August 24, 2024

This week in TV Guide: August 24, 1968




This week we've got a miniseries filled with just about everything television has to offer, a star-studded event featuring high drama and low comedy, tragedy and pathos, suspense, violence, and even theater of the absurd. It runs for four consecutive nights, Monday through Thursday, and it's while two networks will be showing it unabridged, a third plans to present a condensed, Cliff's Notes version. It's the water-cooler show of the year, guaranteed to leave viewers shocked and breathless. 

Welcome to Chicago, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

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It's not as if the chaos of the convention just snuck up on people. You can see it right there in the full-page add for KCRA's convention coverage; referring to the location of the convention, at the International Amphitheatre near the Union Stock Yards, the headline shouts, "Tempest Near the Stockyards," with the body of the ad containing either a promise or a warning: "The Democrats are facing what may be the stormiest convention fight of the century." 

We probably don't need to rehash it all: police on the convention floor; reporters being assulted; delegates taken into custody; a telecommunications strike that hampered media efforts to provide coverage of protests devolving into riots in Grant Park; contentious debates about delegate selection and the Vietnam War plank in the party platform; and more. Media coverage of the convention, and the public's response to that coverage, would be hashed and rehashed in TV Guide (and other publications) in the ensuing weeks and months, and continues to be analyzed to this day. But why wait for that? There's already a lot of second-guessing regarding network coverage of last month's Republican Convention, if the Letters section is any indication.

NBC was the big winner in the ratings race, and so it's no surprise that many of the letters, both positive and negative, refer to the Peacock Network's coverage in Miami Beach. Jean Ward of Kimberton, Pennsylvania, chastises NBC as "saboteurs for the Democratic Party," and says their editorial remarks, "presented as news, were highly improper and, to me, highly objectionable." Tim Johnson, writing from Los Angeles, and D. Sherwood, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, both single out Sander Vanocur; the former calls his reporting "sophomoric cynicism," and the latter found him "highly biased and generally unprofessional." Mr. Johnson adds that, thanks to Vanocur, "I have discovered what a truly remarkable reporting team the CBS Network has." [Nonetheless, I always enjoyed Sander Vanocur myself.] Not everyone was so negative, however; Helene Shalotsky of Parsippany, New Jersey, praises coverage that "vividly uncovered to the American people the hoopla and ludicrous expenditure involved in selecting a Presidential candidate," and James Kusiak, of Wildwood, New Jersey, thanks the networks "for their devoted service to the nation in their coverage of issues as important as the respective conventions."

And then there's ABC, which eschewed the traditional gavel-to-gavel convention coverage in Miami Beach (and the estimated $5 million that CBS and NBC each spent) in favor of a 90-minute nightly summary of each night's session at less than half the cost, while still retaining much of their nightly entertainment revenue. Pam Hornung, of St. Louis, found that this suited her just fine, writing that "I have never enjoyed a convention more or felt more well-informed as to what had happened during the day." Mrs. Cal Heathman, from Champaign, Illinois, extends "My compliments to ABC News. They needed only an hour and a half to tell us what had happened at the Republican Convention; it took CBS and NBC all evening long." She also takes a moment to mention "Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley [who] added a great deal of interest and, in most cases, understanding."

Buckley on the left, Vidal on the right: 
the only time you'd identify them that way.
For coverage of both the Republican and Democratic conventions, ABC signed Buckley and Vidal to provide their own take on things, from, respectively, the conservative and liberal points of view. Their contentious clashes became so famous that, years later, they would become the subject of a documentary. The highlight of their interactions (or lowlight, if you prefer) unquestionably comes on Wednesday, August 28, an infamous night that saw Hubert Humphrey's nomination for president, interspersed with tape-delayed coverage of the clashes between police and protestors in Grant Park. 

Anchorman Howard K. Smith, referring to a clip they had just viewed, had suggested that the raising of the Vietcong flag by antiwar protestors, an act which triggered a violent response from police, could be considered akin to raising a Nazi flag during World War II; Buckley nodded his agreement with Smith. Addressing Buckley, Vidal replied that "As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I will only say that if we can’t have the right of assembly –" at which point Buckley interrupted, "Now listen, you queer—stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered!" A decade later, New York magazine would rank the debates as one of the greatest moments in the history of television to date, right up there with the moon landing and the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show; august company indeed. 

