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OT: "The Name of the Game" 1968 TV Series

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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This is one of those OT posts based on "tying things together" a little bit from my past, and perhaps informing someone's present.

I was net surfing looking for some topics relating to Psycho and(for my own purposes) QT's new 1969-set movie, and I stumbled upon a "50 year anniversary article" about a series that launched in 1968 called The Name of the Game.

I read the article, and I was surprised at the length, depth, and breadth of what the article had to say about TV as the 60's closed out...particularly TV out of Universal Studios, which strode American network TV like a Colossus, practically programming the NBC TV network with a parade of shows that looked and sounded the same(same sets, same credit titles) and yet managed to differentiate for quality when possible. From this era (more the 70's than the 60's), Columbo and The Rockford Files managed to stake out near-movie-level classic status. But a whole lotta other Universal shows(McCloud, McMillan and Wife, Quincy) were just cookie cutter vehicles for stars of a certain level -- TV stars only(Dennis Weaver in McCloud); movie stars brought low(Rock Hudson,MacMillan and Wife.)

Hitchcock can certainly be pulled in here. He was active around these years on the Universal lot, where he kept an office -- when The Name of the Game premiered in the fall of 1968, Hitch around the same time had a press conference about going to work on his new Universal movie Topaz. And though Topaz had some international location footage and foreign actors, some of it was filmed on the same Universal backlot soundstages AS The Name of the Game. It all merged into one homogenized Universal Studios whole -- though Hitchcock DID manage to stay unique, aloof, of himself.

Anyway, The Name of the Game.

It was based on one of the first TV movies ever made, called "Fame is the Name of the Game" and starring Tony Franciosa as a handsome, rebellious magazine reporter who crosses paths with The Mob in one of his magazine investigations. Evidently "Fame is the Name of the Game" was a ratings hit and NBC wanted a show out of it, and they wanted Franciosa to star in it.

But he balked -- as an actor named Peter Falk would later balk about doing Columbo as a weekly series. So the TV show "The Name of the Game" posited Franciosa as one of THREE rotating stars, each star anchoring one episode a week.

The other two stars were Robert Stack(late of The Untouchables TV show) and Gene Barry(late of the suave Burke's Law whodunit TV show.) Unlike the "mystery movie wheel" -- which put entirely different SERIES into rotation(Columbo, McCloud, MacMillan and Wife...Richard Boone as Hec Ramsey), The Name of the Game posited that all three stars worked at the same place: for a magazine empire run by Gene Barry, with Franciosa writing articles for "People magazine"(hey, wait a minute) and Stack writing articles for "Crime magazine." Stack thus ended up with crime episodes, it would seem -- except both Franciosa and Barry got crime-related episodes because, of course, crime sells.

This "50 year anniversary" review of The Name of the Game takes potshots at Franciosa, Barry, and Stack...because all three men are dead now. Simply put, it makes the point that Barry was a self-infatuated prima donna, Stack was unwilling to share his stardom with anybody(he wouldn't "act with" his co-stars) ...and Franciosa was just plain nuts: tempermental, but worse than that, and perhaps on drugs in a big way during the run of the series.

I was intrigued to learn that, as with Peter Falk on the Mystery Movie, Franciosa's Name of the Game episodes were always the highest rated. NBC put up with Franciosa's crap as long as they could because he DELIVERED.

And yeah -- I see it. Tony Franciosa had it in him to be a Rebel Cary Grant -- he was very handsome(moreso as he aged), he had a very smooth voice, and he had that Italian-American flash that would come through later in Pacino, DeNiro...and Gandolfini.

I personally love Tony Franciosa in my guilty-pleasure 1964 Western "Rio Conchos," in which Franciosa plays "the wily Mexican" but with such ladies man charm and sudden-death danger that you see your way past it. Franciosa was paired with Richard Boone as "the two cool guys" in a team of four(Stuart Whitman and Jim Brown are the "straights") and it is an elemental pleasure to see Boone and Franciosa show off their star charisma together.

Indeed, CBS knew from Tony Franciosa's charm in Rio Conchos because CBS elected to run "Rio Conchos" as the CBS Friday Night Movie in 1968 AGAINST Tony Franciosa in an episode of The Name of the Game. I remember that night; you had to choose: Franciosa or Franciosa?

