Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (4 page)

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 connection 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.

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.

Nevertheless, when Leonard sold
Naked City
to ABC-TV, he set it up at Screen Gems; both companies may have been irritated, but they were not stupid. The half-hour series bowed on ABC on September 30, 1958 with Silliphant’s hostage drama, “Meridian.”

Naked City
holds an unusual place in television history. Along with
The Defenders, Coronet Blue,
and a small number of other hold-outs, it continued to shoot in New York City when production was relocating to Los Angeles. “I came in at a time when we were going to film,” he told interviewer Elwy Yost. 
[44]
“Way back in those days it was tape versus film, and film was winning.
Naked City
and
The Defenders
were the two key shows on in New York in the late ‘50s, which was right at the end of the golden age when everyone went to film. [Reginald] Rose wrote nearly all of [
The Defenders
]. We were highly competitive… . We didn’t like their show and they didn’t like our show. We felt they were too preachy and we were very sharp, like today.”

Naked City
was set in Manhattan’s fictitious 65th Precinct, which was actually located on West 54th. Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. But the show’s verisimilitude came from its seasoned New York production crew knowing every alley and cul-de-sac in the city’s five boroughs. As with the 1948 feature,
The Naked City
(the
The
was dropped after the first season) looked at the procedural aspects of crime fighting as it followed Detectives Jimmy Halloran (James Franciscus) and Lt. Dan Muldoon (John McIntire) on their dangerous, but often boring, duties.

“Arriving at the main characters was a joint creative effort between my partner Bert Leonard, who had acquired the rights to
Naked City
from Mark Hellinger’s estate, and me,” Silliphant said. “It seemed so simple — a gruff precinct boss (now a parody character), a young, idealistic detective, and a street cop partner with flattened ears and a busted nose. When I wrote them, they didn’t seem like stereotypes. Today they simply wouldn’t do.” Silliphant also created meaty roles for guest stars, a device that allowed them to cast New York stage actors in the same way that “golden age” live TV dramas in the 1950s reaped the bounty of Broadway. Continuing the tradition of the producer doing the narration, Bert Leonard performed Hellinger’s voice-over chores.

Silliphant wrote thirty-two of the first season’s thirty-nine episodes. “It was easier just to write the damn things than it was to waste time interviewing other writers and trying to get them to catch what we were after, then having to rewrite them, something I truly hate,” he said. He was paid $1,500 for a half-hour script and $2,500 when the show bumped up to an hour. He also collected $500 on those occasions when he polished somebody else’s work. 
[45]
Additionally, eight of his teleplays were adapted into prose by Charles Einstein and published in a Dell First Edition paperback with the unusual arrangement of carrying Silliphant’s byline on the cover and Einstein’s byline within. 
[46]

Although the show was extremely well received by the critics, at first, audiences did not respond. Moreover, there was discord on the set. Some sources say that McIntire grew tired of location shooting in New York and wanted to live on his Montana ranch. Others say that he was irritated by his costar Franciscus’s egotism. Whichever it was, Silliphant arranged for Muldoon to die in a car crash in “The Bumper” (March 17, 1959) and be replaced by a presumably more malleable Lt. Mike Parker (Horace McMahon). Harry Bellaver was added as Sgt. Frank Arcaro. Emboldened by reviews, Leonard protected his series like a lion guarding its young. He shot himself in the foot, however, for the June 23, 1959, broadcast of “A Wood of Thorne.” In a twohander of steadily increasing tension, Halloran intrudes on Lois Heller (Cara Williams) as she celebrates the impending execution of convicted murderer Philip Hone, even though both she and Halloran know that her boyfriend, Nikki, is the real killer, and only she can make the call to stop Hone’s execution. The electrocution process is described vividly, yet it’s all offscreen, which makes it even more riveting. 
[47]
ABC wanted to pull the episode, but Leonard flashed his contract and forced them to air it. In retaliation, the network canceled the series entirely in June, and only the intervention of the sponsor, tobacco company Brown & Williamson, saved it. 
[48]
On its fall revival in October of 1960, it became an hour-long drama with Bellaver and McMahon returning, but Franciscus jettisoned in favor of Paul Burke as Detective Adam Flint and Nancy Malone as his actress-girlfriend, Libby.

Silliphant hadn’t intended to return to television when Screen Gems and Leonard asked him to write the
Naked City
pilot, but when three of his screenplays 
[49]
were bought but not produced (that kind of waste “destroys your whole reason to work,” he said 
[50]
), he took the assignment and, when it sold, he found the changes the medium had undergone to his liking. “A Case Study of Two Savages” (airdate: February 7, 1962) is emblematic of this rekindled interest. “We had a thing where Rip Torn plays a killer from the south, he shoots everyone up all over New York City, he’s making it with Tuesday Weld, and finally he’s gunned down in Grand Central Station. He’s lying there in a pool of blood and Tuesday Weld is crying, and Paul Burke says to her, ‘Why?’ And she says, ‘For the hell of it.’ That’s pretty advanced back in those days, but we felt that was the justification. I mean, wanting a big speech about his mother left him and father went to jail? They would do all that on
The Defenders;
we didn’t. We went for the action and the sharp line. It’s hard to get to that point where you can end the film — she looks up — I’ll never forget the shot — tears in her eyes, she screams out, ‘For the hell of it.’ And you know they’d kill twenty more people if he weren’t dead on the floor. We had no compromises on that show. We never pandered to nice people or giving an easy solution. We really showed it the way it was, and the way it is.” 
[51]

Other episodes are remarkable for their varied mood and character interplay. Scattered examples are “The Bloodhounds” (airdate: May 25, 1959) in which detectives use a traffic accident victim’s lost dogs to find a missing girl, to “The Canvas Bullet” (airdate: June 16, 1959), in which a prize fighter takes to the ring even though he knows it may cost him his life. Real-life champs Rocky Graziano and Jake LaMotta appeared in the character drama, which was directed, as were many episodes, by Stuart Rosenberg (
Cool Hand Luke,
1967). “The Rebirth” (airdate: April 21, 1959) has a scrubwoman, Betty Sinclair, robbing a bank and discovering that money will not relieve her loneliness, so she turns herself in. And “Fire Island” (March 3, 1959) costars a pre-
Route 66
George Maharis, along with Henry Hull, Michael Conrad, and Guy Raymond, in a shoot-out between police and off-season bootleggers. There was also the remarkable “Four Sweet Corners” (airdate: April 28, 1959) in which Maharis, as a returning soldier, decides to drive around the country with a service buddy, Robert Morris. It’s a setup that, if it was not a pre-pilot for
Route 66,
certainly inspired the latter series.

Naked City
ran four seasons and 128 episodes between 1958 and 1963, but Silliphant left, for all intents and purposes, after season one to do
Route 66,
although he wrote the hour-long reboot, “A Death of Princes,” and three additional hours: two in 1960 and one in 1962. He was replaced by the equally industrious Howard Rodman and Arnold Manoff, the latter working under a pseudonym because he, like the original film’s director, Jules Dassin, was blacklisted. 
[52]

Although
Naked City
helped American television grow up, the country and the medium still had a long way to go. Silliphant and Leonard would give it another boost with a series that remains part of the cultural landscape even as its actual namesake has faded.