Bring 'Em Back Alive

The sheen of art that live weekly dramas once gave TV is fast rubbing off. Due to die by fall are Studio One, Climax!, Kraft Theater and Matinee Theater. There was one particularly noisy survivor--a stubby, pugnacious man named David Susskind, 37. Producer Susskind has 25 live drama spectaculars lined up for next season, including seven for Du Pont, seven for Rexall, two for Sheaffer Pen. This is nearly twice as many as any other packager; and, with his bi-weekly Armstrong Circle Theater, Susskind next year may well be producing a good third of the major live-drama output of the entire industry.

"Nothing beats the sheer excitement of live TV," glowed Susskind in the darkness of NBC's vast Brooklyn sound stage one long, tense afternoon last week. Around him rolled the final rehearsals of Kraft Theater's Part 2 of All the King's Men, Novelist Robert Penn Warren's case history of a Huey Longish red-neck politician's rise and fall. Skidding between 14 sets under the glaring lights, fretting actors stumbled over camera cables. Before banks of baffling screens and switches in the darkened control room hunched wild-haired Director Sydney Lumet ("Places, dears. From the top, daddy-O, and punch it like there's no tomorrah!").

Near Lumet, Susskind, scribbled notes on weak spots ("Need more sex chemistry between Ann and Willie . . . Can't see the gun in the assassination scene"). The hours dissolved in one, two, three rehearsals. Lines were furiously added and subtracted, camera shots sharpened. "Suddenly it's 9 o'clock," says Susskind, "and you can't go home."

"Conceived in Sin." The result was an impressive argument for live TV drama. Seldom has so much TV wallop been packed into an hour as in Director Lumet's handling of the fall of Governor Willie Stark, ruggedly played by granite-faced, gravel-voiced Neville Brand, 37, a relative unknown until his Part 1 performance a fortnight ago. Though the limitation of time forced the play to move so swiftly that complexities of Willie's evil drive for self-esteem were lost, it surged with the brutal power of Willie's premise: "Man is conceived in sin, born in corruption, and he passes from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud."

Susskind took over the dying days of the sagging Kraft Theater in a frank attempt to prove what a live weekly show could be, hit a high point with All the King's Men. His other six plays had been enterprising, if not consistently successful. All met zero response from sponsors with next season on their minds.

"Staring in Disbelief." Such sponsor neglect incenses Susskind, a toy bulldog of a man who hardly minds biting the hand that hesitates to feed him. At every chance, he sneers at the "ocean of mediocrity" brought on by "panic buying" of quiz games and westerns. He insists that advertisers are deluded, says that viewers "are staring in stark disbelief and disinterest, and I hazard the guess that their pocketbooks are zipped."

Susskind is convinced that live TV drama will some day rise again to its old estate. Says he: "What scared advertisers think the people like doesn't concern me. If I like it, I think other people will like it too. In this art, you've got to lead. If we bring 'em back alive, the audience will wake up."

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