“Undeniably Hip.” Yeah, That Fits Hayes

As much as I sometimes dread logging onto the Web each morning to see what’s happening around the world, and what assignments or problems I shall have to tackle by day’s close, there can also be pleasant surprises. Today, for example, I found the video embedded above on a closed-group Facebook page called Music for Television. It’s a tribute to singer-songwriter Isaac Hayes (1942-2008). Although Hayes is best remembered for composing the musical score to Richard Roundtree’s 1971 film, Shaft (based on Ernest Tidyman’s 1970 novel of the same name), he also created the main title theme for The Men (1972-1973), “a rotating series of Thursday-night action shows” for ABC-TV that American film and TV music expert Jon Burlingame declares, in this video, is Hayes’ “unsung masterpiece.”

“The network cut it into terrible, 40-second bits,” Burlingame explains, “but the full four-minute theme is melodic, dramatic, and undeniably hip.” I agree completely, and a couple of years ago I purchased a CD titled The Very Best of Isaac Hayes, just so I could have The Men’s complete theme close to hand.

In the event that you’re not familiar with The Men, it was a “wheel series” that featured Robert Conrad’s Assignment: Vienna, Laurence Luckinbill’s The Delphi Bureau, and James Wainwright’s Jigsaw. You can learn much more about all three of those short-run ABC crime dramas in this piece I wrote two years ago for The Rap Sheet.

Triple Treat

News reported here recently that the pilot film for the 1972-1973 ABC-TV crime/adventure drama The Delphi Bureau has been released by Warner Archive dredged up from my memory the “wheel series” of which Delphi was merely one element. So I went looking through YouTube, and discovered the 1972 Fall Preview video--posted above--which introduced Delphi and its two other alternating shows, all of which were broadcast under the umbrella title The Men.

For those who aren’t old enough to remember, The Delphi Bureau featured Laurence Luckinbill as Glenn Garth Gregory, a handsome guy with a photographic memory who’s employed by an indistinctly defined U.S. government agency that does obscure “research” work for the president. “Its actual role was counter-espionage,” recalls Wikipedia, “and its main operative was Gregory, whose liaison with the group’s unnamed superiors was Sybil Van Lowreen (Anne Jeffreys), a Washington, D.C., society hostess. (Celeste Holm had played Sybil Van Lowreen in the series’ pilot film.)” Unfortunately, only seven episodes of Delphi were shot before The Men was cancelled.

In NBC Mystery Movie fashion, Delphi had rotated in a 9-10 p.m. Thursday (later Saturday) slot with a couple of other programs that should have been more successful than they were. The first of those was Jigsaw, which found familiar character actor James Wainwright playing Lieutenant Frank Dain, a determined but kindhearted plainclothes detective with the California State Police Missing Persons Bureau, whose cases took him all over the Golden State. Although this Universal Studios production was created by Robert E. Thompson, a screenwriter with heavy-duty experience in the field of small-screen dramas (his credits included scripts for Have Gun, Will Travel, Mission: Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and The Name of the Game), Jigsaw--not to be confused with Jack Warden’s 1976 NBC crime drama, Jigsaw John--did not fare well with viewers. Ted Fitzgerald recalls on The Thrilling Detective Web Site that

After six episodes were produced, the studio or the network brought in Roy Huggins to punch things up. Huggins began by jettisoning the cop format. The vehicle for the change was Howard Browne’s oft-filmed [1954] novel Thin Air (which would later be the basis of episodes of The Rockford Files and Simon & Simon, among others) in which a man is suspected of murder after his lady friend walks into a restaurant and vanishes into … you guessed it. Stephen [J.] Cannell wrote the script [for that episode, “Kiss the Dream Goodbye”], which ended with Dain clearing his name and getting his private ticket. Huggins plotted the next episode, then the network ran the final unaired cop episode and the show vanished. My memory of the series in general and the P.I. episodes in particular was that it was well-done and played straight; no Rockford-style humor. Huggins and Cannell undoubtedly would have done a good job with a low-key lone-wolf character and the missing-persons hook, but ABC gave them Toma to do instead. And, of course, a year later NBC provided them the Rockford opportunity. In the larger scheme of things, as promising as the still-born Jigsaw might have been, The Rockford Files was, to say the least, the better path for Huggins and Cannell to follow.

