Obituary: Christopher Knopf (1927-2019)
February 27, 2019
When Christopher Knopf, who died on February 13 at the age of 91, turns up in the history books, it is usually a source rather than as a subject.
During a stint as a contract writer at ex-movie star Dick Powell’s significant and, today, too little-known Four Star Productions, Knopf (the k is pronounced, the f is silent) befriended with a trio of future television superstars: Sam Peckinpah, Bruce Geller, and Gene Roddenberry. He saw the truculence that would expand into full-blown insanity and addiction once Peckinpah became a prominent film director, and he watched from the sidelines as Geller and Roddenberry gave birth, respectively, to Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. Roddenberry kidnapped him once on his motorcycle, and took Knopf on a rain-slicked ride that ended with a crash, torn clothing, scraped skin. “Do you realize you may never do that again?” Roddenberry asked his dazed companion. A self-effacing family man, Knopf had little in common with these larger-than-life characters, but remained a bemused, lifelong observer of their perpetual midlife crises.
And yet Knopf’s own accomplishments, despite his reticence to claim credit for them, were prodigious. A past president of the Writers Guild of America (from 1965 to 1967), an Emmy nominee, and a winner of the coveted Writers Guild Award, Knopf was a writer of considerable skill. His voice, though distinctive, echoed off those of the other talented men he shared ideas with in his formative years. His best work espouses the compassionate liberalism one associates with Roddenberry, as well as the pessimistic, myth-busting sobriety of Peckinpah. Knopf wrote about himself a great deal, although his touch was delicate enough that the elements of autobiography might remain safely hidden without the road map Knopf provides in his engaging 2010 memoir, Will the Real Me Please Stand Up.
Sensitive about his origins as a child of privilege (and a beneficiary of Hollywood nepotism), Knopf penciled himself into most of his early scripts as a grotesque but ultimately sympathetic outsider. His first television western, “Cheyenne Express” (for The Restless Gun), centers around a weasel (Royal Dano) who back-shoots the boss of his outlaw gang and then expects the show’s hero (John Payne) to protect him from retribution. Dano’s character would be utterly despicable, except that Knopf gives him a sole redeeming quality, a devotion to feeding a stray dog that tags along behind him – Umberto D in the Old West. A traditional narrative until the final seconds, “Cheyenne Express” ends with a curious anti-climax – Dano falls out the back door of a train as the gunmen close in on him – that scans like a stranger-than-fiction historical anecdote, or a proto-Peckinpavian grace note.
Inscribing his characters with a hidden personal or political meaning became Knopf’s trick for giving early westerns and crime stories a potency often missing from other episodes of the same series. A feminist streak comes through in twinned half-hours that fashioned tough, doomed distaff versions of his autobiographical loner figure. “Heller” (for The Rifleman) and the misnamed “Ben White” (for The Rebel, with an imposing Mary Murphy as a sexy outlaw’s girl known only as T) told the stories of backwoods women – defiant, independent, but with no recourse other than self-immolating violence to combat the drunken stepfathers, Indian captors, and psychotic lovers who victimize them. “Heritage,” a Zane Grey Theater, cast Edward G. Robinson as a farmer whose neutrality during the Civil War may extend as far as turning his Confederate soldier son over to Union occupiers. “That man was my father, who I felt at the time cared more about his work than about his kids,” Knopf told me. Yet the father in “Heritage” finally redeems himself, choosing his son’s life over the barn and the crops that will be burned as punishment for his collaboration.
Widening his gaze from psychological to social injustices, Knopf sketched Eisenhower as an ineffectual sheriff on Wanted Dead or Alive and contributed a fine piece of muckraking to Target: The Corrupters. An exposé of migrant labor abuse, “Journey Into Mourning” centers around a cold-eyed portrait of a cruel and eventually homicidal foreman named Claude Ivy (Keenan Wynn). Ivy’s villainy is flamboyant and inarguable but Knopf insists upon context. Ivy presents himself as a self-made success, a former worker who grants himself the right to mistreat his workers because he clawed his way out of the same misery. Even as the laborers beg and threaten for a few cents more, Ivy grubs for his own meager share, dickering with a slightly more polished but equally callous landowner (Parley Baer). Knopf’s malevolent exploiter is just the middle man; the true evil, though name is never put to it, is capitalism. As in “Heritage,” Knopf is passionate without becoming polemic, studying all sides of a dilemma with an even gaze.
At the age of thirty, Knopf netted an Emmy nomination for “Loudmouth,” an Alcoa Theatre tour-de-force written especially for Jack Lemmon. His reward, of sorts, was an exclusive contract with Four Star, the independent company that produced Alcoa (and Zane Grey Theater). It was a mixed blessing. Knopf loved working for Dick Powell and recognized that Four Star offered writers an unusual creative latitude. However, he found that he could not protect his interests as effectively as Geller, Peckinpah, or Richard Alan Simmons, Four Star’s other star scribes. Unable to unencumber himself from Powell’s credit-grabbing lackey, Aaron Spelling, Knopf spent much of his time at Four Star toiling on pilot development and other impersonal assignments.
Four Star ended badly for everyone, starting with Powell, who died in early 1963 after a brief bout with cancer. The company collapsed and Knopf made a damaging horse-trade to escape the rubble, giving up credit and financial interest in a western he co-created, The Big Valley. Knopf, in the days following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, had written a pitch called The Cannons of San Francisco, which imagined a West Coast version of the Kennedy family that would reign over Gold Rush-era California. Powell’s successor, Tom McDermott, favored a vaguely similar ranching dynasty premise from A. I. Bezzerides that already had a network commitment, and pressured Knopf into writing the first two episodes in exchange for a release from his Four Star contract. Knopf merged his own characters into Bezzerides’s setting, and the result was The Big Valley. The “created by” credit on which ended up going to Bezzerides and producer Louis F. Edelman, who brought star Barbara Stanwyck into the show. (Bezzerides exited the show more colorfully than Knopf, in a bout of fisticuffs.)
Knopf’s two-part Big Valley pilot script forayed once again into Oedipal anxiety, contrasting the manor-born assumptions of a rancher’s legitimate sons (Richard Long and Peter Breck) with the resentment of their bastard brother (Lee Majors). Left in Knopf’s care, The Big Valley might have become an epic family serial – a novel precursor to Dallas – rather than the traditional western that lingered on ABC for four seasons as a middling epitaph for Four Star.
But letting go of the Barkley clan proved liberating for Knopf, who moved on quickly to write a pair of exceptional Dr. Kildares. “Man Is a Rock,” probably his finest episodic work, takes a hard-drinking, hard-charging salesman who resides somewhere on the Glengarry Glen Ross / Mad Men axis, and fells him with a coronary event that requires not just surgery but a lengthy recuperation. Knopf’s interest is in the difficulty of accepting illness as a life-altering event, and the idea that a man might allow himself to die simply because a change in routine represents a more tangible threat. As Franklin Gaer, the salesman who tries to make a deal with death, Walter Matthau contributes an astoundingly visceral performance, full of pain and fear – a feat all the more terrifying when one realizes that Matthau was himself only a year away from a near-fatal heart attack that would shut down production of Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie for months.
Although cinephilia was not a key motif in Knopf’s work, it does play a role in both of his Dr. Kildares. The second is set within the film industry, and although “Man Is a Rock” is not, it climaxes with a scene in which Franklin Gaer delivers this drunken, despairing monologue to his frightened teenage son:
There was this picture, see, and it had this trapeze artist in it. He wasn’t a Jew or anything, but he was in this concentration camp, and he and a bunch of the others broke out, including Spencer Tracy. Anyway, the Germans get to cornering this guy, this trapeze artist, up on some roof in the middle of a German town somewhere. There he is up there, and down below are a bunch of people. They’re screaming at him to jump. And scrambling over the rooftops you’ve got all the nazis with the machine guns and everything, and they’re getting to him. Well, there’s no way out. It’s either back to prison, or jump. So, that’s what he does. He throws his arms out like that, and he shoves off in the prettiest ol’ little swan dive you ever saw in your life. One hundred feet smack right down into the pavement. You know what they did in that theater? Everybody stood up and applauded. For over a minute!
The speech is not only an unusually abstract metaphor for Gaer’s dilemma, but also another coded autobiographical reference. Although Knopf doesn’t name the film in his script, Gaer is describing a moment from The Seventh Cross, a 1944 MGM production overseen by his father, Edwin H. Knopf.
