'L.A. Law' cast members testify to the effect the series had

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Before there was Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean, there was John Garfield. The New York theater actor brought a brooding intensity and realism to his roles in such films as 1938’s “Four Daughters” and 1947’s “Body and Soul” (he earned Oscar nominations for both) and 1945’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Warner Archive’s recently released six of his movies on DVD: 1939’s “Dust Be My Destiny” and “Blackwell’s Island”; 1940’s “Flowing Gold,” “Saturday’s Children”’ and “East of the River; and 1941’s “Dangerously They Live.” A victim of the blacklist, Garfield died of a heart attack at age 39 in 1952. Pictured: American movie star John Garfield, left, testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee on April 23, 1951, accompanied by his lawyers, Louis Hizey, center, and Sidney Davis. (Bob Mulligan / AFP / Getty Images)

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One of Lon Chaney’s greatest cinematic feats was playing Victor Hugo’s tragic Quasimodo in the lavish 1923 Universal silent “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” His poignant performance made Chaney one of the major players in Hollywood. No expense was spared to bring this classic to the big screen. Acres of Universal’s back lot were transformed into 15th century Paris, including the elaborate facade of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The production took six months to film, using 750 crew members and more than 2,000 extras. Now Flicker Alley in association with Blackhawk Films Collection has released the Blu-ray of this seminal silent. Since the film apparently did not survive in 35mm, the digital restoration was made from a multi-tinted 16mm print that had been struck from the original camera negative in 1926. This edition also features a new symphonic score arranged by Donald Hunsberger and conducted by Robert Israel. For more information go to http://www.flickeralley.com. Pictured: Lon Chaney as Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” directed by Wallace Worsley, 1923. (Universal Pictures / Getty Images)

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Lewis Allen’s 1944 “The Uninvited” is one of the best ghost stories you probably have never seen. Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey play a London-based brother and sister who fall in love with a beautiful, abandoned seaside house during a vacation to the British coast. They are surprised when they are able to buy the house for a very low price, but they soon find out why they got it for such a bargain. A favorite of directors Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro, “The Uninvited” also stars Donald Crisp and Gail Russell. And Victor Young’s lush score produced the hit “Stella by Starlight,” based on the film’s main theme. Criterion has just released the new digital restoration of “The Uninvited” on Blu-ray. (Keystone / Getty Images)

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John Cherry, partner and head of the creative department at Carden and Cherry Advertising in Nashville, hit pay dirt in the 1980s with a series of quirky commercials starring the late rubber-faced Jim Varney as Ernest P. Worrell, an unwelcome pest of an unseen neighbor named Vern. Ernest’s catchphrases, “Hey, Vern” and “Know WhutImean?,” quickly became part of the pop lexicon. Ernest proved so popular with kids that Varney and Cherry took the character to the big screen for several films, starting with 1987’s “Ernest Goes to Camp” to television with the 1988 CBS kids’ show, “Hey Vern, It’s Ernest.” Cherry has written a memoir which he points out is not for children about his experiences called “Keeper of the Clown: My Life With Ernest,” available on Amazon, at bookstores and at http://www.HeyVernItsErnest.com.m. (Mark Humphrey / Associated Press)

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Over the last few years cinema and TV buffs have become addicted to Warner Archive, which has released classics, rarities and vintage TV series and movies on DVD. Now cineastes can get access to even more classic product on the Warner Archive Instant pay streaming service. The service isn’t available on iPad or IPhone, but it can be accessed on computers or by using a Roku2 or 3 set-top box hooked up to an HDTV. Selections are added weekly. Some available titles that aren’t yet on DVD include the TV series “77 Sunset Strip” and “Hawaiian Eye.” For more information go to http://instant.warnerarchive.com. Pictured, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes from “77 Sunset Strip,” circa 1960. (Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images)

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Will Hutchins of “Sugarfoot” in 1958. Hutchins starred as a clumsy cowboy in the ABC series. The first season of the genial western TV series “Sugarfoot” has moseyed onto DVD thanks to Warner Archive. Will Hutchins starred in the ABC series, which alternated on the network with “Cheyenne,” from 1957 to ’59 and “Bronco” from 1959 to ’60. Hutchins played Tom “Sugarfoot” Brewster, a young correspondence-school law student from the east who heads west for adventure and excitement only to discover he’s a pretty clumsy cowboy. Among the guest stars appearing on the series were Dennis Hopper, Charles Bronson and Martin Landau. “Sugarfoot,” which was based on the 1954 film “The Boy From Oklahoma,” rode off into the sunset in 1961. (Cloyd Teter / Denver Post via Getty Images)

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In 50 years, he made more than 400 films and worked with Douglas Fairbanks, Shirley Temple and John Wayne.

Director Allan Dwan’s career spanned from the early silent era in 1911 through 1961. He made more than 400 films including Douglas Fairbanks’ 1922 “Robin Hood” and 1929’s “The Iron Mask,” Shirley Temple’s 1937 melodrama “Heidi” and the John Wayne 1949 war film “Sands of Iwo Jima.” Called the “last pioneer” by Peter Bogdanovich, he’s the subject of an exhaustive book, “Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios” by Frederic Lombardi. The richly detailed study of Dwan coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s upcoming retrospective of the director’s work. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

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Silent screen star John Gilbert stands out in ‘Forbidden Hollywood Collection: Volume 6.’ Warner Archive’s new “Forbidden Hollywood Collection: Volume 6” includes such pre-Code goodies as 1932’s “The Wet Parade” and 1934’s “Mandalay” and “Massacre.” But the pièce de résistance of the set is 1932’s delectable melodrama “Downstairs,” starring John Gilbert, who also wrote the story. The silent screen star struggled in talkies after the disastrous 1929 melodrama “His Glorious Night,” but “Downstairs,” in which he gives one of his most daring performances as a charming but manipulative chauffeur, proves that Gilbert had the chops for the sound era. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

By Susan King

Feb. 22, 2014 2 PM PT

Harry Hamlin wasn’t supposed to touch the food on the table during the conference scenes on “L.A. Law,” NBC’s Emmy Award-winning 1986-94 legal series.

