Collin

My friend Collin Wilcox, an actress best known for her showy role in To Kill a Mockingbird, died of brain cancer last week, on October 14.  The New York Times ran a medium-sized obituary this morning, a recognition that was well-deserved in view of Collin’s impressive New York theater resume.  Her husband of thirty years, Scott Paxton, tells me that Collin was diagnosed with multiple brain tumors on August 11, and declined treatment.  She died peacefully, in her home.  Collin was so youthful, strong, and down-to-earth that it seemed like she’d be around forever.

Regular readers of this blog will recall that Collin figured prominently in two pieces that appeared here: a biographical interview in which I solicited her memories of many of her early television appearances, and an earlier story about “The Benefactor,” the famous “abortion episode” of The Defenders.  

When I was researching the latter, I put a call in to Collin, one of the four actresses who played young women who had undergone illegal abortions in that show.  I didn’t expect to get much from Collin, but when she casually mentioned that she had almost died after her own abortion as a teenager, I sat bolt upright in my chair.  I knew that I had a real story and not just a dry account of a TV episode’s production history.  Collin was smart enough to understand what she had just given me, too, and it didn’t bother her in the slightest to have some intimate details from her past repurposed into a human interest story about her work.  She was a courageous lady.

A few months later, I called Collin again and asked her to submit to a longer interview, because I knew her witty, straight-shooting way of talking would make for an entertaining piece that would all but write itself.  (My plan was for Collin’s interview to kick off a series of interviews with underappreciated early television actors, and the next one will appear soon.)

When Collin told me the following story in that interview, she insisted that I omit the name of the movie star she spoke about, because he was (and is) still living:

After Twilight Zone, I flew to Italy to join my fiance, Geoffrey Horne, who was shooting a film in Rome.  Then on the flight coming back, the stewardess, as we called them then, came up and said, “So-and-so would like you to come and join him in first class.”  I said, “Okay!” and flounced up there and sat down next to him.  I had on an angora, like a really nice little fuzzy sweater, and he reached over and cupped my breast and he said, “You don’t mind my doing this, do you?”  And I said, “I really do.”  He said, “Well, I respect you for that,” and went on cupping my breast.  And he was on the aisle seat!  It was like that then.

How did you get out of that?

I said, “I’ve got to go tinkle.”  It really embarrassed me.  Of course I never came back, and of course he wasn’t going to chase me all the way down there to second class.

Because I don’t think Collin would have objected, I’ll reveal that name now.  It was Kirk Douglas.  Because I had to redact that the first time around, I had also had to omit the punchline of the anecdote, which Collin related with great relish.  When Douglas summoned her to sit next to him, she initially mistook him for one of his frequent co-stars, and addressed him as “Mr. Lancaster”!  That didn’t deter Douglas in his pursuit, though.

Late last year, the producer of the Mad Men Season 2 DVD set contacted me with the idea of essentially turning my piece on “The Benefactor” into a brief special feature on that DVD.  Once again, I phoned Collin and asked if I could recount the personal experience that informed her performance in that episode; and again, she gave me permission to discuss her abortion, this time on camera.  For a brief moment, it seemed possible that an interview with Collin could be included on the DVD along with mine.  Collin even offered to film herself answering the producer’s questions.  (Because she didn’t like to leave her hometown of Highlands, N.C., Collin had sent video greetings to several other film and TV events which had invited her as a guest.)  But this never happened, and it’s a shame.

This morning Scott Paxton sent me the photo of Collin that appears at the top of this post.  It’s from her period as a member the Compass Players – the Chicago theater troupe that was a precursor to Second City – which would date it around 1957-1958.

Serge Krizman (1914-2008)

Production designer Serge Krizman died one year ago, on October 24, 2008, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He was 94.  Krizman’s death was reported at the time in his hometown paper, but has not yet been noted by any entertainment industry sources.

Krizman was the initial and/or primary art director on at least four important television shows: The Fugitive, Batman, Harry O, and The Paper Chase.  He also designed sets for the Schlitz Playhouse, Happy Days, Charlie’s Angels, T. J. Hooker, and a number of other series and made-for-television movies.

Because of The Fugitive’s continued popularity, Krizman may be best remembered for his work on that series, which was realistic in its look and somewhat ahead of the curve in combining studio sets with extensive Southern California location work.  (At the time, most TV dramas stuck to the backlot, if they went outdoors at all.)  Krizman even attended at least one Fugitive fan convention in the nineties.  But the most important item on his resume is unquestionably Batman.  Very few television series can claim production design as the defining element of their creative makeup; Batman tops that list.  Krizman’s designs drew on the DC comic, of course, but also expanded to include elements of exuberant camp and dry visual humor that were unique to the TV version.  For that credit alone, Krizman merits a mention in the annals of television history.

That obituary in the Santa Fe New Mexican does a nice job of filling in some details of Krizman’s eventful life, but the author commits one serious error that I think is worth singling out.  The obit lists a purported tally of the individual episodes of various series on which Krizman worked: 70 Batmans, 17 Fugitives, 13 Charlie’s Angels.  I can guess where those stats were sourced.  Wait for it: my old nemesis, the Internet Movie Database. 

