Larry Cohen Page 6

  I believe you only furnished the story for “Scapegoat.”

  Well, if that’s the case, I don’t even know if I got paid or not. I don’t really remember much about it at all. You know, Quinn Martin and I were not the best of friends to say the least. I first met him when I had written “Kill or Be Killed” for The Defenders. He’d caught the show on its original telecast and he contacted me to talk about it. He said, “How did you know what we did in our pilot?” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I said, “I’m not sure I understand you. What pilot are you talking about?” He said, “We just made a pilot for a show called The Fugitive and the first sequence in your episode was identical to the one in our pilot. You see a convict being taken to Sing Sing prison on a train and there’s a train wreck and the guy escapes. It’s the same situation with your show. How can that be?” Well, I couldn’t give him an answer to that because I hadn’t seen the pilot for The Fugitive. I told Quinn Martin that I thought it was just a coincidence but he couldn’t accept that. He always felt something mysterious and treacherous must have happened, but I certainly wasn’t a party to it. In my dealings with Martin, I didn’t always feel that he enjoyed having me around very much. I did invite him over to my house one time for a party, and he was a decent companion for the evening, but when it came to business he was a very different proposition. He was an incredibly uptight guy who wanted to control everything, but he didn’t really know that much to tell you the truth. He had a good staff of smart people working under him who did most of his thinking for him. I don’t think he really knew that much about creativity, he just didn’t want anybody else around him to have any authority. So, Martin presided over a bunch of subordinates who worked with him for years and then, after he stopped making shows, most of them retired. I was glad to have written the one episode of The Fugitive because I liked the characters and I liked the show. But after having done that one episode, I was more than happy to move on and not have to worry about it anymore.

  That same year, in early 1964, you also wrote “Medal for a Turned Coat,” an acclaimed episode of the aforementioned Espionage. That was about a German officer, who travels to England during World War II to negotiate a peace settlement after Hitler is supposedly assassinated by the Nazis.

  I was very happy with “Medal for a Turned Coat.” That script was a play on the idea of the “Good German,” which, to some people, may have once seemed a highly improbable thing. But I wanted to write about an honourable man surrounded by all this destructive evil that was the Nazi machine. “Medal for a Turned Coat” had a few flashbacks in it, which I liked. I thought it gave the episode a certain poignancy. Again, Herbert Brodkin was a producer on Espionage and I was greatly satisfied with the way it turned out. That episode was directed by David Greene and he did a beautiful job. It was a good script that deserved a good director and a good cast, and it certainly got them. Fritz Weaver and several other distinguished actors were in the piece, people whose names I can’t quite recall right now. [9] It was an intriguing idea in the way it dealt with the themes of trust and mistrust, good and evil, condemnation, and redemption, and how the chaos of war colours our perceptions of the enemy and his true intentions. Around this point in my writing career, I became fascinated with the dramatic potential inherent in treason, betrayal, and subterfuge. I revisited the theme of treason a number of times in my work, particularly in The Defenders.

  Let’s go back to The Defenders, which is one of the most famous TV shows of its era. Originally, the father and son characters had appeared in Studio One in Hollywood played by Ralph Bellamy and William Shatner. Was there ever any possibility that Bellamy and Shatner would resume their roles in the series?

  I really have no idea. When they turned The Defenders into a television series, they recast those parts with E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed playing the leads. I was not involved in that decision as I came in a little later. In fact, by the time I was working on The Defenders it was already a huge hit and had won the Emmy Award for Best Series. In those days, they used to make thirty-two episodes in a year, so they desperately needed scripts. Thirty-two episodes is a lot of television to produce in just twelve months, particularly when you consider that nowadays they do around eighteen episodes a year. I was fortunate enough that when I sent in my story idea for “Kill or Be Killed,” the producers liked it very much and let me write the script for it. The director assigned to my first episode was actually Sydney Pollack. He was only a television director back in those days, long before he became an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. Sydney didn’t like Brodkin and he didn’t like the company. He came in from California and he quickly went right back there. Sydney did not enjoy the experience of working for them because they treated him like he was a nobody. Meanwhile, he had been directing a lot of television in California so he didn’t need them. I think he left rather abruptly, even before finishing the show. On the last day, Sydney just took off in the afternoon and left the assistant director to finish the job.

  Did you work closely with the series creator, Reginald Rose?

  Yes, and Reginald Rose was very nice to me. He respected my work and didn’t try to change it. He was always complimentary and encouraging, a positive, nurturing presence. His associate, David Shaw, who was the story editor on The Defenders, was equally helpful. They were both very kind to me and really helped my career tremendously. They were two smart guys and I had a lot of respect for them.

  What were your favorites of the episodes you wrote for The Defenders?

