Red lights flashing, the big white-and-black police car careens around a narrow corner and onto a deserted Los Angeles tire-store parking lot. Two officers, guns drawn, rush into the building. Short, curt dialogue, followed by fast action. One of the cops is wounded. A call is made for police assistance, followed by an inevitable pregnant pause. “Cut,” yells the director and the action stops. The entire scene has taken less than 40 seconds. Now the actors, extras and technicians light hurried cigarettes and drink tepid water from portable studio canteens as they await final word.
Georg Stanford Brown has been watching the morning shooting of ABC’s The Rookies for over an hour. He waits uneasily on a studio stool and sweats in the hot shade. He unfastens the top two buttons of his police uniform. “It’s a print,” announces the director. Brown sighs a deep breath of relief and heads for his dressing room.
But Officer Terry Webster never quite makes it. A small boy, autograph pad in hand, runs up and flashes it at Brown. “Hi Terry!” he squeals. “Hey,” the child accuses, pointing his finger at the prop badge, without numbers, pinned to Brown’s left breast pocket, “you’re not a real cop.” Brown’s serious face quickly breaks into a smile. “Well, son,” he admits, “that makes two of us.”
Yet each week for 60 minutes, Brown is a hip television cop, a hero who wears a modified Afro beneath his regulation hat, who “joined the force to stop cops from beating up my brothers.” For Brown, playing the role of Terry Webster has been something of a struggle.
“I don’t particularly want to represent the police in any romantic light,” he says. “And I don’t want to be accused of selling out. I’ve had a lot of run-ins with the police, and those weren’t pleasant experiences. I’m from the streets, and there’s just no way to escape the policeman when you’re in the streets. It’s a part of your survival. “When I used to see them coming,” he says, “I’d respond in a certain way. I just didn’t like cops.”
Brown was on the streets for most of his life. Born in Havana 30 years ago, he was 7 when his family saved enough money to go to New York City and live the American dream. For the Brown family, it meant a crowded apartment on 132nd Street in Harlem. Georg’s father worker as a chauffeur and his mother was a domestic.
Like many kids on his block, Brown approached school as if it were a communicable disease. When his family moved “up” to a slightly larger apartment in the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, Brown entered William Howard Taft High School. He didn’t stay long. “I spent most of my time there cutting classes,” he laughs. “The last year I was there I cut 44 days in one term and 54 the next. They finally came to me and said, “Hey, don’t you think you ought to drop out?” Brown’s answer: “I’ve been trying to tell you cats that for a long time. I’m bored to death here.” The Taft teachers concurred.
For the next year, Brown hung out on street corners, spending about half his time trying to sing with some of the other street kids. At one point, when he was 15, he sang in a group with the improbable name of the Parthenons. “I remember,” he says, shaking his head in embarrassment, “that we once went on Who Do No You Trust? And got $475 for singing two songs. The group broke up right after that. The other half of the time I simply bummed around.”
At 17 he decided to move West and “check things out,” arriving in Los Angeles in 1962. “For the hell of it” Brown took the entrance exam at Los Angeles City College. “I took nothing seriously then,” he explains. So, when he was notified that he had passed the exam, he enrolled in the school’s theater program. “I just wanted to take something easy,” he says, “but after a while I really got to like it.”
After two years Brown moved back to New York in 1964 “for some serious stuff” at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. And there he met fellow student Tyne Daly (daughter of Medical Center’s James Daly), who is now his wife.
Brown’s New York acting experiences while at AMDA provided a strong foundation for things to come. “The first thing I ever did,” Brown says, “was work for Joe Papp’s Shakespeare productions in Central Park. I was a spear carrier in a mob scene.” He must have been quite a spear carrier, for in short order he had graduated to meatier roles in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Measure for Measure,” “Richard III” and “Macbeth.”
With Shakespeare under his belt, Brown raced to Hollywood to become, a star, but his early movie and television career was excruciatingly slow. His only distinguishing features seemed to be the spelling of his first name and the color of his skin, although not necessarily in that order. He became a minor character actor, one almost totally stereotype-cast. In “The Comedians,” with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, he played a revolutionary. In James Earl Jones’ “The Man” he threw a hand grenade. “I played an awful lot pf militants,” he says.
Earlier, in “Bullitt” (1968), he played a police surgeon. “The role was so obscure,” he says, “that the guy didn’t hardly have a name. It was all a lot of ‘Hey you!’ ” Brown then appeared in “Dayton’s Devils.” “It was a quickie two-week deal,” he says. “My wife was in New York having a baby at the time and I needed the money.” The film went nowhere.
Then came a low-budget comedy, “Black Jack,” a quickie in which father-in-law James Daly also appeared. In spite of the title, Brown’s role had nothing much to do with being black. He was making progress.