In 1967, Knopf got another western pilot on the air, and this time stayed with the project to oversee its creative development. Set in 1888, Cimarron Strip was less a western than an end-of-the-western, a weekly ninety-minute elegy for the frontier that bore the unmistakable influence of the work Knopf’s friend Sam Peckinpah had been doing at Four Star. Of the series’ twenty-three episodes, at least half a dozen centered on some larger-than-life tamer of the wilderness who was now obsolete and who would, by the story’s end, be stamped violently out of existence by encroaching civilization. Knopf’s pilot script, “The Battleground,” charted the inevitable showdown between an irredeemably savage outlaw (Telly Savalas) and his former compatriot, Jim Crown (Stuart Whitman), who is now the marshal of the Cimarron Territory and the series’ protagonist. Preston Wood’s mournful “The Last Wolf” took a sociological perspective in its examination of the wolvers, a class of rambunctious hunters whose value to the community had plummeted once they hunted the prairie wolf into extinction. William Wood’s “The Roarer” guest starred Richard Boone as a cavalry lifer so conditioned to bloodshed that, as a garrison soldier, he creates violence in a time of peace. Explicitly revisionist, Harold Swanton’s “Broken Wing” and Jack Curtis’s extraordinary “The Battle of Bloody Stones” depicted thinly-disguised versions of (respectively) Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill as dangerous charlatans interested in only in their own mythmaking.
Network executives were perplexed by Knopf’s unorthodox approach to the conventions of the western genre, which often meant nudging Cimarron Strip into areas of allegory (several episodes had anti-war, which is to say anti-Vietnam, undertones) or toward other genres altogether. Two particularly strong segments productively hybridized the western and and the horror story. “The Beast That Walks Like a Man,” with a teleplay by Stephen Kandel and Richard Fielder, puts Marshal Crown on the trail of a possibly otherworldly prairie predator that mutilates its victims in a manner unlike any known man or beast. Some scenes, such as the one in which a hardened pioneer patriarch (Leslie Nielsen) finds his family mutilated, are terrifying, and the unexpected resolution is neither outlandish nor a cop-out. Even more outlandish is Harlan Ellison’s forgotten classic “Knife in the Darkness,” which makes the bold conceptual leap of transporting Jack the Ripper into the Old West.
It would be gratifying to hold up Cimarron Strip as an overlooked masterpiece that anticipated the magnificent spate of postmodern westerns that filmmakers like Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, and others would make a few years hence. Unfortunately, only a handful of the show’s finished segments achieved as much stature as the daring, offbeat synopses that Knopf detailed in our interview would suggest. The rest became casualties of an aggressive campaign of sabotage by CBS, even after Knopf and his staff pursued a preemptive strategy of appeasement by alternating straightforward action stories with more challenging conceptual narratives.
Cimarron Strip was final foray into episodic television for more than twenty years. One of the few rank-and-file episodic writers who transitioned wholly into longform work, Knopf crafted a number of distinguished features and television films, including the cult item A Cold Night’s Death, a two-hander about scientists (Eli Wallach and Robert Culp) cracking up in Arctic isolation. For the big screen, Knopf wrote one terrific period piece, the Depression-era rail-riding epic Emperor of the North, and two-thirds of another, the western Posse. In both cases, the subtleties of his characters and ideas were coarsened by the films’ directors (Robert Aldrich and Kirk Douglas, respectively), and yet Knopf’s innate intelligence and empathy remain in evidence in the films. He returned to television at the end of his career, co-creating and producing the Steven Bochco-esque legal drama Equal Justice in 1990.
This piece was adapted from the introduction to my 2003-2004 interview with Christopher Knopf, which will be a chapter in a forthcoming book.
Harlan Hits Hollywood
June 30, 2018
Harlan Ellison wrote some of my favorite television episodes, and hopefully some of yours. There are the acknowledged classics for The Outer Limits and Star Trek, yes, and the combative stints on The Starlost and the eighties Twilight Zone. But there are lesser-known gems, too. There’s the quartet of gleefully horned-up Burke’s Law whodunits, all of which call out or lean into or send up the lust and misogyny that became Aaron Spelling’s golden ticket. If you want a truly pure exercise in pop, sexy and slick, put on “Who Killed Alex Debbs?,” a riff on Playboy Club glamour that opens with the Hugh Hefner character’s corpse stuffed in a gilded cage.
There is the harrowing addiction story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” which Ellison wrote for his friend Zalman King’s ambitious series The Young Lawyers (and which, because it overlapped with the truculent scribe’s short-lived TV column for The Los Angeles Free Press, became one of the best-documented cases of network neutering in an especially timorous era). And there is Cimarron Strip’s “Knife in the Darkness,” a bold genre hybrid that followed Jack the Ripper to the American frontier. “It was an examination of urban violence versus western violence, and urban violence wins every time,” the series’ producer, Christopher Knopf, told me. Ellison, one of the twentieth century’s greatest complainers, thought “Knife in the Darkness” was badly directed.
Early in my career I interviewed Ellison about one of his early works, an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on his 1961 book Memos From Purgatory. Starring a young James Caan as a thinly disguised, flatteringly buff version of Ellison, “Memo From Purgatory” was the science fiction writer’s first television sale, even though it sat on the Hitchcock shelf for a couple of years (due to protracted rewrites or network squeamishness or both; Ellison’s memory was atypically vague, and the production records are inaccessible, although he was right for once about this one, which took on a West Side Story phoniness in the execution). By the time it aired, in the no-one’s-watching Christmas week slot of 1964, Ellison had already done storied battle with the likes of Spelling, Irwin Allen, and the Control Voice (which mispronounced the word “Sumerian” in his narration for “Demon With a Glass Hand,” a flub that Ellison was still mad about decades later).
It could have gone the other way, given how unenthusiastically he suffered fools, but when I called Ellison from my dorm room that afternoon, I caught him in a generous, expansive mood. Over the course of a ninety-minute conversation Harlan ended up telling me the tale of his ill-starred trek to Los Angeles to follow “Purgatory” into purgatory. That portion of the interview was such a lively digression that I set it aside with the hope of someday asking him to rewrite it as a foreword to one of two relevant books I was working on – a plan complicated somewhat by the fact that I still haven’t finished either manuscript. Well, so much for that idea. Harlan, who died on Thursday at the age of 84, has recounted parts of his cross-country odyssey in several essays and interviews, but I think this version may contain a few details not recorded elsewhere.
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How did your book, which was a work of (mostly) non-fiction, end up on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour? It was an odd fit for that series and I didn’t know until you told me that it was actually your first script for television.
I guess it was Norman Lloyd or Joan Harrison, I never have been sure which, but it was one or the other, read the book. It was either recommended to them or they stumbled across it.
I got a call from the Hitchcock office that they wanted to option Memos From Purgatory. So, I was preparing to divorce my second wife at the time – it was kind of a strange situation – and she said, “As long as you’re going to divorce me, at least take me to California where it’s warm.” Which seemed like an odd thing to say, but it made a bizarre sort of sense, so I said okay, and I accepted this offer to buy Memos, but only on the condition that I could write the script. So they sent back word: “Yes, it’s okay, have you ever written any scripts?”
And I, of course, lied in my teeth and said, “Oh, many.”
I had never even seen a script. I had never done a teleplay in my when I accepted the gig. They said, “We’re going to the one-hour format next season, and we’re going to want this script fairly quickly.” So I said, okay, I would come out. I was sort of commuting between Chicago and New York at the time with my almost ex-wife and her fourteen year-old son from her previous marriage. And I had no money at all. We got stuck in Cleveland [his hometown] and I had to wait until a check came through for this book I was doing.
We drove out from Chicago in the middle of winter, December [1961], Christmastime. We were on the road, we got hit by this drunken cowboy on the access bridge leading down to Fort Worth. We’d have been killed had we not had all our baggage and everything. My typewriter and everything was in the trunk and the backseat, and when this guy hit us doing about 60 miles an hour down this icy bridge, it stove in the back of the car and we got thrown into a whole pile of cars that were sort of smashed up on the bridge. We got stuck in Fort Worth because we didn’t have the money to get out, and we were in a motel and there was a newspaper columnist who learned that we were there and he knew my name. He did this little bitty piece about “the author Harlan Ellison is stuck in a motel, his typewriter’s been smashed,” and the sheriff [actually police chief] of Fort Worth – I’ll never forget his name, his name was Cato Hightower – Cato Hightower sort of took me under his wing. All of a sudden there was a garage that offered to fix the car for nothing, there was a stationery place, a typewriter shop that gave me a new Olympia. But we had no money – we had just enough money to pay for the motel.
