By 1974, Joseph Wambaugh was at a crossroads. His first two novels, The New Centurions and The Blue Knight1, had been inordinately successful, resulting in adaptations on both cinema and television screens and the kind of fame that was beginning to interfere with his police duties. Wambaugh had also annoyed the brass with his unconventional work, not least because he had violated Department policy by not submitting his manuscripts for editorial approval: “The Chief’s public comment was that he was glad Sergeant Wambaugh is making a lot of money because he won’t have a job much longer.”
Into the fray came TV’s most recognisable cop, Jack Webb, who had parlayed his success as Dragnet’s Joe Friday into a lucrative career as producer (Dragnet spin-off Adam-12 was the second-longest running television show after the original), as well as semi-official cheerleader for Chief of Police William Parker2 and the LAPD. Webb agreed to review Wambaugh’s latest manuscript, The Choirboys, and protect the author from being fired. When Wambaugh went to retrieve the manuscript, however, his future looked bleak: “I said to my partner that the manuscript was heavier than when I brought it here. Every place where Webb worried about the content, he placed a paperclip – five hundred in total. Every page had multiple paperclips. I kept the paperclips and never met Webb.” Wambaugh was left with a career-defining choice: he could continue as a detective sergeant, or he could make the jump to full-time writer. He chose the latter.
It’s easy to see why Webb might have emptied his stationery cupboard: The Choirboys is a broad-brush indictment of the LAPD institution, as seen through the eyes of ten patrol officers, all of whom smother their roiling neuroses with alcoholism, racism, corruption, practical jokes and misogyny. It functions largely as a dark comedy with a tragic ending, and while Wambaugh does an exemplary job in turning his cops into multilayered, conflicted human beings, the book presented a significant challenge when it came to screen adaptation. Fortunately, Wambaugh’s retirement meant he could write the screenplay; less fortunately, he was about to discover that writing the screenplay didn’t mean he had any control over the final product.
While there’s no such thing as an unfilmable book, The Choirboys comes damned close. With a huge cast of characters, wild variations in tone, and an episodic story, any film adaptation runs the risk of being incoherent at best, and utterly reprehensible otherwise. The success of the book’s somewhat nihilistic ending – in which a young gay man is accidentally gunned down by one of the cops, a traumatised Vietnam veteran – largely depends on the context of the police as damaged individuals. It would take a director of extreme sensitivity to accurately render that ending on screen, one capable of handling context and nuance, and one at least partly sympathetic to the plight of the patrol officer. Robert Aldrich was not that director. While his biggest hits to date had featured groups of insalubrious men fighting the system, he wasn’t a particularly skilled comedy director. His sense of humour had a touch of the sledgehammer about it, frequently lacking the compassion that leads to laughs, and many of Aldrich’s films (including some of his hits) tended to wallow in the kind of nastiness that blunted their iconoclasm.
Aldrich considered The Choirboys to be one of his “gorilla pictures”, a movie that refused to play no matter how hard he worked. The truth is Aldrich would never have made a good movie of The Choirboys for one simple reason: he had no sympathy for the police and the LAPD in particular: “I don’t know how to feel sorry for a cop. It’s a volunteer force. You’re not drafted to become a cop … [Wambaugh] certainly wouldn’t agree with me that the Los Angeles police force is murderous in terms of their attitude towards the public, particularly when the public is black or minority. In New York, cops are on the take. [In Los Angeles], the cops aren’t on the take, but they’ve traded that in for the opportunity to be stormtroopers … So I think you’ve got to show the LA cops as brutal as they really are. And Wambaugh can’t face that problem, so it’s never touched in the book.”3
Aldrich’s enmity is readily apparent in The Choirboys. The movie may open with a traumatic flashback to Vietnam, but it’s quickly overshadowed by a solid ninety minutes of tasteless shenanigans masquerading as comedy, including “playful” sexual assault, rampant homophobia (with mincing stereotypes, naturally), animal abuse (that poor bloody duck), botched entrapments, police brutality4, and such overwhelming misogyny that it’s a wonder any woman would come within an H-bomb blast radius of any of these guys. The novel takes great pains to present their behaviour as a reaction to the stresses of the job; the movie presents the job itself as a series of low-brow, quasi-comic events, so the stress isn’t felt and the choir practices come across like boorish horseplay as opposed to a (still nasty) way of blowing off steam.
