The reason I find myself stopping at one of these channels (besides hoping to see Claudine Longet guest star as a murderer) is that as a kid growing up in LA, I recognize most of the locations that they used. So it’s kind of like stepping into a time machine, except the past is in black-and-white and I can fast forward through the assisted living commercials.
But a lot of local landmarks that have long since been turned into Jiffy Lubes and Casa de Cockroach apartments reappear in all their glory behind Honey West and Amos Burke.
ROUTE 66 is a great one for Way Back Machining. One week they were in the old Marineland and the next they stopped off at Jungle Land, home of many ferocious tranquilized animals. It’s a good thing the scenery is so nostalgic because the show itself was terrible. The dialogue tried to be Paddy Chayefsky and actor George Maharis tried to be, well… an actor. Long florid speeches filled with imagery and dripping with classical references describe a dog that chewed up a garden. What’s disconcerting is that at the time this show originally aired in the ‘60s I thought it was incredibly deep. Of course that's not why I watched it. I was just hoping to see Claudine Longet with a gun.
What struck me most about these old hour shows is how cheesy the production values were. Today a streaming show looks as sumptuous and well lit as a feature. If they get 3,000,000 viewers a week they're lucky. Back then, on network television drawing an audience of 30,000,000 those old shows looked like they were made for $22. Except for Jack Webb-produced shows like DRAGNET and ADAM-12. $22 was the budget for the entire season.
I think the difference is that audiences today have much higher expectations. They can spot a cheapo production. With HD cameras they can make home movies that look way better than KOJAK. (By the way, I see a lot of San Fernando Valley locations in KOJAK – a show set in New York.)
That’s something else I'm always on the lookout for – LA locations masquerading as other parts of the world. I once saw the Burbank airport substituted for Miami. Can’t think of many mountain ranges behind the actual Miami airport. The Fugitive traveled all around the country but one out of three small towns all seemed to have the same Main Street. How dumb was Inspector Girard that he never figured that out?
So even though a lot of these programs don’t stand the test of time I still have a great fondness for them. What a treat that the Los Angeles of my youth has been so captured on film. I feel bad that kids growing up in Los Angeles today won’t have that same luxury. With production costs what they are, it’s now the kids in Vancouver who will be able to look back and see their city as it is today.
How about Burbank Airport subbing for Casablanca? This week, one of those wayback machine channels will begin showing My Favorite Martian (ME TV?). I’m looking forward to watching 2 of my favorite old actors and seeing how the show holds up.
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing the first episode of Route 66 as a kid and it was a dark, psychological episode and I assumed the series was going to be a lot like The Twilight Zone. I was greatly disappointed in the next episode but I stayed for the car. I didn't know who Claudine Longet was.
ReplyDeleteDid you select to write about this today because it is the anniversary of the road being officially designated as "US Route 66" or was it because today's Google Doodle is dedicated to the road? Or did Google decide on the Doddle because of your post?
And someday somebody will say the same thing about all the streaming shows that are the current rage....
ReplyDeleteI gave birth to my son at Roosevelt Hospital on 9th Avenue in NYC. The building has sonce been torn down and the hospital moved over to 10th Avenue. But whenever they show outside footage of the hospital on Seinfeld I point out to him that's where he was born :)
ReplyDeleteMy guilty pleasures are on FETV. Perry Mason and Emergency. Randolph Mantooth said in an interview that all the rescues were based on actual Fire Department rescues, they weren't allowed to be made up by writers.
ReplyDeleteTotally agree -
ReplyDeletethe higher the budget, the better the show.
According to Google:
In 2020 Big Bang Theory cost $8 million per episode to make
in 1991 Cheers cost $2.2 million dollars per episode to make (equates to $4.2 million in 2020.
Therefore The Big Bang Theory is twice as good as Cheers!
(Sigh)
A fun thing about Adam-12. Often, the locations given for Malloy and Reed to respond to, are real. I've spent some time freeze-framing on L. A. locations on screen and then searching google maps street-view for the same locations. It can be interesting to compare today's streetview to 50 years ago on Adam-12. Often, things haven't changed much. Unfortunately, eventually a lot of those locations become studio backlot with the squad car chasing up and down the same suburban street.
ReplyDeleteI guess they didn't forsee the perils of freeze framing when they filmed those shows.
DeleteI may have used this comment before, but it boggles my mind that the Gotham City police force was so poor in investigations that it couldn't figure out that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were Batman and Robin. Think of how many obvious clues there were.