We had enough money to limp out of Fort Worth, and it was still a long drive to Los Angeles. We had only enough money for either gas or food, and so for the last I guess about six [or] seven hundred miles, all we had to eat, the three of us, was the last of a box of Stuckey’s pecan pralines. To this day, to this day, the sight of pecan praline makes me want to throw up.
We limped into L.A., literally limped into L.A. I had no idea where I was going. I had no contacts at all here. We came in on the Hollywood Freeway, and I recognized it was Hollywood because I saw the Capitol [Records] Tower. I turned off, and we went down Vine Street until I saw a TraveLodge and we went in there. We stayed there overnight until the next day, when I could call GAC [General Artists Corporation, a talent agency to which he had been referred] and bluff them into believing that I was this famous writer from New York, and that they’d better hurry up and send a car for me. And they did! It was a complete and total bluff. It was like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
They put us in a TraveLodge on Santa Monica Boulevard across from the Mormon Tabernacle. I didn’t have any money at all. We had no way to get out of there, so I had to borrow two hundred bucks from Robert Bloch, an old friend. And I borrowed from Bob a couple of teleplays, and I, sitting on toilet of this tiny little motel room of the Santa Monica Boulevard TraveLodge while my almost ex-wife and her son slept, I put a board across my lap and I sat there night after night and I wrote the very first teleplay I wrote, which was “Memos From Purgatory.” It was just after New Years’, so it had to be sometime in January 1962.
Which is interesting, because “Memo From Purgatory” wasn’t broadcast until December 1964, nearly three years later.
There was some kind of an upheaval on the show or at Universal, I don’t know what it was, and they put the script aside for awhile. Finally, when they got around to needing a rewrite, I already had an apartment. Billie, my almost-ex, a very nice woman, was living up in Brentwood and I was working my ass off to keep her up in this apartment in Brentwood, while I was living in this $135-a-month, two-room little house in Brentwood. It was a treehouse in Beverly Glen. It’s not even there any more. The street isn’t even there any more. The street got washed away in one of the floods. And on the basis of the Hitchcock script, I was able to get more work and bluff my way through and learn as I went along, and I think along about my fourth or fifth script won the Writers Guild Award for best teleplay of the year in whatever category it was, [for] The Outer Limits’ “Demon With a Glass Hand.”
I was going to ask you if you remembered watching “Memos From Purgatory” when it was first broadcast, but perhaps you don’t, since it wasn’t actually the first one.
It’s a moderately funny story about what happened the night it aired. I was living in Beverly Glen, in this little treehouse. The television set that I had was a real small TV, with rabbit ears, and the antenna was up the side of the mountain behind the house. I mean this house, literally and actually, sat half on a rock ledge and the other half sat in the crotch of a gigantic banyan tree. It was raining that night, it was raining terribly. And the antenna, which was up the hill – rabbit ears down in the house and an actual antenna up on the hill; I mean, there was no cable – well, the antenna fell over.
I had invited all these people to come and see the show, and we couldn’t get any reception. So a friend of mine volunteered to go up, and he put on my raincoat, and he stood up there in the pounding rain, a really torrential downpour. He stood up there holding the fuckin’ antenna up. And I was kind of, you know, upset that he was up there, not to mention that there were cougars or mountain cats – really, there were catamounts or cougars or whatever the fuck they are – up there running loose, because it’s all watershed land. And I was terrified that he was going to get eaten, or washed away, or drowned, or fall off the mountain, or something. So about midway through I went up and I took his place. And I came back drenched, soaking wet, I looked like a drowned rat, and everybody was raving about this thing, and I had only seen about half of it.
Cosmopolitan ran a behind-the-scenes article on the inner workings of Burke’s Law in January 1964. Is that Harlan, who’s mentioned in the text, at the typewriter? Photo by C. Robert Lee
Obituary: Andy Lewis (1925-2018)
April 6, 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.
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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.
Freiberger’s Last Word
July 28, 2017
Star Trek references turn up everywhere you look now, but here’s an unexpected one from 1972 – the same year as the first major fan convention, and well before Star Trek had completed its evolution from flop TV show into pop culture juggernaut.
“And Then There Was One” is a late fifth-season Ironside that starts out with a topical premise: an interracially-owned business is bombed and the chief suspects are a black separatist group (represented on-screen in a typically smart, restrained performance by Percy Rodrigues). The script, by Fred Freiberger, is better than average for the series at this point in its long run. But this being Ironside, and 1972, the political hot potato is quickly dropped. The episode makes a regrettable turn into the most overused seventies TV cliche of all: yes, the old who’s-killing-all-the-surviving-members-of-the-squad-from-Vietnam (or Korea or World War II) mystery. We last see Rodrigues in a throwaway scene, a phone call in which his revolutionary leader character and Chief Ironside agree that they may have some common ground. It’s corny – in terms of nuance and commitment, Ironside’s politics were just this side of The Mod Squad – but you can read it as a sort of wistful, fourth-wall breaking acknowledgment that the show’s makers couldn’t tell the story they really wanted to.
Once Ironside’s team start investigating the Vietnam vets, they interrogate one who seems like a promising suspect because he had been heard threatening to frag their CO back in country. The GI, Gregg Hewitt (a typically Southern-fried Bo Hopkins), laughs off their questions, claiming he hated the officer but his threat was just talk. The dialogue in this scene is subtler than you’d expect for Ironside. Hewitt suggests some alternative theories of the crime, both racially motivated: maybe it was a Vietnamese refugee out for revenge, or perhaps the white business owner murdered his partner. “I never did believe in that buddy-buddy stuff between oil and water,” he says. Noticing Ironside’s African American aide Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell) glaring at him, Hewitt taunts him: “You don’t like my theories?”
“No more than I like rat poison,” Mark Sanger snarls.
Hewitt’s reply to that is so fanciful that it’s almost a non sequitir. “It’s diversity in its infinite variety that makes life interesting in this, uh, star system,” he says. “I’m not sure what that means, but I heard it on a science fiction program.”
“Diversity in its infinite variety”: That’s a pretty close paraphrase of “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,” the philosophy that Star Trek attributed to Mr. Spock’s people, the Vulcans, a race of aliens who were portrayed as more enlightened and cerebral than us humans. Although it’s been incorporated into various iterations of Trek over the years – it’s a useful distillation of the sixties hippie philosophy that fueled the show’s initial underground appeal – the concept was first introduced in the third-season episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” And of course Freiberger, the writer of the Ironside segment, had been the producer of Star Trek during the third season, so what might otherwise be seen as a throwaway reference to a recently cancelled show has to be understood as a meaningful in-joke.
Although the IDIC slogan was compatible with Star Trek’s liberal ethos, it was controversial behind the scenes because of the context in which it was first used. Gene Roddenberry, having for the most part checked out creatively during the third season, shoehorned the IDIC concept rather shamelessly into the script of “Is There in Truth” in order to hawk some cheap medallions through the Trek merchandising company he had created as a side business. William Shatner and especially Leonard Nimoy objected to the product placement strongly enough to shut down production for a confrontation with Roddenberry, who did a rewrite (although the IDIC medal stayed in the episode). Freiberger himself managed to stay out of the IDIC flare-up; overseeing a lame-duck show on a drastically reduced budget, he had bigger problems to solve.
Years later, Fred Freiberger compared producing Star Trek unfavorably to the time in World War II when he “parachuted out of a burning B-17 over Germany to land in the midst of eighty million Nazis.” Part of his resentment was because, as the Star Trek cult blossomed, fans lionized Roddenberry and thought of Freiberger, if at all, as the man who killed the show. Yet there’s ample evidence to suggest that Freiberger’s year on Star Trek was a miserable experience in and of itself, even before fandom weighed in. Inside Star Trek, by Herbert Solow and Robert H. Justman (respectively a studio executive and an associate producer on the original Star Trek), catalogs various indignities to which Freiberger was subjected as a consequence of Roddenberry’s indifference and the stars’ egos. At one point Shatner and Nimoy, competing for prominence on screen, asked Freiberger for a ruling on who was the star of the series. Freiberger deferred to Roddenberry, who equivocated before finally naming Shatner and making a quick exit, leaving Freiberger holding the bag with a furious Nimoy.
