A Half-Century-Old Road to Today

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/arts/television/route-66-shows-50-year-old-issues-relevant-today.html

IF there is such a thing as a visionary time capsule, the newly released boxed set of “Route 66” is it. Watch these discs (from Shout! Factory) and you are transported back to a version of the United States that was still basking in postwar success, a country rich in blue-collar jobs and industrial production and somewhat oblivious to its problems. But while enjoying that return to America as it was, you may also be struck by how often this half-century-old black-and-white television series tackled issues that seem very 21st century.

“Route 66,” which ran from 1960 to 1964 on CBS, was an earnest, ambitious serial about two young men on a random journey across North America in a Corvette. It was shot on location, something hard to imagine given the bulkiness of equipment at the time. Viewed today, a scene on a shrimp boat in New Orleans or at the half-built Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona prompts admiration for the producers, camera operators, electricians and others who made the shots feasible.

It was seat-of-the-pants television, demanding for everyone.

“You were always behind schedule, working 14, 15, 16 hours a day,” recalled George Maharis, who starred with Martin Milner in the initial seasons. “But it was fun. It was like being a pioneer, going over the mountains.”

There was pioneering in the structure of the show as well, and in its scripts. The series was created by Herbert B. Leonard and Stirling Silliphant, who earlier had combined on “Naked City,” and they seemed intent on shining a light into every out-of-the-mainstream corner of America.

Mr. Maharis played Buz Murdock and Mr. Milner was Tod Stiles, friends who embark on a cross-country odyssey after Tod inherits the Corvette. They are among the least fleshed-out lead characters in television history, jarringly so by standards today, when Tony Soprano has inspired entire books. Buz was a hard-slugging guy from New York (not unlike Mr. Maharis himself), and Tod seemed rather preppy, but their main purpose each week was usually to get the show, literally and figuratively, to a place where it could tell a story about someone else.

And what stories they were. This was an era when television hadn’t yet settled into the pattern of silly sitcoms and not-too-taxing dramas that would define it for decades. A TV script — Mr. Silliphant, who died in 1996, wrote many for “Route 66” — could still aspire to be literature. That made for some clunkiness. Writers hadn’t fully grasped that television shows were not stage plays. But even at its most awkward, “Route 66” reached high.

Take, for instance, this slice of dialogue from a 1962 episode called “Aren’t You Surprised to See Me?” A religious nut takes Buz hostage in Dallas and threatens to kill him if the city’s population fails to follow the Ten Commandments for the next 24 hours. The man (played by David Wayne) explains himself in a dizzying monologue that foreshadows both the anti-establishment mood of the Vietnam era and the current laments of the religious right.

“Drop the scales from your eyes,” he tells Buz. “Consider the present society of the world. Are we still individuals, or are we prisoners of bureaucracy? Insects in vast, grinding systems, carrying out antlike, apparently rational actions with no human idea of the ends they serve? Ours is no longer a guilt culture in which control of wrongdoing is self-imposed by conscience. Instead we have a shame culture, one in which acts are judged good or evil solely on the basis of whether one is caught or not, in which the worst punishment is public humiliation, not private guilt. Ours is a world, Murdock, in which conscious morality is treated with derision and reason with scorn. This is an age which no longer waits patiently through this lifetime for the rewards in the next, but instead mills anxiously about overindulging, driven to cheat, driven to crime. So I have killed six men.

“Well, let me tell you that each time, I died with them. Each time I killed myself, too. So what is that insignificant sacrifice against the gigantic moral collapse of the world?”

And that’s just an excerpt.

If that character sounds as if he could be any of today’s unbalanced zealots with a gun, he is not alone. The series was full of people and plot lines that would fit easily in 2012.

Those doomsday preppers who have been the subject of several reality shows would have had a lot to talk about with the central character in “A Fury Slinging Flames,” a 1960 episode in which a physicist expecting a New Year’s Day nuclear attack takes shelter in the Carlsbad Caverns with a group of followers. “Eleven, the Hard Way” (1961), about a small town that sends a gambler to Reno to try to win it a return to prosperity after the local mine goes bust, seems like a metaphor for all those states that hope a casino economy can replace their lost manufacturing revenue. “City of Wheels” (1962), about an embittered veteran in a wheelchair, feels like a precursor to any of the post-traumatic stress disorder plots that are so common in television drama today.

Mr. Maharis, now in his 80s, cited “City of Wheels” as among his favorites. In it, he plunges into a pool to stop a suicide.

