Am I to believe Connors attempted to ride you down with his horse merely because he thought you were a Commie?
What happened was I was walking down the Western street — the very same Western street that was used in Bonanza and other Western shows — and there was Chuck sitting on his horse. He saw me, turned the horse around, and suddenly started galloping in my direction. I didn’t move and he didn’t stop, but finally he pulled the reins up right in front of me. I’m not exaggerating when I say I could feel the snorting of the horse’s hot breath on my face — it was that close! Chuck glowered down at me and said, “I thought you were going to run.” I just looked up at him nervously, not knowing what to say. That incident occurred towards the end of our relationship and pretty soon after that I was gone. If he was attempting to run me off the show, he was trying to do it literally as well as creatively! [Chuckles] Anyway, he did more or less apologize about it that night we were reunited and that was good. The last time I actually saw Chuck was at The Magic Castle where I was having lunch one day. He looked a little old and a little tired, but he seemed very glad to see me and we had another nice little reunion. The next thing I heard Chuck had died. That’s the way things work out sometimes in this business. You have conflicts with people, you have words and bitter disagreements, and everything ends on a poor note. Then, years later, you see them and it’s like nothing ever happened. They suddenly forget that they behaved poorly towards you and are as friendly as can be. That has happened to me several times in my relationships in Hollywood, but there is no sense in holding grudges. I mean, sometimes I’ve wanted to kill people I was so angry with them, but then a few years later ended up working with them again.
You mentioned that Branded was always in and around the Top 10 shows. Did the ratings ever dip over the course of its two seasons and forty-eight episodes?
The ratings may have gone down a little bit over time, but it was certainly the best ratings that Proctor and Gamble had ever achieved in that time period. When Branded was eventually cancelled, they replaced it with a comedy show that was a total disaster. [10] The new show didn’t get half the ratings that Branded had earned, which I’m sure did not go unnoticed. So, it was a big mistake on Procter and Gamble’s part to end Branded because they quickly lost half of their audience.
Back in the mid-1960s, a lot of shows were moving to the hour-long format. Do you think Branded would have succeeded better as an hour-long show?
I don’t know. Of course, Branded was a thirty-minute show going up against The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS and The FBI on ABC, which were both one-hour shows. Both Ed Sullivan and The FBI started at eight o’clock, and it was an intensely competitive time period. Despite that, we more than held our own. It’s hard to believe that back in those days there were so many dramatic shows on television that were just half an hour long. They could tell a story in under twenty-six minutes and sustain a show with the budget for thirty minutes, but in those days things were much cheaper to make. There were many, many dramatic half-hour series on the air including police shows, Westerns and comedies; comedy shows having always been thirty minutes long. Comedies were cheaper to produce because they usually had only one set and not that much production. Even when we did shows like Blue Light, which was a World War II spy show on ABC, it was supposed to be set in Nazi Germany during the 1940s. That show involved period costumes, period cars, and period sets, and everything had to be geared towards realistically presenting a story that was set in the past and in a foreign country. The production values had to be quite high and it was only a half-hour show. It’s amazing that we could actually do shows like that. Today, there isn’t a single half-hour dramatic show on television — not one!
Why do you think Branded struck such a chord with audiences and continues to be fondly remembered to this day?
One of the reasons is undoubtedly its theme song, which I was instrumental in creating, by the way. It just seemed to resonate and linger in viewers’ minds for years afterwards. People would always be able to recall the lyrics: “Branded — marked with a coward’s shame.” The music immediately evoked memories of the show, it was so distinctive. You know, the Coen Brothers made a movie some years ago called The Big Lebowski, which starred Jeff Bridges and John Goodman, in which they repeatedly talk about Branded. They are discussing television shows and one of them brings up Branded. The other one remembers the theme song and together they sing it. After doing that, they decide to go see the creator of Branded. This is really in the movie! They want to find the guy who wrote all the episodes of Branded and created the show. I suppose that this gentleman is supposed to be me. Anyway, off they go and eventually find the guy and they discover that he has an iron lung and is paralysed! [Laughs] And his name isn’t Larry Cohen, but he’s supposed to be the fabled creator of Branded. They take this soldier in to see him, to pay homage to him. It was supposed to be funny and it was certainly very amusing to me, anyway. There’s even a scene where Bridges is drunkenly singing the Branded theme song in the back of the police car, which is great. The Big Lebowski had been out for ten years before I saw it. I didn’t know anything about the movie and its references to Branded until somebody mentioned it to me at a party. I thought, “Hey, I better see this film.” When I did, I was like, “Oh my god, there I am!” It was terrific. I had actually worked with the Coen Brothers on John Landis’ film, Spies Like Us, back in the 1980s. [11] John had asked a lot of directors to come in and play bit parts, people like Sam Raimi, Michael Apted, and myself. The Coen Brothers worked with me on the same scene on the same day, as did the musician BB King and a bunch of other guys. So, we did spend a little time together and we may have even talked about Branded. I don’t really remember. Somehow or other that show stuck with them, as it has with a lot of people over the years, and they celebrated it in their movie.