In the Ironside episode, the context in which Freiberger nods to Star Trek couldn’t be any less flattering. He drops Roddenberry’s idealistic “infinite diversity” slogan into the mouth of a sly bigot who invokes it, mockingly, in a rejection of racial harmony. Was Freiberger just winking innocently at an old job, or was he deliberately referencing an incident that recalled Roddenberry at his most cynical and unprofessional as a belated fuck-you?
Crossing the Pond
April 25, 2017
A frequent and legitimate complaint about this blog has noted its author’s ignorance of British television, apart from a few oft-imported staples like The Prisoner and Are You Being Served? Be careful what you wish for: Here is a primer on four live and/or videotaped dramas of the sixties that remain largely unknown on my side of the Atlantic.
The Man in Room 17 (1965-1966) inverts the locked-room mystery in a clever way: it’s not the crime that occurs in the locked room, it’s the detection. It’s about two criminologists (why, one wonders, is the title of the series singular rather than plural?) whose skills are so rarefied and irreplaceable that they remain sequestered inside a chamber deep in the confines of the British government apparatus. On paper it sounds a bit like the American series Checkmate (1960-1962), which was created by a prominent British novelist, Eric Ambler, and had some vague pretensions toward emulating brainy literary whodunits. But Checkmate saddled its plummy British sleuth (Sebastian Cabot) with a pair of dullard underlings who spent most episodes getting conked on the head. The Man in Room 17 comes closer to fulfilling the rigor of its premise. Even when the crimes are routine, the dialogue is allusive and witty, and the intellectual vanity of the heroes is something no American series could conceive. Oldenshaw (Richard Vernon) and Dimmock (Michael Aldridge) – the first stuffy and acerbic, the other intense and arrogant – not only never get their hands dirty, they seem to revel in the cushiness of their surroundings. The two men evince no masculine vanity, no aspirations to physical courage. The only other regular character, portly, easily-flustered Sir Geoffrey (Willoughby Goddard), isn’t the bulldog one might expect, but an ineffectual liaison to the higher-ups in the government. He’s less of a boss than a glorified manservant.
Sir Geoffrey somewhat reluctantly takes a case to the supersleuths in the opening scene of the first episode, which is cannily designed to emphasize the secrecy and exclusivity surrounding Room 17. After that, the series largely avoids showing any of the bureaucratic tissue connecting Oldenshaw and Dimmock to the legal system. The show’s creator, Robin Chapman, isn’t interested in the mythology around Room 17 (which would be an irresistable temptation if the show were remade today), but in the limits imposed by the claustrophobic premise. Like the corpulent Nero Wolfe, these puppetmasters can’t operate without tentacles in the outside world. The easy way out would have been to assign them a regular legman, but instead the Room 17 gents recruit a different proxy for each operation – often through blackmail, trickery, or some other dubiously ethical machination. In one episode, their operative is discovered and killed by the bad guy. Dimmock and Oldenshaw react with shock and anger but not remorse. The episode “The Bequest” finds the fellows at their most mischievous and sinister. An American is advised to buy a chemical formula known to be fraudulent, and Room 17 finds this hilarious. Later Oldenshaw has the option to rescue an imprisoned operative but declines. “We always disavow our agents,” he shrugs.
The idea of the top-secret crimefighter’s lair isn’t unique – think of the Batcave, or the kid-lit characters the Three Investigators, whose hideaway is a mobile home deep inside a junkyard, accessible only by secret passage. Room 17 is an irresistable hangout, by stuffy bow-tied genius standards. There are no windows and one foreboding metal door, but also some comfy leather couches and a backgammon board. (The fellows play regularly, and backgammon pieces inspired the opening title graphics. I guess the idea was that chess was child’s play for these brainiacs.) The pleasure of visiting Room 17 today is trying to puzzle out how its occupants acquired and analyzed data back in the analog era. Somehow, via daily newspaper deliveries and just a handful of file cabinets and reference books (the prop budget was sparse, apparently), all the world’s knowledge is at their fingertips.
The bulk of The Man in Room 17’s cases involve espionage of one sort or another, which is probably a shame; it dates the show within a certain skein of Cold War paranoia, and attaches it as a sort of also-ran to the sixties spy craze. It offers an occasional frisson of the fanciful glamour of Bond, but lands closer to the grit of Le Carré. In the best of the first year’s segments, “Hello, Lazarus,” the men suspect that an industrialist has faked his own death in a plane crash, and set out to lure the fugitive into revealing himself. Chapman and Gerald Wilson’s script emphasizes the extent to which Room 17 operates without a mandate – Sir Geoffrey and his superiors do not share the men’s view that their quarry is still alive, and yet Oldenshaw and Dimmock brush that off and set to work anyway. The glee that Dimmock takes in manipulating the world bond market to solve a relatively inconsequential crime, and his not-terribly-sheepish concession that this represents a self-indulgent folly, are very funny. The writers permit the audience to consider that their protagonists may be ridiculous or even dangerous. Another standout 1965 entry, “The Seat of Power,” has a startling last-act twist, in which the men realize that the target of an enemy’s up-to-that-point routine espionage operation is them: the whole scheme was designed as bait to flush them out of hiding, and it almost works. If the series were in color, you could see just how pale Dimmock and Oldenshaw turn when the caper suddenly acquires the life-or-death stakes that their isolation was designed to prevent. Though it is primarily procedural and apolitical, what is most intriguing about The Man in Room 17 is that Deep State subtext. It is, in the most literal way imaginable, about how the world is largely run by nondescript men in three-piece suits, invisible to most of us and subject to no one’s oversight.
*
Nominally a cop show, It’s Dark Outside (1964-1965) has grander ambitions. It stars character actor William Mervyn, a sort of tamped-down Robert Morley, as a posh, portly, utterly unflappable, and somewhat egocentric police inspector. In an American police drama the seen-it-all cop tends to come across as a borderline psychopath who spends most of his off-screen time tuning up suspects with the butt of his pistol: Joe Friday or Vic Mackey. Mervyn’s character, Detective Chief Inspector Rose, has the opposite sort of authority, the kind that suggests he can tie a neat cravat but likely has never deigned to pick up a firearm. Rose, with his perilously rounded R’s, seems to have wandered in from an Agatha Christie novel, but the world he polices is the modern one, awash in sexual perversion, racial violence, and other sordid, straight-from-the-headlines social ills. The gimmick of It’s Dark Outside is that it mixes traditional crime elements with aspects of other genres in a pretty explicit bid to declare itself as a serious drama. The show’s story editor, Marc Brandel, was a rare transatlantic television scribe, who had put in time on American shows like Playhouse 90 and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; it’s tempting to speculate that he had been exposed to liberal dramas like East Side / West Side and especially Naked City, and took a bit of inspiration from them for It’s Dark Outside.
The supporting cast of It’s Dark Outside steers the show outside the squadroom. Rose’s stuffy, upper-crust old friend Anthony Brand (John Carson) is a top executive in a human rights organization. His work triggers a running dialogue of liberal social theory versus the implicitly conservative law-and-order stance of the police (although DCI Rose is more of a hard-headed pragmatist than a right-wing ideologue, so the debate is more proscribed than in any comparable American work). Unlike the seemingly celibate Rose, Brand is married, to a smart, sophisticated beauty who chafes at the do-nothing activities her sex and social position force upon her. Just why a cop show should take an interest in these society types isn’t clear at the outset, but the show’s unexpected and ultimately very rewarding focus on Alice Brand (June Tobin) turns It’s Dark Outside into a stealth domestic melodrama.
The fourth regular character is the inspector’s apprentice, a brash young cop in whom Rose insists on seeing promise despite all evidence to the contrary. Rose actually goes through two of these: Sgt. John Swift (Keith Barron), a novice whose carelessness gets a suspect killed in the first episode, and later Sgt. Hunter (Anthony Ainley), who barely conceals his contempt for a boss he thinks of as a pompous old duffer. Brandel may be seeking to upend the traditional mentor-mentee relationship, although I can’t make out quite what It’s Dark Outside is trying to do with it, particularly in the case of the insubordinate Sgt. Hunter, since most of his episodes are now lost. I tend to view Rose’s confidence that he can mold these unyielding lumps of clay into top-shelf sleuths as evidence that his solipsism has a down side.
