Obituary: Andy Lewis (1925-2018)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

And now for the heart of the matter:

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

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

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

But that’s all right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obituary: Alvin Boretz (1919-2010)

Alvin Boretz, a prolific dramatist of early television, died on July 22 at the age of 91.  Boretz claimed to have written over 1,000 radio and television plays.  “From the very beginning I had a good reputation,” he said, “I was always getting work.  I never had to look for it.”

After working his way through school (seven years of nights at Brookyn College) and serving in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Boretz got his first writing job in 1945 after he answered an ad in the paper.  It was a radio gig, and for the rest of the decade Boretz penned scripts for Five Treasury Salute, Big Town, Front Page Farrell, Big Story, and (for producer Steve Carlin, later a figure in the quiz show scandals) Five Minute Mysteries.  His first paycheck, for $60, was signed by radio pioneer Himan Brown, who preceded him in death by just over a month.

“Radio was great because you went in and you created a whole world,” Boretz said.

Big Town and Big Story transitioned successfully into live television, and they took Boretz with them.  Both were newspaper dramas, Story an anthology and Town a crime drama that starred Patrick McVey as a racket-busting editor.  Boretz expanded his catalog to include Treasury Men in Action, which like Big Story was produced by the brothers-in-law Bernard Prockter and Everett Rosenthal.  Appointment With Adventure, Justice, and another Prockter production, The Man Behind the Badge, followed.  In 1952, Boretz watched an unknown actor named James Dean audition for one of his scripts for Martin Kane, Private Eye.  Dean was fired by the director after two days of rehearsal, but he later starred in “The Rex Newman Story,” one of Boretz’s Big Storys.

Though Boretz never joined the first rank of the live TV playwrights, he logged hours on some of the most prestigious anthologies, including Philco Television Playhouse, Kraft Theatre, and The Alcoa Hour.

“Alvin was a professional, no-nonsense writer,” said producer Bob Markell.  “He knew the problems of making TV, and he accomodated the problems, not worrying about whether it was great art or not.  He had no pretensions.  More often than not, the shows were good shows.”

In the early days of live television, the writer was a welcome presence at the table reading and the rehearsals of a script.  Boretz took full advantage of his access.  “I used to sneak an actor away from the producer and say, ‘Listen, do me a favor.  When you play this part, do this, do that, do that,’” Boretz recalled.  “If the producer knew I was doing it, they’d kill me.  But I couldn’t help it, because I wanted to protect my work.”

*

Boretz spoke with a loud Brooklyn accent; he sounded like the actor Joseph Campanella.  The writer Harold Gast remembered Boretz as “a smartass.”  He described an obnoxious gag Boretz would use at parties: He would grab someone by the arm and give it a vigorous shake.  The greeting was a pretext to cause the other man to spill his drink.

But Boretz’s aggressive personality was a key to his writing.  He told me that

I’m a big talker, so when I meet guys, I’ll take a guy to lunch and tell him this idea that I have.  What do you think of it?  “That’s not a bad idea.”  I’d say, Well, how would you go about doing this or go about doing that?  I would bleed them a little for ideas.  Then I would take them to lunch.  I belonged to the Princeton Club.  Not that I went to Princeton; I went to Brooklyn College at night for seven years.  But the guys at the Princeton Club invited me to join because I was a good squash player.

Boretz got the idea for one of his Armstrong Circle Theaters, about a banker who was “a crook, a thief,” from a Princeton Club acquaintance.  (This was 1963’s “The Embezzler,” starring Gene Saks.)  Armstrong was Boretz’s most important early credit.  When David Susskind took over production of the show in 1955, he gave the anthology a distinctive identity by turning it into a showcase for ripped-from-the-headlines, current-events stories.  The scripts utilized dramatic devices borrowed from newsreels and documentaries, something Boretz had already been doing on Big Story.  These were “strong, honest stories,” in Boretz’s view.  Between 1958 and 1961, he penned nearly every third Armstrong segment.

For Armstrong, Boretz wrote about con men, prison reform, highway safety, compulsive gambling, and single parenting.  The Cold War was Armstrong’s bread and butter, and Boretz’s scripts on that subject included “The Trial of Poznan,” about the 1956 uprising in Poland.  Jack Gould, the television critic for the New York Times, wrote that

The best part of his play . . . was its depiction of the contagion of freedom.  The two defense attorneys, who had expected to follow orders as usual, one after the other became interested in putting up a genuine defense.  Next it is the judge who, having granted some freedom, cannot be sure when to stop and finally exercises his own authority.  Finally it is the prosecuting attorney who realizes too late that freedom cannot be turned on and off at will.