The closest the film comes to a genuine comic character is Burt Young’s Scuzzi, a Vice sergeant who is regularly mistaken for the janitor, and who is the only cop in the picture who seems to show sympathy for the young Blaney (Michael Wills)5, even if letting him go means his inevitable demise. While the performances are generally fine – you’ll never hear me talking trash about Charles Durning or Lou Gossett – the movie is so intent on portraying the cops as such monstrous vulgarians, it’s impossible to appreciate the acting, and some characters are so egregiously underwritten (Van Moot, Sartino, and Potts) that they might as well have been left on the cutting room floor. While Aldrich clearly had a much longer cut in mind, it’s unlikely that any of the characters would have been given further shading.
The final thirty minutes take an even darker turn, with the accidental shooting of Blaney and the attempted cover-up. This last section is where Wambaugh parted ways with Aldrich, with the director bringing in Christopher Knopf to write the interrogation and subsequent authority-baiting bluffing match between Spermwhale Whalen (Durning) and Chief Riggs (Robert Webber). This section feels like quintessential Aldrich: rather than martyred, the cops are allowed a moment of temporary triumph through solidarity against an even more corrupt bureaucracy, and there’s certainly a sick thrill in watching Robert Webber squirm. Had the previous hour-and-a-half not been as relentlessly grim, this might have been a satisfactory ending; instead, the credit sequence of the characters laughing (much like that of The Dirty Dozen) feels less like an ironic statement than a vindication of previous behaviour.
Wambaugh was so incensed about the “dreadful, slimy, vile, ugly thing about policemen as fascists” that he took out a full-page advertisement in Variety denouncing the film, sued production company Lorimar for $1 million (based on a verbal contract that no changes would be made to his script, which was settled out of court), and had his name removed from the credits. For his part, Aldrich was adamant that Knopf’s changes to the ending were both minor and necessary, and that the subsequent accusations of vulgarity were based on scenes that were not only present in Wambaugh’s novel, but also Wambaugh’s many screenplays.6 While this may exonerate Knopf’s contribution (and indeed, the last quarter of the film is at least halfway interesting), it doesn’t excuse Aldrich’s antagonistic approach to the material. Aldrich took the lion’s share of the blame from the critics, who were universally appalled by The Choirboys (though I’m pleased to note that many highlighted Burt Young’s performance), and the film failed to find an audience that could appreciate the violent non-humour and tonal lurch in the final quarter. It would go on to be one of Aldrich’s least liked films, and mark the beginning of the end for his career. As for Wambaugh, he considered The Choirboys experience a hard-learned lesson: he immediately bought back the rights to his next two books, The Onion Field and The Black Marble, and went on the hunt for a more sympathetic director. He would find one in Harold Becker, but that’s for next week …
Next Up: "A True American Tragedy Caught On Film!”
The Blue Knight (1973) starred William Holden and was both a mini-series and theatrical release (in Europe). I havered about including it in Wambaugh Month, but decided against it - it’s a solid adaptation in mini-series form, less so in its theatrical version.
Per Wambaugh: “Parker took an inefficient, undisciplined police force and made it the most efficient police force in the world, probably, for a big city. That’s how 8,300 people kept the lid on crime in Los Angeles.”
For the record, I think Wambaugh does touch on this in the book, but it’s not as direct as perhaps Aldrich would have liked (if he read the book at all). Despite all my grumbling here, I do want to clarify that the novel is actually really, really good - the closest thing to Catch-22 in the genre.
Mostly courtesy of Roscoe Rules, a racist, homophobic “black-glove” cop, who seems to spend most of his screentime sneering his way into fights he doesn’t win. It’s probably worth noting that Rules is significantly younger, dumber, and more intimidating in the book, but at some point the audience has to wonder why - even if he doesn’t amend his bigotry - Rules keeps putting himself into situations where he gets his arse kicked three ways from Thursday.
I’d like to take a brief moment to praise Michael Wills here: in a movie that routinely deals with gay stereotypes, Wills’s performance is heartbreaking. He’s one of the few actors who comes out of this mess with some integrity.
Aldrich in Robert Aldrich Interviews: “Wambaugh did six or seven scripts, and in the arbitration of the Writers Guild It was agreed that ninety percent of the work was Wambaugh’s and ten percent of Knopf’s. But Knopf had changed the intent of the work, and that’s why they allowed Wambaugh to take his name off.”