Television Chronicles: Run For Your Life

You’re in the prime of your life. Your career is thriving, and your personal life just couldn’t be better.

You visit your doctor for your annual checkup – a routine thing, most years. But not this time. The doctor notices something that’s far from routine. He runs some tests and soon makes an earth-shattering discovery: you have somehow contracted a rare disease for which there is no known cure. You have roughly one year left to live, perhaps as much as two.

What would you do?

You could succumb to depression, drowning your sorrows in the bottle… or worse. You might find some comfort in your own self-pity, but if you’re smart, you’ll soon realize all you’ve done is waste what little time you have left.

Or you could look at it as a challenge to dive into life, a chance to experience as much as you can for as long as you’ve got. In the process, you just might discover what it really means to live.

This premise and the existential questions it poses are what make Run For Your Life (NBC, 1965-1968) a unique television series. Whereas most prime time protagonists are motivated by a concern for survival in some way, attorney Paul Bryan (played by Ben Gazzara) disdains survival in anything he does, because he is reconciled to the fact that the end, for him, is near.

Assuming he has the means, how does a man conduct himself when his need for the most basic of animal instincts, self-preservation, is obliterated by circumstances? In all probability, Run For Your Life suggests, he would attempt to live every waking instant to the utmost that his wit allows – recklessly, with total abandon.

Which is exactly what Paul Bryan does. He has no wife, no family, no one to whom he is anything more than a good lawyer or a good friend. He’s been told he will be in perfect health and be completely normal until the final two weeks. He gives up his San Francisco-based practice, sells his home, his investments, and all his possessions, and embarks on a quest to live the remainder of his life as fully as possible. He travels the world, from the most exotic locales to the poorest of countries. Whenever he finds “there are questions about my own country that I can’t answer,” he returns to the United States (and, often, back to his native Bay Area), and eventually comes to understand the heart of America better than any man since Charles Kuralt.

Life takes on a new dimension for Paul Bryan. He hopes “to squeeze 20 years of living into one year, or two,” so he cannot linger in one place for too long. Thus, he becomes a man on the run, relentlessly racing against the time limit which has been suddenly imposed on him.

Roy Huggins, of course, originated the “man on the run” concept in network TV with The Fugitive (ABC, 1963-1967). While the story of Dr. Richard Kimble was winning Emmy Awards and pulling record audience numbers, rival producers scrambled to duplicate its success. In television, as in life, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. By 1965, a number of “Fugitive-like” shows made their premieres (Destry, The Loner, The Man From Shenandoah); two more followed in 1966 (Shane and Run, Buddy, Run). None of these lasted more than one full season.

The only variation on The Fugitive that worked, Run For Your Life had one advantage none of the others had: it was conceived and produced by none other than Huggins himself. “Many of my friends and colleagues saw what was going on with these imitations on The Fugitive, and they’d say, ‘Roy, why don’t you do one yourself? Everyone else is doing it, and they’re doing it wrong.’ Even Leonard Goldenson [then-president of ABC-TV] said that to me, only he said it after I’d already developed Run For Your Life and sold it to NBC. But, yes, it was a deliberate attempt on my part to copy my own concept. But how I came about doing Run For Your Life was entirely accidental.”

Accidental, because the original idea behind the premise of Run did not actually come from Huggins himself. “It came from Jennings Lang, who was the head of television production at Universal Studios at the time,” the producer continues. “Jennings met with me one day, and said, ‘I’ve got a great idea for a series. A man is told he’s only got two years to live. Only, when he leaves his doctor, the audience somehow learns that this is a mistake: there’s nothing wrong with him. But the man doesn’t know that. He thinks he’s only got two years to live, and so he decides to live it up!’

“I didn’t say this to Jennings, but I thought it was a pretty dumb idea. Then, once I got back to my office, I sat down and thought, ‘Wait a minute. What if it isn’t a mistake? What if the man really does have only two years to live? If that’s true, then this is a really good idea.’ Because now we’re really dealing with an existential point of view on life.

