Book Review: 'Gordon'

DATE March 10, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Walon Green, executive producer of "Dragnet," discusses
his Hollywood career
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of "Dragnet")

(Soundbite of music)

Unidentified Man: The story you are about to see was inspired by actual
events. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest, Walon Green, is executive producer of "Dragnet," the new
version of the famous '50s crime series. Green is no stranger to crime. He
wrote for "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue," and worked as an executive
producer and head writer on "Law & Order." The creator of "Law & Order,"
Dick Wolf, also created the new "Dragnet." Walon Green won a screen-writing
Oscar nomination for his 1969 film "The Wild Bunch," which was directed by Sam
Peckinpah. He won an Oscar for directing the 1971 film "The Hellstrom
Chronicle" about man's struggle against the insect world. He also wrote the
screenplays for "The Hi-Lo Country," "Dinosaur" and "The Bodyguard."

The new "Dragnet" stars Ed O'Neill, who played the father in the sitcom
"Married...With Children." Now he plays the cop made famous by Jack Webb,
Sergeant Joe Friday.

(Soundbite of "Dragnet")

Mr. ED O'NEILL: (As Sergeant Joe Friday) It was Friday. It was sunny in Los
Angeles. My partner and I were working the day shift out of Robbery-Homicide.
The call came in at 8:30. Caucasian male dumped off Mulholland. I love LA.
Starting another day at the top of the world. My name's Friday; I'm a cop.

GROSS: Walon Green told me that one of the reasons he wanted to remake
"Dragnet" was that he wanted to do a crime series set in Los Angeles. I asked
him why.

Mr. WALON GREEN ("Dragnet"): I wanted to set it, "Dragnet," in Los Angeles,
or a cop show in Los Angeles, because there are very few cop shows on
television that have been set in Los Angeles and work. It's a very hard place
to do one. You don't have precincts and you don't have that kind of
proscenium, you know, stage where you cross all your characters over and they
all run into each other and interact with their lives and so forth. LA's a
very different place that way.

GROSS: Well, I don't know if you were in on the casting or not, but, you
know, Ed O'Neill, because of his comedic part on "Married...With Children" and
because he was such like the doofus on that show, seems like he would have
been a long shot to play Sergeant Joe Friday on "Dragnet." He's very

good in
the role. Again, I don't know if you were in on the casting. But if you
were, what made you have the confidence in him, because it's such a distance
to travel?

Mr. GREEN: Well, yes, actually, I was very much in on the casting. I thought
Ed O'Neill was right for it because I had worked on a short-lived series
called "Big Apple," which Ed O'Neill was in and played a New York detective.
And I thought he was the consummate detective. And I think what also probably
helped me is that "Married...With Children," I think I had only seen it--I
hope Ed isn't listening--but I think I'd only seen it two or three times. But
I also remember he was in "Cruising," he had been Eddie Egan in a TV version
of "French Connection." So my view of him was a cop, and I knew he played a
New York cop in "Big Apple," but I knew he wasn't from New York. I mean, I
knew him. I obviously met him and, you know, interacted with him on that
series. I knew he was from Youngstown, Ohio. And I thought he had exactly
the right--I mean, to me, he was the only guy to play Joe Friday.

GROSS: The cases in "Dragnet" are inspired by real cases. Where do you go
looking for the real cases?

Mr. GREEN: Well, we don't always go looking for the real cases; sometimes the
cases come looking for us. I mean, we read a lot and we search for things,
but occasionally, you know, like Bill Stoner who's an RHD, sheriff's RHD guy
who's our technical adviser, will be on the set and he'll be talking about the
way we're staging the crime scene and just, you know, offhandedly say, `I
remember once coming to,' and tells a story or an anecdote, and that becomes
something that we look for and look into and that might become an episode.

A lot of these things come from sitting down and talking about--for example,
the phenomena of family annihilators, where it just so happened that
three--myself and two other members of the writing staff--had seen a
documentary about this family annihilator in Georgia and one in Virginia. I
had seen about the one in Georgia; they'd seen the one about the guy in
Virginia. And we started talking about it and thought, `You know, that's such
a really weird and scary phenomenon. There's probably a pretty good show in
that.'