ReplyDeleteJeepers. The 60s BATMAN show was a good laugh, not a police procedural. I was six years old when the series started. Even when I watched the reruns when I was older, I never once stopped to consider the ineptitude of the Gotham police. The show was high camp.
DeleteI remember watching an establishing shot on X-Files that was titled "Port of Cleveland" & was obviously Vancouver. 30 Rock actually used some budget to shoot a few street scenes here.
ReplyDeleteThe Darren McGavin show Mike Hammer (1958) was set in New York but I think it was in the first episode he goes to a lake which is obviously Big Bear, which doesn't look much different today than it did in 1958, or how it looked in the 1970s in the first episode of Columbo.
ReplyDeleteThere's a Minneapolis reporter named James Lileks who loves movies from the 40s and 50s and points out details about long-gone businesses in the backgrounds in his blog. It's charming stuff except all of his prose is colored by his party-line view that America was perfect until 1965 when Civil Rights and Vatican II made us all turn into hippies who voted for Jimmy Carter and we all got suicidal until Reagan brought us Morning in America (and that was the party line of the National Review, for which Lileks works).
ReplyDeleteStill a great place for wittily-described ephemera if you can ignore the blog's Q-Anon commentariat that Lileks is apparently fine with.
I wish there were a reliable guide to the good episodes of these old shows, because there were occasional episodes.
ReplyDeleteI would also make a case that the old shows shot in New York tend to hold up better: “The Defenders,” “Naked City,” “East Side, West Side,” “NYPD.” Still some stinkers in there, but a lot of good stuff nonetheless. A lot of drawing on a deep acting pool. And it’s fun to see many steeets before they were turned into highrise canyons.
I love playing "spot the location" in shows that film in NYC, and I love the howling inaccuracies in shows that are set in NYC but film elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteFor the former, I especially love in no the various Law & Order shows when they're going to, say, Brooklyn, but the location where they film is on W. 238th Street in the Bronx (to give but one example).
For the latter, my favorite remains the Jackie Chan movie Rumble in the Bronx, which was filmed in Vancouver. The best was the giant mountain overlooking the golf course. Mind you, there is a golf course in the Bronx, but Van Cortlandt Park and the city of Yonkers are where that mountain was......
Shows that film in L.A. but take place in NYC are the biggest offenders, because everything is so spread out in L.A., plus very few tall buildings, especially once you get out of downtown -- not to mention the palm trees.....
---Keith R.A. DeCandido
It's amazing with the "high production values" and large budgets of today's shows that most of the output is complete junk. And don't get me started about the "premium services". The only thing that keeps them afloat is bad language, nudity and occasional gore. No, give me the programs of the past that at least try to be entertaining and did so in a family way.
ReplyDeleteRoute 66 was horribly overwritten as was much of Paddy Chayefsky's stuff (most of those speeches in Network are ponderous) and George Maharis was bad (although better than Glenn Corbett) but there were three good reasons to watch Route 66.
ReplyDeleteOf course one was the scenery - actual footage from real places all around the country as it was then. Occasionally some history.
The second was the actors - forget Claudine Longet, you could turn on almost any episode and catch a great old actor, a young actor who you knew later as a star or just a solid performer. My favorite is the 1962 Halloween Show with Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney Jr. at the Ramada O'Hare. the plot was nonsense but they were tremendous.My vote for top Halloween episode ever. Couldn't see anything like that today.
The third was the theme song. They often ask best TV theme songs and recency bias gives all these 70s and 80s shows. but it is hard to top Nelson Riddle and that theme song. If not the best TV theme ever, in the class photo.
I agree with your second point. I recently saw the episode which featured Lorre, Karloff and Chaney jr. There was another episode that had Rod Steiger and a pre-Mary Tyler Moore Show Edward Asner.
DeleteAt the moment there is a Season 4 episode of MANNIX co starring Jacqueline Susann and Robert Hogan, five years before he was 'Smilin Jack' on MASH.
Chuck, I love that! Ken, I love your writing. I usually laugh out loud and I really enjoyed this post. I recently saw an episode of McHale's Navy that had Claudine Longet in it and all I could think about was the SNL sketch showing skiers having accidents and Chevy Chase narrating it like they'd been shot by Claudine. That sketch was so funny. I tried to find it on YouTube but no luck.
ReplyDeleteJulie, Burlington, Iowa
Here's the final score from the Martin Milner Bowl:
ReplyDeleteRoute 66
Adam 12
Great!
