by Nat Segaloff
“‘For how much?’ I asked.
“‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think in this instance I can probably scrape up the $750.’
“‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘my price has gone up to $1,000.’
“‘Please read the story, Stirling,’ she urged. ‘I’m sending it right over.’ [36]
“I read it — I loved it — I called back. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I agree — it’s a fabulous story and I’m going to write your single best episode — but only for one thousand dollars.’ Well, happy ending — I got the thou — and from then a thousand for all subsequent half-hours. I think the price jumped to $2,500 for each of the one-hour Suspicions I wrote for Hitch. Robert Stevens, the director of ‘The Glass Eye,’ won the Emmy that year for the episode. I won nothing — except the raise.
“Now, my single meeting with Hitch: Joan told me the Master was actually going to direct one of his TV shows — this one his very favorite story — ‘The Voice in the Night’ — to be the flagship episode for his one-hour Suspicion series on NBC. [37] Joan drove me to his home, up Bellagio Road, one of those canyon streets off Sunset Boulevard where you drive through a gate. Hitch was charming. Congratulated me on the scripts I’d done for the half-hour Alfred Hitchcock Presents shows, personally made me a Scotch and soda and sat me down with my yellow pad.
“I wouldn’t trade the hour that followed for anything I can think of at the moment, except possibly — no, not even that. The man was brilliant. He fucking dictated the script to me, shot by shot, including camera movements and opticals. He actually had already seen the finished film. He’d say, for example, ‘The camera’s in the boat with the boy and the girl. The move in is very, very slow while we see the mossy side of the wrecked schooner. Bump. Now the boy climbs the ladder. I tilt up. I see him look at his hand. Something strange seems to have attached itself. He disappears on deck. Now the girl starts up and I cut to the boy exploring the deck. I’m shooting through this foreground of — of stuff — and I’m panning him to the cabin door. Something there makes him freeze. He waits. Now the camera’s over here and I see the girl come to him. Give me about this much dialogue, Stirling.’ He holds up his hand, thumb and forefinger two inches apart. I jot down, ‘dialogue, two inches.’
“As I say, the whole goddamned film — shot by shot — no dialogue — just the measurements of how much dialogue and where he wanted it. He left its content to me, since there is no dialogue in the entire short story. It’s all introspection and the memory of horror and the writer didn’t want to spoil it with dialogue. Lotsa luck, screenwriter. ‘Give me an inch of dialogue right here.’ I went away and wrote what I still consider a rather neat piece of work, but lo and behold Hitch decided to shoot a movie, and his presence was denied to us. [Arthur Hiller directed it].”
For Hitchcock, Silliphant also wrote the classic “The Crystal Trench” from A.E.W. Mason’s haunting short story about a young couple who go mountaineering. The woman’s fiancé is killed when he falls into a trench in the ice. Out of love and loyalty to him, she remains single over the decades that it takes the slow-moving glacier to reach the foot of the mountain and deposit his perfectly preserved body. When it does, he is wearing a locket. She opens it. Inside is the picture of another woman. The grotesquely chilling episode was broadcast October 4, 1959.
In today’s world, when everybody seems to be writing scripts, it’s worth noting that, years ago, good, solid, fast script writers were hard to find. Silliphant was one of them. “Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s thirty (or so) of us were writing eighty-five percent of prime-time TV,” he reported. “I don’t know if I can explain why this was, it just was. Whether you were freelance or staff, it seemed essential, in order to meet the deadlines.” And there was another, more pragmatic reason: money. “Dean Martin was signed to guest star in a Rawhide episode and my agent got me the assignment to write for Dean. This was the first time I was ever paid $10,000 to write a one-hour show. We’re talking back in the time when $4,500 was considered top money for an hour episode. I may be wrong, but this could have been the highest per-hour episode fee paid up to that time for a Hollywood-based TV show.”