In any case, Sgt. Swift has a more important purpose than teasing out the shadings of Mervyn’s character. The secret heart of It’s Dark Outside is the flirtation that develops between Swift and Alice Brand – a smoldering May/July attraction that had to have been one of the most erotic relationships on British television in the sixties. During the initial episodes, it’s not even clear that this element is intentional – is Brandel playing a long game, or are the actors just getting creative with subtext? Often in sixties television this sort of running character element came with no guarantee of a payoff, but It’s Dark Outside turns out to have been a proto-miniseries. The last three episodes of its initial arc are explicitly serialized, and the penultimate one, “A Case of Identification,” brings the Swift-Alice storyline to a complex and satisfying conclusion. When they drift into a mostly guiltless affair, the dynamic between Swift and Alice Brand turns on their age difference. Alice likes the cop because she thinks he’s “weak”; he replies, “I don’t want to be mothered.” The older woman has the power in the relationship, but the writing doesn’t caricature her as either pathetic or predatory. Alice is sexually assertive and sympathetic; Sgt. Swift never counters with an assertion of machismo; and neither expresses any remorse at having flouted Alice’s marital bond. It’s a more truthful and less judgmental sketch of an extramarital dalliance than American television could have undertaken for another decade or more. Another serial thread runs parallel to that one – a blackmail storyline involving Anthony Brand – and while it’s less involving overall, it sets the stage for a shocker ending to the 1964 cycle. Genteel on the surface, It’s Dark Outside proved capable of dispatching secondary characters as ruthlessly as 24.
*
The fascinating The Plane Makers (1963-65) is one of the few television shows to make a full transition from (themed) anthology to standalone drama to serial. In its first year it told one-off stories with a shared setting, the vast airplane factory Scott Furlong; in its second it tightened its focus to a common set of characters; in its third it placed the most charismatic of them at the center of a thirteen-episode continuity. Like some of the Camelot-era shows in the United States – Dr. Kildare or Empire or even The Dick Van Dyke Show – The Plane Makers cultivates a sleek, technophilic optimism. Instead of the characters, the opening titles show a jumbo jet as it lumbers across a taxiway and into a hangar – lumbers rather unsexily, as it happens, but the soaring music gets across the idea that this show is about the movers and shakers who are making our future. However banal the lives of some of these salarymen might prove to be, the notion that prosperity is the key to a modern world of ever-expanding possibilities surrounds them. It’s no surprise that The Plane Makers founders on the same class disparities that Peyton Place, which is the closest American analogue I can come up with, struggled to encompass. In its second year, the show tried a split-lead approach, with two main characters starring in alternating segments and rarely sharing the screen. Patrick Wymark plays John Wilder, the company’s corporate managing director, a charismatic bulldog who’s good enough at his job that he gets away with being a complete asshole. His counterpart is Arthur Sugden (Reginald Marsh), a middle manager who runs the factory and takes a soft-spoken, staid approach to solving problems. Sugden smokes a pipe, while Wilder chain-smokes cigarettes – just one of many details that carefully delineate these characters as moral and temperamental opposites. (Wilder is a Londoner and Sugden from Yorkshire, a sort of city-versus-country mouse cultural distinction, although the subtleties are lost on this American.) Sugden’s patience and reserve, his allegiance with blue-collar labor, his quaintly old-fashioned way of dressing and carrying himself all designate him as the show’s conscience.
The problem, of course, is that Sugden is incredibly dull – almost perversely so, as if Wilfred Greatorex, the show’s creator, wanted to make the point that the best men among us are often the milquetoasts and mediators who don’t get any credit or attention. Good luck turning that into exciting weekly conflicts, especially when a raging monster like John Wilder is on the other end of the seesaw. The clash between the two men arises in the second week (“No Man’s Land”), in which Sugden squares off against Wilder over management’s scapegoating of a lowly workman for the failure of an expensive test flight. Wilder’s quest to push his new plane, the Sovereign, to completion provides the backdrop for the second cycle, occasionally boiling over into open showdowns with Sugden or other supporting characters (Barbara Murray plays Wilder’s poised wife, Jack Watling his fidgety yes man, and Robert Urquhart a stolid test pilot).
The Plane Makers strives to contemplate capital and labor with the measured, cerebral approach of the editorial page. “Don’t Worry About Me,” the first episode (and the only anthological one that survives; as Doctor Who enthusiasts well know, many videotaped British dramas of the sixties and early seventies were recorded over, a fate that consumed early Tonight Shows and daytime soaps but spared most American prime time shows), addresses a cross-section of professional concerns surrounding a skilled but overbearing metalworker (Colin Blakely) with a casual attitude toward safety and a promising apprentice (Ronald Lacey) given the choice of leaving the shop floor for a less lucrative but more upwardly mobile office job. Writer Edmund Ward emphasizes the resentment that both men express toward their superiors, which seems to conceal a more existential dismay as to how little control either man has over his future. As they play out, the stakes for Blakely’s and Lacey’s characters are lower than they sound on paper – a momentous career decision for a young lad is so inconsequential to the bosses that they have to be reminded about it every time it comes up. The melodrama in The Plane Makers is consistently pitched at a lower level than in any similar American project. Devastating verdicts on a man’s prospects or character are delivered in offhand remarks: at the end of “No Man’s Land” Sugden prevails, and is granted a contested promotion, but a board member adds that there is “no particular confidence in you or your ability.” That’s a line that drops like a hammer if you’re in tune with Greatorex’s show. I always roll my eyes at the idea of “slow cinema,” or critics who condescend by urging allowances for it, but The Plane Makers does reward the American viewer who recalls the old cliches about British reserve and pays attention to all the unspoken or primly articulated nuances that pass between the characters – except of course for John Wilder, the show’s id, who must have been refreshingly easy to write for. Contemporary reviews of The Plane Makers fawn over Wymark’s performance and the dynamism of his character, which proved so obviously the breakout element of the show that some of its subtler elements had to give way.
Although Wilder’s anti-hero charisma is undeniable, the best Plane Makers episodes are vignettes that describe the impact of progress on the Scott Furlong rank and file. Factory stalwarts get crushed in the unforgiving maw of rampant capitalism; executive suite schemers self-destruct when they imitate Wilder’s ambition but lack his panache. “A Question of Sources” concerns a sleazy security chief (Ewan Roberts) on a witch-hunt for the source of a leak. “All Part of the Job” dissects an unscrupulous climber (Stanley Meadows) who sets out to dispose of a rival – a decent, competent purchasing executive (Noel Johnson) – after he discovers the older man has taken bribes from a vendor. The first episode has a spy-movie suspense driving the story, while the second feels like Mad Men without a historical frame drawn around it. And while The Plane Makers is unabashedly about the men in the grey flannel suits, it makes time to sketch sophisticated, sympathetic portraits of the Joans and Peggys in its world. “A Condition of Sale” explores how a seasoned secretary (UFO’s impressive Norma Ronald, a semi-regular) fends off scuzzy sales reps, and contrasts her efficient, blasé rebuff of a crude pass favorably with Sugden’s chivalrous but counter-productive bluster when he learns of the offense. In “Sauce For the Goose,” the long-suffering Mrs. Wilder contemplates an affair with a solicitous American; in a hint at the limits of The Plane Makers’ perspective, it’s less successful than the earlier “A Matter of Priorities,” which chronicled the sordid details of Wilder’s own extramarital indiscretion.
*
Public Eye (1965-1975), the best-known and most beloved of the four shows I’m looking at here, centers upon a seedy, modestly-appointed “enquiry agent,” a lean, taciturn chap named Frank Marker. It has the feel of a rain-slicked jazz noir, like Hollywood’s Peter Gunn or Richard Diamond, Private Detective, but it’s even more downbeat – at times Public Eye is almost as terse as a Parker novel. (It’s a literal jazz noir, by the way: Robert Earley’s theme song is one of the greats.) Like Jim Rockford, Marker comes off as a loser on the surface, a fringe figure in an absurdly cramped rooftop office who skirts the law because it’s the only way he can make a living. At the same time he’s dogged and has a moral code and, when it really counts, he can kick ass. Marker even has a bit of style: most of the time he wears a light-colored tie over a dark shirt and coat, like a reversal image. It was a career-making role for the great Alfred Burke, a small-part character actor whose hangdog face adds layers of dignity and pathos to the literate dialogue.
