On Television
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff A Friendly Lynching Only You, Dick Daring, by Merle Miller and Evan Rhodes (Sloane, 350 pp., $5.95) is an account, at once hilarious and sad, of the birth and...
...Television is a behemoth which dwarfs all the rest of our cultural institutions put together...
...How in the world do they get anything done...
...The Culture Consumers, celebrates America's cultural emergence...
...Then the director discovered the harsh splendor of Ibsen and urged Miller to recast the script in the image of Enemy of the People...
...Rosenberg's rapport with the actors...
...It can't be a privileged schoolmaster and a street corner clown at the same time...
...And never more so than this season...
...I see a man in a dusty pickup in the Southwest," he said...
...A series about a county agricultural agent, it had its genesis in a sudden vision that CBS President James Aubrey had...
...And indeed it is...
...One would think he had learned his lesson, but in his own frank admission, greed triumphed once more...
...The man is wearing a Stetson and khaki pants...
...Not very long ago, he was traumatically involved in writing a script about Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian who fought on lwo Jima...
...What nonsense...
...However, he divorces television from the cultural landscape as special and separate...
...At the risk of sounding priggish, one has to summon the industry to its responsibilities...
...And Jackie Cooper pleads with a disheartened Merle Miller: "If you want me to buy you a writer, two writers, the best writers . . ." Finally, that "friendly lynch scene...
...It is their "tastelessness" which is at fault...
...Nor will it do to provide an easy out for the industry as David Karp, the reviewer of this book for the New York Times Book Review tried to do...
...All looked fine for a while—nothing is ever launched in television except in a torrent of endearments and hyperbole...
...At this point...
...He also realized that "you cannot beat the system...
...All these clowns, the vice presidents, pirouette amiably, but in the end there is the brutal slap of power...
...The county agent was to be transformed into a stubborn truthseeker in conflict with the Yahoos of the Southwest...
...Then there is Bob Aurthur, an agile broken field runner, who was aware of the dangers that lurked behind every desk but could only shout muffled signals across a continent...
...At a crucial moment, the director tells Miller that the famous model, Suzy Parker, thought the script was "crap...
...Miller was visited by an executive who suggested that he keep away from the set ("What I'm trying to do is prevent any anger you may feel from getting in the way of Mr...
...The film colony in its palmy days was much easier to hate—and certainly more fun...
...Despite the big money and the lavish expense accounts, the TV tycoons are modest these days, dispensing psychological pieties and protestations of good will...
...Miller's account is nightmarish and funny, frightening and entertaining—far more entertaining, in fact, than most of what one sees on TV...
...A man given to strenuous calisthenics and cryptic utterance and peremptory decision, he dominates one's imagination but never steps out of the shadows...
...Television is, in fact, a bizarre mixture of Ivy League and Hollywood —the blandness of the former and the autocratic exercise of power of the latter...
...His leitmotiv was "You need to get a little continuity in your life," since his own childhood had been deprived in an affluent kind of way...
...But looming above them is James Aubrey, a remote, hieratic figure— the Pope of CBS—who makes all decisions and to whom all heads incline...
...After a good deal of first-hand research in the Southwest, Miller wrote a draft about a small farmer whose crops were infected, which necessitated the burning out of his fields...
...I don't know exactly what he is, but he's not a cop...
...Then there are the vicepresidents, platoons of them, who provide only a coarse comic relief...
...As Merle Miller and Evan Rhodes have overwhelmingly demonstrated, the industry has a knack for vacating them...
...It was not greed alone that propelled Miller into the gaudy precincts of TV...
...Thoroughly weary of novelistic penury...
...Aiming a blow at the elitists in our midst, Alvin Toffler conscientiously tabulates the number of string quartets fiddling away across the land, our burgeoning community theaters, etc...
...you cannot ever beat the system...
...In the end, Jackie Cooper hired writers, behind Miller's back, who changed the script beyond recognition...
...Theirs is a comedy of humors—the successful matriculant in psychoanalysis who exultantly explains that it is no longer necessary for him to be loved by everyone...
...For what remains with the reader is not a sense of Machiavellian egos lunging for the main chance but of scared organization men working at cross-purposes and spending much of their time flying to meetings whose only result is to send them to the other coast...
...Only You, Dick Daring reads like a comedy...
...A TV executive sloganizes as he charges into a conference: "When a nation goes to war, it doesn't balance its budget...
...There was Jackie Cooper, boy movie star turned into middle-aged tycoon, who was eager to restore the glories that were his with Hennesey...
...But it also has the dimensions of a national tragedy...
...But beneath the gags and the self-pity and self-laceration, there is a hard-boiled anatomizing of failure...
...Television can't have it both ways...
...There is merely silence or sly indirection or just disengagement, with Miller left languishing in a Kafkaesque limbo until even he—the eternal boy scout—caught on and went back East...
...So Miller's script is never rejected in a clearcut way...
...The projected program, Calhoun, appealed to his essential do-goodism...
...The county agent, of course, had a role to play in these proceedings...
...This is the way TV empires are made...
...Nothing is more calculated to create jitters and creative paralysis than such a Byzantine arrangement...
...or the executive who compulsively discourses on what a pilot is ("In the first thirty seconds, the pilot should go like this, 'Fifty thousand murderous Berbers are headed toward Cairo, and only you, Dick Daring, can stop them...
...A television writer himself, Karp laid all the blame at the feet of the people who watch TV...
...Written from the agonized "inside," it provides a view of the world of television which excites not so much indignation as wonder...
...Miller also entertained the naive notion that he could write something serious and socially useful...
...The old sycophancy has given way to a new, trickier sycophancy...
...He was forever telling Miller how much he loved his script —all 19 variants of it—and forever ordering him to get his "little duff" out to California...
...It is, in fact, a committee at the mercy of a supreme potentate: Aubrey in this case...
...A wistful yearner (and a born loser...
...Still, this is 1964, and the executives have read their manuals...
...Cooper's and Mr...
...Merle Miller is best known as a novelist (Reunion, A Day in Late September) who has taken an occasional plunge into TV amid the loud splintering of his own psyche...
...he doesn't carry a gun...
...But Miller did not reckon with his associates, as loving and slippery a group of cutthroats an innocent writer ever had to cope with...
...A pilot, it was patiently explained to him, was a sure-fire way to make a great pile of money...
...Cooper emerges as neither hero nor villain but as just another scared star...
...Miller capitulated to the pilot packagers...
...A recent book...
...What happened, of course, is that the original conception went through countless modifications, the pilot script through endless revisions...
...Before the final debacle, these are some of the things that were seriously proposed: First, someone suggested that there be "a friendly lynch scene...
...TV, as described here, is not merely the horrors of the committee system...
...This is an important book because it scrupulously documents the evisceration of what might have been a worthwhile program, a kind of prairie East Side/West Side...
...As a concluding fillip, there was a market researcher (with a PhD, no doubt) who announced that there should have been a dog in the pilot to enhance its audience appeal...
...Miller finally saw the pilot and discovered "there was nothing to move, enlighten, enlarge, or entertain anyone...
...It is marred somewhat by a certain nervous quippiness, almost a tic in Miller's prose...
...This was creativity by committee, and nothing can be more maddening...
...ON TELEVISION By David Boroff A Friendly Lynching Only You, Dick Daring, by Merle Miller and Evan Rhodes (Sloane, 350 pp., $5.95) is an account, at once hilarious and sad, of the birth and death of a television pilot...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 25
