Programs: Mission Possible

MEMO FROM DESILU PRODUCTIONS: Good morning, Mr. Getter. We like your script. In fact, we think its potential is greater than you realize. Your assignment, should you decide to accept it, Bruce, will be to boil down your feature-length thriller to a tight, pulsating 49 minutes, then come up with 27 more just like it. Samebasic plot on which the fate of mankind hangs. Same fascinating attention to visual gimmickry. We think we’ve got a world-capable series here. As always, should you orany of your Impossible Mission Force be gunned down by the critics, Desilu’s president Lucille Ball will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This outer-office memorandum will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Bruce.

That more or less describes the origin of Mission: Impossible—in the style and pattern of the show’s own standard opening scene. The program is TV’s hottest suspense series, and its fans find in it the same inspired implausibility that characterized The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in its prime. Bruce Geller, 37-year-old film, TV and off-Broadway writer who conceived the whole enterprise, concedes that his original script was basically a paste-up of Topkapi and several other favorite movies. When Hollywood wouldn’t buy it, he turned to Desilu. When Desilu proposed a series, he turned nervous, fearing he would run out of ideas—his own or other people’s. But he tried, and made it. M:l won four Emmys last year, and now in its second season it ranks as a solid favorite in the Sunday evening slot formerly occupied by Candid Camera and What’s My Line? Needless to say, Lucille Ball is disavowing nothing.

Pouf of Smoke. Normal dramatic tools like characterization and motivation are given short shrift on M:I Geller & Co. instead believe in fast plots, dazzling footwork, bizarre technical contrivances. It is always the “how” of a story that keeps viewers pinned to their TV sets, since nearly everything else on the program is deliberately made familiar. At the opening, Peter Graves, 41, as Impossible Mission Leader Jim Phelps, enters a phone booth, warehouse or parked car, finds a hidden tape recorder, and turns it on. “Good morning, Mr. Phelps…” it begins, and then outlines the task: recover something crucial that has been stolen or prevent the supervillains from achieving some dastardly scheme. At the end of the recording the tape destroys itself in a pouf of smoke. The fact that a phone call, meeting or even a note left on a park bench would be less conspicuous hardly bothers M:I addicts.

Next scene: Graves, who is the brother of Gunsmoke’s Jim Arness, browses through photos of available M:I agents. He invariably chooses Barbara Bain, the group’s sexy smoke screen; Martin Landau (in real life Barbara’s husband), master of sleight of hand and disguise; Greg Morris, ace engineer; and Peter Lupus, strong man. The team sets off to the rescue without informing the audience of its plan—which is always a variation of the con game. Each operative wins the enemy’s trust by playing a separate innocent role; together, they catch the villain off balance when everything clicks at a pre-arranged moment, usually four minutes before sign-off time.

In the Think Tank. The program might have been laid out according to the McLuhan notion that in TV, form counts more than content. In M:I the Tinkertoy stuff on the screen is far more important than plot logic. In one elaborate ruse, the M:I team stole a whole train and pulled one car full of passengers into a shed where, with the help of films and sound effects, they convinced the passengers that there had been a wreck. In another, they saved the day by starting an earthquake with supersonic waves. This week, they unnerved a murder-for-hire chieftain by making him believe in ghosts; first by projecting a likeness of Phelps’s face into a cloud of carbon dioxide in a darkened room, then by propping up the unconscious body of one of the killer’s underlings and using a face mask—a favorite IMF ploy—to make him look like Phelps. The killer shoots at the face, but as he walks nearer, the mask dissolves and he finds that he has rubbed out his own man.

M:I combines this sort of fantasy with technical accuracy. For a forthcoming show set in a think tank, Geller sent two writers to make a study of the Rand Corp.’s offices, then reproduced it right down to the paper shredder in the basement. Yes, Phelps ends up crawling through chutes leading to the shredder. With a budget of $185,000 a show, M:I has no trouble coming up with an astonishing array of the latest devices of nuclear-age espionage. Says Staff Writer William Read Woodfield: “We like to think that the CIA is awake and watching us. The CIA isn’t saying. But just in case, shred this.”