On the Streets

A 1958 Ford sedan turned into Harlem's Lenox Avenue and hurtled north, a blazing tommy gun poking out of its window. At 118th Street, the gun jammed.

The car stopped and two detectives ran toward it with revolvers drawn--scared but very brave. A man, even more scared, leaned out the car window and shouted, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot! We're making a TV show." Unlike the startled victims in the usual cliche, the detectives had not exactly stumbled onto the set. ABC's Naked City is one of the rarities of television, a series that is shot almost completely on location.

Its set encompasses all of New York City, from Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx to the farms of Staten Island and east to the runways of Idlewild airport. All year long, every working day, its mobile crew zips around the city in an anxious effort to keep the weekly, hourlong show supplied with finished films. The city police usually cooperate closely, but the two detectives simply had not been told that Naked City would be in the neighborhood that day.

More Than a Fuzz Bomb. Now going into its fourth season, Naked City has the craziest production routine in show business. It is written in Hollywood, and scripts are flown to New York, sometimes a page or two at a time--while the production crew waits to find out what happens next. One man spends most of his time looking for locations that fit the scenes, such as a tenement having an open stairwell with wood banisters (for a breakaway fight scene). Another fulltime employee works overtime getting permits from city agencies, businesses and individuals. Exposed film is flown back to Hollywood for developing and editing.

Meanwhile, story conferences for new episodes are going on constantly, usually somewhere on Route 66, because Naked City's producer, Bert Leonard, also produces Route 66. If Leonard believes in anything, it is authentic atmosphere.

But beyond that, Naked City is not just some fuzz bomb full of nervous motion and synthetic sentiment. It is a remarkably good television show, skillfully written by various hands. Its cool and objective approach derives from Mark Hellinger's 1948 movie. The Naked City (Hellinger's widow has collected more than $80,000 in royalties so far). Whether it is telling the story of a painter who murders his wife or a cop having a nervous breakdown, its scripts are full of insight and nicely caught dialogue. The plots are built, not boiled. And it has won three Emmys in such fields as editing and photography.

Gypsy Cop Cars. Three police roles are the regular substance of the cast (Paul Burke, Horace MacMahon, Harry Bellaver). But the best evidence that Naked City is not just another cop show is its list of guest stars, which has included Eli Wallach, Lee J. Cobb. Maureen Stapleton, Eric Portman, Hume Cronyn, George C.

Scott and Claude Rains. Some of them do not know what they are getting into.

Shooting ordinarily starts at 7:30 a.m., but to avoid crowds is often done between midnight and dawn. Wall Street scenes are filmed on Sunday.

With a waiver from the Screen Actors Guild, the show often uses non-actors as extras when skills are required that actors could not readily acquire--machinists, bakers, athletes. It would be vastly simpler to shoot the whole thing in a studio, but the show savors the authentic sights and sounds of the city. By now, the crew has learned to cope with almost anything.

When the program's two police cars were mistaken for real ones, they were promptly painted in gypsy swatches of red, yellow and black, insane to the passing eye but just like ordinary cop cars on black-and-white film. A Naked City hood once dashed into Pennsylvania Station, stopped an imaginary bullet, and fell "dead" at the feet of a couple of thousand startled commuters. Each show has about six dozen directors--one paid professional, plus all the unemployed geniuses in the neighborhood. "Roll 'em!" a Bowery bum once kept shouting all day at the film crew.

"Roll 'em! This is costing $2,000 a foot."

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