Boretz won a Harcourt Brace Award for “The Trial of Poznan,” which cashed in on the anti-communist hysteria of the late fifties and also subverted it to deliver a progressive message.  It’s a good example of how Armstrong (and David Susskind) navigated the crazed political atmosphere of the times.

Boretz claimed that he was “never stupid enough to join the Party.”  But his politics tilted leftward and he believed he had a “narrow escape” from the blacklist.  A sword hung over his head that had nothing to do with his politics.  His cousin, Allen Boretz, a famous playwright and screenwriter, was blacklisted.  Alvin was twenty years younger and barely knew Allen, but he spent the McCarthy era fearing that someone would mix up their names and blacklist him too.  At one point his friend Abram S. Ginnes, another Armstrong writer who was graylisted, asked Alvin to put his name on one of Ginnes’s scripts so that it could be sold.  Boretz refused.  “Fronts” sometimes followed the men they stood in for onto the blacklist.

Of all his work, Boretz was proudest of his association with Playhouse 90, even though he wrote only one script for it.  “It was a classy show,” Boretz said.  His episode, “The Blue Men,” was a police procedural that the producer, Herbert Brodkin, spun off into a half-hour series called Brenner.  Boretz served briefly as Brenner’s story editor (Earl Booth replaced him), and went on to write for Brodkin’s next two series, The Defenders and The Nurses.

*

One of Boretz’s closest friends in the business was a writer named Allan E. Sloane.  Similar in background and temperament, they both commuted to work from Long Island and for a time shared a pied-à-terre in Manhattan.  Boretz and Sloane had something else in common, too: Each of them had an autistic child, and each dramatized aspects of that experience in his television writing.

When The Defenders debuted in 1961, Boretz was deeply offended by the premiere episode, “The Quality of Mercy.”  Written by Reginald Rose, the series’ creator, this infamous “mongoloid idiot baby” show concerned an obstetrician (Philip Abbott) who euthanizes a mentally retarded newborn.  In examining the issue from all sides, Rose declined to condemn the doctor’s action.  Boretz crafted a response of sorts in the form of “The Forever Child,” a segment of Brodkin’s medical drama The Nurses.  Earnest and compassionate, “The Forever Child” debated the merits of home schooling versus public education for mentally challenged children.  Boretz’s script emphasized the crushing fatigue experienced by the parents of such children.

“The Forever Child” drew upon research Boretz had done for “The Hidden World,” a 1959 Armstrong show about Iowa’s Glenwood State School for the mentally retarded.  It wasn’t the only time he returned to his Armstrong work for inspiration.  One of his three Dr. Kildares, “Witch Doctor,” resembled “The Medicine Man,” an Armstrong exposé on quack doctors.  Another, “A Place Among the Monuments,” depicted a duel of wills between Kildare and a suicidal young woman (Zohra Lampert) who resists his efforts to counsel her.  It was a reworking of “The Desperate Season,” an Armstrong about a suicidal college professor (Alexander Scourby) who receives successful treatment for his depression.

Dr. Kildare, one of Boretz’s first Hollywood credits, led to work on other West Coast doctor shows: The Eleventh Hour, Breaking Point, Medical Center.  Boretz ended up using his pseudonym (“Roy Baldwin”) on all three.  “I carefully documented the case histories of my fictional patients, but the story editors put up an argument,” Boretz told a reporter in 1965.  “My name, to me, has value.  It’s all I’ve got.”

Like a lot of New York-based writers, Boretz struggled against the more commercial and less collegial circumstances of television production on the Left Coast.  Never willing to relocate, Boretz slowed his output somewhat as he wrote for Laredo, Mod Squad, Ironside, The Rookies, and Kojak from afar.  He had a role in developing The Amazing Spider-Man for television in 1977, and wrote a pair of exploitation films (including Brass Target, for his old friend Arthur Lewis, the first producer of The Nurses).  One of his final credits – or, rather, Roy Baldwin’s – was the TV movie and hopeful pilot Brass, starring Carroll O’Connor as a New York City police commissioner.

Brass was shot on location in Manhattan, but Boretz’s real New York swan song may have been his five (out of forty-nine) episodes of N.Y.P.D., the gritty half-hour cop show that ran from 1967 to 1969.  Bob Markell, the show’s producer, remembered that

when I was doing N.Y.P.D., I convinced Susskind and Melnick [the executive producers] to let me go out and shoot what I called stock footage, so that I could use that any time I wanted to.  Fire trucks, ambulances, things like that that you could cut in.  One day, Susskind, or Danny [Melnick], said to me, “What are you going to do with all this stock footage you got?”  I said, “I don’t know.”  I called Alvin up and said, “Alvin, I shot all this stock footage.  You want to write a script around it?”  He wrote a hell of a script.  I loved Alvin.