“I liked it, because it was a Rabelaisian approach to fiction, as opposed to, say, the Bunyanesque approach (as seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, where the thing you must discover is, ‘you do good’). Whereas, according to Rabelais, the idea of life is to have a good time. So I thought, here’s a guy who lives according to Rabelais, who faces his mortality and says, ‘I’m gonna do something about it.’

“I started thinking about what kind of story to tell. Around that time, Jo Swerling had read an article about chicarenos, who were young people with lots of money. They lived on the French Riviera, and they practiced the Nietzschian philosophy of ‘living dangerously.’ They jumped out of airplanes, they dove 200 feet deep into the ocean, and so forth.

“I said, ‘That’s it.’ A story was written which had Paul Bryan coming into contact with a chicareno [played by Katherine Crawford, Huggins’ daughter in real life]. Luther Davis wrote a fine script that became the pilot, and we filmed it as a segment on Kraft Suspense Theater, a show I was producing at the time.”

Of course, Huggins knew that, in order for the series to work, Paul Bryan could not be completely hedonistic. Bryan needed to become a catalyst in the lives of the people he meets in his travels, otherwise the audience would likely become bored with his exploits after a few weeks.

In Rapture at Two-Forty, the pilot episode, Paul meets Leslie Thurston, a chicareno who loses herself in extreme adventure to win her father’s approval after the tragic death of her race car driver brother, the apple of his eye. Paul realizes that in trying live the life of her brother, Leslie is denying herself the opportunity to live life on her own terms. He decides, at great risk, “to salvage the hidden woman” in Leslie. It’s a risk, because not only might Leslie fall in love with him, he might also might fall in love with her – the one pleasure of life Paul can never permit himself to have. Paul knows that kind of personal relationship increases exponentially with time, and the scars are deep once it ends (as he knows, in his case, it must).

Though Paul rarely shares his knowledge of his fate with others, he knows he must tell Leslie before he says goodbye. “I have to be with people who don’t know about me, who don’t really care. With you, I’d see it every day in your eyes: my time shortening. And you’d see it in mine. It’s in your wet, beautiful eyes right now.”

Paul leaves, taking comfort in knowing he was the conduit through which Leslie discovers something very essential about herself. “Perhaps Nietszche meant ‘emotionally,’ and not just risking your neck every day,” she tells her father at the end of the pilot. “I’m going to find myself a man, now that I know they exist. And I’m going to love -- that’s living dangerously. That’s risk. That was the one risk I was afraid to take, but now I can’t wait to take it.”

Thus, as a result of a perfectly logical and believable progression of events, Paul Bryan becomes, in effect, a modern-day reincarnation of the classic Western hero – the mysterious stranger who drifts from town to town, graces the lives of those he meets, and makes each town “a little better than it was” by the time he leaves. Given the circumstances, the audience can understand why Bryan must occasionally terminate his involvements abruptly: he has no choice. The audience can therefore root for Paul without feeling guilty.

“Let’s face it,” admits Huggins. “Without that death sentence looming over him, a man like Bryan, who drifts from place to place, who leaves people behind, etc., would be little more than a bum. You can’t ask the audience to root for a bum every week. You can’t ask the audience to root for a man who keeps walking out on the women who fall in love with him; that’s asking them to root for a heel. Bryan’s predicament changes that. The audience knows that it pains him to leave, but that he really has no choice. That makes him someone they can sympathize with.”

That, of course, was Huggins’ exact thinking when he conceived The Fugitive in 1960. Like Paul Bryan, Richard Kimble was a man who, because of extraordinary circumstances, found himself moving from town to town each week without ever losing the sympathy of the audience.

Paul Bryan was a departure from the typical Roy Huggins character in that, unlike Bret Maverick, he was a man who actively sought dangerous situations. Yet, at the same time, he was very much like Maverick, in that his motivations for embracing danger were decidedly unconventional. “Bryan did things that Maverick would never have done because they were important to giving quality to his life,” explains Huggins, “whereas, to Maverick, avoiding those kinds of situations was a way of achieving something that Bryan didn’t have: long life. Maverick avoided things in order to live to be 90. Bryan jumped into things in order to live as if he had lived 90 years.

