Word: susskind
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dealt with such themes as drunkenness and sexuality in a priest (Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory), sterility and infidelity (John Steinbeck's Burning Bright), infanticide (Medea, with Judith Anderson), and clerical tyranny (Paul Vincent Carroll's The White Steed). Says Producer David Susskind: "We have none of those pernicious and aggravating conditions and taboos that you get everywhere else on TV." Most memorable example to date-WNTA's unbowdlerized production of Jean Anouilh's sex farce. The Waltz of the Toreadors, whose aging lecher-hero is fond of leaning forward to tickle...
...Shame. Gleason's troubles began when he appeared as a participant on a television panel show, David Susskind's Open End, with his World-Telegram partner Fred J. Cook. Teamed with Gleason on numerous expose stories, Cook, 49, a World-Telegram veteran of 15 years and a sometime author (The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss), did most of the writing. Husky, broad-shouldered Gene Gleason did most of the reportorial digging. They worked together on the 1956 slum-clearance expose, collaborated again this year on an extracurricular writing assignment for the Nation. Titled "The Shame of New York...
Midway in the television show, Moderator Susskind turned to Fred Cook with a question that he had been primed by a Nation pressagent to ask: "Did you in your research [on the 1956 slum-clearance series] ever encounter a lack of cooperation, or bribes?" Yes indeed, said Cook. Thereupon he proceeded to tell how, during the investigations, a "high city official" had offered Gleason $75 to $100 a week for laying off. "We can put your wives on the payroll," the city official supposedly said to Gleason, "and you won't have to do anything for it, just stop...
...Playwright S. Lee (People Kill People Sometimes) Pogostin was called in, along with Director Bob Mulligan, two other scriptwriters had fumbled the job. After 48 hours packed with pencil work, pep pills and black coffee, Pogostin and Mulligan had built a play that pleased both Olivier and Producer David Susskind. In the process, they lost some of the novel's dark energy; they never adequately explained how a respectable British stockbroker named Charles Strickland (modeled on famed Painter Paul Gauguin) could abandon wife and family for a new career as an artist-or why, after he seduced Blanche Stroeve...
...impressive as the schedule sounds, Susskind worries. Television, he feels, is not alerting the country to the dangers of strontium 90, the political genius of Adlai Stevenson, the awful problems of the upcoming Geneva conference. That is why he organizes high-sounding discussions on his Open End show. Says his wife: "It's his Alexander the Great complex." Although, at 38, Susskind is undoubtedly TV's most successful dramatic producer, the complex keeps him going. "I want to have my own marquee value, like Sam Goldwyn and Cecil B. DeMille," he says. "Then I wouldn't always...