SEEN, READ 2022

With apologies to Mr/Dr Soderbergh (and a few tweaks to the format) . . . .

All caps, bold: MOVIE

All caps, bold, italics: MOVIE (not a first viewing)

All caps, bold, asterisk: SHORT FILM*

All caps: TV SERIES

Italics: Book

01/01 Hell Hound, Ken Greenhall; GUNSMOKE (1968) (6); THE UNTOUCHABLES (1961) (2)

01/02 Murder Is Not an Odd Job, Ralph Dennis; THE UNTOUCHABLES (1961-62) (5); GUNSMOKE (1968) (4)

01/03 GUNSMOKE (1968) (4)

01/04 Working For the Man, Ralph Dennis; GUNSMOKE (1968) (3)

01/05 THE UNTOUCHABLES (1962) (2); GUNSMOKE (1968) (3)

01/06 MIAMI VICE (1985) (4)

01/07 THE INSECT WOMAN (Kim Ki-young, 1972); YOU ARE A WIDOW, SIR! (Václav Vorlíĉek, 1971); Welcome to Dunder Mifflin: The Ultimate Oral History of The Office, Brian Baumgartner & Ben Silverman

01/08 THE BEAST MUST DIE (Roman Viñoly Barreto, 1952); THE BITTER STEMS (Fernando Ayala, 1956); KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (Hector Babenco, 1985)

01/09 The Face That Must Die, Ramsey Campbell; DREAMLAND (Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, 2020); CAVALCADE (Frank Lloyd, 1933)

01/10 SERGEANT CORK (1963) (2)

01/11 POSSESSOR (Brandon Cronenberg, 2020)

01/12 GUEST OF HONOUR (Atom Egoyan, 2020); SMALL AXE: MANGROVE (Steve McQueen, 2020)

01/13 LES VAMPIRES: THE SEVERED HEAD*; THE DEADLY RING*; THE RED CRYPTOGRAM*; THE SPECTRE* (Louis Feuillade, 1915-16) 

01/14 Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg; APPRENTICE TO MURDER (R.L. Thomas, 1988); WHITE FIRE (Jean-Marie Pallardy, 1984); MANIAC KILLER (Andrea Bianchi, 1987)

01/15 THE BLOODY BROOD (Julian Roffman, 1959); THE MASK (Roffman, 1961); FDR HYDE PARK* (Roffman, 1949); FREEDOM TO READ* (Roffman, 1954)

01/16 Dread Journey, Dorothy B. Hughes; LEPTIRICA; WARD*; THE MAIDEN’S TUNE* (Đorđe Kadijević, 1973)

01/17 LES VAMPIRES: THE CORPSE’S ESCAPE*; THE EYES THAT MESMERIZE*  (Louis Feuillade, 1915-16)

01/18 SMALL AXE: LOVERS ROCK; RED, WHITE AND BLUE; ALEX WHEATLE; EDUCATION (Steve McQueen, 2020)

01/19 MIAMI VICE (1985) (4)

01/21 The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre That Revolutionized American Comedy, Janet Coleman; MIAMI VICE (1985-86) (2)

01/22 MIAMI VICE (1986) (4)

01/24 The 30 Rock Book, Mike Roe; HAPPY PEOPLE: A YEAR IN THE TAIGA (Dmitry Vasyukov & Werner Herzog, 2013)

01/25 A Pagan Place, Edna O’Brien; ON DEATH ROW (2012) (3)

01/26 ON DEATH ROW (2012-13) (5); Dig My Grave Deep, Peter Rabe 

01/28 Starstruck: My Unlikely Road to Hollywood, Leonard Maltin; THE LADY REFUSES (George Archainbaud, 1931); THE WOMAN BETWEEN (Victor Schertzinger, 1931); KEPT HUSBANDS (Lloyd Bacon, 1931)

01/29 EX-LADY (Robert Florey, 1933); GIRL MISSING (Florey, 1933); I SELL ANYTHING (Florey, 1934); REGISTERED NURSE (Florey, 1934); SMARTY (Florey, 1934); MILLIE (John Francis Dillon, 1931)

01/30 The Queen’s Gambit, Walter Tevis; FROM ONE SECOND TO THE NEXT* (Werner Herzog, 2013); LO AND BEHOLD: REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD (Herzog, 2016)

01/31 INTO THE INFERNO (Werner Herzog, 2016)

02/01 QUEEN OF THE DESERT (Werner Herzog, 2017); SALT AND FIRE (Herzog, 2017)

02/02 KING IN THE WILDERNESS (Peter Kunhardt, 2018); Apparently There Were Complaints, Sharon Gless

02/03 HUMAN CAPITAL (Marc Meyers, 2020)

02/04 Union Street, Pat Barker; YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT (David Koepp, 2020); BLOODSHOT (David S.F. Wilson, 2020); AVA (Tate Taylor, 2020); 

THE INFORMER (Andrea Di Stefano, 2020); THE SECRETS WE KEEP (Yuval Adler, 2020)

02/05 TENET (Christopher Nolan, 2020); ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI… (Regina King, 2020); ON THE ROCKS (Sofia Coppola, 2020); LET HIM GO (Thomas Bezucha, 2020)

02/06 SUGARFOOT (1958) (2); BRONCO (1958) (2); Blue Blood, Craig Unger

02/07 MIAMI VICE (1986) (3)

02/08 PUBLIC DEFENDER (1954) (4); SUGARFOOT (1958) (2)

02/09 WANDER (April Mullen, 2020); ECHO BOOMERS (Seth Savoy, 2020)

02/10 FEELS GOOD MAN (Arthur Jones, 2020)

02/11 MEETING GORBACHEV (Werner Herzog & Andre Singer, 2019); NOMAD: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BRUCE CHATWIN (Herzog, 2020)

02/12 The Mongolian Conspiracy, Rafael Bernal; PROMISE OF THE FLESH (Kim Ki-young, 1975); WOMAN CHASING THE BUTTERFLY OF DEATH (Kim, 1978); IO ISLAND (Kim, 1977)

02/13 LES VAMPIRES: SATANAS*; THE LORD OF THUNDER*; THE POISON MAN*; THE BLOODY WEDDING* (Louis Feuillade, 1916)

02/14 Blow Your House Down, Pat Barker

02/15 BILLIONS (2020) (4)

02/16 TIME (Garrett Bradley, 2020); ALONE* (Bradley, 2016)

02/17 SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE (1956) (3)

02/18 CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN (Edward L. Cahn, 1955); GIRLS IN PRISON (Cahn, 1956); SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE (1956) (1); VOODOO WOMAN (Cahn, 1957); ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU (Cahn, 1957); INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN (Cahn, 1957)

02/19 IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (Edward L. Cahn, 1958); CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN (Cahn, 1958); HONG KONG CONFIDENTIAL (Cahn, 1958); GUNS GIRLS AND GANGSTERS (Cahn, 1959); RIOT IN JUVENILE PRISON (Cahn, 1959); INVISIBLE INVADERS (Cahn, 1959); GUNFIGHTERS OF ABILENE (Cahn, 1959); VICE RAID (Cahn, 1959)

02/20 FIVE GUNS TO TOMBSTONE (Edward L. Cahn, 1960); BILLIONS (2020) (3)

02/21 The Elementals, Michael McDowell; THE CROWN (2020) (3)

02/22 BILLIONS (2021) (5)

02/23 Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, Noah Feldman; SNOWPIERCER (2020) (3)

02/24 Memoirs of Hecate County, Edmund Wilson; OKLAHOMA TERRITORY (Edward L. Cahn, 1960); NOOSE FOR A GUNMAN (Cahn, 1960)

02/25 FIREBALL: VISITORS FROM DARKER WORLDS (Werner Herzog & Clive Oppenheimer, 2020)

02/26 THREE CAME TO KILL (Edward L. Cahn, 1960); CAGE OF EVIL (Cahn, 1960); THE WALKING TARGET (Cahn, 1960); YOU HAVE TO RUN FAST (Cahn, 1961); The Bushwhacked Piano, Thomas McGuane

02/27 BOY WHO CAUGHT A CROOK (Edward L. Cahn, 1961)

03/01 Balcony in the Forest, Julien Gracq; THE CROWN (2020) (3)

03/02 King Cophetua, Julien Gracq; SNOWPIERCER (2020) (3)

03/03 THE CROWN (2020) (4); POSE (2021)

03/04 THREE LIVES AND ONLY ONE DEATH (Raul Ruiz, 1996); GENEALOGIES OF A CRIME (Ruiz, 1997)

03/05 THE REFLECTING SKIN (Philip Ridley, 1990); THE PASSION OF DARKLY NOON (Ridley, 1995); CLEARCUT (Ryszard Bugajski, 1991)

03/06 POSE (2021) (2)

03/07 The Store, Bentley Little; POSE (2021) (2)

03/08 SNOWPIERCER (2020) (4)

03/09 The House on Coliseum Street, Shirley Ann Grau; POSE (2021) (3)

03/10 GUN FIGHT (Edward L. Cahn, 1961); GUN STREET (Cahn, 1961); INCIDENT IN AN ALLEY (Cahn, 1962)

03/11 NAKED LUNCH (David Cronenberg, 1991)

03/12 EL PISITO (Isidoro M. Ferri & Marco Ferreri, 1958); LOS CHICOS (Ferreri, 1959)

03/13 HUMANS (2015) (2); The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma, Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz

03/14 Being There, Jerzy Kosinski; YELLOWSTONE (2021) (5)

03/15 THE OMEGA MAN (Boris Sagal, 1971); SOYLENT GREEN (Richard Fleischer, 1973); Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, James Andrew Miller

03/16 THE AGONY OF JERUSALEM (Julien Duvivier, 1927)

03/17 Quicksand, Nella Larsen; YELLOWSTONE (2021-22) (5)

03/18 DER FAN (Eckhart Schmidt, 1982); DECODER (Muscha, 1984)

03/19 THE INHERITORS (Walter Bannert, 1983); ANGST (Gerald Kargl, 1983); FRANKFURT KAISERSTRASSE (Roger Fritz, 1981); THE DAY IT RAINED (Gerd Oswald, 1959); SHIP OF THE DEAD (Georg Tressler, 1959)

03/20 SUKKUBUS (Georg Tressler, 1989); Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale, J.J. Phillips

03/21 A HOLY PLACE (Đorđe Kadijević, 1990)

03/22 Passing, Nella Larsen; HUMANS (2015) (3)

03/23 The Connoisseur, Evan S. Connell

03/24 THE MARRIAGE OF MADEMOISELLE BEULEMANS (Julien Duvivier, 1927); THE MAELSTROM OF PARIS (Duvivier, 1928)

03/25 The Fabulous Clipjoint, Fredric Brown; HER SMELL (Alex Ross Perry, 2019); THE INVISIBLE MAN (Leigh Whannell, 2020); THE QUARRY (Scott Teems, 2020); THE KID DETECTIVE (Evan Morgan, 2020)

03/26 RICHARD JEWELL (Clint Eastwood, 2019); CRY MACHO (Eastwood, 2021); BAD EDUCATION (Cory Finley, 2020); NEWS OF THE WORLD (Paul Greengrass, 2020)

03/27 HUMANS (2015) (3); So Many Doors, Oakley Hall

03/28 MLK/FBI (Sam Pollard, 2021)

03/29 Fireworks, Angela Carter; THE MYSTERY OF THE EIFFEL TOWER (Julien Duvivier, 1928)

03/30 BODY CAM (Malik Vitthal, 2020)

03/31 I AM THE NIGHT (2019) (6)

04/01 Make Room! Make Room!, Harry Harrison; A WHITE SPOT ON THE BACK OF THE HEAD* (Viðar Víkingsson, 1979); DRAUGASAGA (Víkingsson, 1985); TILBURY* (Víkingsson, 1987)

04/02 THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF (Jess Franco, 1962); DEATH WHISTLES THE BLUES (Franco, 1962); RIFIFI IN THE CITY (Franco, 1963); DR. ORLOFF’S MONSTER (Franco, 1964); MARQUIS DE SADE’S “JUSTINE” (Franco, 1969); The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century, Margaret Talbot

04/03 THE DIVINE VOYAGE (Julien Duvivier, 1929); Jack’s Return Home, Ted Lewis

04/04 MIAMI VICE (1986) (3)

04/05 LEAVING NEVERLAND (Dan Reed, 2019)

04/06 BRIDE OF THE GORILLA (Curt Siodmak, 1951); KID MONK BARONI (Harold Schuster, 1952)

04/07 Froth on the Daydream, Boris Vian; ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN (Morgan Neville, 2021); THE ONE AND ONLY DICK GREGORY (Andre Gaines, 2021)

04/08 POLTERGEIST (Tobe Hooper, 1982); TOOTSIE (Sydney Pollack, 1982); THE DIARY OF AN UNKNOWN SOLDIER* (Peter Watkins, 1959); THE FORGOTTEN FACES* (Watkins, 1961); CULLODEN (Watkins, 1964)

04/09 THE WAR GAME (Peter Watkins, 1965); PRIVILEGE (Watkins, 1967); THE GLADIATORS (Watkins, 1969); PUNISHMENT PARK (Watkins, 1971)

04/10 THE MATCHBOX MAN* (Gorman Bechard, 2021); MAIL ORDER MURDER: THE STORY OF W.A.V.E. PRODUCTIONS (Ross Snyder & William Hellfire, 2020)

04/11 NARCOS: MEXICO (2018) (2)

04/12 NARCOS: MEXICO (2018) (3)

04/13 They Came From Within: A History of Canadian Horror Cinema, Caelum Vatnsdal

04/14 NARCOS: MEXICO (2018) (5); Storm, George R. Stewart

04/15 POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE (Brian Gibson, 1986); POLTERGEIST III (Gary Sherman, 1988); WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE (Sherman, 1986)

04/16 LA LLORONA (Ramón Peón, 1933); THE PHANTOM OF THE MONASTERY (Fernando de Fuentes, 1934); TWO MONKS (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1934); RIVER OF GRASS (Kelly Reichardt, 1994); DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (Julie Dash, 1991)

04/17 The Surprise Party Complex, Ramona Stewart; EDVARD MUNCH (Peter Watkins, 1974); EVENING LAND (Watkins, 1977)

04/19 THE STATE OF TEXAS VS. MELISSA (Sabrina Van Tassel, 2020)

04/20 I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE (2020) (3)

04/21 I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE (2020) (3); The Hungry Moon, Ramsey Campbell

04/22 BLOOD THEATRE (Rick Sloane, 1984); THE VISITANTS (Sloane, 1987); HOBGOBLINS (Sloane, 1988); VICE ACADEMY (Sloane, 1989); VICE ACADEMY PART 2 (Sloane, 1990); Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, Daniel Herbert

04/23 NECROMANCER (Dusty Nelson, 1988); EVIL TOWN (Various, 1977/87); DEADLY DAPHNE’S REVENGE (Richard Gardner, 1981/87); HELL RIDERS (James Bryan, 1984); THE AFTERMATH (Steve Barkett, 1982)

04/24 TRANSFORMATIONS* (Barbara Hirschfeld, 1972); NIGHT CALLER* (Dan Gilbert, 1973)

04/25 Apartment in Athens, Glenway Wescott; THE MIRACULOUS LIFE OF THERESA OF LISIEUX (Julien Duvivier, 1929)

04/26 EUREKA (Shinji Aoyama, 2000)

04/27 BACKWATER (Shinji Aoyama, 2013); POLTERGEIST (Gil Kenan, 2015); Mrs. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls

04/28 DESTINATION TOKYO (Delmer Daves, 1943); HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN (Daves, 1944)

04/29 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST (Jules Dassin, 1944); TWO SMART PEOPLE (Dassin, 1946); THE CROSS OF LORRAINE (Tay Garnett, 1943); THE VALLEY OF DECISION (Garnett, 1945); Voices From the Moon, Andre Dubus

04/30 ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES (Arthur Lubin, 1944); SUMMER STORM (Douglas Sirk, 1944); A SCANDAL IN PARIS (Sirk, 1946); SLEEP, MY LOVE (Sirk, 1948)

05/01 SLIGHTLY FRENCH (Douglas Sirk, 1949); THE RED MENACE (R.G. Springsteen, 1949); OUT OF THE BLUE (Leigh Jason, 1947); THE KID FROM CLEVELAND (Herbert Kline, 1949)

05/03 DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD (Kirsten Johnson, 2020)

05/04 The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million, Nathanael West; MIDNIGHT COWBOY (John Schlesinger, 1969)

05/05 Shooting Midnight Cowboy, Glenn Frankel; SHAMELESS (2017) (3)

05/06 JOHNNY COME LATELY (William K. Howard, 1943); THE CRYSTAL BALL (Elliott Nugent, 1943); JOURNEY FOR MARGARET (W.S. Van Dyke II, 1942)

05/07 THE RED HOUSE (Delmer Daves, 1947); DARK PASSAGE (Daves, 1947); TASK FORCE (Daves, 1949); A KISS IN THE DARK (Daves, 1949)

05/08 The Last Worthless Evening, Andre Dubus; MIAMI VICE (1986) (5)

05/09 LURED (Douglas Sirk, 1947); NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (Eliza Hittman, 2020)

05/11 SHAMELESS (2017) (4)

05/12 The Truth and Other Stories, Stanisław Lem; SHAMELESS (2017-18) (2)

05/13 DOWNFALL (John Moxey, 1964); THE VERDICT (David Eady, 1964); WE SHALL SEE (Quentin Lawrence, 1964); FACE OF A STRANGER (Moxey, 1964); THE SICILIANS (Ernest Morris, 1963)

05/14 WHO WAS MADDOX? (Geoffrey Nethercott, 1964); ACT OF MURDER (Alan Bridges, 1964); NEVER MENTION MURDER (John Nelson Burton, 1964); THE MAIN CHANCE (John Knight, 1964); GAME FOR THREE LOSERS (Gerry O’Hara, 1965); CHANGE PARTNERS (Robert Lynn, 1965); STRANGLER’S WEB (John Moxey, 1965); DEAD MAN’S CHEST (Patrick Dromgoole, 1965)

05/15 Eden, Stanisław Lem; SHAMELESS (2018) (3)

