Culp and Cannell: The Greatest American Double Negative

Two talents tinged by sadness: Actor Robert Culp...

By Dan Hagen

Actor Robert Culp and writer-producer Stephen Cannell both proved adept at injecting fresh life into tired, formulaic  American television. But that life came at some cost to their own.

Cannell created several hit shows, including “The Rockford Files,” “The A-Team” and “The Greatest American Hero,” the 1981 superhero series that teamed the old pro Culp with young William Katt, the son of actress Barbara Hale who had starred in the Stephen King film “Carrie.”

One of the writers on “Hero” was novelist Patrick Hasburgh, who also worked with Cannell on “The A-Team” and (as co-creator) on “Hardcastle and McCormick” before creating his own hit series, “21 Jump Street.”

Hasburgh respected both men greatly, although not unreservedly.

...And writer/producer Stephen Cannell

“My producer on Hardcastle & McCormick, an old pro named Les Sheldon, related to me a story about Bob Culp,” Hasburgh recalled. “Bob had been a ‘special guest star’ on ‘Hardcastle’ and Les was giving him a lift home after a late wrap. Les related to me how he sensed a weariness about Bob Culp — that Culp knew, as did those of us who worked with him, that he was a gifted actor; brilliant in both comedy and drama.”

Hasburgh said Culp had the best timing of any actor he ever worked with. “Bob never missed the jokes, but for some reason he was relegated to TV. He could have easily been a film and stage star, and was more talented than most of his peers. But he fell into the TV rut in the ‘50s and then with ‘I Spy’ in the 60s, and he just couldn’t break out of it. And it wore on him, I think.

“Bob could be a bear to work with — an elitist, a real star. And despite sometimes drinking a little too much, he came to play. But (he) always signaled, and maybe rightly so, that he was above the material.

Katt and Culp

“Katt was never his equal, never. Bob was clearly the more skilled actor, and he put up with Billy, which was a full-time job. Katt was one of the most unhappy people/actors I have ever worked with. Bob Culp was a real star, and I was lucky to have worked with him at the end of his prime.”

Hasburgh said Cannell’s career path was similar. “There was a time — with ‘Columbo,’ ‘The Rockford Files,’ ‘Tenspeed and Brownshoe,’ ‘Stone,’ ‘Baretta’ —  when no one did prime time TV better than Steve. Right up until ‘Hero,’ Steve was on his game.”

 In a way, ironically, it was ‘The A-Team’ that turned Cannell's head, Hasburgh said. “It was his biggest hit and the worst show he’d ever done. But he LOVED the fame and attention, and pursued it, I think, as a priority from then on.

“SJC had little to do with ‘Jump St.’ beyond that his Production Co. produced it. I was the creative motor on that show, but Steve was all about fame and profile.”

It’s an assessment Cannell himself might have agreed with, at least partially. “I went through this period where I was the new genius,” Cannell told the L.A. Times in 1997. “I mean, people were carrying me around the lot on a litter. I actually heard the words ‘Stephen Cannell’ and ‘brilliant’ used in the same sentence. When you’ve been the stupidest kid in class, that's a pretty appealing thing to hear, and I went through a phase when I tried to believe it.”

The series boasted one of the most popular TV themes

“There is this feeling in our industry that certain people have ‘The Answer,’” Cannell said. “I went through my period of people thinking I had it. It takes a while before the glow fades. Sometimes your glow can last for 10 years."

“I go from being the stupidest kid in class to being the biggest success at Universal,” Cannell said. “I'm the David Kelley of the moment, I’m married to my 8^th grade sweetheart, and we have a wonderful, wonderful life.

“And then one day, my son Derek dies.”

Cannell’s 15-year-old son died in 1982 at the age of 15, during the run of “Hero,” bizarrely smothered in a giant sand fortress he was building on the beach.

“Steve felt, maybe, that he had lost his legacy and he spent the rest of his life trying to tell the world that he was here,” Hasburgh said. ”On his game, Cannell could rock just about any script. I don't think Steve wrote books as well as he wrote TV, and toward the end he ended up being more famous than he was busy.

“He had become a character in a Rockford episode, maybe — a washed-up TV producer who couldn’t get arrested creatively (as I know that one, too) but one who couldn't leave the spotlight,” Hasburgh said.

“Steve would deny this if he were alive, but there was always a kind of insecure loneliness about him. But a special kind; the kind that rich kids have — the ones with talent, at least. Steve was a rich kid, a WASP, a conservative, and time sort of passed him by, creatively — and he was smart enough, down deep, to know it.”