But his first (and so far his only) starring role came when he landed the part of Terry Webster on The Rookies, at the same time crossing the role barrier from grenade-thrower and revolutionary to policeman. Yet at the time he wasn’t eager to have the part.
“I was on an interview for a job one afternoon,” he recalls,“ when my agent called and told me to go see Mod Squad producer Aaron Spelling – they were casting for a new police show. I simply said I didn’t want to do a police show.” The agent prevailed, but when Brown walked into Spelling’s office he immediately repeated, “I don’t want to do a police show.”
Nevertheless, Spelling persuaded him to take a script home and read it. As he left the office, Brown turned and again said, “I really don’t want to do a police show.”
Brown read the script. He had had minor parts in Mannix and The Bold Ones and a few fairly decent ones in Medical Center. The Rookies represented a chance he couldn’t turn down.
“I did a lot of soul searching,” Brown recalls, “talked to a lot of people.” Friends convinced him that there were advantages to doing the shoe. “People would get to see my work; they would get to know what I could do. I simply discovered,” he says, “that it’s very hard to be an actor without acting. You have to be doing it. You can’t just talk about it.” So, after three weeks, Brown decided to do it.
This is the end of the second season for The Rookies, a series that has miraculously survived the ABC “graveyard” time slot – the hours before Monday Night Football and the Monday Night Movie. For the previous four years, every other ABC show had perished there. “We’ve succeeded,” says Brown, “because we’re very much the same flavor as football – very macho, fast cars, red lights and guns.
And as the show has succeeded, so has Brown. In his own estimation, he has moved up about 10 notches on the experience scale. The series has given him a tremendous sense of accomplishment. “I’ve learned so much,” he says. “Now I know about that camera, and I have the confidence to permit myself a certain amount of freedom and movement within the show.”
Given his particular beliefs about the police and about American society as well, each week Brown scrutinizes the script, not just to remember the lines, but to “try to make it better.” There have been a number of occasions during filming when Brown has asked that certain dialogue – political or sexist in nature – be changed or eliminated. “You constantly have to keep in mind who you are, what you’re doing and where you’re come from,” he says. “Moreover, I don’t want to hurt anyone or let them down with my role.”
But to some extent, the show is inevitable fantasy. “If we showed police doing the work they really do,” Brown argues, “The Rookies would be boring. I would be dull, and there would be nothing to talk about. I love the running and chasing stuff,” he admits. “It’s essential to our action format.”
Also essential to the format is that the characters like each other, both on stage and off. Michael Ontkean (who plays Willie Gillis) is Georg’s constant companion. When they’re not in Georg’s dressing room listening to tapes of Leon Russell and Jackson Browne, they’ve on the set trying to explain Russell and Browne to Gerald S. O’ Loughlin, who plays their lieutenant.
Sam Melville, who portrays the straight Mike Danko (the only married Rookie), is also closed to Brown, “Georg is brilliant,” says Melville. “He’s perceptive and has a very workable concept of what his character is. He knows his work and how to get it to the surface.”
Like most police shows, The Rookies has its technical consultant, a former Los Angeles policeman. “But we’re not like Adam-12,” says Brown, “because we don’t need script approval from the real cops. We work for the SCPD,” he says. “About the closest you can decipher it,” he laughs, “is Southern California Police Department. One week it’s a big-city police department, the next week it’s real small.”
The police consultant does help out, though. “He tells you how to put on the cuffs, how to frisk; basically,” says Brown, “he tries to clean up our act. He has this thing about wearing hats. And I know he’d love to give us all haircuts.”
 There are other real-life cops who are not big supporters of The Rookies. “A lot of them,” explains Brown, “think I’m too soft, or too sensational. I met one cop, or I should say, he met me. He told me I was speeding, arrested me and took me in.” On the way to the station, the policeman told Brown how much he hated the show. “He was most unpleasant,” recalls Brown. “And he’s probably waiting to take me back in again.”
Nevertheless, Brown’s views are changing. “There are a lot of hip police out there,” he says. “I can seriously say that I’ve met cops that I’ve liked, and they’ve been good to me and have been nice people.”
The next morning Brown leaves his quiet, secluded home on a mountaintop overlooking Los Angeles, where he lives with Tyne and their two daughters. He arrives at 20th Century Fox in his used, white Mercedes and dressed in T-shirt and faded jeans. It’s back to work, back to being a TV cop for the next five days.
“I’ve never worked week in, week out before,” he says. “I’ve never experienced anything like this. When I think back on my past, I never finished anything. I floated through it all. About the closest I ever came was making the first two cuts on the Taft basketball team.” He pauses and smiles. “But acting is the only thing I’ve ever really finished. And man, it feels pretty good.”

By Peter Greenberg