text:
School Hours: 9:12 a.m.-3:12 p.m.
Grades: 3-5
John F. Kennedy Elementary School's vision is to create a community that is safe and supportive.
Report Cards: Report
cards for all students are available to parents and guardians
only in electronic format, via the Parent Portal. Click here for detailed information.
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text:
Police search for stolen cable trailerFebruary 12,2013Police search for stolen trailer
ARLINGTON Police are looking for a stolen Comcast Cable trailer.
Sometime between Jan. 25 and Friday, someone stole a yellow cable-reel trailer from the cable companys warehouse parking lot on Route 7A. Anyone with information is asked to call the police at 442-5421. Information can also be submitted anonymously online at www.vtips.info.MORE IN This Just InEmployee charged
with grand larceny
Police said a Fair Haven man was stealing... Full StoryMan arrested
for burglary
A Rutland man will face burglary and larceny charges... Full StoryBENNINGTON Southwestern Vermont Medical Center is hosting an American Red Cross Blood drive... Full Story
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subset: commoncrawl


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I had installed and activated zingiri forums before 5 month.
Then i had deactivate and delete zingiri forums.
now from that day in google webmaster tool all zingri forum links are showing 404 error , i have tried to fixed it several times but didn't able to fix it.
here is a snashot http://freekaaoffer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/404-error.png (have more than 1000 404 erro due to zingri forum)


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Dollansky Has His Day In Knoxville
KNOXVILLE, Iowa – Craig Dollansky held off Davey Heskin to claim his second feature win of the season at Knoxville Raceway on Saturday.
Dollansky was paid $3,000 for his 14th career 410 win at the half-mile.
In 360 action, Jason Johnson took his fifth career feature win, while Kevin Hetrick scored for the first time in his Knoxville career in the 305 class.
Heskin got the jump on Dollansky to start the 20-lap 410 main event ahead of Lynton Jeffrey. Dusty Zomer shot into the top three on lap four. A battle ensued the next several laps as Terry McCarl and quick-timer Justin Henderson moved up to challenge Zomer for a podium position. At the halfway point, McCarl and Henderson moved by Zomer, a lap before Henderson would get by McCarl for third.
After the pair crossed the start/finish line, and with the top five bunched up in lapped traffic, the caution came out for Brooke Tatnell, who got into the turn three wall. The restart saw Heskin lead the field back to green, ahead of Dollansky, Henderson, McCarl and Zomer.
Dollansky slid in front of Heskin on the restart, but the latter was back in the lead a lap later in a torrid battled for the point. Dollansky came back on lap fourteen to take the lead and Henderson followed him by Heskin. Heskin was not to be denied, however, and surged back into second in the closing laps. Noticeably gaining on the leader, he nosed under Dollansky heading into turn one on the last lap, only to be denied by the leader, who took his line and cut his momentum.
Dollansky was victorious over Heskin, Henderson, Danny Lasoski and McCarl. Brian Brown, Ian Madsen, Zomer, Mark Dobmeier and B main winner Brad Loyet rounded out the top ten. Cole Wood, Larry Ball Jr. and Bronson Maeschen won the heats. Bob Weuve and Skylar Prochaska got upside down in the B main on separate incidents. Neither was injured.
"I tell you what, (Heskin) was good," said Dollansky in Victory Lane. "This Knoxville racetrack…they don't come any better. Kris Dunkin and his crew do such a fabulous job with it every week. There's a lot of places where they don't know what to do with the racetrack. This is the best track in the world. I'm just happy for this race team. We've been working hard this week. We still aren't there yet, but we'll keep working hard."
An incident marred the start of the 15-lap 360 feature. After contact from another car, Jonathan Cornell slid sideways, collecting Mike Van Haaften and Kris Miller, who tipped over. Cornell and Miller were uninjured, but finished for the night. Russ Hall led the first green flag lap, before Mike Houseman Jr. came to a stop.
While Hall went high on the restart, Jason Johnson made the bottom stick and took the point before the caution came out again a lap later, for a spun Sawyer Phillips. The restart saw Eunice, Louisiana native leading Hall, Jon Agan, Jamie Ball and Justin Henderson back to the green. Ball passed Again for third on the restart.
Three more laps were in the books when Phillips spun again, ending his night. Ball again had a good start and got by Hall for second. While Johnson checked out, Ball and Hall battled for the runner-up position. On lap ten, Hall took it for good after a lengthy battle. Johnson won the event by half a straightaway over Hall, Agan, who gained third from Ball on the last lap, and Henderson. Joe Beaver, Dylan Peterson. Matt Moro, Jarrod Schneiderman and Matt Juhl rounded out the top ten. Henderson also set quick time in the 360 class, while Nate Van Haaften, Agan and Hall won heat races.
"On the start, I went to the top of one and two and (Hall) actually drove by me on the bottom," said Johnson in Victory Lane. "I was actually surprised he opened the bottom back up on the restart. There was actually quite a bit of moisture there. After that, I just wanted to hit my marks and get a rhythm as fast as I could. This is our third week in a row here, and we've been struggling. I can't say enough about this race team."
Kevin Hetrick shot around the front row of Mike Philben and McKenna Haase on lap one and led the distance using the low groove in the 12-lap 305 main event. The race was slowed only once by a caution at the halfway point for debris from the machine of Corey Kautz.
Haase stayed close in second, ahead of Mitchell Alexander. Matthew Stelzer and J. Kinder ran a strong fourth and fifth. Hard-charger, Stacey Alexander, Philben, Steve Breazeale, Keoni Texeira and Jeff Wilke rounded out the top ten. Chris Walraven registered quick time, while Dustin Clark, Stelzer and Kade Higday won the heats.
"It was a tough race," said Hetrick of his first career Knoxville win. "At times, I wanted lapped traffic and at times, I wanted clean air. I thought I had a good rhythm going. I have to thank my Dad and Brian Anderson. We've been struggling the last couple years here. Tonight, we had a perfect car. I'd like to dedicate this to all the people who help me."


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Jan 11
Jul 11
Hey guys Theory Of Resistance has the opportunity to battle it out to open up for RED and Demon Hunter. I'm sure everyone knows who I'm talking about. We need your help and support by coming out to the battle to get us there!!! Tell everyone you know! We have tickets an flyers to pass out! We also will be giving away a certain amount tickets to the battle and when we win also a couple tickets to the actual show with RED and DH. Hit us up to help reach our dream! See ya at the show!
May 3
Hey guys we're playing May 3rd at The Boiler Room in Dallas!! Tickets are at the door for $10! Come out and support and have a drink and chill out with us!
Mar 29
Mar 22
Hey guys! TOR has a last minute show for the 22nd at Legends in Fort Worth! We had a blast last time there and will be a rockin' time again! Come out for some good music and food!
Sounds Like: RED, Breaking Benjamin, Periphery, Staind, Alter Bridge
Manager: Micah Labrosse
Resisting the norm.
Taking a stand no matter what.
Using music to say something that hasn't been said before.
Theory Of Resistance has been formed through many heartaches and trials. Even when told to give up, and try something else, they have kept on taking the high road out and pursuing their ...See Full Bio


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Ready2Fish 136-Piece 2-Tray Tackle Box
Product Information:
Get ready and go! This great tackle box comes fully prepared with 136 pieces of tackle compiled to get you fishing as quickly as possible. With a collection of floats, baits, and rigging accessories anglers are presented with a wide variety of setups. Create your ideal rig and land the big one with the Ready2Fish® 136-Piece 2-Tray Tackle Box.
- Ready2Fish® 136-Piece 2-Tray Tackle Box
- Two trays with assorted tackle neatly arranged in divided compartments
- Includes: Floats, jig heads, BB, split shots, bait-holder hooks, poly stringer, curl tail worms, tail grubs, and other tools
- Constructed from sturdy material for maximum durability
- Lightweight for easy transportation
- Dimensions: 14.2"W x 8.5"D x 7.5"H
- Model: R2FK-TBVP-2
- Ready2Fish
Country of Origin: ChinaWeb ID: 4008883
Customer Reviews:
Rated 3.6 out of 5�by 24 reviewers.
Rated 5 out of 5�by Pwd Very nice product Very nice product, holds tackle great and is very strong and well made. May 1, 2016
Rated 2 out of 5�by robb Disappointing and Not What I Hoped For The "Ready2Fish 136-piece 2-Tray Tackle Box" turned out to be much less than I hoped for. I wanted to purchase a reasonably stocked tackle box for my grand-kids. As I was also buying them fishing rods & reels, and some of them live across the country. The tackle box itself, is fine. The additional 135 pieces is another story. Inside the box there is a tiny little bag of tackle, that seemed to be ~100 teensy weensy sinkers and ~35 teeny tiny little hooks. It was not nearly sufficient for even the youngest of the grand-kids. I would very much prefer that this item include more useful gear, even if it cost a bit more. I was disappointed. January 12, 2016
Rated 5 out of 5�by jonmo1987 effective...good price The box was exactly what I wanted and a good price. February 24, 2015
Rated 5 out of 5�by michie21 this product was excellent Employee Tom helped me greatly love my tackle box has everything I needed for my first time fishing experience. January 27, 2015
Rated 3 out of 5�by Jim21 Tis what is .. A simple tackle box. The box it self is what I expected, nothing less, nothing more. Seems pretty well built for the price. The include tackle well, we will see about that. Perhaps some of the plastics will lure a fish or two. I bought it for the box and didn't realize until some time later it included some tackle. Hopefully it's lead free. October 15, 2014
Rated 5 out of 5�by Delta90 Great for kids Bought this for my 11 year old son. Tackle box is very sturdy and plenty of space, and selection of items included was good quality. October 9, 2014
Rated 3 out of 5�by fishman73 Good starter box Bought for my 8 yr old daughter to start fishing. Good assortment of stuff with the box, but the shape of the box causes it to tip over quite easily, and with younger children, the latch is usually not fastened after getting things out (yes, the 136 pieces have spilled all over several times). The bottom half should have straighter sides. Otherwise, good latch on box. September 30, 2014
Rated 5 out of 5�by Marge422 Good looking and very sturdy I was looking for a tackle box and this appeared very sturdy. I was pleasantly surprised to find the additional collection of accessories that were included... (I had not seen that it was included). September 23, 2014
Rated 1 out of 5�by mike 136 pieces tackle box There was no 136 pieces of tackle in the first tackle box, when I took this product back there was some tackle but no where near 136 pieces. July 29, 2014
Rated 4 out of 5�by Cool_car2000 Good starter It has everything we needed to get started fishing. Was an excellent Father's Day gift and a reasonable price. July 10, 2014


