Narcissus On An Old Red Fire Engine

Filmed March 1963

The producers of ROUTE 66 had a unique procedure in laying out their schedule. As I understood it, they would select a state to film a group of episodes — say eight or ten. They would select cities within the state and send an advance man to make the necessary arrangements: city hall for permission and permits; a motel or inn to house the production office and the company. Many times the writer for an episode would then go to the city before writing his script. That was very much the case in the evolution of IN THE CLOSING OF A TRUNK, my first ROUTE 66. It was custom tailored to be filmed in Corpus Christi, Texas. And it was also the way my next assignment, NARCISSUS ON AN OLD RED FIRE ENGINE, was created. It too was to be filmed in Texas, in Galveston, and a very strange adventure — before and behind the camera — it turned out to be.

When I reported to the studio, the script was still being written by Joel Carpenter, whom I never met. At a meeting with Bert Leonard and Stirling Silliphant I was told that Carpenter was very slow in writing. I had the impression that Joel was probably a novelist, new to screenplay writing. I have since learned Joel Carpenter was Arnold Manoff, a feature film screenplay writer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. After the blacklisting days waned, he returned to writing, but now it was for television and under the name of Joel Carpenter, a name  he had used during his blacklisting and which he continued to use. Since Stirling was doing some rewriting on Carpenter’s script as his pages came in, consideration was given to the idea of having Stirling take over completely and finish the script on his own, but that idea was almost immediately rejected. They wanted Carpenter’s original input. So they were waiting patiently for him to turn in pages, which Stirling would immediately rewrite; and I was leaving for Texas with fewer pages of script than when I went the first time.

I flew from Los Angeles to Houston, where under the direction of James Sheldon the company was completing filming the first show to co-star Glenn Corbett, the actor selected to replace the departed George Maharis. From Houston the company was scheduled to move down to Galveston, again on the Gulf. Joel and Stirling had been in Galveston when this story was conceived and had discovered a Greek night club that became an important colorful ingredient in the script. But the club was too small to accommodate filming, so another larger club was found and turned into our Greek night club. And that was where our story began.

One of the standard rules in creating a script was, when possible, to have the boys employed somewhere in the community of the week’s episode. In Corpus Christi Todd had worked on the ferry boa; in Galveston Todd and Linc were employed at the local Cotton Baling plant. A decade before I had had some experience along these lines. The spring of 1953 I was still in Mason City, Iowa. Bob Carson, owner of a local radio station and eager to move into the newly arrived industry of television production, approached me with a project he had in mind. It was to be a weekly series called THIS IS YOUR TOWN. The plan was for me to go with a local photographer into Iowa’s small towns and film, documentary style, a profile of the community, its industries, its people. All of this to be accomplished in just a couple of days. And then I was to write (before the film had even been assembled) the script, based on the footage I had filmed. Well I only had to visit one town to realize what an impossible mission the project was; to be a combination advance man, production manager, assistant director, director, script supervisor, screenplay writer of a half hour film to be completed in two days was beyond what I was capable of doing, and I baled out. With my leaving the project died. But filming some of the industries in that one town provided me with some insight into how to film the sequence of the boys at work in the Cotton Baling Plant.

The Cotton Baling plant was our first day’s location, and it was the first filmed confrontation between Linc and Janie. It became obvious very soon that the usual attempt to film the episode in six days was not going to be attempted. This was part two of the introduction of Glenn Corbett as the series’ new co-star, sort of a pilot, and the dailies were viewed with a heightened scrutiny, almost microscopic.

The word from Hollywood when they saw this scene was that they thought Glenn needed more ‘energy’. I wasn’t sure what they meant by that, but I talked to Glenn and we reshot the scene — but in a different location because we had left the Cotton Baling plant. Again they complained that he lacked energy. We reshot the scene for a third time, this time back at the original location. I didn’t really know what they wanted. Later in hindsight I realized what the problem was. Glenn had a low-key personality, not unlike Martin Milner’s. Here he was replacing the rougher-edged, street-smart George Maharis, and obviously they expected another George Maharis. Well Glenn wasn’t George Maharis, but he was a very charismatic, fine actor.