I chose: going to a high school football game with friends. I caught Rio Conchos a year later on CBS, and as for The Name of the Game...well. I don't think I ever watched an entire episode of that series. What I DID watch...like, anytime the show came on and I was home was...the credit sequence.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Oh, the glorious memory of TV series credit sequences of the 60's. At the top of the list: the spy show credit sequences and music. The Man From UNCLE(four different ways for four different seasons); The Wild Wild West, and I Spy. But also It Takes A Thief(....to catch a thief; Robert Wagner in for Cary Grant.) And Ironside(QT had great fun with THAT theme as a theme within "Kill Bill.")

But "The Name of a Game" was a real lollapalooza. This "50 year anniversary" article calls it "Dave Grusin's space age bossa nova theme song" and that's about right. Its VERY exciting -- the kind of music that, frankly, is why Bernard Herrmann was thrown out of Hollywood for awhile until the classicists (Scorsese, DePalma) came in. It showcases each of the three stars -- whoever got the episode that week got the first billing. It can be found on YouTube.

And....in 1968 and '69 and '70...about all I ever watched(or listened to) of The Name of the Game ...was that credit sequence. I had moved on from TV series dramaturgy, for the most part(Columbo aside.) I had moved on to movies. And frankly, other activities on Friday and Saturday nights.

But this: one OTHER movie that CBS put up against The Name of the Game in the fall of 1968 was its second broadcast of " North by Northwest." November sweeps as I recall. I stayed home to watch Grant's run to Rushmore. I skipped The Name of the Game entirely that night.

Stray final bits about The Name of the Game. One of the episodes (a Gene Barry one) was about a trip to the future of America -- and Los Angeles -- in 2017. How far in the future that seemed back in 1971. But now its here and gone. AMAZING. And the director was a fellah named Steven Spielberg.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Meanwhile, Tony Franciosa evidently got worse and worse and worse until they had to fire him off the series entirely -- tough to do when he was the main ratings-drawing star. Universal stuck good corporation men like Robert Culp(a frequent Columbo killer) and Robert Wagner(done with It Takes A Thief) into new characters reading Franciosa's lines.

And the series collapsed without him -- Stack and Barry simply didn't have the charisma.

Some take-aways from this older fellah's meanderings this time:

Tony Franciosa. Another actor I really felt had it in the unsung star charisma department -- put him up there near Richard Boone. But evidently personal demons felled Franciosa as a star. (Still...he got hired to star in more series after Name of the Game; I guess he sobered up AND Hollywood can't leave talented people alone for long.)

Rio Conchos: I've plugged it for Richard Boone. Now I plug it for Tony Franciosa.

The opening credits for "The Name of the Game." Check 'em out on YouTube: this is how TV series once created excitement on a weekly basis(this article says that "The Name of the Game" was intended to be "a Universal movie, each week.")

The CBS Friday Night Movie in the late sixties: home of North by Northwest, Rio Conchos, and The Guns of Navarone. When I wasn't at football games....

50 years ago? Seems like yesterday.

PS. In James Garner's autobio, he writes about making a spy comedy called "A Man Could Get Killed" for Universal. (Its the movie from which Sinatra's infamous "Strangers in the Night" comes.) Tony Franciosa was the co-star. According to Garner, Franciosa kept punching stunt guys in the jaw for real; the stunt guys couldn't protest, but Garner warned Franciosa to stop it. Franciosa DIDN'T stop it -- so, wrote Garner, "I had to pop him one."

Ah, the show business we don't see...

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

Oh, the glorious memory of TV series credit sequences of the 60's. At the top of the list: the spy show credit sequences and music.

Japanese anime series seem to have taken this message to heart in the '90s. Here's the Intro to Cowboy Bebop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRI_8PUXx2A
And here are all the outros to Neon Genesis Evangelion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTxRm9HD7lo
The version of NGE that's recently been released on Netflix has replaced most of these outros causing an uproar. (I was planning to watch the Netflix version in the very good English dub since I've only ever seen NGE in Jap. w. subtitles, but losing all the 'Fly Me To The Moon' outros is a hell of a sacrifice, and so far at least it's put me off.)

Cowboy Bebop as a whole is watchable on youtube (I'm still making my way through it):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxyYxI-hs0bAqmXznw6qUm6yRn5obs3Fw
Netflix is the best bet for NGE newbies notwithstanding the botching of the outros.

