MUCH IN LITTLE

...These actually reinforce conventions which were subjects of attack and ridicule in the polemical Depression dramas that figure so prominently in the genealogy of the new, intimate realism of television...

...The historical fact, however, is that certain practicalities eventuated in certain forms...

...A writer may believe that he is eavesdropping—a strangely apposite idea in an era of superbly managed and recorded invasions of privacy...

...But television writers who succeed know when to stop short of insistence upon self-expression, in a medium wherein no man's work is only his own, and every man's best work runs just so long as there is time—that has been manufactured, packaged, and marketed as the most precious merchandise there is...

...But whereas the latter film focused upon distinctive characters in marshaling its arguments against the idea of the impartiality of the jury system, Twelve Angry Men manipulates men who are types, each exemplifying ambiguities of motivation recognizable as part of social scientific typology...

...Chayefsky's explanations of his characterizations are permeated by the mystique of psychoanalysis—what he himself calls "the primitive Freudian explanations of our relationships to each other...

...Here it may be appropriate to add that the preponderance in television plays of performers who, like Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger, profess the "method" or Actors' Studio style of conceiving and projecting their roles, is hardly accidental...

...Curiously, Rose less than a year afterwards made what amounts to another version of the same story, Dino, in which the picture of the young rebel was somewhat softened, and that of the other adolescents a little less caricatured— apparently because Rose has discovered the Rogers "non-directive" approach to guidance, and makes the social worker a successful practitioner thereof...

...Television plays, for all their happy endings, often seem to accentuate the seamy or at best the unembroidered, ordinary situations of life, in which the actors behave like elaborately mannered role-players in a clinical psychodrama or sociodrama...

...Curiously, it is the satisfied Serling who has written the most profoundly cynical of the shows and films treating big business from the inside: Patterns...

...But they're understandable limitations—and television is only seven years old as a mass medium...

...But they may be seen, too, as complementary or even determinant conditions of the deliberate simplification of themes and treatments...

...Each, moreover, is informed throughout by principles of depth psychology and sociology exemplifying the subtly integral relationship of the form and content of television realism to the operational philosophy, the psychoanalytical orientation, and the case approach of modern social science...

...even so, it is typically simplified down to the most rudimentary elements...

...Discussing The Mother and Marty, he says "I tried to write the dialogue as if it had been wiretapped...

...The stage is too weighty, and the movies too intense, to deal with the mundane and all its obscured ramifications...

...Sure it has limitations...

...Moreover, the Actors' Studio itself, particularly through its leading spirits, Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan, stems directly from the old Group Theater, of the Depression days of social consciousness and the proletarian drama of Clifford Odets...

...When they do, it is because of a special theory of realism, that seeks to portray "the most identifiable characters and the most commonplace situations,'' as Chayefsky says...

...In the opinion of Rod Serling, author of Patterns and The Rack, ". . . of all the entertainment media TV lends itself most beautifully to presenting a controversy...

...Each focuses upon the "small story," and stresses the "meticulous literalness" that Chayefsky regards as the essence of dramatic honesty—and that appears to be the ideal of the television school of realism...

...Society," moreover, is ultimately blamed for the individual acts of those who collaborated in Korea, for not preparing them for their ordeal—while little credit is given anyone, whether individual or hypostatized collectivity, for the behavior of those who did not...

...Both stage and screen, according to Chayefsky, must contrive to be theatrical—hence removed from "reality"—by focusing upon "extraordinary incident" and "exceptional characters...

...Nor is it by any means unquestionable that the particular, recognizably distinctive methods of television drama are those absolutely necessitated by the nature of the medium, and that others are inconceivable...

...Then there is the peculiar television emphasis upon the "small story," the deliberately limited compass, that reinforces the former idea according to technical and economic necessities of the medium...

...The criterion is "meticulous literalness," by which "this marvelous world of the ordinary" may be probed...

...Enlarging the view within the elaborated format of the theatrical motion picture, however, reveals how easily the typical "small story" may vanish into trivia, or appear as exaggerately microscopic...

...Sure it sells soap...

...There is no sense, moreover, of the "small story" being in any way fragmentary or incomplete...

...Television drama, in fact, is held able to reach a qualitative completeness in its representation of actuality only rarely achieved on the stage or in the movies...

...It is not difficult to associate these men as members or representatives of a "school," if for no other consideration than that of their general adherence to what have become characteristic television forms of dramatic production...

...Were there no television, with its endless demands for material, most of these writers would be scrambling to compete in overcrowded markets and turning out work unrepresentative of their talents, or, faced with meeting the economic needs of their families, they would be forced into other fields...

...In Serling's play, The Rack, which was made into a rather fragmentary film, the young officer on trial for collaborating with the enemy in Korea is explained, if not justified, as someone starved for affection since the death of his mother, and denied the overt expressions of love by his father, a Regular Army colonel...

...However, the sense of engagement, of the writer's vocation to express himself in the cause of social betterment, acquires a special temper of bourgeois respectability within the arrant commercialism of the new medium...

...The boy's problem is even further simplified by making his younger brother an apprentice hoodlum, anxious to emulate him—and by the admission of the civilizing influence, or therapy, of a nice, quiet, romantic girl...

...These choices are superlatively revealing, as it is obvious that the theory of drama being expressed is related to the idea of proletarian realism which Miller revived in the 1940s, and to the neo-realism of the Italian film makers...