“He gets into these things, because to choose otherwise would be a contradiction. He doesn’t have a long time to live, so why shouldn’t he get into something that gives excitement to his life? It has nothing to do with making up for lost time – that’s something anybody might decide to do. But that isn’t the case with Paul Bryan. Paul Bryan finds out he’s only got one or two years to live. He’s determined to extract the most excitement he can out of life, in order to lengthen it. Because the end result of ‘living dangerously’ is that you seem to be living longer, and more fully, than the guy who has a wife and kids and goes home at six o’clock. You are more alive, and it contains a sense of extending life, as well as making it exciting.

“I know a little about this, from my own experience. When I was producing television, I would often go off on a three-or-four-thousand-mile drive and dictate stories for my shows into a tape recorder as I drove. I would only be gone for about four or five days, but by the time I came back home, it would feel as if I’d been away for much, much longer. It has something to do with time, and distance, and separation from the ordinary. Your perception of time is different. You can’t believe you accomplished all that in just a few days; you feel as though it’s been more like a month. But you’re still exhilarated from the experience. I had Bryan discover that very early on, and even had him talk about it a couple of times on the show, for the benefit of anyone in the audience who might have missed it.”

A good example of this occurs in Who’s Watching the Fleshpot?, in a scene in which an ingénue named Marsha (Davey Davison) chastises Paul for “wasting his time” instead of focusing on things like career and marriage.

Paul: That’s the trouble with people nowadays. Everybody’s running around, “not wasting time.” I’ve saved so much, I think it’s about time I started spending some... I’m not sure that what I was doing back home was living at all. But since I left, there’s never been a moment of doubt that I was alive.

Marsha: But what have you got if you live just for today? Nothing but a lot of yesterdays.

Paul: Is that bad? At least, they’ll be nice, full yesterdays -- something you won’t mind looking back on.

“Now, I realize,” concedes Huggins, “there’s a contradiction in that line of thinking, in that many people say, ‘Well, isn’t that what makes life feel shorter?’ And, in one sense, it does, in that you’re never bored. But when the experience is over, you nonetheless feel as if you’ve lived much longer. I thought it was particularly important for a man like Paul Bryan to face his predicament that way.”

What did Ben Gazzara bring to the package?

“Everything,” says Jo Swerling Jr., Run’s supervising producer. “He did a brilliant job of playing that character. He gave Paul Bryan a sense of strength, and sensitivity, on all levels of feeling, so that you could tell he had come to terms with his mortality, without feeling sorry for himself, but rather as the challenge of making the most of the time that he had left. You had the sense of a guy who was carrying a burden, but not overwhelmed by it. I thought Ben played that brilliantly.

“We had kind of a bumpy time with him, at first, during that gear-up time when we first started production, after the pilot had been sold. Without mentioning any names, there were certain people who had Ben’s confidence, and I don’t think they really wanted him to do the show. They were whispering in his ear a lot, about how the early scripts that were being developed were ‘no good.’ Since they had been associates of his for some time, and we were the new guys on the block, we hadn’t time yet to win his confidence, and his trust. That created some difficulties between Ben and Roy and me. But we somehow struggled through that, and got the first episode or two on the air. Then, the show started getting good ratings, and really good reviews. From that moment on, he was a pleasure to work with. He was very respectful of the material, and frequently contributed excellent ideas of his own. He was never a troublemaker. He was extremely professional, a very fast study. He always knew his lines. He was a trained actor, and a fun guy. He created a good atmosphere around the set. He was the kind of guy who said Hello to everybody, and treated them well.”

Gazzara originally saw Bryan as a nonconformist anti-hero, the kind of man who would stand on a table in the public library and scream at the top of his lungs. Huggins resisted, confident in his belief that such behavior in a series lead would only turn away the audience. When the premiere broadcast [The Cold, Cold War of Paul Bryan] finished in the Top Ten, and the series proceeded to win its Wednesday 10:00 p.m. timeslot on a consistent basis, Gazzara gave the executive producer his due. “By his knowledge of television, Huggins knows what works with the masses,” Gazzara told TV Guide in 1965. “The ratings are good. So I have to bow to Huggins and say maybe he was right.”