All five of his scripts are winners; Boretz had a real feel for the sleazy two-bit criminals on whom the show focused.  “Case of the Shady Lady” had the cops untangling a knot of suicide, murder, and extortion among a rich playboy (Robert Alda), an wide-eyed B-girl (Gretchen Corbett), and an obnoxious club owner-cum-pimp (Harvey Keitel).  “Private Eye Puzzle” gave Murray Hamilton an amusing star turn as an oily P.I.  “Who’s Got the Bundle?” was a cat-and-mouse game between cops and crooks searching for a missing $150,000.  The money ends up with a pudgy cab driver who crumples as soon as Lt. Haines (Jack Warden) questions him.  M. Emmet Walsh, new on the acting scene but already middle-aged, hits the right wistful note as he delivers Boretz’s monologue explaining why the cabbie kept the loot:

Twenty-two years.  That’s how long for me, twenty-two years.  Cab driver.  You know, I listen to the radio: Fly here, fly there.  Fancy millionaire stiffs me out of a tip.  Then a guy puts a knife in your neck and he takes it all.  Then yesterday morning, suddenly, like from heaven, a gift.  I opened it in my apartment.  I s’pose I knew all the time I wasn’t going to have it.  I mean, after twenty-two years . . . .

*

In March of 2003, I visited Alvin Boretz in Woodmere, a town on Long Island where he had lived since at least the early sixties.  What ensued was a very uncomfortable conversation.  Boretz was suffering from symptoms of Alzheimer’s or dementia, and he could recall his career in only the most general terms.  Alvin would try to cover the gaps by changing the subject or repeating something he’d just told me, and I did the best I could not to let on that I noticed any problem.  The quotations above represent almost all of what I could salvage.

“He wasn’t like this six months ago,” his wife, Lucille, told me as she drove me back to the train station.  Rarely have I been made so aware that my work is a race against time.  Lucille and Alvin Boretz were married for 68 years.

Thanks to Jonathan Ward for his assistance with some of the research.

Obituary: Earl Booth (1919-2008)

Story editor Earl Booth died on December 3 in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, at the age of 89.

Booth, like Nina Laemmle (whose obit has been updated), was one of a handful of people in early television who worked primarily as a story editor without also spending a large part of their careers as freelance writers.  It was a skill similar to that of a book editor, one without an equivalent in movies or in the modern television. 

Booth honed his talent for working with writers and shaping their material with near-consecutive stints on more than a dozen series, on both coasts, over the course of his twenty-five year career: Appointment With Adventure (1954-1955), Justice (1954-1956), Brenner (1959), The Asphalt Jungle (1961), Adventures in Paradise (1961-1962), The Nurses (1962-1965), The Doctors and the Nurses (1964-1965), Coronet Blue (1965), Hawk (1966), Judd For the Defense (1967-1969), Storefront Lawyers (1970-1971), Cannon (1972-1973), and finally Marcus Welby, M.D. (1974-1976). 

I had hoped to interview Booth for years before I tracked him down in Ohio in October.  Booth was already ill with lung cancer and unable to speak on the phone for more than a few minutes at a time.  His daughter, Laurie, very kindly volunteered to help facilitate an interview by e-mail, and Earl passed along a witty, precise essay in response to my first set of questions.

With Laurie Booth’s permission, I am reprinting Earl’s remarks verbatim here:

I’ll begin by providing you with a very uneventful biography.  I was born in Chico, California September 2, 1919.  Just in time to watch my entire family – father’s side and mother’s side, get crushed by the ’29 crash.

I began to weather the depression by joining the Dramatic Society in Chico High School which began an interest that shaped my life.

After graduation I was given a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse which I attended three years.  Along came the Draft and World War II.  There also went 5 years of my life: Infantry, Military Police and eventually “Air Force” – I was a radio gunner on a B-24 in India.

Following my discharge I returned to the Playhouse, re-met old pals and we were soon off to New York City.  One of the above friends was a girl named Ethel Winant who had already gone to New York.

In the meantime I had begun to write mostly one-act plays and eventual television half-hours.  It was through Winant’s position at a talent agency that I made a sale.  Further attempts to sell were fruitless.  One day Ethel Winant called to tell me there was a job at Talent Associates if I wanted it.  The title was assistant story editor – the job really was script reader for the editor Jacqueline Babbin.

A few months went by and Jackie handed me the show Justice – starring Gary Merrill – so, I began to learn while I was producing.

Justice was followed by Appointment with Adventure – a very misguided attempt to do an action series on live TV. 

You may know that although these shows were produced by Talent Associates and broadcast on NBC, the real power was the ad agency Young and Rubicam.  You really answered to them.  Justice ran to the end of its contract and was cancelled.   Appointment with Adventure was soon in very deep trouble and cancelled.  After several months looking for material, I was also cancelled.

