The Upper Hand

For two months, Veteran Author Ben (The Front Page) Hecht had spent four nights a week in front of his TV set, and it was a disturbing experience. But Hecht, sometime newspaperman, playwright, movie scenarist and novelist, felt it was necessary before setting to work on his first TV drama series, Tales of the City (alternate Thursdays, 8:30 p.m., CBS). His conclusions about TV: "There is no such thing as action in television. All the actors do is pretend there has been action--they pant and they groan and they tell you how far they have just run. TV seems dedicated to saying everything without words. The actors stand around and grunt and say 'Dats so' or 'Ain't dat right?' This is stupid." Hecht's decision: "I figured there was one thing I could do. I could write wordy, dialogue-type plays: This sort of thing went out of fashion 25 years ago. I'm hoping to bring it back."

Hecht's first half-hour show, a tale about "the big heart of Broadway" coming to the rescue of a young couple from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was as loaded with corny sentiment as with talk. Says Author Hecht: "We had to make the first one very sentimental because we used it to sell the sponsor [Willys Motors]." His second show last week was on the more Hechtian subject of hate; it told how a woman who has spent ten years in jail for shooting the other woman in a domestic triangle completes the job by plugging her husband.

This shooting is the only violence that occurs in Tales of the City ("And that's a domestic thing between husband and wife, so you can't count it"). Violence, Hecht feels, is overdone on TV because "the only action you can have in a four-foot radius is killing or hitting. It is possible to kill a man from one inch--therefore TV loves it."

But Hecht thinks there is a future for writers on TV: "It's a sort of wondrous version of the medicine show. You do a dance, sing a bird song, and then you pitch the snake oil. But the important thing is that it is not the entertainment that the sponsor is selling, but the snake oil or the beer. Just as long as his beer sells--which might be because it's a hot summer--he will let the writer have the upper hand."

So far, Hecht has written seven shows, spending a day on each, sold the lot for $21,000 (which, he figures, will help him finish an autobiography he has been working on for five years). And since his first indoctrination session, claims Hecht, he has not looked at TV once.

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