by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards Charles and I watched one of the PBS shows that
had accumulated in my backlog, an episode of the Pioneers of Television series dealing with crime dramas and hitting the
expected high points of early TV’s crime shows: Dragnet, The
Untouchables, Mission: Impossible and I
Spy along with such later 1970’s phenomena
as Police Woman and Columbo. The show touched on how TV’s policiers managed to break down racial (I Spy) and gender (Police Woman) barriers basically by not making a big deal about
them: Robert Culp recalled how he had to fight to keep Bill Cosby as his
co-star on I Spy (though it’s not
clear whether the “suits” at NBC objected to Cosby because he was Black or they
were afraid that, as someone whose previous career had been entirely as a
stand-up comedian, he couldn’t act — or maybe a little of both), to the point
where he told the network, “If you replace him, you’ll have to replace me too.”
Perhaps the most interesting segment was about Dragnet because it went into some depth about just how Jack
Webb — who was not only the star of Dragnet but also its producer, frequently its director and
clearly its auteur — got the
effects, including the famous clipped monotone with which not only he but also
virtually everyone on the cast delivered their lines and the emphasis on
close-ups.
It seems that Webb had once watched an old Western movie on TV and
realized that, especially given the poor reception and small screen size of
1950’s TV sets, vast, panoramic vistas that looked impressive on a movie screen
just looked flat and dull on TV. (I have a joke I’ve repeated fairly often on
what it would be like to watch Lawrence of Arabia in a letterboxed print on a normal-sized TV: “You
see that big expanse of desert? You see those two little dots in the middle of
all that desert? Well, that little dot is Peter O’Toole, and that other little
dot right next to it is Anthony Quinn.”) So Webb decided to shoot Dragnet almost exclusively in close-ups, and while the
tennis-match back-and-forth cutting between Webb as Joe Friday and whoever it
was he was interrogating did get a little old and stale after a while, it did allow his actors to show emotion with their faces
that they couldn’t show with their voices due to the clipped, even, flat line
deliveries he insisted on. Dragnet
was also the first fiction show to use a teleprompter; instead of having the
actors memorize their dialogue as usual, Webb wanted them to read it off the
teleprompter. This both cut down production time — an episode that would have
taken five days to shoot with the actors speaking memorized dialogue only took
a day and a half with the actors reading their lines off the prompter (a
throwback to Dragnet’s early days
as a radio show — radio shows were always performed as readings; on the rare occasions radio producers tried to
have their actors speak memorized dialogue, the little slips and hesitations
between and during lines audiences wouldn’t be bothered by if they were watching the performance live or on film proved intolerable
to people who were just listening)
— and helped Webb get the flat, emotionless delivery he was after. One of the
most fascinating interviewees on this program was a woman who took a job as a
guest star on Dragnet, came to
the set line-perfect for the whole part, and got chewed out by Jack Webb and
told to use the prompter. So she had to struggle and keep turning her head
between the camera and the prompter — until Webb said, “We can’t use this. It
looks like you’re reading it.” “I am
reading it,” she said, whereupon Webb, for the first and apparently last time
in the history of Dragnet, let
her perform her role from memory.
As the show progressed it started getting
into more recent shows that I had seen when they first aired, including Columbo (which I found utterly delightful for the same
reason everyone else did: Peter Falk’s amazing, amusing, often irritating
characters — sometimes you actually started feeling sorry for the bad guys as
he continually badgered them until they confessed) and Mannix (which I liked because it aired just as I was
getting interested in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and in the 1970’s
the Mannix character was as close as you could get to seeing anyone like Philip
Marlowe on TV), along with Hawai’i Five-0 (an O.K. show whose principal attraction was the sheer energy level of
Jack Lord’s performance, though this documentary gave it points not only for
shooting on the Hawai’ian Islands but showing Hawai’i’s actual racial mix of
populations, including Polynesians, Japanese and Chinese — though the “novelty”
of an Asian detective in Hawai’i was nothing new to fans of Charlie Chan, whom
Earl Derr Biggers based on a real
Chinese-born detective on the Honolulu Police Department’s homicide squad). I
don’t remember ever seeing Police Woman when it was new, though Angie Dickinson’s bad-ass female detective is
the obvious ancestress of every lady cop on TV since, especially in her
audacious straddling of the line between butch and femme. It was interesting
that Dickinson’s then-husband Burt Bacharach refused to write the theme song
for the show because he thought it was silly, and that the one script she
refused was one that would have required her to drive an 18-wheel truck — she
said that though she might be able to hold her own in fight scenes with bigger
but less well-trained men, she didn’t have the musculature to handle a big rig.
The show alluded to Dickinson’s experience making Rio Bravo with director Howard Hawks, who was famous for
making his women “one of the boys,” which probably prepped her for this series.
It also made the distinction between Dragnet and The Untouchables, particularly in the amount of violence — Dragnet was understated and kept most of the violence
off-screen (Webb was concerned less with the depiction of actual crime than
with its aftermath, and in particular with the details of the police
investigations of crimes) while The Untouchables seems over-the-top even now in its open brutality, though at least producer Desi
Arnaz and his directors cut away from the actual bloodletting. (The narrator
also made a pretty funny mistake when he identified the real Elliot Ness as an
FBI agent; he was actually a U.S. Treasury agent.) Indeed, one of the oddest
things about this show was it revealed how crucial Lucille Ball’s role was in
creating a lot of the crime shows that defined the genre in the 1960’s even though her own fame was as a
comedienne; it seems that Lucy was so popular even after she and Arnaz split in 1960 (and she retained
control of Desilu Studios until she sold it, and its franchises, to Paramount
in the late 1960’s) that she could get just about any series she sponsored on
the air on her network, CBS. It was the post-Desi, pre-Paramount Desilu that
originated Mission: Impossible, Hawai’i Five-0 and Mannix — and when Martin Landau and his then-wife Barbara Bain left Mission:
Impossible over a salary dispute they were
replaced by Leonard Nimoy, just coming off his three-year run as Spock in the
original Star Trek — another show Lucille Ball green-lighted for production at
Desilu (something even Charles hadn’t realized). I remember getting into an
argument once with someone who said he didn’t like Lucille Ball because he
preferred watching more serious TV, like Star Trek — and my voice rose to its “indignant” level as I
said, “If it hadn’t been for Lucille Ball there wouldn’t have been a Star Trek!” It’s a testimony to Lucy’s skill as a talent-spotter and show-picker
that her successes ran so far outside her own genre.
