Saxon Checks Out

American “tough guy” actor John Saxon (born Carmine Orrico), who died from pneumonia yesterday at age 83, seems to be best-remembered by obituary writers for his performances in the films Enter the Dragon (1973) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Deadline notes that Saxon “won a Golden Globe in 1958 as Most Promising Newcomer Male” and “was nominated for the 1966 Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe opposite Marlon Brando in The Appaloosa.”

Yet the list of credits for his television work extend well beyond what he was able to accomplish on the silver screen.

Saxon’s résumé page on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) shows him having been featured in myriad small-screen crime dramas, from Burke’s Law, It Takes a Thief, and The Name of the Game to Ironside, Banyon, Banacek, The Rockford Files, Hardcastle and McCormick, and Murder, She Wrote. He also had a starring role as surgeon Theodore Stuart in a rotating segment of NBC’s The Bold Ones (1969-1973), and he co-starred with Gene Barry in another NBC product, the 1968 spy/adventure pilot film Istanbul Express, written by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link.

Another Saxon TV flick I remember far better, however, was 1974’s Planet Earth. It was actually the second pilot for a weekly ABC science-fiction drama, created by Gene Roddenberry. (The previous try-out had been 1973’s Genesis II, starring Alex Cord). Set in the year 2133, Planet Earth was kind of like a ground-bound Star Trek, sending out a team of scientists—led by Saxon’s Dylan Hunt (a man from the 1970s, revived from suspended animation)—to explore the disconnected, disparate, and often unusual remnants of human society left behind by a devastating nuclear war decades before. Unfortunately, ABC declined to pick that show up as part of its programming roster. Despite this track record, a third pilot was shot, 1975’s far inferior Strange New World, again with Saxon in the lead (but with little Roddenberry involvement); predictably, it failed as well.

It’s been reported that John Saxon was married for the third time and living in Tennessee at the time of his demise.

READ MORE: “Godspeed, John Saxon,” by Terence Towles Canote
(A Shroud of Thoughts).

Ten-hut!

Here’s news of particular interest to old-television buffs, brought our way by Stephen Bowie of the Classic History TV Blog:

Warner Archive will be releasing The Lieutenant (1963-1964) next year. I’ve been hearing rumors about this for months, but it was confirmed on Warner Archive’s Facebook page this week. The Lieutenant, of course, was the first series Gene Roddenberry created for television. It was a show about the peacetime military (although apparently it contained early references to the Vietnam conflict) that defied easy generic classification. Today, The Lieutenant is probably best remembered because it featured appearances by several actors associated with Roddenberry’s Star Trek; Gary Lockwood (guest star in the second Trek pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”) played the title character, and Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, Majel Barrett, and Ricardo Montalban all guest-starred.

Like Dr. Kildare and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (whose star, Robert Vaughn, was the second lead in The Lieutenant), Roddenberry’s creation was an MGM show produced under the banner of Norman Felton’s Arena Productions, which generally guaranteed high production values and compelling stories. Whether that applies to The Lieutenant, I don’t know. Aside from TNT broadcasts of few episodes in the late eighties, The Lieutenant hasn’t been rerun during my lifetime. Even if it doesn’t live up to the hype, The Lieutenant will be one of the classic TV events of 2011.

You can read more from Bowie here. And there are some scenes from The Lieutenant available on YouTube, including part of an episode titled “To Set It Right,” which focused on race relations and wasn’t broadcast during the show’s run.

Does anyone out there remember this program?

Nurse Chapel, Signing Off

Yes, I know this has nothing whatsoever to do with crime fiction. But I don’t want to fail to acknowledge the death earlier today of Majel Barrett Roddenberry, wife of the also late creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry. As the Associated Press notes,

Her romance with Roddenberry earned her the title “The First Lady of Star Trek.” A fixture in the “Star Trek” franchise, her roles included Nurse Christine Chapel in the original “Star Trek,” Lwaxana Troi in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and the voice of the USS Enterprise computer in almost every spin-off of the 1966 cult series. She recently reprised the voice role in the upcoming “Star Trek” film directed by J.J. Abrams.

