so, yeah, Brodkin wouldn’t know me as a pilot director, he would know me as a damn good assistant [on Playhouse 90] and then as a very good episode director on The Defenders and on the English show [Espionage].  So when Shane came along it would be terrific of him to ask me to do the first episode, since there was no pilot.  He said, incidentally, after a few days’ dailies on The Defenders, he said, “Well, Butler, you’re going to have to move to New York.”  Which was him saying he wanted me to work for him a lot.  Obviously I have a lot of respect for Brodkin.  I owe him a lot, actually.  He had a very technically green, untried director setting the tone of his show.  So I think he took a big chance.

How would you characterize your contributions to that Shane episode?

What I bring is simplicity and clarity.  I saw that in much of the work in Shane.  David [Carradine], I thought, was very, very good.  I thought Jill Ireland [chuckles] had a great hairdo.  It was oddly hip and period, both exactly at the same time.  It was very good.

I thought the whitewash on Ryker was a little overdone, and also, the script having been written by a green writer, I realized there was no realistic nonsense.  I mean scripts must have, “Pass the salt. Don’t you have any pepper in this place?”  They must have those grounding, naturalistic warts in them, or they seem a little too earnest and tend a little too much to business.  I noticed that what I consider weakness in the script.  But I saw the sense and the decency and the honesty and credibility being imparted to the characters.  Of course that’s not all me.  That’s them, that’s the material, that’s Brodkin and his assistants on a high bar.  But that’s what I see myself having brought.

It was a little too tight, and I noticed in your Defenders article, you alluded to Brodkin, and I have a vague recollection of that, of a “Brodkin” being that medium tight closeup that was so evident in the first episode of Shane.  So whether I was following my own instincts that coincided with his, or whether I was responding to the boss’s request, I don’t remember.  Some of the moves, some of the camera moves, were very good.  The staging was very good.  And that’s me learning from the directors at [CBS] TV City on Playhouse 90.

I think the climactic gunfight in that episode is brilliantly choreographed.

Well, thank you.  I was impressed with that, too, and I must give the writer some of that, because that backup rifleman to the six-gunner was a concept I had not seen before and I have not seen since.  It just looks like a good standard historically accurate western piece of behavior.  That knocked me out.  Yeah, that was great.

This is a question to us, and the audience, wondering about the script: Did we buy, completely, a school in a saloon?  Is that okay?  Did you have any doubts about that?

No, that didn’t bother me, actually, until you brought it up.  It seems in keeping with the idea of a frontier town that’s just starting to be built.

That’s good.  That’s what the world undoubtedly thought of it.  When I saw it, I thought it was a little too convenient, a little too designed.  What I would do now is not try and change the concept, because I respect the concept though I question it ever so slightly.  What I would have done was set the saloon, the bar, slightly different from the movie and have an area, just some sort of an area where you could cordon off, separate, a dozen kids and a teacher from the body of the saloon.  As opposed to being strongly set right there [by the swinging doors].

Did you have any role in casting the series?

I would guess that the major parts had been cast ahead of my being hired.  The first four or five or six people, and I might have been instrumental in casting the smaller parts.  I don’t know, but that would have been typical at the time.

What do you remember about directing the actors in Shane?

It was theater with cameras.  That was certainly the way Television City ran, and even with a single-camera western, there would have been lingeringly that theatrical tradition of the writer, the word, the close-up conveying more emotion and more content than you could without it.  A lot of that goes to Brodkin plus the other men you’re talking about.  At Television City, as an associate director with all those good directors working, I knew, not firsthand but close second-hand, how directors handled actors.  And part of my feeling that they were removing silliness comes from that experience.  Because what the directors were doing was trying to make the performance invisible and trying to make the story and the character plow through.  That was the essence of what was going on, and it was natural that I would follow that pattern.  So when I watch Shane I see the people being sensibly real, being credible, being recognizable, being identifiable, so that suspension of disbelief is easier, so that you can just fall right in with the characters and ride with them.  I see that going on in the show, which is a big commendation to [Brodkin] and me.

What do you remember about directing David Carradine?

I liked what he did a lot.  It was a little larger than necessary, but not objectionably so.  And he looked good in the part.  He could, in quotes, wear the hat.  That was a big point then about westerns.  Can the guy wear the hat?  I remember David as being easy and effective.  I remember hearing at the time that he had been very, very stylized in a prehistorical play [The Royal Hunt of the Sun].  Apparently one of the reviews had said that he had done a very fascinating sing-song kind of English to indicate the original native language.  I typically would think, whoops, this guy’s going to over-stylize whatever he does.  So I was very on the alert to anything overstylistic that he would do.  And seeing the show the other day, I don’t think he was at all.  He and I got along well.  Jill Ireland, I don’t remember.  I liked the villain who gets shot, and whose body is never accounted for.  Are the children going to arrive the next day, and will the body still be there?  [Laughs.]  I liked that villain.  I thought that guy [Lawrence Mann] was really spot-on.  I almost saw no acting whatsoever.

And Diane Ladd is in it, too.

Yes, she and I worked together many times.  I think that was the first time we worked together.  Good gal, good lady.  She was a little much, for my taste, but I’m really a minimalist.  And Bert Freed.  I thought Bert was a little New York for that guy.

Right, Freed had worked for Brodkin a lot in New York, and I remember thinking he was kind of the New York idea of what a Western bad guy would look like.

Yeah, I agree with you.

What do you remember about the director of photography?  I think he really lit Shane very beautifully.

I liked his work too.  Dick Batcheller.  I remember that he was a very stylish guy in his clothing.  Very sharp guy, and a very pleasant guy, very easy.  Must’ve been very knowledgeable, because also I remember that he wasn’t an older guy.  At that point in my life it was mostly older guy cinematographers, and he was not.

Robert Butler died on November 3, 2023, two weeks before his 96th birthday.

Shane

Like the following season’s Hondo, Shane (1966) is probably remembered, if at all, as one of those ill-conceived attempts to turn a movie classic into a television hit – a sheepish bit of intellectual property-mining that quite properly slunk off the airwaves after thirteen little-watched weeks.  In fact, this unduly forgotten and mostly still unrediscovered series was one of the best Westerns to mosey along after the genre’s late-fifties television boom had turned to bust.  It’s a smart, carefully made show, one with a distinctive visual style and stories that engage in substantive philosophical and political contemplation.  Variety, in a tone that may or may not have been pejorative, characterized it as an “intellectual western.”

Shane was the first (and, as it turned out, only) series to emerge from a major realignment of the prominent independent producer Herbert Brodkin’s operations.  After a long association with CBS that included Playhouse 90, The Defenders, and The Nurses, Brodkin’s agency, Ashley-Famous, had negotiated a liaison with ABC, still the ratings and carriage underdog among the big three.  Meanwhile, Brodkin had sold Plautus Productions, owner of The Defenders and his other pre-1965 output, to Paramount, and had at least informally moved his operations under the film studio’s umbrella.  It was a classic “what were they thinking?” acquisition, and the relationship would sour quickly, as Brodkin’s parsimony, contempt for hit-making, and general intractibility became apparent to his new corporate partner.  But for a brief moment in 1965, the venerable movie studio saw Brodkin as the potential rainmaker it needed to catch up to MGM, Warner Bros., Fox, and Universal in the television market.

Just as Twentieth Century-Fox was doing concurrently (with The Long Hot Summer and Jesse James), and Warners (Casablanca; Cheyenne) and MGM (The Thin Man; Dr. Kildare) had done a decade earlier, Paramount that year initiated a “crash expansion” (Variety) of its television production by looking for entries in its back catalog of features that could be quickly adapted into ongoing series.  Houdini, The Tin Star, and a Stirling Silliphant-scripted, serialized (in imitation of Peyton Place) reworking of Sunset Boulevard were all developed for television.  (Who cared that a big-budget TV version of Paramount’s Oscar-winning The Greatest Show on Earth had flopped only a season ago?)  Shane, the 1953 prestige western about a brooding gunslinger’s impact on the members of a young frontier family, was another obvious choice, and Paramount farmed it out to Brodkin’s new company, Titus Productions.  In June 1965, Brodkin commissioned a pilot script from regular Nurses writer Leon Tokatyan.

Brodkin’s big debut of the 1966 season was supposed to be The Happeners, a topical look at the Greenwich Village arts scene that centered on a trio of folk musicians (vocalist Suzannah Jordan, plus Craig Smith and Chris Ducey, who later recorded as the Penny Arkade and retain a minor cult following among ’60s pop aficionados) and aped the flashy, disjointed look of Richard Lester’s Beatles movies.  Instead ABC nixed the $400,000 pilot, citing advertiser disinterest, although I wonder if they were in fact spooked by NBC’s rival project The Monkees (or perhaps by Plautus’s last CBS series, Coronet Blue, a hard-to-describe adventure series that also feinted in a Mod direction, which so baffled the network that all 13 episodes were shelved for two years).  ABC’s rejection of both The Happeners and another Brodkin pilot, the international-intrigue story One-Eyed Jacks Are Wild (with George Grizzard in dual roles as a Chicago gangster and a European prince), triggered a “one-for-three” contractual clause that forced the network to pick up Brodkin’s next pitch, no matter what it was.  One imagines Brodkin forcing something even more esoteric into production out of spite, but, perhaps hoping to salvage the relationship or just in need of a hit, the producer went with Shane, which was commercially safer and likely cheaper than either of its more ambitious predecessors.  Even placing a safe bet, Brodkin floated perversely uncommercial notions, like changing the title to keep the star in line (“If you named your lead character Shane, you can’t ever fire him. If you named it Western Streets, you can”). He lost that one. The pilot script was set aside (or it may have morphed into the episode “An Echo of Anger,” on which Tokatyan has a pseudonymous story credit) and Shane went straight into production.

The creative group in charge of Shane was an amalgam of Brodkin’s talent pool from New York (including half a dozen favored writers and directors he had used on The Defenders), plus a pair of Los Angeles-based young men with bona fide video oater experience: producer Denne Bart Petitclerc and story editor William Blinn.  Both were recent Bonanza alumni.  Petitclerc and Blinn reported up to David Shaw, who had evolved into the de facto showrunner of The Defenders at some point in the back half of the show’s run, after creator Reginald Rose scaled back his involvement due to exhaustion.  Shaw – forever in the shadow of an older brother, Irwin, who after the war had become one of the country’s most prominent prose writers – had been a live TV playwright of moderate stature, associated with the Philco/Goodyear Playhouse during the period when its impresario, Fred Coe, was nurturing the likes of Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, and Tad Mosel.  Shaw’s work, though generally of high quality, had few of the overtly personal themes that made those writers’ reputations.  Brodkin made him a partner in Titus Productions and Shaw leveraged the Shane job to pay for a move from the Big Apple’s dwindling prime time industry to Los Angeles, where he lived for the rest of his life.

