Independent Star-News from Pasadena, California • Page 74

PASADENA INDEPENDENT STAR-NEWS. IV WEEK, SEPTEMBER 22. 1968 Julia Is With It By MARIAN DERN The critics and columnists didn't wait until air time to write about NBC's new comedy series Julia. Weeks, even months beforehand, the series was much discussed. a i ranged from approval solely because of format (it is the first TV series to have a Negro as star), to criticism because the setting is the comfortable, middle-class milieu which some said did not "tell it like it is." Kanter "Tell it like what is?" queries executive producer-creator and sometimes writer and director of the show, Hal Kanter, one of Hollywood's most comedy writers.

"There are lots of different 'like it iscs'" he wryly observes. This particular "like it is" concerns a pretty young widow named Julia (Diahann Carroll). Her husband, an Air Force officer, was killed in Vietnam, and being a registered nurse by training, Julia moves to Los Angeles to start a new life for herself and six-year old son Corey (Marc Copage). They live in a pleasant, integrated apartment building, and Julia faces the same problems that any single working mother faces. Sometimes the fact she is black is involved in those problems; sometimes it isn't.

The tone is set in the first episode when she is turned down for a job, and obviously discrimination is the reason, though unsaid. Later she is hired by Dr. Chegley (Lloyd Nolan) to work at an industrial medical clinic. And his reaction, when she mentions on the phone, prior to the in-person interview, that she is a Negro, is: "Have you Page 18 always been a Negro, or are you just being fashionable?" The humor in the show derives from the human situation whether it's Julia finding a job, or young Corey plotting to find himself a new daddy, or making friends with the boy upstairs. It involves bahysilters and the hazards of a new job, and fixing the TV set, and Corey being so nervous about the first day of school that he wakes up with a svct bed.

So far the verbalizations and predicaments of Corey and his young friend Earl J. Wagger- dorn (who looks like an Earl J. Waggerdorn, played by Michael i ring true. They have none of the self-conscious coyness that marks the acting and the lines of dialog given most kiddy portrayals on TV. And that is something very important to Hal Kanter.

Another thing he values is the intelligence of the viewer. There is no, repeal no, laugh track on this show. "If it's funny, people will laugh. They don't need a cue to tell them," says Kanter. Hal has remained remarkably unflappable amidst all the comments, suggestions etc.

that have already come his way as producer of Julia. While concerned that one well-known critic crili- ized the show months ahead of time, sight unseen, he says that "I'd rather they talk a lot about it than ignore it. The more talk, the more publicity, the more viewers." Another reason for his calm, may be that he knows exactly what he wants to do, and how to do it. While viewing the world i a liberal eye, Kanler has never exactly been a political activist. The creation of Julia came after he heard a speech by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP.

What impressed Hal the most was Wilkins' reasoned approach, and the facts, figures and specifics of the racial problems in this country. "Perhaps because am so much involved with dramatics, in this business, I am going to be more moved by reason than theatrics, the emotion-filled appeal," he stales frankly. "I had listened to Martin Luther King and to Ralph Abernalhy, but neither reached me so pro- foundly as Wilkins did. Kanter felt he could best make a contribution in the area of understanding hy doing what he does best, writing. So he sat down at the typewriter and created Julia, "on spec" as they say.

He then took it to NBC and credits network vp Mort Werner with carrying the ball and getting NBC to accept the show, without changes. Kanter has written six scripts himself and, as he puts it, "keep my greasy thumbs ofF." anyone, changes dialog after the script has been put into production. 'These scripts are not written on a bus, coining to work," says Hal. "They arc done with care and we don't use them unless they arc good." Hal is not playing the role of do-gooder or crusader. He hires certain black writers because they have the talent, because they need an opportunity, ant because they can do a good joh fur the show.

He feels Diahann is the key to the show, and describes (I to r) Marc Cnpage, Diahann Carroll, Lloyd Nolan, Michael Link. He also hires free lance writers and has given assignments to three talented Negro writers, two of whom had had no experience in TV script writing, so he paired them with two white writers experienced in the (bill. It has worked out extremely well, and to everyone's advantage. The Negro writers arc Gene Boland, (teamed with Hen Hirschman); Harry Dolan of the Watts Writers Workshop (teamed with Harry Winkler); and Robert L. Goodwin who had had TV script experience.

Earl Barret, a white writer, and lloh Goodwin have set up a writing class for Negroes, and one of their most promising students is Ferdinand Leon, who will be writing scripts. a writer himself, Kanter has a rule that no. one, neither the director nor the actors nor her as being "very aware, in the context of her own life, and very bright not to mention He is not doing a documentary on the ghetto. What he i.v doing and what he's interested in doing, is a very funny, very good TV series within the familiar situation comedy formal. And a show that is very much "with it.

With what? Well, with kids, with life as it is today, with the silualron facing a single mother, with tnc fact of prejudice which, says Hal, has humorous aspects, in terms of its absurdity--peopK who drive Cadillacs look down on people who drive Fords. There is i aboiil racial discrimination as Mien, ot about many problems we face in our country today. But as Kanter points out, "most valid points against society have been scored by humorists.".