The problem is that the IMDb is still hit-or-miss in listing the episodic television credits of many people, especially “below the line” crew members.  It will scoop up a few mentions on one series, and every credit on another, without much rhyme or reason.  In that way, the database presents a very distorted portrait of the significance of specific shows within an individual’s career (or, conversely, the extent of a person’s involvement on a particular series).  Just in the year since his obituary has published, the IMDb’s totals of Krizman’s Fugitives and Batmans have ticked upward by a few episodes. 

I don’t have credit transcripts of any of those shows handy, so I can’t provide the correct numbers.  But I can point out that, while Krizman was credited on all twenty-two episodes of Harry O’s first season, the IMDb records him as the art director for only two.  The IMDb contains a lot of traps into which inexperienced users can fall, but that’s no excuse for journalists to depend on it for “facts” that cannot be confirmed from reliable sources.

Norman Katkov, 1918-2009

My friend Norman Katkov has died.  Norman was one of the first people I contacted when I began to compile oral histories with early television writers, and he was a terribly thoughtful and gentle man.  Read my 2003 interview with him here.

QM Minus Two

Paul Burke and Nancy Malone in Naked City (“Requiem For a Sunday Afternoon,” 1961)

The grim reaper has been working overtime this month: Larry Gelbart, Army Archerd, Patrick Swayze, Henry Gibson, Zakes Mokae, Mary Travers, and the estimable Dick Berg, who granted me a good interview last year.  One of the weird coincidences in television history is that many of the major players – actors, writers, directors, crew – from the Quinn Martin factory are or, until recently, were still alive and available for interviews.  If you were writing about Bewitched or Ben Casey, you were out of luck, but if you tackled a QM show you could compile a decent production narrative by way of oral history.

Now death finally seems to be catching up with QM, claiming Philip Saltzman (a producer of The FBI and Barnaby Jones) a couple of weeks ago, and now both Paul Burke and George Eckstein over the weekend.  Burke, of course, was the second star of QM’s World War II drama 12 O’Clock High, replacing Robert Lansing, whom Martin found too diffident and remote to headline his series.  Burke had a more likeable, down-to-earth quality than Lansing, although he was a less gifted actor.  He was Leno to Lansing’s Letterman.

Burke had also been the replacement star of Naked City, taking over for James Franciscus in what the New York Times’s obituarist, Margalit Fox, called Naked City’s second season.  Technically that’s accurate, but Fox’s phrasing reminded me of how it has never felt true.  In my mind, there were two Naked Citys, the half-hour and the subsequent hour-long version.  Both sprang originally from the pen of the prolific Stirling Silliphant, and both took great advantage of the practical outdoor locations available in New York City.  But the casts were different (save for a pair of supporting players), a full TV season separated them, and the extended length of the later episodes occasioned a major shift in tone. 

The Los Angeles Times’s obit for Burke called Naked City “gritty,” but that’s more true of the Franciscus version, a lean, action-centric genre piece that turned Manhattan into a giant playground for foot and car chases.  The half-hour City had more in common with other contemporary half-hour crime melodramas – there were a wave of these made in New York City in the late fifties, including Big Story, Decoy, and Brenner – than with its own sixty-minute incarnation, which told character-based stories in a much wider tonal range.  The Stirling Silliphant of the first Naked City was the terse pulp writer of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and late films noir (The Lineup, Five Against the House).  By 1960, when the hour Naked City debuted, he was the loquacious beat poet of Route 66, a personal writer working an in an ever more idiosyncratic voice.  Because not even Silliphant was prolific enough to write both shows at once, he gradually delegated Naked City to Howard Rodman, whose scripts were even more lyrical and offbeat.

If I haven’t said too much about Paul Burke, it’s because he always struck me as a passive personality, just on the good side of dull.  That sounds like a knock, but it may have made Burke ideal for the hour Naked City, which required the regulars to step aside most weeks to let some grand stage actor – Eli Wallach or Lee J. Cobb or George C. Scott – take a whack at one of Silliphant’s or Rodman’s verbose eccentrics.  One of the best things about Naked City was the relationship between Burke’s Detective Adam Flint and his girlfriend Libby, played by Nancy Malone, that resided on the margins of the show.  The pair were friends as well as lovers, and quite clearly (thanks less to the dialogue than to the sidelong glances between the two actors) sleeping together.  Adam and Libby were one of TV’s first modern, urbane, adult couples: Rob and Laura Petrie without the farce.  Burke may have done his finest work in those scenes.

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George Eckstein produced Banacek, Steven Spielberg’s Duel, and a number of other important television movies of the seventies.  But I suspect more TV fans remember him as a story editor and primary writer for Quinn Martin’s two finest hours, The Fugitive (for which Eckstein co-wrote the two-hour series finale) and The Invaders. 

Last month Ed Robertson, author of The Fugitive Recaptured, chastized me for expressing only modest enthusiasm toward Philip Saltzman’s Fugitive episodes, which included one of Ed’s favorites, “Cry Uncle.”  Well, I’m relieved to report that Eckstein wrote some of my favorite episodes, chiefly “The Survivors” (about Richard Kimble’s complex relationship with his in-laws), “See Hollywood and Die,” and “This’ll Kill You.” 

