BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yep, the '50s was a bad decade to be in show biz in America, so bad that one entrepreneurial producer headed to England, where she became the driving force behind a show that became a blockbuster on American network TV. Sarah Fishko of WNYC, our producing station, has the story.
[THEME MUSIC/THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD]
SARA FISHKO: No, not Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as Robin in the '20s, or Errol Flynn in the '30s, the Robin Hood to remember was a 1950s TV series starring the handsome and dashing Richard Greene -
[CLIP]:
RICHARD GREENE AS ROBIN HOOD: You caught this fellow stealing a deer?
ACTOR: Yes, and we're just carrying out the punishment. We're Royal Foresters.
[END CLIP]
SARA FISHKO: - playing our kind and indignant hero, always sticking up for the underdog.
[CLIP]:
RICHARD GREENE AS ROBIN HOOD: You’re going to do that to him just for killing a deer?
[END CLIP]
[THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD THEME SONG]
PAUL BUHLE: It was the very first British-produced series to be successful in American television.
SARA FISHKO: Author Paul Buhle.
PAUL BUHLE: And it was the first British show to have a song to go along with it that became an actual hit in the U.S. and in Europe. And it ends: “Feared by the bad, loved by the good. Robin Hood.”
MAN SINGING: Robin Hood! Robin Hood! Robin Hood!
SARA FISHKO: Buhler’s book, with Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight, fills in the remarkable back story of the program, which began with a radical entrepreneur named Hannah Weinstein. Weinstein had for years worked on left-leaning projects and campaigns, but as Red baiting and blacklisting rose in the U.S. in that period, she felt she might be more comfortable, shall we say, elsewhere, and she went overseas to produce for TV.
PAUL BUHLE: She and people working with her invented very, very low-cost ways of producing television, and one of the ones best known in television lore is having this one bush on wheels that they moved from one of the set to another.
SARA FISHKO: In Weinstein’s new London production company, Sapphire Films, they also used another clever strategy. They worked with a stable of American writers who'd been accused of being Communist Party members and sympathizers and had been blacklisted in the U.S. Hiring them served a double purpose. It yielded inexpensive, high-quality scripts, and Weinstein was also providing desperately needed work for the writers, who were now completely unemployable in their own country, under their own names.
ALBERT RUBEN: I was her story editor on Robin Hood.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
SARA FISHKO: Albert Ruben was a friend of the producer hired for his trustworthiness, if not his expertise in television.
[SOUNDTRACK/UP AND UNDER]
ALBERT RUBEN: I knew virtually nothing. It was a really sink-or-swim situation.
SARA FISHKO: The main writers for the series were big time movie writers, people like Ring Lardner, Jr., who’d written Woman of the Year, Waldo Salt, screenwriter of The Flame and the Arrow and, much later, the writer of Midnight Cowboy, and Ian Hunter, with a list of Hollywood credits a mile long. Now they were churning out Robin Hood episodes in secret under assumed names.
[CLIP]:
ACTOR: There we are, Robin, on its way to the tax coffers of Prince John.
[END CLIP]
ALBERT RUBEN: Two of her writers were Academy Award winners, which of course you never could have acquired for anything near the salary [LAUGHS] she paid unless they'd been on the blacklist.
SARA FISHKO: Robin Hood was work they could get in the days when one TV season meant 39 episodes. Story editor Ruben was in England and the writers were in America, because in addition to being unemployable, some had had their passports revoked. So a season of necessarily secret communications began, and communication was different in 1956.
ALBERT RUBEN: It all had to be done by snail mail.
SARA FISHKO: Ruben’s job was to write lengthy story summaries and mail them to the writers.
ALBERT RUBEN: They always signed their communication “Will Scarlet and Friar Tuck.” And so I wrote to them as such – W.S. and F. T.
SARA FISHKO: Everything was passed through a third party, of course, to avoid any identification.
ALBERT RUBEN: And then we'd get back the scripts.