You just mentioned Blue Light, a spy show you co-created in the wake of the success of Branded, but it ran for just sixteen episodes in 1966.
Yeah, it wasn’t on the air for long. I became involved with Blue Light when Robert Goulet’s company paid me to write the pilot. They had some development money and engaged me to write something for Goulet to star in. Walter Grauman had the idea of doing a series set during World War II, but I devised the story and the characters. They were all mine, but Grauman received a co-creator credit on the show, which was okay with me. Blue Light was about an American journalist, who pretends to go over and join the Nazis. Instead, he is actually a double agent working for the United States against Hitler’s Germany. I thought Goulet could play the lead part of the spy who is passing information back to the Allied Forces on what the Nazis are doing. The company then sold the project to NBC and it became a pretty good show. I thought the scripts for Blue Light were excellent. I wrote most of the episodes. Unfortunately, audiences did not take to Robert Goulet as a dramatic actor, even though he was good in the series. I mean, the main problem with Goulet was you couldn’t mess him up. If you were doing an action scene and you threw him off the back of a moving truck into a dirt road, Goulet would get back up on his feet and still look like he was suavely strolling into the Academy Awards ceremony! It was virtually impossible to ever remove the glossy, manicured look he had. Viewers just couldn’t accept him in the role, even though he was a solid actor.
Despite its quality, Blue Light did not fare well in the ratings did it?
No, it didn’t do well in the ratings at all. I think the whole idea of wartime spies and espionage may have been too obscure a subject for the general audience to digest at that time. It was 1966, the same year that the Batman TV series became a big hit with kids. Batman offered people a stupid mix of colourful action and comic satire, but a more serious show like Blue Light didn’t really click with them. Actually, very few shows with a World War II background have ever been successful on television.
Some episodes were edited into a ninety-minute movie called I Deal in Danger.
Yeah, that was my idea. I suggested we tak
e the first four episodes of Blue Light, which were all connected, and cut them together to make a movie. So, that’s exactly what we did. I Deal in Danger played in theaters and I went to see it at the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street in New York City. It’s now a beautiful Broadway theater where they mount gorgeous first-rate productions of things like The Lion King, but back in the 1960s, it was something of a grind house. When I saw I Deal in Danger there, the theater was crowded, and I can remember sitting next to this incredibly huge guy. He was about six feet eight inches, an enormous hulk of a man, and his feet were pushed over into my section of the seating. All of a sudden, I Deal in Danger came on and this guy started grunting and grumbling to himself. Within minutes, his grumbles had exploded into shouting and he yelled at the screen: “Godammit, I seen this on television! I paid to get in here and I already seen this on TV!” I was cringing in my seat because, as I say, this was all my idea. No doubt if this guy had discovered that fact, he would have probably reached down and strangled me to death! [Laughs] You know, that place was such a tough theater the usher, who was a uniformed security guard, would walk down the aisle with a baseball bat in his hands. I’m not kidding. He was ready to use it on anybody who started acting up. Can you believe that? Oh, that was one tough theater, but I did manage to get out of there alive.
Did I Deal in Danger do well theatrically?
No. 20th Century Fox put it out as a co-feature with other pictures. In those days, they had double features and it was the double feature with something else. They did the same thing with Broken Sabre, which was a three-episode compilation of Branded that was also released theatrically. They actually did two of them. There was another three-parter from Branded called The Mission that they put out, which was something I wrote. It was perfectly acceptable to do these compilations back then as there was no home video or Netflix. Of course, today, the modern audience would never accept such a thing. Nobody would ever go see them.
You continued with the World War II setting by contributing an episode to The Rat Patrol entitled “The Blind Man’s Buff Raid.”
That came about after I got a call from a friend of mine named Stanley Shpetner, who was producing The Rat Patrol. The show was set during the North African campaign the allies fought in World War II, so it took place in the desert with the allied forces driving around the terrain in jeeps, firing submachine guns at the Germans. I really wrote “The Blind Man’s Bluff Raid” as a favour to be honest with you. I got hold of a secretary and dictated the entire half-hour teleplay to her over at the Goldwyn Studios, right from beginning to end. A couple of days later, I received the script and was reading it, and I immediately noticed that the secretary had rewritten my teleplay herself. She had altered some of the scenes and the dialogue, and made everything much sharper and better. I told her that she had improved my work considerably and that she clearly had some talent. That was certainly one of those rare instances where a little interference paid off handsomely. It usually doesn’t, you know. Usually when a script is compromised it’s ruined, but not in this case. She did a very good job. The Rat Patrol ran on ABC for a couple of seasons but, again, it was that ambivalence audiences had towards World War II shows that probably sealed its fate.