The latter two paired Kimble, the innocent man on the lam, with actual hoodlums of one variety or another, allowing Eckstein to zero in one of the more intriguing aspects of the show’s premise: how does one live among the underworld of criminals without becoming one of them?  “This’ll Kill You” showcases Mickey Rooney as a washed-up, mobbed-up comedian, whose infatuation with a treacherous moll (the great Nita Talbot) leads him to his doom.  It seems like every TV drama of the sixties wrapped a segment specifically around Rooney’s fireball energy; some were dynamite (Arrest and Trial’s “Funny Man With a Monkey,” with Rooney as a desperate heroin-popper) and some disastrous (The Twilight Zone’s “Last Night of a Jockey,” with Rooney as, well, an annoying short guy).  Eckstein’s seedy little neo-noir gave Rooney some scenery worth chewing.

I interviewed Eckstein briefly in 1998 while researching my article on The Invaders.  Eckstein is only quoted in the published version a few times, because he was incredibly circumspect.  Not only would he not say anything bad about anyone, he’d barely say anything at all about them.  I suspect Eckstein agreed to talk to me only because I had gotten his number from another gentleman of the old school, Alan Armer, who had been his boss on the two QM shows.  I wish I could have asked him more – especially now, as I am just reaching the point in the run of The Untouchables (which I had never seen before its DVD release) when Eckstein, making his TV debut, became a significant contributor.  It’s always a race against time.

Obituary: Clement Fowler (1924-2009)

Actor Clement Fowler died on August 16 at the age of 84.  The death notice in the New York Times refers to Fowler as a “working actor.”  That’s a frank expression, one I often see applied to actors who manage (barely) to earn a full-time living from their craft, but never receive much recognition from the public. 

To be even more frank, Fowler possessed the face of a character actor – long, narrow, with a small chin and suspicious little eyes – and in his recorded performances he created a gallery of hustlers, gangsters, and weirdos.  Below, in the tacky suit that seems a rather desperate cry for attention from the costume department, Fowler plays a bookie on Route 66.

George Maharis, the blacklisted actor David Clarke, Clement Fowler, and Martin Milner in Route 66 (“The Opponent,” 1961)

Born in Detroit in 1924, Fowler was performing in New York by 1950.  His resume of Broadway and off-Broadway roles ran to arm’s length, and included a Rosencrantz to Richard Burton’s Hamlet (a role he reprised in the filmed version of that production) and George in a Hartford staging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  Like Chris Gampel, an actor I wrote about last year who had a similar career, Fowler committed himself to the theatre and to New York; his film and television appearances are a patchy index of shows filmed on location in the east.  Also like Gampel, he began in live television and ended on Law & Order.

Among the dramatic anthologies, Fowler played on Studio One and Robert Montgomery Presents, Danger and Suspense, Omnibus and The Hallmark Hall of Fame.  Fowler’s parts were often small, and surely there are many more from the live era which will remain unrecorded.  Soaps (The Doctors; Loving; The Guiding Light, which survives him by just a month) fill in more of the gaps.  The spate of gritty shows – Decoy, The Defenders, Mr. Broadway – that emerged from the Big Apple in the late fifties and early sixties also gave Fowler, with his rough features, a chance at some larger than usual roles.  On Big Story, he played “The Phantom of the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” and on Naked City he was “The Bumper,” the contract killer who bumped off John McIntyre’s Lieutenant Muldoon in a fiery car chase.  It was one of the earliest occasions in which a television series killed off a regular character, and as such I suppose it is Fowler’s historical claim to fame.

Fowler worked for Scorsese in The Age of Innocence, and played Steve Guttenberg’s father in Diner.  There are uncredited movie roles, too, apparently in Robert Mulligan’s The Pursuit of Happiness and the early television film The Borgia Stick.  He was sometimes billed as Clem Fowler, and at present the standard internet sources split his credits between both names.

 

Clement Fowler and Luther Adler in Naked City (“A Memory of Crying,” 1961)

Obituary: Philip Saltzman (1928-2009)

Prolific television writer and producer Philip Saltzman died on August 14 at the age of 80.  Saltzman, who had been hospitalized at the Motion Picture Home, suffered from an advanced form of dementia.

Saltzman began writing for television in the late fifties, on half-hour cheapies for Ziv (Mackenzie’s Raiders, Lock Up) and then for slightly more distinguished westerns like Wanted Dead or Alive and The Rifleman.  Soon Saltzman joined the burgeoning ranks of young writers pumping life into the later seasons of Warners’ cookie-cutter detective shows, Hawaiian Eye and Surfside 6.  “Four-Cornered Triangle,” a noirish story of obsessive love that is Saltzman’s best Eye, remains a perfect example of how to base a formulaic show around character rather than action or genre cliches.

One of television’s top freelancers during the sixties, Saltzman composed teleplays for action and dramatic series like Richard Diamond Private Detective, Five Fingers, The Third Man, The Detectives, Stoney Burke, Dr. Kildare, Run For Your Life, and The Wild Wild West. 

“The Voice of Gina Milan,” a Run For Your Life two-hander, paired adventurer Paul Bryan (Ben Gazzara) with an Italian girl of mystery (Susan Strasberg) who turns out to be an brilliant opera singer in momentary flight from her destiny.  The steam runs out of this romance once we find out Gina Milan’s identity and the nature of her problem; but Saltzman’s story (completed by the talented John W. Bloch) remains admirably claustrophobic, and his lovers have a mischievous, carefree byplay suggestive of the lush-life atmosphere that Run For Your Life always struggled to evoke.