...But most significant of all may be the pervasive philosophy based upon the topical verities of modern social science—exhibiting the relatively unheralded function of the mass media as popularizing forces, for good or ill, of the continuing scientific enlightenment...

...There is a sharpening of the basic argument, in which the members of a jury panel are shown to have brought their personal biases to their consideration of the charge of murder against a young boy of an unspecified minority group...

...A program must engage viewers at once, and maintain their commitment throughout...

...An improvement over the original is also evident in Rose's film of his play, Twelve Angry Men...

...Much in Little by MARTIN S. DWORKIN IF AUDIENCE size is the measure, the leading dramatists of our day are a group of writers whose work was first conceived for presentation on television, and then transcribed to the movies: Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, Rod Serling...

...This is an age of savage introspection, and television is the dramatic medium through which to expose our new insights into ourselves...

...In practice, this pursuit of the dramatized ordinary as reality contravenes itself, as Chayefsky's own best work happily illustrates, succeeding as drama the more it fails as mere reproduction...

...The "TV format," to be sure, did not develop in any small-screen vacuum, without relation to older forms of radio, cinema, and stage presentation...

...In a writers' magazine four years ago, Rod Serling made it clear that for him, "TV writing is satisfying...

...However an artist may theorize about how he wishes to approach closer and closer to what he calls "reality," it is a vision of the real he seeks, and his very seeking is an act of personal creation, not duplication...

...The film may be compared to the French Justice Is Done, which similarly analyzed the motives of a panel of jurors in a murder trial...

...The indictment of society, and the exoneration of individuals on the grounds of psychological and sociological explanations of motivation, is carried to extremes of rhetorical exaggeration by Reginald Rose...

...A new school of serious writers has sprung up in the past few years," avers Reginald Rose, author of Crime In The Streets, and Twelve Angry Men, "writers with much that is important and revealing to say about the social patterns of our times...

...The reality principle of the television realists, Chayefsky, Rose, Ser-ling—and the large group of others who follow them if for no other reason than to emulate success in a commercial medium—may then be seen as a synthesis of three elements...

...But the deadliest danger is that of oversimplification, in whatever service of a worthy cause—especially when it may be so glibly informed by so persuasive a scientific ideology, while at the same time being so industrially practical, and commercially successful...

...The situation may be conceived to epitomize a complex problem...

...For example, that television audiences are not rooted to their chairs, and can instantaneously flick programs into being or into oblivion, has made for a kind of video existentialism...

...But it's the same soap sold in magazine ads opposite slick stories...

...It's an art form that has borrowed from radio, from movies, from the legitimate stage...

...The issues of responsibility and justice are never really stated clearly, although the film is dramatic and finely wrought, but are erased in the exaggerated relativism of the depiction of the characters...

...Television writers, in fact, have often commented upon what they regard as the advantages of the contracted compass in which they work...

...There is the idea that the real is to be found in "the marvelous world of the ordinary," that continues what is now a lengthy tradition of politically conscious naturalism, developing especially in the theater of the Depression and the documentary and neo-realist cinema...

...His three best-known plays, later made into films, Marty, The Catered Affair, and The Bachelor Party, may be seen as a kind of cycle celebrating the institutions of courtship and marriage among working people of the cosmopolitan city...

...In Crime in the Streets, which also was made into a film, in 1956, Rose perpetuated the now common, extreme "social delinquency" approach to juvenile crime, confusing explanations and justifications, presenting pathological violence as merely misguided adolescent behavior, portraying the all-too conventional characters of this genre: the bitter, violent young rebel, his younger brother, his confused and helpless parents, and the ever-present, ever-reliable social worker...

...Such a theory of realism comes to dramatic writing, directing, and acting from ideologies of art, politics, and psychology which have in common a profound, if masked distrust of personality as unique, idiosyncratic, and comically or tragically splendid...

...To do this, the situation of the characters is almost always immediately given, and their personalities developed consequently...

...The lonely young men of Marty, for example, are held to exemplify the prevalence among Americans of "latent homosexuality", and the "Oedipus complex...

...Paddy Chayefsky, speaking of his plays The Mother and Marty as good examples of "proper television material," says that each ". . . tells a small story about a familiar character and pursues this small story with relentless literalness to one small synthesized moment of crisis...

...The idea of much in little—the classical multum in parvo—that distinguishes the theory and manner of television realism, has much more to recommend it than any easy reasoning of technical considerations or studio economics...

...Devices such as the consistent use of close-ups, long takes without the rapid shifting of camera viewpoint characteristic of movie montage, or the use of simple sets on which as few persons as possible can be placed and moved, are obvious responses to the technical and economic practicalities of the medium...

...I tried to envision the scenes as if a camera had been focused upon the unsuspecting characters and had caught them in an untouched moment of life...

...You can take just a part of the problem, and, using just a small number of people, get your point across...

...Chayefsky says that "the closest thing t6 reality" he ever saw on the stage was Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and, on the screen, De Sica's The Bicycle Thief...

...The good, the true, and the beautiful may still draw them on and on...

...To begin with, the analytical emphasis of the Stanislavsky, Moscow Art Theater style of "naturalism," from which the "method" derives, developed in the same late Victorian movement of seeking under surfaces that saw the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis...

...But if the characters he is listening to are convincingly genuine, what he hears is the more authentically created as it is perceived as true and communicated as real...

...And it is the dedicated realist, Chayefsky, so acutely conscious of the "savage introspection" of the age, who has devoted himself most consistently to comedies of customary affirmation...