This happened at the moment I was moving into the Dobbs Ferry, New York house my wife Jean and I had built.  I spent months landscaping while waiting for the next call to duty.

Brenner was that call, from Arthur Lewis.  The exec was Herb Brodkin.  The show had originally been a Playhouse 90 that Herb had created called “The Blue Men.”  The experience was fun even though my relationship with Lewis took weeks to turn positive.  Jim Aubrey at CBS cancelled the show I think because it wasn’t “pretty” enough.  But I continued my contract with Brodkin by working now and then on various projects.  One of which was helping John Gay who was developing another Brodkin Playhouse 90. 

Arthur Lewis called from California asking me to be script editor on a TV version of The Asphalt Jungle.  This lasted the minimum 13 week run and I was stranded in California. 

Another writer friend, Art Wallace, had become producer of Adventures in Paradise.  I hated the show, liked Wallace and accepted the editorship.  The show eventually drew to a merciful end and I was back gardening on a new house in California Jean and I had bought.

Soon, Arthur Lewis called again to say he and Brodkin wanted me to work on The Nurses as editor.  I refused.  This went on for about 3 months.  The show eventually went on the air sans me.  Then I got a frantic call that they needed me and they were firing the present editor.   I could do it any way I wanted.  I accepted, flew to New York to find there were no scripts ready for the next shooting and very little promise of any thing else very soon.  Also, Arthur Lewis disappeared regularly and no one could find him.  So I was the producer with Brodkin’s help.

Unfortunately, that was as far as our interview got.  Booth’s illness took a rapid turn for the worse before we could cover the second half of his career. 

During my brief conversation with Earl, I focused mainly on the uniqueness of the craft of story editing.  I asked how, exactly, one became a success in that role.

“I spent a lot of time searching for new writers,” he replied.  “Writers with different and rewarding ideas, rather than the usual humdrum A, B, C writer people.  Most of those people went on to become very, very successful as screenwriters.”  Booth mentioned Alvin Sargent (Paper Moon, Julia, Ordinary People), who wrote for him on The Nurses, as someone whose talent he nurtured at a young age. 

“I was only able to do it because I worked for people who realized that it was how I got my best results,” Booth added.  “I eventually began to work only with two or three producers that completely understood how I worked.” 

One of those producers was Herbert Brodkin; another was Harold Gast, whom Booth had hired as a writer for Justice and Appointment with Adventure.  A decade later, Booth became Gast’s story editor on the acclaimed Judd For the Defense, and followed the producer to Storefront Lawyers and Cannon.

When I interviewed Gast shortly before his death in 2003, he echoed Booth’s praise, calling him “a very good story editor” and “a close personal friend.”

Corrections Department #3: Notes on Brenner

Last month one of the more fascinating forgotten shows of the fifties made its home video debut.  Timeless Media’s new box set of fifteen episodes of Brenner marks the first opportunity that TV fans, and even veteran collectors, have had to sample this series since its original network run nearly fifty years ago.  I’ve written about a few figures connected tangentially to Brenner – Frank Lewin, the composer who supervised the music and probably composed the terrific, minimalist jazz theme, and Sydney Pollack, a bit player visible on the periphery of several episodes as young plainclothes cop – but even I had never been able to take a close look at the show until this DVD collection went into production.

Brenner‘s historical significance derives mainly from its pedigree.  Its executive producer was Herbert Brodkin, a former set designer who became perhaps the last of the important producers of quality dramas in the waning days of live television.  Taking the reigns of NBC’s Alcoa Hour/Goodyear Playhouse and then CBS’s Studio One and Playhouse 90 during their later seasons, Brodkin produced key live dramas including Horton Foote’s “The Traveling Lady” and “Tomorrow,” Rod Serling’s autobiographical “The Velvet Alley,” and the original “Judgment at Nuremberg” – the one during which the sponsor, the American Gas Company, insisted that all references to the gas chambers be deleted.  Brodkin’s second act came in 1961, when he launched The Defenders, a Reginald Rose creation that raked in a roomful of Emmys and became the most important TV drama of the early sixties.  Brodkin’s other sixties shows – The Nurses, For the People, Espionage, and the cult failure Coronet Blue – were less successful but helped to define his reputation as a standard-bearer of uncompromising quality as television became more and more conventional.  It was a reputation that continued into the seventies as Brodkin, like most of the talented people in television, shifted his attention to movies of the week and miniseries.  Pueblo, The Missiles of October, and Holocaust (also recently released on DVD) were all Brodkin efforts.