text:
- An ISBN is the 10 or 13 digit number, usually printed on the back of a book with a bar code, that serves as a unique identifier for the book.
- Searching by ISBN is the best way to search because it will get you the exact title and edition that you need.
- Many professors include the ISBN on their syllabi or in their course management system.
If you don't have the ISBN, try a title or author search.
Title search
- Enter all words in the title you are looking for. The search engine will try to find books that have all the words you entered in the title. Leave out words such as "a," "an," or "the."
- When including edition, use numeric values. For example, "1st edition" instead of "first edition."
Author search
- Enter all or part of the author name you are looking for.
- You do not need to enter a first name, but if there are a lot of books by authors with the same last name, it may help to narrow the results.
- You can enter the name in any order such as "John Smith" or "Smith John." Avoid using a comma since it has a special meaning in the search.
Keyword search
- You can search by keyword but this approach is not recommended as it will likely return a large set of results.
- If you want to search by keyword, try a combination of author and keyword. For example, "Warren Accounting" where "Warren" is the author and "Accounting" is the keyword.
To refine your results, use the filtering/sorting options
- Filter options include product type and discipline area. Sort options include alphabetical sort (ascending or descending) and copyright year (ascending or descending).
AUTHORS: Hinkel/Hinkel - ©2012
ESSENTIALS OF PRACTICAL REAL ESTATE LAW, 5th edition is a concise, yet thorough examination of the most critical areas of real estate law. It employs a user-friendly approach to introducing important real property law concepts. The text details the transactional aspects of the law needed to assist attorneys with closing real estate purchases, sales, and mortgage loans secured by real estate. It includes case summaries that allow you to practice analytical skills and see how concepts are applied in practice. Each chapter includes practical assignments and a self-study examination to help reinforce your understanding of the material contained in the chapter. The numerous forms and checklists also facilitate understanding of each concept and ensure that you are well prepared to work as a professional in real estate. The legal theory, tips, checklists, relevant forms, case summaries, and assignments assist you in understanding how to successfully work in a real-world environment.
CengageBrain offers two types of free content:


text:
This rum version of the classic Negroni is a good chance to try two newly available alternatives to Campari: Luxardo Bitter and Gran Classico Bitter.
This recipe calls for a sweet sherry rather than vermouth, to balance flavors; make sure to use an oloroso or East India sherry. It originally called for Banks 5 Island Rum; Spirits columnist Jason Wilson recommends a white rhum agricole or an aged white rum, such as El Dorado.
Servings: 1
- 2 ounces white rhum agricole (see headnote)
- 1 ounce Luxardo Bitter or Gran Classico Bitter
- 1 ounce oloroso or east india (sweet) sherry
- Ice cubes
- Twist of orange peel, for garnish
Chill an old-fashioned glass.
Combine the rum, the Luxardo or Gran Classico, and the sherry in a mixing glass. Add ice and stir vigorously, then strain into the chilled glass and add 1 large ice cube.
Twist the orange peel over the drink to express its oils, then use it to garnish the cocktail.
Recipe Source
From Jim Meehan, managing partner of PDT in New York.
Tested by Bonnie S. Benwick.
Email questions to the Food Section at email@example.com.


text:
Most Recent Articles In Fashion Scoops
Latest Fashion Scoops Articles
- Shinola and Argent Open San Francisco Pop-up
- Second/Layer Eyes Accessories and a Freestanding Store for Growth
- Carly Kuhn Pops Into Striiike to Provide Portraits
More Articles By
The Art of Elysium celebrated its committee for next year's Heaven Gala with a dinner at Sunset Tower, hosted by Gilt Group Wednesday night.
"I didn't know much about charity, which isn't really a hip thing to say," deadpanned Topher Grace. "And, I'm really self-centered. But meeting kids who benefit from this organization changed that."
Ali Larter, Elijah Wood, Eva Mendes, Alicia Witt and other actors who teach art to hospitalized kids also turned out for the dinner.
Actress Bonnie Somerville raised $15,000 in one week for the charity by calling everyone she knew. "I called producers who paid me nothing and said, 'You know that movie I did for no money? Well, I need you to give me money now.'"


text: the sidebar on my blog should be on the right. Today, halfway through the listed posts, it split off to the left and is now underneath my last entry. Categories, Archives and the search bar are also underneath my last post on the left. How do I fix this so that all post listings, categories, archives and search bar are back on the right side where they belong?


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A client of mine is organizing a conference and is looking for a way to allow attendees to communicate easily in one place. Things like available seats, extra space in accommodations, looking for recommendations for local restaurants/activities, etc.
There has been a suggestion to add a wiki but the info is so temporary and one-off that it seems like a less complex tool could better serve the purpose.
I was thinking embedding a Twitter feed for a specific hashtag might do the trick but I'm hoping someone might have an idea of a plugin for their WP site or even some other third-party service.


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SAN FRANCISCO – Pablo Sandoval is in the Giants lineup as designated hitter for Friday night's game against the A's.
Sandoval has been sidelined since March 17 with ulnar neuritis in his right elbow, but he threw from 100 feet before Friday's game and reported no discomfort.
"I'm excited to be back," Sandoval said.
Does his inclusion in Friday's lineup mean he'll be playing in Monday's season opener at Dodger Stadium?
"Yeah, it's possible," he said.
The Giants opted for him to serve as DH in the second game of the Bay Bridge Series against Oakland rather than have him play his customary third base. National League teams can opt to use a DH in exhibitions played in their home ballpark.
"If he feels anything, we'll scratch him, but right now he's a go," Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. "He wants to go, he's throwing and swinging the bat. He's fine."
But Bochy acknowledged that Sandoval could come off the bench and serve as a pinch hitter in the Dodgers series if his elbow acts up at all.


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It's easy to relax at this Milan hotel with its pool, sauna and steam room. Swim in the heated indoor pool, or lounge poolside and enjoy the sky view through its glass ceiling. The Health & Fitness Club also features a gym, sauna and steam room.
The hotel offers other convenient services, such as Express Laundry service, Grab & Run Breakfast and secure parking at its 113-space indoor car park.
Health & Fitness Club
- Fully equipped gym
- Heated indoor swimming pool
- Private sauna
- Steam room
Opening hours06:00 - 23:00 (Daily)
Indoor Swimming Pool
Opening hours6:00 - 23:00 (Daily)
Opening hours6:00 - 23:00 (Daily)
At a Glance
Free Internet
As part of the E@syConnect Service concept, Radisson Blu hotels offer Free Internet access. High-speed and/or wireless Internet access is now free of charge for all guests throughout the hotel.
Grab and Run
For our guests on the go with no time for a sit-down breakfast, we offer the Grab & Run takeaway breakfast. Tea and coffee in disposable cups along with fresh fruits and energy bars are available on a special table in the lobby.
Super Breakfast
The Radisson Blu Super Breakfast is an extensive buffet featuring a range of food items selected from the best of Continental, North European, and American cuisine.
Express Checkout
For our guests in a rush we offer Express Check-Out to save valuable time and ensure an efficient and accurate check-out, by offering the options of sending invoice by email, mail or a quick pick-up at the reception desk.
Late Checkout
Check-out from Radisson Blu hotels as late as 6 p.m. (subject to availability) instead of the normal check-out time at no extra cost. Our aim is to accommodate the needs of our guests and offer tailor made flexible solutions.
Express Laundry
The average guests stays at a hotel for less than two days, which makes getting laundry done a complicated matter. But at Radisson Blu we have dispensed of this complication with 3-Hour Express Laundry. All shirts, blouses, socks, underwear, pants and other pieces of clothing, handed in before 8pm. will be returned fresh and clean that same evening.
One Touch Service
All guest needs, whether it is room service, a question for the concierge or a special request, are taken care of at the touch of a button. Just press the One Touch Service button on your room telephone and let us take care of you.
100% Guest Satisfaction
Our goal at Radisson Blu is 100% guest satisfaction, which we guarantee. If you aren't satisfied with something, please let us know during your stay and we'll make it right or you won't pay.