The mobster’s beating Marker takes in the early episode “Nobody Kills Santa Claus” is startling because violence happens so rarely in Public Eye. Marker’s job is tedious and grubby – a world away from Joe Mannix’s weekly gunshot wound to the shoulder. Written largely by its versatile co-creator Roger Marshall, who was barely out of his twenties at the start of it, Public Eye could encompass milieus both seedy and urbane. “The Morning Wasn’t So Hot” is a frank depiction of the prostitution racket, filled with vivid little portraits of feral pimps and the callow young women who flourish in the trade. It climaxes in an amazingly blunt, poetic exchange between Marker and the hard-bitten girl he’s been searching for, who is too far gone to return to the straight life. The divorce case “Don’t Forget You’re Mine” introduces a missing husband (Roy Dotrice) who quotes T. S. Eliot and a kooky mod girl (Diana Beevers) for Marker to flirt with; it also has one of the cleverest midpoint reversals I’ve seen in a private eye story, one with devastating emotional consequences. A courier for strangers’ miseries, Marker takes cases that limn the seedy underside of human nature – his work isn’t so much solving mysteries as handling, by proxy, the personal interactions that his clients can’t bear to endure themselves. “The Bromsgrove Venus,” my favorite early episode, is sad, funny, and absurd. It’s about a petty blackmail scheme over a tame nudie pic (so tame we even see it on-screen!), which succeeds only because the repressed, middle-class husband and wife it targets won’t talk to each other at all.
Public Eye doesn’t transcend genre – it doesn’t try to pretend it’s more than a private eye show – but like all great crime stories it’s expert at using the conventions of genre to explore all the heartbreaking ways in which humans do harm to one another. The seven episodes made in 1969 comprise a contemplative serialized arc, in which Marker, having done a stint in prison for corruption, is released on parole in an unfamiliar coastal town. “Welcome to Brighton,” the premiere, is the story of a man coming slowly and humbly back to life. No longer licensed as an investigator, Marker works as a laborer, breaking rocks on the beach to build a retaining wall. This is an optimistic depiction of prison, of a piece with the U.S.’s Great Society television dramas. Marker’s parole officer is sympathetic, his support system works, and the implication is that Marker may not be just rehabilitated but rejuvenated by incarceration and its aftermath. The off-the-books cases in this septet are trifling (a stolen pay envelope) or intimate (a young woman’s suicide attempt). The emphasis is unequivocally on the personal, especially Marker’s tentative romance with his new landlady (Pauline Delany). The arc’s final episode has no detecting at all, only relationship counseling, as the landlady’s estranged husband returns and Marker must gently dissuade him from making trouble. All seven of the 1969 episodes were written by Marshall, who, after four years, must have decided he wanted to get to know his creation better: without a professional life to fall back on, Frank Marker, depicted in his earlier adventures as little more than a sponge for his clients’ negative energy, has no choice but to try to become a whole person.
The last Public Eye of the sixties is also the first that exists in color. Watching it is a bit like the moment at the end of a dark, smoke-filled party when the host flips on the lights to urge everyone home: the atmosphere instantly vanishes. Finally we learn the true color scheme of Marker’s trademark tie and shirt (spoiler: light purple on dark blue), but it feels like a poor trade. Public Eye would continue, mostly in color, until 1975. Like Marker himself, it was incapable of stasis; during its eleven-year span, under the auspices of two different production companies, the peripatetic show shifted production from London to Birmingham to Brighton to Windsor to Surrey. Despite its limited capacity for exterior filming, Public Eye captured a fair amount of regional color in each setting.
*
Americans often remark, either with contempt or relief, on the smaller size of the typical British TV run – never mind that The Plane Makers toted up a whopping 28 hours during the year it groomed Patrick Wymark as its star. Equally notable was its creators’ and sponsors’ capacity for metamorphosis. One thing I set aside in describing the shows above is how each represents a snapshot in a fairly complex continuity. The Plane Makers not only changed formats three times during its three-year run, it also morphed into a sequel series – called The Power Game (1966-1969) – that followed John Wilder into a new job. The Man in Room 17 shed a cast member (Denholm Elliott replaced Michael Aldredge) and then, when Aldredge returned, adopted a change of setting and a new title, The Fellows (1967). The Fellows in turn launched a spinoff mini-series from creator Robin Chapman, Spindoe (1968), which itself spawned a follow-up, Big Breadwinner Hog (1969), that was narratively unrelated but originally intended as a direct sequel. It’s Dark Outside was the second of three shows, each from a different creator/producer, that featured William Mervyn as the same character. I haven’t seen the first, The Odd Man (1960-63), which survives but isn’t commercially available; the third, though, is wholly different in tone and structure from its predecessor. Sending DCI Rose off into suburban retirement, Phillip Mackie’s Mr. Rose (1966-1967) is erudite but bloodless, a Masterpiece Theatre-ish concept with less distinction than It’s Dark Outside. The best thing about Mr. Rose is the running gag of how the ex-cop keeps stumbling upon, and solving, crimes because doing so is easier and more appealing than his stated purpose of penning his memoirs. As a so-called writer who has published only one other piece in the last nine months, I wish I could report that I’d nabbed the Zodiac during the hiatus.
Just as U.S. television encouraged maximalism – when Peyton Place breaks out, put it on three times a week! – it also shunned any tinkering with a winning format. The only series that were given makeovers were those that flailed in the ratings. For Bonanza or The Beverly Hillbillies, sameness was the only option, no matter how tedious the formula might get – and of course Nielsen existed to endorse that kind of conservatism. If viewers ever abandoned a show because they wanted to see its characters change and its stories evolve, that was a subtlety Nielsen couldn’t measure. What was it about the British that allowed for portion control, and made them able to bid farewell to a popular entertainment before it wore out its welcome?
Stephen’s adventures in transatlantic television may or may not continue later this year with a look at more ’60s British program(me)s, thanks to Network, BFI, and few other UK labels that have released a bounty of hard-to-see shows on DVD or Blu-ray during the past few years.
Defending the Defenders
July 14, 2016
The Defenders is one of the most important television series to air on an American broadcast network. It won more than a dozen Emmys, including three consecutive trophies for best drama (a record not broken for another two decades, by Hill Street Blues). At a moment when the dramatic anthology was on its deathbed, and ongoing series were often (fairly or not) thought of as meritless escapism (Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech depends on this context), The Defenders created the template for what we now think of as quality television. It was a show with both feet in the real world: where other smart dramas gave their elements of social commentary some shelter within genre (Naked City; The Twilight Zone), melodrama (Peyton Place), or abstraction (Route 66), The Defenders was bluntly political. Its basic premise – Lawrence Preston (E. G. Marshall) and his son Kenneth (Robert Reed) run a small Manhattan law firm with an appetite for controversial cases other attorneys might avoid – was in the most literal sense a formula for debating hot-button issues in the guise of fiction. While similar shows have often worn a fig leaf of balance, The Defenders trafficked in advocacy, taking liberal or even radical stances and articulating counterarguments mainly so that it could knock them down. It was pro-abortion and anti-death penalty, anti-nuke and even pro-LSD. Although it lasted for four years in part as CBS’s highbrow show pony (and self-important network chairman William Paley’s unstated apologia for the likes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan’s Island), The Defenders was at least a modest hit, cracking the Nielsen top twenty during its second season. It became the key precedent for shows like The Senator and Lou Grant and a name-checked inspiration for some of the present century’s smartest dramas, including Boston Legal and Mad Men. Had this bold series failed to achieve both popular and critical acclaim, and done so without compromising the elements that made it noteworthy, prime time probably would have been a lot dumber in the decades that followed.
Unfortunately, The Defenders has fallen into apocalyptic obscurity during the fifty-one years since it went off the air. Though it did have a short life in syndication (which is still more than its Plautus Productions siblings, including the excellent three-season medical drama The Nurses and the cult whatsit Coronet Blue, enjoyed), The Defenders had largely disappeared from view by the time VCRs made it possible for collectors to capture and circulate any obscure show that turned up in reruns somewhere. The last known sighting, a short run on the Armed Forces Network circa 1980, is the source of a few of the thirty or so episodes (out of 132) that have found their way into private hands (and eventually onto YouTube). Cerebral shows and black-and-white shows are a hard sell, to be sure, but The Defenders was further hampered commercially by split ownership (between CBS, the corporate successor to its executive producer Herbert Brodkin, and the estate of its creator, Reginald Rose) and possibly by talent deals that established complex, non-standard residual payments. Although short-lived shows often vanish into the studio vaults, it’s extremely unusual for any series that crossed the 100-episode syndication barrier – much less one that took home thirteen Emmys – to remain so thoroughly unseen for more than a generation. That’s why this week’s DVD release of the first season of The Defenders can legitimately be described, at least within the realm of television, as the home video event of the century.