What was Coronet Blue?
Coronet Blue was a show I created for Herbert Brodkin’s producing company, which eventually ended up on CBS. Brodkin had a deal with CBS and he sold them the series. It was actually done before Blue Light, but may have been shown afterwards.
I understand that Coronet Blue was filmed in 1965 but not broadcast until 1967.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Coronet Blue was a series that starred Frank Converse as an American guy who discovers that he is not American. He is found floating in the river one day and is pulled out of the water. He’s been shot and is suffering from amnesia. The only words that he is able to recall are “Coronet Blue.” He doesn’t know who he is and nobody recognizes him. They can’t find any match to his fingerprints and he has no knowledge or memory of his past. It turns out, as the show progresses and he unravels certain clues, that he is actually a Russian posing as an American. He attended the Russian school for spies and has taken on the persona of an American citizen and successfully infiltrated America. That is why nobody knows him. When he tried to defect, the spy organization known as Coronet Blue shot him and threw his body in the river. But he has survived this attempt on his life, so they now want to come back and finish the job. That was the basic story and it’s the exact same plot as The Bourne Identity, which came later. I don’t know if Robert Ludlum saw my series and decided to turn it into a book, or he saw Coronet Blue on TV and it just stuck in his subconscious, but people often do acquire somebody else’s ideas subconsciously as well as consciously. I’m not accusing Ludlum of anything, but the similarities are rather striking. It’s also interesting that there is a similar show being screened right now on TV called The Americans. [12] Of course, many years earlier, I got there first with Coronet Blue, before any of these things were ever dreamed up.
It is generally thought that Coronet Blue was an offshoot of your Defenders episode, “The Traitor.” Was that indeed the case?
No. I mean, yes, there was a similarity between them, because “The Traitor” was about a Russian spy who is posing as an American and is put on trail for treason. It is finally revealed that he is not in fact a traitor, he is actually a spy, and again, that was one of my best shows for The Defenders. I can definitely see the connection between “The Traitor” and Coronet Blue, but it was not derived from that episode.
What caused the delay in the show’s broadcast?
Well, by the time CBS eventually put Coronet Blue on, Jim Aubrey, the executive who’d originally bought it, had been fired. A new administration then came in that wasn’t too sympathetic to anything that Aubrey had purchased. So, we didn’t last very long. We only made thirteen episodes of Coronet Blue and were on the air for just a few weeks. When Aubrey was removed at CBS, the shows that he had ordered basically sat on the shelf until they were finally played in the summer as a summer replacement show. So, Coronet Blue did play, but it didn’t go on until the summer. Today, a lot of shows are put on in the summer and sometimes they premiere a new series during the summer and it’s very successful. So, there is nothing wrong with being on at that time of year. However, at the time they put Coronet Blue on, the contracts for the actors who were in the leads had expired. This meant there was no way to continue the series anyway, because they had all moved on to something else.
You’ve previously stated that Herbert Brodkin turned Coronet Blue into an anthology show.
That’s more or less right. They didn’t know how to do a hardboiled action show. That was not their genre. Brodkin’s company were more interested in doing things like The Nurses and The Defenders, more intellectually stimulating shows in which the action was demoted in favour of the characters and story. They were not into doing a suspense show like The Fugitive, for example, and so Coronet Blue was not the kind of television they were usually associated with. They tried to bend and reshape Coronet Blue into something that they wanted it to be. They played down certain ideas and aspects of the show until it just wasn’t recognizable anymore. Whatever Coronet Blue had started out as, it was no longer the same thing. You just had this guy stumbling from one episode to another without any real connective element between them. After that, I’m afraid the show just didn’t work anymore.
I understand that you apparently “suggested” the Civil War drama series Custer in 1967. What exactly was the extent of your involvement with that show?
Basically, Custer was a settlement on a lawsuit. I had told the idea to some executives and then they went ahead and did the show without me. So, I had to go and make claims against them and they finally agreed to pay me a royalty and give me a credit on the show. I really didn’t have anything specifically to do with the actual making of the episodes; I just watched a few of them. I didn’t watch all of them, either.
The series had good supporting actors and character actors in it, but the guy who played Custer was never heard of again. [13] He simply evaporated into thin air. Custer could have been a great show, but it just wasn’t. That’s really all there is to say about it.
We’ll move on to The Invaders, one of the iconic science fiction series of the 1960s. How did the idea for that show come about?
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