Among the Missing #2: “Barbed Wire”

There is a lost episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater, the acclaimed filmed anthology that ran on NBC for four years in the mid-sixties.  Filmed sometime in 1966, during the first half of the show’s final season, this episode was rejected by the sponsor and never shown publicly.  It’s likely that a copy still exists, but if so, it hasn’t seen the outside of Universal’s vaults in nearly fifty years.

Entitled “Barbed Wire,” the unaired segment starred Leslie Nielsen, Michael Parks, Sean Garrison, and the character actor Don Pedro Colley, in what would have been his television debut.  It was produced by Ron Roth, a former associate producer on the series who by 1966 was one of several rotating Chrysler producers (the others included Gordon Hessler, Stanley Chase, and Jack Laird).  The names of the writer (or writers) were never reported in the press, but the director of “Barbed Wire” was Don Taylor.  (Taylor directed at least one other Roth-produced Chrysler Theater that season, the Western “Massacre at Fort Phil Kearny.”)

“Barbed Wire” was a World War II story set in a stateside stockade for soldiers who had gone AWOL or committed other offenses.  In the sole Variety report on the incident, the author relayed a somewhat garbled synopsis from Leslie Nielsen:

Actor said that he plays a very hard commandant of the camp, a strict disciplinarian.  In a key scene, a drunken GI tells him as far as he is concerned about the war, the more who get killed over there, the better the chances for him to get a job when it’s all over.  Nielsen said that after this remark a fight ensues, in which the GI is accidentally killed.

Contacted last week, Colley offered this description of the plot:

It was about a crazy commander of this stockade, and he had flipped out and was commanding his stockade like it was a [concentration] camp.  He would make people stand in a circle, and if they moved out of the circle, the guards were ordered to shoot them.

Colley also remembered the events leading up to his casting:

I drove down from San Francisco to L.A. after I made up my mind that I needed to go make some money in Hollyweird.  Driving into town at night, the first thing you see is this huge monolith on a hillside that says Universal City.  Back in the day, that was about the only thing that the Ventura Freeway had on it – this monolith that stuck out.  It just froze me to my heart, like seeing an alien from outer space.  At night, just after sundown, it was the only thing that was lit up.  One night, I was at Shelly’s Manne-Hole, on Cahuenga Boulevard.  It was a jazz club.  Shelly Manne was a jazz drummer, the best in the business.  And this fella came up to me and said, “Don Pedro, man, how you doing?  I remember you from San Francisco, when you were hanging out in the jazz clubs and being beatniks and carrying on.”  I said, “Yeah, I remember, Duke.  What’s happening?”  He says, “Listen, I’m a publicist out at Universal Studios, in the Tower building.  Come on out and I’ll introduce you around.”  I said, “You got it, man.”  So we went out there and he did introduce me around to people in the Tower building, and one of those people was Ron Roth, whom he had become friends with.  Universal had a bunch of young producers that they were grooming.  So they said, “Yeah, well, you got this one little bit.  You’re one of the people in the stockade.”

I got there in January ’66, and Duke Williams had been there about six or eight months, in the publicity department.  When I got over there, he had access to a car, and he was making deliveries to the various companies on the lot.  I got to ride along with him.  We went all the way to the top of the hill, which is now the Universal Walk, that was called the Shiloh Ranch [from The Virginian].  They had actual cattle and horses and farm things up there.  We’d look out over the Valley and I was fantasizing, like, “Wow.  The world is mine!  Mine!”  Sitting on a rock and laughing to myself.  People were saying, “That boy’s crazy.  What’s wrong with him?”

On the set of his first television episode, Colley found a way to put his own stamp on his small “Barbed Wire” role:

I’m kind of a goofball.  The only thing that came to my mind was Laurel-and-Hardy kind of goofball, where Hardy gets into a dilemma and all he can do is waggle the end of his tie.  They remember you better if you’re funny, versus just being a bad guy.  I decided to play it that way.  They were there for a reason, and my one scene dealt with that reason.  And that was a little added – my little deal, that I was allowing myself to give this character that much depth.

Don Pedro Colley in 1968 (Here Come the Brides, “The Stand Off”)

So why was “Barbed Wire” shelved?  According to Variety, Chrysler viewed the episode as “anti-military.” It’s tempting to speculate that “Barbed Wire” carried an unwelcome anti-war theme at a time when the Vietnam War was raging, but the actual issue may have been more prosaic; a 1968 Los Angeles Times profile of Colley wrote that it was “judged too violent.”