05/16 MOTHER HUMMINGBIRD (Julien Duvivier, 1930)

05/18 The N’Gustro Affair, Jean-Patrick Manchette

05/19 RED JOAN (Trevor Nunn, 2019); HOPE GAP (William Nicholson, 2020)

05/20 IN FABRIC (Peter Strickland, 2019); THE GENTLEMEN (Guy Ritchie, 2020); ROGUE (MJ Bassett, 2020)

05/21 YOUNG AHMED (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2020); ANOTHER ROUND (Thomas Vinterberg, 2020); AMMONITE (Francis Lee, 2020)

05/22 Dancing After Hours and uncollected stories in The Cross Country Runner, Andre Dubus; SERGEANT CORK (1963) (2)

05/23 DR. DEATH (2021) (3)

05/24 THE AVENGERS (1963) (2)

05/25 The Hanging on Union Square, H.T. Tsiang; DR. DEATH (2021); THE HOT ZONE: ANTHRAX (2021)

05/26 DR. DEATH (2021) (4); Townie, Andre Dubus III

05/27 THE HOT ZONE: ANTHRAX (2021) (5); Meditations From a Moving Chair, Andre Dubus

05/28 THRILLER (1974) (5)

05/29 PUBLIC EYE (1971) (8); THRILLER (1974); Dark Entries, Robert Aickman

05/30 THRILLER (1975) (6); ROGUE MALE (Clive Donner, 1976)

05/31 LOVE’S BERRY* (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1926); THE DIPLOMATIC POUCH* (Dovzhenko, 1927)

06/01 ZVENIGORA (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1928)

06/02 CSI: VEGAS (2021) (3)

06/03 Binstead’s Safari, Rachel Ingalls; SERENITY (Steven Knight, 2019); ARSENAL (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1929)

06/04 EARTH (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930); HAPPY AS LAZZARO (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018); PETERLOO (Mike Leigh, 2019)

06/05 Call Me a Cab, Donald E. Westlake; THE GOOD FIGHT (2020) (5)

06/06 WILD COMBINATION: A PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR RUSSELL (Matt Wolf, 2008)

06/08 Three Summers, Margarita Liberaki; THE GOOD FIGHT (2020-21) (5)

06/09 THE GOOD FIGHT (2021) (7)

06/10 DRIVEN (Nick Hamm, 2019); THE KITCHEN (Andrea Berloff, 2019); COLD PURSUIT (Hans Petter Moland, 2019); LONG SHOT (Jonathan Levine, 2019); 47 METERS DOWN: UNCAGED (Johannes Roberts, 2019); Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald

06/11 FORD V FERRARI (James Mangold, 2019); THE BEACH BUM (Harmony Korine, 2019); UNDER THE SILVER LAKE (David Robert Mitchell, 2019); CHARLIE SAYS (Mary Harron, 2019)

06/12 TRIAL BY FIRE (Edward Zwick, 2019)

06/13 JOJO RABBIT (Taika Waititi, 2019); SHIRAZ (Franz Osten, 1928)

06/14 The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson; LOST BATTALION (Eddie Romero, 1960)

06/15 THE RAVAGERS (Eddie Romero, 1965)

06/16 CASTLE ROCK (2019) (4); Everybody Thought We Were Crazy, Mark Rozzo

06/17 Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies, Blaise Cendrars; BLOOD THIRST (Newt Arnold, 1965); THE BLOOD DRINKERS (Gerardo de León, 1964); THE WALLS OF HELL (de León & Eddie Romero, 1964)

06/18 CURSE OF THE VAMPIRES (Gerardo de León, 1966); BRIDES OF BLOOD (de León & Eddie Romero, 1968); MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND (de León & Romero, 1969); BEAST OF BLOOD (Romero, 1970); BACK DOOR TO HELL (Monte Hellman, 1964); FLIGHT TO FURY (Hellman, 1964)

06/19 AMBUSH BAY (Ron Winston, 1966); IMPASSE (Richard Benedict, 1969); One For Hell, Jada M. Davis

06/20 LITTLE WOODS (Nia DaCosta, 2019); CLEMENCY (Chinonye Chukwu, 2019); LUCE (Julius Onah, 2019)

06/21 CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2017) (6)

06/22 The Mad and the Bad, Jean-Patrick Manchette; MARSHA HUNT’S SWEET ADVERSITY (Roger C. Memos, 2015); HOLLYWOOD CHINESE (Arthur Dong, 2008); THE MAN WHO SHOT CHINATOWN: THE LIFE & WORK OF JOHN A. ALONZO (Axel Schill, 2007)

06/23 CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2017) (4)

06/24 GUNSMOKE (1968-69) (7)

06/25 GUNSMOKE (1969) (10)

06/26 MY LIFE AS A DOG (Lasse Hallström, 1985); SALAAM BOMBAY! (Mira Nair, 1988)

06/27 BERLIN STATION (2016) (2)

06/29 Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara; MIAMI VICE (1986) (4)

06/30 THE DISCOVERY OF BRAZIL (Humberto Mauro, 1937); BRASILIANAS* (6) (1946-56, Mauro); O JOAO DE BARRO* (Mauro, 1956); SAO JOAO DEL REI* (Mauro, 1958); THE SPINNING OLD WOMAN* (Mauro, 1964); THE OXCART* (Mauro, 1974)

07/01 MIDWAY (Roland Emmerich, 2019); MOONFALL (Emmerich, 2022); ESCAPE ROOM (Adam Robitel, 2019); ESCAPE ROOM: TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS (Robitel, 2021)

07/02 THE MASTER OF APIPUCOS* (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1959); THE POET OF CASTELO* (Andrade, 1959); CAT SKIN* (Andrade, 1960); GARRINCHA JOY OF THE PEOPLE (Andrade, 1963); ASSAULT ON THE PAY TRAIN (Roberto Farias, 1962); SAO DIOGO QUARRY* (Leon Hirszman, 1962); ABSOLUTE MAJORITY* (Hirszman, 1964); THE DECEASED (Hirszman, 1965); SAO PAULO, SOCIEDADE ANONIMA (Luiz Sergio Person, 1965)

07/03 TURNING WIND (Glauber Rocha, 1962); THIS WORLD IS MINE (Sergio Ricardo, 1964); THE PRIEST AND THE GIRL (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1966); MACUNAIMA (Andrade, 1969); BRASILIA: CONTRADICTIONS OF A NEW CITY* (Andrade, 1967); THE LANGUAGE OF PERSUASION* (Andrade, 1970)

07/04 COME, SWEET DEATH* (Sérgio Bernardes Filho, 1967); DESPERATE (Bernardes, 1968); HITLER THIRD WORLD (Jose Agrippino de Paula, 1968); SWEET BITTERNESS* (André Luiz Oliveira, 1968); METEORANGO KID, INTERGALACTIC HERO (Oliveira, 1969); THE FOUNTAIN* (Oliveira, 1970); AN EYE FOR AN EYE* (Andrea Tonacci, 1966); BLA BLA BLA* (Tonacchi, 1968); Midnight Road, Jada M. Davis

07/05 ANTONIO DAS MORTES (Glauber Rocha, 1969); MY NAME IS … TONHO (Ozualdo R. Candeias, 1969); THE MONSTERS OF BABALOO (Elyseu Visconti Cavalleiro, 1970); BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG (Andrea Tonacci, 1971)

07/06 THE ALIENIST (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1970); HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN (Pereira dos Santos, 1971); COPACABANA MON AMOUR (Rogério Sganzerla, 1970); NO WAY, SPIDER (Sganzerla, 1970); THE END OF MAN (José Mojica Marins, 1971)

07/07 Watergate: A New History, Garrett M. Graff; ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (Alan J. Pakula, 1976); ZEZERO* (Ozualdo R. Candeias, 1974); THE OLD MAN’S VISIT* (Candeias, 1976); ECOLOGY* (Leon Hirszman, 1973); MEGALOPOLIS* (Hirszman, 1973); WORK SONGS* (3) (Hirszman, 1975-76); MARIA ESTHER: DANCES IN AFRICA*; SKY OVER WATER* (Jose Agrippino de Paula, 1978); TICUMBI*; FEIRA DE CAMPINA GRANDE*; CAVALO MARINHO*; BOI CALEMBA* (Elyseu Visconti Cavalleiro, 1978-79); THIS IS RUE TAO AUGUSTA* (Carlos Reichenbach, 1969); BUCCANEER BLOOD*; THE “M” OF MY HAND* (Reichenbach, 1979)

07/08 LILIAN M. (CONFIDENTIAL REPORT) (Carlos Reichenbach, 1975); THE KING OF THE NIGHT (Héctor Babenco, 1975); LUCIO FLAVIO: PASSENGER OF AGONY (Babenco, 1977)

07/09 IRACEMA (Jorge Bodanzky & Orlando Senna, 1975); THE CONSPIRATORS (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1972); CONJUGAL WARFARE (Andrade, 1975); TROPICAL LANE* (Andrade, 1977); O ALEIJADINHO* (Andrade, 1978); THE BRAZILWOOD MAN (Andrade, 1981); The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter

07/10 The Open Road, Jean Giono

07/11 BURIED (2021) (4)

07/13 Ennemonde, Jean Giono; GUNSMOKE (1969) (6)

07/14 SONG OF LONGING (Humberto Mauro, 1952); THE BANDIT (Lima Barreto, 1953)

07/15 VIOLENCE AND FLESH (Alfredo Sternheim, 1981); PORNO (David Cardoso, Luiz Castellini, John Doo, 1981); THE CHICK’S ABILITY (Doo, 1984); BARE BEHIND BARS (Osvaldo de Oliveira, 1980); AMAZON JAIL (Oliveira, 1982)

07/16 PIXOTE: THE LAW OF THE WEAKEST (Héctor Babenco, 1981); THEY DON’T WEAR BLACK TIE (Leon Hirszman, 1981); MIDNIGHT MASS* (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1982); RIO MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATIVE POLITICAL PLAN* (Sergio Bernardes Filho, 1982); A MAN SIGNED TO DIE: TWENTY YEARS LATER (Eduardo Coutinho, 1984)

07/17 CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2020) (5)

07/19 CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2020) (5); The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey

07/20 THE AVENGERS (1963) (2); SERGEANT CORK (1963) (2)

07/21 MIAMI VICE (1986-87) (4); Conjugal Love, Alberto Moravia

07/22 GOLDEN HOOFS (Lynn Shores, 1941); DEAD MEN TELL (Harry Lachman, 1941); THE LOVES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE (Lachman, 1942); DR. RENAULT’S SECRET (Lachman, 1942)

07/23 SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS (Lewis Seiler, 1944); MOLLY AND ME (Seiler, 1945); Hollywood Godfather: The Life and Crimes of Billy Wilkerson, W.R. Wilkerson III

07/24 MASTERS OF SEX (2015) (4)

07/25 MASTERS OF SEX (2015) (2)

07/26 Almost Innocent, Sheila Bosworth; MOTHER DIDN’T TELL ME (Claude Binyon, 1950); A TICKET TO TOMAHAWK (Richard Sale, 1950)

07/27 MASTERS OF SEX (2015) (3)

07/28 STATE TROOPER (1956-57) (6); THE RESTLESS GUN (1958) (2)

07/29 WHITE COMANCHE (Gilbert Lee Kay, 1968); CATLOW (Sam Wanamaker, 1971)

07/30 MALENKA: THE NIECE OF THE VAMPIRE (Amando De Ossorio, 1969); PHANTOM KILLER (Xavier Setó, 1969); CAULDRON OF BLOOD (Santos Alcocer, 1970)

07/31 The Drinker, Hans Fallada; MASTERS OF SEX (2015) (3)

08/01 THE BIG FAMILY (Fernando Palacios, 1962)

08/03 GUNSMOKE (1969) (4); The Diary of a Rapist, Evan S. Connell

08/04 GUNSMOKE (1969) (2); STATE TROOPER (1957) (6); The Man Who Seduced Hollywood, B. James Gladstone

08/05 HAPPY HOUR (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2015)

08/06 THE ASSISTANT (Kitty Green, 2020); THE LAST SHIFT (Andrew Cohn, 2020)

08/07 WORKING MAN (Robert Jury, 2020); A Graveyard For Lunatics, Ray Bradbury

08/08 ASAKO I & II (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2019)

08/09 HEAVEN IS STILL FAR AWAY* (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2016); WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY (Hamaguchi, 2021)

08/10 THE GILDED AGE (2022) (3)

08/11 THE RIGHT OF WAY (Frank Lloyd, 1931); CAPTAIN APPLEJACK (Hobart Henley, 1931); THE GILDED AGE (2022)

08/12 DRIVE MY CAR (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021); THE GILDED AGE (2022) (2)

08/13 CITY HALL (Frederick Wiseman, 2020); BLOODY NOSE EMPTY POCKETS (Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross, 2020); JASPER MALL (Bradford Thomason & Brett Whitcomb)

08/14 Back in the World, Tobias Wolff; THE GILDED AGE (2022) (3)

08/15 GUNSMOKE (1969-70) (3)

08/16 GUNSMOKE (1970) (4); Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey

08/17 THE LOST SQUADRON (George Archainbaud, 1932); STATE’S ATTORNEY (Archainbaud, 1932); RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS (Richard Boleslavsky, 1932)

08/18 MADAME BUTTERFLY (Marion Gering, 1932); THE BARBARIAN (Sam Wood, 1933); ALEXANDER HAMILTON (John G. Adolfi, 1931); Directed by James Burrows, James Burrows with Eddy Friedfeld

08/19 PARTY HUSBAND (Clarence Badger, 1931); THE HOT HEIRESS (Badger, 1931); WEEK-END MARRIAGE (Thornton Freeland, 1932); SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE (Edward Sutherland, 1932); THIRTEEN WOMEN (George Archainbaud, 1932); HELL’S HIGHWAY (Rowland Brown, 1932)

08/20 BEAUTY FOR SALE (Richard Boleslavsky, 1933); PENTHOUSE (W.S. Van Dyke, 1933); ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON (Stephen Roberts, 1933); THE WOMAN ACCUSED (Paul Sloane, 1933)

08/21 BILLIONS (2022) (8)

08/22 Native Son, Richard Wright; BILLIONS (2022) (4)

08/23 GUNSMOKE (1970) (4); STATE TROOPER (1957) (2); Paul Lynde: A Biography, Cathy Fitzgibbon Rudolph

08/24 GUNSMOKE (1970) (3); STATE TROOPER (1957) (2)

08/26 STRIKE COMMANDO (Bruno Mattei, 1986); ELEVEN DAYS ELEVEN NIGHTS (Joe D’Amato, 1987); KILLING BIRDS (D’Amato, 1988); PRIMAL RAGE (Vittorio Rambaldi, 1988)

08/27 ORDER OF DEATH (Roberto Faenza, 1983); THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE (Cesare Ferrario, 1986); WILD BEASTS (Franco Prosperi, 1984); PAGANINI HORROR (Luigi Cozzi, 1989); STRIKE COMMANDO 2 (Bruno Mattei, 1988)

08/28 Dopefiend, Donald Goines; LA BREA (2021) (2)

08/29 BELFAST (Kenneth Branagh, 2021); SUPERNOVA (Harry Macqueen, 2021)

08/30 Uncle Tom’s Children, Richard Wright; HACKS (2021) (4)

08/31 PARALLEL MOTHERS (Pedro Almodóvar, 2021); SPENCER (Pablo Larraín, 2021); Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story, Joe Florenski & Steve Wilson

09/01 LOVE AND DUTY (Bu Wancang, 1931); JOAN THE MAID I: THE BATTLES (Jacques Rivette, 1994); JOAN THE MAID II: THE PRISONS (Rivette, 1994)

09/02 THE SERVILE (Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 1994); MAN OF THE STORY (Gopalakrishnan, 1995); ANCHORESS (Chris Newby, 1993)

09/03 THE KILLERS* (Andrei Tarkovsky et. al., 1956); THE STEAMROLLER AND THE VIOLIN* (Tarkovsky, 1960); IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (Tarkovsky, 1962); THE UNCKNOWN MAN OF SHANDIGOR (Jean-Louis Roy, 1967); WHO’S CRAZY? (Tom White, 1967); The Late Breakfasters, Robert Aickman

09/04 MIRROR (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975); STALKER (Tarkovsky, 1979); THE SACRIFICE (Tarkovsky, 1986)

09/05 Scratch a Thief, John Trinian (Zekial Marko); NATIVE SON (Pierre Chenal, 1951); ASSASSIN OF THE TSAR (Karen Shakhnazarov, 1991)

09/06 MARIUS (Alexander Korda, 1931); FANNY (Marc Allegret, 1932); CESAR (Marcel Pagnol, 1936); UP DOWN FRAGILE (Jacques Rivette, 1995)

09/07 MY FRIEND IVAN LAPSHIN (Aleksei German, 1985); COME AND SEE (Elem Klimov, 1985); WOMAN FROM THE KILLED VILLAGE* (Viktor Dashuk, 1975); HANDFUL OF SAND* (Dashuk, 1975); MUTE SCREAM* (Dashuk, 1975)

09/08 AMAL* (James Blue, 1960); THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE (Blue, 1962); DRY SUMMER (Metin Erksan, 1964); MANILA IN THE CLAWS OF LIGHT (Lino Brocka, 1975); INSIANG (Brocka, 1976)

09/09 CAIN AND ABEL (Lino Brocka, 1982); THIS IS MY COUNTRY (Brocka, 1984); AFTER THE CURFEW (Usmar Isma’il, 1954); FAREWELL (Elem Klimov, 1983)

09/10 ANGELE (Marcel Pagnol, 1934); HARVEST (Pagnol, 1937); THE BAKER’S WIFE (Pagnol, 1938)

09/11 THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Joachim Trier, 2022); The Johnstown Flood, David McCullough; HACKS (2021) (3)

09/12 Night Voices, Robert Aickman; HACKS (2021) (3)

09/13 ROBERT AICKMAN: AUTHOR OF STRANGE TALES* (R.B. Russell & Rosalie Parker, 2015); Cabot Wright Begins, James Purdy

09/14 IMPROVISED AND PURPOSEFUL (CINEMA NOVO)* (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1967); LET ME SPEAK (Eduardo Escorel, 2007)