Run For Your Life went on to average a 35.3 share for its first season. The share, or “H.U.T. number,” is considered the most accurate measure of audience response in network television. Of the total number of Households Using (i.e., actually watching) Television at 10:00 p.m. on Wednesdays during the 1965-1966 season, over one-third were tuned in to Run For Your Life.

Gazzara also directed a number of episodes, “which were among the best, I think,” adds Swerling. “He did them with a sense of fiscal responsibility, too. Sometimes, when these series stars get the megaphone, they don’t particularly care how much they’re going to cost the studio. But not only were Ben’s shows among our best, creatively, but he brought them all in on schedule, and on or under budget – which I thought was great.

“I was very sad, after it was all over, that he never won an Emmy. He was nominated twice for Best Dramatic Actor, as was the show itself for Best Drama, but we lost both times to Bill Cosby and I Spy. When we were nominated in our last year [1968], I thought it would’ve been nice if, after having given the awards to I Spy the year before, the Academy could’ve possibly ‘spread the wealth around.’ But that’s the way it goes. We were always the bridesmaid, never the bride.”

Run For Your Life was like The Fugitive in one other important way: it was an anthology series with a running character. Though Paul Bryan appeared in every story, there was never anything familiar about his settings from show to show. That opened the door to an infinity of storytelling possibilities. The world of art, the world of crime, the world of theater, the world of business, the world of music, the world of sports, the world of religion, the world of politics, the world of war, the world of the individual, the world of the masses, the world of nature . . . every world which exists on our planet beckoned Bryan to sample it. He could become involved in literally any kind of intrigue, from as basic and simple as helping a small child who lost a balloon, to as hazardous and international as negotiating (above or below the table) the escape of an important individual from behind the Iron Curtain.

As an anthology series, each week featured an attractive lineup of guest stars, including Macdonald Carey, Katharine Ross, Barry Sullivan, Suzanne Pleshette, Ernest Borgnine, Brenda Scott, Kim Darby, Rossano Brazzi, Diana Hyland, Robert Loggia, Telly Savalas, Susan Strasberg, James Whitmore, Mary Ann Mobley, Eve Arden, Henry Silva, Carol Lawrence, Peter Lawford, Harry Guardino, Sal Mineo, Edward Mulhare, Gena Rowlands, Leslie Nielsen, Lesley Ann Warren, Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall, Louise Sorel, Brock Peters, Ossie Davis, Anthony Eisley, Tige Andrews, Jack Palance, Sheree North, Linden Chiles, Michael Dunn, Jacqueline Scott, Peter Graves, Edward Asner, Kent McCord, Gavin McLeod, Bruce Dern, Jack Albertson, Pat Harrington, Dabney Coleman, Jack Kelly, William Windom, Cloris Leachman, Arthur Hill, Joseph Campanella, and Janice Rule (a.k.a. Mrs. Ben Gazzara at the time of the show). Several other actors returned to play the same character in multiple episodes, most notably Fernando Lamas (as Ramon da Vega, professional gigolo), Jeremy Slate (as race car driver Pete Gaffney), Martin Milner (as Mike Greene, Paul’s buddy from the Korean War), Ina Balin (as Lisa Sorrow), and Stephen McNally (who replaced Macdonald Carey as Mike Allen, Paul’s CIA contact). A number of other guest stars graced the show from other realms of show business: stage star Howard Keel, singers Bobby Darin and Mel Tormé, comic Don Rickles, and former middleweight boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson.

Two notes of interest. Mel Tormé also wrote The Frozen Image, the episode in which he starred; while Who’s Watching the Fleshpot?, the episode featuring Bobby Darin, was the pilot for a series that never materialized, The Sweet Life.

