Word: coe
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...upper-middlebrow. Dozens of hourlong teledramas probed modern and historical topics each week. At movie theaters people found that for every social problem, Hollywood had not a solution but a script. Are you looking for the Golden Age of Television? You'll find it in the work of Fred Coe. You want to send a movie message? Call Stanley Kramer...
...Kramer's reputation is stale, Coe's is forgotten, though as producer of Philco Playhouse and later for Playhouse 90, he was the primo impresario of TV drama. Jon Krampner's engrossing The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television (Rutgers University Press; 243 pages; $32.95) helps restore the stature of the Tennessean who made trouble in the studio and at home--he told his pregnant wife, "When the child is born, I want a divorce"--but was still one of TV's smartest, boldest pioneers...
...three bulky cameras, whose lights pushed the thermometer up to 100 degrees; technicians could lose eight to 10 lbs. per show. The actors had to make every mark, remember every line and, between scenes, rush from one set to another without tripping over the miles of fat camera cable. Coe had to keep it all moving smoothly, cue the camera for commercials (shot live in the same studio) and, if the show ran long or short, cut or expand scenes on the spot. If a camera broke down, no problem--Coe would ad-lib a restaging of the show...
Writers, spurred by Coe, paid little attention to TV's restrictions. They'd have characters flash back from old age to youth and back again (requiring split-second makeup applications) or dream up odd location scenes. Coe's own script, This Time Next Year, called for the ghost of Ulysses S. Grant to materialize at Grant's Tomb. The actor playing Grant was to jump into an NBC limo and get uptown in time for the "remote." But there was no limo. So the actor hailed a cab and, in full Grant regalia, ordered, "Take me to Grant's Tomb...
This was just the fieldwork. Coe also chose scripts, fought with sponsors over the hiring of blacklisted actors, scoured the theater scene for talent. He enticed stars, from Jose Ferrer (Coe put Cyrano de Bergerac on TV between its Broadway run and the Kramer film adaptation) to Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda (for a Producer's Showcase staging of The Petrified Forest) to Frank Sinatra (who, in the musical version of Our Town, sang Love and Marriage). Coe's 1955 airing of the Mary Martin Peter Pan was the highest-rated show in the young medium's history...