09/15 GUNSMOKE (1970) (6)

09/16 NO TIME TO DIE (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021); THE PROTEGE (Martin Campbell, 2021); THE COURIER (Dominic Cooke, 2021); THE FATHER (Florian Zeller, 2021)

09/17 BACURAU (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles); BENEDETTA (Paul Verhoeven, 2021); TITANE (Julia Ducornau, 2021); LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (Edgar Wright, 2021); THE DUKE (Roger Michell, 2021)

09/18 THE SPARKS BROTHERS (Edgar Wright, 2021); House of Evil, John Trinian (Zekial Marko)

09/19 THE WHITE LOTUS (2021) (3)

09/20 THE WHITE LOTUS (2021) (3)

09/21 THE INTERNS (1970-71) (4)

09/22 GUNSMOKE (1970) (6); THE INTERNS (1971) (2)

09/23 TRIBES (Joseph Sargent, 1970); MY SWEET CHARLIE (Lamont Johnson, 1970); HAUSER’S MEMORY (Boris Sagal, 1970); WEEKEND OF TERROR (Jud Taylor, 1970); LOVE HATE LOVE (George McCowan, 1971); THE MEN FROM SHILOH (1970)

09/24 THE YOUNG LAWYERS (7) (1970-71); THE BILL COSBY SHOW (1971) (5)

09/25 GUNSMOKE (1970-71) (4); White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief, Donald Goines

09/26 CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2021) (3)

09/27 CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2021) (3)

09/28 POOL SHARKS* (Edwin Middleton, 1915); THE DELICIOUS LITTLE DEVIL (Robert Z. Leonard, 1919); Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, Ken Auletta

09/29 THE COVERED WAGON (James D. Cruze, 1923)

09/30 SHADOW IN THE CLOUD (Roseanne Liang, 2021); MALIGNANT (James Wan, 2021); ANTLERS (Scott Cooper, 2021); CITY OF LIES (Brad Furman, 2021); CRISIS (Nicholas Jarecki, 2021)

10/01 NOBODY (Ilya Naishuller, 2021); @ZOLA (Janicza Bravo, 2021); THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK (Alan Taylor, 2021); THE FRENCH DISPATCH OF THE LIBERTY, KANSAS EVENING SUN (Wes Anderson, 2021)

10/02 FOUR GOOD DAYS (Rodrigo Garcia, 2021); THE WORLD TO COME (Mona Fastvold, 2021)

10/03 Flowers of Grass, Takehiro Fukunaga; CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2021) (4)

10/04 JANE FONDA IN FIVE ACTS (Susan Lacy, 2018)

10/05 The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata

10/06 MIAMI VICE (1987) (5)

10/07 DEATH SPA (Michael Fischa, 1989); THE DEAD PIT (Brett Leonard, 1989); NIGHTWISH (Bruce R. Cook, 1989); Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, Alexandra Lange

10/08 THE FIRST TEXAN (Byron Haskin, 1956); OREGON PASSAGE (Paul Landres, 1957); THE HIRED GUN (Ray Nazarro, 1957)

10/09 COLE YOUNGER, GUNFIGHTER (R.G. Springsteen, 1958); KING OF THE WILD STALLIONS (Springsteen, 1959); Powers of Darkness, Robert Aickman

10/10 BENEATH THE 12-MILE REEF (Robert D. Webb, 1953); THE ADVENTURES OF HAJJI BABA (Don Weis, 1954); NIGHT PEOPLE (Nunnally Johnson, 1954); DADDY LONG LEGS (Jean Negulesco, 1955)

10/11 A MAN CALLED PETER (Henry Koster, 1955); LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME (Charles Vidor, 1955); MY SISTER EILEEN (Richard Quine, 1955); THE OPPOSITE SEX (David Miller, 1956)

10/12 HELL ON FRISCO BAY (Frank Tuttle, 1956); HILDA CRANE (Philip Dunne, 1956); THE BURNING HILLS (Stuart Heisler, 1956); WORLD WITHOUT END (Edward Bernds, 1956)

10/13 SPACE MASTER X-7 (Edward Bernds, 1958); QUANTRILL’S RAIDERS (Bernds, 1958); BLOOD AND STEEL (Bernard L. Kowalski, 1959); WALK TALL (Maury Dexter, 1960)

10/14 SEARCH FOR PARADISE (Otto Lang, 1957); SOUTH SEAS ADVENTURE (Various, 1958); WINDJAMMER: THE VOYAGE OF THE CHRISTIAN RADICH (Bill Colleran & Louis de Rochemont III, 1958); RENAULT DAUPHINE* (1959)

10/15 Sub Rosa, Robert Aickman; THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN (Edward Nassour & Ismail Rodríguez, 1956); THE LIVING IDOL (Albert Lewin, 1957); LISBON (Ray Milland, 1956); TAMANGO (John Berry, 1958)

10/16 Cimino, Charles Elton

10/19 STATE TROOPER (1957) (2)

10/20 STATE TROOPER (1957) (3); SHAMELESS (2018) (3); Waltz, Francesc Trabal

10/21 CANDYMAN (Nia DaCosta, 2021); SPIRAL (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2021); REMINISCENCE (Lisa Joy, 2021)

10/22 THE CARD COUNTER (Paul Schrader, 2021); OLD (M. Night Shyamalan, 2021); THOSE WHO WANT ME DEAD (Taylor Sheridan, 2021); RED ROCKET (Sean Baker, 2021)

10/23 JOE BELL (Reinaldo Marcus Green, 2021); MY SALINGER YEAR (Philippe Falardeau)

10/25 SHAMELESS (2018) (4)

10/26 MIAMI VICE (1987) (3)

10/27 GUNSMOKE (1971) (5)

10/28 Mockingbird, Walter Tevis; A FILM LIKE ANY OTHER (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968); PRAVDA (Godard, 1969); BRITISH SOUNDS* (Godard, 1969); WIND FROM THE EAST (Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1969); STRUGGLES IN ITALY (Godard & Gorin, 1969); VLADIMIR AND ROSA (Godard & Gorin, 1971); SCHICK AFTER SHAVE* (Godard, 1971)

10/29 A PAGE OF MADNESS (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926); LIMITE (Mário Peixoto, 1931); NUMBER TWO (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975); HERE AND ELSEWHERE* (Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976); HOW’S IT GOING? (Godard & Miéville, 1976)

10/30 SHAMELESS (2019) (4)

10/31 SHAMELESS (2019) (3)

11/01 The Floating Opera, John Barth; GUNSMOKE (1971) (3)

11/02 SUCCESSION (2021) (4)

11/03 RUTHERFORD FALLS (2021) (2); Hell’s Half-Acre, Susan Jonusas

11/04 THE MARKSMAN (Robert Lorenz, 2021); FREE GUY (Shawn Levy, 2021)

11/05 THE MAURITANIAN (Kevin MacDonald, 2021); THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Michael Showalter, 2021); C’MON C’MON (Mike Mills, 2021)

11/06 FLAG DAY (Sean Penn, 2021); LAND (Robin Wright, 2021); The End of the Road, John Barth

11/07 61ST ST (2022) (3)

11/08 RUTHERFORD FALLS (2021) (2); MR. MAYOR (2021) (3)

11/09 SUCCESSION (2021) (5)

11/10 Life’s Work, David Milch; THE CHECKERED FLAG (William Grefé, 1963); THE DEVIL’S SISTERS (Grefé, 1966); WILD REBELS (Grefé, 1967); THE NEST OF THE CUCKOO BIRDS (Bert Williams, 1965); SHE-MAN: A STORY OF FIXATION (Bob Clark, 1967)

11/11 STING OF DEATH (William Grefé, 1966); DEATH CURSE OF TARTU (Grefé, 1966); THE HOOKED GENERATION (Grefé, 1968); THE NAKED ZOO (Grefé, 1970); ELECTRIC SHADES OF GREY (Stewart Merrill, 1971); ZAAT (Don Barton, 1971)

11/12 PASSION IN THE SUN (Dale Berry, 1964); HOT BLOODED WOMAN (Berry, 1965); HIP HOT AND 21 (Berry, 1966); HOT THRILLS AND WARM CHILLS (Berry, 1967)

11/13 THEY CAME FROM THE SWAMP: THE FILMS OF WILLIAM GREFE (Daniel Griffith, 2016); THE CROWN JEWELS: AMERICA’S OLDEST INDIE FILM COMPANY* (Griffith, 2016)

11/14 RUTHERFORD FALLS (2021) (6)

11/15 HILL STREET BLUES (1983) (3)

11/16 GUNSMOKE (1971) (5)

11/17 GUNSMOKE (1971) (2); The Witch and the Priest, Hilda Lewis

11/18 Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra, George Jacobs & William Stadiem; WRATH OF MAN (Guy Ritchie, 2021); COPSHOP (Joe Carnahan, 2021); TOM CLANCY’S WITHOUT REMORSE (Stefano Sollima, 2021); DON’T BREATHE 2 (Rodo Sayagues, 2021); THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT (Michael Chaves, 2021)

11/19 A QUIET PLACE PART II (John Krasinski, 2021); THE LITTLE THINGS (John Lee Hancock, 2021); LICORICE PIZZA (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021); STILLWATER (Tom McCarthy, 2021); JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (Shaka King, 2021)

11/20 THE LOST LEONARDO (Andreas Koefoed, 2021); SOME KIND OF HEAVEN (Lance Oppenheim, 2021); ATTICA (Stanley Nelson, 2021)

11/21 The House of Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, Yasunari Kawabata; GUNSMOKE (1971) (4)

11/22 KILLING EVE (2022) (5)

11/23 THE INVISIBLE MAN APPEARS (Nobuo Adachi, 1949); THE INVISIBLE MAN VS. THE HUMAN FLY (Mitsuo Murayama, 1957); THE GREAT WHITE TIGER PLATOON (Katsuhiko Tasaka, 1954); The Shooting Gallery and Other Stories, Yuko Tsushima

11/24 YOUTH OF THE SON* (Masaki Kobayashi, 1952); SINCERE HEART (Kobayashi, 1953); THREE LOVES (Kobayashi, 1954)

11/25 LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF THE SEA (Hideo Sekigawa, 1950); HIROSHIMA (Sekigawa, 1953); SOMEWHERE BENEATH THE WIDE SKY (Masaki Kobayashi, 1954); BEAUTIFUL DAYS (Kobayashi, 1955); The Deadly Isles, Jack Vance

11/26 KILLING EVE (2022) (3); THE INVISIBLE AVENGER (Motoyoshi Oda, 1954); BLUE SKY MAIDEN (Yasuzo Masumura, 1957)

11/27 WARM CURRENT (Yasuzo Masumura, 1957); FLESH PIER (Teruo Ishii, 1958); FOUNTAINHEAD (Masaki Kobayashi, 1956); No Room at the Morgue, Jean-Patrick Manchette

11/28 GUNSMOKE (1971-72) (6)

11/29 ABBOTT ELEMENTARY (2021-22) (4)

11/30 LE HAVRE (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011); THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE (Kaurismäki, 2017)

12/01 GUNSMOKE (1972) (3); Do, Lord, Remember Me, George Garrett

12/02 RIKYU (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1989); GÔ-HIME (Teshigahara, 1992)

12/03 THE LIFT (Dick Maas, 1983); AMSTERDAMNED (Maas, 1988); ORION’S BELT (Ola Solum, 1985)

12/04 Cagney & Lacey … And Me, Barney Rosenzweig; OFF THE MENU: THE LAST DAYS OF CHASEN’S (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, 1997); THE YOUNG AND THE DEAD (Berman & Pulcini, 2001)

12/05 STAR TREK: PICARD (2022) (3)

12/06 STAR TREK: PICARD (2022) (7)

12/07 HILL STREET BLUES (1984) (3); The Steps of the Sun, Walter Tevis

12/08 PAM & TOMMY (2022) (8)

12/09 THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON (Kazuo Hara, 1987); ANTONIO GAUDÍ (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1984); GAUDÍ, CATALUNYA* (Teshigahara, 1959); HOKUSAI* (Teshigahara, 1953); IKEBANA* (Teshigahara, 1956); TOKYO 1958* (Teshigahara et. al., 1958); VITA – SCULPTURES BY SOFU* (Teshigahara, 1963); Isle of Dreams, Keizo Hino

12/10 A CHRISTAS DREAM* (Bořivoj Zeman, 1945); A HORSESHOE FOR LUCK* (Karel Zeman, 1946); INSPIRATION* (Karel Zeman, 1949); KING LAVRA* (Karel Zeman, 1950); JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME (Karel Zeman, 1955); INVENTION FOR DESTRUCTION (Karel Zeman, 1958); THE FABULOUS BARON MUNCHAUSEN (Karel Zeman, 1961); THE MANSTER (George Breakston & Kenneth G. Crane, 1959)

12/11 WEST SIDE STORY (Steven Spielberg, 2021)

12/12 RITA MORENO: JUST A GIRL WHO DECIDED TO GO FOR IT (Mariem Pérez Riera, 2021)

12/13 WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COSBY (W. Kamau Bell, 2022) (4); Scandal, Shūsaku Endō

12/14 SUPER PUMPED: THE BATTLE FOR UBER (2022) (7)

12/15 GUNSMOKE (1972) (4); THE ROOKIES (1973) (3); PETROCELLI (1975) (3); All the Way, Charles Williams

12/16 THE ROOKIES (1973) (3); MANNIX (1974) (5)

12/17 The Sailcloth Shroud, Charles Williams; HAWKINS (1973) (3); SHAFT (1973) (4)

12/18 GUNSMOKE (1972) (3); THE F.B.I. (1972) (3); BARNABY JONES (1973) (5)

12/19 SEARCH (1972) (2); THE F.B.I. (1972-73) (4); BARNABY JONES (1973) (3)

12/20 Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz; THE ROOKIES (1973) (2); MANNIX (1974) (4); SEARCH (1973)

12/21 MANNIX (1974) (4); THE ROOKIES (1973) (3); SEARCH (1973) (2)

12/22 THE F.B.I. (1973) (5); BARNABY JONES (1974) (5)

12/23 God Save the Mark, Donald E. Westlake; BARNABY JONES (1974) (3); THE F.B.I. (1973) (4); SEARCH (1973) (2)

12/24 HAWKINS (1973-74) (4); SHAFT (1974) (3); PETROCELLI (1975) (2)

12/25 POLICE STORY (1975) (5); PETROCELLI (1975) (2); Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz

12/26 CANNON (1975) (4); PETROCELLI (2) (1975)

12/27 POLICE STORY (1975-76) (8); PETROCELLI (1975)

12/28 Tales of Love and Death, Robert Aickman; CANNON (1975) (6)

12/29 MANNIX (1975) (6); POLICE WOMAN (1975) (4); The Barbizon, Paulina Bren

12/30 POLICE STORY (1976) (9); PETROCELLI (1975) (2); Fletch, Gregory Mcdonald

12/31 POLICE WOMAN (1975) (8); POLICE STORY (1975); Broken Vessels, Andre Dubus

For anyone who made it that far, I’ll also offer the modest update that I expect to start posting the occasional long read in this space again soon. Time to start earning my keep again . . . .

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 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 more outlandish 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 conceptual narratives.

Cimarron Strip was 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  it 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 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 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 in Brentwood.  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

An Interview With David Levinson

Always arrogant, never wrong.  At some point around the middle of his career, they made a t-shirt for David Levinson with that line on it.  It was meant as a joke, of course.  But Levinson, the wunderkind producer who won an Emmy at the age of 31, always knew exactly what he wanted and wasn’t shy about being manipulative or pushy to get it.  You had to be unorthodox to ram Levinson’s kind of quality television onto the air in the seventies.  It was a period when frank sitcoms and one-off television movies earned most of the attention, and episodic drama was in serious decline.

Last year, I interviewed Levinson for an article and a subsequent oral history about The Senator (1970-71), the short-lived political drama that aired as part of the umbrella show The Bold Ones.  It was for The Senator that Levinson won the big trophy – one of five the show nabbed after it had been rewarded with a premature cancellation.  During the afterglow period, Levinson oversaw three other series – all made at Universal, all on the air for less than a year, all largely forgotten today, and all uncommonly good.  Earlier this year I sought David out for a follow-up interview that would shine some light on this underappreciated trio: Sarge (1971-1972), the final season of The Bold Ones (also informally known as The New Doctors, 1972-1973), and Sons and Daughters (1974).  As it turned out, we covered a great deal more.

A rundown for the uninitiated: Sarge starred Oscar winner George Kennedy as a cop who, following a personal tragedy, completes his seminary training and becomes a priest.  It was a straight drama that largely eschewed formula, even as it masqueraded as part of a gimmicky crimefighter cycle – fat private eye (Cannon), old private eye (Barnaby Jones), blind private eye (Longstreet) – that always teetered on the verge of self-parody.  Sarge’s genre trappings – like the hulking, karate-chopping sidekick played by Harold Sakata, briefly famous as Goldfinger’s Oddjob – somewhat constrained its more serious aspirations, but it’s a credible, unpredictable effort, and it remains one of Levinson’s personal favorites.

Levinson’s tenure on the final season of The New Doctors, on the other hand, remains one of my favorites among television’s hidden treasures – a major, last-gasp rethinking of a cerebral but impersonal medical drama.  Launched as part of the wheel show The Bold Ones, the series began under showrunner Cy Chermak as a smart but cold show with an emphasis on science and technology, rendered (like The Senator) in a realistic, almost pseudodocumentary style.  Levinson made it a show about the ethics of medicine, one that tackled controversial issues in every episode and arguably exceeded even The Senator in its aversion to pat answers.  But the Bold Ones experiment was a lame duck – one by one, the other entries had fallen away, leaving The New Doctors to fend for itself – and hardly anyone noticed.

Sons and Daughters was even more of a lost cause, eking out only nine episodes at a time when such rapid cancelations were still somewhat rare.  A period ensemble about small town teens and their parents, Sons and Daughters incorporated some autobiographical elements from Levinson’s own coming of age.  It had one of the most perfectly wrought pilots ever made, and the subsequent episodes unfolded vignette-style, each centered on a different character and picking up a plot thread carefully lain down in the pilot.  It’s difficult to find today (although bootlegs of all three shows have circulated, and The New Doctors came out on DVD this year), but the invaluable TV Obscurities website took a detailed look at Sons and Daughters that’s worth a read before proceeding.

