Stirling Silliphant--The Poet Laureate of 1960s Television

Stirling Silliphant and his wife
Tiana Alexandre.

For years, I knew producer-writer Stirling Silliphant as the guy that wrote In the Heat of the Night (a favorite) and The Poseidon Adventure (a guilty pleasure). I had also read where he and James Coburn were good friends with Bruce Lee. That was pretty much it. But that all changed when my wife gave me a DVD set of with 16 episodes from the first season of Route 66 as a birthday present several years ago.

Most people remember Route 66 as that "road show" with the cool music about two guys driving around the country in a Corvette. That's an apt description, though it doesn't capture what made Route 66 innovative--it was almost an anthology show set throughout the U.S., with terrific guest stars and sparking scripts. The lead characters, Tod (Martin Milner) and Buz (George Maharis), were sometimes the focus of the stories...and sometimes not. Oh, one or both would be present in every episode, but their part in the proceedings might be peripheral. (Note: Maharis eventually left the series and was replaced by Glenn Corbett).

Martin Milner and George Maharis.

Yet, what truly set Route 66 apart from its contemporaries--and even more so today--were Silliphant's scripts. Silliphant, who co-created the series with producer Herbert B. Leonard, wrote an incredible 73 of the 116 episodes over the show's four-year run. In terms of entertainment value, the plots were consistently above-average, but it's Silliphant's dialogue that gave Route 66 its unique voice. As David Mamet would do later, Silliphant embellished his characters with dialogue that would never pass for natural--but which conveyed a singular poetry all its own.

Tod, or more likely Buz, often got the poetic dialogue. But it could be a guest star, too, as in the episode "Hell Is Empty, All The Devils Are Here," in which Eva Stern plays a young woman coping with the memory of her husband's first wife:

"All of a sudden, I know how an insect feels, how helpless when it's caught by a cruel child. A blank face, bigger than the sky, smiling down at you from somewhere beyond your own tiny world. Smiling down and taking its time, letting its icy fingers pull off your legs and wings."

No, people don't talk that way...except in Silliphant's Route 66 episodes. In fact, one can often guess which episodes were penned by Silliphant from just looking at the colorful titles (e.g., Love Is a Skinny Kid, How Much a Pound Is Albatross, There I Am--There I Always Am, etc.).

Inger Stevens and George Maharis.

Stirling Silliphant's later career would include a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Screenplay for In the Heat of the Night. Still, I think he was at his peak in the early 1960s, writing for Route 66, creating some of the most poetic dialogue ever written for a weekly TV series.

For a sample scene from Route 66, check out this clip from the Silliphant-penned episode "Burning for Burning" with Inger Stevens.