Me being me, I’d like to briefly discuss why this might not be an altogether good thing.
Remember how The Andy Griffith Show spent part of its first season with Andy as a gibbering hillbilly, before Griffith figured out that he was the straight man? Or how M*A*S*H uneasily aped the chaos of Robert Altman’s film before focusing on its core characters, or how Leslie Knope was an idiot at the beginning of Parks and Recreation? First season shakedown cruises are almost a tradition among great sitcoms, but long-running dramas sometimes take them, too. Mannix started with a convoluted, allegorical format and struggled until its second-season reversion to classicism; Kojak needed a year to get off the backlot and flourish in full-on French Connection, Beame-era Big Apple scuzziness. The Good Wife (another recent show with a lot of Defenders DNA in it) and Person of Interest each slogged through half a year of dull standalone stories before committing to bigger, more original narrative arcs.
You probably see where I’m going with this: The Defenders is one of those shows that didn’t hit its stride until its second season. Although there are many strong hours in the first year, and I’m going to enthuse about some of them in a moment, nearly all of the series’ worst duds can be found in this initial DVD set, too.
The Defenders has often been characterized as the anti-Perry Mason. If Mason was an unabashed fantasy of the defense attorney as an infallible white knight, The Defenders was a corrective that depicted the law with an emphasis on realism and moral ambiguity – to the extent of permitting the Prestons to be among the few TV lawyers, then or now, to lose their cases. Reginald Rose’s lawyer, Jerome Leitner, was credited as a consultant on The Defenders, and one suspects that his influence was considerable. As it evolved, The Defenders’ interest in the arcana of legal procedure came to define it. (Long before The Good Wife made it a seasonal tradition, for instance, The Defenders liked to drop its lawyer heroes into non-standard courtrooms and show them struggling to master their procedural quirks. The first season’s “The Point Shaver” takes place in a Senate hearing, and “The Empty Chute” in a military tribunal.)
It’s a shock and a reality-check, then, to find Lawrence and Ken Preston engaging in some very Perry Mason-esque courtroom theatrics in the early episodes, even to the extent (in “The Trial of Jenny Scott” and “Storm at Birch Glen,” among others) of badgering confessions out of the real culprits on the witness stand. Moments like these are a bit of an embarrassment compared to the more serious-minded tone The Defenders would soon adopt; in hindsight, they seem like something from a different series altogether. In general, the first year was overreliant on personal melodrama rather than legal procedure as the basis of stories. “The Accident,” for instance, was the first episode whose climax turned on an obscure point of law; it was the eighth to air. “The Broken Barrelhead,” the first season finale, introduces an intriguing ethical dilemma that’s been revived lately in news coverage of self-driving cars: was a driver right to plow into a group of pedestrians in order to save the passengers in his car? But David Karp’s teleplay sidesteps the question to focus on the very conventional conflict between the callow defendant (Richard Jordan) and his blowhard father (Harold J. Stone).
Were Rose and company, or the executives at CBS, worried that too much legalese would alienate the audience? I’m speculating here because I still don’t really understand why season one of The Defenders is so frustratingly all over the map. The archival record may answer the question definitely (Rose’s and several of the key writers’ papers are at UW-Madison, Brodkin’s at Yale), but I haven’t had the chance to explore much of it; and while I’ve interviewed many people who worked on The Defenders, all of them remembered its glory days with far more clarity than its early missteps. Network interference is an obvious possibility: when I interviewed CBS executive Michael Dann in 2008, he called the famous “The Benefactor” episode “a turning point,” implying that The Defenders didn’t have a mandate to get political until it tackled abortion head-on and got away with it. The eighteenth episode, “The Search,” has a prosecutor (Jack Klugman) and an implausibly naive Lawrence Preston doing a post-mortem on an old trial after they learn that Preston’s client was sent to the electric chair for a murder he didn’t commit. The structure of Reginald Rose’s script is misshapen and the ending is a cop-out, and I’ve always suspected “The Search” was a neutered attempt at the kind of death penalty broadside that would become The Defenders’ signature issue – addressed passionately in “The Voices of Death,” glancingly in “Madman,” and definitively in the astounding “Metamorphosis,” all from the second season. The network continued to wring its hands throughout the run of the series, shelving an episode about cannibalism (!) for a year and authorizing the classic “Blacklist” only after the producers agreed to drop a race-themed script in exchange; the difference in these later clashes was just that once the Emmys started to pile up, the producers had more leverage.
Along with the degree of network tinkering, the major unknown in understanding the early content of The Defenders is the extent and nature of Reginald Rose’s contribution. The Defenders was unquestionably Rose’s show, although it’s revealing that throughout the series’ run he received screen credit only as its creator, never as a producer or story editor. Rose was extremely hands-on at the outset, to the extent that TV Guide reported on murmurs from disgruntled freelance writers who deployed pseudonyms to protest Rose’s copious rewrites; indeed, overwork triggered some sort of physical breakdown late in the second season, which required Rose to reduce (but never wholly end) his involvement in the writing. (From 1963 on, it’s likely that David Shaw, credited as a story or script consultant, was the de facto showrunner.) But Rose penned only a dozen original teleplays for The Defenders, a startlingly small number compared to the totals racked up by Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone and Stirling Silliphant on Route 66. A few of those 12 are masterpieces, and the last of them (“Star-Spangled Ghetto”) plays as a kind of belated mission statement for the what the show wanted to be about; but more of them feel compromised or desperate, as if Rose was bashing out flop-sweat scripts to fill holes in the production schedule. The second season’s “Poltergeist,” an eccentric bottle show in which the Prestons solve a locked-room murder in an isolated beach house, has elements of concealed autobiography (it takes place on Fire Island, where Rose vacationed in those days) and almost seems to be a cry for help, a subconscious acknowledgment that Rose would rather have spent the winter of 1963 writing anything but The Defenders.
I point all of that out in order to advance a hesitant case that in his approach and his skill set Rose may have been less of a Serling or Silliphant and more like, say, Gene Roddenberry on Star Trek. Roddenberry had a strong, compelling overall vision for his creation, but proved to be a less talented episodic writer than Gene L. Coon, D. C. Fontana, and some others on the show’s staff. It’s hard to point to anything of prodigious quality in Roddenberry’s dialogue or even his prose, and yet every subsequent variation of Star Trek has abandoned the philosophical and structural underpinnings that Roddenberry laid down in the original series at its peril.
In Rose’s case, there’s a thematically coherent body of Studio One scripts that establish his preoccupations with ethics and rhetoric, culminating with 12 Angry Men, his declaration of interest in the intersection of jurisprudence and liberal values, and “The Defender,” a live 1957 two-parter that served as a blueprint for the subsequent series. “The Defender,” with Ralph Bellamy and William Shatner as the Prestons and Steve McQueen as the defendant, is pretty clunky, and it’s noteworthy that when Rose reworked the script as the series’ pilot, “Death Across the Counter,” he improved it. (The third episode broadcast, “Death Across the Counter” was shot in Los Angeles more than a year before production began – an atypically long delay, during which the show was all but brought back from the dead in spite of sponsorial indifference – thus adding to the first-season sense of The Defenders being a different show every week.) The crude generational conflicts between the Prestons in “The Defender” are reshaped into more specific clashes over legal strategy and philosophy in “Death Across the Counter,” and this explicit refinement of a theme over time makes me think that Rose, as The Defenders went into production, was still actively working out what he wanted to say and how best to say it. Mining drama from the statutes is one of those conceptually pure ideas that looks obvious in retrospect, but maybe Rose had to chisel away the hysterics of a thousand hacky courtroom dramas to see it. 12 Angry Men, Rose’s best work prior to The Defenders, emphasizes archetypes over specificity – in a way that’s conscious and effective (Henry Fonda’s common-man rectitude takes on symbolic weight in the film version), but is often seen as reductive, self-important, or dated in contemporary critiques of the piece. (See Inside Amy Schumer’s dead-on parody.) As Serling and Silliphant poured forth with high-flown philosophy and idiosyncratic syntax that always felt fully formed and absent of self-doubt, Rose may have been more process-oriented, and messier: did all those pseudonymous writers complain because the best elements of their episodes were the touches that Rose added? (Howard Rodman, the genius to whom Silliphant bequeathed Naked City for much of its run, had a unique, poetic voice – and a tendency to express it through substantial, uncredited, and often objected-to rewrites of other writers’ scripts. So did The Outer Limits’ Joseph Stefano.)