DeleteAlso that first episode of Columbo by Big Bear Lake that was mentioned. "Murder By the Book" has Martin Milner as the first murderee in the series. So not counting the first two movie pilots.
DeleteI think the closest you'll ever come to seeing Claudine Longet in such a role is an episode of HOGAN'S HEROES in which she played a Gestapo agent posing as a member of a newly-formed Underground Resistance band who tried to seduce Hogan into working with them so the other agents could take he and his men into custody. She didn't use any guns, of course, just her sex appeal.
ReplyDelete"Route 66" had a few things going for it -- that terrific theme from Nelson Riddle and seeing a variety of actors guest star on this semi-anthology series, including several not always associated with drama (I'm specifically thinking of Julie Newmar, whose statuesque presence was always welcome).
ReplyDeleteI'm in the minority, I guess - I thought Maharis was pretty good.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Martin Milner, I just saw TOO MUCH, TOO SOON, a cheesy movie about Diana Barrymore (John's daughter). At the end, fresh out of the alcoholic ward and broke, she has to walk from West 67th Street down to Greenwich Village where, after some dialogue with Milner, she boards a bus and rides off into what is clearly downtown Los Angeles. (I've never been there but everybody knows the distinctive City Hall.)
ReplyDeleteMartin Milner Bowl:
ReplyDeleteRoute 66
Adam 12
The Sweet Smell of Success
I grew up in LA. As a kid I was a fan of the Wonder Woman tv show (I had my reasons…). There was one scene set in the White House, with Wonder Woman saving the President. I noticed immediately that the interior scene was filmed in the rotunda at Griffith Observatory. The dialogue had a tour guide refer to the Foucault Pendulum as a punch bowl.
ReplyDeleteClaudine Longet played a woman accused of murder on The Bold Ones-The Lawyers.
ReplyDeleteBut Burl Ives, like us, knew she would never do such a thing and eventually acquitted her.
The lineup that night (16 Nov 1969) included Bill Cosby Show (830), Dick Van Dyke guesting on Leslie Uggams Show (900), and Claudine (1000).
Just another average Sunday night on the networks.
@Jeff Sweet,
ReplyDeleteYou're so right about the New York series that were actually shot in New York: Naked City and Car 54: Where Are You quickly come to mind.
Naked City -- much like the original Law & Order -- reflects the New York of its time. When the police officers enter one of those gritty old walk up apartment buildings, you can almost smell the neighbors cooking and filling the hallways with the residue of old world recipes.
As someone born in the '50s, who visited often family in the '60s, went to college there in the '70s, and worked in midtown for most of the '80s just as the city's renaissance began -- it's a delightful time capsule to many familiar places (and a reminder of landmarks gone, such as the original Yankee Stadium and the elevated West Side Highway, which collapsed in the early '70s.
"Lizard's Leg and Owlet's Wing"...! (The 1962 Halloween episode of Route 66):
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIg2ce8KmK8
There are some great shots of 1970's New York City streets in the opening and closing credits of The Odd Couple.
ReplyDeleteI remember recently watching the first episode of Route 66 on one of those channels and being intrigued at the production values but unable to follow the plot or the characterizations. So never went back. Not being from LA, the backgrounds were meaningless to me.
ReplyDeleteI read an article years ago about how The West Wing, for example, had many more scenes and words in an episode than a comparable one-hour drama from the 1960s or 1970s. I thought of this watching Emergency on one of the nostalgia channels--they would show them going to the scene, so there would be sometimes about 15 seconds of the rescue unit going through traffic. A waste of time? Or a reminder that there's drudgery? By contrast, I'm reminded of the Cartwrights riding from the Ponderosa Ranch into Virginia City--about a one-hour drive--in eight seconds.
ReplyDeleteRoute 66 reminds me that Bobby Troup wrote the song, and played a doctor on Emergency. The head nurse was played by his wife, Julie London, the ex-wife of the producer, Jack Webb. And in the pilot, Webb had her as a romantic interest for another doctor. THAT is one to ponder.
I felt the same way about the recent repeats of 77 Sunset Strip, which turned out, on reviewing, to be a terrible show, but oh, those circa-1960 LA Locations!
ReplyDeleteI bought the first season of Burke's Law on DVD. It's terrible, but in enjoyable ways, and I love seeing all the "Guest Suspects" having fun, sending up their own images. Whenever Amos Burke's Rolls Royce arrives at Parker Center, as it pulls into the driveway, the exact same motorcycle cop on the exact same motorcycle passes it going the other way, every time. This is because it is the exact same shot in EVERY episode!