“The Voice of Gina Milan” has a killer ending, and a sucker-punch of a third-act twist also distinguishes my favorite Saltzman script, “To Catch a Kaiser.”  This Stoney Burke entry places the titular rodeo hero in the clutches of Eileen Fowler (Diana Hyland), a beautiful trick rider who hires Stoney (Jack Lord) to corral the majestic horse that crippled her.  “Kaiser” is one of those magic hours in which every element comes together: Tom Gries’ forceful closeups, the editing of the exciting jeep-horse chase, Hyland’s typically quicksilver performance, and Dominic Frontiere’s proto-Outer Limits scoring, which teases out the baroque emotions in Saltzman’s teleplay. 

Without ever dropping an obvious clue, Saltzman gradually aligns the viewer with Stoney’s uneasy feeling that Eileen and her father (John Anderson, his glum, gravelly drawl vital to the brooding pall that hangs over everything) are withholding something.  The truth that Saltzman finally reveals is a cruel one, but he follows it (too fast, maybe, but fifty minutes is a tight noose) with a welcome, bittersweet note of catharsis.

Saltzman also wrote regularly for producer Quinn Martin’s 12 O’Clock High and The Fugitive during the sixties.  His Fugitives were always solid, if not among the very best episodes; the highlight was perhaps “Trial by Fire,” one of the handful of segments that brought Dr. Kimble back to his hometown of Stafford, Indiana, this time to interrogate an alleged witness (Charles Aidman) to the one-armed man’s crime.  Saltzman did a year as an associate producer on 12 O’Clock High, then two as the producer of Fox’s half-hour cop series Felony Squad. 

In 1969, Saltzman began a a decade-long, full-time association with Quinn Martin Productions by taking the helm of its most dubious property, the long-running The FBI.  Saltzman ably replaced the producer of The FBI’s first four seasons, the gifted writer Charles Larson, and continued Larson’s strategy of ignoring the cardboard cops (denied any complexity at Mr. Hoover’s insistence) as much as possible in favor of the colorful and often sympathetic criminals. 

After his own four-year stint with The FBI, Larson moved over to QM’s Barnaby Jones.  Saltzman always managed to sound authentically enthusiastic about this geriatric private eye show, which was lambasted by critics and had the misfortune to be rumored as Richard Nixon’s favorite program.  Gamely, Saltzman called it the “Playhouse 90 of the Mississippi,” referring to Barnaby’s popularity in the heartland.

Saltzman ran Barnaby Jones for seven of its eight seasons, during and after which he also wrote or produced a number of other failed pilots, made-for-TV movies, and short-lived shows for Martin.  An expert, by then, on the possibilities of crime-fighting by senior citizens, Saltzman wrapped his career by producing several of the revived Perry Mason and Columbo television movies in the late eighties.

I know little about Saltzman’s background, although one source states that he was born in Mexico; if that’s accurate, he may have been a child of Jews who fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe.  Saltzman’s widow is Caroline Veiller, daughter of the screenwriter Anthony Veiller (The Killers, Moulin Rouge, The Night of the Iguana). 

I never met Saltzman myself, but I am relieved that another TV historian, Jonathan Etter, interviewed Saltzman at length for both his 2003 biography of Quinn Martin and a subsequent Filmfax piece.

Obituary: Mort Thaw (1921-2009)

The Writers Guild of America has confirmed the death of television writer Mort Thaw on May 3.  He was 87.

Thaw sold his first script at the age of thirty-four, to the television anthology Cameo Theater.  It was a prototypical example of a live television drama: intimate, earnest, and personal.  Entitled “Company,” it was the story of a young aspiring writer who resists his mother’s efforts to fix him up with a nice girl from the neighborhood.  More autobiographical scripts followed.  “The Amateur” (for Matinee Theater) extrapolated from Thaw’s own experiences as a contestant on a radio amateur hour program, and “Honest in the Rain” (for the U.S. Steel Hour), about a middle-aged woman with a gambling problem, may also have taken inspiration from real life.  For a time prior to his initial success as a writer, Thaw supported himself at the racetrack and at the craps table in Reno.

What fascinated me about Thaw’s career when I interviewed him in 2003 was how self-consciously he plotted entry into television.  After startling his friends and family with an abrupt move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, Thaw enrolled in a night class on TV writing at Hollywood High.  He could not afford a television set himself, so Thaw would stand in front of shop windows in the evenings and watch the plays by Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling as they were staged live on Studio One or the Philco Playhouse.  Thaw told me that he emulated these plays deliberately, and that’s probably why “Company,” though it draws upon Thaw’s own life, also sounds conspicuously like “Marty.”

Unfortunately for Thaw, he sold “Company” in 1955.  By that time, even though it was only six or seven years after the beginning of the modern television industry, the doors that had let in unknowns like Serling and Chayefsky were beginning to close.  That was one of a second and somewhat forgotten wave of live television writers.  For the most part, as the dramatic anthologies folded, the members of this group either adapted to a more commercial type of writing (as Richard DeRoy did), or they got out of the business. 

Ed Asner and Michael McGreevey in “Shoulder the Sky, My Lad.”