(I met him there by chance one day in 2004 in the Century City Mall.  I recognized Shaw’s second wife, the character actress Maxine Stuart, and followed them into a pharmacy, awkwardly introducing myself while they waited for their prescriptions.  A nice man, Shaw later endured an interview, although he had long since shifted his creative focus from writing to painting, and seemed unencumbered by nostalgia for his television career.  “Stupid idea,” he said of Shane.  “I mean, Shane is a guy who travels around.  You couldn’t have that [in a weekly series].  And we built a set.  He was always about to leave and then he has to stay, every week.”)

Playing Shane was David Carradine, the oldest son of the eccentric character player John Carradine, but a prospective leading man due less to nepotism than to a recent, buzzy Broadway turn as an Inca god in The Royal Hunt of the Sun.  In publicity for his new gig, a helpful Carradine disparaged the late Alan Ladd’s performance in the original Shane (“not really an actor at all but a personality” who “brought very little to the film”), and referred in another interview to Shane’s directors as “traffic cops” and its writers as “plotmongers.”  He at least bonded with Petitclerc, a Hemingway acolyte and counterculture-adjacent figure who would later create the semi-autobiographical biker drama Then Came Bronson (which also starred a young actor with a talent for putting his foot in his mouth).  Cocky or not, Carradine was the real deal, confident on camera and clearly a star in the making, but youthful in a way that contrasted with the world-weariness Ladd (ten years older in his Shane) brought to the character.  Carradine cited Steve McQueen as a point of reference, and it’s easy to see McQueen’s opacity and reserve reflected in Carradine’s Shane.

The rest of the cast was hit-or-miss: the English ingenue Jill Ireland, too delicate to believe as a single mother toughing it out on the range, and beefy Bert Freed, an odd actor whose scowling boulder of a face was undercut by a soft voice and a diffident affect, as the villain Rufe Ryker.  Freed was the guy you hired after Clifton James turned you down, although on the whole Shane succeeded at getting some Big Bad mileage out of his look alone.  Folksy Tom Tully (who had enjoyed a recent career boost in Alan Ladd’s final feature, The Carpetbaggers) counterbalanced Freed as Tom Starett, Marian’s aged father-in-law.

Tully’s character is not in George Stevens’s Shane, and in the television series he takes the place of the character played in film by Van Heflin, the young husband/father.  The movie’s most complex dynamic was the rivalry between Shane and Joe Starrett for the affections of Joe’s wife and son; while the boy’s hero worship of the outlaw is overt, Marian’s sexual attraction to Shane (and Shane’s own feelings for his friend’s wife) go largely unstated.  The spectre of infidelity, suppressed in the film but perhaps less containable on a weekly basis, would’ve been a touchy subject for sixties television.  Shane solved that problem neatly by making Marian a widow, its only significant change from the premise of the film.  The other familial element that distinguished the feature – the tow-headed tyke whose point of view sometimes framed the depiction of violence and other adult motifs – remained intact, with the casting of a child actor (Chris Shea) who was virtually identical to the original’s Brandon de Wilde.  Young Joey’s anguished cry of “come back, Shane,” from the indelible (and often lampooned) climax of the film, even makes an appearance in the third episode, “The Wild Geese.”

As David Shaw told me, the producers were preoccupied at the outset with making Shane’s clash between drovers and settlers sustainable.  Shaw’s script for the first episode, then, reduces the film’s existential battle for the land to a skirmish, over the construction of a schoolhouse which comes to symbolize the permanence of the farmers’ community.  This central conflict remains underdeveloped, but a side story in “The Distant Bell,” in which a schoolteacher (Diane Ladd) imported from the East realizes she has no stomach for frontier violence, begins to find the film’s sense of size and danger.

As its makers reprised some of the same topics they had broached in a quite different context in The Defenders, Shane affords a rare opportunity to examine what a leftist western looks like in practice.  “Killer in the Valley,” in which plague comes to Crossroads, is a muted critique of capitalism that centers on a sleazy medicine drummer (Joseph Campanella) who exploits the tragedy for profit.  Other episodes acknowledge the role of money in society in unexpected ways.  In “The Wild Geese,” for instance, the bad guys turn upon one another after the rest of the gang learns that their leader (Don Gordon) is paying his newest recruit, Shane, more than them.

Ernest Kinoy’s “Poor Tom’s a-Cold” offers a progressive colloquy on mental illness, with Shane advocating talk therapy for a sodbuster (Robert Duvall) whose mind has been broken by the hardships of the frontier, while Ryker wants to put him down like a rabid dog.  Shane compares Duvall’s character to a spider who keeps rebuilding a misshapen web, unaware that he can no longer conceive of how it should be spun, in the best of a series of compassionate monologues that Kinoy assigns to every character.  Ellen M. Violett, the only woman who wrote for The Defenders, contributed a fascinating script about female desire, told from Marian’s point of view.  The relatively weak lead performances (from Ireland and guest star Robert Brown) keep “The Other Image” from being the pantheon piece it might have been, but the ending, in which Shane and Marian work off their unspoken, pent-up sexual energy by chopping an entire winter’s worth of wood together, is brilliant.

Consistently, Shane discovered in its reluctant-hero protagonist opportunities to contemplate and often advocate for pacifism.  Petitclerc’s “The Day the Wolf Laughed” is an outlaws-occupy-the-town story in which Shane offers a pragmatic, non-confrontational solution – the bandits entered Crossroads flush with loot and have promised not to plunder, so just wait them out – but Ryker’s boorish pride pushes the gunmen toward carnage.  A more typical Western (like Gunsmoke, which did several variations on the town invasion premise) would usually invert these politics, casting the town’s craven merchant class as the appeasers while Matt Dillon or Festus maneuver to secure the advantage in a violent confrontation.  Kinoy’s “The Great Invasion” depicts, with sympathy, a veteran so traumatized by the sound of gunfire that he won’t raise a hand to defend himself or others, and his “The Hant” subverts the catharsis of violence even more compellingly as it unveils a diabolical high-concept premise: an old man (John Qualen), the father of a gunslinger Shane shot down years earlier, turns up with a plan not to bury Shane in Boot Hill but to adopt the nonplused protagonist as a surrogate son to replace the one Shane killed.  This was Blinn’s favorite episode, and decades later, in an interview in Jonathan Etter’s Gangway, Lord! The Here Come the Brides Book, Blinn enthused about a detail in Kinoy’s script that got somewhat lost in the execution: that Shane had killed so many men he couldn’t remember this one. “Day of the Hawk,” with James Whitmore as a preacher who embraces pacifism to stifle his dangerous, compulsive anger, is more skeptical, offering a cynical outcome in which the clergyman kills a semi-sympathetic character in cold blood in order to, perhaps, prevent an even greater tragedy.  Here, too, though, the script (by Blinn and Barbara Torgan) gives Shane an unconventional point of view to articulate, a critique of organized religion as an ineffectual, self-indulgent response to the very tangible problems faced by settlers.

The best Shane episode is probably the sole two-parter (especially the first half), which has, among other things, Charles Grodin, in his first West Coast screen acting job, as a snotty New Yorker who gets his ass whupped (twice) by Carradine; Constance Ford as an extremely butch version of Calamity Jane who nevertheless has a Black male lover (Archie Moore, another veteran of Paramount’s The Carpetbaggers); and the Gatling gun as an explicit avatar of a technological escalation in frontier violence, three years pre-Wild Bunch.  Again written by Ernest Kinoy, “The Great Invasion” anticipates the George Hearst storyline from Deadwood.  Shane tries to make the homesteaders understand that the encroaching Eastern conglomerates pose a bigger threat to them than their accustomed antagonist, the small-potatoes cattle baron Ryker, but none of them can see the big picture, not even the Starett family.  The Cheyenne moguls’ strategy involves hiring a mercenary (Bradford Dillman) to push the ranchers off the land on the flimsy pretext of hunting down outlaws.  Kinoy’s target is not only predatory capitalism but also the fearmongering law-and-order politics that often enable it.

If that sounds dry or esoteric, it’s not, mainly because “The Great Invasion” is distinguished by one of the richest villains I’ve encountered in a television western.  The conglomerate’s enforcer, General George G. Hackett, is a West Pointer who openly asserts that he is destined for military glory and an articulate gourmand who sneers at his employer for disdaining sweetbreads.  He’s insufferable as well as psychotic, an unstable martinet who leads his men (arguably with some effectiveness) by inspiring fear rather than loyalty.  Kinoy presents Hackett as at once formidable and pathetic, and Dillman, as good here as he ever was, grasps this contradiction and centers it as the essence of a dynamic and unexpected performance.

Am I going overboard in positing “The Great Invasion” as an allegory, conscious or unconscious, for the clash between Eastern (New York) and Western (Hollywood) sensibilities in Shane?  Alongside the tropes I’ve detailed above, a countervailing and fairly compatible strand of sentiment runs through Shane, in scripts both syrupy (Ronald M. Cohen’s “The Silent Gift”) and satisfying (most of Blinn’s).  The original Shane is about a frontier family, and it’s appropriate that some episodes should foreground this element (even after subtracting a key member of that family).  The best of the domestic entries, “High Road to Viator” (at first titled, much more evocatively, “Blue Organdy”), concerns the theft, by scavenging Native Americans, of Marian’s prized party dress, and Shane’s efforts to recover it.  Depicting in some detail the preparations for a three-day journey to another settlement to attend a party – Joey, we learn, has never heard of a piano – “Viator” runs high on warmth and atmosphere, and low on incident.

