Television
Tertian, Philip
mixed up in his mind, too. The comparison is tempting, even gotten their hooks into us. The Hollywood variety will get their irresistible in certain ways. Each is a spectacular fiasco....
...Marshall's law practice seemed to prosper enjoyed any sort of durable success is Lou Grant, a dramatic extravagantly despite the fact that he paid so little attention to series created from the rib of a comedy...
...PHILIP TERZIAN ITALY'S WRITERS CONFRONT THE RED BRIGADES Terrorism in fiction DESMOND O'GRADY dence in the new government based.on.a...
...Imaghumor, and some of the anarchy and comic genius of the ine, however, the effect this must have on a tender, yet idealisjournalistic life is lost...
...It is, in TV terms, as though Private Doberman tal, and introduced only in ways that satisfied the show's got his own spin-off from the Phil Silvers Show and parlayed it dramatic needs...
...In Lou Grant, the I was speaking about the Hollywood which Joan Didion de- newspaper manages somehow to involve itself in so many scribes in The White Album, a world of motion-picture execu- different matters, and in so many different directions, that the tives who are interested in "deals" rather than in movies...
...At times, however, I wish it weren't so...
...Samuel Goldwyn was wrong, and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, a situation comedy, which spun off message is very clear...
...The fact is that if you have a capable of which are unspeakable...
...In Conrad's novel when Kurtz dies, he mutters, "The horror...
...Lou Grant, have had in mind when he would go on about television's for all its high-mindedness, has a kind of false ring to it that, potential as an educator...
...was money, and Lou Grant is a video testament to the proposiIt has also, in a peculiar way, made television history, but of tion that high-mindedness and dividends do not have to be a purely commercial sort...
...In many respects that is a in its day three other programs: Phyllis a sitcom, Rhoda, wise decision, for it has been done before in different ways, another sitcom, and another one still using the Ted Baxter and frequently with success...
...It is the story in the press releases direct another picture for $1 million tomorrow...
...But he doesn't city editor...
...It is, in its way, a it...
...He was, in his earlier incarnation, cast ideally as the lawyers...
...It was also lucky by choosing the right trade...
...Maybe...
...The symbolism here is just as easily be any kind of assembly-line format...
...No one ever says "scoop" and I so it seems, tackles a fashionable injustice, and the conclurather wish they would...
...pale and private compared with this pubIt was a media event par excellence...
...certain he his the answer to history...
...Apocalypse Now have limited Coppola's choices in life...
...He discourage it...
...into an award-winning dramatic series...
...Here, at last, is a means by which the great goals for tears over the calamities they witness, any more than editors which we have striven can be achieved, and personal notoriety are so consistently impassive, or publishers other-worldly...
...After a time, the effect diminishes...
...Coppola shares Cimino's political straightforward, and varies only as much as stories vary themanalysis that the Vietcong were the cause of all the barbarism selves, which, as any reporter will tell you, is infrequent...
...Lou Grant, I fear, is rather more heavy-handed than that, in Lou Grant, however, was more obviously destined to sucthe way, I suppose, that reporters are less circumspect than ceed...
...It seems that when he came to television drama at the 31st Emmy Awards presentation, is Vietnam, a do-gooder with ideals who helped vaccinate little that it comes closer to genuine newspaper life than any of its children, the \<ietcong chopped off all the children's arms...
...journalism has never enjoyed anything like the professional Lou Grant makes a heroic effort to be credible, and it is popularity it has now, and how.long it will last I don't know, apparent that the producers have spent several afternoons in but television, ever profitable, knows whereof it speaks...
...Lou Grant, in short, lacks a sense of sions, like the presumptions, are painfully predictable...
...be unremitting crusades...
...I doubt, for instance, doubled and then doubled again, the heroes who walked out or that he will be able to continue choosing his own projects...
...in Vietnam and corrupted us American innocents...
...It is the one the war both deserves and demands, the only one that LOU GRANT, SUPERMAN gets beyond the superficialities of Coming Home and The Deer FRONT PAGE ON THE TUBE Hunter...
...I am not at all morose foil to the WJZ news room...
...Each episode was an independent examination of an inde- staggering thought, as though the runt of the litter were to grow pendent subject, and the background of legalism was inciden- into a beauty...
...Clark Kent, it will be recalled, was a mild-mannered chopping block is Coppola himself, for whom a sequence reporter, and his work was customarily a quick and convenient employing a goat might have been more apt...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Reporters are not always on the verge of tic, mind...
...arbitrary and cliche...
...Somehow, I am often reminded character, which lasted, I believe, for one evening...
...To convince us, he defies nature, ignores common sense, and sacrifices our own good opinion 'of him...
...The one likely to find his head on the things...
...climactic writing and printing of the story seems somehow There are of course equivalent people in national politics, and gratuitous, rather like a policeman filling out his report...
...There should also be an idealistic young reporter really mean it, or Coppola doesn't anyway...
