The Bull Roarer

Filmed July 1963

I think that was a historic moment in television. I am 99 and 44/100 percent sure that was the first time the word “homosexual” was uttered in a drama in an American television show. And it happened because of the persistence of one man – George Lefferts. George, a writer-producer based in New York, was sent a Meta Rosenberg created project from ABC with the offer to produce it. The project, the companion piece to their highly successful BEN CASEY, was BREAKING POINT, a medical-psychiatric series produced by Bing Crosby Productions for Desilu Studios. George said that he would accept, but only on condition that he would be able to include in his schedule half a dozen topics usually on television’s verboten list. ABC agreed, so George signed onto the project. One of the topics on George’s ‘demand’ list was homosexuality. When the story outline for THE BULL ROARER was submitted to the network for approval, it was turned down. They said the topic of homosexuality was unacceptable. George said, “Read my contract.” And so THE BULL ROARER continued development into script, written by Ernest Kinoy. It was the story of a gentle, sensitive young man, Paul, dominated by his macho older brother, Murray. Because his behavior was less predatory than his older sibling, Paul had doubts about himself. He sought psychiatric help. Was he a man — or a homosexual?

George’s first choice for the young psychiatrist was Robert Redford. He sent Redford the script and the plans for the series. He told me that Redford said he had walked the beach for hours, pondering his decision. This was a 27-year old Robert Redford with dozens of TV guest shots, but only one independent movie in his resume. He was still six years away from his breakthrough performance in BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. The financial security alone must have looked inviting. But he decided he would turn it down in favor of doing a summer stock tour of a new unproduced play. The play was Neil Simon’s BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Paul Richards was then cast as Dr. Thompson with Eduard Franz as the older, wiser psychiatrist.

We immediately cast Dean Stockwell as Paul, Ralph Meeker as Murray and a young 23-year old actress who had been doing a lot of theatre work in the Hollywood area, Mariette Hartley, as Betty. A couple days later we had a call from Dean Stockwell’s agent. Dean wanted to come to the studio to meet with me. I agreed. Dean came to the studio, and he and I went to a little bar on Melrose Avenue. The assignment had obviously been accepted by Dean and his agent without reading the script. Once he read it, he had a change of heart, and without giving any reason he apologetically told me that he didn’t want to do the show. I sensed he was fearful of the subject matter. It would have been stupid to hold him to his contracted acceptance, so we released him from his commitment.

Lynn Stalmaster, the casting director, had a hot new young actor he wanted us to meet, Michael Parks, a ‘rising star’, so he brought Michael into the production office. I remember Michael sat on the couch, George and I sat on chairs. We spent the first few minutes in get-acquainted conversation. And then I asked Michael to read. Michael announced that he didn’t read for parts. George and I were both a little startled by this. Stars don’t have to read for parts. Well-established character people don’t have to read for parts. Twenty-three year old wannabes read for parts. So I thanked him for coming in and stood up. And he stood up, but instead of leaving, he kept on talking. A couple of times I broke in, trying to end it all, but he just kept talking. So finally I reached over, took his hand, shook it and said, “Thank you again Michael for coming in.” He finally left.

I was not unhappy with the way this turned out, because I had an ace up my sleeve. Just a few months before I had worked with a young actor in New York on the last NAKED CITY that I directed, Lou Antonio. We had a print of that show, COLOR SCHEMES LIKE NEVER BEFORE, sent over from Columbia Studios. George viewed it and approved, so we brought Lou out from New York to complete our star trio. So many New York actors at this time would come out to the west coast with their noses up in the air about doing television. Not Lou! From day one he just said, “I love it here!”

As we neared our opening shooting date, there was the necessary meeting with the censorship department of ABC. Dorothy Brown, who was the head of that department, came over with a couple of underlings and all of her notes for changes she was going to request. George, Richard Collins (associate producer) and I listened to her requests, most of them inane. Many times I suggested cutting lines she was finding objectionable rather than using her suggested substitution. But then we arrived at a place in the script where Dorothy was insistent that somebody call Paul a sissy. I’m afraid I went ballistic. George finally invited me to leave the room with him, we went out into the outer office, and he said, “I think you’d better go if we’re to get through this.” So I went home, they got through it, and nobody called Paul a sissy.

Robert Hauser was the director of photography and again, like Jack Marta on ROUTE 66, was wonderfully cooperative. When we filmed the sequence in the prolog when Paul, emotionally distraught, ran down the stairs, I asked Bob if rather than shooting Paul running down the stairs, could we do his point of view of the descent. Now today with the steadicam, that shot would be no problem. But that was close to half a century ago, and back then that was strictly a B.S. shot — before steadicam. Bob got so excited about the shot that he ended up operating himself. With his eye looking through the lens he strapped an Arriflex camera to his forehead and ran down the stairs. He could have broken his neck, all for two seconds of film.

