"My Name's Friday. I'm a cop."
(8 of 8)
Places to Go. Webb talks of his marriage with puzzled regret. But he has no apologies for shaking off those he felt were not sufficiently fleet of foot (Rosenberg, who sued him for $300,000, gets $625 a week from Dragnet; Meshekoff ended up with more than a million dollars from the M.C.A. sale). "Hollywood," Webb says bitterly, "is full of guys who are expert at riding on your back and putting their hands in your pocket. What the hell have they done since they left me? You just show me their track records. All these suits we've settled out of court. But you wait. The next one, I'm going to fight it till I die. Some of these money men tell me they create, too. They don't create as much as the worst bit actor in the show. But we've got people who do ... people with pride . . . We're ready to go."
Webb is full of furious ideas on places to go. Last week Writer Dick Breen was back in the fold, collaborating with him on a full-length Dragnet motion picture to be released by Warner Bros. Simultaneously, Webb was planning a new television program called Pete Kelley's Blues —a show in which he plans to play a Prohibition-era cornet player, and combine tales of crime, the nostalgia of the '20s and the surging sound of hot jazz in one half-hour package. He wants to produce and direct a motion picture on the life of Jazz Immortal Bix Beiderbecke. And when television goes to color? Who knows what shifts of power between the networks and Hollywood's picture factories might occur, what new and dazzling heights might be revealed to a man who lives to climb? Who knows (does not every climber ask it in the quiet of the night) how far a man might fall?
*On the Pacific Coast: 9 Pm. P.S.T.