And, vaguely relatedly, Ghost In The Shell (1995) was an anime film that *seriously* influenced The Matrix, but its best sequence is an awesome musical interlude/city symphony shot montage that has no counterpart in The Matrix:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB-ik-Bpl0c
Internet culture guru, Nerdwriter, discusses the sequence here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

swanstep,

I deeply enjoy how as I work "my side of the street"(much of it in the past, perhaps a bit too much from childhood, but then that's where the FUN TV shows were)...you can make the connections to other decades, other formats(anime), other TYPES of the same thing.

I've given some of this a watch, and I'll give the rest a read.

[–] yatzo376 (7717) 5 years ago

The Name Of the Game: my parents favorite show and I, hearing the theme music in our living room as I was whisked off to bed.
Seems like yesterday.
As a side note, Franciosa was great as a bad mob guy in the gritty blaxploitation crime drama Across 110th Street from 1973

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The Name Of the Game: my parents favorite show and I, hearing the theme music in our living room as I was whisked off to bed.

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Its fun..in remembering one's childhood, remembering the "cut off times" during which the parents took over the TV and we young 'uns had to go to bed. I expect, in many of our cases, we recall tiptoeing out to watch certain shows "from a distance" unseen by our parents, perhaps hiding behind a chair..

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Seems like yesterday.

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That it does..

--
As a side note, Franciosa was great as a bad mob guy in the gritty blaxploitation crime drama Across 110th Street from 1973

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Yes, I recall Franciosa "branching out" when he could beyond TV, and that Mafia guy was a scary part. His Mafia man went up against the black gangsta contingent of Harlem in that movie and proved quite ruthless(even as Anthony Quinn's NYC cop went up against the Italian-American mob AND the African-American mob.) The movie was meant to mix The Godfather and Shaft(though Shaft had Mafia in it, too)..and the theme song ended up in Jackie Brown 24 years later.

I vividly remember, in that movie, the handsome Franciosa making some weird gesture with his hand deep in his own mouth and then whipping the hand fast out of his mouth, in contempt at one of the black gangsters. The hell was THAT gesture? An actor's flamboyant trick.

[–] yatzo376 (7717) 5 years ago

“Its fun..in remembering one's childhood, remembering the "cut off times" during which the parents took over the TV and we young 'uns had to go to bed. I expect, in many of our cases, we recall tiptoeing out to watch certain shows "from a distance" unseen by our parents, perhaps hiding behind a chair..”

Cue up Mannix!

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

It's interesting how many films and TV shows in that mid-late '60s had game-playing as a key element. Aside from The Name of the Game (TV) we have at least The Name of the Game is Death (movie, 1968), Games (movie, 1967), The 10th Victim (Italy, movie, 1965 - about a televised mutual assassination club essentially - John Wick Land covered in prime time extreme sports fashion), large chunks of both The Prisoner & The Avengers (UK, TV), quite a few eps of Star Trek, The Magus (movie, 1968), and probably many more I can't recall right now.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

It's interesting how many films and TV shows in that mid-late '60s had game-playing as a key element. Aside from The Name of the Game (TV) we have at least The Name of the Game is Death (movie, 1968), Games (movie, 1967),

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...and I think from around the time of "Games," also one called "Night Games."

Which reminds me: "Games"(starring Katherine Ross and James Caan pre Godfather) was a fairly basic Universal Studios production which nonetheless had some art film bona fides -- wasn't Simone Signouret, or whatever her name was, in it? She was in Diabolique so...some bona fides. (Interesting actress, she had a sexy/sensual reputation, was married to Yves Montand, but seemed to turn matronly "just like that.")

And "Games" was directed by a young guy named Curtis Harrington(not Curtis Hanson of LA Confidential fame), who had a "name" for a few years(in movies and in TV movies) and was befriended by none other that Alfred Hitchcock, who had him on the Topaz set and was a bit of a mentor. I recall growing up on Curtis Harrington and starting to confuse him with Curtis Hanson(who was around for a long time himself, starting in the late 70's, before peaking with LAC in the 90's.