Thaw fell somewhere in the middle.  He continued to sell scripts to popular shows, and became typed slightly in the crime and mystery genre; he wrote for The Untouchables, The Detectives, and CHiPs, as well as The Waltons and Emergency!  Occasionally, Thaw could slip in something characteristic of his own sensitive touch into one of these mainstream shows.  One of his finest works is “Shoulder the Sky, My Lad,” a Route 66 about a Jewish boy’s crisis of faith after his father’s sudden, senseless death.  But an Ironside with a Jewish theme, featuring David Opatoshu as a rabbi distraught over the theft of some Torah scrolls, came across as overwrought and somewhat silly.  There were some genre shows into which character-driven writing would not go.

(Thaw never discussed his Judaism with me, and downplayed its significance in an interview with author Elliot B. Gertel.  But Del Reisman, story editor of Matinee Theater, recalled an intriguing pitch of Thaw’s which never came to fruition, a story in which an old-world immigrant father was driven literally crazy by his son’s alteration of a single letter in the family name.  That, too, came from Thaw’s own life; he had changed his surname from Thau.)

In our conversation, Thaw seemed resigned to the modesty of his career, proud of his favorite scripts and bitter about the disappointments.  His film career was a succession of missed opportunities.  Paramount optioned the film rights to “Honest in the Rain” and assigned fledgling producer Alan Pakula to the project, but Pakula dropped Thaw’s screenplay in favor of another one derived from a live teleplay, Fear Strikes Out.  Thaw was the original writer on High Jungle, the MGM adventure picture that shut down after its star, Rawhide’s Eric Fleming, drowned on location in the Amazon.  In the end Thaw wrote only one produced feature, the forgettable Harrad Summer, and remained angry about the results of a Guild arbitration over the screen credit (which he shared with Steve Zacharias).  In the nineties, Thaw and his best friend for more than fifty years, Ed Robak, collaborated on a play about Eugene and Carlotta O’Neill called Together.  A Lincoln Center staging almost came together with Anthony Perkins and Thaw’s close friend Lois Nettleton as the stars, but Perkins’s final illness thwarted the production.

Thaw’s contemporaries probably remember him less for his work as a writer than for his prolific service to the Writers Guild; many of his Guild acquaintances would, I’ll wager, be pleasantly surprised to learn that Thaw was a writer of some talent.  Reisman, a past president of the Guild, told me that Thaw’s most important work was on the Tellers Committee, which monitored the tabulation of votes in Guild election.  It was a thankless task, subject to frequent accusations of incompetence or chicanery, and may explain why Thaw was somewhat press-shy when I approached him for an interview.  I am slightly surprised that the WGA, which issued a lengthy press release enumerating Thaw’s accomplishments when it awarded him the Morgan Cox Award for distinguished service in 1996, has not run an obituary on its website.

Raymond Burr and David Opatoshu in “L’Chayim.”

Obituary: Richard Goldstone (1912-2007)

Thanks to a tip from author Jim Rosin, I’ve done some checking and verified the death of producer Richard Goldstone, on March 7, 2007.  Goldstone was born on July 24, 1912, so he would have been 94 at the time.  As far as I know, his death has not been reported anywhere until now.

Goldstone was a veteran screenwriter turned producer whose early career coalesced in MGM’s short subjects department during its heyday.  After that his name appears on some good films noir, including Robert Wise’s The Set-Up, Gerald Mayer’s Dial 1119, and Anthony Mann’s The Tall Target. 

In the fifties, Goldstone moved over to Twentieth Century-Fox and into television.  He is credited as the producer of Adventures in Paradise during most of its first two seasons, but seems to have left less of a creative mark on the show than some of the other members of the show’s large staff (which included Dominick Dunne and later William Self).  In his memoirs, Paradise producer William Froug depicts Goldstone as a passive personality, willing to defer to Froug on key story matters; he may have handled mainly the physical production. 

The same arrangement seems to have been in effect on Peyton Place, another Fox show, which Goldstone produced during its first season.  But no one I’ve talked to from Peyton Place remembers Goldstone, and the executive producer, Paul Monash, kept tight control over the story content and casting.  Goldstone also filled in for Gene Levitt as producer of a few Combat segments during the 1963-1964 season.

I never know quite what to do with these belated obituaries when I come across them.  I’ve run a couple on the blog over the past year and a half.  They’re not exactly news, but it seems to me that the information should be recorded in some reliable spot on the internet.  It used to be that the trade papers, or just Variety at least, would report the deaths of every small-part actor, assistant director, or makeup man in the industry – and very often, the spouses, parents, or children of same.  But the filmmaking community isn’t a community any more.  Now if you’re an industry veteran and you die, and a member of your family thinks to fax over a press release, the trades might reprint it, albeit without any further reporting, proofreading, or fact-checking.  If you’re lucky.

Obituaries: Bob Fisher; Roland Wolpert; Juarez Roberts

Comedy writer Bob Fisher’s death on September 19, 2008, has been confirmed by the WGA.  Fisher died two days before his eighty-sixth birthday.

One of the most prolific of sitcom writers, Fisher began in television the fifties by pairing up with a veteran radio writer twenty-five years his senior named Alan Lipscott.  Lipscott and Fisher wrote the first episode of Make Room For Daddy in 1953, and went on to craft teleplays for The Donna Reed Show, Bachelor Father, Bronco, How to Marry a Millionaire, and others.  Following Lipscott’s death in 1961, Fisher began writing with Arthur Marx, and that partnership (which lasted for over twenty-five years) produced episodes of McHale’s Navy, My Three Sons, The Mothers-in-Law, The Paul Lynde Show, and Life With Lucy.  Fisher and Marx were also story editors and frequent writers on Alice from 1977-1981. 

