Many a screen career starts small

MANY now famous performers cut their acting teeth on live television in the 1950s and early ‘60s, including James Dean, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Cliff Robertson. Besides the national exposure, doing TV, says Robertson, paid the rent.

“It was a survival route,” he says. “I think we make [doing a project] sound like a journey that we are sharing with the world for the benefit of the world. Many times, it was a very needful way to pay the rent.”

But modesty is getting the best of the 80-year-old Oscar winner. Among the riveting performances he gave on the small screen was as a young alcoholic in the seminal “Playhouse 90” drama “Days of Wine and Roses,” as a ventriloquist dominated by his puppet in “The Twilight Zone” episode “The Dummy,” and as a mentally challenged young man given an operation to make him intelligent, only to return to his previous mental state, in “The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon.”

Robertson received an Emmy nomination in 1961 for “Charlie Gordon”; he would go on to win the Oscar for best actor for the 1968 film version, “Charly.”

The actor will appear Wednesday at a screening of “Charlie Gordon,” scripted by James Yaffe, and another “U.S. Steel Hour” drama from that same year, “Man on the Mountaintop,” written by Robert Alan Aurthur, as part of the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s preservation festival.

Robertson describes doing live television as being “naked” to the world.

“You were out there, and you were live,” said the actor over the phone from Oshkosh, Wis., where the longtime aviation enthusiast was attending an air show. “If you stumbled your lines or did something stupid, you had a lot of people sharing it with you. It was a physical and emotional minefield. I think it was good we were really young because we didn’t know enough what a job it was.”

The actor, who lives on Long Island, had more than his share of gaffes, like forgetting to zip his fly. “That got a lot of people’s attention!” he says, laughing.

Robertson says that by the time he did “Charlie Gordon,” he was gaining a reputation in Hollywood as an actor who was always the bridesmaid and never the bride. He would do a successful live drama only to see a major movie star landing the role when the program was turned into a feature, as in the case of Jack Lemmon doing the 1962 film version of “Days of Wine and Roses.”

During rehearsal on “Charlie Gordon,” Robertson’s costar Gerald O’Loughlin even asked Robertson who he thought would do the movie version. “I said knowing Hollywood, maybe Debbie Reynolds!”

Robertson recalls going home after rehearsal that night with O’Loughlin’s words ringing in his ears. “I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking of my travails. I thought, ‘This is happening too many times. Maybe I should take a page out of Muhammad and go to the mountain -- they are not going to bring it to me.’ ”

So he went to the Theater Guild, which was involved in the “Steel Hour,” and asked if he could purchase the movie rights to Daniel Keyes’ short story “Flowers for Algernon,” on which “Charlie Gordon” was based.

But it didn’t work out quite as he thought. It took him seven years to get “Charly” made.

“I had gained a certain professional recognition and hopefully respect.” But he was not identified as a winner. “A winner was a rich movie star,” he says. “That was the business.”

So during the seven years, Robertson honed the role. “I would visit shelter workshops,” he says. “I spent a lot of time with retarded people on both coasts. When we started rehearsal, director Ralph Nelson said, ‘Cliff has had a lot of time to assimilate this character, so I am going to concentrate on the other people.’ That’s exactly what he did.”

In fact, he says, Nelson gave him one directorial suggestion but confesses he doesn’t remember what the advice was.

Though he’ll be 81 next month, Robertson hasn’t retired. He recently reprised his role of Uncle Ben in the third “Spider-Man” installment.

“I died in the first one,” he says. “You talk about survival. But director Sam Raimi said, ‘I want you back....’ It’s wonderful to be wanted.”

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Cliff Robertson and the U.S. Steel Hour

Where: James Bridges Theater, UCLA

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 206-FILM or go to www.cinema.ucla.edu