The family-oriented episodes, in particular, showcase this minimalist aspect of Shane, which seems to have motivated the show’s somewhat atypical formal strategies.  Brodkin famously embraced the close-up as the building block of television mise-en-scene, and showed little curiosity about the vibrant New York world outside the courtroom and hospital settings of his CBS hits.  Those precepts recur and flourish in Shane, a Western that plays out to an unusual degree in interior spaces, gorgeously amber-lit by director of photography Richard Batcheller (a longtime camera operator who had just matriculated to cinematographer gigs and died young, in 1970), and on the faces of the actors.  “High Road to Viator” can plausibly be described as a “bottle show” (a deliberately under-budget effort to offset overages on other episodes), but so can several other Shanes, and the last one, “A Man’d Be Proud,” is a bottle show’s bottle show, a television hour as devoid of add-ons (no guest stars, no off-lot locations or new sets, no stunts) as it is possible to make.

If you ask whether these austere choices reflect profit motive or aesthetic preference, the answer is “yes” – the considerations are basically inseparable.  (Compare Brodkin, perhaps, to Roger Corman and Russ Meyer, low-budget auteurs who were given big-studio toolkits and, on a fundamental, psychological level, couldn’t scale up to make full use of them.)  A year after its cancelation, Variety snickered about how Titus Productions had pocketed a $30,000 per-episode profit on Shane, never mind the show’s conspicuous failure and presumed unsyndicatability.  Blinn, in the Jonathan Etter interview, described a running battle between ABC, which wanted more action on screen, and Brodkin, who wanted them to pay extra for it; in the end, neither won.  (Anecdotally, cutting corners to guarantee net income from the license fee seems to have been Brodkin’s business model during his Plautus days too, although I haven’t studied the balance sheets.) In The Defenders and The Nurses the professional settings compelled a claustrophobic feel, and a credible argument could be mounted that the scripts’ consciously didactic approach benefited from the absence of adornment or distraction.   What’s remarkable about Shane is that, rather than showing up Brodkin as an indifferent cheapskate, it makes the same minimalism work just as well within a genre that typically opts for expansiveness.

It can be difficult, at a remove of decades, to assess a network and a studio’s commitment to a given project, but one reads between the lines and guesses that by the time it premiered in September 1966, Shane was a burnoff.  Scheduled for the 7:30 slot on Saturday nights, it was predictably creamed by Jackie Gleason, although the third competitor – NBC’s Flipper – also trounced it, underlining the difficulty of marketing a western as wholesome family fare.  (A few years later The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie would solve this riddle by keeping the period survival-struggle elements of the genre and ditching the rest.) By October the trades were already guessing at what would replace Shane on the midseason schedule, and in the end the show’s airdates were just tight enough to record the same year of birth and death in the history books.

The few people still watching Shane on the last night of 1966 were greeted with that rarest of things in early episodic television: a resolution.  The show’s instant lame-duck status gave Petitclerc and Blinn time to craft a finale that tied up the main characters’ storylines, perhaps only the second (after Route 66) in a prime-time dramatic series.  After briefly considering Ryker as a serious romantic partner – not terribly plausible given all the mean things we’ve seen him do, but the writers have some devil’s-advocate fun making the stability he represents look tempting – Marian instead chooses Shane.  Deliberately, I suspect, Petitclerc and Blinn invert the ending of the film, adopting their anti-hero into the community rather than casting him into the wilderness.  This Shane does come back, or, rather, he opts not to leave at all.  The series’ sweet last scene has an unnoticed Joey mouthing “wow” as he overhears Shane and Marian’s commitment to each other, then awakening his grandpa and whispering the news in the old man’s ear.  It’s an unexpected shift away from the ostensible protagonists, and a fitting reprise of the subtle, off-center approach that defined this appealing little western.

Author’s note: Expanded and revised slightly in January 2024.

Obituary: Christopher Knopf (1927-2019)

When Christopher Knopf, who died on February 13 at the age of 91, turns up in the history books, it is usually a source rather than as a subject.  

During a stint as a contract writer at ex-movie star Dick Powell’s significant and, today, too little-known Four Star Productions, Knopf (the k is pronounced, the f is silent) befriended with a trio of future television superstars: Sam Peckinpah, Bruce Geller, and Gene Roddenberry.  He saw the truculence that would expand into full-blown insanity and addiction once Peckinpah became a prominent film director, and he watched from the sidelines as Geller and Roddenberry gave birth, respectively, to Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.  Roddenberry kidnapped him once on his motorcycle, and took Knopf on a rain-slicked ride that ended with a crash, torn clothing, scraped skin.  “Do you realize you may never do that again?” Roddenberry asked his dazed companion.  A self-effacing family man, Knopf had little in common with these larger-than-life characters, but remained a bemused, lifelong observer of their perpetual midlife crises.

And yet Knopf’s own accomplishments, despite his reticence to claim credit for them, were prodigious.  A past president of the Writers Guild of America (from 1965 to 1967), an Emmy nominee, and a winner of the coveted Writers Guild Award, Knopf was a writer of considerable skill.  His voice, though distinctive, echoed off those of the other talented men he shared ideas with in his formative years. His best work espouses the compassionate liberalism one associates with Roddenberry, as well as the pessimistic, myth-busting sobriety of Peckinpah.  Knopf wrote about himself a great deal, although his touch was delicate enough that the elements of autobiography might remain safely hidden without the road map Knopf provides in his engaging 2010 memoir, Will the Real Me Please Stand Up.

Sensitive about his origins as a child of privilege (and a beneficiary of Hollywood nepotism), Knopf penciled himself into most of his early scripts as a grotesque but ultimately sympathetic outsider.  His first television western, “Cheyenne Express” (for The Restless Gun), centers around a weasel (Royal Dano) who back-shoots the boss of his outlaw gang and then expects the show’s hero (John Payne) to protect him from retribution.  Dano’s character would be utterly despicable, except that Knopf gives him a sole redeeming quality, a devotion to feeding a stray dog that tags along behind him – Umberto D in the Old West.  A traditional narrative until the final seconds, “Cheyenne Express” ends with a curious anti-climax – Dano falls out the back door of a train as the gunmen close in on him – that scans like a stranger-than-fiction historical anecdote, or a proto-Peckinpavian grace note.

Inscribing his characters with a hidden personal or political meaning became Knopf’s  trick for giving early westerns and crime stories a potency often missing from other episodes of the same series.  A feminist streak comes through in twinned half-hours that fashioned tough, doomed distaff versions of his autobiographical loner figure.  “Heller” (for The Rifleman) and the misnamed “Ben White” (for The Rebel, with an imposing Mary Murphy as a sexy outlaw’s girl known only as T) told the stories of backwoods women – defiant, independent, but with no recourse other than self-immolating violence to combat the drunken stepfathers, Indian captors, and psychotic lovers who victimize them.  “Heritage,” a Zane Grey Theater, cast Edward G. Robinson as a farmer whose neutrality during the Civil War may extend as far as turning his Confederate soldier son over to Union occupiers.  “That man was my father, who I felt at the time cared more about his work than about his kids,” Knopf told me. Yet the father in “Heritage” finally redeems himself, choosing his son’s life over the barn and the crops that will be burned as punishment for his collaboration.

Widening his gaze from psychological to social injustices, Knopf sketched Eisenhower as an ineffectual sheriff on Wanted Dead or Alive and contributed a fine piece of muckraking to Target: The Corrupters.  An exposé of migrant labor abuse, “Journey Into Mourning” centers around a cold-eyed portrait of a cruel and eventually homicidal foreman named Claude Ivy (Keenan Wynn).  Ivy’s villainy is flamboyant and inarguable but Knopf insists upon context. Ivy presents himself as a self-made success, a former worker who grants himself the right to mistreat his workers because he clawed his way out of the same misery.  Even as the laborers beg and threaten for a few cents more, Ivy grubs for his own meager share, dickering with a slightly more polished but equally callous landowner (Parley Baer). Knopf’s malevolent exploiter is just the middle man; the true evil, though name is never put to it, is capitalism.  As in “Heritage,” Knopf is passionate without becoming polemic, studying all sides of a dilemma with an even gaze.

At the age of thirty, Knopf netted an Emmy nomination for “Loudmouth,” an Alcoa Theatre tour-de-force written especially for Jack Lemmon.  His reward, of sorts, was an exclusive contract with Four Star, the independent company that produced Alcoa (and Zane Grey Theater).  It was a mixed blessing.  Knopf loved working for Dick Powell and recognized that Four Star offered writers an unusual creative latitude.  However, he found that he could not protect his interests as effectively as Geller, Peckinpah, or Richard Alan Simmons, Four Star’s other star scribes.  Unable to unencumber himself from Powell’s credit-grabbing lackey, Aaron Spelling, Knopf spent much of his time at Four Star toiling on pilot development and other impersonal assignments.

Four Star ended badly for everyone, starting with Powell, who died in early 1963 after a brief bout with cancer.  The company collapsed and Knopf made a damaging horse-trade to escape the rubble, giving up credit and financial interest in a western he co-created, The Big Valley.  Knopf, in the days following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, had written a pitch called The Cannons of San Francisco, which imagined a West Coast version of the Kennedy family that would reign over Gold Rush-era California.  Powell’s successor, Tom McDermott, favored a vaguely similar ranching dynasty premise from A. I. Bezzerides that already had a network commitment, and pressured Knopf into writing the first two episodes in exchange for a release from his Four Star contract.  Knopf merged his own characters into Bezzerides’s setting, and the result was The Big Valley.  The “created by” credit on which ended up going to Bezzerides and producer Louis F. Edelman, who brought star Barbara Stanwyck into the show.  (Bezzerides exited the show more colorfully than Knopf, in a bout of fisticuffs.)

Knopf’s two-part Big Valley pilot script forayed once again into Oedipal anxiety, contrasting the manor-born assumptions of a rancher’s legitimate sons (Richard Long and Peter Breck) with the resentment of their bastard brother (Lee Majors).  Left in Knopf’s care, The Big Valley might have become an epic family serial – a novel precursor to Dallas – rather than the traditional western that lingered on ABC for four seasons as a middling epitaph for Four Star.

But letting go of the Barkley clan proved liberating for Knopf, who moved on quickly to write a pair of exceptional Dr. Kildares.  “Man Is a Rock,” probably his finest episodic work, takes a hard-drinking, hard-charging salesman who resides somewhere on the Glengarry Glen Ross / Mad Men axis, and fells him with a coronary event that requires not just surgery but a lengthy recuperation.  Knopf’s interest is in the difficulty of accepting illness as a life-altering event, and the idea that a man might allow himself to die simply because a change in routine represents a more tangible threat.  As Franklin Gaer, the salesman who tries to make a deal with death, Walter Matthau contributes an astoundingly visceral performance, full of pain and fear – a feat all the more terrifying when one realizes that Matthau was himself only a year away from a near-fatal heart attack that would shut down production of Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie for months.

