A LOST ART

by James Lincoln Warren

“Brevity,” counseled Polonius, surely one of the biggest windbags in all of literature, “is the soul of wit.”

Leaving aside the fact that Shakespeare obviously intended this particular passage to drip with irony (“large gobbets of irony that splash around your feet,” observed my wife Margaret), Polonius had a pretty good point, as all lovers of short fiction must concede. And therein lies another whopping dollop of irony, in that in our age of epidemic ADD, sound bites, and MTV-style fraction-of-a-second image video editing apparently intended to invoke grand mal seizures, bestselling novels achieve second lives as doorstops by virtue of their physical mass, if not their literary weight. On the other hand, the current bloated condition of the American popular novel is probably symptomatic of that ubiquitous consumerist compulsion that encourages the purchase of profligate luxury SUVs and Supersized French fries. But back to brevity.

Not being a screenwriter, I am not a member of WGA, and as I have friends on both sides of the divide, I will keep my opinions vis-à-vis the current strike to myself, in the same spirit that proscribes discussion of politics, religion, and sex in polite society. But I do have a bone to pick with both sides in the present Hollywood impasse, writers and producers alike:

Whatever happened to the half-hour TV drama?

It’s been dead for almost forty years, and yet I remember the hullabaloo that accompanied the announcement that “Gunsmoke”, that acme of Western dramas, would expand to an hour back in 1961. At the time, I was six, and was not allowed to watch “Gunsmoke”, which was considered much too adult for my innocent eyes and ears, but I do remember that there was much speculation as to whether an hour-long TV drama was even feasible, despite the initial success of “Bonanza”, TV’s first hour-long series, in 1959. In fact, “Gunsmoke” suffered a severe drop in ratings after changing its format, but the gauntlet had been thrown. By the mid-sixties, hour-long dramas had begun their steady march to displace their shorter cousins. I was out of the U.S. from 1967 to 1970, and the only American show that I got to watch consistently during my junior high years was the 60-minute “Mannix”, which was broadcast in Belgium in English with French or Flemish subtitles. But I remember that when I got back to San Antonio, the half hour drama was a relic.

Which is really a shame. The half-hour versions of “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” were palpably superior to their 60-minute incarnations. “Gunsmoke” notwithstanding, practically all of the great early TV Westerns benefited from the immediacy of conflict demanded by the shorter form: “Maverick”, “Have Gun, Will Travel”, “Wanted: Dead or Alive”, “Cheyenne”, and so forth. And of course, there was the landmark P.I. show, Blake Edwards’ “Peter Gunn”, with its unforgettable Mancini theme song. (“77 Sunset Strip”, another wildly successful P.I. show, was actually the first hour-long detective program to air on TV, but it had to have TWO heroes to sustain it, not to mention sidekick Kookie and his comb.) I don’t mind the hour-long format, but I mourn the demise of the half-hour format.

And the thing that strikes me about all these long-gone shows is how really great the writing was, how much better it was than the writing on contemporary shows, even those justly praised today for their invention and superior script quality. The half-hour shows wasted not so much as a second in establishing characters and moving the tale forward, making use of every technique in the narrative arsenal to brilliant effect. They were a lot more like short stories in form and impact than today’s short-story based feature films. Much of it, I suspect, is that absent the huge budgets and technical effects available today, the shows depended entirely on the quality of the scripts for their success. I also think that their quality owed much to the fact that in the early days of TV, writers came from the ranks of those who got their chops writing prose for publication instead of from a pool of not particularly literate eager beavers slavishly obeying the Holy Writ of books that promise to reveal How To Write a Screenplay.

Margaret recently ordered a collection of several episodes of one of those old shows, “One Step Beyond”. The show was really a precursor to “The Twilight Zone”, having gone into production nine months before Rod Serling’s show in 1959, and had many similar features, including being a paranormal anthology program featuring a narrator (director John Newland) on the set in the opening scene to set things in motion. Many of the best young actors of the day were its stars: Cloris Leachman, Pernell Roberts, Robert Webber, Patrick O’Neal, Elizabeth Montgomery, Charles Bronson, Warren Beatty, Christopher Lee, Mike Connors (speaking of Mannix), Robert Blake, and (this is why Margaret ordered it) Patrick Macnee (John Steed of “The Avengers”). Unlike “The Twilight Zone”, “One Step Beyond” claimed that its episodes were fictionalized accounts of actual events or documented phenomena. Well, that was probably a stretch, but who cares?

The stories are terrific. It’s the most refreshing show I’ve seen on the tube in years.

In the meantime, it seems like everybody in Hollywood is contributing to “One Step Backwards”, instead — not the kind of backward glance that shows you where you come from, mind, but the kind of backwardness that keeps you from seeing that you’re stepping into a pile of Supersized dog poo.