Incidentally, Jennings Lang, Universal’s head of television at the time, denied the controversy, claiming (lamely) that “Barbed Wire” was shelved because of possible plans to develop it as a feature film.  But it’s clear that the Variety reporter put more stock in what he or she called “insider reports” (most likely a leak from Roth) of the more controversial explanation.

About eighty of the one hundred or so Chrysler Theater episodes were syndicated, in two separate packages, albeit never widely.  (The exact episode count for Chrysler is debatable, depending upon whether or not one includes the comedy specials starring Hope that aired in the Chrysler timeslot about every fourth week.)  But many of the unsold pilots and two-parters, as well as scattered other episodes, were withheld from syndication.  In most cases, those were either expanded or re-edited as features for overseas release and resurfaced in the U.S., if at all, in TV-movie packages.  Others disappeared because of rights issues.  (For instance, the writer S. Lee Pogostin told me that his Emmy-winning episode “The Game” got locked away after Hope acquired the rights for a theatrical remake, which was never made.)  Unsurprisingly, “Barbed Wire” appears to be one of those unsyndicated episodes.

I stumbled across this story while researching Then Came Bronson and Michael Parks, who in 1966 was in the midst of a terrible run of luck both personally and professionally.  In 1964 his wife of only five weeks, the actress Jan Moriarty, died of an overdose of pills, and in 1968 the actor’s brother, James, drowned in a skin-diving accident.  In 1966, Parks refused a role in a remake of Beau Geste, and his studio contract at Universal fizzled out in acrimony and litigation. He didn’t act for nearly three years, apart from four made-for-TV movies.  The comeback promised by Bronson had the opposite effect, as Parks’s disputes with the series’ producers and directors were widely reported and landed him on what Bronson casting director Joseph D’Agosta described as Hollywood’s “life’s too short” list.  (As in: Life’s too short to work with that guy.)  Once again, after Bronson was canceled in 1970, Parks was absent from the screen for three years – wholly absent, this time – until he accepted a leading role in Between Friends, a Canadian film by the acclaimed director Donald Shebib, which gradually resuscitated his career.  (Coincidentally, his leading lady in Between Friends was his leading lady from the Bronson pilot, Bonnie Bedelia.)  During that exile, in 1971, Parks’s nine year-old stepdaughter, Stephanie, was hit and killed by a motorist in Ojai.

Although minuscule in comparison to those other setbacks, the disappearance of “Barbed Wire” couldn’t have come as good news – especially since one of those three late-sixties telefilms, 1968’s An Act of Piracy (directed by William A. Graham, who directed the Bronson pilot), was also shelved.  A 1970 Variety article implied that Piracy was rejected for a World Premiere slot due to “violence,” but it’s also possible it was just terrible, judging from Parks’s description of the character he played: “I was forced to play a fat, bald, gold-toothed Mexican revolutionary.  They say I came across like a cross between Fernando Lamas and Marlon Brando; I think it’s more like Alfonso Bedoya and Dame May Whitty.”  At least An Act of Piracy, which also starred William Shatner, was finally broadcast – but not until 1976, and under an even more generic title, Perilous Voyage.

For Colley, “Barbed Wire” had a more positive outcome.  The final version of the episode cut Colley’s one big scene for length, but the supportive Roth arranged for the young stage actor to get a copy of the minute-long sequence for his reel.  Ironically, that one minute would be all of “Barbed Wire” that anyone outside of Universal would ever see – and it helped Colley to get him the breakout role as the Canadian trapper Gideon during the penultimate season of Daniel Boone.

Needless to say, it would be most welcome if Universal were to liberate “Barbed Wire” and some of the other elusive Chrysler Theater segments – if not for a commercial release, at least for deposit at UCLA or another archive.

Obituary: James H. Brown (1930-2011)

Veteran assistant director, production manager, and producer James H. Brown died on July 10.  He was 80.

Brown also directed a handful of television episodes: six Honey Wests, at least one Tales of Wells Fargo, a Wagon Train, an Alfred Hitchcock Hour, a trio of Longstreets, a Doc Elliot, and a Circle of Fear.  But he spent most of his career in production, a reliable behind-the-scenes man tasked with keeping the creative types on time and on budget.

Brown was a source for several things I’ve written over the years, starting when he was in college in the late nineties.  He was at an important place at an important time: Brown spent his first decade in television at Revue Studios during the period when that independent company, a part of the MCA empire, bought Universal Studios and grew into the biggest behemoth in television production.  Most of the production office staff at Revue were movie veterans, with careers dating back almost to the silent era.  (I interviewed one longtime Revue assistant director, Willard Sheldon, who got his DGA card in 1937).  But Brown was just out of college when he began working at Revue in 1953, and he was one of the few people I found who could tell me about the company’s inner workings.

