The Disgruntled Cadillacs

"What the engine is to the automobile," said M.C. David Susskind on his talkathon Open End, "the writer is to a theatrical production. Our guests tonight are seven Cadillacs, the key creators of many of TV's finest hours." The Cadillacs: Robert Alan Arthur, Paddy Chayevsky, Sumner Locke Elliott. James Lee, J. P. Miller, Tad Mosel, David Shaw--almost all of whom have abandoned TV. As a producer (Du Pont Show of the Month) and the Custer of live TV drama (TIME, June 2), Susskind wanted to know why the writers had given up. Why not stay in the medium that produced Chayevsky's Marty and Arthur's A Man Is Ten Feet Tall? Their answer: because writing for stage or screen makes a man 20 feet tall--and a lot richer.

To explain the answer, the writers spent two lively, free-associating hours last week on Susskind's couch (WNTA-TV, Newark), a kind of group therapy that left them feeling sorry for themselves together instead of for each alone. Their main reasons for the decline of live TV drama: P: The public got bored with the sort of slice-of-life vignettes that Chayevsky and the other "agony boys" used to turn out every month. Eventually, the boys got bored themselves. "I didn't get tired of it," said J. P. (Days of Wine and Roses) Miller. "I just couldn't stand it." P: The critics were too rough, flailed original dramas more harshly than run-of-the-hoof westerns. Robert Alan Arthur (Man on a Mountain Top) denounced "an incredibly brutal dismissal" of a recent production of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness by the New York Times's J. P. Shanley: "I think this bum thinks he's still writing obituaries ... It will be a long time before another show of this kind is done."

P: More money is paid elsewhere. "I worked on a movie," said Miller, "and made exactly the compromises that I was forced to make in TV--except that I made them for a lot more money." P: Queasy sponsors want "happy shows for happy people." Lack of artistic freedom ("I'm the lost soul of you chappies") drove Chayevsky to Hollywood. "I didn't make hardly any money out of the movie Marty," he rumbled. "But we had a ball and it was fun." As examples of what TV --"a malevolent juggernaut that's gonna chew me up"--will no longer let him do, he muscularly cited some unusual themes: a woman relieving anxiety over menopause by "throwing a pass" at one of her son's friends; the emotional pattern of an American Communist; the tortures of a man discovering that he is a homosexual. (Cracked Shaw: "But you could try a TV western with a homosexual horse.")

There were some kind words for TV, too. Conceded Bob Arthur: "TV may be getting to be a medium of mediocrity, but there are still five or six wonderful hours a week. That's all I need. With more, I'd become a blithering idiot." Concluded Susskind, addressing the disgruntled Cadillacs: "You seem to be wallowing in self-abnegation ... As opposed to making Olympian comments, why don't you--the men with a creative mark to etch--do something about it?"

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