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chapter 4 Big Screen, Little Screen F or baby boomer Americans of the late 1950s, television was taking the place of an evening at the movies. Young families liked the idea of dialing in two or three TV stations and choosing their own entertainment without having to drive into town. And thus it was decreed that television would become the new assembly line of prepackaged film and entertainment products , albeit in the new short form of the TV series. How ironic, then, that the studio that copied its product line so shamelessly from the mainstream studios—sci-fi tales after Twentieth Century Fox’s success, musicals after MGM, cheap horror films after its own early classics—should now become influential on the programming that this new medium of television began to produce. The Universal formula, not only the quick shooting/producing/ scoring of established genre films, but also their whole roster of familiar characters and plots, would become standard fare for TV through the 1960s. Francis the Talking Mule would become TV’s Mr. Ed, a sarcastic talking horse in a modern suburban setting. Ma and Pa Kettle would translate into various shows from The Beverly Hillbillies, with a hayseed entering big city life, and Green Acres, with city folks adapting to the farm. Universal’s various creature features became The Outer Limits, with silly costumed monsters and pseudo-scientific plots (with orchestral scores by Mancini’s accordion player on Driftwood and Dreams, Dominic Frontiere). The beach musicals became teen series like Dobie Gillis or teen-centered family shows like Father Knows Best or The Donna Reed Show. All of those Universal westerns encouri -xii_1-286_Caps.indd 44 2/10/12 2:46 PM Big Screen, Little Screen 45 aged long-running TV series like Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, and Wyatt Earp. And it is likely that Universal’s toothy tot Tim Hovey, especially as seen in Everything But the Truth, inspired Jerry Mathers as the similarly earnest kid Beaver Cleaver in TV’s Leave It to Beaver. Notice, too, the similarities between Mancini’s Toy Tiger theme for Hovey in The Private War of Major Benson and Dave Kahn’s musical theme for “The Beaver” on weekly TV. (For another Universal movie theme from those days that is even more like “The Beaver,” check Mancini’s main title music to Kelly and Me). The Universal music factory may have been closing, but its influence lived on. Even so, Mancini was out of a job. Ginny was still working as a freelance studio singer around Hollywood, but the pay, if generous, was not continuous. Meanwhile, at home were six-year-old twins and an eight-year-old son. On the table were contracts for Mancini to arrange and conduct record albums, including two discs of Sousa marches. His career seemed to be headed away from films. But as Mancini tells it, fate intervened. Although he was no longer a staff composer at Universal, he still retained his studio pass, with which he could enter the movie lot, use the cafeteria, mingle informally with producers, and, on one important occasion, visit the studio barber shop. There in mid1958 he would meet, from Ginny’s wider circle of friends, the aforementioned Blake Edwards, who had just come from a meeting at which plans were solidified for a new TV series slated for September at NBC. When Edwards asked Mancini if he would be interested in composing the music for the new show, to be called Peter Gunn, he had in mind Mancini’s arranging and producing the club music that would be needed in the series, because one of the recurring settings of the show would be a small jazz cafe. Mancini had previously given him the kind of soft big band style needed for the soundtrack of 1957’s Mister Cory at Universal and some dance arrangements on two other films, so the casual attitude of Edwards’s offer here is understandable. At first, with the word Gunn in its title, Mancini thought the series sounded like a western, but it was quickly explained how Peter Gunn was going to be a slick, easygoing, cool-to-danger, intriguing-to-the-ladies, private investigator; that each episode in the series was going to be sharply and stylishly shot like a mini-movie; and that each script would be crisp and modern. Down with the world-weary Phillip Marlowe/Humphrey Bogart detective antihero of the 1940s or the playboy private eye of the 1950s...

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