That's all in the future, though. For the present, the Doan Report wonders if ABC's limited coverage may be the wave of the future. Looking back to last month, Doan notes that, on average, "nearly 13 million Americans" chose ABC's alternative programming (including reruns of The Rat Patrol and The Flying Nun and an old Jerry Lews movie) instead of watching convention coverage on NBC and CBS. Were they, Doan wonders, "mostly distinterested Democrats? Or were they, regardless of political persuasion, simply switched off by the tedium of 90 percent of the Miami Beach proceedings?" Even worse was the possibility that "a great swatch of the public" has become "so disenchanted with the Old Politics . . .that many people are permanently turned-off to this sort of televised razzmatazz?" The Democrats are taking last-minute steps to streamline some of their proceedings in hopes viewers will find it all less boring; ironically, "TV’s millions may be switching en masse to CBS and NBC if trouble breaks out outside Chicago’s International Amphitheatre. Huge protest demonstrations are in the making." In Miami, NBC and ABC were the clear ratings winners, with CBS finishing in third place for the first time in history. What Chicago has in store, nobody knows for sure. 

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It may be an odd thing to say, given how countercultural 1968 was, but there's a certain innocence to it all at the same time, particularly the idea that a political party was willing to debate important issues and air out its differences right there in front of everyone on live television. You look at those poor suckers on the convention floor, thinking that what they're doing really makes a difference, and yet somewhere in the back of your mind you envy their naïvety, their commitment to something that matters. You look at the motto emblazoned in the convention hall, "Promises Made, Promises Kept," and you wonder how anyone could ever believe such hoke, let alone something like, "Make America Great Again." It may have been the worst of times, but there was somethiung eminently human about it all, something that we've lost in the deIt cades since. 

The Democrats didn't plan it that way, but it happened nonetheless, and the idea that anything like it could happen again today is laughable. As we read a couple of weeks ago, by 1980 conventions were being scripted down to the minute, and today they scan more like cheap infomercials, except those infomercials usually have more substance to them. It's hard to shake the feeling sometimes that we're all just going through the motions, playing the roles that have been assigned to us, while we wait to see what happens next. We wait, and we wonder.
 
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That innocence isn't on display only in the convention hall. You can see it on the Elysian fields of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where the championship game of the Little League World Series is being contested Saturday afternoon on ABC's Wide World of Sports (5:00 p.m., tape-delayed). It used to be that the only other time you'd see a Little League game was if you walked down to a local playground, and in that way it's more of a slice of Americana, something you'd see in a picture book along with parades and church socials, than an actual sporting event. Today, the entire tournament is televised; even the regional rounds wind up on ESPN (in primetime, no less!), and Little League baseball seems more of a commodity, another source of programming for a machine. Even the between-innings segments featured in 1968, with all-stars Carl Yastrzemski, Sam McDowell, and Dave Giusti offering "tips for the youngsters," would seem corny today; the only tips they're interested in are the best home run celebrations for the cameras. 

Apropos of a convention week, some of the best alternative programming comes from exhibition football, where the hitting is only slightly harder than it is in Chicago. On Saturday, two of the oldest and fiercest rivals in the AFL, the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs, face off in KC (5:30 p.m., KNEW), while the teams in the last two NFL championship games, the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, go at it in Big D (6:30 p.m., CBS). The AFL season begins in earnest on September 6, the NFL follows suit on September 15.

Even non-political programming has its tangentially-political side; on Sunday morning, Discovery '68, which Cleveland Amory praised last week, presents a poignant rerun from last November featuring the late Robert F. Kennedy in a program that explores ways to preserve and enjoy "The Vanishing Wilderness." (11:30 a.m.) Among a montage of Americans enjoying hiking, fishing, and camping, Kennedy and his family are seen shooting the rapids on the Colorado River, and RFK later discusses government projects designed to protect these areas. It is an interesting choice by the netw, Aork to replay this particular episode on the eve of the Democratic Convention (just as it was to telecast it last November, a year out from the election); although Discovery is primarily a children's show, I'd imagine this one might have produced a tear or two from grown-up viewers. 

