Cigarette as Smoking Gun : Television: ‘The Boys,’ a film drawn from a real-life partnership, tackles the issue of secondhand smoke.

Dick Levinson and Bill Link had a prolific writing partnership that lasted 41 years and yielded some of the best and most successful shows in the history of television.

From movies such as “That Certain Summer” and “The Execution of Private Slovik” to series such as “Columbo” and “Murder, She Wrote,” they had a rare gift for meshing class and commerce.

Says Link: “It was everything like a marriage except for sex. The joys, the worries, the diplomacy, the arguments. We did nothing separately. We plotted the shows. We created the characters. We sat there line by line, comma by comma, and wrote the script.”

There was one other thing that these friends since boyhood shared, something that enclosed them in a gray cloud that, in retrospect, seems dark and ominous.

From 9 a.m. to noon, six days a week, they shared Levinson’s cigarette smoke.

“Dick was three packs a day--on a bad writing day, four packs,” Link said about his partner, who died three years ago of a coronary at age 52. “I would go to Dick’s house at 9 in the morning and his study would be layered with smoke.”

The smoke is just as thick and choking in Link’s nearly completed ABC movie “The Boys,” whose protagonists are a writing team strikingly similar to Levinson and Link.

The partners are played by those fine actors James Woods and John Lithgow. The talented director is Glenn Jordan. Link, who is executive producer in association with Papazian-Hirsch Productions, wrote the script, which centers on the volatile but tender friendship of the two men at a time of extreme stress and tragedy.

Just as surely, though, “The Boys” is an anti-smoking movie. According to Link, it’s TV’s first.

The story begins with nonsmoker Walter Farmer (Woods) learning that he has lung cancer, the message being that his heavy-smoking partner Artie Margulies (Lithgow) is responsible.

Walter: “That little white cylinder in your hand. I figure you’ve smoked almost a million of them. Most of them in my presence. The National Academy of Sciences did a study. They found out that nonsmoking spouses of smokers face a 26% greater risk of contracting lung cancer than do spouses of nonsmokers.”

Artie’s wife puts it more bluntly: “You killed him.”

Link is quick to point out that he doesn’t have lung cancer and that the issue of lethal secondhand smoke is not only a dramatic device but also a speculative one that cannot be proved scientifically, even though many assume it to be true.

In this scenario, however, there’s no doubt that Walter’s life has gone up in Artie’s smoke.

Link: “Four or five years ago, I said to Dick that this (the issue of secondhand smoke) would be a good idea for a drama. He said he didn’t want to do it. I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘You guess.’

“Then, two days after Dick died, I was at ABC with Brandon Stoddard (then president of ABC Entertainment). I mentioned the concept to him and he said, ‘You have a deal. So write it. Not only do I think it could be a terrific show, it would be very good therapy for you.’ ”

Link didn’t write it, though. Not at first.

For two years, he wrote nothing, instead helping others develop series pilots and becoming supervising producer of the now-floundering “ABC Saturday Mystery Movie,” whose revolving components include the new “Columbo.”

After losing the collaborator he’d had since junior high school in Philadelphia, Link had found himself suddenly confronted by insecurity. “I wondered how good I was going to be after my right leg was amputated,” he said. “There was this self-doubt until two years later, when I wrote a theatrical movie for Universal on spec (without a commitment) that is going to be filmed. Then when I wrote ‘The Boys,’ I knew I was back.”

In a sense, Levinson and Link were back, too. It was “the easiest script I ever wrote,” Link said. “It was like Dick was there dictating it to me.”

“The Boys” is tentatively scheduled for fall. It’s ironic--but understandable in a land where federal subsidies are paid to tobacco growers--that a nation that almost universally condemns the use of cocaine and other drugs would only now be getting its first TV movie attacking the biggest threat of them all, cigarettes.

Despite the controversial nature of his script (the powerful tobacco lobby still throws its weight around despite cigarette commercials being banned from TV since 1971), ABC told Link “not to change one comma,” he said. “That’s the first time that’s happened to me in 30 years of television.”

Although Link says “The Boys” is only partially autobiographical, the Walter-Artie relationship seems in many ways a clear echo of his friendship with Levinson. “He was the only person, next to my wife, that I could totally trust,” Link said.

Link’s memories of Levinson: “Wore the same black loafers every day. Totally responsible and reliable. Great intensity. Marvelous sense of humor. A very decent human being. An endangered species.”

Link would complain about the cigarettes, and Levinson once bought a machine that was supposed to suck up the smoke, but it didn’t work. “I got him once to smoke a cigar after dinner,” Link said. “But a cigar takes a long time to smoke, so he would smoke cigarettes in between.”

Levinson never did try to quit, Link said. “He enjoyed smoking. He truly did.”

Link recalls the precise moment that Levinson smoked his first cigarette. It was during his senior year in high school. “The brand was Lucky Strike, and it was introduced to him by a classmate in Philadelphia who is still smoking.” Link paused. “I hope he sees this show.”