The Biggest Playhouse

To TV's already heavy schedule of drama came a promising addition: CBS's Playhouse 90, the first hour-and-a-half drama factory in TV history. For eight months Playhouse Producer Martin (Climax!) Manulis has skirted the globe to corral top properties; he signed Keenan Wynn in Tokyo, Phyllis Kirk in London, Louis Jourdan in Paris. Of his upcoming teleplays--31 live and eight on film--most are being penned by big-time talents, e.g., H. Allen Smith, Gore Vidal. Each will cost some $100,000 to produce. Currently, four Playhouse directors are alternating assignments so that at least three complete units are in rehearsal on the big Hollywood sound stages at once. On the basis of last week's production, Playhouse go indicated that TV drama was at last coming of age.

Rod (Patterns) Serling's play Requiem for a Heavyweight was a taut, discerning glimpse into the shabby world of prizefighting. The plot dealt with an also-ran pug (Jack Palance) who is put out to pasture after in bone-bruising bouts, and finds it jarringly hard to adjust. He is a tough, disfigured blob of flesh who "could take a cannon ball in the face"; but he is also a gentle man, painfully aware of his ugliness. He is bounced around by some seedy managers and hangers-on ("Why is it," asks Trainer Ed Wynn, playing his first straight part on TV, "so many people have to feed off one guy's misery?") until a pretty employment agent (Kim Hunter) helps him find himself. As the inarticulate punch-drunk. Actor Palance stammered his way through a powerful, sensitive performance.

But the real hero of the evening was

Teleplaywright Serling, 31, an ex-amateur boxer himself. He did not intend, he says, for Requiem simply to daub tar and feathers on the fight game--"I tried to dramatize the rejection of a human being by a segment of society. It could have been played out against any background at all." One of the medium's most prolific authors (ico-odd plays), Serling is serving TV (at a record $7,500 a script) some of the most tightly constructed, trenchant lines it has yet spoken. "I love TV," he confesses, "but writing is mostly just fighting discouragement. Sponsor taboos are still the big bugaboo." Discouraging or not, Serling is scheduled to grind out three more teleplays for Playhouse before its first season is played out.

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