Brenner, made in 1959, was a transitional project for Brodkin.  It was his first independent production, his first series to be shot on film, and (aside from his first producing assignment, NBC’s live Charlie Wild, Private Detective) his initial concession to the reality that programs with running characters were quickly supplanting the anthology drama.  Like The Defenders and The Nurses, Brenner was based on a one-shot anthology show from Brodkin’s catalog, a January 1959 Playhouse 90 entitled “The Blue Men.”  Intriguingly, Alvin Boretz, who wrote “The Blue Men,” is not credited as the creator of Brenner, although he did contribute scripts to the series.

Edward Binns and James Broderick as the Brenners

So just what is the show about, exactly?  It’s a modest police drama that centers on not one but two characters who give their names to the series’ title: Roy Brenner (Edward Binns), a no-nonsense, seen-it-all plainclothes NYPD lieutenant, and his son Ernie (James Broderick), a rookie beat cop.  Viewers familiar with the first season of the better-known Naked City and the underappreciated Decoy (a syndicated show with the sexy Beverly Garland as a tough, beautiful pre-feminist policewoman) will find that Brenner shares much of its flavor, its taut little stories that blend character drama with action (and not always smoothly), with those shows.  The primary difference is that, while Brenner too was shot on location in New York City, it takes little advantage of the panorama of awesome cityscapes that give Naked City and Decoy their visual richness.  Like The Defenders and The Nurses, Brenner plays out mainly on interior sets. 

That may be disappointing to some who hope to get a time-capsule snapshot of Manhattan circa 1959; certainly I had to adjust my expectations a bit when I began studying the Brodkin shows after considerable exposure to the location-rich East Side/West Side and Naked City.  But Brenner has other virtues, in particular some conceptual subtleties that you won’t find in Decoy or the half-hour Naked Citys.

For one thing, although Brenner never quite develops into a serialized story, it is a bildungsroman of sorts that places a great deal of emphasis on Ernie’s growth as a cop.  The episode “Departmental Trial” makes a point of telling us that Ernie is in his first year on the force, and others chart the lessons he learns from his mistakes, and his acceptance or rejection of the examples set by various older cops. 

And the emphasis there is on rejection, because of another unusual element of Brenner.  Roy Brenner’s assignment within the police department is on the Confidential Squad, or what we’d now call “internal affairs”: he investigates allegations of corruption among other cops.  Fully half the episodes in this DVD set focus on some allegation of police malfeasance.  “Small Take” and “Thin Ice” are about beat cops accused of taking bribes or turning a blind eye to a gambling racket.  “Monopoly on Fear” stars Milton Selzer as a plainclothesman charged with cowardice – he’s six months away from retirement and starting to lose his nerve – and “Laney’s Boy” deals with cops who cover up a punk teenager’s petty crimes because his father is a beloved police sergeant. 

Roy Brenner ends up exonerating as many police officers as he takes down.  But viewed in total, Brenner projects an attitude that’s almost perversely anti-police, even by the modern standards of something like the cynical The Shield.  Though the execution is less forceful, it’s this element that links Brenner most closely to the crusading social criticism undertaken in The Defenders and The Nurses.  I have no idea if Brenner enjoyed police cooperation in its filming or not, but you have to imagine that if anyone from the NYPD ever paid attention to the scripts, they’d have gotten mightily steamed. 

Brenner was produced by Arthur Lewis, a Broadway veteran who died two years ago.  (Brodkin, essentially an impresario and still working simultaneously on Playhouse 90, received credit as executive producer.)  Lewis went on to produce the first season of The Nurses, and so many of the same key talents behind that show were also the most prolific contributors to Brenner: the directors Gerald Mayer and Herman Hoffman, and writers like Boretz, George Bellak, and Art Wallace.  You might call them Brodkin’s “B team” – solid mid-level craftsmen from the pool of New York, live TV-trained talent, but not the superstars who would form the more exclusive creative staff of The Defenders. 

A few big names did pass behind the cameras of Brenner.  The great Ernest Kinoy wrote one episode (“Crime Wave,” sadly not in the DVD set), and Peter Stone, a journeyman TV scribe before Charade made him famous, contributed several.  Steven Gethers, later Emmy-nominated for his work on The Farmer’s Daughter, wrote perhaps the most compelling episode in the DVD collection, “Crisis.”  It’s a sensitive, almost entirely personal story in which Roy Brenner falls in love with a woman (Hildy Parks) who cannot come to terms with the element of danger in his job.

Gene Hackman as “Patrolman Claiborne”

Then, of course, there are the actors.  As with any New York-based show of this era, one can have an enormous amount of fun trying to spot all the soon-to-be-famous young performers just launching their careers.  George Maharis, Jerry Stiller, Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis, Mitchell Ryan, and Clifton James all turn up in the episodes on the DVDs.  The X-Files‘ Jerry Hardin has a role with no lines in “Departmental Trial,” and Bruce Kirby appears without credit in “The Vigilantes.”  Brenner somehow had a special knack in casting the roster of patrolmen who have recurring roles in various episodes.  Along with Sydney Pollack, Gene Hackman and Dick O’Neill were among this group.  Oh, and there’s one episode in which sixties leading lady Carol Rossen is visible as an uncredited, non-speaking featured extra.  Can anyone spot her?