Roddenberry was 76 years old.

READ MORE: “Majel B. Roddenberry, Wife of Star Trek Creator, Dies,” by Dennis McLellan (Los Angeles Times); “Majel Barrett Roddenberry’s Star Will Never Fade for Trek Fans,” by Mike Moody (TV Squad).

The President and the Cop Flop

Today marks the birthdays of two well-known American figures who, while they aren’t exactly members of the crime-writing community, nonetheless have been involved with the genre.

The first is former President Bill Clinton, who turns 60 years old today. During his prosperous eight years in the White House, Clinton--an avid, omnivorous reader, unlike his successor--became a champion for this genre. Each summer, the media would inquire about what books he was taking along on his all-too-brief vacations from work. Inevitably, the lists included not only historical texts and novels by famed fictionists such as Gabriel García Márquez, but also mysteries by Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, James W. Hall, and others. And this First Reader was promoting Michael Connelly’s The Concrete Blonde (1994) even before it hit bookstores.

Happy birthday, Bill. We miss you.

It was also on this date, back in 1921, that Gene Roddenberry took his first gasping breath. Now, when most folks think of Roddenberry, what comes to mind isn’t crime fiction. What occurs to them instead is how he created the phenomenally successful Star Trek franchise. But Roddenberry, born in El Paso, Texas, yet reared in Los Angeles, was the son of a cop. After putting in years as a World War II aviator and then as a Pan American World Airways pilot, he joined up with the LAPD himself during the late 1940s, before becoming a Hollywood screenwriter. During his early days in television, Roddenberry penned episodes of Highway Patrol, Have Gun, Will Travel, The Detectives, Naked City, and Dr. Kildare. He was also responsible for a 1963-1964 NBC-TV series called The Lieutenant, a Marine Corps drama set at Camp Pendleton, just outside of San Diego, California.

Of most interest to crime-fiction fans, however, is that after The Lieutenant, Roddenberry sought to launch another TV series, this one called Police Story (not to be confused with the 1970s NBC anthology series of the same name). According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), the program was to focus on an “elite squad of police detectives” who handled L.A.’s “toughest and most sensitive cases,” reporting directly to the city’s police commissioner. A half-hour pilot for the series was shot in August 1965, explains David Alexander in his Roddenberry biography, Star Trek Creator (1994)--around the same time that the second Star Trek pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” was being put together. (A previous sample episode, “The Cage,” starring Jeffrey Hunter instead of William Shatner, had already been rejected by NBC execs.) The Police Story pilot starred Steve Ihnat (who would go on to portray a convincingly round-the-bend starship fleet captain in the “Whom Gods Destroy” episode of the original Star Trek series). Also featured in that pilot, but now most familiar from the original Trek, were DeForest Kelley, playing a lab technician (he would instead move into the plum role of Dr. Leonard H. “Bones” McCoy), Grace Lee Whitney, later to appear as Captain James T. Kirk’s mini-skirted yeoman aide, and Malachi Throne, playing the chief of police. (Throne subsequently turned down the part of Dr. McCoy, but nonetheless appeared in episodes of both Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

Although Police Story ultimately entered the annals of unsold series pilots, Alexander writes that it was the not the fault of “a half-hearted attempt by Gene. He had put a great deal of time and energy into that pilot, as well, pulling a few strings to expose Throne to a real chief of police in hope that would give the show a solid air of reality.” Despite its being filmed in 1965, the IMDb reports that Police Story wasn’t finally shown to TV audiences until 1967.

It’s interesting to speculate on how history might have been changed, had Police Story been picked up by the networks instead of Star Trek. Would Roddenberry have become a storied face in television’s pantheon of crime show creators? Or would be now be remembered for more failed projects than successes?

Roddenberry died at age 70 in 1991 and, quite fittingly, I think, was buried in space.