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The 10th Victim (Italy, movie, 1965 - about a televised mutual assassination club essentially - John Wick Land covered in prime time extreme sports fashion),

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I got took to see that by the parents around the time of my "Psycho ban years." I recall it opening with Ursula Andress killing some guy via guns in her stripper's bra. Like I've said -- I don't think my parents got the memo that there were OTHER questionable movies out there.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

large chunks of both The Prisoner & The Avengers (UK, TV), quite a few eps of Star Trek, The Magus (movie, 1968), and probably many more I can't recall right now.

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Well...everybody plays games. And games can be fun, or dangerous. Recall "The Most Dangerous Game" -- which isn't about PLAYING games, but rather about being hunted AS game -- by a crazed hunter.

We can jump out to 1973 and get the Perkins-Sondheim script for "The Last of Sheila," in which the two entertainers converted on of their "elite celebrity party games" into a whodunit.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that the title "Fame is the Name of the Game" is actually rather silly . Too alliterative. And yet there was NBC/Universal pushing that title, that "TV movie" quite a bit in the mid-sixties. I remember it. And I remember how that one Franciosa movie somehow morphed into the bigger scale multi-star , better titled "Name of the Game."

As I noted, I didn't really watch many episodes of "The Name of the Game" all the way through. By the late 60's I think I skipped watching TV episodes entirely until the 80's came, I settled down and shows like Hill St. Blues, LA Law and St. Elsewhere captured my attention. (I did watch Columbo in the 70's, but it wasn't on much; I tried Rockford Files and liked it, but it was on Fridays and I usually went out.)

But the more I work my memory, I kinda/sorta vaguely remember watching a few "Name of the Games." Martin Balsam was in one and I think I was following him because of Psycho.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

This is a place on an OT thread to contemplate something on another OT thread, and maybe tie them into a Hitchcock/Psycho on topic-nish:

The concept of the "TV star" versus the movie star.

On the other OT thread, I'm looking at how Quentin Tarantino is starting to flesh out the theme of his new movie Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. QT is saying that a lot of male TV stars in the 50's/early 60's were made in Westerns -- they were macho guys. And then, claims QT, with the late 60's counterculture came this group of "androgynous" males -- Kristoffer Tabori(ironically, the son of action director Don Siegel), Young Michael Douglas, Michael Sarrazin, etc.

QT I think rather mixes up his theme with another one: those Western TV series actors who made it to movies(Steve McQueen biggest, Clint Eastwood next, James Garner next and...yes, Richard Boone) versus those who did not(Ty Hardin, Will Hutchins, Clint Walker.) Two themes: (1) tough Western actors vs androgynous male actors and (2) Western TV actors who made it to movies versus those who didn't.

I'm older than QT so I suppose I could instruct him a little. It wasn't just Western TV stars who moved up. Rod Taylor had a TV series called "Hong Kong" in 1960 that he parlayed into movie stardom pretty quickly(and lost just as quickly.) And a lot of TV stars who didn't move up weren't Western stars -- George Maharis was on Route 66(he did one major movie, The Satan Bug, that I liked -- it was a thriller.)

But let's back up a bit.

"The Name of the Game" reminds us that Universal Studios(the biggest game in town) developed a whole raft of "TV only " stars in the 60's: Gene Barry, Robert Stack, and Tony Franciosa; Robert Wagner; Robert Culp.

Culp was also on "I Spy." Those spy series created a few TV leads, too -- Robert Conrad(The Wild Wild West), Robert Vaughn(The Man From UNCLE). That's a lot of Roberts.

William Shatner got made by Star Trek.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And those were the "traditional leads." TV sidekicks like Leonard Nimoy(Star Trek) and Ross Martin(The Wild Wild West) became "TV character stars."

Peter Falk's "Columbo" series of the 70's went to town exploiting 60's TV heroes and sidekicks as "Special Guest Killers." Watch: Robert Culp, Robert Conrad, Robert Vaughn --- William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Ross Martin -- they ALL played Columbo killers; it was as if the Columbo producers were casting out of old 60's TV guides.

And indeed, the very first "Columbo guest killer" -- actually the villain in a stand alone TV movie called "Prescription: Murder" was...Gene Barry.

The point I guess I'm straining to reach when really its an easy point to make is:

There's movie stardom and there's TV stardom. And for the most part, they ARE different.

Yes, McQueen and Eastwood made the jump. Garner made the jump up to movies, but came back down to TV(and then made movies anyway, the best of both worlds.)

