For birthday, Margie gave me two of the books from my Amazon wish list: Just the Facts, Ma’am: The Authorized Biography of Jack Webb (Moyer and Alvarez), and My Name’s Friday (Hayde).
I’ll probably do more thorough reviews on Amazon, but the latter book is a much better read — and a better biography of Webb, and of his cinematic works.
The former work gets into more detail in some places, due to a number of interviews — but is clearly twisted by those interviews, and talks of Webb and his works uncritically. The narrative is difficult to follow, and twists and turns on itself, and has an annoying tendancy to include lots of weaselly “seems” and “appears” and “is said to,” even though these are never directly footnoted. There is a strong bibliography in the back, and the writers were working with Webb’s daughter before her death — which both explains some of the early detail on Webb’s life, as well as the generally favorable tone they give to the man.
Hayde’s work is organized well and chronologically. All of Webb’s works, including the different renditions of Dragnet are gone into in detail, and Webb’s evolving relationship to the show, and to his own creative genius and his Hollywood
“star” are made understandable.
Most people have a stereotyped view of Webb and his “wooden” Sgt. Friday style, not realizing that he was a pioneer of early television, both stylistically and technically, and that his contributions have affected TV dramas to this day. Law & Order‘s Dick Wolf is the first to credit Webb as an inspiration for his show. While it’s easy today to poke fun at Webb, consider the “watchability” of other dramas of the different eras he produced in — Dragnet on the radio (’49-’55), and on TV (’51-’59, ’67-’70), not to mention Adam-12 and Emergency. His impact on the medium was at least that of a Lear or a Bochco.
Good stuff. Thanks for the gifts, honey.