Friday, March 31, 2006

Heckuva Interview

Catching up with shows my beloved TiVo has recently grabbed for me, I just watched an episode of The Colbert Report from a few nights ago. It was the one on which the Lord of Truthiness talked with the departed and disgraced FEMA director, Michael Brown. Mr. Brown has been on kind of a redemption tour lately, coasting on some revelations that perhaps he wasn't quite as incompetent and unqualified as was once reported. He's trying to turn that into the belief that he was competent and qualified...and I don't think we're ready to go quite that far with it. Still, the idea that he was the scapegoat for a lot of folks' screw-ups is not without merit.

The great thing about Colbert's interviews is that it's impossible for a guest to be prepared for them. (It's also impossible for the interviewee to be the funny one, as some haven't seemed to realize.) If you had a cause to advance and you went on with Wolf Blitzer or Larry King or Joe Scarborough or just about anyone this side of Keith Olbermann, you could write out a list of 25 questions in advance, prepare responses for each and you'd be pretty well covered. Most interrogators wouldn't get past the five most obvious. Colbert knocks everyone off-script and the more they try to get back on, the worse they do. In the process, some real answers sometimes slip through the cracks.

Here's a link to an online video of Colbert interviewing Michael Brown. It's funny but it's also a more substantive interview than I've seen anyone else do with the guy. Around seven minutes.

• Posted at 10:11 AM · LINK

Webb Master

Anthony Tollin, who authored Dragnet on Radio, just sent me an e-mail with some more facts about Jack Webb...

Interestingly, Webb didn't want to star in the original 1950's Dragnet TV series. He wanted to work behind the camera as producer/director, and intended to cast Lloyd Nolan as the TV Joe Friday. NBC insisted that Webb had to star in the 1950s TV series in the role he'd created and embodied on radio.

Did you know that the 1950s Dragnet scripts were approved by a young L.A.P.D. police officer named Gene Roddenberry, who was Chief Parker's head researcher and scriptwriter? Roddenberry learned how to write television shows by borrowing Dragnet scripts from Webb's production company and comparing them to the actual telecasts, acquiring the technical terminology so he could later write his own scripts. In 1953, he was assigned as technical advisor to Ziv's Mr. District Attorney syndicated TV show, and launched his scriptwriting career moonlighting on that series.

Jack Webb was intensely loyal to police organizations, and the L.A.P.D. was equally grateful to Webb for providing the best possible P.R. for the department. When Webb died of a heart attack on Thursday, December 23, 1982, Chief of Police Darryl F. Gates eulogized the actor/producer as "a member of the Los Angeles Police Department family" and the man whose image "we all wished we could project." Chief Gates ordered all departmental flags flown at half-mast, restored Joe Friday's promotion to lieutenant and permanently retired badge #714 (which remained on permanent display at L.A.P.D. Headquarters). Webb became the first civilian to be buried with full L.A.P.D. departmental honors usually reserved for hero cops killed in the line of duty — including a Highland piper performing "Amazing Grace," a bugler playing "Taps," a memorial gunshot volley from the Police Color Guard and a missing-man helicopter formation.

If Mr. Webb boosted the rep of the L.A.P.D. — and I have no doubt he did in many ways — it's frightening to think how bad it would have been without him. No matter how good most of them are (and my perception is that most L.A. police officers are very honest and efficient), there are always a couple to remind you that they aren't all Joe Friday. After the incident in 1992 where a bunch of L.A.'s finest used Rodney King for a piñata, Darryl Gates — who was still Chief but not for long — should have projected the image of a Jack Webb. Instead, he made a bad situation worse and did nothing to debunk the notion that cops protect cops, no matter what.

I seem to remember, around the time of Webb's passing, an essay in one of the L.A. papers by a senior police officer. His thesis was that Dragnet actually damaged the image of his profession, in particular when Joe Friday would start lecturing people, berating them with what the author of the article called "one-sided police propaganda." But he also felt that Webb's other shows — Adam-12 and to a lesser extent, Emergency — had more than undone the damage by reminding all that the people who take those jobs are human beings. I forget the specific anecdotes and stats he cited but at the time, it seemed like a logical conclusion to me.