GROSS: Well, what is a family annihilator?

Mr. GREEN: A family annihilator is someone--I guess Lizzie Borden would be
the first family annihilator, you know, in American recorded history. But
it's someone who takes it on themselves to murder members of their family, and
they usually do it on a spree. They start and just start killing.

And it's an interesting kind of show because it's not about the investigation
of the crime. You know who did it. I mean, you know in the beginning who did
it. But you have to outthink this person, because they would not only murder
members of their family, they'll murder people they consider members of their
family or somehow related to their family. So they can go into the workplace
and kill, they can go to someone who is a distant relative or, you know, an
ex-spouse or something like that. So it becomes this kind of nightmare of
second-guessing them. And it made quite a good show.

GROSS: In the premiere episode of "Dragnet," the first victim is a
prostitute, has been raped; semen is found around her vagina and anus and
spray paint is found inside her. You know, I'm thinking of the original "Law
& Order"--I mean, in the original "Dragnet," like I don't know that Joe Friday
could possibly have ever uttered words like that; I don't think anybody had
genitals on TV then.

Mr. GREEN: Well, that's very true. I mean, "Dragnet" was--I mean, you know,
"Dragnet," the original "Dragnet," was originally a show derived from a radio
show that was derived from Chief Parker's relationship with Jack Webb, who
wanted to put a show on that put a good face on the Los Angeles Police
Department, which had had a long period of really kind of heavy-duty
corruption and it was very tainted. And they kept it very--you know, also, I
mean, it was the times. You wouldn't have said any of those things in the
'50s or early '60s. But, you know, it's a different world now, and people
have been exposed on television, even on the reality shows that you see on
cable. I mean, you see very graphic crime-scene photos, you hear very
explicit details of forensic analysis, you hear detailed descriptions of
horrendous crimes, and even occasionally interviews with people who've
committed them describing, you know, what they've done. So I just think, I
mean, to be part of today and to do a show like this--which it is a cop show
and cops deal with very bad people--I mean, that's really what you have to do.

We did, actually, draw the description of these crimes and what had been done
from the crimes committed by Buono and Bianchi here, you know, the real
Hillside Stranglers. And we wanted to revisit that case, but we didn't want
to like redo it with fictional characters, so we invented a copycat, you know,
and then re-examined the case from that point of view.

GROSS: Did you go back and watch any of the original "Dragnet" before writing
the new series?

Mr. GREEN: I actually didn't. A couple of times I looked at like the
openings and I listened to the opening narration. And, you know, somebody
gave me a couple of them to look at, but by then we were already designing the
show. And I thought, you know, `I think I have an idea of what we're going to
do here,' and so I didn't look at them.

And now I have about four of them on CDs that a friend of mine--David Mills,
actually, who executive produces "Kingpin," sent me four "Dragnet" episode.
And I'm going to look at them.

GROSS: OK. Now you were an executive producer on "Law & Order."

Mr. GREEN: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: At any given moment of the day, some station or another seems to be
playing some episode of "Law & Order," either the original or one of the
spin-offs. You must have asked yourself, `Why did it catch on the way it did?
How did it become such a phenomenon?'

Mr. GREEN: Well, I always thought--you know, it's interesting, 'cause I was
on it the third and fourth season, and it wasn't that popular. It was pretty
solid and it had a very good return audience that built little by little. The
network wasn't thrilled with it, and always thought it would tank at some
point, was sort of laying for it. But I noticed that no matter what was on
opposite the show, you know, there was a core of people who wanted that kind
of story-driven show, and they kept coming there. And I think people started
finding it when it--also, then it went on to cable whilst it was on network
television, and I think people started finding it in two places and then
coming back to the original.

And I think it works, I mean, to a great extent because it's a clever show.
It's very well-written. It has very good twists and turns. At about the time
you burn out on the police part of it then you come into the legal, which
might completely unravel the first half of the show. And it's just satisfying
storytelling.

GROSS: Part of the appeal of "Law & Order" and "Dragnet" is the mystery.
There's a crime that needs to be solved. And, you know, the viewer is trying
to solve it more quickly than the detectives solve it. How far ahead of the
viewers do you want your detectives to be?