...After 55 days the next Red Brigades communique ers if events themselves are 'imprisonment in which there were fre- would arrive as if they and the terrorists shaped like a gripping play with quent messages from Moro himself and were working in harness to keep the specstrong symbolism...
...now he serves as a kind of certain that newspapers should turn themselves into large middle-aged, overweight axis around which the vigorous acconsumer action agencies, or that television programs should tivity revolves...
...Each episode, or self-conscious in its maturity...
...Frankly, some of the casual chaos that used to be thrown into That, after all, comes partly near what General Sarnoff must the station house on Kojak would be in order here...
...He complained that Italian DESMOND O'GRADY is an Australian jour- The Red Brigades, who showed sophisti- novelists, always as "insignificant as nalist and short-story writer living in Rome.cated knowledge of the media, supplied English composers," continued to conCommonweal: 562...
...In Apocalypse Now, Col...
...You cannot do anything with a columnist or Coppola's other partial explanation is a visual one, a se- editorial writer-although the attempt would be well worth quence of the ritual slaughter of a bull which is interspliced watching -and a journey down to the composing room could with Willard's assassination of Kurtz...
...after all, is not necessarily its own reward...
...when former Christian Democrat Prime ridden body was left equidistant between The novelist Albert Arbasino asserted Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped on the Christian Democrat and Communist that Italian fiction writers' concerns were his way to parliament for a vote of confi- party headquarters...
...In these ways Coppola will have to go on acting tries to prove something ridiculous and impossible there...
...The seductive thing about this view, particularly for Coppola himself, is that it makes Apocalypse Now the one movie version of the war to be trusted...
...This was the case his Red Brigades kidnappers, his bullet- tacle alive...
...predecessors, although that may be a mixed blessing...
...series about a metropolitan daily there has to be an ulcerous Kurtz also says "the horror" when he dies...
...Journalists could sense when WHAT IS the effect on fiction writ- ment he had negotiated...
...Just as Americans from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, a sardonic desk thought they could win in Vietnam, Coppola thinks he can man, an avuncular managing editor, etc...
...Realism, Seeing that good wouldn't work, Kurtz then switched to evil...
...The Hollywood variety will get their irresistible in certain ways...
...since Vietnam I think we have all been feeling that they have So, the program is essentially a vehicle for social commen12 October 1979: 561 tary, set in a journalistic background...
...interest whenever it Christian Democrat-Communist agree- declined...
...Lou Grant, whether intentionally or not, fulfills every underBut the upshot of that is that it is almost too slick, too graduate's dream of investigative romance...
...Its implication is preposterous that the I venture to say that Superman had the right approach, and mass-murderer Kurtz is in truth a sacrifice on the altar of Lou Grant comes dangerously close to the same way of doing American policy...
...Coppola was so admiring, so nearly jealous, of Michael The process of gathering and writing news is reasonably Cimino's The Deer Hunter...
...The worked, the inability to predict not only the weather, but the fact is that the self-indulgence and sophistry and plain error of film's own plot...
...In my last column means of switching the action elsewhere...
...What he also had in mind, to be sure, were it not so antiseptic, it could avoid...
...I had heart attacks, the systems with back-up systems (two wouldn't be surprised if he finds it easier to produce other separate musical scores, two narrations) neither of which people's pictures than direct one of his own in the future...
...They In this scenario, Coppola has cast himself as Uncle Sam...
...And the real world researching the sets and observing the activities...
...This is the heart of the darkness, into which none can IRASCIBLE OLD Lou Grant, his sleeves rolled up, tie askew, see...
...He has been boasting defensively only story equal to the one the movie wants to tell is not the since Apocalypse Now opened that he could sign a contract to story in it, but the story of it...
...What, then, to do...
...course, city editors more often than not look very different The message tells us nothing except that there are things man is from that, but it doesn't matter...
...explain everything now...
...But he that turned into dispatches from a disaster, the budget that would have to give up a lot of control...
...Of somewhere in the human spirit which is beyond all restraint...
...He's the part of Uncle Sam...
...America's ruination in Vietnam becomes Television Coppola's in Apocalypse Now...
...comes with it, too...
...It is, of course, a spin-off of the mutually exclusive...
...of The Defenders, which was also on CBS, and ran in the All of them were mediocre, and the only one that has early '60s...
...They have made him is the fellow who makes a vast fortune in nothing flat, then vulnerable to people who finally care little for talent and squanders it all in some jungle half-way around the world...
...lic drama...
...A partial explanation is put in Kurtz's The great virtue ofLou Grant (CBS), which was named best own mouth as an anecdote...
...There have been From this we are supposed to understand how Kurtz came to be very few television programs about newspapers, and that is a genocidal maniac, but all the anecdote really explains is why probably because the opportunities for variety are limited...
...material to rekindle...
...The hooks into Coppola now...
...This imageless one-word message is sent back from is everyone's picture of what a city editor must be like...
...He have compromised and diminished him...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 18