Also on Sunday, Glen Campbell's summer replacement series airs its final episode. (Don't worry; thanks to the dispute between CBS and the Smothers Brothers, he'll be back soon enough.) For the finale (9:00 p.m., CBS), Glen presents a country-music concert with Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three, the Stoneman Family, and regulars Leigh French and John Hartford; Pat Paulsen features in his mock-presidential campaign, advocating for increased gun-control laws. 

Monday illustrates the challenges faced by West Coast stations when it comes to covering live events. CBS and NBC both begin their live, gavel-to-gavel convention coverage at 4:30 p.m.; if things go as planned (which they never do), their affiliates should have an hour or two to fill before their late local news (and, in the case of NBC, The Tonight Show, with Bob Newhart as guest host for the week). It's pretty much business as usual for ABC, though, with the Chuck Connors series Cowboy in Africa (7:30 p.m., The Rat Patrol (8:30 p.m.), and Howard Duff and Dennis Cole in Felony Squad (9:00 p.m.), followed by their nightly convention wrap-up at 9:30 p.m. (about three hours after its live broadcast).

On Tuesday, ABC continues its counter-programming offensive with Garrison's Gorillas (7:30 p.m., although with all the explosions and whatnot, viewers might have been forgiven for thinking the network was interrupting things for live footage from downtown Chicago), followed by It Takes a Thief, with guest star Susan Saint James. Tonight the convention runs late, ending after 10:00 p.m. in the West, so weary viewers might have opted for a special Merv Griffin broadcast from the streets of Harlem, in support of New York's "Give a Damn" program to benefit ghetto youth (8:30 p.m., Channel 36). Following opening remarks from NYC's mayor John Lindsay, Merv presents performances by James Brown, Joe Tex, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Spanky and Our Gang, Willie Tyler and Lester, the Pied Piper Drummers and Dancers (doing a tribal dance), and a fashion show of African-style clothes. There are also appearances by former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali and actor Burt Lancaster, who grew up in the neighborhood. 

Wednesday, ABC's alternate reality reaches its peak, when the network puts Elvis up against the politicians; Blue Hawaii (7:30 p.m.) is, says Judith Crist, "bearable to the non-[Elvis] fans as well," with "pretty views of Hawaii, has the usual quota of pretty girls on hand, has a couple of tidy tunes in its repertoire and even has Angela Lansbury to brighten the screen as Elvis's mother." Of course, Angela Lansbury also played the evil mother in The Manchurian Candidate, one of the great political thrillers of all time, so she's got you covered either way. Keep in mind, though, that the presidential balloting takes place on Wednesday, which also features rough stuff inside the convention hall and rioting outside it, so the network may have decided to go live earlier in the night.

If ABC continues its minimalist convention coverage, its Thursday night lineup is made up of comedies (make of that what you will): The Second Hundred Years (7:30 p.m.), The Flying Nun (8:00 p.m.), Bewitched (8:30 p.m.), and That Girl (9:00 p.m.) However, Channel 2 has Portrait: James Mason (9:00 p.m.), which includes clips from The Seventh Veil, Odd Man Out, I Met a Murderer, A Star Is Born, and Georgy Girl; his career is discussed by those who have worked with him, including Stephen Boyd, Sue Lyon, Omar Sharif and director Sidney Lumet. Following that, NET Playhouse (10:00 p.m.) presents an adaptation of Georges Simenon's "The Suspect," a dark, non-Maigret story of terrorism and revolutionary fervor.