Anyway, thanks for the info, Tony but I have two questions. Did Joe Friday ever solve the case of the Clean Copper Clappers that were kept in the closet until they were copped by Claude Cooper, the kleptomaniac from Cleveland? And would that sketch have been the least bit funny if Jack Webb had been the least bit funny?

• Posted at 9:30 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I mentioned Dragnet the other day and someone wrote in to ask, "What was the deal with Jack Webb?" Near as I can tell, the deals with Jack Webb were all pretty much financial. He was a shrewd producer who wanted to make a lot of money in radio and television...and succeeded.

Webb was an actor in film and radio who was often cast as a police detective. He was offered a number of different shows in which to star but preferred to create something himself so he could own it. Pretty smart move, there. He had a certain narrative and dialogue style in mind, much of it suggested by a 1948 cop film in which he'd appeared, He Walked By Night. The show he came up with, Dragnet debuted on radio in 1949 and segued to television in 1951, running until 1959. It wasn't all Webb did during that time. He also had a short-lived radio show which later became a movie, Pete Kelly's Blues and he did a film about a drill instructor called The D.I. that probably inspired the creation of the comic book character, Sgt. Rock. Later, about the time Dragnet was cancelled, Webb did a really good film about the newspaper business entitled 30.

In the sixties, Dragnet made a comeback. The way the story was told to me by someone who worked on the show — and I think the "official" accounts differ from this a little — several networks wanted to revive the property but without Webb. They all thought he was too old and stodgy to connect with viewers of the day, either as producer or performer. Webb took the position that it wasn't Dragnet without its distinctive style and only he could replicate that...so he had to be in charge of the proceedings. He also said that he would relinquish the on-camera job only if they paid him as much as Executive Producer as they'd have to pay him as Executive Producer and Star. Eventually, NBC gave in to the extent of commissioning a TV Movie/pilot on his terms. The result was encouraging enough to yield a series, which was on for four years. Each time it was renewed, Webb's production company landed a few more commitments for other pilots and these turned into Adam 12, Emergency and several other weekly shows.

The most interesting thing about the sixties Dragnet show was, to me, the day players. Webb had a little stock company of actors, many of them good friends, who appeared over and over as crime victims and witnesses. They included Virginia Gregg, Julie Bennett, Herb Vigran, Doodles Weaver, Jack Sheldon, Olan Soulé, Bobby Troup, Leonard Stone, Buddy Lester, Vic Perrin and Amzie Strickland. Often, when the studio or casting director tried to freshen things up with new faces, Webb would say, "No, get me Vic Perrin again."

If he cast you in an episode, the big no-no was knowing your lines. Actors did not get scripts in advance and were encouraged not to memorize. The dialogue was all on TelePrompter and Webb, when he directed, would tell the performers just to read what was on the prompter. After each take, he'd have the TelePrompter operator increase the speed a hair. The idea was to get the actors reading as rapidly as possible without sounding like they were auctioning tobacco. Henry Corden, who was on many an episode, told me, "Jack always used the next-to-last take you did. The last take was when it got to be too fast so he'd use the one just before it." If anyone questioned Webb's methods, there was a fast response: It works. He made a ton of cash off Dragnet, especially in the last season when they set many episodes in one or two rooms and were able to film them in one or two days with one or two guest actors.

Webb died in 1982. I met him briefly — for maybe four minutes — the year before that. I was going in to pitch something at CBS and he was coming out from showing a demo tape to the same exec, and someone introduced us. The two main things I remember are being somehow surprised that he sounded so much like Jack Webb...and that, off-camera, he laughed like a human being. He actually had a good sense of humor that wasn't in evidence when he played Joe Friday. But he loved parodies like Stan Freberg's Dragnet spoofs and he even participated in the best one, which was the case of Johnny Carson and the Clean Copper Clappers Kept in the Closet. Here it is...

• Posted at 12:34 AM · LINK

April 1, 2006 • Current • March 30, 2006