Who would have thought that the legendary stone-faced, stacatto-spoken Joe Friday would be responsible for bringing to the screen his polar opposites: the completely natural, boyishly charming team of Officers Reed and Malloy, serving and protecting the streets of Los Angeles--acting like real human beings?
Television's introduction to the routine of uniformed policemen on their daily patrol, Adam-12 was the brainchild of the late Robert Cinader, a name usually identified with the long-running Emergency
Tom Williams, who worked behind the scenes on Adam-12 and was its producer for the last two years, told us recently, "Bob Cinader" [pronounced SIN'-uh'-der] was working as associate producer on Dragnet when he came up with this idea, because there had never been a uniformed policemen show except for Car 54, and that was a comedy."
"And Webb said, 'Yeah, that's a great idea. Why don't you go investigate it?'" The problem was in choosing just the right title. "Cinader wanted to call it 17-Adam-something," recalls Tom. "Seventeen is the number of the division--he was riding with policemen in that division to get his idea for the story--and Adam means it's a two-man car and 12 is the area that it works out of.
"There's a Lt. Dan Cooke who was a technical advisor on Dragnet, who says that when Jack was having difficulty coming up with a title, he suggested One-Adam-81 cuz that was his car number when he was a policeman, and Webb didn't like that number; then he suggested Adam-48, another car he worked.
Then they started out with Adam-1, Adam-2, and when they got to Adam-12, Webb stopped and said, "That's it."
It was Webb's clout that brought the show to the screen. "If it weren't for Webb it would have just sat there--he could sell anything!" enthuses Tom. "When he sold Emergency he sold it without a pilot."
Tom, who worked on Dragnet, was in on Adam-12 from its first mention, having begun his association with Webb, he laughs, as "a drinking buddy." That's how you become a production assistant. You're just a friend of the family, and then if you play your cards right, they let you become something!"
Tom was assigned a task that would result in one of the most memorable things about the series: "I picked the girl who said, 'One Adam-12, One-Adam-12.' That was Sharon Claridge. She was the real radio operator in the valley." Tom had brought tapes of three real dispatchers to Webb, who made the final decision. The experience in itself was especially memorable for Tom. "The night I was there picking girls is the night they shot Robert Kennedy.
I was in there and they said, 'Stand by--you'll never see this happen again!' "There's a master switch where the guy talks to the whole city of police cars. He pushed a button and this big buzzer went off and he says 'Attention all units. The Los Angeles Police Department is now on Stand-By status. This is an emergency situation. Everyone will go to their location until further notice.'
"It was just like we had been bombed! And then they announced what had happened. "They brought Sirhan Sirhan into the building and I didn't even know it. I was downstairs in the radio room and they had him up on the third floor in sombody's office because they didn't want anyone to know where he was; they were afraid of a Jack Ruby type of situation.
"So they got the people who weren't policemen yet, they were still going to the police academy, and they armed them and put them on all the doors of the police building so they wouldn't let anybody in without identification.
And when everybody came to work in the morning they wouldn't let 'em in. And these deputy chiefs said, 'Young man, don't you know who I am?' He said, 'Not without identification, sir.' Which was perfect because they couldn't do anything to these guys because they were just following orders.
I went out to the coffee truck at about four o'clock in the morning and tried to get back in and the guy wouldn't let me in. I said, 'I just walked by you!' He says, 'You got identification?"
The basis for Adam-12 was brilliantly simple. Tom recalls, "All you had to do was come up with a main theme of an idea of what goes on during the show, like, you've got a bad police car that won't work, or something like that. "Then you got these individual problems of police work. You pay the $50 to the policeman, who hands him the story, and you get four stories and you tie those all together with this theme."
The result was a show that could never bore any viewer: a real-life look at the fast-moving montage of calls that policemen handle during a shift. And no matter how odd the ocassional call might be--like the man who reported that his lawn was stolen--the backbone was Jack Webb's first credo: make it real.
Well, reality in most senses. Where they did veer from reality was the show's own effort to protect and to serve. As Tom Williams told us, "We did things with the technical advisor there all the time. But sometimes we would do something intentional--we didn't want to be a training film for bad guys!
"So we did not let them know that, like, on each tail light on automobiles it tells what year the car is, so you can order a new one for that car. So if you come up behind a car and you look at the tail light, you see what the number is, you know what year it is.
And you ask the driver, if you think he doesn't own this car, 'What year is this car?' If he doesn't come up with with right year...We couldn't give that away. "We would never give away that the best place to find fingerprints was behind the mirror, because when a guy gets in to steal a car, he adjusts the mirror. We would never give away something like that. And then soon all these other police shows came in, they gave away everything!"
Working on Adam-12 was the perfect way for the little boy in every man to act out the cops-and-robbers fantasy, and Tom experienced how it felt to play both sides. "I had a police radio in my car," he recalls. "I showed up at a liquor store robbery before the police did one night. And when I got there I realized that I didn't know what to do, because when they came up, if I were to drive away they would chase after me. "If I stayed there with the car running they would throw me on the ground, thinking I was part of the robbery. I didn't know what to do.
"Out of the corner of my eye I could see they're coming down the street; there's this car coming down the street; there's this car with its lights off, and I could see the little red lights on top of it. "You know," Tom chuckles, in movies we put on the sirens and everything, but they don't do that in real life--they sneak in.
Anyway, this police car came in and I heard the door open--and their lights don't go on when the doors open--I just hear this guy holler: 'Get outta the car!!" And I hollered back, 'I'm with Adam-12! And he, with a little expletive, yelled, " don't care who you're with. Get your hands up and come out of that car.'
"And I could hear the shotgun: PING. The shell going into the case. And it's something we could never do, we could never seem to get that real sound of a real shell going into the chamber. Your hair crawls! You just go: Oh my God, I'm dead.
So I got out, opening the door from the outside handle, knowing that's the best way so they could see my hands. And I finally got out and as I started walking toward them, the other guy said, 'No, that's right, he is with Adam-12.'
Fortunately they recognized me, otherwise I would've been on the ground!" "Riding with policemen you would see the acts that they go through. I mean, they're just joking around, having fun, and then all of a sudden they go to pull somebody over--it's all business.
And then comes 'the act,' because they must prove that they are in charge of the situation. And as the person that's getting arrested, if you ever say: 'You can't do that to me!' you're in trouble because," Tom laughs, "you're arousing their competitive spirit--and that's something you never want to do!
"I always get so angry with television shows where the policeman comes up and puts his hand on the guy's arm and the guy says, 'Don't touch me!' and he pulls away. If that happened in the real street, the guy'd be hit in the head and on the floor.
"What's even more ridiculous is when you've got some guys who are streetwise and they'll say that they really have to go to the bathroom. And if you're by yourself, you don't let him go, because he's only said that so you'll undo his handcuffs so he can beat the hell out of ya. You tell him, 'Pee in your pants. I don't care what happens to you.' "So it is a frightening situation, the acts that they go through in an arrest.
One of the top forces in today's world of action-adventure TV found himself in a frightening situation while cutting his teeth in the business. Tom remembers, "Steve Cannell was our story editor. He was standing on the wrong side of a telephone pole one time when there was a shoot-out!
"He was riding with the policemen, trying to get stories. What they usually do if you ever get in a pursuit is let you off at the corner and they take off. But they said, 'Okay, get over there, stand over here,' and then went chasing after this guy. "And PLING! PLING! All of a sudden he realized, 'Oh, the guy's back the other way!' He was on the wrong side of the pole!"