The sandwiches were strictly props. But Hamlin, who played attorney Michael Kuzak, the serious-minded youngest partner in the City of Angels’ firm McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney and Kuzak, had other ideas.

“If you go back and watch the pilot as the very first conference room scene ends, I reach over and pull a sandwich toward me,” recalls Hamlin, who plays an ad executive on AMC’s “Mad Men.” The move was unexpected

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“I picked it up as they were shooting my last bit. I had my mouth full of food. We shot another conference room scene, and there was a plate of croissants. I thought, ‘I will make this a “thing.”’ If you look go back and look, I will be eating in every conference room scene. It became a running gag with the prop department.”

Nearly 30 years after he read the pilot, Hamlin maintains the script “remains one of the most brilliant two hours of TV. I never read anything quite as a good as that.”

In September 1986, then-L.A. Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg was also laudatory in his praise of the pilot. “There should be a law requiring more series like NBC’s new ‘L.A. Law,’” he wrote.

The ensemble series, which seamlessly blended current events, stark drama, soap opera and outrageous comedy, was created by Steven Bochco, who co-created the groundbreaking ensemble police drama “Hill Street Blues,” and Terry Louise Fisher, a former L.A. County prosecutor and a producer on “Cagney & Lacey.” David E. Kelley, who went on to create his own legal series, “The Practice” and “Boston Legal,” was a writer and eventually became an executive producer. On Tuesday, Shout! Factory is releasing the first season on DVD.

Besides Hamlin, the series also starred Corbin Bernsen as the handsome, vain divorce attorney, Arnie Becker; Susan Dey as deputy D.A. and Kuzak’s love interest, Grace Van Owen; Richard Dysart as the level-headed senior partner, Leland McKenzie; Alan Rachins as the obnoxious money-minded partner, Douglas Brackman Jr.; Jimmy Smits as the firm’s passionate Latino attorney, Victor Sifuentes; and Susan Ruttan as Roxanne, Arnie’s motherly secretary.

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Real married couple Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker’s characters of idealistic attorney Ann Kelsey and sweetly nebbish tax attorney Stuart Markowitz turned a lot of heads in an episode in which he tells her about a sexual technique mysteriously called “The Venus Butterfly.”

Though Bernsen, currently a regular on USA’s “Psych,” became an overnight sensation as the womanizing divorce attorney, he admitted that he couldn’t get into the mind-set of Arnie during his first audition in New York with Bochco, Fisher and co-executive producer-director Gregory Hoblit.

Still, said Bernsen, Bochco told him that “if you ever come out to L.A., we’ll do something with you. So give us a call. I got in my Jeep the next day and drove across country.”

He got insight into what made Arnie run, quite literally running on Mulholland Drive one day. “I saw this girl in this white Jeep with her blond hair flying behind her. I kind of remember her turning her head in slow motion looking at me running along.”

It was exactly what would have happened to Arnie. “I called my manager and said get me back to Steven Bochco, I know the character,” said Bernsen, who is trying to bring Arnie back in his own TV series. “I went in the next day and essentially the day after I got the job.”

Smits’ first audition was with some NBC executives in New York. “It went horrendous,” said Smits, currently on FX’s’ “Sons of Anarchy.” Then a friend of his from graduate school who had come to L.A. encouraged Smits to fly out here and try to arrange a meeting with Bochco.

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When he met with the show’s casting director, “I was very prepared. She said, ‘You have got to meet Steven and Greg. Steven has all of this sports memorabilia in his office.’ I remember walking into his office and Steven had this bat. He was swinging his bat, and I said to myself, ‘If you mess up on this one, you know what’s going to happen.’ It went well, thank God.”

Over the years, Latino attorneys and politicians have told Smits they went to law school because they were inspired by his character. “That can be the strength of the small screen,” Smits said.

Reactions to Rachins’ Brackman were a bit different. Fans weren’t shy tell him how much they hated his character. “I’d say, ‘Well, thank you,’” said Rachins, laughing.

Rachins, who is married to Bochco’s sister, actress Joanna Frank, loved that his brother-in-law and the writers gave Brackman “a wonderful series of extracurricular activities,” including affairs with a sex therapist, his father’s ex-mistress and a young woman who was his trainer.

“There were a number of women I got to become involved with,” said Rachins, who later starred on the series “Dharma & Greg.” Why? “He was so buttoned up, he had to have some outlets,” Rachins speculated.

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Ruttan recalled the immediate effect of the series on her life. The day after the series premiered on Oct. 3, 1986, she went to lunch with a friend and noticed that people were looking at her when she walked through the restaurant.

“It was like at that moment, you kind of feel your world shift,” she reflected. “It was incredible because people loved my character. People automatically liked me.”

Bochco wrote the parts of Ann and Stuart for Eikenberry and Tucker. But the couple nearly didn’t do the series after shooting the pilot because Eikenberry discovered after it wrapped that she had breast cancer. “When I got the diagnosis, Mike called him and said we can’t do the show because Jill has cancer,” Eikenberry said.

Though she didn’t have to have chemotherapy, Eikenberry did have to undergo radiation treatments. Bochco made sure she could continue on the show, working it out so she could leave the set at 5 p.m and go to UCLA for her treatments. Two years later, Eikenberry revealed publically that she had had breast cancer.

“People were no longer afraid to go public,” said Tucker to his wife. “You really led the way with that.”

susan.king@latimes.com