WHO'S WHO VOLUME I, BROADCAST 18 as broadcast over the CBS TELEVISION NETWORK Sunday, June 12, 1977 10:00 - 11:00 PM, EDT With CBS News Correspondents Dan Rather and Charles Kuralt and Barbara Howar "BARETTA TALKS TOUGH" (ROBERT BLAKE) - Produced by Igor Oganesoff "SWIFTY" (IRVING LAZAR) - Produced by Read Jackson "AFTER THE HOAX" (CLIFFORD IRVING) - Produced by Jon Wilkman "ALL ABOUT YVES" (YVES ST. LAURENT) - Produced by Christine Ockrent "ON THE ROAD WITH CHARLES KURALT" (COLONEL C. COSBY KERNEY) Produced by Charles Kuralt; Associate Producer Jonnet Steinbaum PRODUCED BY CBS NEWS \ ©MCMLXXVII CBS Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DAN RATHER: Good evening. I'm Dan Rather, with Barbara Howar» and Charles Kuralt reporting from On The Road. Here are some of tonight's stories of people other people talk about: Swifty Lazar, agent of the superstars - but he himself is the name to drop; Yves St. Laurent, the nervous Michelangelo of high fashion; Clifford Irving, the man who invented Howard Hughes - he's back at the typewriter again; and Robert Blake, the star of "Baretta", takes a two-fisted approach to the debate over television violence. f\ [Music - film montage of WHO'S WHO personalities featured on this broadcast] 41 [•ANNOUNCEMENTS] ["BARETTA TALKS TOUGH"] RATHER: Violence on television - that super-heated public issue - is one of those questions with at least three sides. This story is not an attempt to cover them, It's about one person - an extremely interesting man who's passionately convinced that both of the other sides are wrong: the American Medical Association, PTA and other parent groups for trying to eliminate violence on the tube; the networks just as wrong for having already sharply reduced it. Our subject is Robert Blake. He's the parent of two pre-teenage children himself, and he's also the star of "Baretta". When a citizen's group rated shows currently on the air in order of their violence, "Starsky and Hutch" came first, second was "Baretta"i [Excerpt from "Baretta"] In case you haven't watched regularly, there's a lot of action in "Baretta". Action is the word television people use when they're talking about violence. [Excerpt from "Baretta"] We had a long talk with the star, the bad boy of television himself actor Robert Blake. ROBERT BLAKE: Well, I tried to invent a character that was close enough to me so that I could be myself at least part of the time, and he's kind of half my Idealized image and half my real self. All the things I want to be, all the things I never was, and some of the things I am. \ RATHER: Well, okay. That's what you'd like to be — tough guy, slap people around, into macho, into violence. BLAKE: What? Ni, ni. Ni, ni, ni, ni. No, no, not at all. I mean, I don't think Baretta's that, and I don't want to be that. When you're a street cop and you deal— As a matter of fact, whfen you're on the streets, I don't care if you're selling hotdogs or selling your body or whatever you're doing, you'd better know how to handle yourself, because the streets are a very scary and dangerous place, and I like to, and I think it's important to, make that point on television. If I do an episode that teaches children that they should stay home and not go out and hit the road and hit the streets, and to that end I have to have a fourteen-year-olfi girl raped, I've got 20- or 30-million kids thinking twice about whether they should leave home or not. [Excerpt from "Baretta"] Now, I see other shows that are strictly violence for violence's sake. I see-- the same thing exists in movies, but I don't think we use violence for violence's sake on "Baretta". I— It's usually there to make a point. RATHER: Is there pressure on your show to— to write the violence out of it? BLAKE: Sure. — RATHER: Do they say, look, you can hit a guy twice on the show, but you can't bounce his head on the concrete? BLAKE: Well, the latest rules - and I get these pink sheets every day and I do funny things with them - the latest rule is there will be three acts of violence in every hour show, and I think it's „ one act for every half-hour show, and so just— you know, for Jives, I was saying, well, what is violence? You know, I see shows on television that have a 25-minute chase sequence that ends with "I gotcha*"-and that's not violent. But if BaretHa takes a guy in an alley and says tell me what I want to know, because there's a human life at stake and I'm going to put your nose out of Joint, that's violent. It takes three seconds. But they can have, you know, the Bionic Woman pushing over fifteen buildings and Jumping through the moon, but that ain't violent. It's all Jive, man. It's all nonsense. RATHER: But who puts out this pink slip? You get a pink slip that says this is the— the rule for this week? BLAKE: The network, yeah. Well then, you know, the Fecterales come down here when the pink slip is not adhered to and 4then they sit in the office and they start saying: I said you can only have three acts of violence. And I said you can pack it to Pittsburgh. And we go back and forth, and then I go do what I want. \ \ ' RATHER: If you want to put eight acts of violence in— in the hour, you do it? <» BLAKE: That's right. I got to live with me. I know if the show has a point of view. I know what the show is saying to people, and if it requires violence to make the point, then that's what I do. And if they don't like it, they can take it off the air. [Blake on the set]r Read me the part later on, where I tell the old guy . , . RATHER: There's no question who runs "Baretta". On the set and off, Robert Blake is in charge. He often changes whole sections of a script, putting his personal imprint on each scene. BLAKE [on the set]: Quidk notes. The end, number one . RATHER: He's in fact one of the writers of the show, though he claims he can hardly read. In high school, he was repeatedly thrown out for making trouble. He began to learn his way around a movie set in 1939 in the "Our Gang" series. And his first major role was as one of the killers in the film In Cold Blood. * BLAKE [on the setJ: —[Indistinct]— "You got a right to live. I was wrong for telling you to put him away." Now, that's got to be the exact tenor of that scene. RATHER: What Blake says about the clampdown on violence is not happening Just on one network. All three - CBS, NBC and ABC - have similar policies. Is your series already getting less violent? BLAKE: No, not since the first five or six episodes. There's a lot of heat. See, television is a perfect foil; it's a marvelous tool, because it can't fight back. And you got to look good if you criticize television. It's like criticizing the press. You got to look good criticizing the press, because there's nothing— you don't have no enemy. Nobody can come back at you. Everybody Just runs and hides, and that's what happening to television. I don't think^tH^ people pay a lot of attention to violence one way or the other. RATHER: Then why is there so much of it on television? BLAKE: Why is there so much of it in movies? Let's see, is there really a lot of it on television right now? How many dramatic shows are left on television, when you think of all the soap operas, all the comedies? There's a lot of this fantasy violence - you know, the Bionic kind of violence- in those kinds of shows. I don't know what you— See, there— there's realistic violence, there's fantasy violence, there's nonsense violence - like Laurel and Hardy - there's all kinds of it. And there's all kinds of it in every kind of drama. I'm convinced that, you know, violence is a very important, dynamic tool of any kind of drama. Where would The African Queen be without violence, or the threat of violence? Where would Sierra Madre be without the violence? Where would the whole point of On The Waterfront be without violence? RATHER: You don't mean to say - or do you - that there is no direct causal relationship between violence on television and th^ rise of violence in this country? v* 4 BLAKE: Oh, nonsense! Oh, my goodness! This country has some very serious emotional, social problems, particularly with the young kids. It's one of the first times in this country that the young kids have not had a cause, or leaders. They've seen their leaders killed out in the streets, and they see people do nothing about it. They've seen their President turn into a gangster, and have everybody let him off the hook. They've seen all kinds of terrible things.