Obituary: Alden Schwimmer (1925-2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playhouse 90 Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Stephen Bowie

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

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

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

Act One: Program X

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

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

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

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

Act Two: Television City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act Three: Summer Stock in an Iron Lung

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

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

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

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

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

Act Four: Target For Three

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

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

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

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

Act Five: Gas

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

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

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

Act Six: Old Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 Reading Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, some quick takes ….

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

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

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

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

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

Shane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obituary: Christopher Knopf (1927-2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harlan Hits Hollywood

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.