Fisher also wrote occasionally with Arthur Alsberg (on I Dream of Jeannie and Mona McCluskey) and had three plays produced on Broadway: the hit The Impossible Years (with Marx), Minnie’s Boys (with Marx), and Happiness Is Just a Little Thing Called a Rolls Royce (with Alsberg), which closed after one performance.

I had tried unsuccessfully over the past few years to arrange an interview with Fisher, and had heard from other writers that he led a peripatetic lifestyle.  So I wasn’t surprised when word of his death surfaced only last month via Mark Evanier’s blog. 

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Roland Wolpert, a television writer adept at both drama and comedy, died on March 25.  Wolpert was another writer who was too ill to be interviewed by the time I contacted him two years ago, so most of what I know about him comes from the death notice in the Los Angeles Times. 

Wolpert was born in New York City on December 30, 1923, went to City College, and was a correspondent during World War II.  His television career began with a move to Los Angeles in 1961, and he amassed credits on Naked City, Mr. Novak, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, Lancer, My Living Doll, Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, Family Affair, Room 222, Dan August, Emergency!, Good Times, and others.  Wolpert did not write for The Bold Ones, but had a shared creator credit on the series because the Leslie Nielsen “Protectors” segments were spun off Deadlock, a TV movie that Wolpert co-wrote.

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Eventually I’ll publish my interview with writer Juarez Roberts, who died of cancer on February 21.  In the meantime, all I will write here is that he was a long-distance friend and a truly larger-than-life character.  Certainly, he took up more room than Hollywood was ready to make for him.

Juarez was one of the last writers to break into television by throwing a script over the transom of one of the live television anthologies.  In his case, it was a U.S. Steel Hour called ”The Little Bullfighter,” which was inspired by stories told to him by a Mexican friend and co-worker at the Los Angeles foundry where Juarez was a foreman.  A second Steel Hour script drew upon memories of his Dust Bowl childhood (he was born in Oklahoma in 1923).

After the anthologies folded, he created scripts for popular Hollywood shows like Hawaiian Eye, Adventures in Paradise, and Checkmate.  He wrote the teleplay for a pilot based on The African Queen, with James Coburn and Glynis Johns in the Bogart and Hepburn roles.  It didn’t sell as a series but the pilot film landed on The Dick Powell Show in 1962. 

Six feet tall, with an Okie drawl that led many to mistake him for a rube, Juarez intimidated some producers and baffled others.  He fought for his ideas even on escapist work, and often lost; he used a pseudonym (George Stackalee) on Bonanza and took his name off a Route 66 altogether.  Forty years after the fact, Juarez was still annoyed that they changed the title of his Channing episode (about boxing) from something provocative (“Blood’s Not Very Red on TV”) to something generic (“Beyond His Reach”).

Juarez’s character was very much formed by his World War II service – he spoke of it often – and I once asked if he’d ever submitted any ideas to the TV series Combat.  “Come on, Stephen, you should know better than that,” he replied with disgust.  Combat met a lot of television critics’ standards for battlefront verisimilitude, but not Juarez’s.

Those stories should give you some idea of how Juarez’s low tolerance for compromise made a life in television impossible for him.  As far as I know, none of Juarez’s work was produced after 1963, although he toiled on some film scripts that were never made.  Sometime in the seventies Juarez turned his back on Hollywood and drifted up the coast to Mendocino, and then to Waldport, Oregon, where he died.  About a year ago, Juarez completed his first novel, which draws upon his own experiences as a paratrooper.  His widow, Sonya, is seeking a publisher, and I hope she finds one.

UPDATE: Sonya Roberts has provided a few corrections (which I have made to the above) and the following photo of Juarez in 1945.  I had not seen it before, but I think it amply illustrates the points I have tried to make about his individualism and strength of will.  

2008 Necrology

Now that enough time has passed for the stragglers to trickle in, here’s our second annual honor roll of the classic TV folks who left us last year. 