It may seem strange to struggling screenwriters, or to those who are aware of current industry scruples, but there was a time when film and television producers actually wanted to read material and had story departments constantly on the lookout for it. Silliphant entered the game at that exact moment when TV was desperate for scripts and even more desperate for grown-ups (Silliphant was in his mid-thirties at this time) who could churn them out quickly. “At the time there was an obverse Greylist,” he later remarked. “There was a prevailing policy at the studios not to hire the bright young blokes all the studios are now searching for. I don’t believe that age — whether the writer is young or old — is an issue. Only the work matters. There are millions of old coots who can only write mediocre material and millions of young minds who can’t do any better. If anything, the odds are in favor of the younger guys simply because they are writing for a medium which can seldom tolerate ‘excellence’ — a medium which only wants ‘hot’ or ‘trendy’ or ‘best seller’ — and we all know that those requirements can only be met by mass appeal comic strips disguised as motion pictures.”
During this period, Silliphant also wrote the script for the feature film, Damn Citizen, based on a true story of corruption in Louisiana and told with a semi-documentary style popularized years earlier by Louis de Rochement. Universal-International Pictures sat on it for a year and then dumped it into a few theatres on March 1, 1958.
One of the stranger collaborations — strange in that it was not a collaboration — occurred with Nightfall (1957), an atmospheric crime thriller directed by Jacques Tourneur. Tourneur had distinguished himself as a genre filmmaker with Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) at RKO and was prepping Curse of the Demon (1957) when Columbia handed him Silliphant’s script of Robert Goodis’s novel of the same name. “All I remember of this gentleman [Tourneur] was that he seemed much too gentlemanly to be a director,” Silliphant offered. “He fits elusively in the remote backcountry of my recall as a courteous person. He simply showed up on time at Columbia, took my script (which, incidentally, had Anne Bancroft in it), and went out and methodically shot it. If he was distracted prepping Curse of the Demon, I was never aware of it.”
Nightfall has Aldo Ray falsely accused of a bank robbery and a murder, and he must clear himself not only with the police but with the actual robbers/killers. It sounds stock, but its gyrating narrative is immensely appealing, and the darkness itself, as befits a Tourneur film, becomes a separate, threatening character.
At that time, Silliphant — who had been writing episodes of Suspicion, Chicago Manhunt, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, West Point, and Perry Mason — linked with director Donald Siegel to script one of the best films that either man would make, The Lineup (1957). Siegel had directed the pilot for CBS’s The Line-Up TV series in 1954, and when Columbia decided to spin off a feature film, they removed its hyphen and brought back Siegel, who brought in Silliphant. The story has to do with a heroin ring that smuggles smack into the city in unsuspecting travelers’ unguarded luggage, but when they stash some in a little girl’s doll that then vanishes, all hell breaks loose.
Siegel and Silliphant instantly hit it off. “I loved the guy,” Silliphant said. “I found him immensely competent, in total control of his craft. If Don ever had any doubts about what he was up to, I was never aware of them. If you had fought in a platoon in Vietnam, Don would have been the kind of lieutenant you’d have hoped you were lucky enough to have been leading your scared ass. I was with him in San Francisco on location when he shot The Lineup. I remember being somewhat apprehensive about his reaction to my script when it was first given to him. I had created an off-the-wall character (played by Robert Keith — Brian’s father) — an agent for Eli Wallach, one of the country’s top hit men. The idea of a killer having an agent appealed to me immensely, since the connectio
n to Hollywood was immediately symbolic. As Wallach proceeds through my script, blowing people away in successive killings, each time he’d return to the waiting line and the eager agent, Keith, would ask him the inevitable question: ‘Well, what were their last words?’ Keith was an avid collector of such closing statements. Eventually, his insistence on knowing last words provokes his client to shoot him; Wallach is fed up with this philosophic shit. Back in the 50s, this was hardly your average screenwriting, if I can be somewhat immodest, and so I was shaken about Don’s reaction. Well, he fucking went out of his mind — hooted with laughter — and shot it all with relish.”