Mr. GREEN: Just one step. The viewers are very sharp, you know. And if Joe
Friday gets a hunch, you can't actually reveal the hunch too well, because as
soon as they know, `Well, if Friday got a hunch, he's probably right.' And so
the viewers will jump you there. But you play that like a chess game where
you try to stay a move or two ahead of the audience, but you don't want to get
too far ahead of them, because then, you know, it's--well, I think it's an
insult to them, and they feel lost. You kind of want them to be almost with
you and maybe sometimes they may second-guess you, but what they shouldn't be
able to do is second-guess the ending.

GROSS: Why not?

Mr. GREEN: Well, I think that would be dissatisfying. You know, that would
be--there are shows--there's a different kind of show, you know, and sometimes
we do--we have a show that we did like this. Sometimes you do a show where
you tell the audience who the killer is right up front, like the one I just
talked about, and then you're second-guessing his moves to save people.
There's another kind of show where you tell the audience who the bad guy is
and then you say, `Well, we know he's the bad guy, but how are we going to get
him? He's too smart.' And then the audience goes on that ride, and they
think, `Well, you can get him by this or that, or why don't'--you know. And
it isn't really an investigation to find out who done it; it's an
investigation to find out how you get the guy that done it.

GROSS: My guest is Walon Green, executive producer of the new "Dragnet" on
ABC TV. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of "Dragnet" theme music)

GROSS: My guest is Walon Green. He's a veteran of crime dramas. He wrote for
"Hill Street Blues," "NYPD Blue" and "Law & Order." Now he's executive
producer of the remake of "Dragnet."

What's the process of plotting the murder mystery part of the program's life?
When you start the plotting, do you know who did it and what their motive was
and then try to figure out all of the intricate plot details in between?

Mr. GREEN: Well, you know, I wish there was some magic sort of way of doing
that. And I've heard that the great writers have, like, a way of just doing
it. I don't really know. I usually work at it from who's the bad person,
what have they done, what are their goals, what would they have done right,
and what would they have done wrong, and then what they did right is going to
be harder to find out. And, of course, when you do it, I think, well, what
they've done right actually turns out to be wrong, because they've outsmarted
themselves, and there's a lot of satisfaction in that.

GROSS: I know like a lot of literature teachers will say, `The last thing you
want to do in a short story is end it by saying, `And then I woke up and found
out it was all a dream.' It's like a terrible escape. You can't do that.
What are some of the things you can't do and that you tell your writers they
can't do when writing a crime story?

Mr. GREEN: Well, in our show, for example, they can't break point of view.
They can't see something, hear something, bring awareness to the story of
something that our characters would not have seen or would not have
experienced. Because when you go with our characters, you go as--like,
there's two cops; you go as the third cop, and you see it as they see it and
you don't see something that they wouldn't see; I mean, hopefully you don't,
and you never should. You know, sometimes dramatically you think, `Gosh, this
would be great if we could just show this,' but you can't show it 'cause the
cops wouldn't have seen it. So, I mean, those are limitations you impose on
yourself for this kind of storytelling, and that's something--we don't even
violate it in terms of the camera; like, if the door hasn't opened a crack and
the cops are coming through, you can't be in the room. So you could have
gotten through the crack in the door before they did, but you can't be in
there waiting for the door to open.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. GREEN: And we keep very true to that.

GROSS: What else can't you do?

Mr. GREEN: The other thing--I mean, there are certain rules, but basically we
look at them and try to figure out ways to break them. You know, they would
say, for example, `Well, you shouldn't--in a dramatic television show the big
dramatic turn on the show should come at an act break.' And that's one I
personally like to violate. I mean, I like to throw--for example, in the
first show, you know, killings happen right in the middle of an act, and it's
not the act out. Because I think that way it's harder for people to
anticipate. It's makes them edgier and they're not sure--you know, they don't
get the comfort of thinking, `Oh, OK, well, this person's dead. Now it's
going to be the end of act two,' you know. And you do things like that that
are deliberate and I think part of good storytelling that prevent the
anticipation of things.