You want LA locations in a non-LA-set show? Try the original Dynasty from the 1980s. It's set in Denver, a Denver with PALM TREES, and streets with names like "Sepulveda" and "Ventura Blvd." It's also a Denver where it never snows! No winter in Dynasty's Denver ever.
Actually, for bare-faced location-lying, The Mentalist, less than a decade ago, had an episode in which the caption "Houston, Texas" was slapped over a clear shot of The Mark Taper Forum in the Music Center in downtown LA. They managed not to have the LA City Hall in the shot. I was reminded of the gag-shot in Kentucky Fried Movie, where we see a stock shot of New York harbor, lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, with the caption "Hong Kong!" My roommate in those days and I made that into a running gag. Whenever we'd see a clear establishing shot of a famous landmark, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc., we'd yell out, "HONG KONG!"
And as for comedy shows of the 1950s, it's a relief to see that Bilko and Our Miss Brooks hold up. I Married Joan sure doesn't.
"Blogger Mike Barer said...
ReplyDeleteI may have used this comment before, but it boggles my mind that the Gotham City police force was so poor in investigations that it couldn't figure out that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were Batman and Robin. Think of how many obvious clues there were."
Not to mention their inability to figure out where the Batmobile goes at night. And no one ever notices Batman and Bruce Wayne have the same mouth, chin and voice!
Same on Superman. Superman puts on a pair of glasses and no one, not even his closest friends, recognize him or his voice. When I started wearing glasses, not one person I knew said to me "Who are you and where is Douglas?" And when I had cataract surgery and stopped wearing glasses again, no one said, "You're back! Who was that bespectacled guy who was impersonating you for the last decade?"
It's almost as though Batman and Superman were comic book characters for children. There's few things more absurd than seeing comics freaks discussing the Batman movies of the last 30 years as serious dramas!
"AlaskaRay said...
ReplyDeleteHow about Burbank Airport subbing for Casablanca?"
How about Burbank Airport being Berlin's airport in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?
It was Van Nuys airport not Burbank in Casablanca
DeleteYes on Route 66. They did shows everywhere- the Oregon Coast, Pittsburgh, Montana. It seemed the only road they avoided was the actual Route 66.
ReplyDeleteI do like to watch these old shows- they're comfort food. Actors like Michael Dunn and France Nuyen are welcome anytime. Sometimes you can tell when they're reusing sets from other shows- like the lagoon from Gilligan's Island. And then sometime you stumble on an episode that's a real mind warper- like that 1963 "Rawhide" episode that features Dick York and Barbara Eden as con artists- or that Perry Mason where Yvonne Craig plays Neil Hamilton's step daughter- one decade before Batman.
In our defense, we can always point out to the young people that we grew up an backward and deprived era where TV sets were 21 inches in diameter (measured diagonally), and there was no instant on-after you turned the TV on you had wait a minute for the set to warm up.
Of course, for great period LA Locations, I always enjoy revisiting Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. "Santa Rosita" in the second half of the movie includes the "California Incline" in Santa Monica, lots of street locations in downtown Long Beach (Including a clear beautiful shot of the old Cyclone roller coaster at The Long Beach Pike, long gone, torn down in 1968. It was the first roller coaster I ever rode), a bit of Malibu, Buster Keaton in Newport, and "The Big W" was on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, literally right down the street from where I was living when the movie was shot. A carefully-placed bush hides Marineland in the Big W shots, as it would otherwise be clearly visible a mile directly behind the Big W. The school where I attended 1st grade can be seen in the background of a few of the Big W shots.
ReplyDeleteThere's a shot in IAMMMMW where Spencer Tracy runs across a roof, and in the background we see a very clear view of the old Long Beach Municipal Auditorium, torn down around 1970 and replaced with the Terrace Theater designed by my friend Ed Killingsworth. I appeared in productions of Camelot, Kiss Me, Kate and Finian's Raibow in the old auditorium, so it always tickles me to see Spencer Tracy run past a theater in which I worked extensively.
D. McEwan appears to have taken over the comments section. Dang it.
DeleteI think there are two "Route 66" songs. One is the theme to the TV series and was written by Nelson Riddle. The other is sung and written by Bobby Troup.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy those channels, except for the repeating ads aimed at super-old people or ill folks who want to sue their doctors. But to modern eyes, black-and-white TV already looks outdated and weird... so I don't think most of us notice the poor production values as much as a TV pro would.