Launching an innovative series is always burdened with a prosaic risk – can you find enough people who will understand how to write it? And Rose, lacking the Serlingian-Silliphantian stamina to pen the lion’s share himself, was at a perilous disadvantage. The first season’s credits are full of one- or two-off writers who weren’t asked back. There are other flaws at work, too, including skimpy production value (something that never really changed; The Defenders was an interior-driven show, and any expectations of further exploring the vintage New York of Naked City must be gently managed), tonal inconsistencies (check out the weirdly overemphatic presentation of the Prestons’ old-school-ties nostalgia at the beginning of “The Point Shaver”), and direction that’s a bit stodgy. Herbert Brodkin’s aesthetic was notably conservative – he favored endless extreme closeups to the extent that his directors referred to this set-up, contemptuously, as a “Brodkin.” (Not to mention that most episodes climaxed in the confines of a courtoom – a setting where convention placed severe constraints on any potential flourishes in set design or composition. Did any of the great directors do their best work filming trials?) The Defenders eventually came to have some of the forceful compositions and contrasty, documentary-styled lighting that one finds in the New York indie films of the day. The series’ most visually imaginative director was Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke), who debuted with a late first-season episode and became a regular the following year. Aesthetics, too, were a work in progress.
For skeptics, the best way to tackle The Defenders on DVD might be to skip ahead to “The Attack,” the thirteenth episode broadcast and the first one that is unquestionably great. Featuring Richard Kiley as a surly beat cop whose daughter is sexually assaulted, “The Attack” tackles both pedophilia and vigilantism. The outcome of the trial ends up feeling anticlimactic; what’s notable about the ending of “The Attack” is that Lawrence Preston has grown disgusted with his client, has come to believe in the man’s moral guilt. Think about that for a moment: The Defenders positions Preston as its putative hero, yet here it shows him rejecting the kind of eye-for-an-eye emotionalism that was axiomatic in westerns and crime dramas, in a way that dares the audience to consider him unmanly. In what would become another recurring theme of the series, “The Attack” advocates for the necessity of institutional over individual justice; the catharsis of the latter is depicted as a refuge of barbarians. This was almost beyond the pale at a time (and, really, this is still the case today) when television’s vigilantes were often sketched sympathetically even as, say, a reluctant Matt Dillon punished them, and when masculine honor and physical courage were (or are) unassailable. Route 66’s Tod and Buz might’ve been wandering poet-bards of the asphalt frontier, but they still managed the beat the shit out of some unhip lunkhead (or each other, if lunkheads were in short supply) most weeks. Preston prioritizes his ethical obligations over his personal feelings, and does so without a great deal of hand-wringing or soul-searching. He’s a professional; this is simply how the law works. Other smart, liberal Camelot-era dramas would play on this conflict between duty and personal conviction, but in ways that flattered the hero and the audience. When Ben Casey solemnly invoked the Hippocratic oath and performed life-saving surgery on some maniac who murdered three people before the opening credits, it ennobled him; when the Prestons used legal trickery to get some mobster or neo-nazi off on a technicality, it was an inescapably sordid affair. Moral victories could also be Pyrrhic ones.
All of this strikes me as a huge advance over even 12 Angry Men, with its unthreatening man-against-the-mob calculus, and other high water marks of live anthology drama. The Defenders insisted that the audience respond to the material intellectually as well as emotionally, and it confounded traditional, unquestioning identification with a show’s protagonists to a greater extent than anything else on television prior the antihero cycle of The Sopranos, The Shield, Mad Men, et cetera, forty years later.
After “The Attack,” episodes that are just as complex and confrontational start to alternate with the clumsy ones. “The Iron Man” is a profile of a young neo-nazi (Ben Piazza) that wades into the paradoxical weeds of free speech absolutism. “The Hickory Indian” draws a moral parallel between the mob and prosecutors who use strongarm tactics to pressure an informer into testifying against it. “The Best Defense” features Martin Balsam as a matter-of-fact career criminal railroaded on a bogus murder charge; the Prestons agree to defend him on the grounds that crooks deserve good legal representation as much as anybody else, and they’re rewarded for their idealism when Balsam’s character, scorpion-and-the-frog-style, implicates them in a false alibi. “The Locked Room” uses a Rashomon structure to chronicle a “Scotch verdict” case, in which the prosecution can’t prove guilt but the defense can’t mount a persuasive case for innocence, either. Its themes are existential: lawyers often don’t know or even need to know whether their clients are guilty; trials often fail to get anywhere close to the actual truths of a crime.
I suspect that “The Locked Room” – the title refers to the jury’s place of deliberation – was a conscious, semi-critical reply to the high-mindedness of 12 Angry Men. Its author was Ernest Kinoy, whom I would single out as the key writer of The Defenders – even more so than Reginald Rose, and in fact it’s possible that Kinoy’s first-season scripts (which also include “The Best Defense”) influenced the direction in which Rose took the series. Something of a legend among his peers, Kinoy won Emmys for The Defenders and Roots, and reliably wrote the best episodes of half a dozen series in between. An adoptive Vermonter for most of his professional life, Kinoy kept one foot out of the industry; he’s semi-forgotten today, and I deeply regret that he never used one of those Emmys as leverage to get his own series on the air. Rose and story editor William Woolfolk acknowledged him as the only Defenders contributor who always turned in shootable first drafts; the filmed versions of these suggest that Kinoy had an ease with naturalistic dialogue and realistic behavior that made other good writers’ work seem phony or overwrought. Like The Defenders itself, Kinoy kept getting better as he went along; his greatest triumphs were “Blood County” (a clever analogy for violence against civil rights activists), “The Heathen” (a defense of atheism), “Blacklist,” and “The Non-Violent” (James Earl Jones as a Martin Luther King, Jr. figure), all from the second and third seasons.
The infamous abortion episode, shown in April 1962, was The Defenders’ trial by fire; I wrote about it in detail in 2008, when Mad Men wrapped a “C” story around it. Produced in the middle of the season, “The Benefactor” endured its sponsor revolt and aired as the third-to-last episode. Positioned as such, it’s something of a moral and aesthetic cliffhanger: the culmination of The Defenders’ evolution from a brainier version of Perry Mason to courageous political art.
I hope that by writing this I haven’t rained on the parade of everyone who has been looking forward to seeing The Defenders, or even sabotaged the show’s chances of continuing on DVD. (Shout Factory, its distributor, has indicated that future releases depend on the sales figures for this one.) Even the weaker episodes have something to offer, whether it’s the gritty New York atmosphere or the chance to spot important Broadway and New Hollywood actors a decade or so prior to their next recorded performances.
(Some favorites: Gene Hackman as the father of a “mongoloid baby” in “A Quality of Mercy”; an uncredited Godfrey Cambridge as a prison guard in “The Riot”; Barry Newman as a reporter in “The Prowler”; Jerry Stiller and Richard Mulligan as soldiers in “The Empty Chute”; Roscoe Lee Browne as the jury foreman in “The Benefactor”; James Earl Jones, above, as a cop in “Along Came a Spider”; Gene Wilder as a waiter in “Reunion With Death.”)
Rather, my purpose here is to preemptively shore up the reputation of The Defenders in anticipation of contemporary reviewers who may note the early episodes’ creakier elements and wonder, “What’s the big deal?” The Defenders’ first season has a rough draft feel; it tests out all the blind alleys and bad ideas and rejects them in favor of greater complexity and commitment and innovation. The first season is a journey; let’s hope that Shout Factory gives us the destination.
Note: The frame grabs illustrating this post are not taken from the DVD release, which hopefully will look better.
An Interview With David Levinson
May 12, 2016
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 youunger 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 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, 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. 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, I think I told you, 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 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, blah blah blah. 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.