Although cinephilia was not a key motif in Knopf’s work, it does play a role in both of his Dr. Kildares.  The second is set within the film industry, and although “Man Is a Rock” is not, it climaxes with a scene in which Franklin Gaer delivers this drunken, despairing monologue to his frightened teenage son:

There was this picture, see, and it had this trapeze artist in it.  He wasn’t a Jew or anything, but he was in this concentration camp, and he and a bunch of the others broke out, including Spencer Tracy.  Anyway, the Germans get to cornering this guy, this trapeze artist, up on some roof in the middle of a German town somewhere. There he is up there, and down below are a bunch of people.  They’re screaming at him to jump. And scrambling over the rooftops you’ve got all the nazis with the machine guns and everything, and they’re getting to him. Well, there’s no way out. It’s either back to prison, or jump.  So, that’s what he does. He throws his arms out like that, and he shoves off in the prettiest ol’ little swan dive you ever saw in your life. One hundred feet smack right down into the pavement. You know what they did in that theater?  Everybody stood up and applauded. For over a minute!

The speech is not only an unusually abstract metaphor for Gaer’s dilemma, but also another coded autobiographical reference.  Although Knopf doesn’t name the film in his script, Gaer is describing a moment from The Seventh Cross, a 1944 MGM production overseen by his father, Edwin H. Knopf.

In 1967, Knopf got another western pilot on the air, and this time stayed with the project to oversee its creative development.  Set in 1888, Cimarron Strip was less a western than an end-of-the-western, a weekly ninety-minute elegy for the frontier that bore the unmistakable influence of the work Knopf’s friend Sam Peckinpah had been doing at Four Star.  Of the series’ twenty-three episodes, at least half a dozen centered on some larger-than-life tamer of the wilderness who was now obsolete and who would, by the story’s end, be stamped violently out of existence by encroaching civilization.  Knopf’s pilot script, “The Battleground,” charted the inevitable showdown between an irredeemably savage outlaw (Telly Savalas) and his former compatriot, Jim Crown (Stuart Whitman), who is now the marshal of the Cimarron Territory and the series’ protagonist.  Preston Wood’s mournful “The Last Wolf” took a sociological perspective in its examination of the wolvers, a class of rambunctious hunters whose value to the community had plummeted once they hunted the prairie wolf into extinction. William Wood’s “The Roarer” guest starred Richard Boone as a cavalry lifer so conditioned to bloodshed that, as a garrison soldier, he creates violence in a time of peace.  Explicitly revisionist, Harold Swanton’s “Broken Wing” and Jack Curtis’s extraordinary “The Battle of Bloody Stones” depicted thinly-disguised versions of (respectively) Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill as dangerous charlatans interested in only in their own mythmaking.

Network executives were perplexed by Knopf’s unorthodox approach to the conventions of the western genre, which often meant nudging Cimarron Strip into areas of allegory (several episodes had anti-war, which is to say anti-Vietnam, undertones) or toward other genres altogether.  Two particularly strong segments productively hybridized the western and the horror story. “The Beast That Walks Like a Man,” with a teleplay by Stephen Kandel and Richard Fielder, puts Marshal Crown on the trail of a possibly otherworldly prairie predator that mutilates its victims in a manner unlike any known man or beast.  Some scenes, such as the one in which a hardened pioneer patriarch (Leslie Nielsen) finds his family mutilated, are terrifying, and the unexpected resolution is neither outlandish nor a cop-out. Even better is Harlan Ellison’s forgotten classic “Knife in the Darkness,” which makes the bold conceptual leap of transporting Jack the Ripper into the Old West.

It would be gratifying to hold up Cimarron Strip as an overlooked masterpiece that anticipated the magnificent spate of postmodern westerns that filmmakers like Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, and others would make a few years hence.  Unfortunately, only a handful of the show’s finished segments achieved as much stature as the daring, offbeat synopses that Knopf detailed in our interview would suggest. The rest became casualties of an aggressive campaign of sabotage by CBS, even after Knopf and his staff pursued a preemptive strategy of appeasement by alternating straightforward action stories with more challenging high concept narratives.

Cimarron Strip was Knopf’s final foray into episodic television for more than twenty years.  One of the few rank-and-file episodic writers who transitioned wholly into longform work, Knopf crafted a number of distinguished features and television films, including the cult item A Cold Night’s Death, a two-hander about scientists (Eli Wallach and Robert Culp) cracking up in Arctic isolation.  For the big screen, Knopf wrote one terrific period piece, the Depression-era rail-riding epic Emperor of the North, and two-thirds of another, the western Posse.  In both cases, the subtleties of his characters and ideas were coarsened by the films’ directors (Robert Aldrich and Kirk Douglas, respectively), and yet Knopf’s innate intelligence and empathy remain in evidence in the films.  He returned to television at the end of his career, co-creating and producing the Steven Bochco-esque legal drama Equal Justice in 1990.

This piece was adapted from the introduction to my 2003-2004 interview with Christopher Knopf, which will be a chapter in a forthcoming book.

Harlan Hits Hollywood

Harlan Ellison wrote some of my favorite television episodes, and hopefully some of yours.  There are the acknowledged classics for The Outer Limits and Star Trek, yes, and the combative stints on The Starlost and the eighties Twilight Zone.  But there are lesser-known gems, too.  There’s the quartet of gleefully horned-up Burke’s Law whodunits, all of which call out or lean into or send up the lust and misogyny that became Aaron Spelling’s golden ticket.  If you want a truly pure exercise in pop, sexy and slick, put on “Who Killed Alex Debbs?,” a riff on Playboy Club glamour that opens with the Hugh Hefner character’s corpse stuffed in a gilded cage.

There is the harrowing addiction story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” which Ellison wrote for his friend Zalman King’s ambitious series The Young Lawyers (and which, because it overlapped with the truculent scribe’s short-lived TV column for The Los Angeles Free Press, became one of the best-documented cases of network neutering in an especially timorous era).  And there is Cimarron Strip’s “Knife in the Darkness,” a bold genre hybrid that followed Jack the Ripper to the American frontier.  “It was an examination of urban violence versus western violence, and urban violence wins every time,” the series’ producer, Christopher Knopf, told me.  Ellison, one of the twentieth century’s greatest complainers, thought “Knife in the Darkness” was badly directed.

Early in my career I interviewed Ellison about one of his early works, an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on his 1961 book Memos From Purgatory.  Starring a young James Caan as a thinly disguised, flatteringly buff version of Ellison, “Memo From Purgatory” was the science fiction writer’s first television sale, even though the script sat on the Hitchcock shelf for a couple of years (due to protracted rewrites or network squeamishness or both; Ellison’s memory was atypically vague, and the production records are inaccessible, although he was right for once about this one, which took on a West Side Story phoniness in the execution).  By the time it aired, in the no-one’s-watching Christmas week slot of 1964, Ellison had already done storied battle with the likes of Spelling, Irwin Allen, and the Control Voice (which mispronounced the word “Sumerian” in his narration for “Demon With a Glass Hand,” a flub that Ellison was still mad about decades later).

It could have gone the other way, given how unenthusiastically he suffered fools, but when I called Ellison from my dorm room that afternoon, I caught him in a generous, expansive mood.  Over the course of a ninety-minute conversation Harlan ended up telling me the tale of his ill-starred trek to Los Angeles to follow “Purgatory” into purgatory.  That portion of the interview was such a lively digression that I set it aside with the hope of someday asking him to rewrite it as a foreword to one of two relevant books I was working on – a plan complicated somewhat by the fact that I still haven’t finished either manuscript.  Well, so much for that idea.  Harlan, who died on Thursday at the age of 84, has recounted parts of his cross-country odyssey in several essays and interviews, but I think this version may contain a few details not recorded elsewhere.

*

How did your book, which was a work of (mostly) non-fiction, end up on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour?  It was an odd fit for that series and I didn’t know until you told me that it was actually your first script for television.

I guess it was Norman Lloyd or Joan Harrison, I never have been sure which, but it was one or the other, read the book.  It was either recommended to them or they stumbled across it.

I got a call from the Hitchcock office that they wanted to option Memos From Purgatory.  So, I was preparing to divorce my second wife at the time – it was kind of a strange situation – and she said, “As long as you’re going to divorce me, at least take me to California where it’s warm.”  Which seemed like an odd thing to say, but it made a bizarre sort of sense, so I said okay, and I accepted this offer to buy Memos, but only on the condition that I could write the script.  So they sent back word: “Yes, it’s okay, have you ever written any scripts?”  

And I, of course, lied in my teeth and said, “Oh, many.”

I had never even seen a script.  I had never done a teleplay in my life when I accepted the gig.  They said, “We’re going to the one-hour format next season, and we’re going to want this script fairly quickly.”  So I said, okay, I would come out. I was sort of commuting between Chicago and New York at the time with my almost ex-wife and her fourteen year-old son from her previous marriage.  And I had no money at all. We got stuck in Cleveland [his hometown] and I had to wait until a check came through for this book I was doing.

We drove out from Chicago in the middle of winter, December [1961], Christmastime.  We were on the road, we got hit by this drunken cowboy on the access bridge leading down to Fort Worth.  We’d have been killed had we not had all our baggage and everything. My typewriter and everything was in the trunk and the backseat, and when this guy hit us doing about 60 miles an hour down this icy bridge, it stove in the back of the car and we got thrown into a whole pile of cars that were sort of smashed up on the bridge.  We got stuck in Fort Worth because we didn’t have the money to get out, and we were in a motel and there was a newspaper columnist who learned that we were there and he knew my name.  He did this little bitty piece about “the author Harlan Ellison is stuck in a motel, his typewriter’s been smashed,” and the sheriff [actually police chief] of Fort Worth – I’ll never forget his name, his name was Cato Hightower – Cato Hightower sort of took me under his wing.  All of a sudden there was a garage that offered to fix the car for nothing, there was a stationery place, a typewriter shop that gave me a new Olympia. But we had no money – we had just enough money to pay for the motel.

We had enough money to limp out of Fort Worth, and it was still a long drive to Los Angeles.  We had only enough money for either gas or food, and so for the last I guess about six [or] seven hundred miles, all we had to eat, the three of us, was the last of a box of Stuckey’s pecan pralines.  To this day, to this day, the sight of pecan praline makes me want to throw up.

