People's Faces

"I felt it was time for television to get out of the little tap-dancing acts," said Phillips Lord last week. "I thought: let's do it stark naked, the way they do in Italian films."

To get his naked quality, Lord, 47-year-old veteran radio producer (Seth Parker; Gang Busters; Mr. District Attorney; We, the People), combs New York City for likely-looking characters. His scouts prowl the Bowery and Broadway, hang around fight arenas and ballparks, wander Brooklyn and Harlem slums. The people they find--including rum-soaked derelicts, strapping longshoremen, street-corner evangelists, wispy old ladies--become the actors in The Black Robe (Wed. 8:30 p.m. E.D.T., NBC-TV), highstrung Phillips Lord's first TV venture.

The Black Robe's ragtag characters shamble through a fictitious police court. Their problems range from strong-arm felonies to a housewives' quarrel over the basement washing machine. The only professional actor in the shifting cast is the judge. None of the others even try to memorize lines. Instead, they are rehearsed over & over in incidents gathered from court stenographers, judges, police reporters, detectives and the files of the Better Business Bureau. Lord encourages them to act out the basic drama in their own words.

"We broke all the TV rules & regulations on this show," says Lord. "The camera doesn't shift around, it stays on people's faces. The only time it moves is to show the bag of their trousers or the length of a sleeve. The courtroom is only in there for conflict--I wanted just to look at people's faces."

On the basis of his radio successes, Lord's new show can probably look forward to a profitable run. But Lord will no longer have anything to do with it. Back in his early days in radio, he sometimes wrote and directed as many as four shows at once. Today, as soon as a show is under way, he leases it to anyone who wants it--a network, advertising agency or another producer.

This week, the as-yet-unsponsored Black Robe goes on the TV screen for the fifth time, and Lord--satisfied with its format--has turned it over to ex-Movie Director Ed Sutherland, who will run it for NBC. Heading north to his 3,000-acre island off Mt. Desert in Maine, Lord carried with him the idea for another TV show. "I'm going to call it Sidewalks of New York," he said. "It might open just showing people's feet as they walk along, or maybe just their heads. And I'll show reflections of people's faces in store windows. It'll be an artistic thing. Like a French movie. But I haven't decided yet what the conflict will be."

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