Hammered Again

Last year, I wrote about the 1958-1959 TV series Mike Hammer, and wondered who produced the show.  Though it would be unthinkable today, MCA at the time omitted producer credits from some of its television programs.

Recently, I took a minute to poke through Variety‘s digitized archives and solved the mystery (at least partially).  As Hammer expert Max Allan Collins suggested in a comment on the original article, MCA lifer Richard (Dick) Irving was the primary producer of the show.  Variety first announced the Darren McGavin/MCA package on June 12, 1957, in a piece that noted the earlier Brian Keith pilot based on the Spillane character, but confirmed that neither Keith nor Richard Lewis, the producer of that pilot, would have any involvement in the new series.  Rather, “the syndicated private eye skein will be producer by Karl Kramer and Dick Irving, with the latter directing most, if not all of the segments.”

Karl Kramer – whose name you’d probably never heard until now, even if you’re a TV aficionado  – was a senior MCA executive, one of the former band bookers who became, according to Dennis McDougal’s The Last Mogul, the agency’s treasurer and a member of its “ruling elite.”  A contender to succeed Jules Stein as the company’s president, Kramer instead became the company’s chief television executive around 1950.  Kicked upstairs shortly after the Mike Hammer launch (his title in 1958 was “honorary chairman” of Revue Productions), he retired in the early sixties and died in 1980.  (One of Kramer’s daughters was married to sitcom director Jay Sandrich).  It’s pretty safe to assume, then, that most or all of the creative decision-making fell to Irving, who incidentally ended up directing fewer than a dozen episodes – an early sign that television production, even in the days when a TV show could have but a single producer, would prove more complex than the executives or the press initially assumed.  (Irving also directed all the New York City location shooting, even in episodes credited to other directors.)

One of the very first directors associated with MCA’s production unit – he started on generic, threadbare anthologies like Stars Over Hollywood and The Gruen Guild Playhouse as early as 1951 – the one-time bit actor Irving stayed with the company as a sort of mid-tier creative for nearly two decades.  (He was initially assigned to The Virginian, but bumped when Universal hired a “name” – Rawhide creator Charles Marquis Warren – to oversee the prestigious 90-minute Western.)  As a producer and occasional director on the likes of State Trooper and Laredo, Irving may be best remembered as a mentor of young talent: he hired both Sydney Pollack (on Shotgun Slade) and Steven Spielberg (on The Name of the Game) early in their careers.

So that solves that, except that I couldn’t find any reference to who produced the second (1958-1959) season of Mike Hammer.  It’s likely that Irving stayed on, but perhaps not – and it’s also possible that he had an associate producer or story editor whose name still remains lost to history.

One other interesting tidbit I discovered is that – contrary to my assumption that one series followed the other – Mike Hammer and Darren McGavin’s subsequent starring vehicle for MCA, the Western Riverboat (1959-1961), actually overlapped in production.  According to Variety, McGavin shot the first two Riverboat episodes prior to May 23, 1959, at which point he went back to shoot another five Mike Hammer segments.  “After the five, he’ll continue to shuttle between the two shows, with 11 more Hammers to be made,” the trade paper added.  And James Garner thought he had it rough on Maverick!

Riverboat premiered on September 23, and a quick check of the TV listings suggests that, at least in the New York City market, new episodes of Mike Hammer were debuting as late as November 1959.  So, for a couple of months that fall, McGavin fans could see their favorite actor headlining two different first-run series at the same time.  How many other times in television history has that happened?

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