But while Brown gave me some useful background, my attempt to interrogate him for a longer oral history was basically disastrous.  Generous with his time but also modest and circumspect, Brown answered my questions with little detail or embellishment.  If he had anything negative to say about anyone he ever worked with, those stories went with him to his grave.

As a UCLA student, Brown had no thought of entering the movie business until he became friendly there with members of Alan Ladd’s family, and switched to a major in film.  A mailroom job at MCA led to his promotion to second assistant director in late 1955.  Brown’s duties in that capacity included “paperwork, doing all the chasing and setting the background.  Getting actors out of their dressing rooms, getting extras onto the set.”  A junior administrator without an office, Brown would grab a table on the set and make out the next day’s call sheets by hand.

Brown didn’t say so in our interviews, but he must have been viewed as something of a wunderkind at Revue, where his professional advancement happened quickly.  He was promoted to first assistant director within a year (now, his primary duty was working with extras to stage the background action), and began to land some choice assignments on the studio’s series.  Brown went the extra mile to help the directors to whom he was assigned:

In the early days, when there were quite a few directors coming out from live television in New York and had been used to using three or four cameras, sometimes single cameras really kind of threw them in terms of how to stage and how to use a single camera.  So a lot of times I’d take a director home and have dinner at my house and then sit down and go through the script with them and try to help advise him how to use a single camera.  And the directors who were coming out of film were used to having more money and a bigger budget, more time to shoot.  So I would try to guide them.

Often in Hollywood, but especially at the budget-conscious Revue, directors often viewed their ADs and production managers as the enemy, as spies for the production office.  I got the sense that Brown, although loyal to the front office, succeeded by positioning himself as more of an ally to his directors than many of his older, more jaded colleagues were willing to do.

Brown worked on most of the early Revue shows at least a few times as a first assistant: The Restless Gun, M Squad, Johnny Staccato, Riverboat, Checkmate, Laramie.  But he was assigned most often to the studio’s dramatic anthologies, which he thought were “treated more as the A-list because of the casting, the producers, and the writers,” and to the long-running western Wagon Train.

On Wagon Train Brown became friendly with Ward Bond, and observed a falling-out between Bond and co-star Robert Horton as the latter sought to get out of his contract and leave the series.  “Bond was a wonderful, warm person.  Gruff on the outside.  Demanding, but not unfairly demanding.  I think he felt as if Horton wanted abandon ship, and he was the skipper,” Brown said.

Of the Revue anthologies, Brown worked most often on The General Electric Theatre, whose host was Ronald Reagan.  “He always came on the set and had four or five jokes he wanted to tell everybody before he went to work,” Brown remembered of Reagan.

Brown’s favorite directors were John Ford, who he assisted on episodes of The Jane Wyman Theatre and Wagon Train, and Alfred Hitchcock.  Brown supplanted Hilton Green as Hitchcock’s first assistant of choice on his eponymous series, and followed Hitchcock to The Birds and Marnie as well.  (Ford also asked Brown to assistant direct a feature for him, The Long Gray Line, but Brown was unavailable.)  More than any of the rank-and-file episodic directors he worked with, Brown was impressed by Ford’s and Hitchcock’s effortless command of their sets.  “They were the best teachers I ever had,” he said.

After leaving Revue, Brown moved briefly to Four Star Productions (where he worked on Honey West and Amos Burke, Secret Agent) and then to Paramount (The Brady Bunch, The Odd Couple, Longstreet).  At Revue, Brown had directed some second units, including a batch of San Francisco exteriors for Checkmate, as well as Robert Horton’s outdoor screen test for Wagon Train and many of Hitchcock’s and Reagan’s introductions for their respective shows.  That experience led to his own desultory directing career, which consisted mainly of assignments that fell to him when another director dropped out.  Brown also spent a few years directing television commercials (for Sears, AT&T, Dove Soap, Chevrolet, and Maxwell House’s late sixties “my wife” campaign), and briefly considered transitioning into a full-time career as a director.

“I thought about it seriously,” Brown said, “but I had a wife and four children, and financially it was too big a risk.  I was working fifty-two weeks a year and begging for time off in production, and as a director, starting out, I knew it was going to pinch financially.”

Instead, Brown became a line producer, with credits on Joe Forrester, The Quest, Dallas, and a number of made-for-television films.  He retired in 1992, following an unpleasant experience on the telefilm Danielle Steel’s Secrets.  But, as was his way, Brown would never tell me exactly what went wrong on that show.