After Sons and Daughters, Levinson made a conscious move toward escapism, for reasons he details below.  He passed through Charlie’s Angels and Mrs. Columbo, then spent the eighties and nineties working on genre shows like Hart to Hart, the revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and several Stephen J. Cannell productions (including 21 Jump Street and The Commish).  Levinson retired about a decade ago, but a protege, Craig Silverstein (creator of the current TURN: Washington’s Spies), lured him back into the writer’s room of the spy thriller Nikita.  Nikita went off the air in 2013 – some fifty years after Levinson sold an outline to Leave It to Beaver and got his name in the credits of a television show for the first time.

To pick up right where we left off last year: How closely did Sarge follow upon the end of The Senator?

Directly.  The studio had sold the series – on paper, arguably one of the silliest premises I had ever seen.  I hadn’t done anything like a detective show before.  This was very loosely – I mean, they made it similar to Father Brown, although it wasn’t.  The premise was that this was a guy who had studied for the seminary, dropped out, become a cop.  When his wife got killed, [he] went back to the seminary and became a priest.  But he kept getting involved in cases, because of his ex-cop [connections].  The studio called me and said we need somebody to produce it, because the guy who had created it wasn’t really qualified to run a show, in their opinion.  So I said yeah.

He isn’t credited as the creator of the show, only the original producer (Don Mankiewicz wrote the pilot), but are you referring to David Levy?

Yeah, David Levy.  Not the sharpest tool in the deck, but a very nice man.  He had a lot of credits.  As I recall, most of them were in the comedy area.  I don’t know how he had gotten hold of this particular thing.  But as I say, he was very nice, and I got rid of him as quickly as I could.  [Laughs.]  Because I didn’t want him getting in the way.  

It took us a little while to figure out the show, and the key to it – the story editor on the show was a man named Robert Van Scoyk, who was a terrific, terrific writer.  He was the one that, in a story meeting one day – because we were trying to figure out what was going on with it – finally said, “You know what?  He’s more interested in saving asses than he is in saving souls.”  With that, it just clicked in.  It really became him helping his parishioners when they got into trouble.

The [episode] that we did with Jack Albertson, “A Terminal Case of Vengeance,” that was written by Joel Oliansky and directed by John Badham, is the best show I’ve ever had my name on.  A completely outrageous ending.  It ends up with the Godfather on a beach in a ballet tutu.  It’s insane.  I just love it.

We started off with that crossover show, Ironside and Sarge.  I remember saying to the head of the studio, isn’t that a little bit like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein?  But NBC really wanted it, so we did it.  It turned out pretty well, I thought, all things considered.  I then managed to finagle the Albertson show to be the first one on the air [after the crossover], and the head of the studio protested.  He called me and he said, “You can’t put that on first.  It’s too weird.”  I said, “Well, there’s a problem, because nothing else is going to be ready.”  Which was kind of a fib.  But he didn’t know that.

Was this Sid Sheinberg?

Yeah.  So we went ahead, because that’s the one I wanted to get reviewed, and it got terrific reviews.

Do you think it might’ve turned off some of the potential audience, though?  

No.  I don’t remember what our competition was [The ABC Movie of the Week and Hawaii Five-O], but I know that it was really rugged, whatever it was.  We just got clobbered.  [George] Kennedy was great to work with.  It was like me hitting a daily double, with him and Hal Holbrook [on The Senator], because they’re two of the most gracious actors I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.  George was no-bullshit, very unpretentious, just came to work every day and worked his ass off.  I was sad when the show got canceled, because we had finally figured out how to do it, and we were having some fun with it.  But, as I say, the ratings were just dismal.  So another cancellation.  By this time I was getting used to them.

That was at the beginning of era of the gimmick detective show, with Ironside being essentially the progenitor of that little subgenre, and on the surface Sarge seems like it’s trying to be that.  Is that what the studio’s intent was with the show?

No, not at all.  I mean, I think they were delighted to have Kennedy as a presence in the show.  He had won his Academy Award by then, for Cool Hand Luke.  No, basically they didn’t know what the show was.  They just liked George Kennedy.

I never tried to mold any show I did after something that was already on the air.  My thesis always was that you just try to find out what the show wants to be and if you’re lucky enough to find it out before you get canceled, just keep doing it.  That was the case with Sarge.  We did find out early on how to make it work, and we made some, I thought, really, really good shows.  Very human.  It was a very humanitarian kind of show.  

The church called me and said, could you please put him in something besides a windbreaker?  They wanted to see that collar, boy.  We were doing everything we could to hide the collar.

To what extent did the Catholic church have input into the show?

Absolutely none.  I think their attitude was that if they closed their eyes maybe it would go away.  But we didn’t get any interference from them, and we shot, obviously, in several churches over the course of the season.

Do you remember more about the development of “A Terminal Case of Vengeance”?

[Laughs.]  Good question.  Joel [Oliansky] had up and moved to England, for no reason other than he always wanted to live in England.  Which was kind of Joel’s modus operandi.  So I called him, in England, and said, “Listen.  Is there a story that you always wanted to tell, that you were never able to sell anyone?  Because if you’ve got one, just tell it to me, and we’ll figure out how to make it into an episode.”  So he had this notion about a guy who had been humiliated years ago by a two-bit hood, who ultimately rose to become the West Coast godfather.  It has that marvelous opening with Sarge talking to Albertson, who’s all upbeat, and then Sarge finds out the doctor just told him he’s got six months to live.  From there it really turned into a mystery.  He’s worried that the guy may have committed suicide, goes to his place, finds all those pictures.  It was a pretty standard detective story, except for the twist that comes in, which is why he’s doing all this.  It was a very, very risky ending, because we did not want it to be funny.  We wanted it to be kind of tragic.  That this poor bastard has spent his entire life dreaming of the day of vengeance, and he’s going to get it, but it’s really the most hollow kind of victory.  

Badham just shot the hell out of it, and the actors were just superb.  Roy Poole was the godfather.  Mike Farrell played Albertson’s son, and he was terrific.  It was one of those things where everything that could go right did.  I can run the damn thing in my head, practically.  It’s, in my opinion, the best thing I ever did.

My own favorite might be Van Scoyk’s “A Bad Case of Monogamy,” which is almost a comedy, in which Sarge becomes a de facto marriage counselor for two pretty horrible people.

One of Bob’s great assets – he worked in the hour format, but he had a terrific sense of humor.  He would sprinkle every script with a lot of really funny stuff.  But this one, you’re right, it was very close to a balls-out comedy.  Because we didn’t want everything to be doom and gloom.  

We did a really good one [“Ring Out, Ring In”] with Marty Sheen.  That’s the one where he’s rehearsing the wedding rehearsal, and something about Martin Sheen, who’s the groom-to-be, strikes a memory chord [in Sarge], and he ends up having to arrest the groom for a murder that happened years ago.  I remember one of the best lines, because it nailed the whole series, where the bride-to-be comes to Kennedy, totally distraught, and screams at him, “You’re a priest.  Why can’t you just be a priest?”  It kind of summed up the conundrum that Kennedy would find himself in.

I thought the one with Vic Morrow (“A Push Over the Edge”), where he plays a homicide cop who becomes fixated on a case and just completely loses it, was very good.

Yes!  Yeah.  That one has Levinson’s name on it, as I recall.  As a writer.

I was going to ask about that more broadly, in terms of the extent to which you’re credited as a writer on the shows you produced.

You won’t see my name a lot.

Right.  I don’t really think of you as a “writing producer,” because you never really had a separate freelance writing career.

That is correct.  Not until I left Universal, and even then I technically wasn’t a “freelance writer.”  I was writing pilots and movies of the week.

So to what extent would you take to the typewriter yourself, versus assigning rewrites to others?

That particular show, Stan Whitmore had written a story that basically dealt with this serial killer, and he couldn’t write the script, for some reason.  He was off doing something else.  So I wrote it.  I didn’t write a lot, because the way Universal worked back in those days, you didn’t get paid for it.  It basically was applied against your guarantee.  So my attitude was, “Fuck you.  You’re not going to pay me, I ain’t gonna write.”  Which I always hated.  I hated writing till the day I stopped.  It’s just too goddamned hard!  But that particular one, I really knew the area, and it just made sense for me to do it.  And it was really good.  Vic was just terrific and Gerald [Hiken], who played the serial killer, he was just great.  It was really, really spooky.  There was a shot when he finds that his shoes have all been destroyed.  I remember John Badham, because we didn’t have anything fancy in those days, took a small camera called an Eyemo and hung it from the ceiling, from a catwalk, by a rope, and then he twisted the rope around and around and around.  When it came time to roll the shot, he let go with the rope, so the camera was spinning.  That’s that shot where he’s huddled up on the floor in a fetal position, and the room is just spinning around and around.  That was all John.

David Shire did the music for Sarge.  Was he someone you brought in?

Yeah.  Shire was one of the new kids on the block, and he and I fell in love right away.  I think he did all the music for the show.  As a matter of fact, I liked it so much that the following year when I took over The Bold Ones, I had David redo the theme for the show.  I got a phone call at home, like one minute after the show had gone off the air, from Sheinberg, who was furious.  He said, “What do you mean, replacing the music?  Everybody knows that music!  It’s identified with the show.  Get rid of that new theme.”  Which of course was infinitely better than what they’d had, but I was a good soldier and I got rid of the theme.

Sarge had an eclectic supporting cast.

Well, Oddjob was just great.  Harold Sakata.  Every once in a while I’d be down on the set talking to one of them, and the other one would come over and they’d just kind of surround me, Kennedy and Sakata together.  Big guys.  I’d say, “Am I being threatened?”  “No, David, no.  Just give us fewer lines to say.”

The martial arts aspect of Sarge strikes me as a bit gimmicky.

Yeah, well, that’s what he was known [for].  If you’ve got Oddjob, you’re going to use him.  It would be crazy to let a resource like that go untapped.

“John Michael O’Flaherty Presents the Eleven O’Clock War” was a very prescient indictment of irresponsible infotainment news personalities.

Yeah, Bill O’Reilly.  That was [written by] Bob Collins, wasn’t it?  Bobby was terrific, and went on to have a really, really good career.  He started off as a film editor, and he was a terrific film editor, but he wanted to write and ultimately direct, and ended up doing both.

Along with that crew of younger Universal directors – Badham, Richard Donner, and Jeannot Szwarc – you used one of my favorites on Sarge, Walter Doniger.

Walter was a close friend of several of my dearest friends.  One of them said to me, “You will want to kill him during the prep period.  And after he gets done shooting, you can’t wait to hire him again.”  And that’s exactly what happened.  Walter did every show as if it was both his first episode and going to be his last.  He gave you everything he had and, as result, during the prep period was a royal pain in the ass, because he wanted this, he wanted that, take a look at this, is this right, can we do this better?  He would just drive you fuckin’ nuts.  Then you would go and look at the dailies, and holy shit.  He was really, really good.  I loved working with him.  You know, if you go in knowing what it’s going to be, it’s less painful.  If the dentist says, “This is going to hurt like a sonofabitch,” as opposed to, “This may sting a little.”

I walked into his prep office one day, and there was maybe a three-inch or four-inch stack of checks that he had in front of him.  I said, “What are those?”  He said, “My Peyton Place residuals.”  By the time I worked with him, he didn’t need to work.  Peyton Place had made him a very wealthy guy.  He was not a kid any more, but he still had the same passion.

So how did you end up back on The Bold Ones?

When they canceled The Lawyers and went to a single [series], I don’t know whether it was the network’s idea or the studio’s idea, but they came and said, “We’d like you to do it.”  I’d never done a medical show, so I thought, “Cool, let’s do a medical show.”

What’s the backstory on The Bold Ones going to just one show?  And on some of the changes you instituted when you took the reins?

I guess it was Cy Chermak who had been producing the medical segments.  [Chermak oversaw the first two years; Herbert Hirschman replaced him for the lackluster third season.]  Cy was someone who I didn’t care for, both as a producer and as a human being.  Everything that he did, I had seen before, in one form or another, and I didn’t think much of it.  I thought the shows were really shitty.  I didn’t say that to anybody; didn’t need to.  They’d said to me, “Go do what you want to do.”  By that time, it was all centered around [David] Hartman, who they were planning on turning into a major star.  They dropped [John] Saxon.  It was just E. G. [Marshall] and Hartman.  Hartman: not one of nature’s noblemen.

But Hartman’s so likable on screen, though!

Oh, yeah.  Believe everything you see!  He had originally asked for me to do the show.  After about the fourth episode, he was calling NBC behind my back and asking that I be fired.  That’s David.

Why?

My shows were too edgy for him.

Isn’t that what he wanted when he asked for the producer of The Senator?

Evidently not.  [Laughs.]  Yeah, you’d kind of think.  After the third episode aired, I got a call from the West Coast chapter of the AMA, wondering when I was going to give up my attacks on the medical profession.  I responded, “When I run out of material, which ought to be in about five years.”

That’s one of the biggest stealth transitions of a long-running show that I’ve seen.  Almost to the extent of when Bruce Geller and Bernard Kowalski took over Rawhide and turned it into a stark revisionist Western, and quickly got fired for it.  On The New Doctors, all of sudden there was a hot-button topic every week, which isn’t how it had started out at all.  So I’m wondering, what are the factors that enable you to be able to alter the substance of a show so radically?

You know, I didn’t ask anybody.  The studio basically liked what I was doing.  The fact that it was edgy didn’t seem to bother anybody.  I mean, I had done – I think I may have told you the Virginian story?

No.

Oh, this is good.  By the way, I was a total asshole about this.  This is my second season on the show as a producer.  I’m like 27 years old.  I’d done like four episodes the season before, and I wanted desperately to do a show about black cowboys.  I talked to a writer by the name of Norman Jolley, and we’d come up with a really good story about a cowboy who had worked his whole life to save up the money for his son to go to college, and then he got ripped off.  In order to get his money back, he falls in with a bunch of rustlers to steal the cows from John McIntire’s ranch, and bad things happen.  

Nowhere in the script did it mention that the father and son were black.  Just the character names.

Everybody liked the script, and I go in to see the executive producer, and he says, “Who are you thinking of casting?”  

I said, “I want to cast James Edwards.”  

There’s this long pause, and the executive producer – who, by the way, was the nicest fellow you’d ever want to meet: Norman Macdonnell, who had produced Gunsmoke all those years – looked at me and said, “Isn’t he black?”

I said, “He was the last time I saw him.”  

Very gently, he explained to me that we had a primarily redneck audience and you just couldn’t cast a black man as the guest star in one of the shows.  I said to him, “Well, listen, you’re the boss, and if that’s the way you feel, that’s what we’ll do.  But I feel it only fair to tell you that I’m going back to my office and calling The New York Times and The L.A. Times to tell them about this conversation.”  

He came up from behind the desk, and he was a big guy.  His face was totally flushed and he looked at me and said, “You little cocksucker.”  

I said, “Yes, sir.”  

And we cast Jimmy Edwards.  The show went on the air.  There were no letters.  Nobody fucking noticed that there were two black actors playing the leads in this show.  But shortly thereafter I left The Virginian.

Yeah, I can’t say I’m surprised.

Sheinberg called me and he said, “David, Norman Macdonnell is the nicest man on the lot, and he wants to kill you.  What did you do?”  I said, “I don’t know.  I’ve just got a way with people, I guess.”  That was me then.  When I look back on it, it could have been handled much better.  But I was 27 years old and I thought I was invincible.

It is belately occurring to me that you had already worked with David Hartman on The Virginian.

Yeah.  He and I had a conversation early on, where I said to him, “You’re not fooling me with this nice guy act.”  

“What do you mean?”  

I said, “David, you’re an asshole.  I know you’re an asshole.”  

He said, “Well, it takes one to know one.”  

I said, “That’s how I know!”

He felt that I was destroying The Bold Ones by doing these very hard-edged types of stories.  And I let him know that I knew about it.  Because, what’s the fun of it if you can’t let them know that you know they’re duplicitous?  Also, he was very upset because we were going in the crapper ratings-wise.  Which was not a surprise to anybody.  I forget what the competition was [The ABC Movie of the Week and the second half of Hawaii Five-O on CBS, again], but it was horrific.  This was in the days when NBC did not have a lot of real strong shows.  So I’m a good scapegoat for the ratings being shitty.  It’s always been the showrunner who takes it in the shorts.  That’s okay; I mean, that comes with the territory.  I was making the show the best I knew how.  And, as I say, he just didn’t like the fact that it was going down in flames.  Well, who would?  And we finished out the seventeen shows and went off into the sunset.

I’m wondering if that has something to do with the way that Robert Walden emerges, to a certain extent, as the new star of the show during that last season.

Well, no, that wasn’t intentional, and I don’t know that I agree with that assessment.

Well, he’s the protagonist of some episodes, including the one I remember the most clearly – the lesbian love triangle.

Yes.  Well, the network had made two requests.  They wanted me to do a show on Masters and Johnson and the sex therapy clinic, and they wanted me to do a show about lesbianism.  Fine with me.  In terms of satisfying that, well, yeah, you figure out how to tell a story about lesbians and make it personal and part of our cast, particularly because we had no women regulars in the cast.  We sat around and did a lot of “what if”s, and one of the “what if”s was “what if you fall in love with a woman who’s gay?”  I think we called it “A Very Strange Triangle,” and I know that we were working toward that confrontation between Bobby Walden and Donna Mills’ partner.  That was the big scene.  But it was obvious that that was the only way to do it, make Bobby be the protagonist in it.  

By the way, he was terrific.  I forget where we had seen him; some movie where he had really just been very impressive.  He’s got wonderful energy, and we were thrilled to have him on the show.  But there was never any conscious effort to make him the lead in the show.  That was Hartman.  That was never in question.

What was your take on E. G. Marshall?

The best.  Total pro.  Showed up, did his work.  No fuss, no muss, no bother.  He was just an angel.  And a very funny guy, by the way.  We did a show with Milton Berle.  I remember going down to the set, and E. G. and Milton were breaking each other up.  I remember I jumped in with some smartass remark, and Milton just turned and looked at me and said, “You really want to play with us, kid?”