The last and perhaps best-remembered segment of The Men was Assignment: Vienna, about which I’ve written on this page before. It starred ex-Wild Wild West lead Robert Conrad as Jake Webster, “an American expatriate in Vienna who was the operator of Jake’s Bar & Grill, an American-style establishment near the scenic heart of the [Austrian capital] city,” Wikipedia explains. “In fact, the business was a cover for Jake’s actual reason for being in Vienna. He was involved in tracking down various spies and international criminals at the behest of U.S. intelligence, which apparently held something against him which, if disclosed, would have resulted in his being deported from Austria and apparently then incarcerated in the United States. Jake’s liaison with U.S. intelligence was a Major Caldwell (Charles Cioffi).”

Assignment: Vienna--which followed a 1972 pilot film, Assignment: Munich, featuring Roy Scheider in the Webster role--seemed to offer considerable promise. As I remarked in my previous post about that show: “It had the talented pair of Eric Bercovici and Jerry Ludwig (who’d worked previously on episodes of Mission: Impossible) as its creators and executive producers. It had a terrific, intrigue-filled theme by jazz pianist and composer Dave Grusin (who had composed the theme music for Burt Reynolds’ Dan August and Robert Wagner’s It Takes a Thief, among others).” And in Conrad it boasted a bankable star, a pretty boy who nonetheless carried a tough demeanor suggesting he’d taken a few punches in his time and knew how to throw more of his own. (In fact, Conrad had been a pop and rock singer before he embarked on an acting career.) Furthermore, this final spoke of the Men wheel was shot in European “locations of intrigue and adventure,” giving it a freshness that other programs filmed around New York City or Los Angeles lacked. Yet, once more, Assignment: Vienna was yanked from the TV schedule after only eight episodes.

Warner Archive’s DVD release of The Dephi Bureau pilot gives me hope that it will follow up with a complete packaging of the series. And maybe that will incite the sale of both Assignment: Vienna and Jigsaw in the same format. I’d love to see them all once more--complete with the Isaac Hayes theme that originally introduced The Men.

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The video clip embedded at the top of this post comes from a longer ABC Fall Preview--the first of two parts--found here. An episode-by-episode index of The Men is here.

Who Is the Man?

If, like me, you remember fondly the 1971 motion picture Shaft, based on Ernest Tidyman’s first (1970) novel about super-cool, African-American New York City private eye John Shaft, then this is news of a particularly sad sort. As CNN reports:

Soul singer and arranger Isaac Hayes, who won Grammy awards and an Oscar for the theme from the 1971 action film “Shaft,” has died, sheriff’s officials in Memphis, Tennessee, reported Sunday.

Relatives found Hayes, 65, unconscious in his home next to a still-running treadmill, said Steve Shular, a spokesman for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.

Paramedics attempted to revive him and took him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after 2 p.m., the sheriff's department said.

No foul play is suspected, the agency said in a written statement.

Tidyman went on to write six more Shaft novels (the final one being named, of course, The Last Shaft), and that initial feature film starring Richard Roundtree spawned two lesser sequels--Shaft’s Big Score! (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973). Roundtree reinhabited the character in a 1973-1974 CBS-TV version of Shaft, which forced “the black private dick/that’s a sex machine to all the chicks” to tone down his language, wear double-knit pants (what the hell were they thinking?), work with “The Man” more often than against him, and share a Tuesday night rotation with Jimmy Stewart’s legal drama, Hawkins. And in 2000, the Manhattan gumshoe returned once more in the inferior film Shaft, this time with the usually magnetic Samuel L. Jackson playing the part.

For anyone who saw that first movie, though, none of these other incarnations means squat. None of them measures up to the original, with Hayes’ soon-to-be-famous theme. In celebration of the late composer’s work, I’ve embedded the opening of Roundtree’s Shaft above. It’s a long clip, and Hayes’ unforgettable lyrics don’t even kick in until the 2:49 mark. But on this day of all days, it’s definitely worth another listen, don’t you think?

READ MORE: “Isaac Hayes, 65, a Creator of ’70s Soul Style, Dies,” by Ben Sisario (The New York Times); “Isaac Hayes, Deep-Voiced Soul Icon, Is Dead at 65” (Associated Press); “Beyond Shaft,” by Kevin Burton Smith (January Magazine).