text:
Sorry! The position you're looking for is no longer available. Check out other Journalism internships in Washington, DC below.
Results 1 — 10
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Daily Caller Journalism Internship - Fall 2016
The Daily Caller — Washington, DC
July 25 2016
The Daily Caller, a 24-hour online news publication founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, is seeking a journalism intern who is interested in a fast-paced, exciting workplace that values motivatio…
Application Deadline: 8/19/2016
Bluemercury Social Media Intern - Beauty/Cosmetics
Bluemercury — Washington, DC
July 19 2016
Bluemercury Social Media Intern Content Marketing This position will support social media strategy and content marketing in coordination with the Content Marketing team, inclusive of all social platfo…
Application Deadline: 7/29/2016
ICCF — Washington, DC
July 19 2016
FALL INTERNSHIP COMMUNICATION PROGRAM Program Length: September 12, 2016 to December 16, 2016 Primary Category: Media, Communications, & Journalism Secondary Category: Marketing, Advertising, & Public…
Application Deadline: 8/19/2016
Broadcast/Radio Internship
emPower magazine — Washington, DC
July 18 2016
A publisher & radio host seeks a broadcast intern to assist with a weekly radio show called emPower Hour at a Washington D.C. FM station. The show focuses on social justice issues affecting communitie…
Application Deadline: Available Year-round
Weddings and Events Fall Internship - MUST LIVE IN Washington DC, Maryland, or NoVA
Completely Yours Weddings and Events — Alexandria, VA
July 18 2016
Completely Yours Events, LLC is an award-winning wedding and event planning, coordination, and styling agency. We are based in the Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area but have served clients …
Application Deadline: 8/19/2016
Marketing and Communication Intern
MedStar Visiting Nurse Association — Baltimore, MD
July 15 2016
About MedStar Visiting Nurse Association (VNA): MedStar VNA, a non-profit, Joint Commission accredited, in-home healthcare provider, offers skilled nursing, rehabilitation and infusion therapy for hom…
Application Deadline: 9/1/2016
Paid Web Development & Writing Internship
Creative Analytics — Washington, DC
July 14 2016
Creative Analytics, a digital strategy and marketing agency, is seeking a detail-oriented, self-guided and enterprising candidate for the Web Development & Writing Internship position. The ideal candi…
Application Deadline: 7/28/2016
Paid BNF Fall Intern
The Bridging Nations Foundation — Washington, DC
July 11 2016
Bridging Nations Foundation is a non-profit 501 c3 private foundation located in Washington DC. We are located in the Dupont Circle in the neighborhood of think tanks like Carnegie Endowment, Brooking…
Application Deadline: 7/31/2016
Marketing/Social Media Intern
House Studio — Hyattsville, MD
July 11 2016
DCs Number 1 Recording Studio is looking to hire an intern with strong knowledge and understanding of the digital media landscape, including various social media websites. The intern hired for this po…
Application Deadline: 8/31/2016
Photography Intern
BH Media Group — Fredericksburg, VA
July 08 2016
The photography intern at The Free Lance-Star is a talented and motivated visual journalist who will join the photography department on a temporary basis to shoot a full range of assignments for the …
Application Deadline: Available Year-round


text:
Supple is a joint pain reliever that comes in the form of a drink, rather than capsule or topical cream. Sold exclusively on the internet, the Supple official website, while informative, has a 'gimmicky' impression, uses some exaggerated statements and devotes space to putting down rival products.
The 'As Seen on TV' product claims to work in as little as 7 days, and backs this up by offering a 100% guarantee, 'challenging' their customers to see for themselves. The overall appearance of the site is attractive and colorful and is also very user-friendly, featuring well labelled sections and headings. Several diagrams are provided to show the structure of the joint and how pain can occur in this area. Although the manufacturers make a number of statements regarding the clinical studies that have been performed on Supple, no actual proof is provided. The company does show photo-accompanied customer testimonials, a reasonable FAQ section and a section explaining how superior Supple is to other products on the market.
Supple – Facts
The Supple website has a good amount of information regarding the ingredients in the drink, which combines 10 vitamins and minerals with natural fruit juice and puree. The beverage is available in one flavour, mango and peach, and only requires one can per day. The manufacturers recommend that Supple is drank in place of a snack and by doing so may help the user lose weight, obesity being another cause for joint pain.
The full ingredient list is provided and each ingredient amount is also shown. The two main joint pain relief ingredients in Supple are Glucosamine and Chondroitin, both commonly found in joint pain medications and that work best when combined. The addition of Rebaudioside A, a natural sweetener that helps reduce blood sugar levels, allows the user to feel fuller for longer, while a blend of vitamins C, D, E, B6 and B12 help to form collagen, an essential component of healthy cartilage, boost immunity, and provide anti-oxidants. The minerals calcium and magnesium work to strengthen the bones, support cells and aid in protein synthesis.
Unlike many joint medications, Supple is suitable for those with shellfish allergies and for vegetarians as the Glucosamine is not derived form animal sources.
Positive Features
- The full ingredient list is provided
- Supple is in the form of a fruit flavored drink
- Supple is suitable for people with shellfish allergies
- Only one can per day is required
- The formula contains 10 vitamins and minerals
- The company promotes joint health through fitness and nutrition
Negative Features
- No proof of clinical studies are shown
- The company website makes some over-exaggerated claims
- The product is not available in retail stores
- Discounted prices are only offered with enrolment into the auto-shipping program
- Supple is offered in only one flavour
- Supple contains no hyaluronic acid or fatty acids, essential for joint lubrication
Supple contains some good, healthy ingredients and, if anything, would make a good daily dietary supplement. It is probably not the best product to provide joint pain relief however, and some important ingredients, in particular MSM and hyaluronic aid are not present in the formula. Despite the vitamins and minerals in the formula, Supple is expensive, costing $47.95 for a 24 day supply or $94.95 for a 48 day supply (which is only offered once enrolled in the auto-shipping program). Many of the same ingredients could be found in any multi-vitamin/ mineral supplement at a fraction of the cost.
Top Joint Pain Relief Products
**This is a subjective assessment based on the strength of the available information and our estimation of efficacy.
*Results may vary. If you are pregnant, nursing, have a serious medical condition, or have a history of heart conditions we suggest consulting with a physician before using any supplement. The information contained in this website is provided for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease and should not be relied upon as medical advice. Always consult your doctor before using any supplements.
Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are "associate sales links." This means if you click on the link and purchase an item, we will receive a commission. Regardless, we only recommend products or services which we use personally and/or believe will add value to our readers. We are disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials."