Run For Your Life featured a number of other talented people behind the scenes. Director Michael Ritchie (The Candidate) and casting director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever) each went on to successful careers as directors of feature motion pictures. Nicholas Colasanto, better known as “Coach” on Cheers, directed and acted in many episodes. Jazz composer Pete Rugolo earned Emmy nominations each year for his musical score, as did cinematographer Lionel London for his work on the first season.

Run For Your Life was also marked by its use of “forced perspective,” the innovative camera style first made popular by Canadian director Sidney Furie in The Ipcress File (1965). “That film,” Roy Huggins points out, “was the first big breakthrough in getting people interested in all sorts of unusual techniques – techniques that could be used in films for mass entertainment, not just for use in classes about film-making or so-called ‘art’ pictures.

“When I saw The Ipcress File, I said, ‘This guy is doing things with the camera that are not difficult to do.’ They weren’t special effects, so they wouldn’t be expensive to do. It was simply imaginative use of the camera, and of the set, and of perspective and composition. I’m sure a lot of directors were influenced by that film, as was I.” The technique was perfectly suited for television, where the confines of the small screen created opportunities to “open up the box” in terms of depth.

The Savage Season is one of many excellent examples of how Run For Your Life put forced perspective to use. When we first see Ben Gazzara in this episode, he’s standing behind Jill Haworth, and they’re sort of framed by a circle. The circle turns out to be the cut-out hole of a 45-RPM record, which Haworth is holding directly in front of the camera. After a few lines of dialogue, Haworth pulls the record toward her, then places it on a turntable. Later in that same scene, the camera is positioned behind a drinking glass, and we see Gazzara and Haworth dancing, as if we’re kneeling down and watching them from the glass’ perspective.

Besides making the film visually interesting, forced perspective can also be an effective means of enhancing an important story point or heightening the drama of a particular scene. About midway through The Savage Season, Paul Bryan is jumped in an alley by two thugs, and is eventually knocked cold. The camera zooms in tight on Gazzara’s face, as Bryan slowly slips out of consciousness. The screen then goes black, and stays that way for about 20 seconds, before Gazzara comes to.

Success breeds confidence, which often gives you room to experiment. Run For Your Life is also a “typical Roy Huggins production” in this respect. The series often took chances, sometimes by doing stories that addressed topical issues (such as Cold War politics, or abortion), sometimes by breaking the unwritten rule in network television that the hero of a weekly series is always right.

Jo Swerling: “We did an episode [in the third year] called The Killing Scene, which Ben directed. It was a really potent, anti-capital punishment piece, with quite a remarkable cast, in retrospect: the guest stars were Tom Skerritt and Robert Duvall. Very briefly, Bryan comes across a news item about the pending execution of a death row inmate (Skerritt) whom he had once represented. He lost the case; though he always believed in the man’s innocence, he was never able to prove it. Bryan goes back, hoping he can get a stay, and eventually comes to the very firm conclusion that he knows who did do the crime – this man played by Robert Duvall. Now, during the ten or twelve years that Skerritt’s been on death row, Duvall has become a model citizen: he has a wife and kids, and his owns a small business (a gas station). Bryan goes to him and says, ‘You can’t let an innocent man go to the gas chamber.’ But Duvall says, ‘Just watch me. You don’t seriously expect me to turn myself in, do you?’ And he and Ben have some powerful scenes together. Finally, though, Bryan works his magic, and Duvall becomes very, very disturbed, to the point where his conscience gets to him. He can’t let this guy die. He runs to the nearest police station to confess, and to say ‘Stop the execution.’ And they all dive for the telephone, and so on and so forth. The telephone rings, they get the warden, and they say, ‘Stop the execution.’ Only the warden says, ‘It’s too late. They pulled the switch 30 seconds ago.’

“It was really good stuff, and about as powerful a statement against capital punishment as you could possibly make – although, having said that, I must add that I would never make that movie today. You couldn’t put a gun to my head and have me make that movie today, because now I’m very much pro-capital punishment. My outlook on such matters have changed considerably since 1965…”

Another departure from the norm was Down With Willy Hatch, starring Don Rickles as a down-on-his-heels nightclub comic falsely accused of statutory rape in a small rural town. Paul bails Willy out of jail, and encourages him to take the stage again while he carries out his investigation. Though Willy is reluctant, Paul presses him: “You’re innocent until they prove you’re guilty. Performing tonight is the only way you have of showing this town you’re not afraid of them.”

