Schaffner’s March Across TV, Movies

Someday a book could be done on all the paths by which directors have found their way to their craft. I think, for example, of young Steven Spielberg borrowing the family camera to photograph his model trains colliding head-on. His father had warned him that after the next collision there would be no more repairs. Spielberg figured he could relive the last crash over and over again via film--and look where the notion led.

I thought of beginnings again a few weeks ago when I conversed with Franklin Schaffner during a tribute to him, which was one of the events of AFI/L.A. FilmFest, as the American Film Institute’s Los Angeles International Film Festival is more economically known.

The evening commenced with the mind-blowing first sequence of “Patton,” when an American flag fills the vast screen top to bottom, left to right, and George C. Scott as Gen. George Patton strides up from the rear, glimpsed first as the tip of a shiny helmet and then as a giant figure, pearl-handed pistols in place, knee-high boots adazzle.

A more arresting start to a movie does not come to mind, and watching it the other night it seemed a very long way from Tokyo, where Schaffner was born, the child of Protestant missionary parents. He did not see the United States until he was nearly 5, after the sudden death of his father.

He grew up in Amish country, in Lancaster, Pa., and went to Franklin & Marshall College locally, aiming for law school, not the movies or anything close to it. That’s what’s so interesting about the paths to film making.

In Schaffner’s case, the war preceded law school and after Navy service on LSTs (landing ship tanks) and then in intelligence in Southeast Asia, he thought it was too late for the law. He worked for a time with a world peace organization, which led by chance to a job as a kind of location scout for “The March of Time,” which, equally by chance, led to a job at CBS.

The network was struggling with the lusty infant television, desperate for young men who could be directors. So far as Hollywood was concerned, television was The Enemy (likely to be a passing fad in all events), not to be worked for, and the networks were starting from scratch.

Schaffner remembered that he received a three-week course in whatever it was a director did, and was almost immediately thereafter directing telecasts from Ebbets Field of the Brooklyn Dodgers at play, with kindly assistance from the great sportscaster Red Barber. Schaffner also did the evening news (15 minutes long), politics, features on the United Nations, religious shows, specials.

And live drama. Six Studio Ones in 1948, including “Jane Eyre”; a dozen in 1950, included “The Scarlet Letter,” “Macbeth,” “Wings of the Dove,” “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” and “Treasure Island.” You name a classic, there was a fair chance Schaffner directed it, on a breakneck schedule of one every two or three weeks.

“There was good reason for doing the classics,” he explained. “They were in the public domain. Therefore they were cheap.”

He directed for “Ford Theatre,” “Person to Person,” “The Kaiser Aluminum Hour,” “Playhouse 90” (“The 80-Yard Run,” “The Great Gatsby” among others). He was a principal director on “The Defenders,” widely regarded as television’s first great dramatic series.

The sheer daring of the choices early television was making is breathtaking to read or hear about now, when drama, except in series or as miniseries or Movies of the Week, has all but vanished from the medium. But Schaffner has an explanation for that, too: “We didn’t know that what we were doing was impossible,” he says.

Hollywood actors found it impossible or dangerous to do television so the medium was finding its own casts, and one of the rising young talents who worked for Schaffner was Charlton Heston. There were other young tigers around, including Jack Lemmon and Robert Redford.

For the directors, as for the writers and performers, it was a trial by fire, a postgraduate education and a golden opportunity to grow by doing. And just as D. W. Griffith and his heirs were inventing the language of film as they went along, so Schaffner’s generation of pioneers in live television, and then in tape, were inventing their medium as they turned out remarkable work on a crushing schedule.

Schaffner did the television original of “Twelve Angry Men,” with Robert Cummings in the role Henry Fonda played in the movie. He also did “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” for television.

They were eyewitnesses to history, Schaffner and contemporaries like Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Delbert Mann and others, and they made history even before they found their way to Hollywood. Schaffner won a special Emmy for his direction of a tour of the White House with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962.

After 15 years learning his craft in television, Schaffner himself came West in 1963 to do “The Stripper,” with Joanne Woodward, based on William Inge’s play “A Loss of Roses.”

While his apprenticeship was amid the necessary confinements of television, Schaffner has made his film reputation as a director who can handle the epic scale (“Patton,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Nicholas and Alexandra,” “Papillon”). But size without intimacy is merely big, and Schaffner’s further gift is to give life-sized insights to larger-than-life figures like the most idiosyncratic of all American generals, and a last man among the ruling apes.

The AFI’s tribute to Schaffner had its own subtitle, “Films of Brave Men and Destiny.” The urbane and quiet-spoken Schaffner would probably opt for something a little less grandiloquent. But beginnings, however distant they grow in time, space and circumstance, are bound to leave their mark.

The idealism of missionary parents may well be the lingering influence that explains why a man’s best works are ultimately about the embattled human spirit, films that suggest films can be taken seriously.