Another episode that also involved an icy dip, “Even Stones Have Eyes” from late in Season 2, may be his least favorite, not because of the story but because of the aftermath. The script called for him to dive into a pond to rescue a blind woman.
“The water was like 40 degrees,” he recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “They couldn’t get my clothes on over the wet suit.” So he went without the wet suit.

“It was 4 in the morning,” he said. “It was freezing. My jacket froze on me. They had to pour hot water on me; you can see it in the shot, the steam rising.”

He became thoroughly ill, and soon he found himself with hepatitis (later linked to a B12 shot, Mr. Maharis said). Though he continued to appear into Season 3, he said the lingering illness ultimately knocked him out of the series. Mr. Milner went on alone for a time, then acquired a new partner played by Glenn Corbett, but the show was never quite as strong.

“If I had it to do all over again, the only thing I’d change would be getting that bug,” Mr. Maharis said. Among the pleasures, he said, was working with numerous actors who would go on to have substantial careers. The doomsday character in Carlsbad Caverns was played by Leslie Nielsen, later so successful in, among other things, the “Naked Gun” movies. That gambler sent to Reno carrying his town’s hopes? Walter Matthau.

Martin Sheen, Barbara Eden, Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Julie Newmar and other now familiar names also make appearances. Most had yet to achieve fame, but as its reputation grew the series was able to attract a different order of star. “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing,” from 1962, features the horror greats Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff as themselves.

Mr. Milner, 80, went on to roles in “Adam-12” and many other shows. (He had a stroke a few years ago, acquaintances said.)

The other star of the series was the Corvette, which was actually a series of Corvettes. Though in references to the series the car has been described as red, Mr. Maharis said that was never the case.

He recounted how he ended up with a nice perk through a bit of subterfuge. “I said to them, ‘Listen, I would like to bring my car on location with us; is that O.K.?’ And they said, ‘What are you driving?’ And I said, ‘A Ford Thunderbird.’ ”

They gave him his own Corvette.

Route 66, Iraqi sites among most at risk

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Route_66_Iraqi_sites_among_most_at__06062007.html

Route 66, Iraqi sites among most at risk: heritage group
Published: Wednesday June 6, 2007
AFP

America's famed Route 66 and Iraq's archeological sites are among the world's most threatened cultural treasures, according to a list published Wednesday by a leading US-based heritage group.

The World Monuments Fund's 2008 watch list includes 100 sites from around the world deemed at risk from man-made threats such as climate change, conflict, urban development and unchecked tourism.

"Human activity has become the greatest threat of all to the world's cultural heritage," the non-governmental group said in its report.

"But, just as we caused the damage in the first place, we have the power to repair it," the group's president Bonnie Burnham added.

Among the best known sites on the list are Machu Picchu in Peru, which the fund said was at risk from rampant and unmanaged tourism.

Similarly, the skyline of 18th century St Petersburg in Russia was threatened by the proposed construction of a new skyscraper, it said.

Other cities facing similar threats were parts of Shanghai built in the 1920s and 30s and Damascus, where historic buildings were being torn down to make way for modern developments.

The watch list was compiled by an international panel of experts in archaeology, architecture, art history and preservation.

The fund said that cultural sites of Iraq had suffered catastrophic loss since the US-led invasion of 2003, while fragments of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, largely destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, were also at risk.

Other sites threatened by conflict included Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, one of Christianity's oldest churches, which the fund said was deteriorating as a result of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Sites deemed at risk due to climate change included the Antarctic hut from which Captain Scott led his fateful bid for the South Pole in 1912. The hut was suffering from increased snowfall believed to be caused by climate change.

Chinguetti Mosque in Mauritania, located in one of Islam's seven holy cities, was threatened by shifting deserts, while Leh Old Town in India, a rare medieval city in the Himalayas, was at risk from changing weather patterns.

Historic areas of New Orleans, much of which were badly damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, were also threatened, as were sites along Route 66, once the only all-year road linking the United States' east and west coasts and now popular with tourists making road trips.

Perhaps surprisingly, the latest list also included some modern sites, such as a 1940s university in Florida designed by pioneering architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona, from the 1970s.

The fund also identified the threat to Main Street Modern -- the post war civic buildings that dot American towns but are considered out of date and are being demolished across the country at an alarming rate.

Founded in 1965, the World Monument Fund provides millions of dollars in grants to help preserve sites at risk, but also works to help raise awareness -- something it says sparks local interest and draws in far more funding.

"By recognizing the endangered heritage it becomes possible to do something about it," said Marilyn Perry, the fund's chairman.

Previous watch lists have included landmarks such as the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and the devastated city of Pompeii in Italy, along with a host of lesser known heritage sites from more than 70 countries.