Joseph Wambaugh, whose experience as an LAPD officer enabled him to bring a warts-and-all realism to his novels about policing and the movies and TV shows like “Police Story,” died Friday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 88.
The cause was esophageal cancer, a family friend told the New York Times.
Wambaugh’s work in novels such as “The New Centurions,” “The Blue Knight” “The Choirboys” and best seller “The Onion Field” rendered the flat, idealized portrait of the Los Angeles Police Dept. presented in “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” permanently outdated, and yet cops felt they understood him and got the way they talked, and they remained among his biggest fans over the course of his career as a novelist.
A highlight of Wambaugh’s relationship with Hollywood was the Harold Becker-directed feature “The Onion Field” (1979), with Wambaugh penning the screenplay based on his own true-crime novel. The book had faithfully and effectively communicated the legal and other complexities of the tragic 1963 case, in which a psychopath (played masterfully by James Woods in the film) kidnapped two Los Angeles police officers, forced them to drive about 100 miles to a lonely, rural area, and murdered one of them (played by a young Ted Danson), leaving the other (a powerfully devastated John Savage) an emotional wreck for years. Wambaugh reportedly supervised production of the film, and the attempt to communicate all of the case’s complexities was born of his desire for realism, but without the simple, appealing narrative structure that simplifying the details would have allowed. As the New York Times said in its review of the film, “The criminals’ histories are every bit as convoluted and fascinating as those of the policemen they abducted. Even the courtroom drama is unusually complicated, introducing a new legal team with each new trial. In writing his book about this, Mr. Wambaugh had time and energy to explore each new twist. But the format of a movie demands something more concise.”
In 2008 Wambaugh told NPR: “I was put on Earth to write ‘The Onion Field.’ That’s how I felt about it. It was such an emotional experience for me. I took a six-month leave of absence from the police department to write that book. I read 40,000 pages of court transcripts; I interviewed about 63 people and wrote the book in three months.”
In 1973 Wambaugh created the innovative NBC series “Police Story,” which ran for 96 episodes until 1979. It was unusual in that it was an anthology series, which meant it could show police characters in a critical light in a way that a regular series, with continuing characters for whom the audience must retain long-term sympathy, could not.
Reviewing the first season of “Police Story” for DVD Verdict in 2011, Victor Valdivia said: “The episodes of ‘Police Story’ encompass all aspects of police work, from cops on the beat to undercover operatives, from homicide detectives to the chief of police himself. What they all have in common is that they all address the life of a police officer from the inside. This isn’t a procedural where the audience is asked to solve a mystery; in fact, most of these episodes aren’t mysteries at all. Instead, these are stories about just what cops go through every day: how they handle the stress, the quirks, the aggravations, and the rewards of their unique jobs. It’s also about humanizing them and letting them sometimes make mistakes, bad choices, and show poor judgment. It’s even, at times, about how they don’t win their battles.
In developing “Police Story” for NBC, Wambaugh “insisted on two nonnegotiable conditions: that the show be as realistic and down-to-earth as possible, and that the show be an anthology series so that it would be possible to show protagonists who are imperfect, unlikable, and even doomed,” Valdivia explains in his review.
The creative freedom that came with the anthology format meant that there could be some episodes where the bad guys got away, where the protagonist dies, where the cop “makes a crucial mistake or bad judgment and ends up losing badly, just like in real life. That’s what police work is about, as Wambaugh himself has said, and it helps ground the show in realism,” DVD Verdict’s Valdivia makes clear.
“Police Story” was followed by the TV movie “Police Story: Confessions of a Lady Cop” (1980), starring Karen Black.
Despite his interest in realism — or perhaps because of it — Wambaugh brought comedy to some of his work. His comic novel “The Choirboys” was adapted into a Robert Aldrich-directed feature in 1977, but while Wambaugh was an uncredited contributor to the adapted screenplay, he ultimately distanced himself from the final film, which starred Charles Durning, Perry King, Tim McIntire, Randy Quaid and Burt Young.
After the adaptation of “The Onion Field” came the 1980 feature adaptation “The Black Marble,” with Harold Becker again in the director’s chair and Wambaugh again adapting his own novel. Robert Foxworth and Paula Prentiss starred in what was a romantic comedy in a police setting, with Foxworth as a possibly mentally ill Russian LAPD officer who falls into a relationship with his partner, played by Prentiss. Roger Ebert called “The Black Marble” an “unusual and distinctive comedy.”
An HBO TV movie based on Wambaugh’s “The Glitter Dome” and starring James Garner, Margot Kidder and John Lithgow aired in 1984.
Wambaugh adapted his own novel for the 1987 CBS miniseries “Echoes in the Darkness,” starring Peter Coyote, Stockard Channing, Robert Loggia and Peter Boyle in the true story of the murder of a Pennsylvania teacher and her two children in 1979.
The author served as supervising producer on 1992 TV movie “From the Files of Joseph Wambaugh: A Jury of One,” starring John Spencer, and he adapted his own novel and exec produced the 1993 TV movie “Fugitive Nights: Danger in the Desert,” starring Sam Elliott and Teri Garr.
Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, Jr. was born in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of a police officer. He did a stint in the Marines, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Cal State Los Angeles and joined the LAPD in 1960. Over the course of 14 years, he worked his way from patrolman to detective sergeant at the department’s Hollenbeck station.
“The New Centurions” was Wambaugh’s first book (published in 1971), and first work to be adapted. It was made into a 1972 film directed by Richard Fleischer and starring George C. Scott, Stacy Keach and Jane Alexander.
The next year his 1972 novel “The Blue Knight” was adapted into an NBC miniseries that starred William Holden and Lee Remick, which was followed by a 1975-76 TV series of the same name that starred George Kennedy.
As his celebrity grew, he sometimes found himself “hounded for autographs by the people he put in handcuffs,” according to the 2008 NPR profile. On the other hand, the Los Angeles police chief was miffed by portrayals of flawed L.A. cops in Wambaugh’s early novels.
He left the LAPD in the mid-’70s, after returning from the leave of absence he took to write “The Onion Field.” Wambaugh told Palm Springs Life in August 2007 that his fellow cops “showing deference to me was pretty unbearable. If they’d shown more resentment or jealousy, it would have been easier to deal with, but they didn’t. They were sweet. They held open doors for me. And that was worse.”
NPR revealed that little had changed in 2008: “Joe Wambaugh is treated like a star when he visits the Hollywood police station he helped immortalize. Framed posters of his movies hang on the walls, and when he shows up, he’s invited to address the baby-faced officers during roll call.”
Wambaugh wrote works of nonfiction as well, but returned to a fictional depiction of the LAPD with his “Hollywood Station” novels beginning in 2006.
Wambaugh taught screenwriting courses in the 2000s as a guest lecturer in UC San Diego’s theater department.
He is survived by his wife Dee, a daughter, a son, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.