Writers
Jan 31: Robert Guy Barrows, dramatic writer, usually with wife Judith (Kraft Suspense Theater, The Man Who Never Was).
Feb 2: Richard Neil Morgan, adventure/crime specialist (Riverboat, Dragnet).
Feb 12: Oscar Brodney, veteran screenwriter latterly in TV (It Takes a Thief).
Feb 22: Richard Baer, prolific comedy scribe (Hennessey, The Munsters, That Girl).
Mar 4: Robert Warnes Leach, “B” action writer (Ripcord, Men Into Space).
Mar 6: Malvin Wald, busy all-purpose writer (Climax, Lock Up) and Daktari story editor.
Mar 8: Richard DeRoy, live TV veteran and Peyton Place writer/producer.
Mar 13: Raymond Goldstone, daytime soap writer (Days of Our Lives).
Mar 25: Abby Mann, live TV playwright (“Judgment at Nuremberg”) and Kojak creator.
Apr 8: Seaman Jacobs, top comedy writer (Bachelor Father, The Real McCoys, My Three Sons).
Apr 18: Kate Phillips, The Blob screenwriter also in TV with husband Howard (Riverboat).
Apr 28: Jack Hanrahan, Laugh-In staff writer and freelancer (Get Smart, Marcus Welby).
May 9: Zekial Marko, pulp novelist and occasional TV writer (Kolchak, Rockford Files).
Jun 2: Bill Dial, author of WKRP’s famous “Turkeys Away.”
Jun 10: Eliot Asinof, novelist, front for blacklist victims, sometime TV writer (Channing).
Jun 29: Irving Pearlberg, action/drama writer/ producer (Dr. Kildare, Man From UNCLE).
Jul 29: Luther Davis, talented dramatic writer (Kraft Suspense Theater, Bus Stop).
Aug 8: Thomas Y. Drake, folk lyricist who wrote for & story edited Then Came Bronson.
Aug 12: Nina Laemmle, longtime story editor (Peyton Place, Marcus Welby).
Aug 24: Tad Mosel, live TV playwright (Philco/Goodyear TV Playhouse, Playhouse 90).
Sep 1: Sheldon Keller, comedy veteran (Caesar’s Hour, Dick Van Dyke Show, M*A*S*H).
Sep 24: Oliver Crawford, prolific blacklisted writer (Climax, The Fugitive, Star Trek).
Oct 1: James Menzies,’60s drama/comedy writer (It’s a Man’s World, Mr. Novak).
Oct 13: Paul Schneider, drama & action writer (Dr. Kildare, Star Trek, Bonanza).
Nov 11: Arthur A. Ross, screenwriter who dabbled in TV (Mr. Lucky, Alfred Hitchcock Hour).
Nov 19: Irving Brecher, creator of The Life of Riley.
Nov 25: William Gibson, live TV playwright famous for “The Miracle Worker”; Robert Schlitt, 60s New York writer (The Nurses, NYPD) turned mystery specialist (Matlock).
Nov 27: Alan Woods, comedy & action journeyman (Lassie, Father Knows Best).
Dec 3: Earl Booth, veteran story editor (The Nurses, Judd For the Defense).
Dec 21: Dale Wasserman, live TV writer (Kraft Theater, DuPont Show of the Month).

Directors
Jan 4: Herbert B. Swope, Jr., retired after directing ’50s live TV (Climax, Lights Out).
Jan 28: Dwight Hemion, won 47 Emmy nominations for specials and variety shows.
Jan 30: Herbert Kenwith, live TV director later busy in sitcoms (Good Times).
Feb 9: Kirk Browning, live TV’s only opera specialist.
Mar 7: George Tyne, blacklisted actor turned sitcom director (The Brady Bunch).
Apr 5: Alex Grasshoff, documentarian who directed ’70s action (Rockford Files, Toma).
May 18: Joseph Pevney, ’50s movie director who became prolific in episodic TV (Star Trek, Wagon Train).
May 27: Sydney Pollack, A-list episodic director of the early 60s (Ben Casey).
May 29: Georg J. Fenady, first AD turned action specialist (Combat, Emergency).
Jul 3: Dave Powers, multiple Emmy winner for The Carol Burnett Show.
Jul 12: Claudio Guzman, primary I Dream of Genie director.
Aug 6: Jud Taylor, supporting actor turned director of episodic (Star Trek, Then Came Bronson) and TV movies.
Dec 20: Robert Mulligan, top live anthology director-producer (Suspense, Studio One).