I said, “No sir.  No sir.”  

I’d like to talk about some of the other specific episodes, and the topics you covered in them.  There are very few duds in there.  The New Doctors has just come out on DVD, and I hope people find this final season, even if they don’t care for the earlier ones.

We were very leading edge on that show.  We did a show on embryo transplants, before anybody had even thought about it.  There was research being done on it underground.  When I talked to one of the guys, I said, “Can I come over and see your lab?”  He said, “No.  Because if anybody ever finds out about the lab, they’ll come and burn us out.”  They hadn’t taken an embryo to full term yet; they were just going a month at a time.  That’s how far ahead of the curve we were on that one.

The show we did on cancer patients, that was based on the work of a doctor in Houston, whom I spent hours on the phone with, that [Richard] Donner directed, was just superb.  It was a female patient who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.  I remember the doctor saying to me, “The biggest problem I have is that the minute the patient hears they have cancer, they start to die right there.  What I’ve got to do is get them past the fear, so I can give them a longer, better quality of life for the time they have left.”  That stuck with me so much.

Jeff [Myrow, the writer] had been a documentarian, had done a lot of stuff for Wolper, and wanted to break into the one-hour drama business.  I gave him the shot at doing this thing, and he wrote a good script, and Donner directed it terrifically.  We took her through her first night in the hospital in about sixty seconds, that whole terrifying experience about checking in and knowing that you’ve been diagnosed as terminal, and what it’s like.  It was all Dick.  He knew how to do it and make it work.  So much of it was about getting over the fear.  Because in those days, nobody ever said cancer.  It was “the big C” or “the bad disease” or “a long illness,” but nobody ever just came out and said, “Yeah, I got cancer.”

It was one of those now innocuous words that you couldn’t say on TV, like “pregnant.”

Right.  Shit, I remember twenty years ago when I was diagnosed with cancer for the first time, my GP said to me, “You’re going to be taking time off from work.  Don’t tell anybody why you’re leaving.”  

I said, “What are you talking about?”  

He says, “Well, people associate cancer very negatively.  It might hurt you professionally.” 

I said, “That’s like telling me I should wear a toupee.  Ain’t gonna happen.”  

I went in to Steve Cannell and said, “Listen, I’ve got prostate cancer.  I’m going into the hospital.”  

He said, “Okay.  Let me know how everything turns out.”  It’s like, I’m not going to keep it a secret.

Robert Collins’s script about impotence is one of my favorites.  When I first watched it years ago, I didn’t realize that – like the current series Masters of Sex – the sex therapists in the last act are based on Masters and Johnson, who offered practical counseling to couples with sexual problems.

I went back to St. Louis to spend time with Bill and Ginny.  Somebody said, “Why are you going back there by yourself?”  I said, “They’re going to show me how to masturbate.”  

It was tough, because they had had a lot of adverse publicity, due to the fact that they had both been married when they started their research, but not to each other.  They broke up their marriages, they got married, and then they got hit with a suit from one of the surrogate husbands, who she hadn’t bothered to tell that she was doing this.  He sued for divorce and named Masters and Johnson as the correspondents.  So they were a little gunshy.  I was able to convince them that we weren’t going to be exploiting it in any way, or making any judgment about it.  We were just going to try to show what it was like.  The show turned out okay.  It wasn’t one of my favorites.

What was your take on Masters and Johnson?

It was basically good cop, bad cop.  He was very stern and a little bit intimidating, and Virginia was a wonderful Jewish mother: “You don’t like the sex therapy?  I’ll make you chicken soup.”  Just really a nice lady.  

I did get one really funny call from a producer on the lot, who said, “I understand you’re going back there.  Would you like to talk to a former patient?”  “Ooookay.”  I go up to his office and he starts telling me about all the problems he and his wife were having sexually.  I’m looking around, saying, “Who do I fuck to get out of here?”  Because it’s not stuff you want to hear firsthand.

I’m even surprised that you were able to take the time to fly to Missouri to prep an episode of a weekly TV show.

Well, the network had requested it, which made it a lot easier than if I’d walked in and said, “Oh, I want to do this.”  But they gave us travel in those days.  

The teenage alcoholic show, the movie I did [Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic], also came about because of a network guy – the president of NBC at the time, who discovered that one of his relatives was an alcoholic.  He called the studio and said, “This is a terrible problem,” can they do a show about it?  Because I was the resident literari, which means I read a lot of books, they called me and said, “What book could we adapt?”  

I said, “Well, there’s a couple, but they’re all going to come out looking like a remake of The Lost Weekend.  If you want to do something interesting” – again, this was a blurb at the bottom of a newspaper column – “I read somewhere that kids are turning away from pot and turning to alcohol from their parents’ closets, because it’s so much easier to get ahold of.  You could do a show on teenage alcoholism.”  

The next thing I know I’ve got a commitment from NBC to do a two-hour movie on teenage alcoholism.  When the network would request something, the studio generally acceded to it.

Otherwise, were they mostly hands-off on The New Doctors?

Well, no.  The Broadcast Standards people were really terrible.  

Aha.  Tell me about some of those clashes.

The one that sticks in my mind the most was on the unnecessary surgery show [“Is This Operation Really Necessary?”], where they wanted me to change “her uterus” to “the uterus.”  I said, “Why would you want that?”

They said, “Well, it’s less personal.”  

I said, “Wait a second.  A woman’s uterus is the most personal thing she’s got.  Why would you want to make it impersonal?”  

“Well, we just feel it would be less…”  Blah, blah, blah.  I think, if I recall, I won that battle.

The one that we didn’t win, and this was again Bobby Collins at his best: On the Masters and Johnson show they called us and said, “You cannot use the word erection.”  

I said, “Wait a second.  You guys, NBC, asked me to do a show about a sex therapy clinic.  That’s one of the symptoms.  Why would you not let me….”  

“Well, you can’t use it.”  

I called Bob and said, “What are we going to do?”  

He said, “It’s okay.  I’ve got a solution.”  

He substituted the word reaction: “When’s the last time you had a reaction?”  It’s so close, they might as well have let us say “erection.”  That’s what a good writer can do for you.  But it was the stupidest kind of censorship, because I was not in the business of trying to do anything licentious.

Did anyone take the bait on that show?  I mean, did The New Doctors trigger any kind of public controversy?

No.  First of all, we didn’t have enough viewers.  [Laughs.]  But, no.  Again, like with the black cowboys, everybody assumed that this stuff was really controversial, and it wasn’t.  It was controversial in their minds but not in anybody else’s.

Universal had a weird schism during that period when they dominated television output by such a wide margin.  They produced a lot of really banal, commercial shows, and I think that’s what people tend to remember more today, but they also did some expensive-looking, intellectual shows, like the ones you worked on.

I remember I was having a meeting with Sid one night and he said, “I’ve got to look at a couple of Adam-12s.  Come on and watch them with me.”  So we go down and I sit through two of them, and I’m like, “Ugggghhhh.”  He said, “David.  Adam-12 pays for your shows.  These shows are the ones that allow us to do the kind of stuff you do.  So don’t be so dismissive.”  He was absolutely right.  Sid understood that, that you can’t just do the shows you like.  You have to do the shows that are going to bring in some business.

Sons and Daughters may be my favorite of the shows we’re discussing.

That’s surprising.  I love it, but it ain’t my favorite.

Well, first of all, who was M. Charles Cohen, who’s credited as the creator of the series?

M. Charles Cohen was a Canadian writer.  I honestly don’t remember why the hell I chose him to do this.  He was an older guy.  Way older than me, and I grew up in the fifties.  I mean, he was a very good writer, but it was not good casting.  I ended up rewriting most of [the pilot], because he didn’t know how to write the kids.  Or the adults, very well.

So the show was more your conception than his?

Well, I don’t know.  We worked together.  I drew a lot on my own growing up.  As a matter of fact, one of my dearest friends, who watched the pilot, said it moved him so much he went back into therapy.  It brought up so many memories.  He and I had grown up together.  But I didn’t grow up in a small town.

Where did you grow up?

Chicago.  

This all started with Sheinberg saying to me, “We’d love to do some version of Red Sky at Morning as a series.”  That was a movie with Richard Thomas.  It was a family drama, a period piece.  That’s where it started.  We got a script that NBC liked a lot, and then chose not to do it.  I can’t remember why.  They ended up showing it to CBS, which I guess was kind of good news.  At the time it seemed like good news.  We made a pilot, and it sold.  Freddy Silverman loved it.  The biggest problem with the show was that it got slotted at 7:30, in what was then the family hour, so we couldn’t deal with sexuality at all.  You can’t do a show about teenagers without delving into sexuality.  It’s just ridiculous.  I mean, I grew up in the fifties, and nobody got laid.  But we thought about it a lot, and we pursued it a lot, and a lot of fun came out of it – a lot of funny experiences.  To not be able to really touch on it at all made it almost impossible to have any fun with the show.

Although the question of whether Gary Frank and Glynnis O’Connor are going to have sex is very present, isn’t it?

Yeah, but we’re dancing around it pretty good.  It was hard.  We also had problems, not the least of which was Little House on the Prairie [which debuted opposite Sons and Daughters on NBC].  I remember my kids coming to me very abashedly and saying, “Dad, we don’t want to hurt your feelings, but we’re not going to watch your show.  We’re going to watch Little House on the Prairie.”  I should have known at the time that that was the tolling of the bell.  Doom!

To what extent did American Graffiti influence Sons and Daughters?

Obviously, a lot.  The whole night thing, that night sequence [in the pilot] that went on forever, was right out of Graffiti.  Where they’re driving around town all the time in the cars.  Because we lived in our cars.  I had loved the movie, so it was very much in my mind when we were developing it.  

That sequence, by the way, got me in all kinds of trouble, because it was meant to be shot over two nights.  We got a forecast that bad weather was moving in.  We could shoot one night, but we wouldn’t be able to shoot [the second night] for another two weeks.  And we couldn’t come back to Stockton, where we were shooting it, so I made the decision that we would just shoot all night.  Which, in those days, cost a fortune.  I got a phone call from my pal: “What the hell happened?!”  

“Well, we got this bad weather report.  I couldn’t take a chance on not being able to come back, so we just went ahead and shot.”  

He said, “Well, did the bad weather come?”  

I said, “No.”  And he hung up on me.

This was Sid Sheinberg again.  

This was Sid.

Can you elaborate on what elements in the show are drawn from your life?  Are you a character in it?

Oddly enough, not really.  None of the characters is specifically drawn [from] my childhood memories.  They’re amalgamations, to a large degree.  The death of a parent, yes, I experienced that.  As did my best friend.

Dana Elcar is so good as the gentle dad, that it’s heartbreaking when he dies in the pilot.

Yeah.  We wanted the two kids each being faced with crises.  So the death of the father and the divorce of Glynnis’s parents served to do that, and served to kind of bring them together.  At least that was the intent.

Was there much discussion of how much Sons and Daughters would be serialized, versus telling self-contained stories each week?

Oh, yeah.  Freddy came out of daytime, and he insisted that we lay out the entire season.  All 24 episodes.  It was maybe one of the most difficult chores I had ever attended to.  We had to have overriding arcs that would last for six or seven or eight episodes.  He wanted one arc that would last over all 24.  At the same time, he wanted episodes to have beginnings, middles, and ends.  It was a very tall order.  The guy that I was working with on the show, Dick DeRoy, who was also one of my compatriots on Hart to Hart, had been on Peyton Place.

And so had Michael Gleason.

As had Michael Gleason, yeah.  I had hired Joseph Calvelli, who was a terrific writer.  Halfway through writing the first episode after the pilot, he had a heart attack.  He was not going to be able to do the show.  So Michael very graciously agreed to step in and help out.  He was terrific.  He went on to create this little show called Remington Steele.

Freddy was absolutely dogged in terms of getting this whole thing laid out.  I said, “Well, what if you cancel us?  All this work!”  

He said, “Don’t worry about that, you’re going to be fine.”  

Nine episodes later, bam!  There was no warning.  Nobody said this was coming.  Freddy said to us, “Come over to CBS.”  We walked in and he had that big white board with the schedule on it, and right in our timeslot was an empty space.  [Laughs.]  It was like staring into an open grave.

And for the benefit of the three remaining Sons and Daughters fans in the universe, do you recall how any of those story arcs would have ended?

Oh, no, I don’t have any idea.

No big finale planned?

I know that it did finish off some stories, and kind of left a cliffhanger.  Again, nobody was doing that in prime time.  I guess Peyton Place had broken that ground.  After I left Universal, before I went over to Charlie’s Angels, I did a pilot for Freddy, based on an English series, about steel workers in Gary, Indiana, that was going to be a prime time soap.

What was it called?

I called it Dream Street.  It never got made.  It broke my little heart, because when they read the script, everybody loved it, and I got a call to go over and talk with the head of ABC production to start laying out a budget and the whole thing.  This pilot, if it got on the air, was going to be on three nights a week, which means I was going to be very, very rich.  

Then I got a call about a week later from the head of development, who was a good buddy, and he said, “Listen, there’s this one glitch.  We forgot about this thing we’ve got, this miniseries called Rich Man, Poor Man.  Freddy feels that if that works out he’ll put that on as a soap.  But if it doesn’t, we’re going to go with yours!”

Do you remember casting Sons and Daughters, particularly the young people who hadn’t done much before that?  And the adult actors, like John Ragin and Jan Shutan.

Jan was not meant to be a continuing character.  That character of Ruth was just going to be in for the pilot.

Oh, that’s right, she moves out of town in disgrace at the end of the pilot.

Exactly.  What happened was that when I brought DeRoy in, he looked at me and said, “You’re dropping her?  Are you crazy?  She’s one of the best characters you’ve got going.”  So we kept her.

Then Dabney Coleman (who played the character based on Bill Johnson in The Bold Ones) comes in as the guy she left her husband for, and he’s great.  You’re ready to hate him, but he’s so normal and decent.

Yeah, well, as I said to Jan once, there was a reason why Dabney was always cast as an asshole.  

But the casting of the show, it was not easy.  Freddy was very demanding.  He had specific do’s and don’t’s.  I remember one phone call with Ethel Winant, who was the head of casting [for CBS] at the time, and we were getting down to it pretty close.  She was borderline hysterical: “What are we going to do?  Freddy won’t make up his mind, and I don’t know what to do!”  

I said, “Listen.  What’s the worst that can happen?”  

She said, “We won’t make the pilot!”  

I said, “That’s right.  Is that going to end the world?  Are they going to take your children out into the street and shoot them?  Are they going to throw you off a mountain.  No.  They won’t make the fucking pilot.  Big deal.”  

She said, “You know, I never thought of it that way.”  

And of course Freddy approved Glynnis.  It was the only time that – we had better actors, but we didn’t have anybody that was as appealing as her.  I mean, you look into those eyes, you could just fall into them.  It was impossible not to be in love with Glynnis.

I found myself with more of a crush on Debralee Scott, who played the girl with the bad reputation.

Debralee was one of the people that Freddy was considering [to play the lead], and I was resisting that because I didn’t think she was right.  I wanted somebody who was supremely vulnerable, and Debra, god bless her, was a tough broad.  Thank goodness it finally fell our way.

And of course your current marriage came out of Sons and Daughters.

Yeah.  I had separated from my wife very early on while we were developing the series.  This was some time in late July or August.  We were shooting, and I walked in one day and Jan was sitting on the set looking very disconsolate, and I said, “What’s wrong?”  

She said, “My husband and I have separated.”  

I said, “That’s too bad.  Would you like to go out?”  I had found her very attractive, but she was married.  Well, when she wasn’t married any more, she was even more attractive.  And we’ve been together since 1974.

I think we’ve disagreed a bit on the relative merits of the Universal shows you produced.  How would you rank them?

Without question, the best of them was The Senator.  And I’m very, very fond of Sarge.  I think that we made so much better a show out of it than anybody could have anticipated.  And I’m proud of a lot of episodes I did on The Bold Ones.

To me that’s really a bookend with The Senator.  In a way, it’s just as political.

Yeah.  But I had grown up in a medical family.  I was ten years old before I found out that not every man in the world was a Jewish doctor.  Hanging around this many doctors, I had kind of been privy to a lot of stuff that you don’t see on medical series.  As a matter of fact, one of the things that I couldn’t get through was the shot of a bunch of doctors standing in front of an x-ray, shaking their heads and saying, “Beats the shit out of us.”  The network said, “You can’t do that!”  I said, “But I’ve seen that.”

The one with Susan Clark [“An Inalienable Right to Die”], who was in the boating accident, was about the patient’s right to die.  That was kind of a telling experience, because in large degree it changed the course of my career.  First time that had ever been done on television, because you couldn’t deal with it.  I had seen [the idea] somewhere, because I was a voracious newspaper reader then, which is where I was getting most of my stories.  They were not ripped from the headlines, they were ripped from the bottom of the column, the filler stuff that they put in.  And I read somewhere that in Florida, somebody had brought an injunction against a hospital keeping them on life support, and it had gone to trial and the guy had won the injunction.  I used that as evidence that there was precedent for this kind of story, and I was able to get the network to approve it.

I ran into a friend of mine after the show some months after the show had aired, and she said to me, “You know, I saw that show, and it put me in a depression that lasted for weeks.”  

I thought to myself, “Man, that is not the business you should be in.  That’s not what you’re doing.”  

I mean, I felt very strongly about the patient’s right to die with dignity.  But I found that using my TV shows for that kind of forum was not the best way to go.  It didn’t stop me from doing [A Case of Rape], which had a really downbeat ending.  But I remember when we did the teenage alcoholic show, the writers wanted her to die at the end and I said, “No fuckin’ way.  She’s not going to go through all this shit to end up on a slab.  She’s going to go to an AA meeting and stand up and say, ‘My name is Sarah T. and I’m an alcoholic,’ and everybody’s going to go home happy.”

That was Sarah T.: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic?

Yeah, with Linda Blair.  Those two movies got humongous ratings.  With the teenage alcoholic show, [Richard] Donner had a great idea, which was to get those stations to post a local call-in number – all the NBC affiliates – and the stations were flooded with calls for days after the show was on the air, from kids looking to get into a program.  That one, I went around saying, “Jesus, if it worked for one kid, you just saved a life.”