GROSS: "Hill Street Blues" had such a different kind of writing style than,
say, "Law & Order" and "Dragnet" in the sense that "Hill Street" was so much
about the personal lives and the characters of the cops. You know, you found
there were crimes they were working on and so on, but it would also follow
them outside of their work and you'd see all the problems they were having at
home and in relationships. And "Law & Order" and "Dragnet" are police
procedurals where you really don't see the characters outside of their job,
and those shows are dedicated to solving the crimes.

Mr. GREEN: Well, there are two different kinds of shows. A character-driven
show doesn't usually--as a rule, you don't concentrate very much on the
stories. Because, for example, in "Hill Street" or "NYPD Blue" or, you know,
any sort of well-done character-driven show, you might run three stories or
even more through the show. You might run four stories. And they're called
modulars, because you can decide--you have a grab bag of stories, and you're
going to tell them in X number of beats. And so you go through the bag and
you say, `OK. Well, this story is probably the A story. It's the strongest
story. This will be the A story of the episode.' And then you're
intercutting those with the B stories, the C stories and maybe a D story, and
then you weave the personal stuff through that.

So it's a very different kind of storytelling. I mean, it's a lot more like
soap opera where your engagement in the show is, yeah, you're engaged in the
stories and you want to see these guys solve the crimes or fail to solve them
and you want good stories, but mainly you want to know what's happening with
you characters, how are the relationships going between them and other
characters, and people engage very closely with these people. And, I mean,
one interesting thing I noted is that they really care more about how the
characters that are the running characters on the show interact with each
other than they do about how they interact with the criminals and so forth
that they run into. You can have an excellent guest actor come in and do
something with one of your leads. They're more interested in how that lead
interacted with another lead.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. GREEN: So the strength is not in the story, I guess is what I'm saying.

GROSS: Do you have any preference for the character-driven vs. the police
procedural?

Mr. GREEN: As a writer, just, you know, writing myself, I'd rather write
character-driven. It's easier for me to write. I don't like plotting very
much, you know. I do it, and it's just not as much fun. You don't get to
stretch out as much in terms of human behavior of your principals because, you
know, you're not keeping them just on a cause-and-effect course, you know.

But I like both shows. I'm proud of both shows. I mean, I worked on "NYPD
Blue" and "ER" and "Hill Street." Those are character-driven shows. And I
really like some of the episodes that I wrote on those shows or was involved
in, you know, developing. But then some of the stuff I did on "Law & Order,"
you know, where you can deal with issues, which you probably should stay away
from on character-driven shows, you know, where we did the Crown Heights story
and things like that that raised issues of constitutional law or, you know,
what's right, what's wrong, what's ethical, what's not ethical. You don't get
to do those as much on a character show, and that's a lot of fun to do, too.

GROSS: Walon Green is an executive producer of "Dragnet." We'll talk more
about writing crime dramas in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, how TV cops compare with the real thing. We continue our
conversation with "Dragnet" executive producer Walon Green.

And Maureen Corrigan reviews "Gordon," a novel about a sadistic sexual affair
first published in 1966 and then banned in Europe for indecency.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Walon Green, executive
producer of "Dragnet," the remake of the '50s TV cop series. Green has also
written for "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue," was head writer and executive
producer of "Law & Order" and co-executive producer of "ER."

You know, it strikes me that in the United States a lot of people are very
ambivalent about cops. They really feel the need for protection, they want to
be safe, they want law and order in the streets. But on the other hand, a lot
of people feel that cops can be intrusive, that they're sometimes stopping the
wrong people or that they can be racist in who they decide to stop, etc., etc.
But people are not ambivalent about cop shows. I mean, I think just people
love cop shows. Have you thought about that a lot, the ambivalence people
seem to have about cops and the absolute love they have of cop shows?

Mr. GREEN: Well, yes. I think the reason people, you know, feel ambivalent
about cops--and we all do; I mean, I do, too--and yet like cop shows is that
they can choose a cop show that makes them feel sort of safe about cops, and
then they can enjoy what they would like to enjoy about cops. Because I
think, you know, cops are basically hired to do something we don't want to do.
We don't want to go out and shoot at people and stop bullets and beat people,
you know, if they're dangerous or apprehend them. We don't want to do those
things. So we hire other people to do that for us. And we'd like to think
that there's something heroic about what they're doing.

