In Praise of Warlords
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television IN PRAISE OF WARLORDS BY MARVIN KITMAN When I first heard the news that the blockbuster opening event of the 1980-81 TV season would be a 12-hour Japanese movie without subtitles...
...Before Silverman)—by Paul Klein, the prior head of programing and a man of literary taste...
...Indeed, some of the fights looked like Pearl Harbor newsreel scenes...
...I don't know a single reader whose paperback Shogun hasn't physically ended in shreds and tatters...
...The really exciting thing about Shogun is that it proves the networks don't have to program down to the audience anymore...
...My final comment on the pre-Shogun buildup was: Rots of ruck, NBC...
...There also was John Belushi's samurai series on the same network's Saturday Night Live: samurai delicatessen store owner, samurai accountant, samurai Saturday night fever, and plain samurai...
...In fact, Shogun was wonderful precisely because it was completely foreign and strange...
...1 have put it down and picked it up again many times the last two years it has been in paper...
...I don't remember their names, but what great faces they had...
...Oh, oh, I thought, and I didn't mean Johnny Oh, Japan's leading home run hitter...
...Then he makes it again and again...
...She found it fascinating, as does everybody who can get into it...
...NBC now could even get away with producing a show based on Parkman's History of the Oregon Trail...
...Instead of literally tens of people being interested in a quality show that demanded attention, curiosity and mental activity, apparently the number was closer to 60-70 million and embraced many folks out there in Peoria...
...They play hard ball in Japan, I tell you...
...Nor was the fact that half the show was in Japanese as much of a problem as I had imagined...
...First, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan cost him the Olympics, which he also had nothing to do with buying...
...The novel by James Clavell that it was all based on is one of these paperbacks the size of the telephone directory (1,100 pages...
...It's a credit by association industry...
...In the book, Clavell makes his point about Japanese society struggling to cope with the influence of the West...
...It had an unhurried quality, in sharp contrast to the usual bang-bang pace of most American shows...
...So Uncle Freddie is back in the ball game...
...They can explain lifestyles slowly enough for your average moron like myself to understand them...
...One beheading, I discovered from Shogun, is sufficient to carry you through 20 minutes of lethargic plot...
...Soon I found myself willing to pay anything, even subscribe to cable, for some special service that would tell me exactly what was happening...
...What showmanship...
...In other words, Richard Chamberlain gets pillowed, no doubt to the amusement of insiders out there in the Big Orange (Los Angeles...
...In September, NBC was forced to present the Emmies without the winners (all the actors boycotted the show, except for one ego-maniac...
...Although the goings on in the East remained inscrutable, NBC's motives in buying such a complicated book became very scrutable...
...Somehow I can't see him reading a book, let alone Clavell's monster...
...Starting off the season with a $22 million Berlitz course takes a man of courage, like a kamikaze attack...
...Did someone up there at NBC really believe the folks in Peoria were ready for five nights in a row (September 15-20) of Shogun, featuring a horde of Japanese actors who couldn't speak a word of English and had names that sounded like sushi ingredients...
...Think of all the people who go to Chinese and Japanese restaurants," my wife explained...
...After all, they had managed to sell the American people Japanese cars on TV...
...Maybe I was living on a different planet...
...Richard Chamberlain was the fourth or fifth choice for the part of the English hero...
...Was this my American people that Uncle Freddie, the quintessential professional television executive, the merchant of schlock, was programing for...
...But even Chamberlain wasn't all that bad as the swashbuckling pilot-navigator who becomes a samurai warrior—considering that the role might have gone to Lee Majors or Erik Estrada or some other TV lichee nut...
...It may have been an advantage...
...It's even an act of friendship...
...Literally...
...Television's previous major contribution to our understanding of Japanese culture was last season's Pink Lady and Jeff, an NBC variety program of which Freddie Silverman was inordinately fond and probably the only viewer...
...But such is the nature of the TV business that Uncle Freddie would get all the credit, or blame, for Shogun...
...Perhaps because it had nothing else to write about during the actors strike that delayed most of the new season (Shogun was one of the few productions completed before the work stoppage) the press tried to make the whole enterprise seem plausible...
...My own estimate was that literally tens of people had been waiting for a mini-series about Japanese feudal society in the 17th century, starring Richard Chamberlain in his best role since he played a begonia...
...The novel falls apart at the end, though...
...Well, maybe Uncle Freddie's...
...That most popular of all TV mini-series had been bought by Martin Starger, who subsequently jumped or fell from power as head of ABC TV...
...But so much for the conventional wisdom...
...Despite all the hoopla about Uncle Freddie's contract being extended in August, he was more than on thin ice at NBC...