text:
November 5, 2012
Q: "What was Dorothy about?"
A: "Two weeks."
– Archive of American Television interview with Bob Carroll, Jr.
In August of 1979, a situation comedy about a middle-aged woman who served as a sort of den mother for a quartet of rambunctious boarding school girls debuted on Friday night, in the 8:30PM time slot.
No, it wasn't The Facts of Life. It was Dorothy.
Although the "summer tryout" was and remains an unusual method of launching a series, the networks that year, in their boundless imagination, used it to test-launch two nearly identical shows in the same month. The Facts of Life, on NBC, became a modest but long-running hit that lasted for seven seasons and enjoyed a strong syndicated afterlife. Dorothy, on CBS, vanished into obscurity after its initial batch of four episodes were broadcast.
The Facts of Life (which actually featured seven girls at the outset, pared down to four a year later) starred Charlotte Rae as the teacher / surrogate mother figure. Dorothy was named after its star, Dorothy Loudon. Both Rae and Dorothy Loudon were Broadway veterans – they knew each other, had vied for some of the same roles – but while Rae had become familiar on television as a character comedienne, playing regular parts on Car 54, Where Are You? and Diff'rent Strokes (from which The Facts of Life was a spin-off), Loudon was a pure theatre performer. She had made a brief splash on television in the early sixties, taking Carol Burnett's comedy-and-songs slot on The Garry Moore Show, but before and after that Loudon stuck mainly to nightclubs and the stage. After fifteen years as a sort of Susan Lucci of Broadway, consistently earning the best reviews in a series of high-profile flops, Loudon had won a Tony Award in 1977 for her role as Miss Hannigan, the conniving head of the orphanage, in Annie.
Dorothy was a classic high-concept "package," a Hollywood entertainment that attemped to fuse disparate but proven elements. Often those packages are assembled by agents, trying to get jobs for several clients at once, but Dorothy was the brainchild of a Warner Bros. executive named Alan Shayne. A former casting director (for East Side/West Side and N.Y.P.D.), Shayne had seen Loudon in Annie and thought she would be a natural to headline her own series. Even though Miss Hannigan was the villain of Annie, and not at all enthusiastic about little girls, it made sense to exploit the connection to the hit show by placing Loudon in a similar setting. Separately, Shayne was also taken with Linda Manz, the teenaged actress who had played Richard Gere's sister in Days of Heaven (1978) and whose thick Brooklynese provided the film's unusual narration. Manz (below) would play the most prominent of the girls featured in Dorothy, a tough-talking tomboy very similar to Jo (Nancy McKeon), a character added to The Facts of Life in its second season.
The third element that informed the construction of Dorothy was Alice, the blue-collar Linda Lavin sitcom that was at the time Warner Bros.' most successful television property. Shayne, as the studio's executive vice president in charge of television, oversaw Alice and drafted its executive producers, former Lucy writers Madelyn Pugh Davis and Bob Carroll Jr., to develop Dorothy. "They were my mainstays," Shayne said in a recent interview. "They would, in a pinch, always save any show that was in danger." The premise devised by Carroll and Davis – who shared a creator credit with Nick Arnold, a name that was not mentioned in publicity for the show and that Shayne could not recall – had Loudon playing Dorothy Banks, a former showgirl reduced to teaching music and drama at a run-down private school.
To direct, Shayne hired television's top comedy director, John Rich (The Dick Van Dyke Show; All in the Family). Though Rich was been a director on Alice, Shayne had awarded the famed pilot director a royalty for every future episode of the show in order to screen the uneven early episodes and suggest some critical changes. (Alice ran for eight seasons and Rich probably earned more from a few hours' work than some directors make in a whole career.)
With all those heavyweights involved, how did Dorothy turn into such a massive flop – grotesque and all but unwatchable even by the middling-at-best standards of lowbrow fare like Alice or The Facts of Life?
One clue may be in the chronology. Loudon committed to the Warner Bros. Television deal in 1977 or 1978, while she was still in the cast of Annie, but the show had to wait once Loudon committed to star first in Ballroom – a musical adaptation of the made-for-television movie Queen of the Stardust Ballroom – on Broadway. Only after Ballroom closed, earlier than expected, on March 24, 1979, did Loudon go to Los Angeles for Dorothy, and only then did "format and script work" commence on the series.
Loudon's limited availability boxed the entirety of conception, writing, casting, and taping into a period of just over four months. Little wonder, then, that Manz's character made no sense – she looked and spoke like a street urchin, but had a vaguely identified patron whose charity kept the school from closing, and therefore from expelling her – or that the other principal girls were barely developed beyond the teen-Charlie's Angels stereotypes of blonde (Elissa Leeds), brunette (Michele Greene), and nerd (Susan Brecht). Shayne cast another broadway star, Russell Nype (Call Me Madam), as the spineless headmaster, but Nype seemed stiff and ill at ease, while the two actors who played Dorothy's fellow teachers – Priscilla Morrill (French) and Kenneth "Kip" Gilman (biology) – were shrill and overbearing.
The process of casting Gilman was an example of the haste that went into assembling Dorothy. Davis and Carroll remembered him from Loves Me, Loves Me Not, a short-lived sitcom with Susan Dey, and hired Gilman without a formal audition. "The two of them were just the sweetest people in the world," Gilman recalled. "They basically were saying, well, you've got the role, do you want to do this? They had a piano in their office, and just out of the enthusiasm of the meeting, I sat down and started fooling around, and I think that's maybe where they got the idea that I might also be able to do some musical stuff with Dorothy. I don't think they had that in mind originally, because I was the science teacher."
To write the four episodes, Davis and Carroll assembled three pairs of comedy writers: themselves; Rick Hawkins and Liz Sage (The Carol Burnett Show); and Vic Rauseo and Linda Morris (Welcome Back, Kotter). All but Davis and Carroll were relatively new to the business, but the most of the jokes could have been pilfered from Buddy Sorrell's gag file. (Some examples: "While our students were looking at fish, Mimi and I were going to make a few waves!" "You shouldn't be intimidated by Mr. Foley just because he's headmonster … er, headmaster.")
Loudon hinted at conflicts with the writers when she did publicity for the series, telling one journalist that she'd had to show them clips of her appearances on the Tony Awards broadcasts as a guide to the kind of material she could do. According to associate director Gary Shimokawa, Loudon clashed with the writing staff – "I think she just didn't think they wrote to her, wrote enough to what she could do" – but found an ally in Rich (now earning his Alice windfall, it would seem). "I think John managed to keep her together on that, and she trusted him. He was a big personality as a director, and so I think that helped a lot," said Shimokawa.
Even Gilman (below, with Loudon), who was inclined to focus on the positive and who sidestepped most of Dorothy's behind-the-scenes conflicts, spoke out about the scripts:
Even though I was having fun with it, I [wanted] it to be a little bit more subtle and not as much on the nose. I remember saying something to John Rich, and I think Dorothy might have felt the same to some degree, that I felt that somehow we were doing like a radio show, where some of the jokes were – they had some crust on them. They were a little old. And John's response to that, as the director, he said, "Well, you've got to understand, Kip, this is television, and these [gags] are like old friends!"
Since Loudon's claim to fame was as a musical comedy star, one element that Rich had deep-sixed from Alice became central to Dorothy: an abbreviated but showy song or two in every episode. In the four produced episodes Loudon performed "There'll Be Some Changes Made," "Hard Hearted Hannah" (with Gilman), "Strike Up the Band," "Keep Your Sunny Side Up," and Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am the Monarch of the Sea" (with the girls). The selections were probably made by Loudon, who had used some of them in her nightclub act. "Changes" was one of two songs she had performed in a 1946 audition for the talent agency MCA that had launched her professionally, and she once described singing "Hannah" "on top of a piano in a bar in Troy, New York" as the worst job of her life. Loudon also performed Dorothy's title tune, which was written by Bill Dyer and the distinguished film and television composer Billy Goldenberg (Duel; Columbo), who probably got involved because he had made his Broadway debut with the score for Ballroom.
The songs were arguably the show's main draw but they created a plausibility problem, as Alan Shayne pointed out:
When we did Alice, we did a couple [of episodes] and it was a bomb. I mean, it wasn't going at all, I thought, and one of the things John Rich said was – at that point, Linda Lavin was going to sing a number in each show – and one of the things he said was, "Let her sing on somebody else's show, but not on Alice, because she seems like a loser. If she sings great, what is she doing as a waitress?"
Well, in a similar way, with Dorothy, it was more about her being a performer, and when she did her number, you kind of thought, "Why is she in this girls' school?" But I loved her performing. I must say, I loved her when she sang.
But Shayne's hoped-for successor to Alice died on arrival. "It simply didn't work," he said recently. What no one had told Shayne was something that the company of Annie had discovered very quickly: that Loudon, in the words of the show's composer Charles Strouse, "really, genuinely, sincerely, hated children . . . . She was very ill-natured, in that respect." Loudon would shoo away not only the many little girls in the show's cast but also the dog, Sandy, whom she also despised. Doubtless she was less than thrilled that, in her bid for more widespread recognition, the baggage of Annie made youngsters an unavoidable part of the package.
While Loudon's pedophobia might have been perfect for the larger-than-life hostility of Miss Hannigan, it couldn't work for a den-mother sister to Mrs. Garrett. "Dorothy really didn't like the kids, I don't think," Shayne said. "And although she was at war with the kids, you had to feel that she also loved them. That didn't really work. Dotty was a tough lady, you know. She had a lot of hostility." Loudon's husband, a television arranger and composer named Norman Paris, had died unexpectedly just six weeks after she won the Tony for Annie, upending her personal life just as she reached her professional peak.
Kip Gilman also observed Loudon's discomfort around her young co-stars, and thought that Manz – a casting director's off-the-streets discovery whose experience up to that point had been limited to Terrence Malick's highly idiosyncratic style of moviemaking – was especially ill-at-ease with the demands of performing comedic material in front of a live audience. Gilman suggested that, as a consequence of all that, the other three episodes may have been altered to reduce the girls' roles and build up the screen time of the (still underdeveloped) faculty characters.
That was a miscalculation, since the juveniles were more appealing than any of the adults on display. The closest Dorothy came to being any good was in the premiere episode (it was the second one taped), "The Bookworm Turns." Loudon was less manic in this one than in the other three, and it ends with a sweet moment in which she consoles her gawkiest charge (the appealing Susan Brecht, above) over an unrequited crush on Gilman's character, Mr. Landis (also a totally implausible romantic interest for Loudon, who was old enough to be Gilman's mother).