*

I’ve filed this piece in the “Corrections Department” section because Brenner has languished in such obscurity over the years that virtually nothing has been written about it – and much of what’s out there is inaccurate.  Most reference books describe Brenner as a father-and-son cop show – a reduction that makes it sound like some hoary Pat O’Brien melodrama from the thirties – without mentioning more substantive aspects of the premise (Ernie’s inexperience; the “rat squad” angle).  Every source I’ve come across, in print and on-line, contends that Brenner filmed an initial batch of episodes in 1959 and then briefly resumed production again in 1964 to create ten more episodes.

That’s a highly unusual production history of which I’d always been skeptical – why would CBS choose to revive a failed, forgotten show, and why would Brodkin and the two stars participate, five years further on in their careers?  The copyright dates on these episodes finally confirm my suspicion – that the entire Brenner series was created in 1959, and that the show’s summer replacement run on CBS in 1964 was simply a burn-off of unaired segments.   

Any reference you consult, apart from an exhaustive catalog compiled by the Museum of Broadcasting (now the Paley Center) for its 1985 Brodkin retrospective, will tell you that there are 25 Brenner episodes.  Actually there are 26 – sort of.  As was common at the time, Brodkin used the series’ final production slot to film a “backdoor pilot” for a proposed spinoff called Charlie Paradise.  (The episode itself is called “The Tragic Flute.”)  Just as Brenner emulated Naked City, Charlie Paradise was a pretty blatant attempt to join in on the wave of cool private eye actioners that followed upon the success of Peter Gunn and Richard Diamond, Private Detective.  Charlie (Ron Randell) is the proprietor of an ultra-hip coffee house, a sort of godfather of Greenwich Village to whom Roy Brenner turns for help in navigating the wacky world of beatniks. 

Fred Gwynne, Severn Darden, Gerald S. O’Loughlin, and Ron Randell in Charlie Paradise

Presumably, had the series sold, Charlie would’ve been an amateur sleuth along the lines of John Cassavetes’ Johnny Staccato, and one imagines that the New York location shooting might have offered an authenticity exceeding that of any of the other “jazz-eye” shows.  But “The Tragic Flute” is undistinguished; it tries for a light-hearted flavor that trades too heavily on the supposed exoticism of the beat world.  (The writers were James Yaffe and Peter Stone, working here more than on his other Brenners in the comic mode that won him the Oscar).  Broderick doesn’t appear in the segment at all, and Edward Binns looks exquisitely uncomfortable as he plays straight man to all the kooks (which include Roberts Blossom as a beat poet, and Fred Gwynne as a character named Frances X. Fish).  Taken out of context Charlie Paradise is simply baffling, and it might have been wiser for Timeless to segregate it as a bonus feature on the DVDs.

As for those DVDs, the image quality is exceptional – far superior to the often battered, sixteen-millimeter derived copies of the early Universal shows (Arrest and Trial, Checkmate) that Timeless has been releasing lately.  Unfortunately, I’m told that unless another print source is found, this will be a standalone “best-of” release.  It would be wonderful to have the other eleven Brenners on DVD someday.  It would be even more wonderful if CBS/Paramount would open up its vaults and give us The Defenders, The Nurses, and Coronet Blue.

The Day the Running Finally Stopped: Barry Morse (1918-2008)

At the risk of letting this blog become just an honor roll of the dead (never my intention), I have to chime in with a few words about the inimitable Barry Morse, who passed away this past Saturday, February 2.

Morse remains beloved by TV fans because of his role on The Fugitive, one of the finest dramas on the tube during the ’60s.  (Less discriminating TV viewers may remember him from his regular role on Space: 1999.)  Morse played the primary pursuer and tormentor to David Janssen’s innocent death-row escapee Dr. Richard Kimble.  Every episode of The Fugitive saw Kimble ducking around corners or thumbing for the freeway to elude the local fuzz in whatever backwater burg he found himself hiding in.  But the really tense episodes, the ones where the producers (Alan Armer and later Wilton Schiller) wanted to up the stakes a notch, put Morse’s Lt. Philip Gerard on the case. 

Gerard was the hometown police detective who busted Kimble in the first place, and who was handcuffed to the alleged wife-killer during the train wreck that set him free.  Though he had no special jurisdiction over recapturing Kimble, Gerard would drop everything and hop on a plane anytime word of a Kimble sighting came in over the teletype.  When Dr. Kimble saw Gerard sniffing around on his trail, he knew he was in really deep shit that week. 