ReplyDeleteOne of the more lush "Man from UNCLE" episodes (also repackaged as a movie for foreign markets) used the then-new Los Angeles Airport building as the villain's lair. A single fleeting matte painting relocated it to a foreign desert.
ReplyDeleteAn 1950s pilot for a Sherlock Holmes series took pains to get the real Tower Bridge in the background for a London exterior -- with modern motor traffic clearly visible.
Always enjoy when impressive real-life exteriors -- or models or mattes, for that matter -- are intercut with thrifty little interiors.
For The Record:
ReplyDeleteBobby Troup wrote the song "Get Your Kicks On Route 66."
The theme for the Route 66 TV series was written by Nelson Riddle.
Just so you know ...
Lemuel: Lileks was not always this way; he abruptly changed after 9/11. (He's had his blog going since the 1990s and I began following it back then because I was on staff at the Minnesota Daily, the university paper, a few years after he was.) By the way he's always been a columnist and not a reporter, currently at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune plus a National Review monthly column. I don't subscribe to any of his political ideas but he is usually wryly funny; he also produced the book The Gallery of Regrettable Food some 20 years ago, which lives on at his site. (I agree about the commenters.)
ReplyDeleteMoved from upstate NY to Agoura Hills in 1979. So awesome growing up watching TV shows being filmed.
ReplyDeleteCHiP's, Dukes, BJ & the BEAR, Charlie's Angels, movies etc., filmed all over the quiet canyon suburbs of the 80"s.
Total time capsule.
Get Your Kicks on Route 66
ReplyDeleteI'm going to go out on a limb and say its the only song recorded by Bing Crosby and The Rolling Stones
I think the other one was "Star Star".
DeleteI read somewhere that some ranch near LA was used for Korea.
ReplyDeleteAnother show Ken was associated with was an answer on Jeopardy the other day in the "Shows by Theme Song" category - who was "Moving on Up"? Speaking of Jeopardy - Friday question: Ken, what do you think of Matea? So young for knowing all that stuff.
@ Chuck
ReplyDeleteI've been doing that for twenty years. And posting a lot of my finds on IMDb, till they did away with the comments sections. "Dragnet" mixes a lot of backlot with actual locations. But yes, "Adam-12" uses a ton of actual locations, describing where they are. Or, I see street signs, or businesses in the background. Honestly, it's an obsession with me. Old movies, as well. (But, also, I'm a location scout in film/TV/commercials, so it makes sense.) There are a few web sites dedicated to showing how locations change with time...
Some of my favorite outdoor locations appear in Adam-12, Law and Order, and The Rookie.
ReplyDeleteMany years ago I read a book about an American's African experiences in the mid-'50s. She mentioned that the lush jungle setting where a lot of the action took place was right next to their local supermarket. (The cameras were set up in the street).
ReplyDeleteShe also mentioned that in one sequence a runner had to relay an important message to the king. They showed him running through the jungle, rivers and over mountains. When he finally reached the king he was totally exhausted, but he delivered the message in Swahili, which in actuality translated to "They didn't pay me enough to be in this movie".
Film Location Books
ReplyDeleteLeon Smith
• Hollywood Goes on Location
• Movie and Television Locations
• Following the Comedy Trail: A Guide to Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang Film Locations
Jim Pauley
• The Three Stooges: Hollywood Filming Locations
John Bengtson
• Silent Echoes (Buster Keaton)
• Silent Traces (Charlie Chaplin)
• Silent Visions (Harold Lloyd)
Also has a blog
https://silentlocations.com
and YouTube channel
@Joseph Scarbrough
ReplyDeleteClaudine Longet played an accused traitor or murderer on at least 3 shows, Hogan's Heroes, the Rat Patrol and the Bold Ones (the last one being particularly creepy since it hinged on whether she or her husband, the wonderful Charles Aidman, killed her lover).
It's like the producers sensed something.
@McEwan
ReplyDeleteI've been watching a lot of Bruno Heller shows and I recently revisited the Mentalist. The last season had the team moving the team to Austin, TX, to work with the FBI.
Austin now had lots of majestic mountains in the background.
The last few seasons of Monk also got extremely lazy with all sorts of LA landmarks showing up in SF.
Ken,
ReplyDeleteHard push back on Route 66 for a few reasons:
1. Stirling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night, Village of the Damned, Naked City) was an uneven writer but capable of some very good things.