We limped into L.A., literally limped into L.A.  I had no idea where I was going. I had no contacts at all here.  We came in on the Hollywood Freeway, and I recognized it was Hollywood because I saw the Capitol [Records] Tower.  I turned off, and we went down Vine Street until I saw a TraveLodge and we went in there. We stayed there overnight until the next day, when I could call GAC [General Artists Corporation, a talent agency to which he had been referred] and bluff them into believing that I was this famous writer from New York, and that they’d better hurry up and send a car for me.  And they did!  It was a complete and total bluff.  It was like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

They put us in a TraveLodge on Santa Monica Boulevard across from the Mormon Tabernacle.  I didn’t have any money at all.  We had no way to get out of there, so I had to borrow two hundred bucks from Robert Bloch, an old friend.  And I borrowed from Bob a couple of teleplays, and I, sitting on the toilet of this tiny little motel room of the Santa Monica Boulevard TraveLodge while my almost ex-wife and her son slept, I put a board across my lap and I sat there night after night and I wrote the very first teleplay I wrote, which was “Memos From Purgatory.”  It was just after New Years’, so it had to be sometime in January 1962.

Which is interesting, because “Memo From Purgatory” wasn’t broadcast until December 1964, nearly three years later.

There was some kind of an upheaval on the show or at Universal, I don’t know what it was, and they put the script aside for awhile.  Finally, when they got around to needing a rewrite, I already had an apartment.  Billie, my almost-ex, a very nice woman, was living up in Brentwood and I was working my ass off to keep her up in this apartment in Brentwood, while I was living in this $135-a-month, two-room little house.  It was a treehouse in Beverly Glen.  It’s not even there any more.  The street isn’t even there any more. The street got washed away in one of the floods.  And on the basis of the Hitchcock script, I was able to get more work and bluff my way through and learn as I went along, and I think along about my fourth or fifth script won the Writers Guild Award for best teleplay of the year in whatever category it was, [for] The Outer Limits’ “Demon With a Glass Hand.”

I was going to ask you if you remembered watching “Memos From Purgatory” when it was first broadcast, but perhaps you don’t, since it wasn’t actually the first one.

It’s a moderately funny story about what happened the night it aired.  I was living in Beverly Glen, in this little treehouse. The television set that I had was a real small TV, with rabbit ears, and the antenna was up the side of the mountain behind the house.  I mean this house, literally and actually, sat half on a rock ledge and the other half sat in the crotch of a gigantic banyan tree. It was raining that night, it was raining terribly. And the antenna, which was up the hill – rabbit ears down in the house and an actual antenna up on the hill; I mean, there was no cable – well, the antenna fell over.  

I had invited all these people to come and see the show, and we couldn’t get any reception.  So a friend of mine volunteered to go up, and he put on my raincoat, and he stood up there in the pounding rain, a really torrential downpour.  He stood up there holding the fuckin’ antenna up.  And I was kind of, you know, upset that he was up there, not to mention that there were cougars or mountain cats – really, there were catamounts or cougars or whatever the fuck they are – up there running loose, because it’s all watershed land.  And I was terrified that he was going to get eaten, or washed away, or drowned, or fall off the mountain, or something.  So about midway through I went up and I took his place.  And I came back drenched, soaking wet, I looked like a drowned rat, and everybody was raving about this thing, and I had only seen about half of it.

Cosmopolitan ran a behind-the-scenes article on the inner workings of Burke’s Law in January 1964.  Is that Harlan, who’s mentioned in the text, at the typewriter?  (Photo by C. Robert Lee)

Obituary: Andy Lewis (1925-2018)

Andy Lewis, one of the second generation of dramatists who emerged at the end of the live television cycle, died on February 28 at the age of 92.  Nominated for an Oscar for 1971’s Klute, one of only two feature credits, Lewis spent the preceding decade writing for the small screen, contributing a run of articulate, offbeat scripts to shows like Dr. Kildare, Outlaws, The Nurses, The F.B.I., and The Virginian.

The son of a prominent philosopher, Lewis (sometimes credited as Andrew K. Lewis) did odd jobs and sold magazine stories before drifting into television in his late twenties through a family connection to the producer Robert Saudek.  He wrote material for Saudek’s high-minded smorgasbord Omnibus, from mini-documentaries to an adaptation of The Iliad, as well as scripts for other Saudek miscellany during the fifties.  Next Lewis somehow connected to the Ontario-based adventure series Hudson’s Bay (which also imported its star, Barry Nelson, and cinematographer, the legendary Eugen Schuftan, from the U.S.), and from there began making inroads into some of the top Hollywood shows.

Like Jerry McNeely, Lewis – for much of his life a Concord, Massachusetts, native – achieved the unusual feat of accruing an A-list television resume by mail.  There’s a similar pattern to both writers’ credits: clusters of a half-dozen or so scripts for a particular series or producer, pitched and story-conferenced during brief commutes to New York or Los Angeles.  Although they are impersonal, and mostly spun from producers’ prompts or outlines by other writers, Lewis’s multiples for The F.B.I., The Virginian, and Medical Center are all about as good as those series could manage during the period in which Lewis was writing for them.  A minor claim to fame: It is Lewis’s name that adorns the 1969 episode of Medical Center, “The Last Ten Yards,” which launched the acting career of O. J. Simpson.

Although he never wrote for the company’s flagship series, The Defenders, Lewis fell in with Herbert Brodkin’s Plautus Productions for a few productive years in the mid-sixties, writing for The Nurses, For the People, Coronet Blue, and the unproduced, ambitious-sounding serial drama The Quest.  The Nurses (and its network-neutered, final-season mutation The Doctors and the Nurses) was a show for which Lewis had a particular affinity.  Though he tended to sidestep the political activism of the Brodkin brand (Lewis’s “Choice Among Wrongs” begins with an abortion angle, then moves onto a less confrontational tangent), he advanced a subtler kind of social critique in a range of acid-tinged autopsies of the professional and personal compromises that his protagonists’ medical careers seemed to demand.  “Show Just Cause Why You Should Weep” is nominally about child abuse, but Lewis takes greater interest in outlining the mechanics by which oily hospital bureaucrats avoid defending a young nurse who violates patient confidentiality while defending an endangered child.

Other Lewis episodes conjure the nurses’ and doctors’ middle-class milieu as a vivid hellscape of highballs and hi-fis.  The clingy divorced dad (William Shatner) of “A Difference of Years” and the promiscuous single mother (Virginia Gilmore) of “The Human Transaction” are so poisoned by affluence and befuddled by the trappings of modernity that they can’t see the havoc they wreak on the younger innocents in their orbit.  Lewis saw his own era through more or less the same jaded lens that Mad Men would cast upon it half a century later.  His final script for The Doctors and the Nurses, “A Messenger to Everyone,” was complex and abstract, a colloquy on suicide in which a jumper on a neighboring ledge, unseen by the audience but visible through all the windows in the hospital, provokes a range of vicarious reactions from the regular characters.  In the end Lewis opts to provide little catharsis or comfort, sending the unknown man hurtling to his death and offering no hint as to his motive.

Lewis grew close enough to the Plautus group that when he financed an Off-Broadway run of his play The Infantry in 1966, he hired Arthur Joel Katz, the producer of The Nurses and For the People, to mount it.  The Infantry closed in a week, notwithstanding the presence of a twenty-three year-old Blythe Danner in the cast, but Lewis’s cinematic ambitions would bear more fruit.  Klute was a spec script that Lewis wrote to try to break into movies, and it had the good fortune to catch the notice of an important director (Alan J. Pakula) and star (Jane Fonda).  The resulting film remains an exemplar of a certain kind of vogueishly elliptical American art-movie style; more to its credit, perhaps, it stands out one of the few movies of the male-centric New Hollywood era to espouse an authentically feminist perspective.

(The bylines on both The Infantry and Klute, as well as about half of Andy Lewis’s television credits, are shared with his older brother Dave.  In interviews Andy tended to describe his brother, a disabled World War II veteran, as a sounding board and a brainstorming partner, although to me he characterized the partnership more as a legal fiction devised to guarantee an income stream for Dave Lewis and his family.  Either way, the primary sensibility behind all of the work was Andy’s.)

As someone who has spent a lot of time insisting upon the creative significance of the early small-screen work of seventies auteurs like Altman, Peckinpah, and Cassavetes, I take some delight in noting that Lewis cited a television script as a specific precursor to Klute: the title character of his Lancer episode “Zee,” an outlaw played by Stefanie Powers, was an early model for Fonda’s character Bree Daniels.  Lewis felt that he had an aptitude for writing “smart, individualistic women” characters, and they are a recurring motif throughout his strongest scripts, from Dr. Kildare’s “Immunity” (Gail Kobe as a doctor who bootstrapped her way out of poverty) to Wide Country’s “The Girl From Nob Hill” (Kathryn Hays as a thrill-seeking socialite).  Of course the protagonists in The Nurses were female – it was conceived as a distaff rebuttal to the dreamboat doctor fad – and Lewis’s episodes are among the few to emphasize the personal relationship between the middle-aged floor supervisor (Shirl Conway) and the student nurse (Zina Bethune) she mentors.  His first Nurses script, “The Walls Came Tumbling Down,” concerns a former nurse (Beverly Garland) who put her husband through medical school and now regrets giving up her career to keep house for him; his best, “To Spend, to Give, to Want” (the title is from Spenser), is a showcase for Lee Grant as a workaholic nurse with a drinking problem and an implicit sex addiction, who over the course of a moving hour comes to accept her need for psychiatric help.

*

I tried to do a phone interview with Lewis, then living in Walpole, New Hampshire, in 2003, but it didn’t work out very well.  Even before the tape recorder malfunctioned, I couldn’t seem to engage him, and I realize now that I should’ve suggested an epistolary approach.  In a wonderful interview a few years ago, the website The Next Reel got out of Lewis by email everything I was trying to coax out in conversation.

Much like Norman Katkov, another talented writer who endured my probing with polite disinterest, Lewis took the matter-of-fact line that his work for the screen was too susceptible to alteration to really count as his own, or to merit much scrutiny.  My opening gambit was to praise the moral complexity of a terrific 1963 Kraft Suspense Theater called “A Hero For Our Times,” which starred Lloyd Bridges as a witness to a crime who won’t come forward because doing so would expose his own infidelity.  By way of a reply, Lewis chuckled and mailed me a copy of a prefatory essay to his papers, which he’d given to the University of Wyoming. (All the quotations in this piece are either from this document or the Next Reel interview.)  