Actors
Jan 10: Maila Nurmi, Vampira on live L.A. TV in the fifties.
Jan 15: Adele Longmire, stage actress turned agent.
Jan 17: George Keymas, pock-faced villain; Allan Melvin, menacing comic villain (Andy Griffith, Gomer Pyle) and Sam the Butcher (The Brady Bunch).
Jan 18: Lois Nettleton, top ’60s TV guest star (The Twilight Zone, The Fugitive).
Jan 19: Suzanne Pleshette, sultry ’60s ingenue and Bob Newhart Show spouse.
Jan 25: Louisa Horton, live TV character actress.
Jan 29: Manuel Padilla, Jr., child actor (Tarzan).
Feb 4: Augusta Dabney, live TV actress and soap star (Loving).
Feb 5: Barry Morse, The Fugitive’s Lt. Gerard.
Feb 9: Robert DoQui, busy African-American supporting player.
Feb 11: David Groh, Rhoda’s spouse.
Feb 14: Perry Lopez, supporting player specializing in Latinos & Indians.
Mar 16: Ivan Dixon, Hogan’s Heroes bit player who could also act (The Defenders).
Apr 5: Stephen Oliver, surly Peyton Place and Bracken’s World regular; Charlton Heston, live TV star (Studio One) turned gun nut.
Apr 8: Stanley Kamel, nervous-looking ’70s character actor later on Monk.
Apr 15: Hazel Court, classic British scream queen in lots of American TV too.
Apr 16: Nino Candido, bit player turned prop master.
Apr 18: Joy Page, Warner Bros. heiress in some ’50s TV.
Apr 27: Peter Mamakos, mustachioed ethnic character actor.
May 2: Beverlee McKinsey, NYC guest ingenue and popular soap star (Another World).
May 8: Dorothy Green, blonde, distinguished-looking supporting player; C. M. (Chris) Gampel, New York character actor.
May 24: Dick Martin, ’60s comedy icon.
May 29: Harvey Korman, rubber-faced Carol Burnett Show comedian.
Jun 17: Henry Beckman, scene-stealing character man from Peyton Place through The X-Files; Jacqueline Bertrand, stage actress occasionally in sixties NYC shows (Dark Shadows).
Jun 22: Dody Goodman, dotty character actress (Jack Paar’s Tonight Show).
Jun 26: Lilyan Chauvin, angular-faced small-part actress (Combat’s resident Frenchwoman).
Jul 7: Richard Angarola, swarthy small-part actor in many ethnic roles; Steve Harmon, Ensign Pulver to TV’s Mister Roberts.
Jul 17: Larry Haines, character actor and soap star (Search For Tomorrow); Paul Sorensen, balding, deep-voiced bit player.
Aug 2: Charles Gray, Rawhide cowboy.
Aug 10: Isaac Hayes, music and blaxploitation star recurring on The Rockford Files.
Aug 11: George Furth, character actor in an array of gay archetypes.
Aug 18: Roberta Collins.
Aug 19: Diane Webber, Playboy model and occasional sixties TV eye-candy.
Aug 21: Fred Crane, Gone With the Wind actor in early TV bit parts.
Sep 1: Michael Pate, Australian expatriate who was the ultimate all-purpose TV actor.
Sep 18: Peter Kastner, star of The Ugliest Girl in Town; James Gavin, bit player and stuntman (Big Valley); Howard Mann, comic character actor (Alice).
Sep 24: Irene Dailey, imposing character actress (The Twilight Zone), later on soaps.
Sep 26: Paul Newman, star of the late live TV era (“Bang the Drum Slowly”).
Sep 29: Louis Guss, fleshy-faced stock Italian-American in many New York shows (Naked City).
Oct 1: House Peters, Jr., bit actor (Lassie, Wyatt Earp) famous as Mr. Clean in commercials; Robert Arthur, male lead often on TV in the fifties.
Oct 8: Eileen Herlie, yet another soap opera matriarch (All My Children).
Oct 11: Gil Stratton, sportscaster cum TV bit player.
Nov 5: Michael Higgins, chameleonesque actor ubiquitous in New York dramas.
Nov 17: John Napier, busy sixties supporting actor (Perry Mason, Dr. Kildare).
Nov 19: Wayne Heffley, stocky supporting actor (Highway Patrol, Twilight Zone).
Nov 21: Rose Arrick, stage actress occasionally on TV (East Side/West Side, Law & Order).
Dec 1: Paul Benedict, The Jeffersons‘ Bentley.
Dec 2: George Pelling, a constable or butler in many Thrillers and Hitchcocks.
Dec 5: Beverly Garland, tough ’50s beauty (Decoy) later on My Three Sons; Nina Foch, prolific star character actress from live TV through NCIS.
Dec 8: Robert Prosky, cherubic stage actor who replaced Michael Conrad on Hill Street Blues.
Dec 9: Lynn Bernay, fifties ingenue (M Squad, Highway Patrol).
Dec 13: James Dukas, tough-looking NYC character actor (Naked City, NYPD); Van Johnson, MGM song & dance man turned frequent TV guest star (Batman, Ben Casey).
Dec 18: Majel Barrett, Star Trek’s Nurse Chapel.
Dec 25: Eartha Kitt, Batman’s final Catwoman.
Dec 30: Bernie Hamilton, busy black supporting actor, later the captain on Starsky and Hutch.
Dec 31: Brad Sullivan, thick-lipped character actor occasionally on TV (Movin’ On, NYPD Blue).

Others
Jan 16: Ronald Noll, music supervisor for CBS shows in New York in the fifties & sixties.
Jan 18: Frank Lewin, primary composer for The Defenders and The Nurses.
Feb 15: Harry Geller, composer/conductor (The Baileys of Balboa, Hawaii Five-O).
Feb 23: Carl Pingitore, film editor at Warners (Maverick) and Universal (Run For Your Life).
Feb 29: Gayne Rescher, director of photography (The Nurses, TV movies).
Mar 4: Leonard Rosenman, composer of classic TV themes (Combat, Marcus Welby).
Mar 9: George Justin, NYC-based line producer (You Are There, Espionage).
May 15: Alexander Courage, Star Trek theme composer.
May 16: Sandy Howard, live TV producer/director (Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo).
May 18: Nick Archer, film editor (Run For Your Life, Raid on Entebbe).
May 26: Earle Hagen, composer of classic TV themes (Andy Griffith Show, Mod Squad).
May 28: Robert H. Justman, producer (Star Trek, Then Came Bronson).
Jun 28: Robert Lewis Shayon, radio writer/producer who became influential TV critic for the National Review.
Jul 3: Dave Kahn, often uncredited composer of theme songs (Mike Hammer, Leave It to Beaver, Hitchcock, Bachelor Father) and stock libraries.
Jul 11: James Heckert, film editor (F Troop, Roots). 
July 23: Anthony N. Wollner, film editor (Annie Oakley, Big Valley).
Sep 26: M. Clay Adams, production manager (The Phil Silvers Show, The Defenders).
Oct 11: Neal Hefti, composer of the Batman theme.
Oct 15: Warren Welch, set decorator (Batman).
Oct 24: Serge Krizman, art director (Batman, The Fugitive).
Oct 31: Studs Terkel, beloved oral historian and star of Chicago live TV’s Studs’ Place.
Nov 14: Irving Gertz, composer (Peyton Place, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea).
Nov 28: Bill Finnegan, assistant director (The Man From UNCLE) and producer.
Dec 13: Leo Lotito, Jr., makeup artist long at Universal Television.