2. The production values look rough partly because of how the show was shot. From Wikipedia:
Route 66 shot each episode on location around the country. Writer-producer Stirling Silliphant traveled with location manager Sam Manners to a wide range of locales, and wrote scripts to match the settings. The actors and film crew would arrive some time later. Locations included a logging camp, shrimp boats, an offshore oil rig, Riverside Raceway, and Glen Canyon Dam, the latter while still under construction.
3. Though hit and miss, when everything came together, the show could work beautifully as it did with this classic (again from Wikipedia):
An episode featuring Ethel Waters also guest-starred Juano Hernandez, as well as the fictional five-piece Memphis Naturals band, made up of actors Bill Gunn and Frederick O'Neal and real-life musicians Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, and Jo Jones.
Alias was delightfully shameless about its "locations". They'd have a postcard shot of Istanbul, Beijing, London and then cut to the same back lot warehouse for the action. They didn't even bother dressing the scene, perhaps adding new dumpster.
ReplyDeleteNaked City did a great job with NYC, both culturally and as a backdrop. A lot of NYC historians use its episodes as source material, but the show also did a lot of cultural exploration. There were Chinese restaurants, an authentic Romanian gypsy wedding, bohemian improvisation spaces, ping pong parlors, soup kitchens, fashions shops and a host of other neat stuff. The shows hold up fairly well.
@Brian - Mash was filmed a bit inland from Point Mugu. Our group used aerial photos of that area as fake generic "dry country with hills" for training spy image interpreters.
I've noticed how producers almost always use San Pedro for shots that are supposed to be in San Francisco.
ReplyDeleteAlso I remember how on "Mom," although they're supposedly in Napa, California, their version of the city sure looks a lot like LA. From what I understand, the winemaking town is still rather 'Northern California' with an exurban flavor. But everyone, If that's not true anymore, let me know. (They did, however, use an authentic Napa public bus for a scene once.)
Finally, one of the things I love about Hitchcock's classic "Vertigo" is how some scenes seem almost a virtual tour of the SF-area coastline. Thank God good ol' Alfred apparently didn't skimp on the location shooting for that flick.
I'd like to defend ROUTE 66. Sure, a lot of it was pretentious, but I guess I like some pretentious material, with Sterling Silliphant's scripts for ROUTE 66 and NAKED CITY some of may favorites.
ReplyDeleteOther examples: I also always loved Kirk's impassioned (cheesy?) speeches on the original STAR TREK. More recent pretentious material I like was Aaron Sorkin's work on THE WEST WING, which apparently was set in an alternate universe where everyone is highly educated and can understand the most obscure literary, political, or scientific reference and is always ready with a funny quip.
Popping in to defend Sterling Silliphant, Paddy Chayefsky, and Aaron Sorkin, and, by extension, William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw and Lillian Hellman and and Rod Serling and Herb Gardner and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. If I want to listen to believable talking, I can always hang out in a coffee shop or a hardware store. Turns out, though, that wit is actually in short supply in such places... "Believable" dialogue, so-called, soon becomes boring. Chayefsky practiced it for years, Mamet-like, then wisely gave it up for his firecracker-lighting wordsmithery.
ReplyDeleteOne of the major tricks in dramatic art is in making your characters not real-real, but real enough for the purposes of your story - the balance is all. The handling is important - as Mike Nichols said, "Style is a way of doing everything in a play so that all the things called for by the author can actually happen."
But, friends of Ken, some of this is on the viewer. A story is a vehicle, and you gotta go where it goes to see the sights. If you as a participant in the story won't buy Chayefsky's speeches, you're going to miss what he's got to say, which, especially in "Network," is directly applicable to everything happening in TV and pop culture right this fricking minute. (Read the New York Times's current pieces on Tucker Carlson, for example - right up Paddy's street, and he'd be mad as hell to know how accurate he still is.)
Many Harold Lloyd films have been beautifully restored and part of the pleasure of watching them is noticing details of the LA and NY locations in the 20s.
ReplyDeleteLots of history and highlighting John Bengston in an LA Times article:
Silent-film gold was made in this humble Hollywood alley. But how would you know? There’s no sign
Dave Creek said: "THE WEST WING...apparently was set in an alternate universe where everyone is highly educated and can understand the most obscure literary, political, or scientific reference..."