When Dorothy premiered on August 8, the publicity marked it as a lame duck. Loudon hemmed and hawed over whether she really wanted to do television or move to Los Angeles, all but publicly apologized for the writing, and suggested that if the show were renewed, the school setting might be dumped, and her character could make a return to the stage. But the reviews were surprisingly kind. Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News compared the show unfavorably to Our Miss Brooks but felt that "[s]till Loudon is a welcome addition to television." Variety hedged: "Loudon was forced to work awfully hard for the laughs she got – but the point is, she got them." Jerry Krupnick of The Star-Ledger wrote that "[t]he plot is ordinary, the rest of the cast is merely competent, but Dorothy Loudon is sensational."
Only later, after the show was safely buried, did the knives come out. "Dorothy, you may recall … was a total disaster," was how Krupnick reversed himself in 1983. "It was loud, frantic, senseless, unfunny – with Dorothy reduced to a desperate series of leers and triple takes." On her website, Michele Greene (the only one of the four girls to have a durable career as an actress) calls the show "horribly idiotic." Loudon herself must have realized, from the first moment she saw herself on screen, that no one had succeeded in scaling down her broad, stagy style. In later years, she told interviewers about a mortifying premiere party that she spent sitting in a corner, drinking wine. "Thank goodness nobody saw [Dorothy]," she said in 1982. "I watched the first episode and cried all the way through."
Sources: Author's telephone interviews with Kip Gilman, Alan Shayne, and Gary Shimokawa; Archive of American Television interview with Madelyn Davis and Bob Carroll, Jr.; Charles Strouse interview, Life After Tomorrow DVD (2008); John Rich, Warm Up the Snake (University of Michigan Press, 2006); Kay Gardella, "Loudon sounds off for songs," New York Daily News; August 1, 1979; Kay Gardella, Dorothy review, New York Daily News, August 8, 1979; Jerry Krupnick, "Dorothy is dazzling in long-overdue return," Star-Ledger, August 8, 1979; Arthur Unger, "'Bound to have viewers begging for more,'" Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 1979; Stephen M. Silverman, "Dorothy has high hopes for her sitcom," New York Post, August 14, 1979; Dorothy Review, Variety, August 15, 1979; Richard Christiansen, "Singing, clowning, touring, winning: Loudon's dues are paid in full," Chicago Tribune, September 12, 1982; Jerry Krupnick, "Dorothy Loudon: Musical comedy star adds a distinctive note to 'Best of Everything,' Star-Ledger, September 18, 1983.
This piece was an outgrowth of my work on a project of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to digitize Dorothy Loudon's papers, which were donated to the Library following her death in 2003. I am also writing about Loudon for the Library's blog.
As of this writing, the episode "Lies and Whispers" is available on Youtube, along with some clips from other episodes of Dorothy. The Paley Center for Media has copies of all four episodes in its collection.
Back in the Saddle
October 17, 2012
Lined up on the shelves of the library where I work are a number of television Westerns from Timeless Media, discs that I haven't purchased (yet) and that Netflix doesn't carry. Recently I got around to taking home a stack of episodes from the first through the third seasons of Wagon Train, where I still have a lot of gaps.
Everything I've written about Wagon Train so far has been pretty critical. I was mixed on the rejuvenated seventh season, which expanded to ninety minutes and went to color, and I also mocked the laziness of some of the episodes immediately preceding that change. But a random survey of a dozen or so early segments reveals a better, cannier show. Wagon Train doesn't rank among the best television Westerns, but it can fill up an oppressive August weekend quite effectively. What better actor to turn to than Ward Bond, with his grating, unmodulated donkey-bellow, to make himself heard over the full blast of my air conditioner?
Wagon Train started with a premise that was extremely well-designed, as simple and sturdy as a Conestoga. It had two lead characters, Major Seth Adams (Ward Bond) and Flint McCullough (Robert Horton), each of whom could serve as the center of a story or step into the background whenever the guest star of the week took up most of the screen time. That was important, because most Wagon Trains introduced a guest character in the very title ("The Joe Schmidlapp Story"), and the show was marketed on the basis of its big-name guest stars.
(This was a promise Wagon Train could deliver upon, initially, because it was produced by MCA, which until 1959 was also the biggest talent agency in town. It's doubtful that Shelley Winters or Ernest Borgnine, both at the peak of their film careers in 1957, would have deigned to appear in a television Western – a brand new one, no less – without a little arm-twisting by Lew Wasserman or his dark-suited lieutenants. After MCA was forced to sell its agency business, Wagon Train's guest stars became slightly less stellar, although they still comprised the top actors working in television.)
Adams and McCullough were modular leading men, versatile moving parts that could be plugged into a variety of different places. If Adams remained tethered to the train, McCullough, a scout who rode ahead looking for trouble, could roam about and stumble into adventures of almost any sort. Most dual-lead Westerns had interchangeable characters – the stage drivers of Stagecoach West, the rest stop minders of Laramie – but Wagon Train was conceived from the start to alternate between "home" and "away" stories.
Think about what a useful blueprint that is, from every point of view. The writers could tell almost any kind of Western story they could think of, without being constrained by the trail setting or the cumbersome pack of settlers in the train. The two stars could minimize their screen time and avoid the fatigue that plagued actors who carried a whole show on their backs (although that didn't spare Ward Bond a fatal heart attack in 1960). Shooting on multiple episodes could overlap if necessary. And the audience was treated to a much greater variety of faces and settings than on a typical weekly series.
The Flint McCullough episodes remind me of the "off-campus" event episodes that serial dramas would try decades later. The West Wing and ER, especially, liked to send a main character – John Carter (Noah Wyle) or C. J. Cregg (Allison Janney) – off on his or her own once per season, to solve a personal problem or star in an action set-piece. It was Emmy-bait (Janney's one-off with Donald Moffat as her ailing father is still one of my favorite television hours) but, more importantly, gave the audience a break from the intricate and potentially exhausting multi-character storylines. Wagon Train has the capacity to loosen up in the same way: just when I start to get tired of watching Ward Bond scream at the idiot settlers who wreak havoc on his train, there's a breather where the smooth, likable Horton breezes through a less predictable adventure in a less familiar setting.
Wagon Train and ER might seem like apples and oranges, but in fact the Western series was one of the earliest dramas to take some tentative steps toward serialization. Most seasons began with an episode or two set in St. Louis, at the beginning of the train, and ended with one or two segments set at the end of the trail, in San Francisco. For instance, the third season opens with an episode ("The Stagecoach Story") detailing the main characters' return trip, by stage, from the West Coast to Missouri, following the preceding years' train. The next episode ("The Greenhorn Story," with the inevitable Mickey Rooney in the title role) covers the formation of the new train, with an emphasis on the naïve easterners' adjustment to a new, harder way of life.
In the middle of the season, episodes do not follow a chronology – some of them span the course of months, and the physical progress from one to the next would probably zigzag back and forth across a map – but the viewer is not discouraged from thinking of each season's various progatonists as members of the same train, with every individual story one panel in a mosaic of headaches thrust upon Major Adams over the course of a single year. The first season finale, "The Sacramento Story," makes this assumption explicit; it is a combined sequel to three earlier episodes. (The series would continue to "check in" with popular characters, bringing Borgnine back in the second season premiere to reprise his role from the pilot, "The Willy Moran Story," and revisiting the young lovers from "The Heather and Hamish Story" a year later in "The Last Circle Up" – albeit with both roles recast.) Since Wagon Train was never truly serialized, I tend to view its unusual commitment to beginning and ending at opposite ends of the trail as less about continuity than variety. In other words, it was an excuse to plant a few episodes in an urban setting instead of amid the monotonous plains.
In its willingness to make each episode as different from the others as the format would bear, Wagon Train became porous enough to allow for auteurism, among both its writers and directors. I mentioned few of these cases the last time I wrote about Wagon Train, and I'm still uncovering more of them. What to make of Jean Holloway, who wrote both the dull "Stagecoach Story" and the lively, appealing "Greenhorn Story"? Somewhere in the middle, in terms of quality, falls "The C. L. Harding Story," a "haircut" of Lysistrata in which a muckraking reporter (Claire Trevor) leads the women of the train in a general strike. It's tempting to read something into the fact that this very safe excursion into pre-feminism comes from the pen of one of the show's two regular women writers, and probably much too cheap. Sometimes the absence of a strong voice is itself revealing: "The Cappy Darrin Story," with Ed Wynn as a sea captain who takes the term "prairie schooner" a bit too literally, was written by Stanley Kallis, a veteran production man who penned only a handful of scripts. There's an incongruous fantasy sequence, in which Cappy and his young grandson (Tommy Nolan) fight off some pirates, that rouses journeyman director Virgil W. Vogel from his slumber to try his hand at some dutch angles (even more incongruous in the world of Wagon Train). These dead ends take me back to the Western's long-standing showrunner, Howard Christie, who seems to have favored the rather cloying tone – light at heart but somehow leaden – that "The Cappy Darrin Story" shares with many other segments.
Then there's "The Ruth Owens Story," one of two early episodes directed by the great Robert Florey (Murders in the Rue Morgue; The Beast With Five Fingers). This one is set mostly at night and includes many bold close-ups of actors, often in profile, framed against total blackness. Its expressionistic imagery – the frame grabs assembled below illustrate only a few of the Florey's bold compositions – doesn't resemble any other Wagon Train I've seen or, indeed any other television episode this side of The Twilight Zone.
Horton Foote Takes the Bus
August 10, 2012
Another historian once told me that his attempt to interview Horton Foote got off on the wrong, er, foot when he referred to his subject as a "regional writer." Mr. Foote undoubtedly felt that his work contained more multitudes than that, and perhaps it does, but his reputation remains that of an East Texas memoirist and a chronicler of gentle Southern lore. On the arc of live television dramatists, Foote's Southern stories reside at a far end of specificity, counterbalancing Paddy Chayefsky's equally acute catalog of Jewish (and Jewish-disguised-as-other-ethniticies) masturbators and mamas.
Foote reworked many of his teleplays for the stage or the big screen, with enough success that in many cases the original works have been forgotten. The Paley Center seeks to rectify that oversight this month with a small but well-chosen series of the reluctant regionalist's television work, beginning with "The Trip to Bountiful" (a 1953 Goodyear Television Playhouse) on Sunday and then "The Traveling Lady" (a 1957 Studio One) on August 19.
"The Trip to Bountiful" concerns old Mother Watts (Lillian Gish), a semi-senile senior who shares a two-room apartment in Houston with her married son but yearns to return to the tiny Texas hamlet where she once worked a farm and raised two children by herself. This was a barnstorming comeback for Gish, who had starred for D.W. Griffith in the silent films, and she milks it for all it's worth, weeping and literally rending the scenery (or at least a crucial prop) at the finale. Gish probably owed her memorable role in The Night of the Hunter to this performance, but a middle section of the show is stolen from her by twenty-nine year-old Eva Marie Saint, only a year away from On the Waterfront and major, if fleeting, stardom. Saint, playing a helpful stranger, herself adrift on a lonely journey, is lovely, capable, and respectfully sympathetic toward her frail traveling companion. Even though Foote fills the vacuum almost immediately with another helpmate, a soft-hearted sheriff (Frank Overton), "The Trip to Bountiful" deflates a bit after Saint exits at the midpoint. In scarcely twenty minutes, she establishes herself as Gish's equal, perhaps exceeding Foote's intentions; the part almost calls for a less radiant ingenue, one whose own story we don't feel the need to see completed.