The Fugitive was a show I gorged myself on during my teens, and it was my first real exposure to Morse.  Since then I’ve seen a lot more of his early television work, and what I’ll bet a lot of people don’t realize is how much of a departure the character of Gerard was for Morse, at least at that time. 

Catch one of Morse’s pre-Fugitive TV roles, and more than likely you’re in for a heavy meal of ham.  Most of the time, Morse went big.  Maybe because Morse was British by birth and Canadian by inclination – he resettled in Toronto in 1951 and did so much live TV they called him “the CBC test pattern” – American television didn’t know quite what to do with him.  For much of the early sixties, he was typed within a pretty narrow specialty: bohemian artists and snooty critics. 

Morse is pretty hard to take as Fitzgerald Fortune, a theatre critic who tortures people with a haunted player piano, in “A Piano in the House,” one of those generic Twilight Zones in which some mean little man yaps for the whole half-hour about how he’s going to avenge the gigantic chip on his shoulder.  He’s even more insufferable in “Who’ll Dig the Graves,” a Defenders in which he chomps the scenery as an alcoholic, junkie beatnik poet.  Classically trained (at RADA), Morse was a natural choice whenever some showoffy writer had dressed up a thesaurus as a character, as in the Nurses episode “A Private Room.”  Somehow, in the execution of Morse’s performance as Oliver Norton Bell, a misanthropic failed scholar dying of leukemia, the actor and his director, Don Richardson, came to the ill-advised conclusion that Bell’s each and every line should be barked at full volume.

Morse’s other early specialty was accents: English, German (as a defector scientist in another Nurses, “Escape Route”), or simply nondescript Euro-generic.  I think it’s supposed to be French in the maladroit Alfred Hitchcock Hour, “A Tangled Web,” in which a toupeed Morse attempts a flamboyant hairdresser whose, er, business partner is Robert Redford.  One element of the say-what? twist ending is that Morse’s character isn’t as gay as he’s coded to be; in any case, it’s the nadir of Morse’s over-the-top eccentric period.

If you know Morse only as Philip Gerard, it’s hard to imagine him in these roles.  But Stirling Silliphant’s earnestly Freudian Naked City, which used Morse thrice between 1961-62, began to see him in the same way The Fugitive would.  In “Portrait of a Painter,” about William Shatner’s homicidal non-representational artist, Morse whirls through in a cameo as an art dealer called in by the cops (with a straight face) to scrutinize Shatner’s canvases and advise as to whether he’s crackers or not.  Later Morse starred in Abram S. Ginnes’ complex “Memory of a Red Trolley Car,” as a chemistry professor whose exposure to a deadly poison sends him on a journey of self-exploration, confronting mother, mistress, and estranged wife.  It was a difficult role, requiring Morse to verbalize a lot of emotions that would logically have remained subtextual, and he executed it with simplicity and integrity.  (It helped that the script incorporated Morse’s own background as an Americanized Englishman.)  In both segments Morse got a lot of mileage out of the same thick-rimmed glasses that would become an essential prop for Lt. Gerard.

Gerard: As I write this, I’m watching “Never Wave Goodbye” again.  It’s a two-parter, the first Fugitive to give Gerard a personal story parallel to Kimble’s.  Look at Gerard’s opening scene, where he gets a lead on a one-armed ex-con (not the right one, it turns out) in L.A. and soft-soaps his boss (Paul Birch as Captain Carpenter) into letting him go have a look.  Morse plays it down to practically nothing, all soft-spoken and reasonable-sounding.  He had no way of knowing the series would last for four years, but he leaves himself room to build to the fever pitch Gerard would hit before the end.  “Never Wave” gives him the character’s first crescendo, the first time he squares his jaw and bails on a fishing trip with his son to go chase Kimble; the first time he barges into some out-of-town police station and starts barking orders at slack-jawed local cops.  The first glimpse of Supercop.  Or, no: more.  Worse.

Because, here’s the point I wanted to make about Barry Morse.  I think he may deserve more credit than anybody else for the element of The Fugitive that’s truly subversive: the anti-police subtext that made it a counterculture totem.  Morse’s Gerard represented American television’s first sustained presentation of the police as essentially maleficent.  A lot has been made of how the network oafs all turned down Roy Huggins’ pitch for the show because (no matter how slowly Huggins talked as he explained that Kimble was innocent) they didn’t get how a criminal could be a hero and a cop could be the bad guy.  Fine, but that idea was coming anyhow, with the Watts riots and Kent State only a few years away from the evening news.  It was Morse who made the ugliness of the police visceral, with his clamp-jawed sneer and his thousand-yard stare.  Morse underlined the fact that it was personal for Gerard.  He wasn’t a dutiful flatfoot.  He was an authority figure whose omnipotence had been flouted, and he wanted payback. 

