I spent almost 10 minutes yelling at the TV this evening.
Why?
I was witnessing an outrage.
No, not an episode of Two and a Half Men.
Actually, it was an episode of the PBS documentary series Pioneers of Television focusing on the western genre.
It opened with grainy Dust Bowl footage, over which narrator Kelsey Grammer solemnly intoned the tale of a young man named "Jimmy" who overcame an impoverished childhood and grew up to become a national hero.
An astronaut? The President?
Nope--Maverick.
Yes, little "Jimmy" grew up to be James Garner. And, after watching this segment, if one had never seen Maverick, one might have thought Garner was the whole show.
"America loved Maverick because they loved James Garner," Grammer gushed.
Okay, a few years ago, I would have thought nothing of such overly effusive praise. James Garner was Maverick, and I didn't know any different.
Then, I started watching Maverick and discovered the show actually had another star in addition to Garner: Jack Kelly. And, he played Maverick longer than James Garner did.
But, was JK credited this evening as a pioneer of television? As the other star of Maverick? At all?
Nope, although he could be glimpsed for a second or so in two black-and-white stills. Meanwhile, Garner was showcased in color stills and in film clips from the show.
Perhaps the creators of Pioneers of Television thought, "Well, maybe it will be simpler if we mention only James Garner. And, he's still alive, so we can interview him."
However, they later discussed The Wild Wild West and interviewed star Robert Conrad. They also lauded his late co-star, Ross Martin.
They spotlighted the Gunsmoke gang, too. That segment wasn't just a valentine to James Arness. It also acknowledged his supporting cast, nearly all of whom are now deceased.
And, Linda Evans warmly remembered Barbara Stanwyck, the late star who portrayed her mother on The Big Valley.
So, they could have also given Jack Kelly his due if they'd wanted to. But, instead, they made their tribute to Maverick a tribute to James Garner. As I've said before, I have nothing against Garner; I've enjoyed watching his performances over the years. But, there was so much more to Maverick than just James Garner, and he was not the only reason people watched and loved the show.
Once again, however, the true history of TV was headed off at the pass, and Bart was the missing Maverick...
Posts
I wanted to watch this show, Bartista...but, forgot to, on the night it was shown. This kind of thing really upsets me! So, maybe it is best that I forgot to watch?
ReplyDeleteThe first thing in my mind, after reading your blog about JK being a "nonperson" as far as the show's description/history of "Maverick" was this...James Garner KNEW that there was indeed another Maverick! Why did he go along with ignoring that fact?? In reality, Jack Kelly was "Maverick" to me! I was a 10 yr.old in 1957, and did NOT even like the show...until Bart showed up! I think I have always had very good taste in people!! LOL
Seriously, though, without Jack Kelly, "Maverick" would have been a very monotonous and tiresome show, in my opinion. Also, it would have been over, when JG quit! AND, did viewers just "imagine" James Garner was still in the show, the last years of "Maverick?" Were they just brainwashed into thinking he was the star, but really didn't know the difference? I wonder.
I am so happy that I am not the only one who feels this way.
Thanks for standing up for the BEST Maverick brother, Bartista!!
I am starting to think JG is full of himself...and, of course, he is older now and maybe not remembering alot. But, how do you forget someone like Jack Kelly...or worse, deliberately ignore him to make yourself seem more important?? I used to say I didn't have any problem with JG, but lately...I do.
Janet T.
I watched the "Pioneers of Television" Western show last night...it was rerun at 6 pm here in Pa., Bartista.
ReplyDeleteI guess I am in shock really...to me, it was like talking about "Gunsmoke" but NOT mentioning James Arness!! Jack Kelly was "Maverick" as far as I am concerned. I only started to watch the show when Bart came on.
I felt like the PBS show really did a terrible job with the "Maverick" segment! I am going to write them and let them know.
Remember the line in "The Wizard of Oz," that said something like "...Just ignore that man behind the curtain?" Well, that is how I felt watching JG take all the glory for "Maverick," as if JK never even existed!!
I am just glad I am not alone! I felt that way as a child, when I first watched "Maverick" in 1957...JK was just never given the attention he deserved.
Janet T.