And cop shows, for the most part, even though they may show people as being
weak in one way or another, or reacting badly, they don't really show the
misfits unless they're specifically designed to do that. And to justify
showing the sort of better side of cops, I think that probably--I mean, the
majority of most police are just guys doing this job and trying to do it well.
But like anything else, the screening process is not perfect and there are
people, you know, on the street, being cops that should probably be in jail.
You know, but that's just life.

GROSS: I think the best example of the ambivalence that people have about
cops and the love they have of cop shows is Ice-T, who's on "Law & Order:
SUV"--I always say "SUV"--"SVU," "Special Victims Unit." And, you know, as a
rapper, Ice-T had some very anti-police kind of recordings. But, you know, he
plays a cop and plays a cop quite well on the "Law & Order" show.

Mr. GREEN: Yes. I've heard him speak about it actually and, you know, he
said sort of a different version of what I just said, that, you know, he could
do that because he knew that there was a need for cops and he knew that there
were cops who were good guys. And even though that was not his own personal
experience, you know, from which he drew, you know, the lyrics that you're
referring to.

And I think that's everybody's story; if you're a minority, it's certainly
probably more your story that someone like myself. And, I mean, it's an
important thing to call attention to this because the cops themselves have to
constantly screen themselves and they have to find a way to walk this very
narrow line, because there are times when it's very tempting to just be
effective but do something illegal. And they cannot do that.

I mean, it's interesting that Bill Stoner, who is our technical adviser, is a
retired RHD cop, is far more conservative--and I don't mean that politically
at all--he's far more conservative in what he thinks police should be allowed
to do than we are, you know, who are doing this show. And we consider
ourselves--you know, we're liberal guys, and he's a guy who really thinks that
cops shouldn't even swear, you know, they shouldn't use foul language because
they have to be a paragon. He said that, `You've armed them and given them
the right to carry a gun. You know, they can't have the same rights as other
people. They can't allow themselves the same lassitude that other people do
in society. They have to be special.'

GROSS: Hey, that's an interesting perception. Did that get you thinking that
maybe you should have your characters feel that way, too, and conform to that?

Mr. GREEN: I think it's a little too much--you know, I think it would be
unreal. I mean, you know, the original Joe Friday was more along those lines,
but I didn't believe it. And I especially didn't believe it watching the show
in the '60s, you know. But there is a real example. I mean, Bill Stoner is
that guy. He would never--I mean, I will never use an epithet or even--he
won't even hear an off-color joke, you know, as an officer of the law.

GROSS: Has writing and producing police stories for television made you see
police any differently?

Mr. GREEN: Well, yes, it made me see police differently because before I
started writing cop shows, you know, I mean, in the '60s and so forth I
associated police with bigotry and head-bashing and, you know, kind of
reactionary, fascist elements. But then as I started working on these shows,
you know, and meeting the people that were connected with them in a technical
advisory capacity or for stories and so forth, you know, I met them and got to
know them and I saw that my perspective was very narrow of what police were,
and that they were incredibly dedicated people.

And the other thing I saw that was interesting that surprised me was that
police are often more tolerant and liberal about human behavior than people
who consider themselves very liberal. You can meet very tough cops who will,
you know, when the public says, `Well, this guy is a murderer and a killer and
he stabbed this woman 62 times,' and they'll say, `Well, this is a working guy
and things, you know, got very rough for him. And his life started to fall
apart and, you know, just a lot of stuff came together and he couldn't deal
with it. And it's just a tragic thing that happened to him because he's not a
bad guy.'

And, you know, they'll take a point of view because of what they see that is
not only not hardened by the experience, but is much softer than someone
reading the newspaper about a man who stabs a woman 65 times and says, `This
guy's a monster, you know, kill him or do whatever.'

GROSS: Do you get stopped much by cops? Has that happened to you?

Mr. GREEN: I do get stopped occasionally for really silly things, too.