The other important made-for-TV movie you produced during that period was A Case of Rape.

This was a project that was brought to the studio by a guy who had not produced before, so they asked me if I wanted to oversee it.  What Lou [Rudolph] had developed had the protagonist as a twenty-one year old single woman, and I immediately said, “That won’t work.  I can’t sustain two hours simply on whether or not she’s going to get revenge.  It just won’t hold.  I want to make her in her thirties and married.”  Well, the network didn’t like that at all.  I believe it was because they had their own dark fantasies, sitting and looking at dailies.  They wouldn’t budge, so I quit the project.

What do you mean by “dark fantasies”?

What do you think?

Spell it out for me.

Well, they’re going to sit and mentally masturbate at the idea of a young girl being raped.

Really?  It was that crass?

That’s my guess.  But in any event, they wouldn’t budge and I wouldn’t budge, so I quit.  Because I said I’m not going to be responsible for a two-hour I-told-you-so.  The next day I got a call from a network executive who growled into the phone, “Okay, you win.”  And we had a married thirty-year-old woman [as the protagonist].  

The addendum to this particular story is that after the show had been made, I found myself at a party with this same NBC executive, who looked at me and said, “Aren’t you glad we talked you into making her married instead of young and single?”  At first I thought he was putting me on, but he wasn’t.  I love show business.

How did Elizabeth Montgomery end up attached to the project?

She had done a couple of movies of the week for ABC, which always boiled down to a young woman, alone, being threatened.  This was several strides up for her.  The studio was desperately looking to bring her in to do a series with her, so they offered her this.  She was not who I wanted, but that didn’t matter.

Was there someone specific that you wanted to cast?

Yeah, I wanted Tuesday Weld.  I had seen her in Play It as It Lays, which was an adaptation of a Joan Didion novel, and she was just superb.  But didn’t obviously have the TV name that Elizabeth Montgomery did.  So I lost that one.  

We went ahead, and Liz came in.  She’d been running her show for all these years, and expected to be able to do the same thing.  The first clash we got into was over the casting of the rapist.  We both agreed that we didn’t want him to look like a rapist.  [Instead it should be] a nice, clean-cut kid.  There was a young man under contract, a nice-looking guy, Cliff Potts, with a charming smile and a charming manner.  She went a little ballistic and said he looked like he should have a bolt in the side of his neck, because he looked like a monster.  I said, “Well, he’s who you’ve got.”  She didn’t like that at all.  

She had all kinds of ideas and one day I finally said to her, “You know what, Liz?  Why don’t you produce the picture?  You can have my office.  I’ll give you my desk, my phone, my typewriter, and you can produce the goddamn thing, because I’ve got other things to do.”  At which point she backed off.  

Then we started making the movie, and [director] Boris Sagal was just wonderful, as he always was.  We finished the courtroom [scenes] first.  The script had an addendum, with her striding out of the courthouse undaunted, proud, and her head up high.  Now, when the writer asked me what I wanted the intent of the picture to be, I had originally said I want women either throwing things at their television set or cutting their husbands off sexually for the next month.  I wanted to really raise anger, because there was a law on the books at the time that in rape trials in California you were to disregard the testimony of the victim because it couldn’t be corroborated.  It was obscene.  So I really wanted to do a little yellow journalism, if you will.

Anyway, we were filming stuff in the courtroom and there was a shot that Boris made, and I looked at it and I thought, “Boy, that’s a good ending to the movie.”  As it turns out, we got ahead of schedule, and the only thing that was left was this two-eighths of a page of her striding out of the courthouse.  I knew I was never going to use it, and I saw a chance to save fifty grand.  So I announced that we were wrapped.  

She went insane.  It was the only reason she did the picture, to prove she didn’t get knocked out by [the rape] – all good feminist arguments.  But not the picture that I had set out to do.  

In any event, I got called up to the studio president’s office.  This was not Mr. Sheinberg.  This was Frank Price, who took the place of Mr. Sheinberg when Mr. Sheinberg moved up to become Lew Wasserman.  I was not a fan of Mr. Price.  Wasn’t, and still am not.  He had this habit of drumming his fingers on his desk.  Very Nixonian.  He said to me, “I understand you don’t want to shoot that last scene.”  

I said, “That’s right.  I don’t need it.”  

He said, “Well, you know, the studio’s looking to develop a relationship with Elizabeth, and I think that it might be a very good idea for us to go and shoot the scene.”  

I said, “Frank, it’s your fifty grand.  It ain’t coming out of my pocket.  But I’m telling you we don’t need it.”

“Well, we’re going to go ahead and shoot it anyway, David.”  

So they all traipsed downtown to the courthouse, and Boris spends the entire day shooting this two-eighths of a page.  I’m playing fair, so we put the picture together and that’s the ending we had on it.  Now I run it for a couple of the studio executives, and when the lights come on they say, “Why doesn’t it have the punch that we thought it should have?”  

I said, “Interesting that you should ask that question.  Let me show you an alternative reel I prepared.”  And that had the ending that I had seen in dailies those weeks before.  I ran the last reel again and the lights came on, and they were like, “Holy shit.”  

I said, “Well, you can go talk to Frank about it.  I’ve had my discussion with him.”  

So once again David gets called up to Frank Price’s office.  “I understand from my executives that the picture seems to work better without the ending coming out of the courthouse.”  

I said, “Yeah, that’s right, it does.”  

He said, “You wasted fifty thousand dollars?”  

I said, “No, Frank, you wasted fifty thousand dollars.”  

He said, “Well, maybe I wasn’t listening close enough.”  

I said, “I suggest next time when I talk, you listen.”  And got up and walked out of the office.

The show got a fifty share, because, I mean, who’s not going to tune in to watch the Bewitched lady get raped?  The best thing that came out of it for me was the call we got from Sacramento.  They had rape legislation pending that was going to knock out that rule about ignoring the victim, and they said, “Could you send a print of the picture up here?  Because we want to show it to the guys who are on the fence.”  Subsequently the legislation passed.

You told me that Robert Collins rewrote A Case of Rape without credit.

The Guild denied him credit.  It was shameful.  He brought life to the characters.  The guy who wrote the original script, Bob Thompson, it was written by the numbers.  It was all flat, predictable; you didn’t care about anybody.  You were only meant to care about her because she’d been attacked.  There was nothing in her character that made you want to like her, or her husband.  They were all ciphers, kind of, and Bob [Collins] made them human beings.  All the intimate moments are his.

I guess your thoughts about that reaction to “An Inalienable Right to Die” are partly an answer to this, but: Tell me how the Emmy-winning producer of The Senator ends up on Charlie’s Angels only half a decade later.

I had lost a job, not because of my big mouth, but because of my propensity for relevant issues.  My name had been brought up at NBC to do some show, and the head of NBC at the time said, “No, he’s too relevant.”  This was passed back to me.

Do you remember what the show was?

No.  But shortly thereafter, I got this call from my agent, saying, “You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you, but Aaron Spelling just called and they want you to come in and produced Charlie’s Angels.”  

I said, “What?!”  What went through my mind was, “That cocksucker at NBC, I’ll show him how irrelevant I can be!”  And I went over and did the show.  

Now, to be honest, I did it the best I knew how to do it, because I don’t know any other way.  I remember having an interview with Time magazine, because the girls were going to be the cover, and I didn’t want to do it.  I said, “But Aaron, why aren’t they interviewing you?”  

He said, “They don’t want to talk to us, they want to talk to somebody who’s actually on the lot every day.  If you don’t do it, it’s going to reflect badly on the show.”  

I said, “Okay, fine, I’ll do it.”  

So the Time guy comes in, and he’s looking for dirt.  There were all kinds of rumors floating around about how difficult they were.  He said to me, “Can you believe that this is going to be a cover story on Time magazine?  This show?”  

I said, “Hey, man, it’s your magazine.”  

He said, “Well, tell me about the girls.  How are they?”  

I said, “They are wonderful.  It is a joy to get up every morning and drive into work knowing that I’m going to get to deal with these three kind, bright, gorgeous women.”  I said, “I’m maybe the luckiest guy in town.”  

He finally looked at me and said, “You’re not going to tell me a goddamned thing, are you?”  

I said, “You got that right, baby.”  And if you were to dig up the Time article, I’m nowhere mentioned in the story.

Were Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts on the show at that time?

No.  They just did the pilot and then they left, although I did get a very nice call from the two of them.  What I came up with that they hadn’t really realized [was] I said to Leonard [Goldberg], “If the idea for the show doesn’t make you grin, it’s not a good area.”  To put them in the army, to put them in the Playboy world, all that stuff was kind of fun.  So we did one that was a takeoff on The Maltese Falcon, and ended up with one of the most famous sequences of Charlie’s Angels, which is Farrah [Fawcett] on a skateboard being pursued by a heavy in an ice cream truck through Griffith Park.  Anyway, I got a call from the two guys and they said, “Thank god somebody finally got what we intended when we came up with the show.”  They intended it to be kind of a comedy.  Unfortunately, Aaron and Len were not in the comedy business.  They couldn’t see it.  But I thought, “Shit, if it isn’t funny, don’t do it.”

Is that why you left the show so quickly?

No.  I had two pilots going, a pilot at ABC and a pilot at NBC, and when they called me and said how many shows do you want to do, I said, “Well, four sounds about right.  By then you’ll be sick of me, I’ll be sick of you, it’ll be time to move on.  You’ll see.”  They didn’t believe me.  They asked me to stay for the rest of the season, and my response was, “I’m losing valuable I.Q. points every day I stay here.”  Aaron, who was really pissed that I didn’t stay on, told the girls that I had violated my contract.  He was a bit of a shit, not that that’s any surprise to anybody who worked in the business.  I loved working with the girls, but it was not my metier, not what I do.

So that was actually true, what you told the Time reporter!

Oh, yeah.  No, they were good.  Kate was crazy.  Kate was crazier than a loon, but the other two could not have been more joyous to work with.  Farrah was incredibly funny.  Jackie [Jaclyn Smith] was sweet beyond belief.  Just really nice women.

I wouldn’t have guessed that Kate Jackson was the difficult one.

She was far and away the best actor, there’s no question about that, and very bright.  Most of her anger, I think, dealt with the fact that Aaron and Len had said, “We’re going to develop a series for you.”  And then they cast Farrah.  I understand where her anger came from – “I’m pissed off because you cast someone who’s really knock-down gorgeous with great tits” – but the worst part of it was, she couldn’t say that to anybody, which is really infuriating.  

When she and I had our first set-to – which wasn’t long; I think it was my third day of prep – I went to her trailer, and she was doing shit like throwing things at the A.D., and just acting out in all kinds of ways.  I said to her, “Look, Kate, I know what you’re angry about, and if you want to talk about it, I’m here to talk about it.  But in the meantime, don’t take it out on all these kids.  Take it out on me.  Call and scream at me, that’s what I’m here for.”  She just got up and walked out of the trailer, and she never said a word to me again.

Can we talk about the Bill Cosby pilot you produced?  Top Secret?

Oh, god.  Pull my wings off, baby.  [Laughs.]  That was for Sheldon Leonard.  Working with Shelly was one of the great experiences of my career.  Working with Cosby was not.

Was that an attempt to rekindle the magic of I Spy?

I Spy, yeah.  Shelly wanted to do it with a woman.  He’d gotten very annoyed with [Robert] Culp when they were doing the original I Spy series, because he had cast Culp as a very buttoned-down, competent man.  The minute the show took off Cosby suddenly was a comet rising in the heavens, and Culp wanted to be hip and happenin’ too.  Sheldon kept saying, “No, no, no, that’s not the way this works,” and Culp kept ignoring him.  So by the end of it Sheldon was not Culp’s biggest fan.  He thought, we’ll do it this time with a woman.  And that seemed to work fine.  

We ran into some problems, one of which is that Cosby really has trouble saying the lines the way they’re written.  It’s part of his process.  He has to run it through his own filter and make it his own.  But if he’s working with actors who don’t know how to improvise, it becomes very difficult.  They try to follow as best they can, but it’s tough.  And he was just really unpleasant to work with.

Then we, unfortunately, ended up with a director that we should not, that I should not, have hired, who didn’t know what he was doing.

Paul Leaf, whom I’d never heard of.

You never heard of him, and I hold myself partially responsible for that.  Because he was in way over his head.  He’d done one two-hour movie called Sgt. Matlovich vs. the U.S. Air Force, about the prosecution of a gay soldier, and it was pretty good.  Unfortunately this was an action comedy, and he just didn’t have the faintest idea what the hell to do.  Plus he had Cosby, which is tough for any director, much less a relatively new one.  And he wouldn’t listen to anybody, this director.  Shelly had directed an awful lot of stuff, and I had done enough shows that I knew basically how to help him, and he didn’t want any help.  Shelly kept saying to me, “We’ll fix it in the cutting room,” and I said, “I can’t cut what I haven’t got.”  

When NBC saw the picture, the head of development said to me, “What happened to that really good script that we sent over to Rome?”  It was not fun at all.

But Sheldon Leonard left a favorable impression, at least.

Shelly was the best.  He just was gracious and smart and tough.  I just adored him.  It made the time in Italy livable.  Because the days were awful, but the nights were – and my wife is waving her hand, because she went over there with me.  We weren’t married at the time, and the minute she heard that I was going to Rome for three and a half months, she invited herself.  She had a swell time.

Cosby wasn’t mixing her drinks, I hope.

No.  It’s funny, he used to come by the room almost every night.  He was working on a bit, and he would come down and run it for me.  It never occurred to me that he came down to the room hoping that I’d be out!  By the way, he worked on this thing for at least the three months we were together, and I saw him perform it on the Carson show for the first time.  This was his genius.  I’d been listening to the thing for three months, [and] it was like he was making it up as he was going along.  Talk about being in the moment.

What did you mean when you said he was unpleasant, though?  More than his method of working?

We had a moment during the first or second week of shooting.  We were all sitting around in the hotel one night, and Cosby went off on a riff about how Hal Holbrook was an overrated actor.  I looked at him and said, “Bill, where did you get your doctorate?”  

He said, “The University of Massachusetts.  Why do you ask?”  

I said, “Well, I was curious about the university that offers a PhD in Everything.”  

The room got very quiet.  He glared at me and I stared right back.  He finally got up and walked out of the room.  

From that point on, he kept coming and asking my opinion about stuff.  I guess I was one of the few people that would tell him to go fuck himself, and he didn’t quite know how to deal with that.

Was it just a coincidence that Holbrook came up, or was it intended as a shot at you, since you were associated with him from The Senator?

Oh, I’m sure that it was a shot at me.  But that’s what I mean about unpleasant.  Camille [Cosby’s wife] was there, and the whole time we were there, he was hitting on [a woman connected to the production].  He kept hitting on her, hitting on her, and she had absolutely no interest in him.  One night Bill said, “I’m taking everybody out for dinner,” so we all met in the lobby at eight o’clock, and [the woman] wasn’t there.  

We said, “Where is she?”  

Bill said, “Oh, she wasn’t feeling well.”  

But he had told her that we were leaving at 8:30, so she came downstairs to find an absolutely empty lobby.  Didn’t know where anybody had gone.  That’s Bill.

You think he was punishing her for rejecting him?

Exactly.

Shelly subsequently got the two guys [Cosby and Culp] together to do what I thought was a really cool idea, which was to bring the two of them together because both their kids had gone to work for the CIA, and they’re being protective fathers.  He wanted me to write it and I said, “No way, Shelly, you’ll never get me within a hundred yards of that man again.”  Now, as far as Shelly was concerned, Bill could do no wrong.

Really?

Yeah.  They basically adored one another.

I’m just wondering if you think Sheldon was turning a blind eye to Cosby’s behavior.  He had to be, right?

It may have been that.  You don’t want to hear bad things about your kids, and that’s how he felt about Cosby.  You know, I Spy was the first casting of a black lead in a dramatic television series.  It was a real milestone, and Shelly fought like a sonofabitch to get him the role.  And was very proud that he was able to do it.

He was right about Cosby’s talent, of course.

Oh, yeah.  And the charisma was just incredible.  The reason for the show’s success was Bill.  I mean, Culp was always a journeyman actor.  I’m sure it struck Culp the same way that the casting of Farrah struck Kate Jackson: “What happened to my show?”

Robert Culp did have a reputation as one of Hollywood’s great egomaniacs.

Oh, yeah.  There’s a quick story: Years and years and years ago, the first job I had working on The Chrysler Theater, we were doing a Rod Serling script [“A Slow Fade to Black”] about a Hollywood tycoon.  Rod’s version of The Last Tycoon.  Rod Steiger was playing the lead, and Culp had a small role in it.  We went on the set one morning, and there was Culp with a bunch of pages.  He had rewritten his scene with Steiger.  The producer, Dick Berg, took a look at it, dropped it in the waste can, said “Thank you very much, Bob,” and walked off the set.  But that was Culp then!  That was pre-I Spy.

Mrs. Columbo brought you back together with one of your mentors, and one of my favorite forgotten television writers, Richard Alan Simmons.

Yes.  I had just gotten back from Italy, and I get a call one day from Richard.  He says, “David, I got bad news and worse news. You know that awful idea that we heard from Link and Levinson about Mrs. Columbo?”  

I said, “Yeah, it’s a terrible idea.”  

He said, “Well, I’m going to be doing it.”  

I said, “What’s the worse news?”  

He said, “I ain’t going to be doing it alone.”  

And there I was.  Because there was nothing in the world he could ask that I wouldn’t say yes to.  It would have worked if we could have cast Maureen Stapleton.  That’s who everybody saw as Mrs. Columbo.  Not Freddy Silverman!  Peter [Falk] went berserk.  He didn’t like the idea of Mrs. Columbo anyhow, but now it looks like he’s Woody Allen – you know, that he’s married to this girl who’s young enough to be his daughter.  Kate Mulgrew was a nice actor, but there was just no way to overcome the premise.

Richard Alan Simmons suggested to me that he wrote a lot of himself into the Henry Jones character, the newspaper editor.

