(To the right, George Maharis as Buzz and Martin Milner as Tod in Route 66)
I was just 12 years old when the idea of a Route 66 first entered my impressionable mind. It was the
fall of 1960, and I was sitting on the floor in front of our television as
Nelson Riddle’s jazzy moving-down-the-road theme first filled the room and the
screen filled with Tod and Buzz making their across America in Tod’s Corvette.
Nothing, to me, was better than the CBS series Route 66, and I was a happy soul the
other day when my complete DVD set of all four seasons by the Shout! Factory arrived. This was “the iconic television series of
the 1960s,” writes Nat Segaloff in his biography of screenwriter Stirling
Silliphant, whose hip, existential, Zen-like scripts made the show television’s
own crossroads between 1950s Beat and late ‘60s Hip.
This was a series that put Yale-educated Tod Stiles, played
by Martin Milner, and Hell’s Kitchen survivor Buzz Murdock, played by George
Maharis, on the road every week “looking not for adventure but … for meaning,”
journalist Michael Ventura has written. “Route
66 was not a television show, it was a promise. A weekly training film. A
way out and through and over.”
Tod and Buzz traveled America, that vast, story-rich
landscape many New Yorkers and Angelenos dismiss as the “flyover”. They went
down the same road Woody Guthrie hitchhiked with his guitar, the same road John
Steinbeck’s Okies in The Grapes of Wrath
traveled in the Great Depression, the same road yours truly hitchhiked in 1969
and wrote about in a 2009 short story Alfred
Hitchcock Mystery Magazine liked enough to submit for an Edgar Award.
This was a working class show. Every week Tod and Buzz would
roll their sleeves up to do a job on an oil rig or in a chicken farm or on a shrimp
boat. A favorite character actor would usually join them—Keenan Wynn, Janice
Rule, Susan Oliver, Robert Duvall, Whit Bissell, Martin Balsam, Nina Foch, Mike
Yellin, Lois Nettleton. Occasionally a Sam Peckinpah or Robert Altman would
direct. Silliphant’s magic pen, also seen in the earlier landmark TV series Naked City, made sure that plot didn't overrule character and also that the show always had something to say.
The pilot for the series took place way off Route 66 in
Mississippi, where a local boss played by Everett Sloan rules his town like a
little Mussolini. Another early segment puts Tod and Buzz on a shrimp boat at
Grand Isle, Louisiana, where Charlotte Duval, played by Janice Rule, proves
herself in a man’s world by saving her suitor’s boat during a hurricane.
Back in those days, the network execs gave Silliphant and
producer Bert Leonard total control, a kind of artist’s paradise. Silliphant
hit the highway ahead of cast and crew for the on location filming, staying in
hotels and motels along “the mother road,” checking out the local hangouts and
talking with folks about local stories and legends.
When the gig finally was up—Maharis left halfway through the
third season, replaced by Glenn Corbett, and the show never quite recovered—and
the last segment aired on March 13, 1964, the execs decided they’d allowed all the
artistic license they could stand. “Before long, network executives whose hands-on
experience had been limited to changing the channel were demanding to approve
not just finished teleplays but story ideas, casting, locations, production
crew, and even the costumes and wallpaper,” Segaloff writes. “Focus groups
replaced intuition and experience.”
Hardly any life after life followed the end of the road for Route 66. Original negatives were hard
to find. Lawyers and corporations tied up opportunities to show it to a new
generation. When Shout! Factory came
out with the DVD collection in 2012, the media paid little or no attention. “Route 66 represents something of an
evolutionary dead end for the TV drama,” writes Todd VanDerWerff. “It was an
attempt to blend the closed-off, social-issues-based storytelling of the best
anthology series with the recurring characters of a more traditional drama
series. It’s an approach that still works in other countries—Doctor Who springs to mind—but has more
or less died out in the U.S.”
The show’s fate has been similar to the road that gave it
its name. Route 66 was named one of the nation’s most endangered historic
places in 2018, a victim both of development and neglect.
What television viewers saw in Route 66 was an “embrace of an American counterculture that was
slowly moving into the mainstream eye,” VanDerWerff writes. “Characters on Route 66 did drugs or agitated for
political positions that would have been seen as far left even a decade prior.”
In other words, Route 66 was shaking
things up years before the Sixties became the Sixties. Maybe that’s
one reason my 12-year-old self liked it so much.