Word: susskind
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Happily for television, while David Susskind (rhymes with bus mind) talks and talks and talks, he is far too busy to listen to himself. He goes right on producing adaptations while claiming to prefer originals, bolsters his shows with big-name stars (a technique he says he deplores), and brightens a commendable number of evenings with some of the best, most tastefully produced shows television has to offer. Last week, while he prepared his own Open End talk show for New York's gabby Channel 13 and juggled projects that will keep him busy from Broadway to Hollywood well...
Safe & Superlative. In both spectaculars, which went on the air within four days of each other, Susskind was backing a sure thing. Meet Me matched the light-fingered direction of George (Green Pastures) Schaefer with a cameraful of Hollywood glamour: Myrna Loy, Walter Pidgeon, Jeanne Crain, Tab Hunter, Jane Powell, Ed Wynn. The Browning Version was also star-packed: Sir John Gielgud, Margaret Leighton, Cecil Parker, Robert Stephens. With so much to offer, neither show could fail. And in the case of The Browning Version, Gielgud's superlative performance could have done the job alone. Sir John...
...last week Susskind rushed in and out of rehearsals, spending almost as much time on the phone as he did watching the actors, yet seeing enough to scribble endless notes of advice; e.g., "Keep Myrna alive." He supervised the cutting of Jeanne Crain's lines ("She's no Duse"), and hesitated not a moment to order the taping of an entire scene from The Browning Version when one actor showed a tendency to blow his lines. (This last maneuver, by a man who has always championed live TV and frowned on tape and other mechanical aids...
Frenetic & Familiar. Susskind's frenetic pursuit of both the television dollar and television quality has left many a competitor gasping in his wake. "Oh, I like David all right," says a Broadway pal, "but he's a Harvard version of What Makes Sammy Run?." The observation is unfair. Dave Susskind (5 ft. 9 in. by his own measurement) may not only be taller than Sammy, but he dresses more stylishly and talks in round, mellifluous tones. The observation is also chronologically inaccurate. David was running fast before he joined the Ivy League-fast enough to have married pretty...
...first, Susskind did well with original shows-The Rainmaker, Other People's Houses-but soon he found that there was less and less room to gamble. Sponsors wanted every effort to be a success, so the titles became more familiar-The Winslow Boy, The Prince and the Pauper, Pinocchio. Off TV, he sometimes tried the unusual: his movie, Edge of the City, was an artistic success, and his current Broadway hit, Rashomon, though based on a successful Japanese movie, is an occasionally baffling exercise in fantasy. But on TV, clients are cautious, and "you have an inevitable compromise between...