GROSS: Like?

Mr. GREEN: But you mean--well, they're usually traffic, you know, but...

GROSS: Uh-huh. And do you mention your job?

Mr. GREEN: No. No, I don't.

GROSS: When you are stopped, do you find yourself studying the officer who's
ticketing you so that you can get material?

Mr. GREEN: No, actually, I don't. You know, I think we all study the cop who
stops us because there's a certain--well, certainly in California there's a
certain anxiety level. You know, you think, `I don't want to be misread,' I
mean, because you read about people, they reach for their wallet and got shot
or something like that. So I'm extremely cooperative. And I think I have
that--I don't know if fear is the right word, but I certainly have that
caution that we all have, you know, in interacting with the police, especially
in traffic situations and in LA.

Now New York's very different. I've never--or the East Coast. I don't know
Philadelphia cops well, but like in New York, cops are so easy to talk to and
they're so accessible. But out here it's very, very different.

GROSS: My guest is Walon Green, executive producer of the new "Dragnet."
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Walon Green, and he's executive producer of the new TV
series "Dragnet." He was an executive producer of "Law & Order" and wrote for
"Hill Street," "NYPD Blue" and "ER."

You actually started making movie or TV documentaries. What kind of
documentaries were they? And did that help with doing cop shows?

Mr. GREEN: Well, yes, I did start making documentaries for David Wolper, who
virtually gave me my first job off the street because I didn't know anything
about movie making or filmmaking or writing or anything else. And I started
as a researcher, and then I got to fix a show that was in trouble, about Nazis
in South America, because I'd been in South America. You know, they sent me
to South America and let me look for Mengele and Bormann and find people who'd
knew them and so forth and do that. That was like my first sort of job.

And then because I was always a natural history buff, the National Geographic
Series started, Emmitt Cousteau's(ph) series, and it was just one of those
really good, lucky breaks because I was the guy with the organization who
actually knew, you know, something about nature. And I got to do I think five
"National Geographic Specials" and I worked on the Cousteaus and was on
Calypso and all that. It was wonderful.

But I didn't do any writing then, I only directed and produced.

GROSS: Did directing and producing documentaries give you an idea of what
real life should look like and what you wanted fiction to look like when you
wanted the fiction to look like real life?

Mr. GREEN: Yes, documentaries do give you that. I also had--I always liked
reality-based, you know, films and it was always--even when I was a kid, you
know, I liked, for example, when I was, you know, 11, 12, 13, I liked films
like "Shoeshine" and "Bicycle Thief" and neorealist films and things like that
because I liked things that looked like life, you know, that I actually
thought, `Well, that's life. That's the way those people live.' And I liked
that a lot in the European cinema at the time and then the Americans, you
know, started making films that touched on neorealism, too--"Naked City,"
films like that.

And it's just--I don't know. I can't explain why, but it was my preference
over science fiction and, you know, things like that, that didn't really
interest me that much.

GROSS: You wrote the screenplay for the movie "The Wild Bunch," which was
directed by Sam Peckinpah. It was made in the late '60s. And it's basically
considered a landmark in brutal violence in American cinema. It's a movie in
which there's no real good guys, per se. People are really brutal and mean.
The violence is really ugly. And it's for that period very explicit. I mean,
you see blood spurting out of bullet wounds, women are shot. These are things
you weren't really seeing at the time in movies. And some of the violence is
shown in slow motion. Did you write the film with a sense that you wanted it
to have that place in history as a landmark in brutal violence?

Mr. GREEN: I didn't write the film thinking it would be a landmark in
history. I mean, that surprises me. I mean, I really wrote the film because
it was a film I wanted to see. I had seen a lot of Westerns; they were
usually heroic. Some of them were very good. And they played to these mythic
characters, and I thought--you know, I'd lived in Mexico for a while, and I
had also hung out with a lot of cowboys at that time, you know, that were guys
that worked in the stockyards and stuff like that. And it was a very violent
culture. I mean, they sat around and talked about fights they'd been in or
wanted to be in. And they had this penchant for that.

