The problem with TV cops

The first episode of Law & Order I saw----I had avoided the show for years because of it's George Wallace-esque title and the red-white-and-blue graphics. But I finally watched an episode. The prosecutors have a disturbed teen talk to a psychiatrist, learn that his problems come from years of emotional abuse at the hands of his sadistic, Amy Chua-like father. Then they prosecute the child as an adult and send him to prison for twenty years.

I decided to continue avoiding the show.

There had been an episode of Dragnet where Joe and Bill investigate a case. Someone has been embezzling money from a company. They tail one of the employees after work, a timid middle aged accountant. It turns out he has a gambling problem.

Joe and Bill sit down with him. They're very sympathetic. They explain that compulsive gambling is an addiction, a disease. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's a medically recognized psychiatric condition. He can get help through such groups as Gamblers Anonymous.

In the end, the accountant and his wife come to the police station. He is finally able to admit that he does have a gambling problem.

Then, finally, before the closing credits, we are told that the accountant is now serving eight years in San Quentin for embezzlement.

You really don't want a cop helping you with your psychological problems. It creates a real problem for TV producers who want to do a show tackling some important social issue. How do they do this realistically without having the episode end with the troubled person going to prison?

On the other hand, this is probably good for people to see in case a cop ever tries to "help" them.

Dragnet style acting

One of the real problems of extreme low budget cinema is not-very-good acting. There's acting where you can see they're acting, and, very often, actors say their lines very, very slowly.

I saw one locally produced video. I rented it from a local video store. It was an extreme case. It was a comedy, but it appeared that no one in it had ever seen a comedy. They apparently thought that the way to make a line funny was to say it very, very slowly, and to stretch out certain words for no reason.

There was only one line of dialog I remember. The person started out speaking slowly but normally, but as she got to the end of the sentence, she slipped into it. She said, "This is very bad for my self-esteeeeeeeeeeeeeeem."

Even if they had spoken normally, the movie would have stunk.

I've seen much better extreme low budget comedies. There was one made for $2,000 by a guy I used to know. It was rather amazing. It had pyrotechnics, some fairly impressive special effects. It had a scene of a car exploding, of a water tower collapsing, of alien space craft. The acting was pretty good. The writing was very good. It had a large cast. It had a real airplane with a strafing scene, a real fire engine, a real jail cell, and real cops. A fake bazooka though.

But there were two flaws. One is that it was filmed on regular VHS. The other is that the otherwise good actors talked too slow.

So. I realized the solution to slow talking and bad acting.

It was the Jack Webb approach.

Dragnet

Actors on Dragnet never memorized anything. Jack Webb didn't want them to.

One actress told how she was speaking her lines in an episode. Jack Webb stopped her.

"What are you doing? You're not reading your lines!"

"I don't need to read them. I memorized them."

"Well, stop it! Just read your lines!"

She started reading the teleprompter. But her eyes were moving back and forth. Jack Webb stopped her.

"It looks like your reading!"

"You TOLD me to read!"

"Okay, well, just go back to what you were doing!"

Harry Morgan told her that she was the first person on the show to get away with memorizing lines.

Another guy told about an actor who was acting. In all the anecdotes, Webb was barking orders at the actors.

"Cut!" Jack Webb yelled. "What are you doing?"

"I'm acting."

"Well, stop it!"

He gave the guy a newspaper.

"Read this!"

The guy started reading the newspaper the way people generally read newspapers. Flat, unemotionally.

"THAT'S what I want!"

When they're reading, they can talk faster. The results were usually pretty good----not any worse than on some other shows, anyway.

It also sped up production. An episode that normally would have taken a week to film could be done in a day and a half.

I've never tried it

I do wonder if unpaid actors would play along. They're appearing in your stupid movie. You have to give them something in return, and if it's not money, you have to give them the opportunity to do something they want. I don't know if reading a cue card in front of a camera is going to fulfill their dream of being an actor.

And, anyway, this sort of thing would only work in certain types of unambitious productions.

Dragnet usually cut back and forth between close-ups of the actors reading their lines as fast as they could. I don't like that kind of thing. I want medium wide shots.

In fact, Jack Webb made a couple of failed attempts to use his production methods in theatrical film.

Ozzie Nelson, Charlie Sheen

Years ago, there was a show--was it on Biography?--about Ozzie & Harriet and the Nelson family.

Critics responded as if it had exposed the Nelson family as frauds who failed to live up to their public image.

I didn't agree. I thought they seemed like a very nice family, pretty much as they appeared to be. They were together constantly, they worked together and were extremely close. The kids were home schooled. There was a morals clause in their contract, so Ozzie Nelson would sit down with the boys and explain to them what they couldn't do and how it would result in the financial ruin of their family and all the people who worked on the show. They were the ideal family--well, some people's ideal.

But----the result of the homeschooling was that Ricky Nelson was very poorly educated and had to work for hours writing simple business letters. The result of the morals clause was that Ricky and David hired a prostitute for Ricky while they were on vacation in Britain. Ricky was 14.

It's not that their private lives didn't match their public image. It's just that their image wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Three and a Half Men

I guess it would be kind of stupid for a TV sex comedy to have a morals clause in the stars' contracts. But it looked like the poor devils who work on the show would be out of work while Charlie Sheen is pulling himself together.

Some people suggested that Sheen pay the cast and crew while he goes through rehab. He no doubt spent a fortune on his binge. But now they're reporting that they'll resume filming in a few weeks. The episodes they don't film now will be added on at the end of the season, so no one will lose any work.

I sat through about ten minutes of an episode of Cops one time. They investigated a robbery. The poor guy was fairly wealthy, but he put his money in a trust fund because he was a recovering drug addict and he didn't want to lose his fortune when he went into relapse, as most recovering addicts do at some point. Good thing he did. He went on a bender and his new drug addict friends cleaned out his house.

Charlie Sheen should give that some thought once he gets back to normal.

I wonder how Angus T. Jones will end up. Will he be more of a Ricky or more of a David Nelson?

Harry Shearer, Leave it to Beaver, Lumpy

Harry Shearer, the voice of Mr Smithers, Mr Burns, Reverend Lovejoy, and a number of other characters on The Simpsons, writer-director of Teddybear's Picnic, novelist, host of Le Show on public radio.

Turns out Shearer played Eddie Haskell in the pilot to Leave it to Beaver, and he could have played him in the series. Fortunately, his parents didn't want him to do it. He was a child actor and had appeared on The Jack Benny Program among other things. But his parents felt that an occasional role was one thing---doing a series could wreck his life. And it probably would have.

Of course it was years before Eddie Haskell's character got it's, well...would you call it a cult following? It was years before anyone was impressed that the guy who played Eddie Haskell played him.
The one I feel sorry for is Lumpy. Poor devil. Played such an unattractive character. Not that anyone else on the show was very appealing. I came across a book he wrote, Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It To Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life. He was into hot rods as a young person, something which they incorporated into the character he played.

I don't know. I liked the idea of Lumpy. But not the grim reality.