The justly famous centerpiece of "The Trip to Bountiful" is the unbroken nine-minute take in which the bus riders played by Gish and Saint exchange backstories. Carrie Watts's anecdote about the man she loved but was forbidden to marry is only a small part of this conversation, and yet it formed the basis for a quartet of Foote teleplays. The simplicity of this scene is breathtaking; a single cut would have broken the spell. If the stereotypical idea of the live television director is that of John Frankenheimer, chain-smoking his way through a broadcast and snapping "take one, take two, take one," then "The Trip to Bountiful" conjures a competing control booth image of Vincent J. Donehue, feet propped up and skimming most of the evening edition during the second act of "The Trip to Bountiful."
Although one tends to think of Foote as a Grand Old Man, "The Trip to Bountiful" (which Donehue and producer Fred Coe staged on Broadway eight months after the telecast) is a young man's play, sympathic to outsiders and scornful of establishment values. Bottomless in his empathy for Mrs. Watts, Foote falters in his characterizations of the spineless son and the shrewish daughter-in-law (whose preference for Hollywood over Bountiful is carefully underlined). Like Chayefsky's "Marty," Foote's script concerns itself with the relations between parents and their adult children. Because Goodyear can render Bountiful as little more than a single dilapidated, weed-choked front porch, the visceral experience of the Foote and the Chayefsky shows is not terribly dissimilar, even as the respective film versions of each, shot in authentic outdoor locations, feel worlds apart. The disconnect between Foote's rural Texas settings and their soundstage approximations forces the viewer's attention toward the thematic and universal elements in his work – a process that has no equivalent in the early scripts of Chayefsky, Serling, or Rose, most of which took place in hot, dingy little rooms that were more easily evoked in a TV studio.
The ending of "The Trip to Bountiful" is nostalgic but hardly sentimental. Indeed, one almost longs for Foote to fell Mother Watts, sifting the soil of her ruined homestead through withered fingers, with the fatal heart attack that is foreshadowed throughout. But no: instead he gives us a testy reconciliation between parent, child, and in-law that plays out as a pathetic exercise in self-deception on the part of everyone concerned.
If "Bountiful" is a journey that ends in stasis, then "The Traveling Lady" is a static work that ends on the cusp of a journey. Arguably more mature in its characterizations than "Bountiful," "Lady" – another piece partly about a vulnerable young woman's bus trip – is nevertheless the lesser work. "Lady"'s path to television was the inverse of "Bountiful"'s: after The Trip to Bountiful flopped on Broadway, Foote and Donehue reteamed to mount The Traveling Lady for the 1954 season. It, too, closed in a month, and was revived three years later by Herbert Brodkin on Studio One, probably less out of devotion to Foote's work (even though he was by then a sought-after scribe) than as an excuse for Kim Stanley to recreate the title role, that of a single mother reuniting with her husband following his six-year jail sentence, for a wider audience.
A New Mexican who liked to tell people she was from Texas, Stanley fit Horton's delicate dialogue like a glove. She's extraordinary in "The Traveling Lady," a model of Method acting at its most precise, hitting different emotional beats on every Footean syllable and many of her own pauses in between. The viewer can hardly keep up.
It's too bad that "The Traveling Lady," already a collection of characters in search of a play, suffers from the miscasting of nearly all the supporting roles. Less nonsensical on the page, one hopes, Mildred Dunnock's floridly dotty Mrs. Mavis is a Tennessee Williams reject, and no one could have picked two less Texan leading men for Stanley than Steven Hill and Robert Loggia. Loggia essentially pulls off the rogue who wants to make a home for his family but cannot escape violence and alcoholism; Hill, wooden and tripping up on a vague attempt at an accent, is a disaster as Slim, the deputy sheriff who falls at first sight for our traveler. (And Slim has the best monologue, too, sharing a painful secret about his late wife.) Lonny Chapman and Jack Lord, who did the male leads on Broadway, likely came closer, and a dream cast of Pat Hingle and Andy Griffith might have nailed it.
As it was, the director of "The Traveling Lady," Robert Mulligan, tried again, with a feature version in 1965 retitled Baby the Rain Must Fall. He finally perfected the casting – Lee Remick, Steve McQueen, Don Murray – but still Foote's difficult souffle did not rise. Amazingly, Stanley essayed the role a third time in 1958 – for ITV's Armchair Theatre, with Denholm Elliott and Ronan O'Casey as her leading men. I'd love to hear how they managed the East Texas brogues.
Sources: Together Jon Krampner's excellent Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television (Rutgers UP, 1997) and Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley (Back Stage Books, 2006) form a sort of penumbral biography of Horton Foote.
Me and The Defenders
August 1, 2012
Todd VanDerWerff of The AV Club has an important piece about The Defenders, that cornerstone courtroom drama of the sixties that remains frustratingly out of reach for most ordinary mortals.
I'm quoted at some length by Todd, who buys into my theory that the early sixties are a "Platinum Age" of early television in which the best traditions of the live New York dramas were transmuted into ongoing series, in ways that remain unacknowledged or misunderstood. (I think I might be the first person to use that phrase as a corollary to the legendary "Golden Age" of the fifties, and I hope it sticks.)
For someone who's only seen a handful of episodes, I think Todd does a great job of capturing the gist of The Defenders and sketching in some of the context within which it originally aired. The commenters make some valuable points, too; for one thing, both Todd and I forgot that for a time Law & Order indulged in those "we're fucked" endings, where the bad guys walk and the prosecutors end up with egg on their faces. The tone of those is very similar to some of the Defenders episodes in which the Prestons lost their cases, and I bet Dick Wolf was well aware of the precedent.
Trust me, if more people could see more episodes of The Defenders, it would be cited in fanboy discussions of the all-time greats just as often as The Fugitive or The Twilight Zone or The Dick Van Dyke Show. Maybe someday.
April 29, 2012
On last week's Mad Men, "Far Away Places," Roger Sterling (John Slattery) and his trophy wife Jane dropped acid. Roger's trip involved a magazine model with a weird hairdo who turned out to be Ted Baxter – well, not the Mary Tyler Moore Show news anchor, but the actor who played him, Ted Knight, who evidently supported himself with modeling gigs during his lean years as a bit player on Combat and The Outer Limits.
Matt Zoller Seitz, my go-to guy for Mad Men parsing, called the acid trip sequence "the least judgmental, most period-innocent depiction of the cosmic insight that people took LSD to experience in the mid-sixties." This season of Mad Men is set in 1966, a moment when experimenting with LSD really did enter the mainstream. I'll bet many Mad Men watchers were surprised by the idea that there were a few years – after LSD emerged from the counterculture of Ken Kesey and Owsley Stanley, before it was criminalized in 1968 and Richard Nixon called Timothy Leary "the most dangerous man in America" – when hard-drinking, out-of-touch middle-aged guys like Roger might have taken a dose. Even Cary Grant dropped acid around this time.
What may surprise TV fans even more is that Roger Sterling isn't the first TV character in a suit to enjoy a beneficial acid trip. In fact, even in "TV time," Kenneth Preston (Robert Reed) beat him to it by more than a year, in an amazing 1965 episode of The Defenders called "Fires of the Mind."
In that show (and for the record, I'm self-plagiarizing this description from a post I wrote two years ago), Donald Pleasence plays a Timothy Leary-like LSD advocate who is tried for murder after one of his patients commits suicide. What is remarkable about this show is its unwillingness to take as a given the idea that psychotropic drugs are harmful. The father-and-son attorneys fall on either side of a generational split on LSD, with Lawrence Preston (E.G. Marshall) so disgusted that he drops out of the case and his son Kenneth (Robert Reed) curious enough to take an acid trip. Ken is permitted to enthuse about his expanded consciousness without rebuke, and on the witness stand the LSD doctor demonstrates some of the positive effects that drugs have had on his perception and memory.
"Fires of the Mind" was one of the last works by Arnold Manoff, the blacklisted writer who enjoyed a too-short revival of his career, under the pseudonym "Joel Carpenter," in the early sixties. Manoff's episodes of Route 66 and Naked City are quirky, off-beat comedies. But for his single Defenders, Manoff contributed a straightforward, frank script, clear-eyed and questioning in a manner typical of the taboo-busting legal drama. It feels like the work of someone who needed to stick up either for the experience of LSD or, at least, for its proponents who were being demonized in the press.
For the most part, early television was monolithically anti-drug, rarely mentioning illicit substances and then only in the most hysterical, unhip terms. "Fires of the Mind" aired for the first time on February 18, 1965. Manoff, who had a weak heart, had died eight days earlier. Roger Sterling took his acid trip in September 1966. Four months later, on January 12, 1967, Benjy "Blue Boy" Carver died of an acid overdose in the now-famous, latter-day camp classic Dragnet episode "The LSD Story," effectively ending the conversation – on television, at least – about the possible benefits of lysergic acid diethylamide.
Robert Reed on acid!
Another Night to Remember
April 25, 2012
One hundred years and eleven days ago, the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, taking 1,514 lives with it. This month, to commemorate (or compound) the disaster, Twentieth Century-Fox has re-released James Cameron's bloated epic Titanic in fake 3D. The Criterion Collection has gotten into the act by debuting Roy Ward Baker's A Night to Remember (1958), an earlier, more stately film about the famous sinking, on Blu-ray, with a bounty of new extras.
A Night to Remember was based on a best-selling non-fiction account of the Titanic's demise by Walter Lord – a book that was also staged, with great fanfare, as a live television drama in 1956, some two years before the Baker film was released. Given its recent habit of licensing live television segments as supplements for its discs (including The Fugitive Kind and 12 Angry Men), one might have expected Criterion to acquire the Kraft Television Theatre version of "A Night to Remember," too. For whatever reason, they didn't – but you can watch it on Youtube.
Semi-forgotten today, Kraft's "A Night to Remember" was remarked upon at the time as one of the (ahem) high-water marks of live television. Dramatically taut, the production was also newsworthy for its deliberate pushing of the physical and technical boundaries of the medium. "A Night to Remember" cost $125,000, slightly more than three times the budget of an average Kraft. One hundred and seven men and women in period costume filled the mock Titanic, and seventy-two of them had speaking parts. There were thirty-one sets, some built at skewed angles to simulate the increasing cant of the sinking vessel, others (seen only for a moment in the final broadcast) in a tank that could be filled with water up to the actors' waists.
