For some reason, I've gotten hooked lately watching the reruns of Dragnet and Adam-12 on MeTV, which may be my favorite channel if only for its name. I've always thought of my life kind of as "me" TV.
The Dragnets are a lot of fun when its star-producer-writer-director Jack Webb wasn't lecturing people about drugs and/or the responsibility of having a badge. I don't think a lot of folks know that those shows were shot as rapidly as possible. They limited exteriors — and when they did venture out, they shot scenes for multiple episodes since Webb and his co-star Harry Morgan always wore the same clothes.
Dialogue scenes were done with heavy reliance on TelePrompters. Mr. Webb had a certain way he wanted the show to "sound" and the way he got his desired delivery out of most actors was to not let them see scripts in advance or memorize lines. They'd show up on the set, find out what they were playing and then they'd read their parts right off the prompter. After each good take, Webb (who directed most of 'em) would tell the TelePrompter operator to speed up the crawl a bit. The actors would read their parts over and over, a bit faster each time…and when they got to the point where they sounded like Alvin, Simon or Theodore, Webb would designate that the next-to-last "take" be the one used. It sounded odd at times but it sure got a lot of story into some of those half-hours.
Mr. Webb also produced Adam-12. I like this show first of all because it was set in Los Angeles so you get a lot of shots of L.A. in the early seventies and I can recognize many of the locations. I like the rapport between Martin Milner and Kent McCord and I like the surprising selection of actors who have small roles in some of them. The other day, they ran an episode where Officers Reed and Malloy stopped Keefe Brasselle for speeding. It was probably the last time he showed his face on TV. I'm surprised no one has done a big book or movie about Mr. Brasselle, one of the more — shall we say "colorful?" — folks in the history of television, a man who mysteriously got his own prime-time variety show on CBS despite no one knowing who the heck he was.
In 1972, I was working for Western Publishing, writing an awful lot of their Gold Key comics line. I worked for the West Coast office which produced about half their comics and there was an East Coast office that handled the other half. The company made a deal to do an Adam-12 comic book, it was assigned to the West Coast office and the senior editor there, Chase Craig, told me he wanted me to write it and Dan Spiegle to draw it. That was fine with Dan and me…but then intra-company politics intervened and the book was shifted to the New York office where it was written by Paul S. Newman and John David Warner, and drawn by Jack Sparling and Mike Roy.
There were no hard feelings — Dan and I had plenty of other work — but when I visited the New York offices shortly after, the editors there apparently thought I was upset and they asked me if I'd read the book they were doing and if I had any criticisms of it. I said the writing and art were fine (which they were) but that it was sure obvious the folks doing the comic didn't know Los Angeles. The scenery looked nothing like my home town and there would be frequent geographic boo-boos — like a police call to the intersection of Pico and Wilshire…or some other two streets that never cross. Or I think in one issue, someone was at the main police station, which is way downtown, and they took a short walk to the beach, which is in reality quite some distance away.
The editors in New York admitted that was a problem and after that, they occasionally called me for L.A. technical advice to ask if these two streets intersected or if this famous location was near that famous location. I guess that was easier than buying a map.
Anyway, as I'm now watching Adam-12 reruns, I'm starting to notice that Reed and Malloy keep getting calls to go to the corner of Lankershim and Santa Monica Boulevard…or some other non-existent intersection. Or you'll see them out in front of the Hot Dog Show on Riverside out in Toluca Lake and they'll get an urgent call to hurry to Beverly and Fairfax, which is a good half-hour away, and they'll say, "We can be there in three minutes!" So maybe the comic book was more accurate than I thought, at least in replicating the TV show.