Lewis’s essay opens with a recounting of the plot of “A Hero For Our Times” and continues:

[T]he script itself was quite deft.  It has played for year after year, literally, and all over the world.  I’ve been complimented for it now and then, and responded with suitable modesty.

And now for the heart of the matter:

The heart of the matter is that this story wasn’t mine at all; it was invented by [the series’ producer] Frank Telford.

And neither was the script!  Not a word, not a comma. I did indeed get hired and paid for it, but my work was summarily discarded by the show’s executive producer [Roy Huggins] and reinvented in detail by some nameless but capable wretch in his office.

So all I ever got out of it was the money.

But that’s all right.

Lewis goes on to dismiss most of the rest of his videography just as airily.  In 1965 he holed up in a hotel room and churned out three Twelve O’Clock High scripts in five days, only to watch as the producer, William D. Gordon, “rewrote them in entirety” during a forty-eight hour marathon.  “My name, his strivings,” Lewis concluded.

“I’d propose them, I’d write them … and then witness, or even participate in, their gradual abasement,” he wrote of the historical anecdotes he pitched as episodes of Hudson’s Bay or The Americans.  “After a while I just stopped looking; I didn’t watch my own shows.”

Lewis enumerated only a grudging handful of television scripts that survived with some of his own contributions uncorrupted: a failed Alan Young pilot from his Canadian years entitled “The Last of the Hot Pilots,” some other pilot scripts that were never shot (Sam Houston, for Gunsmoke producer John Mantley, and The Danners), and his three episodes of Profiles in Courage, in which Lewis was “essentially free to do my best.”  His best is good indeed, with the timely “Prudence Crandall,” about a female abolitionist who attempts to integrate a Connecticut school for girls in the 1830s, representing a high point not only for Profiles but for socially-conscious sixties television in general.

Lewis’s final television credit, and indeed his only credit after Klute, was a failed TV-movie pilot (Big Rose) that starred Shelley Winters as an mannered sleuth in the Columbo vein.  Like many screenwriters, Lewis saw the career momentum that came from his Oscar recognition squandered in luckless development hell, even though he made a living writing unproduced scripts for more than a decade.  Right after Klute he adapted a Lillian Bos Ross novel for what became Zandy’s Bride (1974), an odd, New Hollywood-adjacent frontier saga with an inspired cast (Gene Hackman, Liv Ullmann, Susan Tyrrell, Harry Dean Stanton) and an imported director (the Swede Jan Troell).  But the screen credits bore only the name of Marc Norman, who did a late-stage rewrite.

Lewis’s other unmade screenplays in the seventies included an adaptation of a Bill Pronzini crime novel (Panic) for Hal Wallis; something for Warner Bros. called Sometimes Champs, which I suspect is the project Lewis described for The Next Reel as having foundered in a battle between an “inflated and devious” producer and director; and a biopic of the Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson for the producer-director Stuart Millar (Rooster Cogburn).  A backer of the latter project, William G. Borchert, ended up with the sole writing credit on the 1989 made-for-television movie My Name Is Bill W., so one is left to wonder if that Emmy-nominated teleplay bore any traces of Lewis’s work.  If so, they would represent the last such remnants. By 1985 Lewis had abandoned professional writing to focus on other pursuits, including the design and construction of an experimental house in which he lived during the last part of his life.

“[T]o look for originality, pace, accent, or nuance in TV drama is to go on a damp errand,” Lewis wrote.  Well.  That damp errand happens to be my life’s work, and I hope that I’ve illuminated a few of those qualities in this excessively modest writer’s body of work.

Thanks to Arthur Joel Katz and the staff of The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.

Freiberger’s Last Word

Star Trek references turn up everywhere you look now, but here’s an unexpected one from 1972 – the same year as the first major fan convention, and well before Star Trek had completed its evolution from flop TV show into pop culture juggernaut.

“And Then There Was One” is a late fifth-season Ironside that starts out with a topical premise: an interracially-owned business is bombed and the chief suspects are a black separatist group (represented on-screen in a typically smart, restrained performance by Percy Rodrigues).  The script, by Fred Freiberger, is better than average for the series at this point in its long run.  But this being Ironside, and 1972, the political hot potato is quickly dropped.  The episode makes a regrettable turn into the most overused seventies TV cliche of all: yes, the old who’s-killing-all-the-surviving-members-of-the-squad-from-Vietnam (or Korea or World War II) mystery.  We last see Rodrigues in a throwaway scene, a phone call in which his revolutionary leader character and Chief Ironside agree that they may have some common ground.  It’s corny – in terms of nuance and commitment, Ironside’s politics were just this side of The Mod Squad – but you can read it as a sort of wistful, fourth-wall breaking acknowledgment that the show’s makers couldn’t tell the story they really wanted to.

Once Ironside’s team start investigating the Vietnam vets, they interrogate one who seems like a promising suspect because he had been heard threatening to frag their CO back in country.  The GI, Gregg Hewitt (a typically Southern-fried Bo Hopkins), laughs off their questions, claiming he hated the officer but his threat was just talk.  The dialogue in this scene is subtler than you’d expect for Ironside.  Hewitt suggests some alternative theories of the crime, both racially motivated: maybe it was a Vietnamese refugee out for revenge, or perhaps the white business owner murdered his partner.  “I never did believe in that buddy-buddy stuff between oil and water,” he says.  Noticing Ironside’s African American aide Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell) glaring at him, Hewitt taunts him: “You don’t like my theories?”

“No more than I like rat poison,” Mark Sanger snarls.

Hewitt’s reply to that is so fanciful that it’s almost a non sequitir.  “It’s diversity in its infinite variety that makes life interesting in this, uh, star system,” he says.  “I’m not sure what that means, but I heard it on a science fiction program.”

“Diversity in its infinite variety”: That’s a pretty close paraphrase of “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,” the philosophy that Star Trek attributed to Mr. Spock’s people, the Vulcans, a race of aliens who were portrayed as more enlightened and cerebral than us humans.  Although it’s been incorporated into various iterations of Trek over the years – it’s a useful distillation of the sixties hippie philosophy that fueled the show’s initial underground appeal – the concept was first introduced in the third-season episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”  And of course Freiberger, the writer of the Ironside segment, had been the producer of Star Trek during the third season, so what might otherwise be seen as a throwaway reference to a recently cancelled show has to be understood as a meaningful in-joke.

Although the IDIC slogan was compatible with Star Trek’s liberal ethos, it was controversial behind the scenes because of the context in which it was first used.  Gene Roddenberry, having for the most part checked out creatively during the third season, shoehorned the IDIC concept rather shamelessly into the script of “Is There in Truth” in order to hawk some cheap medallions through the Trek merchandising company he had created as a side business.  William Shatner and especially Leonard Nimoy objected to the product placement strongly enough to shut down production for a confrontation with Roddenberry, who did a rewrite (although the IDIC medal stayed in the episode).  Freiberger himself managed to stay out of the IDIC flare-up; overseeing a lame-duck show on a drastically reduced budget, he had bigger problems to solve.

Years later, Fred Freiberger compared producing Star Trek unfavorably to the time in World War II when he “parachuted out of a burning B-17 over Germany to land in the midst of eighty million Nazis.”  Part of his resentment was because, as the Star Trek cult blossomed, fans lionized Roddenberry and thought of Freiberger, if at all, as the man who killed the show.  Yet there’s ample evidence to suggest that Freiberger’s year on Star Trek was a miserable experience in and of itself, even before fandom weighed in.  Inside Star Trek, by Herbert Solow and Robert H. Justman (respectively a studio executive and an associate producer on the original Star Trek), catalogs various indignities to which Freiberger was subjected as a consequence of Roddenberry’s indifference and the stars’ egos.  At one point Shatner and Nimoy, competing for prominence on screen, asked Freiberger for a ruling on who was the star of the series.  Freiberger deferred to Roddenberry, who equivocated before finally naming Shatner and making a quick exit, leaving Freiberger holding the bag with a furious Nimoy.

In the Ironside episode, the context in which Freiberger nods to Star Trek couldn’t be any less flattering.  He drops Roddenberry’s idealistic “infinite diversity” slogan into the mouth of a sly bigot who invokes it, mockingly, in a rejection of racial harmony.  Was Freiberger just winking innocently at an old job, or was he deliberately referencing an incident that recalled Roddenberry at his most cynical and unprofessional as a belated fuck-you?

Crossing the Pond

A frequent and legitimate complaint about this blog has noted its author’s ignorance of British television, apart from a few oft-imported staples like The Prisoner and Are You Being Served?  Be careful what you wish for: Here is a primer on four live and/or videotaped dramas of the sixties that remain largely unknown on my side of the Atlantic.

The Man in Room 17 (1965-1966) inverts the locked-room mystery in a clever way: it’s not the crime that occurs in the locked room, it’s the detection.  It’s about two criminologists (why, one wonders, is the title of the series singular rather than plural?) whose skills are so rarefied and irreplaceable that they remain sequestered inside a chamber deep in the confines of the British government apparatus.  On paper it sounds a bit like the American series Checkmate (1960-1962), which was created by a prominent British novelist, Eric Ambler, and had some vague pretensions toward emulating brainy literary whodunits.  But Checkmate saddled its plummy British sleuth (Sebastian Cabot) with a pair of dullard underlings who spent most episodes getting conked on the head.  The Man in Room 17 comes closer to fulfilling the rigor of its premise.  Even when the crimes are routine, the dialogue is allusive and witty, and the intellectual vanity of the heroes is something no American series could conceive.  Oldenshaw (Richard Vernon) and Dimmock (Michael Aldridge) – the first stuffy and acerbic, the other intense and arrogant – not only never get their hands dirty, they seem to revel in the cushiness of their surroundings.  The two men evince no masculine vanity, no aspirations to physical courage.  The only other regular character, portly, easily-flustered Sir Geoffrey (Willoughby Goddard), isn’t the bulldog one might expect, but an ineffectual liaison to the higher-ups in the government.  He’s less of a boss than a glorified manservant.

