The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television - Hardcover

Jon Krampner

4.4

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780813523590: The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813523591 ISBN 13: 9780813523590

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1997

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Today television drama consists mainly of formulaic series and TV movies filmed in Hollywood. During the 1950s, however, there was a Golden Age of Television - live electronic theater based in New York and broadcast to living rooms across the country. This book is the first biography of the man who did the most to make that Golden Age possible: Fred Coe (1914-1979). Coe, the greatest producer of this era, was the mastermind of Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, the best of a crop of live New York dramatic anthologies that included Studio One, Kraft Television Theatre, and Robert Montgomery Presents. Born in a small town in the Mississippi Delta and raised in Nashville, Coe went on to nourish such impressive talents as writers Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, Tad Mosel, and JP Miller, directors Delbert Mann and Arthur Penn, and countless major actors. Among the enduring live dramas he produced are "The Days of Wine and Roses" (for Playhouse 90), "Marty," and "The Trip to Bountiful" (for Philco-Goodyear); Mary Martin's acclaimed Peter Pan; and the situation comedy Mr. Peepers. Coe later made several films and became an important producer on Broadway, with The Miracle Worker, Pulitzer prize-winning All the Way Home, and A Thousand Clowns (which he also directed) to his credit. To a large extent, though, the rise and fall of Fred Coe parallels the rise of live television drama in the late 1940s and its fall at the end of the 1950s. Jon Krampner's lively book brings the postwar New York era to life along with a gallery of memorable characters. He provides the most sustained look yet at the causes of the growth, efflorescence, and decline of a remarkable period in American television history.

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About the Author:

Jon Krampner is an expatriate New Yorker who lives in Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor of Emmy magazine and has written on television and entertainment subjects for the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Modern Maturity, the New York Times Syndicate, and numerous other publications.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A long-neglected pioneer of live TV drama is appropriately praised but not brought to life in this biography by a contributing editor to Emmy magazine. Krampner ably interweaves the stories of Coe's rise in television and the growth of live TV drama in the 1940s and '50s, demonstrating Coe's crucial role in the flowering of that form. It needed both Coe's eye for acting talent (bringing young Grace Kelly and James Dean to TV) and his ability to attract and edit fine writers to produce enduring dramas like The Trip to Bountiful, The Days of Wine and Roses, and Marty, and the understated comedy Mr. Peepers. With the demise of live TV, Coe turned to producing Broadway successes like A Thousand Clowns. But after withdrawing from one of these (Fiddler on the Roof) he began to decline. Some successes, more failures, and serious drinking followed, until his death in 1979. All of Coe's artistic accomplishments serve his contention that ``there's nothing duller than rich people!,'' which became the driving force behind his trademark kitchen-sink dramas. Keys to his inner life are more elusive, however, despite accounts of his failed marriages and his father's early death. Some of the author's conclusions are also unconvincing. Though Coe lacks the cachet of other early TV luminaries, it is untrue that ``today, Fred Coe is forgotten.'' He lives on in the works of those he nurtured--Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, Delbert Mann, and others- -and in TV's continued ability to succeed in the domestic drama. Coe's life may be sad, but it is not--as Krampner labels it-- tragic, at least not as presented here. Similarly, comparisons to underappreciated filmmaker D.W. Griffith, which Krampner makes throughout the book, do not fully ring true. As the only sustained resource on Coe, this book is useful to media scholars, but as dramatic reading, it wants the poetic humanity of Coe's works. (20 b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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