I mentioned Dragnet the other day and someone wrote in to ask, "What was the deal with Jack Webb?" Near as I can tell, the deals with Jack Webb were all pretty much financial. He was a shrewd producer who wanted to make a lot of money in radio and television…and succeeded.
Webb was an actor in film and radio who was often cast as a police detective. He was offered a number of different shows in which to star but preferred to create something himself so he could own it. Pretty smart move, there. He had a certain narrative and dialogue style in mind, much of it suggested by a 1948 cop film in which he'd appeared, He Walked By Night. The show he came up with, Dragnet debuted on radio in 1949 and segued to television in 1951, running until 1959. It wasn't all Webb did during that time. He also had a short-lived radio show which later became a movie, Pete Kelly's Blues and he did a film about a drill instructor called The D.I. that probably inspired the creation of the comic book character, Sgt. Rock. Later, about the time Dragnet was cancelled, Webb did a really good film about the newspaper business entitled 30.
In the sixties, Dragnet made a comeback. The way the story was told to me by someone who worked on the show — and I think the "official" accounts differ from this a little — several networks wanted to revive the property but without Webb. They all thought he was too old and stodgy to connect with viewers of the day, either as producer or performer. Webb took the position that it wasn't Dragnet without its distinctive style and only he could replicate that…so he had to be in charge of the proceedings. He also said that he would relinquish the on-camera job only if they paid him as much as Executive Producer as they'd have to pay him as Executive Producer and Star. Eventually, NBC gave in to the extent of commissioning a TV Movie/pilot on his terms. The result was encouraging enough to yield a series, which was on for four years. Each time it was renewed, Webb's production company landed a few more commitments for other pilots and these turned into Adam 12, Emergency and several other weekly shows.
The most interesting thing about the sixties Dragnet show was, to me, the day players. Webb had a little stock company of actors, many of them good friends, who appeared over and over as crime victims and witnesses. They included Virginia Gregg, Julie Bennett, Herb Vigran, Doodles Weaver, Jack Sheldon, Olan Soulé, Bobby Troup, Leonard Stone, Buddy Lester, Vic Perrin and Amzie Strickland. Often, when the studio or casting director tried to freshen things up with new faces, Webb would say, "No, get me Vic Perrin again."
If he cast you in an episode, the big no-no was knowing your lines. Actors did not get scripts in advance and were encouraged not to memorize. The dialogue was all on TelePrompter and Webb, when he directed, would tell the performers just to read what was on the prompter. After each take, he'd have the TelePrompter operator increase the speed a hair. The idea was to get the actors reading as rapidly as possible without sounding like they were auctioning tobacco. Henry Corden, who was on many an episode, told me, "Jack always used the next-to-last take you did. The last take was when it got to be too fast so he'd use the one just before it." If anyone questioned Webb's methods, there was a fast response: It works. He made a ton of cash off Dragnet, especially in the last season when they set many episodes in one or two rooms and were able to film them in one or two days with one or two guest actors.
Webb died in 1982. I met him briefly — for maybe four minutes — the year before that. I was going in to pitch something at CBS and he was coming out from showing a demo tape to the same exec, and someone introduced us. The two main things I remember are being somehow surprised that he sounded so much like Jack Webb…and that, off-camera, he laughed like a human being. He actually had a good sense of humor that wasn't in evidence when he played Joe Friday. But he loved parodies like Stan Freberg's Dragnet spoofs and he even participated in the best one, which was the case of Johnny Carson and the Clean Copper Clappers Kept in the Closet. Here it is…
