Only You, Bill Dozier

THE INDUSTRY

A student who mistakenly stumbled into U.C.L.A.'s Haines Hall might have thought that he was listening to a class in Double-Dealing and Back-Knifing 1. The university catalogue calls the course Network Television: The Facts of Life (Theater Arts XL 198A), but its professor, William Dozier, calls it The Jungle. This appraisal, he tells his class, is "not a pessimistic view but a realistic one. It is a jungle. Compared with television, Khe Sanh is the fairway of the Bel Air Country Club."

This grim Beverly Hills hyperbole is the characteristic verbal coin of a man who is the quintessence of movie-industry cynicism and success. Bill Dozier, 60, started in Hollywood in 1935 as an agent for Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, and has since been a top production executive at several movie studios and the executive producer of several TV programs, including You Are There, Studio One and Batman. Such is his reputation for plain talk that one-fifth of the registrants in his Monday-night course are not U.C.L.A. undergraduates but Hollywood directors, producers and pressagents.

Purge Scene. What they get for their $40 tuition is eleven 2 1/2-hour seminars, including screenings and analyses of TV pilot films. Dozier also gives the floor to big-name guest lecturers whose castigations and confessions are reminiscent of scenes from Nurnberg or a Moscow purge. Screen Gems' Harry Ackerman, one of TV's hottest hit makers (Dennis the Menace, Bewitched, The Flying Nun), conceded that the only hope for quality programming is a fourth network, run by Washington. Another visiting professor, Lee Rich, TV vice president of the Leo Burnett ad agency, said that there is nothing original or worth watching on the air. He blamed the industry primarily, but thought the government could do more. "The FCC should be taken out and machine-gunned," he said half facetiously at one point. Rich cited particularly the violent Saturday-morning cartoon shows, which he said are "almost as dreadful for kids as the atom bomb." He then admitted that his own agency's clients sponsored two of them, and concluded: "It's a pretty disgraceful thing."

Until recently, Dozier was an apologist for TV's lowest common denominator and highest profit philosophy. "We don't need to be ashamed," he once wrote. "Were F. W. Woolworth and J. C. Penney ashamed because they weren't Tiffany and Cartier?" But in the wake of "the past four seasons, which he calls "the worst in television history," Dozier has turned reformer.

Typical of a business where the decision-makers blame their audiences' tastes rather than their own for what gets on the air, Dozier produced not only Batman but also two other series that contributed to TV's debasement during that period--Green Hornet and The Tammy Grimes Show. Tammy, an implausible sitchcom about a mindless heiress, lasted only four weeks and was, as Dozier himself admitted to his class, "the most conspicuous failure ever on television." Now that he is back in movies, Dozier feels free to lecture his longtime TV colleagues. "There hasn't been a meaningful show since The Defenders," he says, "and I would like my students to be fired up with a determination to reshape television."

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