On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television YEAR OF THE MINIS BY MARVIN KITMAN Lace, ABC's five-hour minise-ries based on the popular novel of the same name by Shirley Conran, was shown the evenings of February 26-27. It told...
...As much as I may poke fun at miniseries based on novels by literary masters like Conran, Krantz and Sheldon, they are far better than the shows television usually offers...
...The story, written brilliantly and single-handedly by William Hanley, began witharape...
...It was such an intriguing puzzle that I forgot to watch the DuPont Journalism Awards on public TV that night...
...Kate was surrounded by mansions, masterpieces, men, and money, money, money...
...With the help of my local librarian, and Karl Meyer—a former Washington correspondent for The New Leader and TV critic elsewhere, who has turned to a life of crime as an editorial writer for the New York Times —I have compiled a guide...
...Sidney Sheldon's shoes are as difficult to fit as Cinderella's...
...Nothing happened...
...Sidney Sheldon is one of those modern novelists who seem to write directly for miniseries...
...He should have been grateful that mama gave him an empire as a toy...
...Master of the Game was a breakthrough work for Sheldon...
...The story must kick into gear in the first 30 minutes," otherwise the audience is gone," notes a network official...
...They do two types of fiction—either the five-hour novel (The Rage of Angels) or the nine-hour novel (Master of the Game...
...Each lasts about 12 minutes, and has a beginning, a middle and an end...
...The opening 30 minutes, however, did pile it on...
...Actually, prime-time TV this season has been like a lending library...
...I still don't understand why Lacewas so successful...
...Nobody ever went too far wrong overestimating the taste of America's audience, if I may quote are reliable authority (one of my columns in The New Leader...
...There will be a lot of "he said...
...A JL...
...She was rich, although somehow she couldn't afford a comb for the mess on her head...
...If it isn't already true, the modern novel as taught in college creative writing courses will soon be lighter on interior monologue than Melville's, but heavier on dialogue...
...It violated all the rules for miniseries success...
...But he was a rotten artist...
...On the tube, author Sidney Sheldon is a far bigger novelist than Renata Adler...
...That made the show sound extraordinary...
...or use some other literary conventions of our electronic age...
...Ali McGraw and Robert Mitchum were not the biggest stars on earth when they were cast for The Winds of War...
...Around the throat is the best place to do the grabbing...
...How this was to be done anatomically is a how-is-it puzzle for gynecologists...
...Having only nine hours to play with, perhaps the producers ran out of time...
...But what the heck...
...Opening night it even crushed CBS' Star Wars...
...Even Sheldon's characters have trouble doing that...
...Conversely, TV miniseries could have page numbers in the corner of the screen...
...God knows...
...But my urge was tempered by the knowledge that they might doit...
...You can call most TV movies the rape-of-the-week...
...Every playlet has to build to a climax before the commercial break...
...Then it doesn't matter that an Ali McGraw or Robert Mitchum can't act...
...And they weren't allowed to see each other's segments...
...The three installments were so disconnected that you might think they were written by different people...
...You can see the tremendous skill involved as you watch the fiction being dramatized in our age of the minis...
...Back in the late 1960s, oneof them had gotten pregnant and all three decided to have the baby together...
...Master of the Game, I gather from reliable sources, was really the story of how a make-up man managed to turn Dyan Cannon into an 80-year-old woman named Kate Blackwell in a mere six hours on TV (the last two parts...
...The cast should be able to make the cover of People magazine look different that week...
...J^ n example of a miniseries that really worked was Celebrity, NBC's six-hour job based on Tommy Thompson's novel, presented February 12,13 and 14...
...Consider just a few of the literary gems that have been put on the racks, so to speak...
...A friend of mine also watched Master of the Game...
...But she didn't know who her mother was...
...I wanted to know who the mother was...
...In a few years, novelists will probably add directions like "dolly in" or "pan to," by way of helping the reader visualize the story...
...Its nine hours spread over three nights made it almost twice as important as the five-hour Lace...
...What was everybody else's excuse...
...Maybe the attraction was Phoebe Cates, the unknown actress with the gorgeous legs who conducts the search for Mom...
...Richard Chamberlain has played 50 roles this season alone, or so it seems...
...Using the imagination, after all, is the point of fiction...
...But that's my job...
...First, you can have performers the public is curious about...
...This is a very hard form of writing, like haiku...
...There was Judith Krantz' Princess Daisy on NBC for six hours last November...
...It didn't seem psychologically plausible either...
...In Celebrity's opening half hour, though, not only did the rapee die during the act—she passed out from sheer pleasure, claims one of three loathsome high school buddies—but there was also some further mayhem that left one buddy dead and a second comatose...