Our major location was a construction site. In seeing the film today, you would think we had gone to some distant place on the outskirts of the city. But we were shooting in the heart of Los Angeles, in the Hollywood Hills south on Mulholland Drive just west of Laurel Canyon. It was an area that had been cleared of trees and was being graded for the construction of new homes.

There was one line in the script that George was sure we would have to lose. At the scene when a very pretty young Betty Lorimer, who works in the office, walks across the grounds, the guys have a ball, teasing her, calling out suggestive remarks. One of them yells, “Honey, you want to ride on my bulldozer.” I said, “No, George. We don’t have to lose that line. You see, he’s sitting in a bulldozer when he offers the invitation.” So the line was left in. And with that explanation it survived all of the later ‘censorship’ meetings that were held.

When filming on location it was a practice sometimes to record wild lines to insure having a clean line reading. We wouldn’t do it for full dramatic scenes, only for lines like the “bull-dozer” line. And so I had Bill Bramley do several voice only recordings of those lines he called down to Betty. George Lefferts was on the location when we did it, and he was so pleased he said. “And we’re going to use the dirtiest reading.”

Psychiatry was still a relatively new medical science. One of its first entrances into show business (if not the first) was when Moss Hart used it as the basis for his 1941 musical, LADY IN THE DARK, later transferred to the screen in I944. In 1948 the screen revisited the subject with the Olivia de Havilland starrer, THE SNAKE PIT. I don’t know if the subject was ever utilized in the live Golden Age of Television, but its advent into filmed television came on strongly in 1963 with two series: MGM’s THE ELEVENTH HOUR produced by the creators of DR. KILDARE and BREAKING POINT from the BEN CASEY company. But although the approach of both series to the subject was totally serious, public statements about psychiatry were ambivalent:

Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined. – Samuel Goldwyn

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I’m schizophrenic,
And so am I.
–      Oscar Levant

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch. – Marshall McLuhan

That attitude could also be found in the public perception of the profession.

I’m not proud when I say my one confrontation with Dorothy Brown left me feeling slightly adversarial. I thought the script for THE BULL ROARER was an intelligent and thoughtful treatment of a difficult subject and I didn’t appreciate the narrow-mindedness she brought to our meeting. But I finally had my own little private moment of revenge. I’m sure nobody besides me ever recognized it. I’m not sure it even means anything except to me. But in a sequence where Paul and Murray drove Betty home, Murray berated Paul because he had not been forward enough in ‘nailing’ the gal. Paul nervously tried to light a cigarette with the car lighter. And when he went to put the phallic-like lighter back into its dashboard receptacle, I had him have trouble inserting it. Like I said, it probably doesn’t mean anything to anybody else, but to me it’s “UP YOURS, DOROTHY BROWN!”

Normally in staging a scene for a film the action for the actors is planned first and any adjustments needed in the set or set dressing are made later. But it can be done in reverse, especially in television with its budget limitations. When I was shown the standing set for Dr. Thompson’s office, I took special notice of a picture on the wall. I then used the picture as the basis for my staging of a scene.

Although George Lefferts had made the inclusion of a script about homosexuality a condition of his signing on to produce this series, THE BULL ROARER did not tell the story of a homosexual relationship. It would be another decade before television would do that. So Lefferts and writer Ernest Kinoy very deftly used the subject as the key to a very valid exploration of a problem just as important, a problem peculiarly very American, a problem that nearly a half a century later still exists.

THE BULL ROARER, like so many of the teleplays I directed in this period, owed a great debt to television’s live GOLDEN AGE. The quality of writing during that period was of epic proportion. Many of the teleplays written for the small television screen had an extended life on the movie theatre’s big screens and on the Broadway stage: MARTY, THE MIRACLE WORKER (both Broadway and the big screen), JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT, THE CATERED AFFAIR and on and on. Just as importantly that quality of writing continued in much of the fare of evolving television film productions. Writers were still probing the darkest recesses of the human psyches. And the networks were not yet afraid of long extended emotional clashes, had not yet totally replaced them with explosions and car crashes.

This was the first of three shows in which I directed Ralph Meeker. He was a superb actor. He had years before replaced Marlon Brando on Broadway in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. Later he starred on Broadway in the original production of William Inge’s PICNIC. He gave some outstanding performances in several major motion pictures. But he never broke through and became a major film star. Why?

In 1932 in the film CABIN IN THE COTTON Bette Davis said to Richard Barthelmess one of her early classic lines: “I’d like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair.” I always wondered if that film might have influenced Ernest Kinoy when he wrote the following scene.

The young actor who kept intervening to break up the fights was Eddie Guardino, stage name Danny Guardino. In real life he was the kid brother of Harry Guardino.

It was not a cop out that George Lefferts, having insisted on including the verboten subject of homosexuality as one of his projects, had ended up delivering a show whose main theme was “what is a man?” Contract or no contract there was no way ABC in 1963 would have aired a story of a homosexual relationship. It was a major breakthrough that the subject was even discussed and it opened the door for the future.

The journey continues