  I liked “The Traitor,” which was a very well-received episode. It shared a lot of similarities with “Medal for a Turned Coat” and, coincidentally, was also directed by David Greene. “The Traitor” was about a Russian spy living in the United States and posing as an American who gets put on trial for treason. I also liked “The Secret,” which co-starred Martin Landau and was also very well-received. That was about an American nuclear scientist who refuses to give up his discovery to the U.S. Government. He is put on trial by the Government, who claim that his mind belongs to them. I later turned that story into a stage play called Nature of the Crime that I did off-Broadway. Another of my Defenders episodes that I like is “May Day! May Day!” That was about a military person, an admiral, in a nuclear submarine. He wants to usurp the Government and start World War III, and is tried for sedition. That was yet another story about treason. I did a bunch of them and I actually referred to them as the “Treason Trilogy.” I love dealing with the same recurring themes in my work, but in different ways. Back then, rather than just doing individual episodes of television shows, I was consciously trying to create a body of work which had some relationship to each other. That was not always easy as some of these shows differed greatly from each other in their specifics. I also thought that “The Go-Between” with Arthur Hill and “The Unwritten Law” with Kim Hunter and Jessica Walter, were both very good episodes, as well. So, there were quite a number of strong ones that I wrote for The Defenders, and they all got me a lot of positive attention. In fact, I don’t think I have a distinct favorite out of any of them. I like them all.

  The Defenders ran for four seasons before being cancelled in 1965, the same year that you created the Western series Branded. Was there any overlap in terms of your writing commitments between these shows?

  No. I was back in California at that point, and I wanted to see if I could get my own show on the air. I had generated some heat because I was now well-known as a writer for The Defenders, which was the #1 TV show in the country. I wanted to cash-in on the good reactions that people were having to my work.

  Branded debuted on January 24, 1965, as a replacement for the NBC sitcom, The Bill Dana Show, which had been cancelled. What inspired you to create the show?

  Well, there had been a lot of blacklisting in America in the preceding years. The House of Un-American Activities Committee had attempted to identify communist sympathisers and influences in the motion picture industry and vanquish them. A
s a result of this, many people’s reputations had been destroyed. They could no longer work and lived in disgrace. They couldn’t clear their names after they had been accused of being communists and were considered disloyal and dangerous. These individuals were accused of being subversives, because they had once been the member of a liberal organization or a communist-related organization. None of them were spies or anything, they were well-meaning people. Sometimes they were stupid, but they certainly weren’t trying to overthrow the Government. They were just citizens who believed in civil rights and other forms of progressive politics, and the only way they could express themselves was through leftwing organizations. But suddenly, because of these affiliations, they couldn’t work anymore in Hollywood and were blacklisted. I began to think about that terrible situation and the inevitable effects it caused. I realized that it would be impossible to do a television show about that contemporary period, but maybe if I disguised the story as a historical Western I could address some of these things directly. So, that’s exactly what I did. Branded was basically about a blacklisted cowboy, a United States Cavalry captain who has been unjustly accused of cowardice. He is unfairly stripped of his rank and ordered to leave the fort in shame, never to return. It would have been unthinkable to have dealt with this subject literally in the 1960s, but by taking the blacklist and dramatising it in an acceptable manner — and in a popular form like the Western — it was possible. So, I thought I’d do a Western show about somebody whose reputation had been destroyed and that taint and those accusations followed him around wherever he went.

  You once famously described the hero of Branded, Captain Jason McCord, as “the tallest underdog in the whole West.”

  Yeah, he certainly was. Chuck Connors, who played McCord, was a big guy, and we were lucky to have him for the role. As soon as Chuck had signed on to do Branded, we were immediately scheduled on NBC for Sunday nights at 8:30 and that was a great time period for a show. Branded was preceded by Walt Disney Presents and was followed by Bonanza, so it was sandwiched between these two huge hits, two of the biggest shows on NBC. Without even shooting a pilot, Branded was on the air and that was pretty remarkable. In fact, it was pretty much unheard of. Everybody was astonished that I’d managed to get this show on television, and shown in a primetime slot like that, without ever shooting a pilot. That made me a big hero in Hollywood.

  Were you friendly with Chuck Connors?

  For a while. Then, one day, when we were both sitting around talking and having lunch, I told him that Branded was really about a blacklisted cowboy. The moment those words left my lips it was the end of the friendship. Chuck was a right-wing conservative guy, and when he heard my revelation about the show, he thought he’d fallen into the hands of a communist! After that, we didn’t have very much to do with each other. I do remember that before that incident occurred we were shooting the first episode of Branded out in Utah. In the middle of the night, when everybody else was asleep, Chuck suddenly knocked on my door. He was wearing these long cavalry boots that came up to his knees and he asked me if I would go back to his room and help him take them off. I immediately thought, “Uh-oh, this is suspicious! I do not want to go back to this guy’s room! It’s the middle of the night and he’s a lot bigger and taller than me!” I didn’t know if he had any romantic inclinations but I thought to myself, “This is the worst thing that could possibly happen! I finally get my own show on television and the star makes a pass at me!” [Laughs] Eventually, I agreed to go back to Chuck’s room with him. When we got there I teetered down and began trying to pull his boots off. He said, “No, you’ve got to turn around and put my foot between your legs. Pull on the boots and I’ll push on your ass with my other foot.” I thought to myself, “Oh Jesus, this is a classic! I should have brought my wife with me.” Anyway, I pulled and pulled on the boots and then, after one mighty last effort, the boot came loose and Chuck suddenly went flying back off the chair and hit his head on the coffee table. He was just lying there on the floor, unmoving, and for a few horrifying moments I thought I’d actually killed him. All I could think was, “The show isn’t even on the air yet and I’ve just killed the star! I’ve really fucked everything up!” But after a few minutes Chuck regained consciousness and slowly got back up. I said, “Hey, this story is going to look great in TV Guide.” Chuck suddenly flashed me a look like he thought I really meant it. Despite that incident, we still remained on good terms, until that fateful day at lunch when I told him the origin of Branded. Once I intimated that the show had something to do with the unfortunate blacklisting of people, which I’m sure Chuck was very much in favour of, by the way, it marked the immediate termination of our friendship.