And the only sort of redeeming thing that I'd found about them was that, as
violent and sociopathic as they were, they did have this incredible sense of
bond, you know, I mean, of camaraderie, and even to the point of, I mean,
idiocy. Like, one of them once--he robbed an unemployment office in Burbank
and they all went and perjured themselves, even though they didn't like him.
I mean, he was somebody they didn't like. Some of them hated him. But they
went and perjured themselves to try and get him off. He didn't get off. I
mean, he might have even been executed. I don't know what happened to him.

But I thought, there was this one element of them that had some nobility, and
I thought, `How weird. What a weird contrast that these people who have all
this disdain for, you know, the traditional values of society have this one
thing.' I mean, and it was very, very strong. And I thought, `That's an
interesting idea,' and I would imagine that's probably what people in the
early West were like; they lived in a very violent world; the law was whatever
the governing powers decided to make it, you know, such as railroads and so
forth.

And so they created this code, and like in the same way that predatory animals
will usually not enact predation against each other, like they have ritualized
combat in which they don't hurt each other and they will stick together,
that's what these people are like. And I thought it went back to a very basic
element of behavior. So that became sort of the theme of the film.

GROSS: Did you and Peckinpah, the director, talk a lot about how the violence
should be shown visually?

Mr. GREEN: We didn't talk a lot about it, but he read the script and just got
it. He said--at that time the films that were the inspiration for myself and,
as it turned out, for Peckinpah, although we didn't know each other before I
wrote this script--were the Kurosawa films, you know...

GROSS: Like "Seven Samurai"?

Mr. GREEN: Like "Seven Samurai" and "Rashomon." And this was before
"Yojimbo," I think, or "Yojimbo" might have been out; I don't remember. And,
you know, we thought, `Well, that's it. I mean, that's probably what combat
really looks like. And then occasionally Kurosawa did use--he was the first
person, I think, to use slow motion in combat. In "Seven Samurai" I know
there's one slow-motion shot; I think there's two slow-motion shots in the
film.

GROSS: Do you ever look at violence and explicit violence on film now and
think, `Oh, that's going too far'?

Mr. GREEN: Well, yes, I do; and not so much by the level of violence, but by
the use of violence. You know what I mean? Like, I've seen films that don't
particularly seem that violent, because they're supposedly silly. But
sometimes there's too much sort of joy in the violence, and I think that's--I
mean, it's to get you off, I guess is what I'm saying. And I always hoped
that that wasn't what we saw in "The Wild Bunch," although obviously people
did go see it and liked that aspect of it and got off on it. I mean, it was
really to show that the world is just a immensely cruel place. And even a
12-year-old kid gets wound up and excited by this kind of action, and picks up
a gun and shoots a guy in the face with it, you know.

GROSS: There was a time when people assumed that if you were a serious writer
the place for you was movies, and TV was the place to make money, but, you
know, it was not the place to really practice your craft in a way that film
was. Do you ever feel that it's sometimes the opposite, that the writer's
more respected in television than in film?

Mr. GREEN: Yes. The writer is much more respected in television than in
film. And, in fact, if somebody told me they wanted to write dramatic
material, you know, are really cared about what they wrote, I would probably
say, `I don't know anything about the theater, but maybe that's good. Film is
probably the most depressing place for a writer.' I mean, you have about the
same status as Kleenex, you know. And, I mean, producer Don Simpson said, `I
don't consider I've done justice to a script unless at least 20 writers have
worked on it.' So you're easily picked up; you're easily discarded; your
views, you know, whatever original views you had are of no significance,
really. It's extremely rare, even if you're a respected writer. There's a
honeymoon period, and then there's the period where they decide what the movie
should be, and you may not be part of that.

In television, because you stay with the project and directors come and go, if
you can do it within the confines of what that project is, you do have a way
of saying things. I mean, I think Norman Lear has put a real stamp on, you
know, getting what he feels to the American public certainly more successfully
than any other writer I can think of in the motion picture business.

GROSS: Well, Walon Green, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. GREEN: Well, thank you for having me.