The sets were so vast that the production was moved from NBC's Studio 8H, to both 8H and 8G, and finally out to the network's largest available space in exotic Brooklyn. Six cameras, instead of the usual three or four, captured the action. We know these stats because NBC trumpeted them in the press, in a successful campaign to position "A Night to Remember" as one of the year's most important television events. James Cameron was not the first storyteller tempted to see in the Titanic the makings of a superproduction.
Following an on-camera introduction by Claude Rains, an effectively stentorian and British choice to narrate the show, the first dialogue in "A Night to Remember" is spoken by the familiar actor Marcel Hillaire, here playing a French waiter in the Titanic's exclusive restaurant with all the hauteur he can muster. Although it also places barbed emphasis upon the cascading incompetence of officers and crew that delayed rescue – we're teleported over to the nearby SS Californian, where a radio operator misses the distress call because he can't be bothered to turn a crank – television's "A Night to Remember" finds its theme in the suddenly lethal class distinctions that informed the outcomes available to the Titanic's passengers. Hubris and privilege are the boogeymen in "A Night to Remember," not the iceberg that (thanks to the limitations of the medium) we barely see.
The show's director and co-writer, George Roy Hill, a Minneapolis-born Yalie who styled himself as a cantankerous Irishman, empathizes with the proletariat in steerage and sneers at the rich twits in first class in a way that resounds in the era of the one-percenter – even though the third-class passengers are sketched more roughly and enjoy less screen time than the swells on the upper decks. Mrs. Astor slices open a life vest to see what it's made of – cork; "Why, how clever!" – and another young lady expresses delight because she's never seen an iceberg. Hill practically seems to be opining: good, natural selection is finally catching up with these fools. Perhaps the most effective moment in "A Night to Remember" is the one in which J. Bruce Ismay, the head of the White Star Line, steps into a lifeboat even as he knows that women and children remain on the sinking ship. The glare of utter contempt that the crewman who lowers the raft fixes upon Ismay is unforgettable, and Hill does not even need a close-up to emphasize it.
"A Night to Remember" is a compendium of vignettes like those. It follows certain characters from start to finish, like the Caldicott-and-Charters pairing of Gracie and Smith (Larry Gates and Woodrow Parfrey, cast effectively against type), who meet their fates with stiff-upper-lip reserve. Other famous passengers, like Isidore Straus (Edgar Stehli), whose wife opts to stay on the ship rather than leave him behind, are glimpsed for only seconds. If the 1958 feature finally picks a central character out of Walter Lord's panoply – Second Officer Lightoller, a minor character here, becomes in Dave Kehr's words the film's "hero . . . an upright representative of the emerging middle class and managerial caste" – the shorter television staging resists fixing on any single figure as a spine; although it does hover occasionally around Thomas Andrews (Patrick Macnee, then unknown), the thirty-nine year-old "shipbuilding genius" who had a hand in designing the Titanic, and whose main function here is to deliver, sheepishly, the technical explanation as to why the ship will surely sink. (Macnee and Andrews were both Scots, so the actor attempted a brogue in rehearsals, delivering his key line as "The ship must go doon." Hill's reaction: "Less of the Irish, please.") [Author's note, 5/23/12: Much of the last sentence, which was sourced from Patrick Macnee's 1989 autobiography Blind in One Ear, is erroneous. See the comments section for more information.
Rains, whose dulcet and unmistakably British tones supply snippets of Titanic lore in a voiceover so dense that it is almost an audio book, becomes the vital structuring element of this decentralized narrative. "A Night to Remember" is a docudrama, but one of a specific sort that emphasized the panoramic impact of a particular historical incident. Studio One's "The Night America Trembled" (about the historic "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast), The Seven Lively Arts's searing "The Blast in Centralia No. 5," and Playhouse 90's "Seven Against the Wall" (on the St. Valentine's Day Massacre) all took the same basic approach. Already in its death throes, live television made a mini-genre out of this kind of pocket historical epic, the size of which attracted press attention and fostered, perhaps, the poignant illusion that the medium could compete on Hollywood's own terms with the industry that was about to bulldoze it.
If directors like Sidney Lumet or Paul Bogart, a consummate lover of actors who died this month, were content to work with material that was essentially stage-worthy and intimate, there was another class of live television director that tried to tug the primitive medium toward the art of the cinema. Franklin Schaffner and John Frankenheimer led this pack, with George Roy Hill following close behind; all three achieved a destiny as epic-scaled filmmakers that is difficult, on the surface, to reconcile with their origins in television. (At least until one recalls that Hill wasn't the only member of this daredevil trio to seek out the foolhardy challenge of filling a television studio with a large quantity of water: Schaffner nearly electrocuted the cast while sinking a submarine in Studio One's "Dry Run," and Frankenheimer built a huge water tank to simulate the flooding of the Mississippi River in Playhouse 90's "Old Man.") Inevitably, all three men were determined careerists – an ambition to work on a huge canvas seems inextricable from a large ego – and "A Night to Remember" plays as a very self-conscious calling card on the part of a young director eager to be noticed.
One of the least contestable auteurist entries in live television, "A Night to Remember" was not only directed but also co-written – with John Whedon, later a sitcom writer and also the grandfather of Joss Whedon – by Hill; and while Kraft at that time had a producer, Stanley Quinn, he was an ad agency lifer with few creative bona fides apart from Kraft. Quinn also took no screen credit on "A Night to Remember," leaving many published accounts to list Hill as the producer, perhaps not wholly inaccurately. Hill may also have exerted influence through a key personal relationship. When last we encountered George Roy Hill, he was seducing the underage star of one of his early features. During that time, and possibly as early as 1956, Hill was also having an extramarital affair with Marion Dougherty, who was the uncredited casting director of Kraft and therefore, without question, a key creative component in a live show boasting a telephone book-sized cast list.
A control-room director's dream, "A Night to Remember" supposedly featured over one hundred cues (that is, cuts) in its first act alone. The personality that Hill imposes upon it is an omniscient one: an unseen hand – whether it be that of God, George Roy Hill, or Claude Rains, clutching Lord's book and in a sense standing in for the author – directing our attention, rapidly, forcefully, toward a succession of brief moments on the surface of a vast event. Andrew Horton, the chief chronicler of Hill's career, finds "A Night to Remember" interesting mainly for the way in which it anticipates the complex editing schemes of later films like Slaughterhouse-Five. Indeed, the director's cutting is masterful. Early on, Hill introduces the characters in steerage with a fade from a violinist, entertaining the haughty diners in first class, to a bagpiper, leading an exuberant dance below decks. Near the end, when an immigrant family that has fought its way up from steerage to the top deck arrives just in time to watch the last lifeboat being lowered, Hill drops out the cacophonous sound, scoring the moment of dreadful realization with a second of total silence. Hill superimposes the dangling boat cable over the family's stunned faces. "A Night to Remember" is subtle at times, blunt at others – but amid the chaos of disaster, the tonal shifts make sense.
"A Night to Remember" enjoyed a rapturous reception. Every major critic, even the tough two titans, Jack Gould (of the New York Times) and John Crosby (of the Herald Tribune), approved. NBC took out a full-page ad in the Times to tout its a repeat of the kinescope on May 2, a rerun that, because of reuse payments due to the gargantuan cast, cost the network more than putting on a new play would have.
("A Night to Remember" was not restaged live, as some sources claim. And, incidentally, if you look in the wrong places you'll also find Hill deprived of his co-writing credit, or read that Hill won Emmys for writing and directing the show. Although he was nominated for both, and "A Night to Remember" for best dramatic program, the only Emmy win was for its live camerawork).
The live television dramas that tend to hold up best are the small, claustrophobic character pieces – the storied "kitchen sink" opuses. Adaptations of books and plays, or shows that give off a whiff of the "tradition of quality," are the most likely to seem stodgy and ancient. But, despite its unconcealed self-importance, "A Night to Remember" works both as a drama and, more vitally, as an action piece. It moves at a terrific pace and builds real suspense along the way. Only the ending seems somewhat crude. Hill wisely uses as little stock footage as possible (like the 1958 film, this version borrowed its Titanic exteriors from a 1943 German film that built some impressive miniatures), but that decision renders the climax necessarily brief. Hill tries for a pair of shock effects, neither of which really comes off – at least to the extent that we can observe today.
The show ends in the main stateroom, empty except for a steward and the shell-shocked designer Andrews. As the stewart flees, the entire set tips forward, toward the camera, and the sea sweeps away the steward and rushes toward the viewer – an effect achieved, none too convincingly, by shooting through a fishtank that was rapidly filled with frothy water. Just before that, allegedly, we see Andrews crushed (or decapitated, according to one account from the set) by a gigantic chandelier that falls from the stateroom ceiling. Hill staged the effect through a multi-camera sleight-of-hand, by cutting quickly from a close-up of Patrick Macnee to a long shot, from another angle, in which Andrews is represented by a dummy. Contemporary reviews record some shocked reactions to this graphic image. But, in the surviving kinescope, the effect is lost. The Andrews dummy is barely visible at the left edge of the frame, and one would never notice his "death" unless, as I did, one goes back for a second look with the knowledge of what's supposed to be there. On a first viewing of the extant "A Night to Remember," the final image of Andrews is now a stunned, guilt-ridden close-up of Macnee's face. Not a bad ending at all – but also a sobering reminder of how the poor positioning of a kinescope camera can rewrite television history.
Walter Grauman and the Noise of Death
March 23, 2012
My ten-year career as a corporate office drone ended in the following manner: An instant message, sent to my computer screen by a human resources underling, summoned me to a conference room. The room was occupied only by two executives I had never met before. They introduced themselves by sliding a severance agreement across the table. "So . . . tough toimes!" was how the senior executive (a Brit) began his spiel. My boss, to whom I had reported, on and off, for the whole ten years, was not present. He learned that I'd been laid off when I told him.
That day came to mind when I revisited "The Noise of Death," the seminal, turning-point episode of The Untouchables that blueprinted the series' transformation from a simplistic cops-and-robbers shoot-'em-up into a richer, more character-driven melodrama. "The Noise of Death" chronicles the fall of one Joseph Bucco (J. Carrol Naish), an aging mafioso who's being put out to pasture for no special reason, other than change for change's sake. Nobody tells Joe Bucco that he's done. They just start doing things around him – collecting extra from the business owners in his territory without telling him, rubbing out miscreants without his approval. Bucco has to ask around to find out what everybody else knows already – that his young rival, Little Charlie (Henry Silva), has taken over. Redundancy – the term that my former corporate overlords favored – is executed not in a hail of bullets from the window of a shiny black sedan, but with a passive backroom shrug of the sort that David Chase would later stage so brilliantly in The Sopranos. (Chase's series is a mafia text that "The Noise of Death" resembles more closely than the thirties gangster films which inspired The Untouchables). Your final exit has nothing to do with your own record of success or failure. You don't see it coming. You don't get to face your executioner.