Silliphant’s filmography during this brief period from 1956 to 1959 includes sixty-eight episodics and five features (5 Against the House, Huk!, Nightfall, The Line-Up, and Damn Citizen). That’s three scripts per week, not counting the movies. “Things in TV were immeasurably different than they are today,” he understated. “In the 60s and 70s, for one thing — and this is key — the network commitment to a producer for any given series achieving airtime was for a far greater number of episodes than the networks now allot. Half-hour shows usually scored a 36-episode season. Hour shows seldom less than 24 episodes. For this reason, when a producer turned up a writer with whom he resonated, he was more likely than not to ask (even beg) that writer for multiple commitments. Apparently I was such a writer when I was freelancing. For example: the series Tightrope, starring Mike Connors, produced by Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse. I believe I wrote four episodes for Tightrope and the producers wanted me to write even more, but I wasn’t free after those four. For Route 66 I ran up an almost ridiculous score. Similarly for the half-hour Naked City season when I wrote 32 out of 39 episodes. When we got to the hour-long show I couldn’t maintain that pace, since I had to write Route 66 simultaneously. So the combination of having my own shows, plus the then-common practice of producers trying to grab the ‘hot’ writers for multiple assignments, plus the much-larger-than-now numbers of episodes per season — all these elements made it easy for me to pile up the kind of score I did.” [38]
It was no accident that his scripts were actor magnets. “When I first got to Hollywood, I attended acting classes for three years, then I went back every few years — right up until I left town. I wanted to understand the acting process so I could write for actors. Watching them, I learned how to streamline my dialogue — where to hesitate — where to rush — so that the writing itself would give the actor all the clues he needed to find his way under the skin of the character I’d written. Why should I tell him to speak a line ‘defiantly’ when he might be more effective, out of his own life, to play defiance by seeming to be meek — or seeming uncaring — or all the other infinite shades of human reaction? So not only is such writing presumptuous, it is short-circuiting. It is denying the potential for magic to happen.
“Believe me, I had to learn this, because I used to write that way too — feeling like God, telling my actors how they were going to conduct themselves in the presence of the nuggets I was giving them — until I put myself on the same stage with the actors and realized how goddamned hard it was to be an actor and that the last thing he needed was some half-assed writer telling him how to do his job.
“And I had great teachers. Once, in a Naked City, at the top of Act II, I wrote two inches of dialogue for Lee J. Cobb that I felt should have been carved in marble on the Lincoln Memorial. Lee took me aside before the scene was shot and asked me if he could play the scene with no dialogue. I was appalled. Jesus, Lee, not say all this good stuff here? Let me show you something, he said, and he acted out my words with a few simple movements, not mime, just body language which spoke far more eloquently than my precious words. [39] George C. Scott — when we did Mussolini: The Untold Story — gave me a refresher course in the same way — a look rather than the words — a shift of shoulder rather than the words. In little snippets in parentheses beneath the dialogue. Just the dialogue. And you’ve even got to watch that.
“But do not think that I didn’t have to go through exactly the same process that freelancers have to deal with today in TV. Yes, I had to go meet the producer. I would even have to sit in the projection room and run the pilot or be given the pilot script and be expected to read it. I was then asked if I had any storyline in mind which might fit into that specific format or program which had just been ordered by a network or was under development at a studio. Either I pitched a story at that first meeting or I’d come back the next day and make the pitch.
“For some reason — maybe it was those earlier years in publicity trying to convince bored movie editors at the New York papers to please for Christ’s sake, Bosley [Crowther], give me a break this Sunday — can you give us the right-hand column and a four-column cut for this piece of shit opening at the Roxy next week? For some reason I seem to have a talent for pitching stories and telling just enough to whet the producer’s appetite without telling him too much and revealing I haven’t yet worked the fucking story out to whatever its ending might be. I don’t recall ever going to a pitch meeting (in those days, not now) from which I didn’t emerge with an assignment — or a multiple deal — before I’d written fade in.
“But I never worked with the story editor of any series. I always felt these guys were either jealous or were saving an assignment for their second cousin. I met only with the show’s creator (usually the producer) or with the Boss (e.g., Aaron Spelling) or the v.p. of TV development at a given studio or the network v.p. in charge of development. I always regarded story editors as extremely low on the totem pole.
“For me the proof of this is that virtually all of my television writing — which I consider in many instances to have been my best writing for the medium — has been original — the stories, the people, the thematic element — all these came from within the cosmos of my own life experience in one way or another. The attitudes and beliefs expressed began in my own psyche. How much simpler to write out of one’s self than to address an alien piece of material and find in it those elements which impelled the producer to acquire the property in the first place, then to try to dramatize those properties for the actor and the camera, and yet still try not to submerge within this foreign stew your own personal feelings and beliefs.”