Oh, really?  Well, the Henry Jones character made sense.  The Mrs. Columbo character made no sense at all.  What’s she doing?  She’s a housewife.  To have her as a neighborhood reporter at least gave her some kind of excuse to go poking her nose around.  But it was such a stretch.  [Simmons] had done the last two or three seasons of Columbo, and did some absolutely brilliant, brilliant shows.  And then to have to – [Mrs. Columbo] just was one of those ideas that wasn’t ever going to work.  On the other hand, it gave us the chance to spend some quality time together.

The two horror telefilms that you and Simmons did with Louis Jourdan, Fear No Evil and Ritual of Evil, still have a cult following.

He only did one.  Excuse me sir, he only did one of them!  I did the other one.  I worked on the first one with him, which is where we got to know one another.  Then the studio wanted another version, because they kind of liked the whole idea of the psychiatrist and the occult.  They assigned it to some old-time producer [William Frye] who’d worked with Ross Hunter, I think, and he was having just a terrible time trying to figure out a story.  I said to Sheinberg, “I’ve got a story for it.  Let me produce it.”  

He said, “Produce it my ass.  Go and tell it to him.”  

So I dutifully went down and told him my idea, and he thought it was just terrible.  I couldn’t understand why he didn’t like my idea.  It was a perfectly reasonable idea, based on Indian beliefs that when you take a picture of someone you steal their soul.

About three weeks later he called Sheinberg and said, “I can’t lick it.”  Sheinberg called me and said, “You know that idea you had?  How fast could you get us a script?”  

So at age 28 I became the youngest TV movie producer around.

We haven’t covered your early days at Universal in any detail.  Can we end at the beginning?

I came out of the University of Missouri with my journalism degree.  I wrote up a resume and took it around to all the studios, not knowing a soul, and got a call from the Universal publicity department.  They wanted somebody to train to write publicity blurbs.  So off I went to the publicity department.  I was so thrilled to be on the lot.  Then subsequently I moved to the Revue [Productions, the studio’s television arm] mailroom, which was a different operation, and started writing stories and taking them around on my mail runs.  Dropping them off in people’s offices.  I sold a couple.

That explains your early story credits on episodes of Leave It to Beaver and McHale’s Navy.  Was that common practice for mailroom employees?  Were you risking anyone’s wrath?

Nobody ever said anything about it one way or the other.  I wasn’t doing it covertly.  

People ask me how did I get started, and my response is I knocked up my wife.  About a month after I’ve started in the mailroom, my wife is teaching in Long Beach.  I’m commuting from Long Beach to Universal every day.  Loads of fun.  I come home one day and she announces that she’s pregnant.  I am making a fast sixty-five bucks a week, and she’s going to have to quit teaching after her fifth month, because god forbid the children should see a bump and want to know where it came from.  This is back in the early sixties.

Meanwhile, we don’t know anybody out here, so I call back home and say to my mother, “Who do you know who’s on the West Coast that can take care of a baby?”  She gives me a name and a number and we make the appointment.  It’s someplace on Wilshire Boulevard and Roxbury, and we go over there and go up to the penthouse, and sitting in the waiting room is Janet Leigh.  The rug is maybe three inches thick.  There are oil paintings on all the walls.  I suddenly realized that this guy we’ve been sent to is the OB/GYN to the stars.  So I say to my wife, “Let’s get out of here.  We can’t afford this guy.”

She says, “Well, he knew your father, and we’re here.  We can afford to pay for one appointment.”  

She goes in and gets an examination, and then the doctor calls me back to his office.  I said, “Look, before we go any further, we’re going to need the name of another doctor, because I can’t afford you.”

He looked at me and said, “You think I’m going to charge you?”  It turns out he was very close to my father.  My father had been very helpful to him during the war.  He says to me, “What are you doing?”  

I said, “I’m in the mailroom at Universal, but I’m going to have to find a real job.”  

He said, “Do you want to do that?”  

I said, “Not particularly, but I’ve got a baby on the way.”  

He said, “Well, one of my closest friends is a guy named Jerry Gershwin,” and my jaw drops, because Jerry Gershwin is Lew Wasserman’s right hand man.  He says, “Let me talk to Jerry and see if we can get you out of the mailroom.”  

It took nine months, because there was only one job I wanted.  They kept coming up with other ways for me to get out of the mailroom, but I wanted to go to work for a man named Dick Berg, who was producing The Chrysler Theater, which was a very prestigious show.  That was the show that I wanted to work on, and I really wasn’t interested in working on anything else.  They kept pressing and pressing and finally somebody gave the okay for Dick to hire me as a gofer.  That was the start.  I was really in the door, and the two years I spent with him were one of the great learning experiences of my life.    

When I watched the pilot for Nikita in 2010 and saw your name in the credits, I remember thinking, “That couldn’t be the same David Levinson, could it…?”

That was Craig Silverstein’s show.  On The Invisible Man I came in – the executive producer of the show had quit.  They were already in production.  They had no scripts.  They had no stories.  The executive producer had had enough of the executive at [The Sci-Fi Channel], and he just up and quit: “Fuck it.”  And they were desperate.  Somehow I got a call.  It was getting to be the captain of the Titanic, and I couldn’t turn that down.  I had stayed away from science fiction my entire career.  I don’t like it.  But this seemed like an opportunity just to really be busy, and an impossible situation.  And I walked into the office the first day, and there was Craig, 25 or 26 years old, sitting alone in the writers’ room staring at a blank board.  That was the beginning of our friendship.

When he sold his first show, Standoff, he called me and said, “You’ve got to come work on it.”  I had retired by that time.  I didn’t want to do it any more.  I’d been gone from it for about three years and I was really enjoying myself.  Ultimately, I couldn’t say no to him.  Then when Nikita came along, we kind of worked on the pilot.  He would come up here and talk it out with me.  When the show sold, this one I wanted to get involved with, because I thought it would really be fun.  But it’s real hard to be a crew member after you’ve been a captain.  And I don’t think I was as deferential as I might have been.  Like: “That’s the worst fuckin’ idea I’ve ever heard!”  But thank goodness our friendship survived it all.  Because in the final analysis, that’s what you take away from the career, is the people that you were with.

The top image of David Levinson, who maintains that he has no photographs of himself at work during the years we discussed, is taken with gratitude from Inside Division: The New Nikita, a making-of documentary on the DVD and Blu-ray of Nikita: Season 1.

Among the Missing #3: The 91st Day

The made-for-television movie wasn’t invented, in its modern form, until the mid-sixties – See How They Run (1964) is usually cited as the first one – and it didn’t become a big deal until NBC and ABC dedicated weekly prime-time blocks to them around the end of the decade.  Prior to that, though, there were many one-off dramatic specials, in prime time and also tucked into daytime slots and the FCC-dictated Sunday afternoon “cultural ghetto.”  In the fifties these were often star-driven adaptations of plays or musicals – Laurence Olivier in The Moon and Sixpence (1959), for instance.  During the early sixties, as stark dramas like The Defenders flourished briefly and many in the industry mourned the demise of the live anthology, some smaller-scaled, more austere playlets in the kitchen drama vein cropped up.  They’re all completely forgotten today.

Here’s one example, chosen essentially at random.  (I stumbled across a file on it at work.)  The 91st Day, broadcast on public television stations during the month of JFK’s assassination, was a case study of mental illness and an indictment of the inadequate public health remedies for it.  The protagonist, Loren Benson, was a high school music teacher who suffers a breakdown; his wife Maggie, the other main character, becomes an advocate for his care as the system fails him.  The title refers to the state-mandated discontinuation of Benson’s institutionalization: at the end of ninety days, the mental patient is kicked to the curb, cured or not.

The 91st Day commands interest first and foremost for its stars: Patrick O’Neal, a sardonic, hard-drinking Florida-born Irishman who seemed custom-built to understudy Jason Robards in the complete works of Eugene O’Neill; and Madeleine Sherwood, an Actors Studio doyenne who could come off as both matronly and high-strung.  Sherwood died last month (that’s what prompted me to finish this half-drafted, half-forgotten piece); despite having appeared in the original Broadway production of The Crucible and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and films for Elia Kazan (Baby Doll) and Otto Preminger (Hurry Sundown), Sherwood was best known for her most ridiculous credit, the role of The Flying Nun’s Mother Superior.  The supporting cast, drawn from the crowd of New York-based theater and television actors – The 91st Day was filmed in studios on West End Avenue, in June 1963, with a location trip to a hospital outside Reading, Pennsylvania – included Staats Cotsworth, Royal Beal, and Robert Gerringer (a stolid Frank Lovejoy type who served as one of The Defenders’ rotating prosecutors).

At almost ninety minutes, The 91st Day was a feature-length work, and yet it was created by outsiders to the world of scripted film and television.  Lee R. Bobker, its director, was an independent filmmaker, an Oscar-nominated documentarian, and an NYU instructor.  (Bobker’s company, Vision Associates, had produced Frank Perry’s independent film David and Lisa the year before, and both projects had the same film editor, Irving Oshman; The 91st Day was probably an offshoot of David and Lisa, which also dealt with mental illness.)  The writers, Emily and David Alman, were novelist-playwrights better known as neighbors of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who sought publicly to clear their names after the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage in 1953.  The Almans employed a pseudonym, “Emily David,” possibly to deflect attention from their leftist associations – although publicity materials identified them, and their involvement was mentioned in The New York Times’s coverage of the show.  The Ford Foundation-funded NET, the precursor to PBS, produced and aired The 91st Day, and the budgetary limitations of public television meant that it was likely made for a quarter, or less, of what a comparable network program cost.  (The single sponsor was the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French, a corporate forerunner of GlaxoSmithKline.)  Most mainstream talent probably discovered that they had prior commitments that month.

Was it any good?  The reviews were mixed.  TV Guide wrote that it “grinds no axes, calls no names, but forcibly reveals a few of life’s truths.”  John Horn, in The New York Herald Tribune, thought it “badly needed substance, point and human engagement.”  Without much else from Bobker’s or the Almans’ resumes to compare it to, it’s hard to judge whether The 91st Day would seem earnest and amateurish today, like an afterschool special, or sensitive and urgent, like a lost two-parter from Ben Casey or The Nurses.

The 91st Day doesn’t turn up in the catalogs of either the UCLA Film and Television Archive or the Paley Center For Media – and Worldcat doesn’t locate it in any libraries, which is surprising, given that it was likely made with the idea that it could have a long afterlife in educational and institutional settings.  (Perhaps its length kept it out of the repository of 16mm films your school library stocked for those days when your teacher was hungover.)  It’s likely that prints of it exist, though, if not in the archives of PBS or The 91st Day’s corporate sponsors, then in the basement of one of its makers. The show doesn’t come up in the Library of Congress’s database, but the NET archives are housed there, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they have an uncataloged copy.  If not, though, you’re crazy if you think you have a chance of seeing The 91st Day.

Shrug

It’s been another one of those summers, just like pretty much every summer now, one of those summers in which by the middle of June I can just barely meet deadlines for paid work and can’t think about doing any research for fun or even soliciting more paid work, in which it’s still swampy in mid-October and my list of things to do once the weather is bearable has become so overstuffed that even the crisp relief of autumn has an early pall over it.  A summer in which Laugh-In‘s Judy Carne dies and the obituaries make her autobiography sound frank and compelling, so that I go downstairs at the library where I work and find that someone else has had the same idea and checked out the only copy.  A summer in which I notice that the next shelf over is amply stocked with copies of Edd Byrnes’s 1996 autobiography, “Kookie” No More, and I figure: Ah, what the hell.  Why not?

For much of the general public, skimming the turgid prose of victory-lapping celebrities might be as pleasurable as abdominal surgery, but in my line of work, if that’s what you want to call it, it’s an inoffensive pastime that occasionally yields useful facts or avenues of inquiry.  (Sample trivia: Steve Trilling, the yes-man whose name adorned a million memos that I read during my college days as a page in the USC Warner Bros. Archives, committed suicide in 1964, immediately after Jack Warner fired him.)  Even though he is refreshingly forthright and unapologetic about his gay-for-pay days before Warner Bros. made him a TV star, Edd Byrnes comes across in his pages as precisely the same sort of glib and uncomplicated personality that he projected during his salad days of playing Kookie, the hep-talking, self-absorbed parking lot attendant who was the flash-in-the-pan sensation of 77 Sunset Strip.  This is, after all, a guy who spent the last half of his career mostly playing game show hosts (and who very nearly became one himself, before he drank the chance away).  You can practically hear Byrnes addressing his ghostwriter: “How much do I need to dish to sell this thing?  More?  Okay, whatever.”  Which would be fine if Byrnes had been intimate with any artists of a higher caliber than Natalie and RJ, or if he had chalked up even a handful of nuanced performances before his career slid into dinner theater.  But in these departments Byrnes, alas, falls short, even relative to, for instance, Tab Hunter (whose own book, Tab Hunter Confidential, which I also read this summer, is nearly as bland, but whose talent as an actor remains underappreciated, at least).

Ordinarily I wouldn’t go out of my way to beat up on a minor celebrity’s ghostwritten memoir, especially one that’s twenty years old, even one that ends in an addict’s proselytizing embrace of religion as a substitute addiction (spoiler: rather touchingly, the man who dragged Byrnes into AA was fellow Warners contract oaf Troy Donahue, although Byrnes seems oblivious, or perhaps resistant, to the humorous aspect of this support system of has-beens), even one that peddles tales of womanizing suffused with a casual, condescending sexism.  But then Byrnes rouses himself from the mediocrity that encircles this whole endeavor – that is, the book as well as the career it enshrines – to make a hilarious, wholly unexpected last-page plunge into jaw-dropping stupidity.  An aside of stupidity that I not only don’t feel particularly guilty about mocking but one that also served, for this ungrateful reader, as kind of collapse-into-hysterical-laughter coup-de-grace for this whole wheel-spinning season of migraine-addled unproductivity.  Permit me my epiphanies where I find them, okay?

Anyhow: Right across from the first page of his index (“Burghoff, Gary, 188”; “Calhoun, Rory, 195”), Byrnes helpfully offers a “recommended reading” list, a bibliography consisting of nine books.  Eight of them are non-fiction – self-help tomes like Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity, by Catherine Ponder.  The ninth book, though, is Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and unlike the other eight Byrnes helpfully annotates it with a parenthetical –

No, wait, I have to interrupt myself here and swear on a stack of flop sweat-soaked AA pamphlets that I am not making this up.  Really.

Okay, are you ready?  Edd Byrnes thinks you (or maybe just half of you, I guess) should read:

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (an excellent money book for women)

There.  Now you never have to read Edd Byrnes’s “Kookie” No More, because I have done it for you.  You’re welcome.

And we’ll get back to the serious work soon, I hope.

An Interview With Anthony Heald

Yesterday The A.V. Club published my interview with Anthony Heald as part of its Random Roles series.  In addition to being one of the best character actors working today, Heald is an articulate and analytical person – in other words, an ideal interview subject.  I had a great time sharing a long lunch with him last month, and I think the interview turned out pretty well.

(Also, check out these great photos from Heald’s Broadway career, which I helped to get digitized as part of my other job.)

For the last few months this blog has been more idle than at any earlier time in its seven-year history.  Sorry about that!  But there is a backlog of half-written material, so we’ll get back on the TV beat soon.

This Is The Continuing Story….

Ever since I discovered it ten years ago, one of the series I’ve most wanted to write about in a definitive way is Peyton Place.  Most of the truly canonical television series have been identified, if not universally agreed upon, by now.  I think Peyton Place may be the one exception – the sole long-running American show that belongs in the pantheon but has generally been excluded.  To my great delight, The A.V. Club has given me the opportunity to make a case for its excellence.

I’ve also written about Peyton Place in a less comprehensive way in a few other places.  After you read the A.V. Club piece, you may want to check out (or revisit) my interviews with writer-producer Richard DeRoy and actor Tim O’Connor, my obituary for director Walter Doniger, and my thoughts on James Rosin’s book about the series.

In addition to the four people named in the preceding paragraph, I also want to acknowledge a number of others who spoke to me about Peyton Place over the years: the late Franklin Barton; the late Gerry Day; the late Harold Gast; Lee Grant; Jeffrey Hayden; Patricia Morrow; Ed Nelson; Peggy (Shaw) O’Shea; the late William Self; and Jack Senter.  In particular, I’m grateful to the late Del Reisman, who spent many patient hours discussing this and other shows with me over the course of several years, and to Sonya Roberts, an off-the-record friend of long standing who finally and graciously consented to become a source for this piece.

As was the case with Ben Casey, there will be a few sidebars here during the next few weeks to showcase some of the research that didn’t make it into the A.V. Club essay.

(A final postscript: I spent some time trying unsuccessfully to locate the three African American writers who briefly joined Peyton Place‘s writing staff in 1968. Gene Boland and Sam Washington, if you happen to come across this post, I’d love to interview you.)

Waves

Now it all makes sense.

Half an Interview With Gail Kobe

Gail Kobe, who died on August 1, was one of the busiest television actresses of the late fifties and sixties.  Falling somewhere in between ingenue and character actress, she was in constant demand as a guest star.  Although she had a wide range, I thought Kobe did her best work in heavy roles that required a certain quality of hysteria, like the high-strung young mother she played on Peyton Place during the height of its popularity.  Shortly before her fortieth birthday, Kobe made a dramatic decision to leave acting and work behind the camera.  Eventually she became a powerful executive producer in daytime dramas, exercising a major creative influence over Texas, The Guiding Light, and The Bold and the Beautiful during the eighties.

Last year, I learned that Kobe was a resident of the Motion Picture and Television Home and contacted her to ask for a phone interview.  She agreed, but with a certain reluctance.  Although Kobe seemed eager to reminisce – she’d recently donated her extensive papers to a museum in her home town of Hamtramck, Michigan, and was preoccupied with the question of her legacy – she wasn’t terribly receptive to fielding questions.  Kobe was smart, introspective, and sharp-tongued.  I got the impression that that she was used to steering the conversation rather than being steered – which meant that we didn’t get around to many of the topics I’d hoped to cover.  A couple of times, when I posed a follow-up question that was uninspired, or failed to fully grasp her point, she pounced.  “Are you having trouble hearing me?” she asked sarcastically, and later: “I thought I made that clear.”