Cannell had an admirer in Culp, who preceded him in death by mere months. Culp died after falling on a sidewalk near a park in Los Angeles on March 24, 2010, and Cannell died Sept. 30 of that year from complications of melanoma.

In 1982, I interviewed Culp for my friend David Anthony Kraft’s magazine, and asked him about Cannell.

DAN: With “Rockford Files” and “The Greatest American Hero,” Steve Cannell seems good at putting a twist on a genre and making it kind of fresh.

ROBERT: What Steve is good at is taking a light-hearted approach to a genre, if you will, and kind of, as you say, putting a twist on it that no one else would think of but Steve Cannell.

DAN: Making it sort of seem to fit reality a little better than genres do ordinarily.

ROBERT: Nowadays, yes. The suspension of disbelief is the first law of the theater taught to every dramatist when he’s starting out. If he doesn’t learn it, he’s sunk.

The audience walks up to the box office and plunks down its five bucks — or $45 or $50 if it’s Broadway — and walks into the theater and sits down in a seat. The analogy is apt for the living room, as well, because you are buying commercials that you don’t really want.

The first thing that has to happen for that audience is that it must be permitted to suspend disbelief. Because they know they’re in a theater seat or they know they’re sitting in front of a colored block in their living room. That’s disbelief, because we’re gonna tell ‘em a story up there that they automatically will say is just a story on a box or just a bunch of actors on a stage.

So the suspension of disbelief is the phrase that’s been come up with in the last 300 years, and it’s everything. To do that nowadays, with the degree of audience sophistication having squared itself several times since I was a kid, is very, very difficult. And one of the ways you do it is through, like, double negatives.

The double negative, when you’re talking in terms of language, yields a positive. The same thing sometimes occurs in physics and in chemistry. And it certainly yields wonderful results in the theater. Something that Steve Cannell understands instinctively, I studied it. I don’t think he ever did.

DAN: How would you apply it to what he does? Can you give me an example of a double negative in the “Greatest American Hero?”

ROBERT: Well, here we have the ridiculous situation of being given this suit by extraterrestrials and sticking these two absolutely disparate human beings together and, somewhere in that, the extraterrestrials knew that the chemistry between these two particular human beings was flawless for what they wanted.

One of them hates the suit — that’s the negative — but cannot resist when he’s called upon and made to feel guilty where his patriotism is concerned by a guy who distrusts and dislikes almost everything in the world except the kid and the suit. That’s the double negative. You put ‘em together and you get a synergism. Instead of two plus two equals four, it equals five.

DAN: A lot of little innovations, too. For example, violating the genre by calling him Ralph instead of giving him a super-hero name.

ROBERT: That’s another example of the concept of coming at it sideways, or in a negative sort of way.

DAN: Right. What it would be like if somebody was actually given a suit like that.

Ralph Hinkley flies (badly)

ROBERT: Well, imagine this. The very hook that made the series sell, and made it work for the first year, but became a detriment in the second year, was that he couldn’t work the suit. That’s a negative. He kept bashing into walls ...

DAN: Right. You couldn’t do that forever, though.

ROBERT: You can’t do that forever because the audience got down on it! I mean, you have no idea of the mail and the talk on the streets. “When is somebody gonna teach that asshole to fly that suit?” We all knew that it was going to come to a swift end, and it did.

And pretty soon, what we did in the second year was start to accelerate his ability to find uses for the suit and to make it work. And by the time we got to the third year, we didn’t expect too many crashes and too many screamings and falling out of the sky. Only a few.

DAN: How would you compare it to the other superhero series on the air? I would say more sophisticated than all of them. Although “The Incredible Hulk” was okay, I thought.

ROBERT: “The Hulk” was again another example of the negativeness that I’m talking about, which is silly, but yields the kind of comedy that we were doing that nobody else on television was doing - outside of maybe “Saturday Night Live.”

DAN: Except that yours had a twist of humanism. “Saturday Night Live” always seems pretty harsh and negative to me.

ROBERT: Harsh and negative, yes. Both of those things. But we didn’t want to be that, because the essential thing that made the show work was, underneath it all, a kind of sweetness — a core of sweetness in Ralph that his fiance, and later his wife, could identify. And there was also a core of that in Maxwell that Maxwell would deny ‘till his dying breath.

Sources: Patrick Hasburgh; David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview; “Banging Out a New Ending’ by Bruce Newman, Los Angeles Times.

"Rockford Files" star James Garner with Cannell.