We're finally back to normal on Friday, and tonight's choice is the very funny Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" (8:30 p.m., NBC), featuring Kirk and Spock as a couple of Chicagoland gangsters, and introducing to the world the game whose rules never end, Fizbin. And this leads us to the week's unbylined cover story, a profile of DeForest Kelley, the erstwhile Dr. Bones McCoy. Kelley comes across, to me at least, as a man of contradictions: a minister's son who eschews religion in favor of the New Age-y Science of Mind; a quiet, droll man who nonetheless has become something of a "teen-age sex symbol," serenated by Sunset Strip hippies who offer him love beads; one of the three stars of a successful TV series who still has to "fight for everything I've gotten at Star Trek, from a parking space at the studio to an unshared dressing room," and once found himself left out of an episode entirely. 

He's immensely popular with the crew and his fellow actors; "De really cares about people," says Leonard Nimoy, who also calls him "truly the most human of all the actors I've ever known," while William Shatner cites "a simple, unassuming niceness about this man that's rare in any business." He doesn't deny the disappointments of his career, the stardom that seemed close but always remained just out of reach, but of course he attains an immortality that few actors ever reach. And not only that—earlier this year he found himself, for the first time, part of a TV Guide crossword puzzle, which hs wife clipped out and framed. "It's not an Oscar or an Emmy," he says, "but to an actor it's something."

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It was just a couple of weeks ago that we were discussing, in this very space, how frequently TV Guide looks at children's programming. And so what do we have this week? Another article on children's programming! And, somewhat appropriately, this, too, has a tangental relationship to the week's festivities in Chicago, as Dr. Joyce Brothers asks the question: "Are the seeds of violence nurtured through the public's airwaves?" 

She starts out with a sobering statistic: "Without changing the dial, a child of our electronic age can watch some 50 near or actual violent 'deaths' on his television set in a day’s time." He's also going to spend as many hours in front of the TV over the course of a year as they do in front of a schoolteacher. No wonder that mothers "worry more about the effect of tele-violence on their children's souls than they do abou tthe effect of television on their eyes and posture." And, "in the wake of Sen. Robert Kennedy's assassination, everybody has been worrying with them."

Following Kennedy's assassination, there was a wave of self-censorship on television, with networks pulling the more violent episodes of various series (only to air them later, after things had died down), but Dr. Brothers is skeptical of such moves, viewing them more as a quest to find a scapegoat. "History,' she quotes William James, "is a bath of blood. To hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living."

Not surprisingly, there's no real consensus on the topic among those who study such things. "There are as many opinions as there are experts," says Brothers, "and their disagreement is often as violent as our television fare. Not all the opinions are based on facts, for there are very few of these. Research on television’s influence on our lives has barely begun. And many of the findings are contradictory." 

For example, one expert says there's no such thing as something too violent for kids, that violent television serves the same purpose as Grimm's Fairy Tales; "Children still need these hair-raising stories that end happily if they are not to be terrified by their own unresolved and frightening fantasies." Another replies that television is "a school for violence that most of our children attend regularly," and that kids wind up learning that "violence is the great adventure and the sure solution, and he who is best at it wins. We are training not only a peace corps but also a violence corps." 

Brothers cites the results of a questionnaire completed by over 300 psychiatrists at a recent American Psychiatric Association meeting; 30 percent beleved fictional violence (TV shows, movies, comic books) teaches actual violence to children, while 24 percent believe it helps dissipate aggression. "The rest were undecided." Studies run on children produce results that differ dramatically. 

If there's any clarity at all, it might come from a Stanford University study that found that "children are less affected by the violence they witness on their TV screens than they are by their parents’ attitudes toward violence." In other words, happy children with loving parents tend to focus more on the struggle between good and evil, between hero and villain, while those who have been neglected, mistreated, or underprivileged often bring their existing frustrations to their viewing, where what they see on TV adds fuel to the fire. 

Marshall McLuhan, one of the most influential of media watchers, offers some interesting observations of his own. According to McLuhan, children actually look at the faces of actors much more than they do the weapons or the action. What they really fear, he says, is the unknown. Children (and most adults) don't watch Westerns or detective stories for their violent content; rather, it's "for the pleasure of participating in the solution of a crime or in building a frontier town." Violence in that detective show or Western is familiar to them, and less upsetting than stories like 1984 or Jane Eyre. Which, to me, suggests that something like, say, the Three Stooges, or the Road Runner cartoons, is so formulaic, so predictable, that the violent content would have little effect on children watching them. 