Yes, Kelly remains unfortunately ignored most of the time when the series comes up on television. Everyone with whom I've ever discussed the show inevitably says exactly the same thing, though, that their favorite episodes are the ones with both Garner and Kelly. Hey, I just realized that, except for "Pappy," "Maverick and Juliet," and "The Maverick Line," there are essentially no full-fledged 2-brother episodes after Huggins left at the end of the 2nd season, only Garner ones in which Kelly shows up briefly (except arguably "Maverick Springs")! There were eight 2-brother episodes under the stewardship of Huggins in the first two seasons. But then Huggins had Garner for two seasons instead of only one, which blunts my point.
ReplyDelete"The Maverick Line" is probably the best example of what we remember as a real 2-brother episode, truly evenly divided between Garner and Kelly, although it's from the inferior post-Huggins period and can't measure up to the first two seasons in terms of sheer subtle polish. Garner and Kelly are wonderful in it, though. Kelly was always at his absolute best when working directly with Garner.
By the way, I wrote approximately 99.7% of the Wikipedia articles "Maverick (TV series)" and the "List of Maverick episodes" under various different guises and never realized that intriguing factoid about the dearth of post-Huggins 2-brother episodes until this moment. I also basically wrote the Wikipedia articles for "The New Maverick" (the version with the best costumes by far), "Young Maverick," and "Bret Maverick" (Kelly was going to be a regular in its 2nd season and a stack of scripts had already been written for him before NBC shockingly canceled it despite good ratings, probably fallout somehow from Garner's lawsuit against Universal over "The Rockford Files" payments).
I've been backtracking through this amazing blog and noticed a little controversy about Garner and Kelly's respective heights, or maybe that was the Facebook page. Anyway, you probably know that Garner was 6'3" tall and Kelly was 6'1" so they were only two inches apart.
One more comment about 2-brother episodes. The scripts for them were written with the characters delineated as "Maveick 1" and "Maverick 2," with Garner getting first choice of which to play due to his seniority, a shockingly crucial advantage when you think about it. All other single-brother scripts for the first two seasons, by producer Roy Huggins' order, were written with Garner in mind and labeled "Bret" even when Kelly wound up playing them as Bart. The only exception, as a lark, was "Passage to Fort Doom" in the second season, ironically a really magnificent episode that sticks in the viewer's memory.
ReplyDeleteI didn't occur to me to mention it earlier but I also wrote the Wikipedia article about Jack Kelly although it's been subsequently butchered relentlessly, with all the color meticulously drained out of it. I had originally included a good line about Kelly's sister Nancy Kelly's career being more successful so Jack Kelly unfortunately endured the unenviable experience of being overshadowed by a sibling both in fiction and reality. It's true but that was scissored out within a couple of years, like most interesting prose in Wikipedia (I used to own a set of 1910 Encyclopedia Brittanicas, the most famous edition, and encyclopedias did not start out being so dry, believe me).
ReplyDeleteAre there any published photographs of Jack and Nancy Kelly together, by the way? I swear I've never seen a single one. They resembled each other extremely closely. She had quite a huge movie career as a leading lady back in the 30s and 40s and had received an Oscar nomination the year before Kelly started on "Maverick." Wish they'd brought her onto the show as Maverick's older sister in the 4th or 5th season (she and Kelly looked so much alike that she couldn't have played anything else on the show, hence her never appearing in a Maverick episode--can't have the brothers kissing their own sister; well, maybe Garner could've gotten away with it but he'd have to mention that something about her seemed awfully familiar). But a female Maverick seems more a 21st century notion than a 1950s-early 1960s one.
This'll be my last comment for a while, I promise; my comments for this column are longer than the column. I just watched the PBS documentary in question and it was refreshing in that it's the first time I've seen Garner discuss what it was like to work with Kelly instead of the other way around. Garner was extremely generous (and accurate) in his comments: "It makes it easier. Oh my God yes. When I get somebody like that I could just bounce off him, watch him act."
ReplyDeleteAs for the show not mentioning Kelly by name (or even acknowledging the existence of Roger Moore, for that matter), Garner's obviously not personally to blame for the way the producers edited it, he actually complimented Kelly effusively and undoubtedly would not have guessed while discussing his co-star that Kelly's name would be entirely absent from the finished product.
By the way, Kelly said more than once that he and Garner were the most effective screen team ever, and I agree with that, none of the others come close. Kelly once noted in an interview that when you watch them working with each other, you ask yourself, "...why isn't the celluloid melting?" I've noticed that people who remember the show and discuss it almost always mention that they liked the 2-brother episodes the best.