Sir Geoffrey somewhat reluctantly takes a case to the supersleuths in the opening scene of the first episode, which is cannily designed to emphasize the secrecy and exclusivity surrounding Room 17.  After that, the series largely avoids showing any of the bureaucratic tissue connecting Oldenshaw and Dimmock to the legal system.  The show’s creator, Robin Chapman, isn’t interested in the mythology around Room 17 (which would be an irresistable temptation if the show were remade today), but in the limits imposed by the claustrophobic premise.  Like the corpulent Nero Wolfe, these puppetmasters can’t operate without tentacles in the outside world.  The easy way out would have been to assign them a regular legman, but instead the Room 17 gents recruit a different proxy for each operation – often through blackmail, trickery, or some other dubiously ethical machination.  In one episode, their operative is discovered and killed by the bad guy.  Dimmock and Oldenshaw react with shock and anger but not remorse.  The episode “The Bequest” finds the fellows at their most mischievous and sinister.  An American is advised to buy a chemical formula known to be fraudulent, and Room 17 finds this hilarious.  Later Oldenshaw has the option to rescue an imprisoned operative but declines.  “We always disavow our agents,” he shrugs.

The idea of the top-secret crimefighter’s lair isn’t unique – think of the Batcave, or the kid-lit characters the Three Investigators, whose hideaway is a mobile home deep inside a junkyard, accessible only by secret passage.  Room 17 is an irresistable hangout, by stuffy bow-tied genius standards.  There are no windows and one foreboding metal door, but also some comfy leather couches and a backgammon board.  (The fellows play regularly, and backgammon pieces inspired the opening title graphics.  I guess the idea was that chess was child’s play for these brainiacs.)  A pleasure of visiting Room 17 today is trying to puzzle out how its occupants acquired and analyzed data back in the analog era.  Somehow, via daily newspaper deliveries and just a handful of file cabinets and reference books (the prop budget was sparse, apparently), all the world’s knowledge is at their fingertips.

The bulk of The Man in Room 17’s cases involve espionage of one sort or another, which is probably a shame; it dates the show within a certain skein of Cold War paranoia, and attaches it as a sort of also-ran to the sixties spy craze.  It offers an occasional frisson of the fanciful glamour of Bond, but lands closer to the grit of Le Carré.  In the best of the first year’s segments, “Hello, Lazarus,” the men suspect that an industrialist has faked his own death in a plane crash, and set out to lure the fugitive into revealing himself.  The script by Chapman and Gerald Wilson emphasizes the extent to which Room 17 operates without a mandate – Sir Geoffrey and his superiors do not share the men’s view that their quarry is still alive, and yet Oldenshaw and Dimmock brush that off and set to work anyway.  The glee that Dimmock takes in manipulating the world bond market to solve a relatively inconsequential crime, and his not-terribly-sheepish concession that this represents a self-indulgent folly, are very funny.  The writers permit the audience to consider that their protagonists may be ridiculous or even dangerous.  Another standout 1965 entry, “The Seat of Power,” has a startling last-act twist, in which the men realize that the true target of an enemy’s up-to-that-point routine espionage operation is them: the whole scheme was designed as bait to flush them out of hiding, and it almost works.  If the series were in color, you could see just how pale Dimmock and Oldenshaw turn when the caper suddenly acquires the life-or-death stakes that their isolation was designed to prevent.  Though it is primarily procedural and apolitical, what is most intriguing about The Man in Room 17 is that Deep State subtext.  It is, in the most literal way imaginable, about how the world is largely run by nondescript men in three-piece suits, invisible to most of us and subject to no one’s oversight.

*

Nominally a cop show, It’s Dark Outside (1964-1965) has grander ambitions.  It stars character actor William Mervyn, a sort of tamped-down Robert Morley, as a posh, portly, utterly unflappable, and somewhat egocentric police inspector.  In an American police drama, the seen-it-all cop tends to come across as a borderline psychopath who spends most of his off-screen time tuning up suspects with the butt of his pistol: Joe Friday or Vic Mackey.  Mervyn’s character, Detective Chief Inspector Rose, has the opposite sort of authority, the kind that suggests he can tie a neat cravat but likely has never deigned to pick up a firearm.  Rose, with his perilously rounded R’s, seems to have wandered in from an Agatha Christie novel, but the world he polices is the modern one, awash in sexual perversion, racial violence, and other sordid, straight-from-the-headlines social ills.  The gimmick of It’s Dark Outside is that it mixes traditional crime elements with aspects of other genres in a pretty explicit bid to declare itself as a serious drama.  The show’s story editor, Marc Brandel, was a rare transatlantic television scribe, who had put in time on American shows like Playhouse 90 and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; it’s tempting to speculate that he had been exposed to liberal dramas like East Side / West Side and especially Naked City, and took a bit of inspiration from them for It’s Dark Outside.

The supporting cast of It’s Dark Outside steers the show outside the squadroom.  Rose’s stuffy, upper-crust old friend Anthony Brand (John Carson) is a top executive in a human rights organization.  His work triggers a running dialogue of liberal social theory versus the implicitly conservative law-and-order stance of the police (although DCI Rose is more of a hard-headed pragmatist than a right-wing ideologue, so the debate is more proscribed than in any comparable American work).  Unlike the seemingly celibate Rose, Brand is married, to a smart, sophisticated beauty who chafes at the do-nothing activities her sex and social position force upon her.  Just why a cop show should take an interest in these society types isn’t clear at the outset, but the show’s unexpected and ultimately very rewarding focus on Alice Brand (June Tobin) turns It’s Dark Outside into a stealth domestic melodrama.

The fourth regular character is the inspector’s apprentice, a brash young cop in whom Rose insists on seeing promise despite all evidence to the contrary.  Rose actually goes through two of these: Sgt. John Swift (Keith Barron), a novice whose carelessness gets a suspect killed in the first episode, and later Sgt. Hunter (Anthony Ainley), who barely conceals his contempt for a boss he thinks of as a pompous old duffer.  Brandel may be seeking to upend the traditional mentor-mentee relationship, although I can’t make out quite what It’s Dark Outside is trying to do with it, particularly in the case of the insubordinate Sgt. Hunter, since most of his episodes are now lost.  I tend to view Rose’s confidence that he can mold these unyielding lumps of clay into top-shelf sleuths as evidence that his solipsism has a down side.

In any case, Sgt. Swift has a more important purpose than teasing out the shadings of Mervyn’s character.  The secret heart of It’s Dark Outside is the flirtation that develops between Swift and Alice Brand – a smoldering May/July attraction that had to have been one of the most erotic relationships on British television in the sixties.  During the initial episodes, it’s not even clear that this element is intentional – is Brandel playing a long game, or are the actors just getting creative with subtext?  Often in sixties television this sort of running character element came with no guarantee of a payoff, but It’s Dark Outside turns out to have been a proto-miniseries.  The last three episodes of its initial arc are explicitly serialized, and the penultimate one, “A Case of Identification,” brings the Swift-Alice storyline to a complex and satisfying conclusion.  When they drift into a mostly guiltless affair, the dynamic between Swift and Alice Brand turns on their age difference.  Alice likes the cop because she thinks he’s “weak”; he replies, “I don’t want to be mothered.”  The older woman has the power in the relationship, but the writing doesn’t caricature her as either pathetic or predatory.  Alice is sexually assertive and sympathetic; Sgt. Swift never counters with an assertion of machismo; and neither expresses any remorse at having flouted Alice’s marital bond.  It’s a more truthful and less judgmental sketch of an extramarital dalliance than American television could have undertaken for another decade or more.  Another serial thread runs parallel to that one – a blackmail storyline involving Anthony Brand – and while it’s less involving overall, it sets the stage for a shocker ending to the 1964 cycle.  Genteel on the surface, It’s Dark Outside proved capable of dispatching secondary characters as ruthlessly as 24.

*

The fascinating The Plane Makers (1963-65) is one of the few television shows to make a full transition from (themed) anthology to standalone drama to serial.  In its first year it told one-off stories with a shared setting, the vast airplane factory Scott Furlong; in its second it tightened its focus to a common set of characters; in its third it placed the most charismatic of them at the center of a thirteen-episode continuity.  Like some of the Camelot-era shows in the United States – Dr. Kildare or Empire or even The Dick Van Dyke Show – The Plane Makers cultivates a sleek, technophilic optimism.  Instead of the characters, the opening titles show a jumbo jet crossing a taxiway and entering a hangar – lumbering rather unsexily, as it happens, but the soaring music gets across the idea that this show is about the movers and shakers who are busy creating our George Jetson future.  However banal the lives of some of these salarymen might prove to be, the notion that prosperity is the key to a modern world of ever-expanding possibilities surrounds them.  It’s no surprise that The Plane Makers founders on the same class disparities that Peyton Place, which is the closest American analogue I can come up with, struggled to encompass.  In its second year, the show tried a split-lead approach, with two main characters starring in alternating segments and rarely sharing the screen.  Patrick Wymark plays John Wilder, the company’s corporate managing director, a charismatic bulldog who’s good enough at his job that he gets away with being a complete asshole.  His counterpart is Arthur Sugden (Reginald Marsh), a middle manager who runs the factory and takes a soft-spoken, staid approach to solving problems.  Sugden smokes a pipe, while Wilder chain-smokes cigarettes – just one of many details that carefully delineate these characters as moral and temperamental opposites.  (Wilder is a Londoner and Sugden from Yorkshire, a sort of city-versus-country mouse cultural distinction, although the subtleties are lost on this American.)  Sugden’s patience and reserve, his allegiance with blue-collar labor, his quaintly old-fashioned way of dressing and carrying himself all designate him as the show’s conscience.

The problem, of course, is that Sugden is incredibly dull – almost perversely so, as if Wilfred Greatorex, the show’s creator, wanted to make the point that the best men among us are often the milquetoasts and mediators who don’t get any credit or attention.  Good luck turning that into compelling conflicts every week, especially when a raging monster like John Wilder is on the other end of the seesaw.  The clash between the two men arises in the second segment (“No Man’s Land”), in which Sugden squares off against Wilder over management’s scapegoating of a lowly workman for the failure of an expensive test flight.  Wilder’s quest to push his new plane, the Sovereign, to completion provides the backdrop for this second cycle, occasionally boiling over into open showdowns with Sugden or other supporting characters (Barbara Murray plays Wilder’s poised wife, Jack Watling his fidgety yes man, and Robert Urquhart a stolid test pilot).