Perhaps most interesting, and most sobering, is a finding that juvenile viewers are far more disturbed by verbal aggression on TV than by physical violence. "They were least upset by shooting, more upset by knives and most upset 'when grownups are angry with one another and shout.'" And maybe that's the lesson we take from all this: that what's important is not what children see on television, but what they see in their own households, from their own parents. Television, Joyce Brothers says, is not a chief motivating force; rather, it's "a mirror in which we see the reflections of ourselves and the world in which we live." And changing the mirror image doesn't change the world. 

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I think we could all do with something a little lighthearted to round things out, and that comes to us courtesy of Joseph Finnigan's article on those "long-gone TV luminaries" who've found their fame—and fortune—working in Europe. Stars like George Nader, Ty Hardin, Edd Byrnes, Ray Danton, and others, who may have disappeared from American televisions but now grace the marquees of foreign theaters. 

    George Nader, king of the
    sauerkraut spy circuit.
Their role model, of course, is Clint Eastwood, who headed to Italy after the cancellation of Rawhide to make a spaghetti-Western called A Fistfull of Dollars. Two more movies followed—For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—and Eastwood emerged a bona fide movie star, one whose fame and acclaim have grown exponentially larger in the decades since this issue of TV Guide was published. George Nader, who starred in the forgettable single-season series Shannon among other series, is no Clint Eastwood. However, he's the star of a series of secret-agent movies in Germany, where he's now a celebrity. "I make my living in Europe now," he tells Finnigan. Even after years in Hollywood, "I hadn't had any offers." But now, "I look at my counterparts in Hollywood and they’re playing guest roles. In my pictures, I’m the leading man."*

*He also starred, with Richard Kiel in a sci-fi flick called The Human Duplicators, which aired on MST3K. Maybe we'll see that here someday.

Edd Byrnes, who captured the hearts and minds of viewers as Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip, travelled to Europe to keep things rolling after they stopped on the Strip. He calls Europe "a gold mine, It bought me a Rolls-Royce, a big house in Hollywood—and I still keep my apartment in Rome." He cautions though, that in the shady world of European movie-making, it's best to get paid up-front, "before yu shoot the last week of the picture." He was paid $100,000 for one Western; the going rate for most Hollywood émigrés is about $25,000 per picture.

Adam West is another veteran of the spaghetti-Western circuit, declaiming there after the end of the Robert Taylor series The Detectives, in which he played one of the titular characters. "I was offered five more pictures over there," he says, "but I didn't want to get involved in Italian film. Then Batman came along." He, too, says there are drawbacks to working in Italy or Spain. "We filmed our picture in the desert outside of Almeria, Spain, where Lawrence of Arabia was made. It was so hot that after a few hours your horse would lie down and roll over in slow motion." European actors, reluctant to be upstaged by the big American star, didn't pull their punches, either. "Ali of those villains wanted to be the hero, wouldn’t settle for being the bad guy," he recalls, remembering one who "put his spur through my left shin in a fight one day."

The American expats acknowledge that their European stardom might not be quite the same as if it were Hollywood. But, as one Hollywood agent puts it, "they can make three or four pictures a year abroad at $25,000 a shot. In what other industry can a guy make $100,000 a year and still be called a failure?" And, as George Nader said, be called the star of the movie?

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MST3K alert: Invasion of the Neptune Men
(Japanese; 1962) A group of youngsters have difficulty convincing anyone they were attacked by a spaceship. Shinichi Chiba, Kappel Matsumoto. (Friday, 9:00 p.m., KEMO in San Francisco) There are really only two recommendations for this movie: a very early appearance by famed Japanese martial arts actor Sonny Chiba; and the return of Phantom of Krankor (Bill Corbett), the villain of a similar (and much better) MST3K flick, Prince of Space. For the SOL crew, it's a rare bright spot in one of the worst movies they've had to endure. TV  

1 comment:

  1. Kelly had quite a career before Star Trek playing outlaws in westerns and villains in noir-ish crime thrillers.

    ReplyDelete

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