Lloyd Bridges Dives Back Into Weekly TV

When last seen, Lloyd Bridges was being a thoroughly unpleasant U.S. senator from Michigan, demolishing the prospects of the upstart auto maker Preston Tucker in Francis Coppola’s “Tucker,” the maverick being a threat to the senator’s most important constituents, Chrysler, Ford and General Motors.

The nice twist for the audience was that Tucker himself was played by Bridges’ son Jeff. The performances were so fine you’d have thought they’d never been introduced.

Father Bridges, a notably erect and shipshape 76, is these days shooting episodes of what will be his seventh television series. It is called “Capital News” and he plays Jo-jo Turner, the editor-in-chief of a major Washington daily newspaper.

The range of real role models in Washington being limited, Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post come to mind, and there is not much doubt that they are supposed to. The series is scheduled to start on ABC in mid-January, although in the event of an early season casualty it could appear earlier.

Bridges and the show’s producer and principal creator, David Milch, had lunch with a couple of friends a few days ago to talk about the series.

Milch taught creative writing at Yale for 10 years and then sold a script to “Hill Street Blues.” Called “Trial by Fury,” it was about the brutal murder of a nun. It won awards and gave Milch a new career as writer and then executive on “Hill Street,” leading to the present venture.

“I wasn’t going to do another series,” Bridges was saying. “But I had the feeling this one would be well received--and it’s something like steady employment,” he added with a grin.

His most successful series was, of course, “Sea Hunt,” four seasons and 156 episodes from 1957-61. Bridges and the series are still receiving honors for the show’s success in widening public interest in the seas.

“They wanted more shows,” Bridges says, “but they wouldn’t budge on the format. They wanted more cops and robbers. I wanted to look at the real villains of the sea, like the oil companies.”

The other Bridges series have been:

-- “The Lloyd Bridges Show” for Aaron Spelling;

-- “Joe Forrester,” in which he was a cop on the beat;

-- “The Loner,” largely written by Rod Serling and, Bridges suspects, too far ahead of its time and gone after only a year;

-- “San Francisco International Airport,” of which he was the manager;

-- and “Paper Doll,” in which he was a multimillionaire whose holdings, so to speak, included a model agency. “It didn’t go. A bit too much of the ‘Dynasty’-type thing,” Bridges explains.

“Capital News,” in the tradition of “Hill Street,” “St. Elsewhere” and “L.A. Law,” will have three plot lines going in each show and a large, continuing cast of 12 players. “A nice Dickensian multiplicity,” says Milch.

The first show, Bridges says, will touch on a situation resembling the HUD scandals, on corrupt judges with private interests, and a touchy investigative story involving the Soviets, which Bridges decides in the public interest to keep out of the paper.

“I was originally going to a series about the Washington lobbyists,” Milch says. “I had a series commitment, but the network got nervous that the audience would say the lobbyists didn’t seem like a very interesting problem. But what I really wanted to do was examine the dynamics of government, which we can do this way.”

The series is being produced by the MTM Enterprises under its new British ownership, and the new owners, Milch adds, want to demonstrate their commitment to quality.

Milch and Chris Williams, a Washington Post graduate who was partnered with Bob Woodward after Carl Bernstein moved on, wrote the pilot script, which was shot in April and which Milch says tested well. (The diplomatically sensitive story that is part of the first script was suggested by Bernstein.)

Bridges and Milch had a breakfast months ago at which Milch pitched the part and Bridges volunteered a long list of controversial issues the show could deal with. He also, Milch says, had a lot of ideas about the character.

Bridges was born in San Leandro, Calif., into a family with some links to show business: “My father managed a nickelodeon in San Francisco. One of my grandfathers was quite a promoter. He built a hotel for gold miners. He and my grandmother did a juggling act and wrote plays to entertain them.”

But Bridges’ father insisted on something more orderly and steered him into a pre-law course at UCLA. He graduated, but he had never stopped acting and he never made it to law school.

“I was supposed to go to law school, too,” Milch remarked at lunch. “But they expelled me in 45 minutes.”

Bridges went East to work in stock. He adapted and directed a modern-dress version of “Othello,” playing Iago himself, and it became his Broadway debut in 1939. Two years later a Columbia producer saw and signed him to a studio contract. He did solid work in films that ranged from some humdrum action pictures to what are now classics: “A Walk in the Sun,” “High Noon” and “The Rainmaker.”

It remained for television to lift him from the ranks of admired players to the headier ranges of admired stars. Now he is back at the weekly wars, and delighted to be there.