Word: sherwood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...American literature--the sense of nature and of revelation of Emerson and Thoreau, the sharp and pessimistic but compassionate wit of Twain, Lardner, and Marquis, the enthusiasm of Whitman, the highly developed awareness of fantasy and symbolism of Melville, James, and Faulkner, the sense of social forces of Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Steinbeck, and the linguistic facility of Thurber and Perelman. Add to this the satiric ability of George Orwell...
...result was an NBC contract for more than $100,000 under which the network buys the Sherwood name and brain for a period of five years and a total of nine TV plays, although the playwright retains movie and stage rights. This week televiewers got a look at Sherwood's first offering, The Backbone of America, sponsored by Miller High Life Beer. Sherwood had been promised there would be no censorship ("Unless, of course, I loaded the script with four-letter words"). NBC went even further: Sherwood got free run of the set, and the actors (Thomas Mitchell, Wendell...
...containing such familiar Broadway ingredients as the hard-as-nails career girl (actually, she is soft as butter inside), the aspiring author who must write advertising copy instead of novels, and a country bumpkin who proves to have more intelligence and integrity than the city slickers. Along the way. Sherwood pokes some gentle fun at television itself and at the giveaway psychology of U.S. advertising...
Before he became a TV writer, Sherwood had watched nothing but fights and ball games on his own set. With the TV contract in his pocket, he devoted a month to a careful study of TV drama, concluded that 1) TV is more like the theater than the movies; 2) live TV has more reality and immediacy than filmed TV; 3) kid parts should be kept to a minimum; and 4) he would never have an animal on his show...
After two weeks of rehearsal and constant rewriting of his script, Sherwood conceded that "TV is far and away the most difficult medium to write for, because of the terrific precision of the timing." Sherwood's second play, scheduled for February, is still untitled but "is full of slapstick and pratfalls." The third, to appear at Easter, will be a serious drama with a Biblical theme, called The Trial of Pontius Pilate. Says Sherwood: "I thought the first ones should be comedies. I wanted to sort of ease into television...