And everybody else? TV stardom. I would figure that Robert Wagner and Gene Barry and Tony Franciosa eventually knew in their hearts that TV stars is what they would be. Paid well, cranking out the work, star personas of a certain nature...but not stars that people pay to see.

I recall reading this comment from Robert Conrad about his decision to play a Columbo killer: "Usually I am the star of any project I do. I don't do many guest appearances. But for Columbo, I made an exception." Conrad's point was well taken...even as a TV star, you have to maintain a star persona.

And I recall thinking this , when I saw William Devane as the villain in Family Plot: "Hey, this is a Robert Culp role! But I guess Hitchcock couldn't hire a TV star for his movie. But he couldn't attract a real movie star either so -- we get this Devane guy. At least he has a CHANCE to become a movie star." Devane indeed got that chance(Marathon Man, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training)-- but it didn't happen.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And this: Peter Falk was interesting. A movie character actor AND TV guest in the 60's, once Columbo made him a big TV star in the 70's , Falk elected to try being a movie star. There were two Neil Simon movies in the 70's. The hit spy comedy "The In-Laws" with Alan Arkin. Robert Aldrich's final film, the questionable lady wrestling comedy All the Marbles(Falk was the manager.) And his small but significant role in the classic "The Princess Bride." And...not much else. Back to TV Falk went...back to Columbo in the 90's.

Anyway, that's enough for some thread musing. QT will be taking up the topic of "stars who made it, stars who didn't" in his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood next week.

But between those who made it in movies and those who did not, a toast to all those "stars of the small screen." Gene Barry, Tony Franciosa, Robert Wagner, Robert Culp..we salute you!

PS. One actor from Hitchcock who sort of ended up in this issue area: John Gavin. He was launched as a movie star in the late fifties and ended up in some major movies right off the bat: Imitation of Life, Psycho, Spartacus, Midnight Lace, Back Street. But the movies didn't last long for Gavin. By the mid-sixties, Universal had put him in TWO TV series that came and went: Destry(a Western) and Convoy(a naval show.) From then on, Gavin was a TV star...and not really ever a lead...more of a guest. Oh, Ross Hunter put him in one movie and used him well (Thoroughly Modern Millie; 1967) -- but that was it.

[–] yatzo376 (7717) 5 years ago

Interesting
I enjoy your thorough posts ecarle!
Re William Devane- Rolling Thunder (1977) with a young Tommy Lee Jones. What a great B revenge flick that was!

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Thank you...

...yes, its interesting given how elegant Devane is in Family Plot in 1976 ("Play the clothes," Hitchcock directed the three-piece-suited actor), one year later in Rolling Thunder he's rough and tough and violent as it comes in a classic B-movie "rough one."

And Bruce Dern had had savage fights with John Wayne(in The Cowboys) and Clint Eastwood (in Hang Em High). So both men COULD have played a fight scene in "Family Plot."

But it wasn't on the menu. "Family Plot" is about "regular people" in a series of chess moves that end in checkmate.

Meanwhile, Hitchcock certainly WAS willing to film fights on many occasions -- though often he staged the fights "realistically" as...struggles. Bob Cummings versus Norman Lloyd in Saboteur; Cary Grant versus Vandamm's men at the Glen Cove mansion in NXNW; John Gavin versus Tony Perkins(TWICE) in Psycho; Paul Newman vs Gromek in Torn Curtain -- and the big duke-out/wrestling match of Guy and Bruno in Strangers on a Train.

But by Frenzy and Family Plot...no interest on Hitchcock's part on having good guy fight bad guy..

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

One Hitchcock side-bar on that internet article about The Name of the Game.

Evidently, Tony Franciosa drove all manner of his Universal producers nuts on his episodes...and many of them quit.

One who did quit -- and who was willing to give quotes for this article -- was Norman Lloyd, who famously fell from the Statue of Liberty for Hitchcock, famously helped run Alfred Hitchcock Presents/Hour...and then, after Hitchcock closed his TV shop, evidently became a line producer for a lot of Universal "product."

In the 80's, Norman Lloyd rekindled his acting career on "St. Elsewhere," and he still lives today -- at 103! -- to diss Anthony Franciosa. Keeps him young, I guess.