ReplyDeleteYes, I've always marveled at movie or TV characters who seem to have the perfect quote at the ready for every occasion. "The West Wing" was especially egregious in this regard. President Jed Bartlet would, with appropriate gravity, spout off some obscure quote at a meeting, and after a brief pause, someone else would say "Des Cartes!" and they would all nod at each other, knowingly.
I always think "Damn! I wish I could do that!"
And two of Martin Milner's better roles were: William Castle's "13 Ghosts," and that episode of the Twilight Zone where Vera Miles keeps thinking she has an evil twin running around.
Ethel Water's Emmy nominated appearance on Route 66 "Goodnight Sweet Blues" is available on Tubi and YouTube (with ads) and on Amazon Prime
ReplyDeleteBetty White's early series hold up well: Life with Elizabeth and Date with the Angels are still enjoyable (and White was one of the first women producers).
ReplyDeleteAnother series I really like is the detective show Peter Gunn, very stylish and jazzy.
I tried watching The Flying Nun and thought it would be quirky, but found it repellent somehow. The flying sequences are unsettling and the gimmick is just too weird.
Watching the old television westerns going to recognizable locales such as Vasquez Rocks or Bronson Canyon is always fun to see.
ReplyDeleteOf course, many other types of TV series also filmed at those sites such as Star Trek.
I remember thinking that The High Chaparral was noted for shooting in Arizona for much of its production. They did indeed do so, but I also caught episodes where they were clearly in California outdoor locations. Later read that they had to do that for some episodes as a cost saving measure because it was so expensive to go outside of California and set up a production in other states back then.
As a fan of The Wild, Wild West I enjoyed catching how many times the series utilized the exterior & interior sets of the Barkley Mansion from The Big Valley. TWWW would also use the Dodge City soundstage set from Gunsmoke, as well as Matt Dillon's office and the Longbranch Saloon sets too.
When I was a kid my friends and I loved watching The Man From U.N.C.L.E. We'd play UNCLE agents and run all around our neighborhood doing so.
Many years later I caught a few episodes and realized that while it was a pop cultural phenomena when it first aired in the 1960s, it is now a rather lame, slow moving espionage show that can be rather dull. And don't get me going when they did their third season as a camp-type of show attempting to follow the Batman craze and garner top ratings.
But that's the reality with every TV show from every decade, isn't it? Some will age like fine old wines while other will age like Dorian Gray.
At the risk of a 3rd comment -
ReplyDeleteI've been listening to episodes of Gilbert Gottfried's podcast today.
The first was an interview with Bill Persky, who spoke of going to a wrap party, and the only person who talked to him was Claudine Longet.
And the second was with Drew Friedman where they spoke about Route 66.
(Next is Alan Thicke on Thicke Of The Night and writing for variety specials - the coincidences surely end there)
Too bad the guys on Route 66 didn't have Waze or Google Maps because somewhere along the line they took a hard turn to the east and ended up in Cleveland-----twice!
ReplyDelete"Enucious Finch said...
ReplyDeleteD. McEwan appears to have taken over the comments section. Dang it."
I have? Because I see 62 comments here not written by me. Excuse me if I found the topic interesting. At least I post under my real name, Finch.
"Anonymous Steve Lanzi f/k/a qdpsteve said...
ReplyDeleteFinally, one of the things I love about Hitchcock's classic "Vertigo" is how some scenes seem almost a virtual tour of the SF-area coastline. Thank God good ol' Alfred apparently didn't skimp on the location shooting for that flick."
Sir Alfred Hitchcock LOVED San Francisco, by far his favorite American City. He kept a ranch / vineyard not far from SF where he weekended. He set Vertigo in San Francisco to have an excuse to go shoot there. The Birds starts in SF for the same reason, and though Family Plot is set in an unnamed city, the exteriors were all shot in SF because Hitch loved to go there. He hated shooting on location, but if he must go on location, he preferred to go to SF.
My mom was always tickled that in Minnesota they had mountains in the background on "Little House On The Prairie".
ReplyDeleteD. McEwan: I've always personally found the two most fascinating directors of all time to be Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick. Both of whom demanded and got utter, total, complete control of their films.
ReplyDeleteI've also always found it quite interesting re Vertigo, that the woman (played by Kim Novak) whom Scotty (James Stewart) is so determined to mold into his dream woman, bears such a strong resemblance to... Grace Kelly, whom I've read Hitch was *extremely* upset to have lost as a leading lady. I believe he had a massive unrequited love for Kelly as well.
