Martin Landau continued...

OUTRÉ: Do you miss those days?

LANDAU: No, not really. I guess that's why I haven't written a book, which some people have told me to do. I mean, I like the past, I enjoy the memories...of course, I miss certain things about my youth, but I'm having a good time now. I'm fortunate; I'm get some pretty decent roles from the time to time. There are not too many roles for actors my age that are any good. Fortunately, I got Tucker and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Then I did a picture that no one saw called Mistress and probably got the best reviews I have ever gotten for anything I've ever done. Robert De Niro produced it.

OUTRÉ: There's another project of yours that many people are unfamiliar with: The Savage Report, which was directed by Steven Spielberg.

LANDAU: That was the last movie for television that Steven did. I played a character not unlike Mike Wallace, an investigative reporter; it was television doing television. Richard Levinson and William Link, who had done Columbo, produced it. They were the hottest young guys at Universal, and they approached me with a format in which they could go after things like the FDA and other topical subject matters. Because it was an NBC pilot movie, I approached Julian Goodman who was head of NBC news to see if he had any objection to my playing a reporter on his network, the line between fiction and truth being rather thin.

As ludicrous as it sounds today, I had to fight to get Steven Spielberg as our director. At the time, the head of television at Universal said Steven was going to go over budget. I said, "Yes, but this is a shoddy show, and we need a cinematic fellow who is willing to break rules." You see, this was a very talky show, and I felt we to compensate for that. Steve was very cinematically inclined. There were a lot of directors who were basically shooting radio shows. We needed to get someone who would move things along so it didn't become too static.

And do you know that the NBC television news department ultimately shot the show down? It went from being the best pilot of the year--it was definitely going on the air-to being absolutely buried by them, which is why no one has never heard of it.

OUTRÉ: What year was that?

LANDAU: It was1970 or 1971. Steve celebrated his 24th birthday on our set, that's how young he was.

OUTRÉ: You've received a lot of honors and awards from the European community.

LANDAU: I was recently honored in France. At the Grand Prix Theatre I spent an evening there for my television work: Mission: Impossible, Space 1999, The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. They sing along with the theme songs over there; it's amazing. There's an incredible mix of people who go to these events. They are everything from very serious intellectual people to just regular television fans.

OUTRÉ: Were you able to work directly with Rod Serling when you did the Twilight Zone?

LANDAU: Oh, yes. The first Twilight Zone episode I did ["Mr. Denton on Doomsday"] was in 1959; I did another one a few years later ["The Jeopardy Room," 1964]. We sat around a table, as they did in the days of live television old live days. Rod was at the head of the table, and there was the cast and the director. We would read the script and play with it-"How would this sound? What do you think of this?"-until we got on our feet.

OUTRÉ: The Twilight Zone stories were more like twenty-three-minute morality plays than television scripts. Do you think that more creativity was allowed in those days?

LANDAU: No question. The advertisers didn't have the hold on the material as they do now. They were very imaginative back then. Today, they're a lot of experts with no sense of history. It's hard to generalize, but ratings are so important now that the chance of giving a show some time to develop and build a audience is practically nil, and that's the main change. If you don't get numbers immediately, you're off the air. Mission: Impossible would not have made it in these days. Mission did not get numbers for the first season, and it was only in the summer reruns that it started catching on. Then it was the following year that it really caught on. But in the beginning, we were almost cancelled. One of the things that saved us was that [network president] Bill Paley liked the show. Also, one of our producers was Lucille Ball, and she was threatening CBS too. The reason it stayed on the air was a lot of luck, frankly, and then it became a big hit. In today's climate it would not have been given the chance.

OUTRÉ: Do you prefer acting in films or performing on stage?

LANDAU: I enjoy them both. For an actor, the beauty of the theatre and film is that you have a thousand strangers in a room, and hopefully every one of them is having the same experience in time, which is very hard to achieve. You can get ten of your best friends in your living room, and to get them all to feel the same thing at the same moment is very difficult. To get a thousand strangers in a room to literally go through the same experience together is quite spontaneous and instantaneous. It really is a wonderful way of touching people, moving them, affecting them. You're never going to change the world, but you certainly can enlighten people. The main thing is that we are all very much the same-that's the bottom line. And when a performance works, it's because you're touching those nerves in all people.

Previous Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Contents