...The novel had been purchased in 1977 B.S...
...Modesty prevents me from mentioning all the sex that took place in Shogun starting the third night...
...The way things were going.it looked like there would be another baseball strike right before the World Series...
...Sumo wrestling is next, if I know my Roone Arledge...
...I couldn't tell who was who in a three-sided struggle among the warlords and bandits...
...The gardens and houses gave me ideas for my summer place in the Hamptons—and I don't even have one yet...
...Here was this guy Chamberlain in Japan, unable to understand what anyone was saying to him...
...It's a book they say you can't put down...
...1 could put it down...
...This was when the show got a little confusing...
...he was on a banana peel...
...His administration had been the equivalent of a great books course, buying and making mini-series of Brave New World, Martian Chronicles, 79 Park Ave., Aspen, and Wheels...
...This would have been especially useful in the last scene the second night, when the villagers were told that if Chamberlain did not learn bad Japanese in six months, the warlord was going to burn their village down—after crucifying all the men and women...
...That the ratings for the first night of Shogun beat out ABC's Monday Night Football did not surpise some authorities...
...At this very moment, though, the TV executives—Uncle Freddie included—are probably poring over the results of the incredible experiment, trying to find out what happened so that they can make sure it never happens again...
...The second installment featured an arrow in the neck, shot without warning out of the darkness and precipitating a series of battle scenes...
...But a beheading is not merely meant to keep you awake...
...Shogun, I believed, was going to do for Silverman's career what Pearl Harbor did for General Short and Admiral Kimmel's...
...Bill...
...Still, if it doesn't have red fabric with gold flocking, it's not authentically "oriental" to many Americans...
...Luck-wise, as they say on Madison Avenue, Uncle Freddie had been having a bad couple of years since leaving ABC for NBC...
...More than Roots in 1977, Shogunv/as a blow for good programing...
...It was the last of the ninth inning, with two out, and he had Shogun coming to the plate...
...My expectations thus were somewhat off the mark...
...Thepmovie turned out to be fantastic, one of the best American-made television productions ever...
...It's part of the Japanese code of honor, I learned, and the best thing that can happen to you, along with dying in general...
...They call it "pillowing," and it's a normal healthy thing, like taking a hot bath...
...The mini-series got 47 percent of the audience on opening night (anything higher than 30 per cent is a success), and continued building all week...
...Of course, it occurred to me that I could be wrong...
...When you commit hara-kiri, you invite your best friend to finish the job...
...A barrage of stories appeared on how authentic the series would be, on the shooting locations, on the historians consulted...
...Anyway, it was all bloodless on the screen, like the violence on Mr...
...He happened to be in the right place at the right time when Roots, a similarly daring experiment, opened on ABC in 1977...
...But 1 did spend a week this summer, in preparation for the big TV event of the season, watching my wife read it...
...This violated all the rules, particularly TV's first commandment: "You can never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people...
...The samurai warlords chopped heads with all the effort you might take turning the dial...
...Just as you were preparing to doze off on the metaphorical mat, a man's head would be lopped off...
...You've never seen such mean, angry dudes, and without the obvious expressions that usually pass for acting on TV...
...Nevertheless, I must admit that I was expecting a special edition of Live at Five (the big news show at NBC's affiliate in New York), with Uncle Freddie saving face by committing hara-kiri on camera, a TV first...
...They can do quality stuff...
...I was puzzled as well by the machine guns on the sampans...
...On Television IN PRAISE OF WARLORDS BY MARVIN KITMAN When I first heard the news that the blockbuster opening event of the 1980-81 TV season would be a 12-hour Japanese movie without subtitles it seemed like the most incredible experiment in the history of prime-time programing...
...Shogun played it like it was...
...For a television show it was a genuine mental challenge—complex, provocative, always keeping you wondering what was going to happen next...
...He had to be the first samurai TV mogul...
...It was not the 600 years of Japanese history, politics, and economics that the network was interested in, it was the sex and violence...
...That, as my wife explained, is how you get a book to run 1,100 pages...
...A new day could be dawning for television, like Japan opening to the West in the 1600s...
...The producers had Sean Con-nery or Albert Finney in mind...
...It was difficult enough for Chamberlain to keep up his fake British accent...
...The Japanese actors were very strong...
...they might sell us Japanese history, too...
...Actually, Uncle Freddie had as much to do with Shogun being at NBC as I did...
...Being in the same boat made it easier to appreciate his position...
...There were long walks down pebbled paths that captures the Japanese lifestyle...
...Even the serenity was deceptive...
...Shot in Japan by Andrew Laszlo, it was lavish and beautiful to look at...
Vol. 63 • October 1980 • No. 18