On top of that, Kobe suffered from COPD, a lung disease that can impede mental acuity as well as the ability to speak at length.  We had to postpone a few times until Kobe had a good day, and she apologized often for failing to remember names – even though her memory struck me as better than average for someone her age, and I tried to reassure her of that.  After our initial conversation, I lobbied to schedule a follow-up session, but I had a gut feeling that between her ambivalence and her health, it probably wouldn’t happen.  And, indeed, we weren’t able to connect a second time.  As a result, my interview with Kobe ignores some of the key phases of her career – namely, the television series on which she had regular or recurring roles (Trackdown, Peyton Place, Bright Promise) and the soap operas that she produced.  Now that the opportunity to complete the interview is gone, I’m publishing what I was able to record here for the sake of posterity.

Tell me about your background.

I was born in 1932, in Hamtramck, to a largely Polish and French family.  At that time Hamtramck was sort of a village, a Polish village.  You could walk fifty blocks and never hear English spoken.  It was a very old-fashioned, terrific place to grow up.  But it did seem as though we were both European and behind the zootsers and all of that stuff that was sort of prevalent around that time.

My mother was very active in promoting both the history of Poland and, at the time, during the war, of being very supportive of the people who were under the nazis.  There were a lot of Polish artists who were able to escape, because artists were not treated well, nor was anybody else, by the nazis.  But they came to Hamtramck and they formed a group called the Polish Artists.  And they would do – there was a Polish radio station, WJBK, and they would do shows on that, that were serialized.  Interesting that I went into the serial form later, when I became a producer.  They were serials on the radio, and then they would conclude the story by doing the whole thing as a play for Friday, Saturday matinee, Saturday evening, Sunday matinee, and Sunday evening.  They would conclude the play and then finish on the air the following Monday.  But that was my first theater involvement.  I was a dancer, and I danced in those, and pretty soon I was given small speaking roles, in Polish.  And I did the Polish radio shows.

They were the most interesting people I’d ever met.  They were just fabulous.  They had scars and smoked cigarettes and they were flamboyant and beautiful and they wore makeup.  What a group!  It was called the Young Theater (Młody Teatr).  There we learned the Polish folk dances. We learned a lot of the poetry, a lot of the literature.  We met at the junior high school.  We used one of their auditoriums to meet and to rehearse.  It was a way to keep the culture going.

Did you speak English or Polish at home?

We spoke both languages.  And would you believe it, Polish is the language that I remember as opposed to French, which would have gotten me a heck of a lot more [work].  My mother made me really, really, really speak English, and pronounce correctly.  I said, “Don’t you think I would have been more interesting if I’d had a lovely accent?”  And I think so.  But, anyway, I learned to speak without an accent.  And I had the best of any possibility that you could have.  I was raised as a European in America.  How lucky can anybody be?

Did you also embrace American culture?

Oh, absolutely.  We marched in every parade there was.  I loved America.  I loved going to camp, which I did every summer.  I loved American baseball.  My dad loved American baseball.  We were very involved with American politics, having both parties represented in our home.  I think of them, my mother and my dad, in different parties, but living in the same house in America.  It was interesting on several levels, both as a woman who did not follow her husband exactly, and because they were two different approaches to politics.  But pride in America was something that I always had.  Always, always.  My grandparents did not.  They worked very hard and they made money for their children, and both families were quite large, Catholic families.  They took care of each other very well, and they also had pride in America, but not the same as my mother and dad did.  My mother and dad were both activists.  In the best way.  So I was able to be raised in the center of that.  But also, being surrounded by all these artists – if you don’t think that’s high drama at its best, you’re wrong.

Was it the auto industry that the Polish immigrants were moving to Detroit for?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.  All the factories were there.

Did your father build cars?

No, my father did not.  My father worked in his own garage.  He was a pattern maker.  In sand, if you can believe it.  I have a few things left that he made when he was a younger man.  But that’s what he did.  He said he was either behind or ahead of the industry – I can’t remember.  But he was not in the automobile industry itself.

How did you develop as an actress?

I started as a dancer first.  I loved dancing.  But as I began to spend more time with the Polish Artists, I realized how much longer the life of an actor was than the life of a dancer.  A dancer only lasted as long as their legs lasted.  And it was very, very [demanding].  You knew you had to practice two to three hours a day.  And I did take two or three dance lessons a week.  I studied with a man whose name was Theodore J. Smith.  Every time the Ballet Russes, for instance, would come into Detroit, we would have one of the major dancers teach a master class, which we were able to take if we could afford it.  Everybody saved their money so I could take those classes, and they were wonderful.

When did you leave Hamtramck?

In 1950.  I came to UCLA.  I had to do the test to see if I would pass to get into the college level, and I did, very easily.  I had wonderful teachers in high school that were very instrumental and helpful.  Bea Almstead, who I think always wanted to be an actor and taught English and speech, she was just terrific.  During that time I did a dramatic reading – I think it was a scene with Mary Stuart and Elizabeth the Queen, one of those things that you turn your head to the right or the left depending on who you are.  I won the speech contest.

She was really terrific, and so was Mr. Alford.  I thought he was an old, old man, and he was probably younger than I am now.  He taught Latin.  He was kind enough to teach me I had Latin by myself, so I could take part in the senior play.  I had the lead, of course.

UCLA was one of the few colleges [that offered a pure theater major].  Usually you had to train to be a teacher.  Of course my family would have loved that, because I would have had a job to fall back on.  But I had wonderful teachers in college, people who had been in the professional theater.  Kenneth Macgowan, who produced Lifeboat with Tallulah Bankhead.  He was the head of the New Playwrights division, which interested me from the beginning, from the time I was a seventeen year-old freshman, because I knew then that if you didn’t have the words on the page, there was no way that it would ever make any difference on stage.  I knew that so early on, and it stayed with me when I worked for Procter & Gamble.  I started their Writer Development Program.

Getting back to the good teachers that we had, Ralph Freud had been in Detroit with the Jessie Bonstelle Theater, which was one of the WPA theaters, and he was the head of the Theater Division.  There was a Radio Division.  I don’t know that there was a television division until the next or the following year.  Walter Kingston, who had one of the first classical music radio stations here in California, in Los Angeles, that I became aware of, was on staff too.  He taught radio.  I still know that I could fix an electric lamp if it was broken, because we had to learn how to do lighting.  We had to learn how to sew and make costumes and do that.  We had to do props, we had to do makeup, we had to take classes in that.  It was like being part of a company of actors, all though college.

What was the first professional work that you did?

I was still at UCLA when I did The Ten Commandments.  Milton Lewis was what they called then a talent scout.  He went to everything.  Everything!  All over Los Angeles – every little theater, every major company that was passing through.  Dapper gentleman.  He saw me in a play that was written by Oscar Wilde.  He called me to come for an interview at Paramount.

When I was there, we went to have lunch, and this gentleman came over from [Cecil B.] DeMille’s table, which sort of looked like the last supper.  There he sat in the middle of all of these men who worked for him.  All of the departments that worked for him.  He wanted to meet me.  And that was the beginning of my relationship with him.  And I did test for [The Ten Commandments], for the part that eventually went to Yvonne DeCarlo.

What was your impression of Mr. DeMille?

He was wonderful to me.  He kept me working.  I played a lot of different roles [in The Ten Commandments], and I did all of the looping.  I played a slave girl in one of those midriff outfits that you can hardly believe.  It was the last of the big, major costume dramas, and it was his last picture.  I got to have tea with him.  Most afternoons he would ask me to join him.  A lot of people were terrified of him, and I just adored him.  He was a very handsome man, a very bright man, and he would challenge me on so many little [things], just intellectually.  And I, for some reason, just accepted the challenge and loved it.

You played roles in the film other than the slave girl?

Yes I did.  It was the scene of the first seder.  I was there for a week, week and a half, I don’t know how long – a long time – every time the red light went on I would have to stop and moan and carry on as though my eldest son had been killed.  It was wonderful!  Then I played a young girl helping one of the older women across – one of the Jews escaping the Egyptians – and we rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed, and took her across and made way for her.  Well, when it came time to shoot it, suddenly there was this big water buffalo in front of me, and I stuck my hand out and stuck it in the middle of his forehead.  I just said, “No, no, no!”  DeMille did laugh about that a lot.  Other people thought he was going to kill me, because I think it ruined the shot.

Today, you’d never have somebody play different parts in the same movie!

No.  But we once had a little contest among really close friends to see if they could find me [in the film], and they couldn’t.  And people still can’t, and it’s fine with me.  It’s so absurd – I have the dumbest line, something about “a blackbird drops its feather.”  I think it’s with Anne Baxter.  He fired somebody – he’d already done that scene, and I replaced somebody.

Why do you think DeMille took an interest in you?

I think I challenged him.  I disagreed with him often.  When he said he was going to hire Yvonne DeCarlo and not me, I said, “Why would you do that?!  I would be much better than she is!”  And he said, “You’re not the right age.  You’re too young.”  I said, “I could be older.  I would be wonderful!”  That’s how I was when I was young.  I think about the boldness of some of the things I said.  It was fun.

And you were in East of Eden?

Oh, yes.  Well, I went to school with Jimmy Dean.  I did a play with Jimmy, and we would sit and talk.  He was so full of himself, but he was of course talented and wonderful and really cute.  But I was not interested in him.  I thought he was a terrific actor, and so spoiled.  So spoiled.  I wanted to leave the play because Jimmy was taking all of the time to discuss his role.  And I said, “Wait a second.  There are two people in this play, and you’ve got to listen.  You cannot be tap dancing around here to your own private music.”

I think I was smarter then than I was later in my life, about relating to actors.  A lot of them have to be, in order to get any place in their careers, single-minded.  And that doesn’t [make] them good husbands, or even good friends, sometimes.

You sound as if you were pretty single-minded yourself.

Oh, I think I’ve always been single-minded.  Yeah.  I loved rehearsing, even more than performing.  I loved new material.  I loved creating.  To me that was the creative part of acting that I just adored.

But you didn’t get the opportunity to rehearse much in television, did you?

Well, no, but you could.  Nobody stopped you from going into each other’s dressing rooms and running lines and looking for things.  And I did a lot of theater, small theater, and I was always in somebody’s class.  I joined Theatre West in the first year [1962].

I remember sitting, when we were all young, sitting with Clint Eastwood and David Janssen, saying, “Ooh, listen, you guys, I’m taking this terrific class, with Curt Conway. Listen, you’ve got to come to this workshop!”  They were already stars, for god’s sake.  We were all in the commissary together having lunch, I think, when I said to them, “I’ve just been loving this class!”  And they said, “Yeah, keep going to class, kid.”  I just said, “I have to.  That’s what’s interesting to me.”  They of course were both stars, and they were interested in other things.  They each had their own show, and I had done each of those shows.  I really liked them.  They were fun, and god knows they were handsome, and I played interesting roles, always, on their [shows].  I rarely played victims.  I cried a lot, but I rarely played victims.

Clint Eastwood has really developed, I think, as both a man and certainly a director.  I don’t know that directing at that point was [in his plans].  Don Siegel was directing a couple of the Rawhides, and I think that’s how Clint Eastwood became interested in directing.

Don Siegel directed one of your Twilight Zones.

Yes he did!  He was a wonderful director.

Did you get the part in East of Eden because of your connection to James Dean?

No, I did not.  I went on a call to read for a small role.  And he [Kazan] hadn’t made up his mind until that morning who was going to play it, and you were just one of the students.  I think the whole scene was cut from the movie.

What was your take on Elia Kazan?

I didn’t have any respect for those men.  I, of course, thought they were incredible.  But they took advantage, such advantage, of women.  He and Arthur Miller, Odets, they were all after whatever body they could get into.  It was hateful.  They were disgusting, because they used their position in order to fuck everybody alive.  Excuse my language.  And I knew it then.

So you actually saw Kazan and others taking advantage of actresses?

Did I see it?  Was I sitting on everybody?  [Sarcastically.]  Yeah.  It was very clear.  Not on the set, I didn’t see it.  But then I was so devastated, because it was just this nothing scene.  And everybody [else] was excited to be in a Kazan film.  But as you observed them, unless you were part of the Actors Studio, and I wasn’t; I tried twice, I think, for the Actors Studio, and then I sat in on a couple of Lee Strasberg’s classes, and I really did not like them.  And yet that was the way that I worked, but there was something about those men and the advantage they took of their positions that upset me emotionally very much.  It wasn’t even something I could talk about until later.  I wasn’t one of the devotees, one of the people who fell over and became a disciple.

Without challenging you on that observation, I am curious as to how you perceived that aspect of sexual inequality if you didn’t actually witness it in action.

I don’t know.  You may challenge me all you wish.  I don’t know that I can give you a satisfactory answer.  I would go with no makeup on – I didn’t get all dolled up and put on the right clothes and put on the right makeup.  So it wasn’t that I didn’t have a sense of self.  I didn’t have a sense of vanity.  But on my thirty-some birthday I sat in the corner of my closet, and I was married at the time, and said, “Who the hell am I?  Who are all these people hanging up in here, these clothes?  Who are they?”  They were all different, one from the other.

I don’t want this to be some kind of psychological study.  I’m going there with you, but it’s not something that I want you to use as representing me.  Do you understand that?  How did I – I don’t know how I was able to pick up on it.  I was like that all the time.  And yet, I was very attracted to attractive men.  But I didn’t like Franciosa or Gazzara.  I loved Montgomery Clift.  I didn’t like Brando!  Now that’s a sin to say that.  But I used to say it then, and people would say, “How could you not like the most brilliant…?”

What early roles do you remember doing on television?

The Rebel.  I just loved the writing.  [“Night on a Rainbow”] was about a woman whose husband came back from the Civil War addicted.  It was way, way, way ahead of its time, and the woman’s role was really well-written.

Dragnet was one of the first shows.  That was like straight dialogue for like three pages, and he [Jack Webb] was insistent that you know it word for comma.

That’s interesting, because eventually Webb came to be known for his reliance upon TelePrompTers.

Well, because he wanted what he’d written, and there were too many actors who couldn’t do three pages in a row.   He was asking for people to use muscles that were not used in pictures or television, up until then.

I never used cue cards when I did a soap, until I got [contact] lenses.  You did not stop tape for anything when I was doing Bright Promise.  When I got lenses I suddenly saw these things – they used to write them on big pieces of cardboard, and I looked at them and I just stopped dead and was watching, and I said, “What are those?”  They were like huge birds.  They were the cue cards.  Well, I took my lenses out and I never put them back in.  Because when I had that haze of nothing, it gave me this wonderful, wonderful privacy.  Everything was a private moment.  When I put my lenses in, I did say to the guy who I was acting with, “God, you’re good!  You are so good!”  But all the other distractions were wiped out by not being able to see.

What are some of the other TV guest roles that you remember?

The Outer Limits.  Hogan’s Heroes.  I played a lot of foreign [characters] – I could do that sort of Middle European accent.  I did Combat, I did Daniel Boone, I did a bunch of everything.  I was always called back [to do different roles on the same shows], which I think was a really nice – they don’t do that now.  Ironside – oh, that was wonderful.  I played with Arthur O’Connell.  He and I were starring in the Ironside, and he dressed me like a young boy.  It was really funny.  They took me to the boy’s shop at Bullock’s and I got the suit and the shoes and everything.  I’ve never seen it.  I never saw a lot of the early television that I was in because we didn’t have VHS or DVD or any of that stuff, and at night I would be rehearsing for a play or a scene that I was doing at Theatre West.

This is kind of a silly question, but how would you know when an episode you’d filmed was going to be broadcast?  Would they send you a note or something?

No, you saw it in TV Guide.

So you didn’t get any special treatment – you had to hunt them down for yourself!

Yeah.  That’s why I have all those [clippings] that my mother cut out.  My mother saved a lot of stuff.  And my sister was a librarian, and used to saving things.  Between the two of them, they saved things early on, and then I started, knowing, hey, I should save this, because you can’t count on your memory.

How did your career build?  Did you have an agent who got you a lot of work?

I did.  I was with Meyer Mishkin for a long time.  He would set up the interviews, but eventually people started calling for me.  I always was prepared.  I was always there on time.  And directors asked for me, which was really nice.  I worked with a lot of wonderful directors.

Which directors do you remember?

Well, I remember Don Siegel.  And Perry Laffery, for The Twilight Zone.  I worked with him a lot, and then he became an executive with the network.  He was the one that said, “You know, if you ever get tired of acting, you could direct.”  And I said, “I want to, I want to!”  But it was really hard.  Ida Lupino was sort of the only woman who was directing.

And I had a hard time when I made the switch over to producing.  I had been hired to do a movie – and I will not go into names and specifics on this – but on Friday I had the job and on Monday I didn’t, because the person he wanted became available.  I went to bed for three weeks, cried for three weeks, wept, carried on, pounded the pillow, got up and said, “Nobody’s going to have the ability to do that to me again.”  I made my decision that I was not going to act.

And I’m really sorry, when I think about it now.  I loved acting.  I didn’t love producing.  What I loved was the ability to be able to hire people who were good young writers, good actors.  I was in a position to give people jobs that should have them, not because of the way they looked but because of their ability.  Not because of who they knew, but because of their ability.  I would say to my whole staff, listen, you do your work, you get it done well, efficiently, and tag after the person whose job you think you’re interested in, if they give you permission to do that.  Including me.  And if they’d write a script on spec, I’d read it.  I’d do all the reading I had to do, which when you’re doing an hour of television a day is a lot of reading.  Because we were doing long-term, short-term breakdowns, they called them.  Doing notes on the breakdowns, and then we had other writers.  For me to agree to read stuff was really a promise that was not easy to keep, when I was producing.

Did you ever consider making a comeback as an actor? 

When I stopped being a producer, one of the young gentlemen I knew that was managing actors said please, let me represent you.  He talked me into it.  [Then he said] “You have to go to read for this.”

I said, “Read for this?  It’s three lines!”

He said, “Okay, but will you come and read for it?”

He went with me, and I read for it, and they said thank you very much, we’ll let you know.  And it was a pretty good reading – I mean, for three lines.  Gee, could you tell a lot?  They were just casting whatever.  As we were coming out, we were going down the sidewalk, and who was coming toward me but Carroll Baker.  She was coming toward me, and she ended up playing those damn three lines!