[ROBIN HOOD FANFARE/MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
SARA FISHKO: The scripts, not surprisingly, reflected the values of their writers. Years later, Ring Lardner, Jr. noted that the series gave him plenty of opportunities for oblique social comment on issues and institutions of Eisenhower-era America. And so it went.
[CLIP]:
ACTOR: I came to die here, where they can't find my body, so Sir Charles can't collect his tax.
[SOUND TRAILS OFF][END CLIP]
SARA FISHKO: One episode has an unfair property tax placed on the poor serfs.
[CLIP]:
ACTOR: Properly speaking, a serf owns nothing except his stomach. But we enjoy generous customs on this manor.
[END CLIP]
SARA FISHKO: And Robin and his men work to restore justice to the underclass.
[CLIP]:
RICHARD GREENE AS ROBIN HOOD: I’d like to see his face when he hears he isn't gonna get my ox.
[LAUGHTER][END CLIP]
SARA FISHKO: In another, loyalties and allegiances are tested, as the rulers try to infiltrate the band of outlaws -
[CLIP]:
ACTOR: We must convince them that Robin has only one reason for being an outlaw, his own personal profit.
[END CLIP]
SARA FISHKO: - and then try to force them to betray Robin.
ACTOR: So you thought you’d make fools of us with your playacting.
[END CLIP]
SARA FISHKO: Sound familiar?
ACTOR: My men could give you lessons in that. They saw through you from the first.
[AUDIO TRAILS OFF][END CLIP]
SARA FISHKO: There’s even an episode about a witch hunt.
[CLIP]:
ACTOR: We saw her in the woods last night in Matt’s garden. She met a demon there.
ACTRESS: It looked like Satan himself. I think I saw his horns.
[END CLIP]
SARA FISHKO: Robin has to save a village woman who would be burned at the stake for conspiring with the devil.
[CLIP]:
ACTOR: Bring her to trial, I say.
[CROWD HUBBUB][END CLIP]
SARA FISHKO: Sometimes the episodes went further afield.
ACTRESS: This ship is bringing Jewish refugees who've lost their homes, and they're here to find new ones.
[SOUNJD UP AND UNDER]
ALBERT RUBEN: I would say one of the most in - intriguing episodes for me was the episode treating anti-Semitism, which basically has Robin Hood defending a merchant banker in York and his daughter, against being dispossessed by royalty.
[CLIP]:
ACTOR: Surely, my lord sheriff, the idea of a whole shipload of these people coming here with their foreign un-English ways is as intolerable to you as it is to every right-thinking person!
[SOUND TRAILS OFF][END CLIP]
ALBERT RUBEN: In the context of 1954 and the Rosenbergs, and so forth, and so forth, uh, pretty clear.
[SINGING/ROBIN HOOD/UP AND UNDER]
SARA FISHKO: The Adventures of Robin Hood was an instant hit on both sides of the Atlantic. It ran for several seasons on CBS. And, of course, the more successful it became, the harder it was to conceal the identities of its band of merry blacklisted writers. Albert Ruben stood fast. Finally, after a long stretch, he was dispatched to New York for an important meeting with his writers. There they were, face to face, alias Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet and the man who'd covered for them, their devoted story editor.
[SINGING, LAUGHTER FROM SOUNDTRACK]
ALBERT RUBEN: That was a big throw-your-arms-around-each-other moment. That was an opportunity for us to do some laughing and raise a drink.
SARA FISHKO: So here’s to The Adventures of Robin Hood. You couldn't make this story up: A band of writers forced to be outlaws, writing in secret about a band of outlaws, with values and politics intact, for four years, in primetime, a bull’s eye, you might say.
MAN SINGING: Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.
SARA FISHKO: For On the Media, I'm Sarah Fishko.
MAN SINGING: He called the greatest archers to a tavern on the green. They vowed to help the people of the king. They handled all the trouble on the English country scene, and still found plenty of time to sing.
[MUSIC/SINGING FADE]