The live locations I had shot up until now did not prepare me for shooting in a motel room. Alma’s house in IN THE CLOSING OF A TRUNK, which had been small, was three times the size of Linc’s motel room. I never was able to film a master angle showing all four characters; the room wasn’t large enough.

Anne Helm was at a real disadvantage. Janie was a very complex character, and as new pages of the script arrived, as the story slowly unfolded, new facets of her disturbed personality were revealed. When we began filming we had the opening scene in the Greek bar and the next meeting of Linc and Janie. It was sort of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but we didn’t have the overall picture; we didn’t really know where we were heading. I remember discussing with Anne my feeling that her boyfriend Bill, to whom she frequently referred, was a figment of her imagination, a phantom lover, and that was the premise on which we based her character.

We had music tracks for the Greek dances, but no track had been furnished for when Janie invites Linc to dance American style. The sound crew had a tape of Nelson RIddle’s ROUTE 66 theme song, and that was what they danced to when we filmed. I was disappointed when I saw the final film that Janie’s dancing to the music they used to replace the show’s theme song (and I knew that they would replace it) was not as exciting nor as sensual as what we had filmed.

We filmed in the local jail. I had to do one shot of Martin Milner being released from his cell. It was fortunate that we didn’t have to do more; the stench was unbearable.

Then we arrived at a scene that I considered a vital collision of Linc’s libido and Janie’s problem. I staged it on a miniature golf course with strange, exotic animal figures. When Janie said, “Who are you not to listen?” sometime virginal Janie was again seductively coming on to Linc, and he responded. He embraced her, holding her tight and kissing her neck, while she kept on talking about Bill. Behind them was the head of a large black whale with a white eye. It was very sexual and Daliesque, with nothing that I felt network censorship could object to. It never got to the networks. Bert wanted it reshot, and it ended up just a lot of intellectual talk in place of sensual action.

The other major location selected by the author to include in the script was the Amusement Center on Pleasure Pier. And what a wonderful location it turned out to be.
It came with wonderful mirrors and an antique red horse-drawn fire engine

The Amusement Center was later destroyed by a hurricane. A hotel, the Flagship, was build on Pleasure Pier, but it too was recently destroyed during Hurricane Ike. The current owner announced he is going to put a Pleasure Pier-like Amusement Park on the pier. I’m not sure what happened to the red fire engine.

About the fifth or sixth day of shooting Anne came to me, all excited. She had had a chance to read the new script pages that had just arrived, which I hadn’t yet seen. “Guess what! There really is a Bill. He shows up.”

The stunt double for Linc in the fight scene was not a very good likeness. A more experienced director would have shot the master angles from further away.

I have a confession to make. At the time I was filming these two Herbert Leonard series, my favorite was ROUTE 66. I liked the poetic romanticism, the literate dialog — qualities that were rare even then in film and have all but disappeared from our current entertainment screens.

It takes less time to write an action sequence than to film it. The length of the scene on paper from the time Linc exits the amusement center until the two stunt doubles dove into the water was three eighths of a page. By my normal allotment of an hour a page that would allow about twenty-two and a half minutes to film it. It took four and a half hours.

Both Glenn and Anne had to go into the water for the closer angles rescue part of the sequence. When we did the final scene of them on the beach, they had to be watered down before each take. We had a fire nearby and lots of blankets to keep them warm between takes. But it was COLD.

We completed filming I think on a Wednesday. The film had taken ten days to shoot, which was not surprising because of the scenes that were reshot and the fact we didn’t begin filming with a completed script. No one was disturbed by this. The film was in essence a pilot, presenting a new leading man, to secure a renewal of the series for another season, and CBS did renew ROUTE 66 for its fourth season. The company was scheduled to leave Texas and go to Florida for another group of episodes. I was booked to direct the next episode in Florida, the start date of prep to be the following Monday. I was exhausted. I had directed four shows (two ROUTE 66’s in Texas and two NAKED CITY’s in New YORK) in about nine weeks. Factor in the travel, and I think I was entitled to be tired. I requested permission to go to Florida from Texas rather than returning to Los Angeles. I figured the three or four days of down time was necessary. For some reason the production office refused. I then asked to be released from the commitment to direct the next show because of fatigue. They agreed, and I returned to Los Angeles, ready to give myself a break. What I didn’t know was just how short that break would be.

The journey continues