And then there's the fact that Mr. Hitchcock directed at least one film, *every single year,* from the mid-1920s to 1960 (after Psycho), and that so many of them are stone cold classics. I could almost admire him as a person, were it not for the beastly way he reportedly treated Tippi Hedren.
Finally, I love the legend that once in the 1970s, when someone told him that his earliest films were lost, Sir Alfred replied "good! They were lousy anyway." :-)
I did a foner with Harry Morgan for radio the night of Jack Webb's death. Easy peasy, since I knew all about Dragnet. We did about five minutes. (He told me that Dragnet was all by the numbers, and acting didn't really enter into it. He was not nostalgic about Dragnet or Webb, but he was polite about it.) When we were done, he asked me what my plans were for the evening, since it was New Year's Eve. I told him I was getting together with my girlfriend when my shift was over. "Tell her I said hello!" he said, and so I did.
ReplyDeleteAt least you only get LA used for other towns in the same country.
ReplyDeleteI live in Glasgow which DC now uses as Gotham City (the closing scenes of The Batman were shot in one of the most famous cemeteries), we routinely get used for London, we've been used as Harvard, Philadelphia (the opening sequence of World War Z), Prague (the original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Moscow... I can'r remember the last time I saw something shot here and set here!
"Honest Ed said...
ReplyDeleteAt least you only get LA used for other towns in the same country."
Not actually true. I've seen Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles used as "Mexico" on Perry Mason. The TV version of Mission: Impossible used various LA locations to be foreign countries (Often fictional ones) all over the world. (The whole world has palm trees!) There's an episode where the team is supposed to be clambering around on the roofs of a foreign capital in South America, which would be much more convincing if the Griffith Park Observatory didn't pop up in one ill-aimed shot. They barely managed to keep the Hollywood Sign out of the shot.
Speaking of the Griffith Park Observatory; it's the home of Jor-El on Krypton in the first episode of The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves. So that's not even the same planet!
(I had a great-great grandfather born in Glasgow.)
Another good show for NYC exteriors is Beverly Garland's Decoy from 1957. No Naked City, but a definite sense of place.
ReplyDeleteLet's not forget the settings in space on Star Trek, they said they were in the Delta quadrant, and it is easy to see they were in gamma quadrant.....
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteFOR THE PODCAST
Here's a podcast topic for a "slow week" (when Burghoff won't consent to a tele-interview) - how do various old-time shows "hold up"? That is - the more obscure ones - like those mentioned today.
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all of (James Lileks') prose is colored by his party-line view that America was perfect until 1965 when Civil Rights and Vatican II made us all turn into hippies
I'm a bit too young for that, but was fascinated with Ken's (and George Harrison's, and Patti's) observations of the "real Haight-Ashbury." That, and his Growing Up in the Sixties memoir makes one understand their were a minimum of two 60s-cultures.
George Maharis was one of the "three Georges" Tarantino mentioned in his Hollywood Fable and its novelization. Good to know a little more about the background.
seeing how (My Favorite Martian) holds up.
I liked that show as a kid - saw the pilot on YouTube not so long ago. Interesting how hot a young (14?) daughter of the landlord was for Bill Bixby.
As for "premium services" - I tend to agree those give access to an ocean of $#!T - along with oases of excellence. I just paid $25 to AMC (via Amazon) for the last season of Better Call Saul. WOW, that one is a home-run-derby.
For my money, a great, if not the BEST, cover of Route 66 was made 35-40 years ago by the estimable Manhattan Transfer. About ten years ago my teens and I turned north off I-40 onto US 66 (Kingman, cited in the lyrics). Stopped at a Sonic and was served by a 16-year-old who had never heard the song. I played her the Manhattan Transfer cover. She said the right thing - that she would look for it.
High expectations and budgets.
Kubrick's 2001, according to a late "making of" book, cost $12-13-million of MGM's money 1964-68. No one had "expectations" - save, perhaps, for Kubrick, Clarke, and the production crew. Not even The Man himself expected it would be his only highest-grossing-of-the-year box-office smash,
WAIT! The 'Stones covered Route 66! Checking that out!
@ thirteen
ReplyDeleteWhat's a "foner"?
A "foner" is a telephone interview.
DeleteI feel the same way about "Hawaii Five-O." I grew up in the seventies and feel that reruns are old home movies. Especially since we didn't have a 8mm movie camera like some of my friends.
ReplyDeleteI was watching a 1958 episode of "Decoy" on Amazon Prime, and was stunned to see Beverly Garland and another actress walking out of my Upper East Side co-op!
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