My Favorite 1960s Dragnet #16: Burglary: Mister
This episode introduces us to Daniel Loomis, Mr. Daniel Loomis. The Story begins with Mr. Loomis walking off with everything his wife’s blind grandmother owned. And from there, we learn to really hate the guy as we learn that he stole the money for his own mother’s funeral and has another wife.
This episode was noted for marking a falling out between Jack Webb and Burt Prelutsky, who wrote seven episodes for season three, but only this one episode for Season Four. Pretulsky wrote:
In the script, the perp had a fondness for bowling. For him, it was a pastime that approached a compulsion. The way I had it, he committed a couple of crimes involving bowling alleys, was arrested while trying to pick up a 7-10 spare, and in between there was a lot of Friday-Gannon banter that revolved around bowling.
Webb wanted to change the compulsion to butterflies, partly because someone he’d grown up around somone that had that compulsion, and mostly because it would avoid a trip off the studio lot. Pretulsky had a solution for the problem:
Through the use of sound effects and a glass counter full of bowling shoes and score sheets, I advised, we could easily indicate the venue in the earlier scenes. And instead of arresting the perp on the lanes, Friday and Gannon could cuff him at the coke machine.
However, all was not well between the two:
For in Jack Webb’s world, I had committed the unpardonable sin. The problem wasn’t that I’d come up with the solution to his problem. It was that just prior to solving it, I had told him that I’d done all the work on the script that I was contracted to do, work that he’d already accepted and approved of, and that if he insisted on my turning our villain into a butterfly collector, it would entail a page-one rewrite. In other words, I would expect to be paid to write that brand-new script he had in mind.
Watching the episode as shot, only two scenes actually involved bowling. The core of the story was about the incredible Mr. Loomis’ career in crime not his career in bowling. I can sympathize with why Webb felt like Prelutsky was trying to shake him down for more money when a page 1 rewrite really doesn’t seem necessary. As a writer, I can also understand Prelutsky fighting for his vision. He just may have chosen the wrong tactic to use with Webb.