Okay, I'm going to give everyone a break and finally shut up now. Sandra's Maverick website back in '99 had a forum section that was quietly shut down and moved to some other location so that Kelly adherents could talk among themselves without my encyclopedic interjections, then later the whole website was taken down due to the then-expense of maintaining it (does anyone know what happened to Sandra?). I think I recognize some of the names here (hi, Janet!) and won't conduct a repeat performance. That having been said, this is a great site and I'll look at it from time to time as long as both the site and myself continue to exist (I imagine I'm the more tenuous of the two).
hi bartista and mike p. too! i broke my right wrist in a fall on ice...so excuse my typing...please. :-D
ReplyDeletei found the pbs site re: this poorly done show and commented to pbs about this.
if anyone is interested in letting them know we were upset to see bart ignored, just scroll down to bottom of page and click on "contact us." let them know they did a shoddy series...obviously, the writers and editors weren't familiar with this western classic!
http://www.pbs.org/opb/pioneersoftelevision/about-series/thanks/
thanks for listening...
janet t.
Janet, I'm sorry about your wrist! Hope it's getting better and better all the time!
ReplyDeleteVery good points. Did you know that Jack Kelly's episodes of "Maverick" regularly got higher ratings than James Garner's? I think it's largely because Kelly had more range as an actor and his episodes were usually more adventurous and exciting (battling Indians, banditos, and searching for gold) whereas Garner's episodes were more comedic and at times slapstick (such as "Gunshy"). I like Garner in the show, but Garner pretty much played himself (as he did in "Rockford Files). Kelly became Maverick and gave the show it's best episodes and its longevity. The show never would have stayed as fresh without their rotatation. Interestingly, it was Garner who was suspended without pay during the writer's strike in 1960, which caused him to leave the show. It doesn't appear as though Kelly was suspended, which makes me think that Warner Bros. may have intended to push Garner out in favor of Kelly. In the final season, new episodes with Bart rotated with re-runs of Bret.
ReplyDeleteGary
Okay, I have to address what Gary said at the end here. Garner was wildly more popular than Kelly in terms of publicity and national attention and his last couple of years on the show were sort of a countdown to when he'd leave for a big movie career (I think he made five movies the year after he left, once he was finally hired by William Wyler over Jack Warner's objections and the "blacklist" was broken).
ReplyDeleteRoy Huggins strongly maintained in his Archive of American Television interview that he believed that Kelly's ratings were a percentage point or two above Garner's in the first two seasons because the public was eager to see the show again the week after a Garner episode. I think everyone was suspended during the writers' strike but Garner used it successfully as a lever to escape his now-onerous Warner contract, while Kelly had no such movie career waiting if he left the show and probably realized that it would probably be the height of his career. The last thing Warner wanted to do was push Garner out, in fact, after Huggins left the series at the end of the second season, the ratings sharply diverged in Garner's favor in the face of the decline in quality, and Warner Bros. and Kaiser Aluminum offered Garner the moon and a piece of the show to stay.
I do absolutely think it's true that the best episodes feature both Garner and Kelly and that they were the best team in all the annals of show business, but Kelly's ratings skidded and skidded as a solo after Huggins' unfortunate departure. Warner alternated new Kelly episodes in the last seasons with old Garner shows in a desperate effort to prop up the ratings enough to save the show from cancellation but it was no use by then, and some of the Kelly solo shows from that season are just awful (like "The Money Machine"). I do strongly think that the earlier rotation between Garner and Kelly and especially their episodes together gave the show a whole dimension that really sets it apart. I have to say, though, that Garner was one of the greatest of all light comedians, in Cary Grant's and Jack Lemmon's league, and that he's probably currently America's greatest living actor (well, barely living).
The big thing I got out of the "Pioneers of Television" Maverick installment was the presence of those telling stills of the town streets, which were mostly huge photos for the backgrounds! This is apparent in later episodes of "Gunsmoke" but I could never spot it in "Maverick," not even once, because the series was so superbly shot. Those photos just twisted my head around. What a comprehensively great series.....
ReplyDeleteI wish Jack Kelly had been given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame like his sister, Nancy Kelly.
ReplyDeleteOnce I saw those great photos of the Western towns mostly consisting of huge photographs, something anything but obvious while viewing the show, the series has never looked quite the same to me.
ReplyDelete