  What was the significance of McCord’s broken sword in your mind and his insistence that he always carry it around with him?

  In the other series Chuck had starred in, The Rifleman, his character always carried a Winchester rifle. I felt we needed to give McCord his own weapon, something unusual that was uniquely his own. Of course, the sword is an ancient weapon and perhaps a more honourable one than a gun. The half-sword also seemed like it was integral to the story as it directly symbolised the memory of McCord’s disgrace. He had been unfairly accused and is wrongly despised, and is trying to shed this image of cowardice and dishonour. The sword gets broken in the opening sequence of every episode when the officer strips McCord of his rank and snaps the weapon over his knee in front of him. We shot the court-martial sequence in Kanab, Utah, and not in Hollywood. The reason being if we did it in Utah, we could secure a lot more extras and wouldn’t have to use members of the Screen Actors Guild. It was as simple as that, really. Incidentally, the actor playing the officer had been a big movie star at one time. His name was John Howard and he’d played Bulldog Drummond in five or six films, some of them alongside John Barrymore. Howard had also played Ronald Coleman’s brother in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon and had been Katherine Hepburn’s fiancée in The Philadelphia Story. He was a terrific actor.

  What were the events that led to your creative control of Branded being rescinded at the end of the first season?

  That was directly a result of my falling out with Chuck. I wasn’t kidding earlier. As soon as Chuck heard that his character was really a blacklisted cowboy, boy, he seriously wanted to get rid of me! It took a while for that to happen but, eventually, they did replace me. I was happy to be done with the show at that point, too. When it all started turning sour, they had other writers come in and start fussing around with my scripts, making changes after I was finished with them. Subsequently, there were script assignments given out that I didn’t know about and I finally realized it had become a deeply unpleasant situation just showing up to work every day. So, I left. I mean, I don’t think the other writers on the show did a very good job. I don’t think they fully explored the potential inherent in the character and his story. Branded could have been a lot better, actually. They brought in another producer and he had a penchant for hiring old movie actors. Not that I had a big problem with that, but it was obvious to me that the overall quality of the show was beginning to plummet. When that happens a show is doomed.

  I understand that Connors’ erratic behaviour was also partially responsible for the demise of Branded. Is this true?

  The truth is Chuck did become increasingly more arrogant and difficult to deal with as time went on. Frankly, I think success must have gone to his head. He began to agitate the sponsors, Proctor and Gamble, and then finally alienate them altogether until they were just furious with him. They would ask Chuck to make personal appearances at various sponsored events, dinners and publicity opportunities, and he made it very difficult for everybody. I guess he thought that because the ratings for Branded were so good he was invulnerable, but that was certainly not the case. The sponsors owned that time period and NBC had nothing to do with it. It was Proctor and Gamble’s 8:30 slot and they made the decision to cancel Branded. Connors’ behaviour was tantamount to committing suicide as far
as the show was concerned. You don’t provoke your sponsors. You just don’t do that. I mean, Branded was consistently in the Top 10 shows, or floating around just outside the Top 10, but it ended up getting cancelled after two successful seasons. That was a shame because there were many more stories to tell, more adventures for the character to enjoy, but it was all gone. I think Branded could have run for five or six years if certain individuals had been a little more focused, friendly and harmonious. All it would have taken is a little attitude adjustment and it could have continued moving forward.

  Was Connors ever contrite in later years?

  Well, in the years that followed, Chuck’s career waned and he did become a lot more friendly and approachable. He had another television series on the air after Branded called Cowboy in Africa, but that was cancelled after just one season. Then, several years later, an event was held at what used to be the old Republic Studios. It was a dinner to celebrate all the great Republic Westerns that they used to do. They honoured people like Gene Autry and Tex Ritter, and invited everybody that had ever been associated with Westerns. Chuck and I were seated together and we had a friendly evening. We started talking about the past and Chuck actually told me that he regretted his behaviour on Branded, and wished things had turned out differently. He said, “If I’d just treated the sponsor a little better we could have had a few more seasons.” What could I say to that? I completely agreed with him. He then said, “Hey, do you remember that day when I tried to ride you down on the Western street at Paramount and you didn’t run? I galloped that horse right at you and you just stood your ground and didn’t move. Boy, I had a lot of respect for you after that.” I said, “Well, to tell you the truth, Chuck, I was so terrified I was frozen in position!” [Laughs] I certainly hadn’t forgotten that day either.