...Part I introduced a far-fetched story (it was set in South Africa, in contrast to the nearfetched Rage of Angels, set in America) about the founding of a family fortune...
...Here, then, are "America's Not Yet Discovered for Prime Time Novelists": * Jack London * Saul Bellow * Willa Cather * Upton Sinclair * Thomas Wolfe * Ernest Hemingway * James Baldwin * John Dos Passos * William Dean Howells * JohnO'Hara * Erskine Caldwell * William Faulkner * James Fenimore Cooper * Carson McCullers * Norman Mailer * John P. Marquand * Sherwood Anderson * Donald Barthelme * Nathanael West * James T. Farrell The list, of course, is incomplete...
...she said...
...I have to confess, though, that even I was in the audience this time...
...As an exercise in self-persecution she watched it all the way through the credits ending Part III...
...Conran's novel was not exactly Freud's Interpretation of Sexuality...
...The longest mini this year was Master of the Game...
...They're all big stories, whose 3,500 interacting characters include: 300 sexpots, 175 doctors, 90 priests, 250 good-natured prostitutes, 75 ruthless killers, 600 millionaires, 360 resentful butlers and maids, 210 oil magnates, 275 high-fashion models, and an assortment of confused teen-agers...
...The mystery there: Which of three girls at a finishing school in the Alps was the mother of Lili...
...That's not so new...
...Everyone was down on Kate for manipulating her son'slife...
...It didn't have a compelling cast or a great story...
...It was so bad that the deaf people watching it close-captioned stuffed cotton in their eyes...
...LeeLee, to borrow the television French much in use in the production, was determined to find out which of three women gave birth to what Angela Lansbury called "the beebee," and vowed to destroy her .This was some ungrateful child...
...For six hours a gorgeous lady lawyer had affairs with Presidential hopefuls and emerging Mafia capos, gave birth to an illegitimate child, and still managed to spend a full day in court...
...It just goes to show you can't satisfy kids...
...And there was Sidney Sheldon's Master of the Game, a nine-hour affair aired by CBS on February 19, 20 and 21...
...It told the story of Lili, a poor little 17-year-old orphan with an identity crisis...
...The source of the wealth was diamonds, a welcome change from the oil glut on TV...
...Miniseries generally have big-name actors, too...
...It consists of a series of short plays, or playlets...
...Still, they were movie actors who rarely appear on TV...
...There are two ways to make a hit min-iseries...
...it was totally pointless...
...I continue to be amazed at how television takes a bad book and, by spending $10 million or $20 million dollars, turns it into a bad miniseries...
...You are invited to play the new parlor game, too...
...For the next five-and-a-half hours, as I sat watching the cassettes on my VCR, I kept wondering who was wrapped up...
...The great books onTV are starting to run together in my little brain...
...If the plot is sensational enough, people will fall in love with the characters...
...The sultry French porn-film queen (or is it princess...
...It's no accident, I'm sure, that Lace was a who-is-it...
...In Part II, the plot established the previous night was totally abandoned...
...The second way to make a hit mini is to have a great story...
...The first of his works to be dramatized, The Rage of Angels, was seen on NBC last year by more people than ever saw Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, either the novel or the whale...
...That is what I call a gripping start...
...He was wrapped up like a mummy and yelled at by Hal Holbrook for playing possum...
...I'm surprised that Sheldon's publisher doesn't sell commercials at the bottom of his paragraphs...
...Rage of Angels was possibly the dullest show in the history of video tape as well...
...Celebrity may have marked the start of a new genre: To the whodunit we now seem to have added the who-is-it...
...A miniseries with the usual TV names—Sharon Gless, Barry Bostwick, Morgan Fairchild, Richard Thomas—is in trouble right away...
...I kept waiting for a new story line or a bit of character development...
...Lace proved to be a monster hit in the ratings...
...A miniseries, whether it is four or 18 hours long, must grab you in that first half-hour...
...Some have complained of an intellectual bubonic plague...
...She had a strong urge to call up CBS to " ask them to explain it to me...
...had everything—fame, good looks, good reviews ("That whore can really act...
...It was supposed to be a treat, like visiting the International House of Pancake Makeup...
...So there are, in effect, 18-20 climaxes in two or three nights...
...It didn't make the cover of People with a cast headed by Ben Masters, Jeff Beck and Joseph Bottoms...
...While watching the latest Sheldon, it occured to me that maybe the TV executives who buy these properties have not heard of some of the other novelists whose work could be made into minis...
...They could also write in pauses for an "ABC News Brief," brought to you by the ink company or paper mill...
...You would be right—three writers received credit...
...It's a two-way street...
...Ditto for Part III...
Vol. 67 • March 1984 • No. 5