Though Paul succeeds in proving the entire case against Willy was fabricated, he ultimately fails his friend in a more fundamental way. Willy takes the stage – and fails to get a single laugh from the members of the audience. Willy’s frustrations boil into anger and, ultimately, confrontation. He lunges after a patron, prompting a massive brawl; by the end of the story, he is reduced to a catatonic state, and eventually wheeled away to a mental hospital. Paul is devastated. In his zeal to prove Willy innocent, he failed to recognize just how close his friend was to a nervous breakdown: “Sometimes you have to remember to deal with your friends on their terms, and not yours.”

“The theme of that show,” adds Jo Swerling, “can be summarized in that old adage, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ With all good intentions, Paul Bryan gives advice to this down-and-out comedian which ends up destroying him. Now, there are a lot of people who would say that show was a bad idea, that ‘you don’t do that with the hero of a television series. You don’t have him be that wrong.’ And yet, it was a very human kind of thing, because he really meant well. He thought he was giving the guy good advice; it just turned out all wrong. That, of course, happens to all of us, sometimes.”

Though some TV reference books list leukemia as the mysterious ailment which suddenly befell Paul Bryan, neither Bryan nor his doctor (Eric Mason, of the Garmes Clinic) ever indicate precisely what he has (other than, “it’s one of those afflictions they name after the poor fellow who discovered it”). In truth, the exact disease was never actually named. “That’s because there is no such disease,” reveals Roy Huggins. “Both NBC and the American Medical Association asked us not to specify it, because otherwise doctors all over the country would be deluged with people who thought they might have it. They said, ‘Say as little about his ailment as you can,’ and that’s what we did. We never named it, because in fact it doesn’t exist.”

However, Huggins himself was often deluged with requests for a show which found a cure for Bryan’s condition. But the writer/producer steadfastly refused:
“I thought such a resolution would be terribly contrived, and against the grain of what the show was about. I felt the audience would see right through that. And I really didn’t want to do it, anyway.”

What Huggins did want to do was a fourth season. “I felt we could have continued one more year. Our numbers were still good [the show averaged a 27.8 share during its third and final season]. The reviews were still good. But there was a guy running programming at NBC at the time – he didn’t last long, because he was so sure that everything he ever said, or thought, was absolutely incontrovertible. He said to me, ‘You can’t go beyond a third year; you’ve been telling people he’s only got two years, and you’ve already gone a year too long.’

“I tried to argue that the audience wasn’t that literal. I said, ‘Look, little Annie Rooney never grew an inch. The audience is willing to concede at least a fourth year.’ His answer was, ‘That audience, and the television audience, are completely different. Television audiences are extremely literal.’

“Now, he may very well have been right about that, though exactly how he knew that was another question. I don’t know whether he’d actually done any research to establish the truth of what he was saying, or whether it was just his opinion. But that was all that really mattered: it was his opinion, and that’s what made it right. And we were gone.”

It’s possible to understand NBC’s decision to drop the show in one respect: Run’s audience numbers, though still very respectable, did go down slightly each year. Still, if the show were on today, with the same numbers that Run had in its third year, it’s highly unlikely that any programming executive would cancel it. By today’s standards, a show with a 27.8 share would be a Top Ten hit.

Still, looking at the matter literally, Run For Your Life ran for a total of 85 episodes during its three seasons on NBC. If you think of each episode as a week, then the series would have only covered about a year-and-a-half of Paul Bryan’s life. A full television season in 1968 lasted 26 weeks; had the show continued for a fourth season, Paul would have in effect lived two years (which was the maximum prognosis he’d been given).

“That’s sound logic,” agrees Huggins. “But, to the network, a season equaled a year. In their thinking, he’d already lived one year too long.”