That's not to suggest that Bucco does not eventually meet a violent fate. He does, but his final encounter with a bullet is one that is foretold, ritualized, in a manner that the author of "The Noise of Death," a blacklisted genius named Ben Maddow, does not feel the need to fully diagram. The end of Joe Bucco is not motivated by a chain of crystalline events; it moves forward with its own momentum, a momentum that not only cannot be stopped but that also does not appear to be precipitated by any of the players, not even Little Charlie, who stands to benefit from a Bucco-less world. "The Noise of Death" is about the inevitability of fate.
It takes a triumvirate to execute a piece as fragile and strange as "The Noise of Death." A visionary screenwriter, of course, but also a producer who understands the ideas in it and has the courage not to conventionalize them, and a director who knows how to visualize them. Of course, "The Noise of Death" hit the trifecta, or we wouldn't be discussing it. It marked the initial collaboration of Quinn Martin and Walter Grauman, a producer and director whose sensibilities aligned perfectly; they would work together often for the next twenty years, on The Fugitive and later The Streets of San Francisco, Barnaby Jones, a number of made-for-television movies.
Maddow's script for "The Noise of Death," likely written as an unproduced feature and then adapted for The Untouchables, was eighty-three pages long, an impossible length for an hour-long episode. (The Hollywood rule of thumb is a page per minute.) And yet Quinn Martin put it into production, had Maddow cut it down some and then still let Grauman overshoot during the six shooting days in August and September of 1959.
"I don't sleep, Mr. Bucco. I dream, but I don't sleep," says Bucco's imbecile henchman Abe (Mike Kellin) at one point. The line is never explained further. It is the most blatant of the many off-beat, quasi-existentalist asides that Maddow interjects in "The Noise of Death." Grauman or Quinn Martin could have easily breezed past them or deleted them altogether, but both indulged Maddow, carefully underlining his best dialogue and his most radical ideas. Maddow's real coup is to render Joe Bucco as a sympathetic character, a Lear figure, even as Ness correctly insists that he is a monster responsible for many deaths. There is little, qualitatively, that separates Bucco from Charlie. Towards the end, Little Charlie holds a glass of wine to the lips of a B-girl (Ruth Batchelor) who has mildly defied him, and violently forces her to drink. Charlie laughs harshly, enjoying the moment. The scene clarifies Charlie's sadism, his inhumanity; and perhaps by this point the viewer has forgotten an earlier sequence in which Bucco casually orders Abe to hop around and imitate a monkey, as a way of demonstrating to Ness the blind loyalty his subjects have for him.
It is not an accident or a flaw that Bucco and Charlie remain nearly indistinguishable. The arbitrariness of Bucco's removal – a more conventional script would have shown him falling down on the job, being taken advantage of due to his age, but Maddow includes no suggestion of dwindling competence – is what makes him a perversely sympathetic figure.
"I want to make something clear to you," Walter Grauman said to the cast of "The Noise of Death." "This is probably the best script I have ever read, and there is a rhythm to the speech. So please do not change a word."
Grauman loved "The Noise of Death." When Martin sent it to him in June 1959, Grauman read it three times in the same night, so excited by its possibilities that he couldn't sleep. A relatively untested director, Grauman had done a lot of low budget live television (four years on Matinee Theater), one minor feature, and a few half-hour filmed shows, out of which only a series of Alcoa-Goodyear Theaters indicated his prodigious skill with both camera and performers. Quinn Martin, an equally green producer – a few years earlier, he had been a lowly sound editor for Ziv – saw one of the Alcoas and hired Grauman for his new series about Eliot Ness and his squad of thirties G-Men. The Untouchables would be a hit, would elevate both Martin and Grauman to the big time, although neither knew it yet; "The Noise of Death" was only the third episode on the shooting schedule. (The fact that it was the fourteenth to be broadcast suggests that someone, either Martin or the network, sought to establish the show's gun-blazing bona fides before loosing the more cerebral entries.)
"The Noise of Death" begins with a flourish, a scene in which a woman in widow's weeds screams at Bucco from the lawn of his nondescript suburban home. This is the stuff of darkness, and when we next see this woman (Norma Crane), it will be on a shadowy street and then a inside a matchlit meat locker where her husband's corpse dangles from a hook. But Grauman stages this opener in blindingly bright sunlight, with Crane's black dress contrasting harshly against the blown-out white brick of Bucco's house. The contrast between this wraith and her surroundings signals the strangeness that will follow throughout in "The Noise of Death."
Grauman's signature shot was a low angle framing of a person, or, more often, a Los Angeles high rise or a Lincoln Continental; power appealed to him, as both a narrative element and a compositional strategy. In "The Noise of Death," even though he requested that ceilings be built over two sets, Grauman uses his low angles sparingly. There is corpse-eye view in the mordant morgue sequence, in which Bucco clings to an unforgettable litany ("I respectfully request permission to phone inta my lawyer") as Ness tries to convince him to turn on the mob, but I prefer the pointed wit in an earlier composition that places the word "cadaver" above Bucco's head.
Like the low-angle image of Norma Crane above, "The Noise of Death" assembles a series of unusually powerful close-ups of its players. Like almost all of the sixties episodic A-listers, Grauman was a "total package" director, one who could shape compelling images as well as encourage rich performances from their guest stars. J. Carrol Naish, who played Joe Bucco, was a limited actor, one of those dialect specialists (like Vito Scotti) who usually played ethnic caricatures, often very broadly. Grauman's chief contribution to "The Noise of Death" may have been to anchor Naish in the realm of reality. Though Naish speaks with a thick accent, it feels authentic, and his wooden-Indian acting translates into a kind of Old World remoteness. As Little Charlie, a young Henry Silva tries out an early version of the stone-faced psychosis that would become his trademark, and grow gradually more campy. In "The Noise of Death," he's scary and mesmerizing, and a focal point for Grauman, who felt an instant affinity for the actor. Grauman cast Silva in an Alcoa Theater only a week later, used him as a last-minute replacement in another Untouchables ("The Mark of Cain") after another actor was injured on set, and even wrote an outline for an unproduced sequel that would have brought back the Little Charlie character.
Even whittled down to episodic length, Maddow's script ran long, and Grauman, working with only a six-day shooting schedule, had to pick his battles. Much of the show plays out in standard television set-ups – static long shots, over-the-shoulders. It is chiefly in the final act of "The Noise of Death" that feels one feels the confident touch of a strong director at work. The climax of Maddow's script is a long sequence set in a mostly empty restaurant, in which Bucco finally capitulates and attempts to negotiate a retirement that will permit him to save face. Little Charlie steps into the washroom, leaving Bucco alone for a moment. Slowly, the trio of musicians who have been playing in the background through the scene edge forward, toward Bucco. Are they there to assassinate him, or are they just the band? The answer actually remains slightly ambiguous, but somehow Bucco ends up freaked out enough to duck out onto the fire escape, where a waiting gunman mows him down.
It is an authentically surreal moment, one that Grauman stages and extends for maximum effect. The musicians all have unusual, unreadable faces – the selection of a less interesting set of extras would have ruined the scene. There's a topper, too: when Bucco stumbles back in through the window after he has been shot, doing a grotesque dance of death, a burlap sack is tied around his head. (Why and exactly how Bucco's killer has done this is another thing that Maddow and Grauman do not attempt to explain.) Grauman echoes the startling image a moment later, when we see Bucco lying in a hospital bed, his head completely swathed in bandages. In death, he is a faceless man. "The Noise of Death" concludes with a series of cross-generic ideas – the weird forward creep of the musicians; the off-screen murder, indicated only with the violent sound effect of a tommy-gun burst; the out-of-place scarecrow/mummy imagery – which hint that Grauman, whose first feature (1957's The Disembodied) was a low-budget horror film, may have been under the influence of Val Lewton. Certainly, it's appropriate that Maddow's horror over the nature of mafia violence – divorced, much like my corporate severance, from normal human feeling by ruthless procedure or collective psychosis – should bubble up, finally, in the form of images associated more closely with horror movies than with gangster films.
Grauman directed eighteen more Untouchables before moving on to other projects (including Martin's next series, The New Breed), and some of them contain even more dazzling work, especially "The Underground Railway" (an action-packed noir with a heavily made-up Cliff Robertson doing a Lon Chaney-esque tour-de-force) and "Head of Fire – Feet of Clay" (also from a Maddow script). His selection of "The Noise of Death" as a career high point implies a certain professional modesty. Some of the cult directors of early episodic television – Sutton Roley, Walter Doniger, John Peyser – were willing to smother a script in technique, but Grauman always protected the writing. Abe's murder in "The Noise of Death," for instance, is an abrupt, brutal act, and afterwards Grauman quickly cuts to Bucco, who is seated nearby on a shoeshine stand. The shoeshine boy starts to run away in fear, but Bucco grabs him and delivers another astounding Maddow line: "Go on, boy, finish. Ya start something, ya finish." Grauman holds on this tableau of man and boy for an extra second, giving us time to register the awful non sequitir of Bucco's reaction, and to contemplate the boy's future, the extent to which the witnessing of this bloody act may damage him as he grows to manhood.
Apart from a well-placed close-up of a skipping record, Grauman does very little with the episode's twist ending, a gag that is transgressive in both its sheer corniness and in the way it emphasizes how ineffectual Ness, the putative hero, has been throughout the story. Grauman so enjoyed Maddow's punchline that he retold it with relish when I interviewed him more than fifty years later:
Ness has been told a message: go to my vault. He and the guys go to the bank, and they come out with a recording. They go back to their office and the recording's put on an old-fashioned turntable. Ness puts the needle down on it and it goes scratch, scratch, scratch. "My name's Giueseppe Bucco, and like I tole you, Ness, I'm a-gonna sing." Scratch, scratch, scratch. "O sole mio . . ." Ness turns to his cohorts, and they don't say anything, they just look at each other. He takes the record off and he drops it into the wastebasket, and that's the end of the picture.
Walter Grauman hears still the noise of life; he turned ninety last week. Tonight Walter will speak in person at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which will screen "The Noise of Death" and – perhaps more significantly – a print of an unaired version of "Fear in a Desert City," the 1963 pilot for The Fugitive. The opportunity to see a television segment from that era projected on 35 millimeter occurs infrequently, and Walter himself is a master raconteur. Not to be missed.


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