Word: webbe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hollywood has seldom seen such a climber. Only eight years ago, Jack Webb was an unknown news announcer in a San Francisco radio station. Only six years ago he was a "starving" motion picture bit-player. But even then, he was seeking compulsively for handholds, eyes fixed unblinkingly on the heights. No ledge was too narrow, no couloir too deep to halt him. The traveling companions who could not keep up he left behind. Some grabbed for his ankles or coattails. He shook them off. He bounded up to fame almost overnight as Sergeant Joe Friday, the quiet, dark-haired...
Last month, Webb moved his old gun collection, his $135 sports jackets, his portable typewriter and Dudley, his bassett hound, into a $100,000 ultramodern two-bar house, high in Beverly Hills' celebrity-studded Coldwater Canyon. Last week he had the house up for sale. In his intense and single-minded haste to go on conquering Hollywood, he has not even found time to use his swimming pool. "Jack," says Stanley Meyer, the protocol-conscious business manager of Webb's Mark VII Productions, "would live in one room with a cot and a movie projector...
Passion for Work. Webb covets money, but except for Cadillacs (he is on his fifth, a cream-colored convertible with blue upholstery) he gets little personal pleasure from it. He is a warm, sympathetic and basically modest man. He fervently admires talent in others. But fellow toilers who do not share his perfectionism and his passion for work fill him with injured bewilderment and anger; he reacts to any threat against complete artistic control of his work with the ferocity of a Boer trekker defending his oxen against the howling black...
Unlike his creature, Sergeant Friday, Webb can roar with laughter and talk with vast intensity and enthusiasm. He attracts all sorts of people. But he has few friends, almost no social life and is seldom seen in Hollywood nightspots. Nothing but an ailing script can keep him from sleeping nine hours a night, and he is hard at work every morning at 8 o'clock. In his spare time he stares at motion pictures, often "stopping them and backing them up" to engage in rapt inspection of every last optical effect and lap dissolve. In five years...
...Holmes? In the 116 weeks since the first 26-minute 25-second Dragnet film (The Human Bomb) was flashed on the nation's television screens, Jack Webb has made Joe Friday one of the most famous fictional detectives of all time. Sherlock Holmes himself never captured the instantaneous interest of so many millions of people, and in comparison, such latter-day sleuths as Philo...