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Despite the big money they earn the shows are filmed on a tight budget: around ?40,000 and three days for each half-hour. With rare exceptions, the all-important night scenes are faked on the back lots of Hollywood; to save overtime wages, these are shot in daylight with the cameras stopped down or filtered. Most of the all-important fights are faked too. Some actors, e.g., Craig Stevens, who was once an amateur boxer, like to throw their own fists in the closeups, but directors are leary of such heroics. So far in 51 scraps, Stevens has had only one accident—a torn fingernail. Darren (Mike Hammer) McGavin has also had only one accident: a broken rib. Still, the producers prefer the standard technique of organizing camera angles so that stunt men can take over. (The stunt men get paid well; they can afford an occasional puffed lip.) The heroes must survive, pressed, currycombed and unscrambled.' for next week's case.
Not only the Private Eyes themselves are dry-cleaned. In a TV production, violence becomes strangely stylized; the corpse may have been plugged by a .45 at point-blank range, but there is only a neat hole in the otherwise unsullied forehead. The back of the skull is intact; there are no brains on the rug. In some of these spruced-up shooting matches, the Eyes carry .38s, each with a short sleeve welded inside the barrel so that real bullets cannot be fired. The blanks the pistols accommodate cost only a dime apiece. For scenes when the audience actually sees a man shot down, "blood capsules" fired from compressed air guns splatter against Plexiglas plates hidden beneath the victim's clothing. There are special bullets filled with flaked aluminum to simulate shattering glass; others are packed with a sticky powder to make telltale puffs of dust when they ricochet off a wall.
All this special Private Eye technique has opened up a new area of employment for talented extras, men who know how to simulate the absolute stillness of death (corpses are embarrassing when they breathe), who know how to wear a cop's uniform with ease. On location in Manhattan, actor cops get up to $100 for a day's work ($22.05 if they have no lines). Real New York policemen pound their beats for salaries starting at $15 a day.
Taboos of the Tube. For writers, too, the Private Eye shows make a socko source of income. For them, the big trick is the art of telling a story without tripping over the plot. The picture on the tube cries for action; the detective who takes time out to think becomes tedious. It was different on radio, says Writer-Producer Dick Carr, a veteran of radio's Richard Diamond and now a writer on TV's Staccato. "In radio you could always use a narrator to tie up the loose ends. I could cover any hour TV show today in one half-hour of radio with the use of narration. The hour TV show has room for only a half-hour of ideas."