What hath George Clooney wrought?
Several weeks after Clooney used his star clout to get the drama “Fail Safe” broadcast live — in black and white on national television — entertainment-industry trade publications have already reported plans for two other live dramas. One is on CBS with Julie Andrews as the star; the other is on HBO with Glenn Close as co-executive producer. Other projects are in the talking stages.
Optimists see this as the glimmer of a possible second Golden Age of television. More likely it’s just the latest in reality programming. Bored with seeing attractive young people on MTV’s “Real World” work out their emotional problems on camera? Not thrilled enough about the prospect of strangers voting one another off a desert island near Borneo while the whole world watches in CBS’ “Survivor”? Instead you can watch actual famous people put themselves in potentially embarrassing situations and hope for the worst.
“Maybe somebody will make a mistake; that’s half of the appeal,” says Jeff Kisseloff, the author of “The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920-61.” “It’s just a gimmick. It’s not the Golden Age of television.”
The potential for disaster seems to interest the press. Articles about “Fail Safe” referred to the show’s being broadcast three hours later on the West Coast, “mistakes and all,” and asked producers to comment on what would happen if an actor forgot a line or tripped over a wire. The answer: We’ll just keep going. Much like the actors appearing on stages across the country on any given night. Theater actors are full of stories about losing their place or their pants or their props and riffing their way through. Now there’s excitement.
The same sort of fascination also works its way into possibly apocryphal stories about those live television plays in the 1950s: the night the corpse didn’t realize the camera was still on him and got up and walked away, for instance. But the energy of those shows didn’t come only from immediacy.
“In the old days they were flying by the seat of their pants,” says Kisseloff. To compare broadcasting a live television play in 2000 to doing one 45 or 50 years ago is, he says, “like getting into an airplane and thinking you’re taking the same risks as Orville and Wilbur Wright.” The people working in television in the 1950s were, he says, “young and talented and excited — everything that this is not.”
Ron Simon, curator of television at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, couldn’t agree more. “There were new voices and original scripts, creating a voice and a mood for television, creating a whole language,” he says. “There was a whole community of technical people” thrilled to be specializing in a brave new field like television.
As Simon points out, there was Fred Coe, the producer — legendary within the television industry — who nurtured writing talents like Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote and Gore Vidal. The teleplays they created were largely, he says, about “contemporary life in the ’50s.” “Marty,” for instance, the 1953 television play written by Chayefsky, was not just about an unmarried young butcher with a possessive mother and no ideas for what to do on Saturday night, but about the transition from “tradition to modern values,” from prewar to postwar thinking. “Fail Safe” — which starred Richard Dreyfuss, Brian Dennehy, Harvey Keitel and Noah Wyle — was based on a 1964 movie and dealt with the Cold War anxieties of the early ’60s.
The next big live network drama is also an adaptation of an older work, although its concerns are less specifically tied to a particular era. CBS is set to do a live broadcast in late fall of “On Golden Pond,” which most people know as the 1981 film starring Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda. Julie Andrews will star as the devoted wife of a physically frail retired college professor, helping him through the terrors of aging. The roles of her husband and their angry, alienated daughter, Chelsea, are still to be cast.
Craig Anderson, who directed the original stage play by Ernest Thompson (first at the Hudson Guild Theater, then on Broadway in the late ’70s), is directing the television version. He is doing it, he says, just because it’s a challenge.
“This is an opportunity to mix my two lives,” says Anderson, referring to his live theater work and his career as a television producer. “There aren’t any rules.”
At least that’s a Golden Age attitude. Anderson is considering using a turntable set, which would move as the actors walk, and hopes to “invent some new cameras” designed for the dual demands of television and theater.
“On Golden Pond” will be staged in Los Angeles, and the broadcast will include views of the black-tie audience, which, it is hoped, will laugh and cry at the right times.
Still, it isn’t much of a risk to present a story that has had thousands of stage productions since the film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won three.
If there are going to be original plays in television’s future, they may come from Father Lucky Productions, the company set up with HBO by Close and by Robert Pastorelli, who starred on the CBS sitcom “Murphy Brown” as the artist, house painter and nanny Eldin. Variety, the trade newspaper, reported that Father Lucky would develop and produce a series of dramas to be performed live and would begin by commissioning four dramas. No one at HBO was willing to discuss the project because it was too early in the process.
Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that a company like Father Lucky would be formed by two actors. Live performance may be a much bigger charge for those on the screen or the stage than for the people watching them. “That relation between performer and audience is what acting is all about, what theater is all about,” says Anderson, echoing a theater truism. If the relative profitability of feature films, television and live theater are any indication, though, the audience has not always shared that passion.
Or maybe it’s just that we see plenty of live television already.
It’s true that prime-time programming consists mostly of filmed comedies and dramas and the daytime soap operas long ago switched to videotape. Even the late-night talk shows are taped hours before they are broadcast.
But the morning infotainment shows like “Good Morning, America” and the “Today” show are live, and Americans seem as thrilled now as their forebears were in the early ’50s to stand outside the shows’ studio windows and wave. Most sports events and awards shows are live.
The police car chase, broadcast live from helicopters, has become a television staple. This may not say much for us as a culture, but it feeds the need of some Americans to hold their breath and wait to see if a real-live human is going to be caught, shot or blown up or meet some other terrible fate.
NBC’s late-night comedy sketch show “Saturday Night Live” has, for 25 years, lived up to its name. In fact, it may be the one true success story among the industry’s efforts to capitalize on the novelty of the live broadcast. The show has had its ups and downs, but it has never lost its slightly desperate edge. As its producer, Lorne Michaels, said last year, describing the process of writing, rewriting and rehearsing each sketch: “It doesn’t go on because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30.”