To put Morse’s contribution in perspective, just consider how much tamer The Fugitive would have been with a stolid, conventional cop actor – like, say Tige Andrews, The Mod Squad‘s Captain Greer – in the Gerard role, someone who would’ve played it like he was the hero.  Gerard actually had lines like that all the time – modest-sounding dialogue about how he was just a tool of the law, and it wasn’t his problem whether Kimble was guilty or innocent – but the way Morse said them, you knew he was full of it.  The sixties were when we first realized that some cops beat people up just because they got off on it; and that often the police function, not to punish the guilty or protect the innocent, but to suppress those who challenge the status quo.  (Gerard’s catechism was “The law said Kimble is guilty.  I enforce the law.”)  On its face The Fugitive was never this topical – not even close – but Morse’s performance smuggled the idea in.

“Never Wave Goodbye” was also the first episode in which Gerard went rogue (he jumped ship in a little rubber raft after a coast guard skipper wouldn’t continue pursuing Kimble in a thick fog), and from then on you can pick any episode and find Morse personifying some new wrinkle in martial arrogance.  A few weeks later, in the great “Nightmare at Northoak,” the one where Gerard is even haunting Kimble in his dreams, Gerard crashes town to pick up the fugitive after he saves some kids from a burning bus.  Kimble is the local hero and the small town folk all loathe the condescending Lt. Gerard.  Morse plays it totally oblivious.  “Now, look, son, you have nothing to be ashamed of,” he says to the little boy who got Kimble captured, just oozing smugness. 

As the show went on, Morse built on this notion, turning the character more tight-lipped and tightly-wound, more short-tempered and monomaniacal.  Stephen King wrote about it in his intro to Ed Robertson’s Fugitive companion book, how Morse made it possible to track Gerard’s progression, in King’s words, “further and further into freako land.”  The idea was always there in the premise – The Fugitive was what TV writers used to call a “haircut” of Les Miserables – but I’m convinced that without an actor as intelligent as Morse in the role, someone to recognize and emphasize the connection to Hugo’s Javert, the show’s anti-authoritarian strain would have evaporated.  No one else could have built it in as subtly, and who would have fought to jam it in at the surface?  Not Quinn Martin, and not ABC.

Even Morse’s physicality was a kind of innovation.  He didn’t look like any movie or TV cop that came before him.  With his small frame and slighly outsized head, his receding hairline (with the odd, birdlike tufts in the back), Morse seemed more like an accountant or an academic than a tough guy.  And the actor cultivated that look.  Morse told Ed Robertson that, during the shooting of the Fugitive pilot, he chucked the cliche wardrobe (trenchcoat and fedora) that the costumers dug up for Gerard behind a bush and stuck to off-the-rack suits for the rest of the series.  Gerard was an unprepossessing figure, a quotidian cop, and that tied into the show’s concept of law enforcement as a malevolent force cloaked in a bland guise.  The Fugitive took care to identify Gerard as a quintessentially American character, a suburban dad and wife, and that mythology became part of the nightmare.  Gerard takes his son hunting, and the kid runs into Kimble and ends up bonding with him instead (in “Nemesis”); later Gerard’s wife, explicitly cracking up because of his obsession, leaves him and almost falls into Kimble’s arms too (in “Landscape With Running Figures”).  And Morse plays this baroque material with a stiff upper lip: his Gerard, his übercop, doesn’t have the imagination to do anything but nurse his wounded pride and wait for his day of vengeance.

Which never comes.  It’s a tribute to Morse that he hovered over The Fugitive as an ominous presence even though he only appeared in about a third of the 120 episodes (plus the weekly opening title sequence).  He was sufficiently formidable to personify the relentless presence of law enforcement even as the producers kept him off-screen enough so that Gerard didn’t become a joke, always tripping over Kimble just as Gilligan was always almost getting off the island.  The big payoff in the final episode was not Kimble’s exoneration, which didn’t even happen on-screen, but the final encounter between Janssen and Morse.  An anti-climax?  You be the judge.

In the late nineties I knew a video entrepreneur who recorded Morse introducing some Fugitive episodes for a VHS release.  He told me that Morse (by all accounts a thoroughly nice man) was not well and despondent over the loss of his beloved wife, so I was surprised that he lived as long as he did.  He used his final years well, completing an autobiography that I hear is worthwhile and a cute video promo for it. 

If there’s an afterlife for TV characters, then Richard Kimble’s just got a lot more complicated.  He’ll be looking over his shoulder again after a long breather . . . but then again, he’s got some company for the long, lonely journey now.

That thousand yard stare (from “Nightmare at Northoak”).