GROSS: Walon Green is now an executive producer of "Dragnet," which is
broadcast on ABC TV.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews a novel that was first published
in 1966 and banned in Europe for indecency. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Edith Templeton novel "Gordon"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Edith Templeton, who wrote for The New Yorker in the 1950s, is now enjoying a
revival. Her short-story collection, "The Darts of Cupid and Other Stories,"
was nominated last year for a national book award. An early work of erotica
called "Gordon" has just been republished. It's based on her sexual
involvement with a man whom Templeton has said dominated her inner life. Book
critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN reporting:

Ordinarily I try not to be seduced by the hyperbolic claims of the publicity
material that accompanies new books, but it was hard to resist this
three-sentence teaser in the flier folded into Edith Templeton's
just-resurrected novel "Gordon." First published in 1966 under a pseudonym,
"Gordon" was subsequently banned in Europe for indecency, but sold well enough
to attract the attention of the original Parisian publisher of "Lolita,"
"Story of O" and the "Naked Lunch." "Gordon" was retitled and reissued in
1968 as part of the "Travelers Companion" series, a line of books whose
dark-green jackets were familiar to gentlemen readers everywhere.

Because of its shocking sexual content, "Gordon" was never reviewed.
Naturally, I rose to the bait and volunteered to review "Gordon." Hey, it's a
smutty job, but somebody has to do it.

"Gordon" opens by introducing Louisa, an aristocratic 28-year-old woman of the
world, unsentimental and unfazed by gross anatomy, scatology and the loonier
contortions of the libido. World War II has just ended, and Louisa, who's
recently been demobilized from the army, walks into a crowded London pub. A
sinister queer-eyed stranger, whom we later know as Gordon, approaches her,
presses his thumb hard against her pulse and commands Louisa to follow him.
Gordon takes her into a damp garden. They walk, they talk, and then suddenly
Gordon takes possession of Louisa on a cold stone bench. Louisa tells us,
`The whole was achieved in a matter of about four seconds. It was speedy and
casual and effortless, and at the same time seemingly impossible, like any
virtuoso performance.' During and after the act, Louisa behaves submissively
to the point of humiliation; Gordon behaves indifferently to the point of
cruelty, and there you have the chemistry of their mutual obsession. `I'll
hold you forever,' Gordon prophetically tells Louisa, `because I shall always
find new ways of torturing you.'

For almost a year, Louisa is regularly summoned by Gordon to assignations in
his flat and office. He turns out to be a psychiatrist, and much of the
couple's pre- and postcoital repartee revolves around Gordon's Hannibal
Lecter-like probings into Louisa's painful childhood in Austria, her father
fixation, her subsequent male and female love affairs, her abortions, and her
sexual craving to be pulverized into nothingness by the domineering Gordon.

I can't quote the graphic passages where Gordon sadistically and tirelessly
obliges Louisa, but, trust, me, he's unflagging. Gordon's decadent ubermensch
aura is enhanced by the fact that he and Louisa, who are both well-read, quote
a lot of Goethe, particularly "Faust," at each other. Then in a sudden twist
of events, their affair abruptly ends.

"Gordon" is intricately constructed, elegantly written and absorbing. But for
me personally, it wasn't all that arousing. It's not that I believe sexual
fantasies somehow have to be politically correct, but whenever Gordon publicly
humiliated Louisa, I felt like I'd just been injected with the literary
equivalent of a hormone blocker. Those scenes reminded me of too many
distasteful real-life incidents I've witnessed, where minor domestic tyrants
have gotten their kicks out of patronizing their partners in public. So can
a work of erotica still be considered good if it doesn't strike a reader as
particularly erotic? I think so; otherwise, literarily speaking, we'd
evaluate the works of the Marquis de Sade or Nabokov the same way we evaluate
Penthouse.

"Gordon," because of its psychological bent, cleverly investigates the twisted
roots of Louisa's sexuality. The slow, mental striptease here, where Louisa's
longings are reluctantly laid bare, was much more titillating to me than the
couple's acrobatic and sweaty sessions on the couch. If you agree with
whomever it was who once said that the brain is the sexiest organ of all,
you'll like "Gordon." And if you disagree, you'll like "Gordon" even more.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She
reviewed "Gordon" by Edith Templeton.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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