The irony is that Silliphant, who preferred to write originals and distinguished himself by doing so, would wind up becoming one of Hollywood’s highest-paid adapters of material from other media. But that was before he moved back to New York for a gambit that made that great city’s streets a character in one of the most celebrated TV series ever produced. It also put him in business with a colorful rogue who would later take him for a ride on Route 66: Bert Leonard.
3: Eight Million Stories
Naked City had been on the air for three years when MAD magazine chimed in with their twist on the TV show’s regular closing line: “If there are eight million stories in the Naked City, how come all the re-runs?” [40] What they didn’t know at the time was that Stirling Silliphant and Herbert B. Leonard, who produced the series, were asking themselves the same question.
“The line was first used in Mark Hellinger’s black and white film noir,” Silliphant reported. “New York was less populous at the time Mr. Hellinger produced it, [so] the closing line was ‘There are five million stories in the Naked City — this has been one of them.’ By the time we geared up, New York had grown, hence we notched the count up to eight million stories. Each week, as I faced the daunting task of coming up with a new episode, Bert and I would have lunch and kick ideas around. I remember saying to him on several occasions, ‘Bert, if there are eight million stories in the Naked City, why in the fuck can’t we come up with even one?’” [41]
The motion picture The Naked City (1948) had been directed by Jules Dassin from a screenplay that Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald had written from Hellinger’s original story. Hellinger, a street-savvy newspaperman who brought that gritty sensibility to such movies as The Killers (1946) and Brute Force (1947),
didn’t romanticize New York, but he didn’t flinch either. He constructed a drama (and narrated it too) about the murder of a young woman that leads to the exposing of a ring that deals in stolen jewels. What lifted it above the level of a standard cops-and-robbers picture was its attention to the details of police work and the spectacular use of New York City itself as a character, in part inspired by the work of photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig) in his 1945 book of the same title. The film, which is now regarded as a classic, was doubly jinxed as it neared its March of 1948 release, first, by the blacklisting of writer Albert Maltz in the wake of the October, 1947 HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) hearings, and the December, 1947 death of Mark Hellinger. [42] Doubtful of the film’s commercial potential and frightened of right-wing pressure against Maltz, Universal Pictures considered burying the film until Hellinger’s family reminded them of a mandatory release clause in Hellinger Productions’s contract.
When Bert Leonard acquired the rights from the Hellinger Estate, he took it to Screen Gems, the television division of Columbia Pictures, where he had been an independent producer on The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin (1954-1958) and Circus Boy (1956-1957). The Screen Gems connection was not a slam-dunk. Although Leonard had a profitable track record with the company, he also had a belligerent one. But, then, he had a belligerent relationship with nearly everybody.
A charming man with a dangerously casual manager about his own affairs, Leonard combined the buccaneer bravery of early Hollywood moguls with the business savvy of the bean counters who were taking over the industry just as he was coming into producing prominence. The catch was that it was only his own beans that he counted. Born in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen in 1922, he was a Navy fighter pilot in World War II. After the war he and his brother, Roger, spent time in Mexico living a sybaritic life until he moved to Los Angeles eager to get into the film business as well as the starlets who were drawn to it. He succeeded at both. Although his uncle was Columbia Pictures’s vice president Nate Spingold, Leonard chose to go it alone, linking with Sam Katzman, the prolific exploitation film producer, from whom he learned filmmaking from the bottom (where Katzman fed) up. In 1953, he felt confident enough in his own talent, and confined enough by Katz-man, to make a deal with Lee Duncan, the discoverer and trainer of Rin Tin Tin (sic), to star the charismatic canine in a TV series. [43] The original Rinty had saved Warner Bros. from bankruptcy in the silent days when Darryl F. Zanuck was running the studio and also pounding out innumerable scripts featuring the noble German Shepard. But that was three decades earlier; the current Rin-Tin-Tin #4 was a shadow of his talented great-grandfather, and Leonard — who sold the show to Screen Gems and ABC-TV — had to work around his limitations by using doubles. Leonard’s ingenuity and tenacity created a hugely successful series, but his constant arguing with the studio brass over budget, quality, and scripts continually threatened to scrap the deal. Uncle Nate Spingold tried to quell the conflict, with scant success. The fact that Leonard was generally correct in his judgments only made the studio executives dig in.