The Plane Makers strives to contemplate capital and labor with the measured, cerebral approach of the editorial page.  “Don’t Worry About Me,” the series’ premiere (and the only anthological episode that survives; as Doctor Who enthusiasts well know, many videotaped British dramas of the sixties and early seventies were recorded over, a fate that annihilated early Tonight Shows and daytime soaps but spared most scripted American prime time shows), addresses a cross-section of professional concerns surrounding a skilled but overbearing metalworker (Colin Blakely) with a casual attitude toward safety and a promising apprentice (Ronald Lacey) given the choice of leaving the shop floor for a less lucrative but more upwardly mobile office job.  Writer Edmund Ward emphasizes the resentment that both men express toward their superiors, which seems to conceal a more existential dismay as to how little control either man has over his future.  As they play out, the stakes for Blakely’s and Lacey’s characters are lower than they sound on paper – a momentous career decision for a young lad is so inconsequential to the bosses that they have to be reminded about it every time it comes up.  The melodrama in The Plane Makers is consistently pitched at a lower level than in any similar American project.  Devastating verdicts on a man’s prospects or character are delivered in offhand remarks: at the end of “No Man’s Land” Sugden prevails, and is granted a contested promotion, but a board member adds that there is “no particular confidence in you or your ability.”  That’s a line that drops like a hammer if you’re in tune with Greatorex’s show.  I always roll my eyes at the idea of “slow cinema,” or critics who condescend by urging allowances for it, but The Plane Makers does reward the American viewer who recalls the old cliches about British reserve and pays attention to all the unspoken or primly articulated nuances that pass between the characters – except of course for John Wilder, the show’s id, who must have been refreshingly easy to write for.  Contemporary reviews of The Plane Makers fawn over Wymark’s performance and the dynamism of his character, which proved so obviously the breakout element of the show that some of its subtler elements had to give way.

Although Wilder’s anti-hero charisma is undeniable, the best Plane Makers episodes are vignettes that describe the impact of progress on the Scott Furlong rank and file.  Factory stalwarts get crushed in the unforgiving maw of rampant capitalism; executive suite schemers self-destruct when they imitate Wilder’s ambition but lack his guile.  “A Question of Sources” concerns a sleazy security chief (Ewan Roberts) on a witch-hunt for the source of a leak.  “All Part of the Job” dissects an unscrupulous climber (Stanley Meadows) who sets out to dispose of a rival – a decent, competent purchasing executive (Noel Johnson) – after he discovers the older man has taken bribes from a vendor.  The first episode has a spy-movie suspense driving the story, while the second feels like Mad Men without a historical frame drawn around it.  And while The Plane Makers is unabashedly about the men in the grey flannel suits, it makes time to sketch sophisticated, sympathetic portraits of the Joans and Peggys in its world.  “A Condition of Sale” explores how a seasoned secretary (UFO’s impressive Norma Ronald, a semi-regular) fends off scuzzy sales reps, and contrasts her efficient, blasé rebuff of a crude pass favorably with Sugden’s chivalrous but counter-productive bluster when he learns of the offense.  In “Sauce For the Goose,” the long-suffering Mrs. Wilder contemplates an affair with a solicitous American; in a hint at the limits of The Plane Makers’ perspective, it’s less successful than the earlier “A Matter of Priorities,” which chronicled the sordid details of Wilder’s own extramarital indiscretion.

*

Public Eye (1965-1975), the best-known and most beloved of the four shows I’m looking at here, centers upon a seedy, modestly-appointed “enquiry agent,” a lean, taciturn chap named Frank Marker.  It has the feel of a rain-slicked jazz noir, like Hollywood’s Peter Gunn or Richard Diamond, Private Detective, but it’s even more downbeat – at times Public Eye is almost as terse as a Parker novel.  (It’s a literal jazz noir, by the way: Robert Earley’s theme song is one of the greats.)  Like Jim Rockford, Marker comes off as a loser on the surface, a fringe figure in an absurdly cramped rooftop office who skirts the law because it’s the only way he can make a living.  At the same time he’s dogged and has a moral code and, when it really counts, he can kick ass.  Marker even has a bit of style: most of the time he wears a light-colored tie over a dark shirt and coat, like a reversal image.  It was a career-making role for the great Alfred Burke, a small-part movie actor whose hangdog face adds layers of dignity and pathos to the literate dialogue.

The mobster’s beating Marker takes in the early episode “Nobody Kills Santa Claus” is startling because violence happens so rarely in Public Eye.  Marker’s job is tedious and grubby – a world away from Joe Mannix’s weekly gunshot wound to the shoulder.  Written largely by its versatile co-creator Roger Marshall, who was barely out of his twenties at the start of it, Public Eye could encompass milieus both seedy and urbane.  “The Morning Wasn’t So Hot” is a frank depiction of the prostitution racket, filled with vivid little portraits of feral pimps and the callow young women who flourish in the trade.  It climaxes in an amazingly blunt, poetic exchange between Marker and the hard-bitten girl he’s been searching for, who is too far gone to return to the straight life.  The divorce case “Don’t Forget You’re Mine” introduces a missing husband (Roy Dotrice) who quotes T. S. Eliot and a kooky mod girl (Diana Beevers) for Marker to flirt with; it also has one of the cleverest midpoint reversals I’ve seen in a private eye story, one with devastating emotional consequences.  A courier for strangers’ miseries, Marker takes cases that limn the seedy underside of human nature – his work isn’t so much solving mysteries as handling, by proxy, the personal interactions that his clients can’t bear to endure themselves. “The Bromsgrove Venus,” my favorite early episode, is sad, funny, and absurd.  It’s about a petty blackmail scheme over a tame nudie pic (so tame we even see it on-screen!), which succeeds only because the repressed, middle-class husband and wife it targets won’t talk to each other at all.

Public Eye doesn’t transcend genre – it doesn’t try to pretend it’s more than a private eye show – but like all great crime stories it’s expert at using the conventions of genre to explore all the heartbreaking ways in which humans do harm to one another.  The seven episodes made in 1969 comprise a contemplative serialized arc, in which Marker, having done a stint in prison for corruption, is released on parole in an unfamiliar coastal town.  “Welcome to Brighton,” the premiere, is the story of a man coming slowly and humbly back to life.  No longer licensed as an investigator, Marker works as a laborer, breaking rocks on the beach to build a retaining wall.  This is an optimistic depiction of prison, of a piece with the U.S.’s Great Society television dramas.  Marker’s parole officer is sympathetic, his support system works, and the implication is that Marker may not be just rehabilitated but rejuvenated by incarceration and its aftermath.  The off-the-books cases in this septet are trifling (a stolen pay envelope) or intimate (a young woman’s suicide attempt).  The emphasis is unequivocally on the personal, especially Marker’s tentative romance with his new landlady (Pauline Delany).  The arc’s final episode has no detecting at all, only relationship counseling, as the landlady’s estranged husband returns and Marker must gently dissuade him from making trouble.  All seven of the 1969 episodes were written by Marshall, who, after four years, must have decided he wanted to get to know his creation better: without a professional life to fall back on, Frank Marker, depicted in his earlier adventures as little more than a sponge for his clients’ negative energy, has no choice but to try to become a whole person.

The last Public Eye of the sixties is also the first that exists in color.  Watching it is a bit like last call in a dark, smoke-filled pub, when the bartender flips on the lights to urge everyone home: the atmosphere instantly vanishes.  Finally we learn the true color scheme of Marker’s trademark tie and shirt (spoiler: light purple on dark blue), but it feels like a poor trade.  Public Eye would continue, mostly in color, until 1975.  Like Marker himself, it was incapable of stasis; during its eleven-year span, under the auspices of two different production companies, the peripatetic show shifted production from London to Birmingham to Brighton to Windsor to Surrey.  Despite its limited capacity for exterior filming, Public Eye captured a fair amount of regional color in each setting.

*

Americans often remark, either with contempt or relief, on the smaller size of the typical British TV run – never mind that The Plane Makers toted up a whopping 28 hours during the year it groomed Patrick Wymark as its star.  Equally notable was its creators’ and sponsors’ capacity for metamorphosis.  One thing I set aside in describing the shows above is how each represents a snapshot in a fairly complex continuity.  The Plane Makers not only changed formats three times during its three-year run, it also morphed into a sequel series – called The Power Game (1966-1969) – that followed John Wilder into a new job.  The Man in Room 17 shed a cast member (Denholm Elliott replaced Michael Aldredge) and then, when Aldredge returned, adopted a change of setting and a new title, The Fellows (1967).  The Fellows in turn launched a spinoff mini-series from creator Robin Chapman, Spindoe (1968), which itself spawned a follow-up, Big Breadwinner Hog (1969), that was narratively unrelated but originally intended as a direct sequel.  It’s Dark Outside was the second of three shows, each from a different creator/producer, that featured William Mervyn as the same character.  I haven’t seen the first, The Odd Man (1960-63), which survives but isn’t commercially available; the third, though, is wholly different in tone and structure from its predecessor.  Sending DCI Rose off into suburban retirement, Phillip Mackie’s Mr. Rose (1967-1968) is erudite but bloodless, a Masterpiece Theatre-ish concept with less distinction than It’s Dark Outside.  The best thing about Mr. Rose is the running gag of how the ex-cop keeps stumbling upon, and solving, crimes because doing so is easier and more appealing than his stated purpose of penning his memoirs.  As a so-called writer who has published only one other piece in the last nine months, I wish I could report that I’d nabbed the Zodiac during the hiatus.

Just as U.S. television encouraged maximalism – when Peyton Place breaks out, put it on three times a week! – it also shunned any tinkering with a winning format.  The only series that were given makeovers were those that flailed in the ratings.  For Bonanza or The Beverly Hillbillies, sameness was the only option, no matter how tedious the formula might get – and of course Nielsen existed to endorse that kind of conservatism.  If viewers ever abandoned a show because they wanted to see its characters change and its stories evolve, that was a subtlety Nielsen couldn’t measure.  What was it about the British that allowed for portion control, and made them able to bid farewell to a popular entertainment before it wore out its welcome?

Stephen’s adventures in transatlantic television may or may not continue later this year with a look at more ’60s British program(me)s, thanks to Network, BFI, and few other UK labels that have released a bounty of hard-to-see shows on DVD or Blu-ray during the past few years.