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The Illustrated Guide to I Spy
 Robert Culp Interview 1
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The following excerpts are taken from:
”The Greatest American Hero's ROBERT CULP - A Volatile Talent in the Electronic Wasteland”
by DON McGREGOR
(This article appeared originally in the January 1982 issue of StarLog)
In 1965 Robert Culp and Bill Cosby broke the racial barrier on network television in a series called “I SPY” - they were one of the great screen-teams of all time. They had a special rapport, a give and take, a beautiful camaraderie that is too seldom seen in real life, as Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott. Besides being one of the two stars of “I SPY”, Culp authored seven of its most memorable scripts - stories with evocative scenes and brooding dialogue, as with the Warlord Chuang remembering a game of musical chairs in the 1967 episode called, “The Warlord”:
“There is a game I remember seeing in England. A game of child's play. To you perhaps, quite common. But to me strange, fascinating. The children dance around the chairs. One by one the chairs are removed and the children who have lost a place in the game drop out ... one by one. A whole history of activity, laughter, and shouting, about the chairs. Finally at the end, all the children have been forced out of the game ... and only one child remains ... the act of winning, to win ... (cold, quiet, distant) ... the child must finish ... alone. One child and one chair. And at last the game is over.”
Robert Culp isn't Kelly Robinson anymore. These days, he plays the frenetic, dogmatic FBI agent, Bill Maxwell, on ABC's “The Greatest American Hero.” Culp invests Maxwell with a manic energy and patriotic fervor that makes Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.'s Lew Erskine (on TV's FBI) look like a dope-dealing anarchist.
As with many creative projects there was a circuitous route that linked “The Greatest American Hero” creator, Stephen J. Cannell, with Culp. Culp discusses those beginnings with the natural rhythm of an innate storyteller, with the pauses and intonations that let you know that telling stories is an exquisite, honorable tradition.
“Stephen Cannell doesn't kid around. He's a real straight-shooter,” states Culp. “Let me get that in there right now. I have never had a professional association with anybody - ever! - on the level of producer or executive producer that I have enjoyed so much. The guy just wins all the laurels going that way hands down. How he does what he does, having to juggle volatile talents like Bill Katt and myself, against his own, which are equally volatile, and the network, which is more volatile than anybody ... all of us put together ... when I say volatile I mean it could be a liquid and within an hour it can turn into a gas, and you've lost it!” He chuckles at the image. “A bad gas. Passing gas.”
Culp hasn't always spoken so highly of people in control of series he has worked in. His relationship with producer Vincent Fennelly of “Trackdown,” his first series in 1957, was turbulent.
Culp began writing scripts during “Trackdown,” and when he undertook his second series, “I SPY,” he wrote seven of the scripts, one of which received an Emmy nomination. His episodes, “The Loser,' “The WarLord,” “The Enchanted Cottage,”{this became "Magic Mirror"} and “Home to Judgement,” are some of the most powerful television dramas since Sterling Silliphant's “Route 66” and “Naked City” days and Rod Serling's “Twilight Zone.”
“I'd had the word out for a long, long time, since “I SPY” folded, which was January 1968, that I would never consider doing another television series. I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to read any pilots. If you've got a pilot, that's fine, give it to somebody else,” he says easily, perhaps remembering the few days of vacation he had during the three years of making “I SPY.” “A friend of mine said, `I know how you feel, but if you don't read this, “just read it,” you're making a big mistake.' Well, if someone whose opinion I respect says a thing like that to me, I'm going to sit down and read it.”
He goes on to tell of his work on “The Greatest American Hero”
”We jumped into it, and we shot hot and heavy for two -and-a-quarter weeks, and we all knew we had a real good show! It was really cooking! We had a marvelous director Rod Holcomb, a huge man with a dynamic sense of humor. We started to seesaw and build stuff, pyramid ideas upon one another while we were working from the printed page.” Culp's enthusiasm for his work begins to show, like a flame leaping up a trellis. “I was very unsure of the character, I knew I wanted to play ;the guy because I had to. Nobody had ever played this character on TV, or anything like him.”
Robert Culp wrote an episode for “The Greatest American Hero,” based on his grandfather. He also found he had a great deal in common with Stephen Cannell
“I had been drawing in my head from the same sources he had. Plus I had the added value of my grandfather. who oddly enough, fits into this character, as he has fit into all the really neat stuff that I've done in my lifetime.”
Robert Culp played his grandfather in “The Greatest American Hero.”
Culp's grandfather, Joe Collins, was not only the inspirational source for Bill Maxwell, but also for Kelly Robinson's Uncle Harry in “Home to Judgement.” Will Geer portrayed the farmer with the keen eye, the firm hand, and the reassuring wisdom. Una Merkle played his grandmother/aunt. It is quite possible that someone saw Will Geer as Uncle Harry and decided he was perfect for the role of the grandfather on “The Waltons.”
Mr. Collins was 60 years old when Culp was born, but he was Culp's most affecting teacher. His love and respect for his grandfather is still evident, though he died many years ago.
In “Home to Judgement,” Kelly has returned to the home of his youth, with golden afternoons and comic strips in his memory, but he has returned with killers on his trail, and equates himself to sticks of dynamite, a far different kind of agent than Bill Maxwell. Maxwell seldom questions the means and ethics of his profession. Culp did not find any difficulty in playing a character so far removed from the other he is most famous for.
“I'm older by 15 years than when I did “I SPY,” Culp says carefully, considering the differences of time and character. “I lived through the thick and thin of the `60s, and the movement. Out on the other side, I am not the same guy that I was then. I'm just not the same human being. My thinking processes are not the same, either. But above and beyond everything else, when I'm acting, as opposed, to let's say writing, or directing, or producing, when I'm acting it is the joy and delight of my life to find characters who are absolutely idiosyncratic ... that are living, walking contradictions to themselves.”
During his days doing “I SPY,” Culp not only wrote, directed, and acted in episodes, he also choreographed his own stunts. In one episode he fenced with samurai swords, in another he used Martial Arts techniques to take out guest villain Jack Cassidy. All of this was before Bruce Lee brought the martial arts to American consciousness. Culp does not pursue these elaborate stunts as fervently these days.
“I finished the fight yesterday, and by nightfall I couldn't even move. I'm not gonna do that stuff anymore,” he says with good humor. “I'm 51 years old. Give me a break.” He recalls some of those “I SPY” stunts. “Yeah, I used to do all that stuff till I was 35, and one morning I did this very elaborate stunt, series of stunts, swinging on a bunch of pipes on the backside of a yacht in Greece. It was really a great set of stunts. A lot of kips, walking on top, kicking guys over the side, jumping down. It was terrific. The following morning I couldn't get out of bed. I said, `I'm 35, I'm through with this sh*t.' I stopped doing it after that.'”
Fights and stiffening joints aside, Culp hasn't given up his love affair with writing …
Robert Culp continues to write, but one cannot fail to run into problems with the networks.
There is a trick, apparently, that many ruling powers of the entertainment media have. When something seems to violate the narrow confinements they have set for genre material, when it appears that the creative team have gone beyond the rigidly defined formula they have devised for a specific genre, they often appear to get panicky, as if they are afraid they have stepped too far out onto thin ice. Since the ruling powers seldom like to admit fear, of cracked ice or anything else, they offer ambiguous phrases meant to obfuscate the issue. This attitude not only shows a disrespect for the genre from which they hope to make a fortune, but also to the audience they hope to attract. This is a perennial battle, the necessity for writers, actors and directors to go beyond what they have done before, to make something fresh out of the stale clay they have been handed. It is a battle that is sometimes won, and more often, lost.
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