Reginald Rose's Studio One Teleplay 12 Angry Men (1957)

The September 20, 1954 broadcast

Reginald Rose (in 12 Angry Men)'s original Twelve Angry Men aired live on CBS's Studio One on September 20, 1954. The broadcast ran approximately fifty-three minutes (a one-hour timeslot minus commercials and station identifications), was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, and starred Robert Cummings as Juror 8, Franchot Tone as Juror 3, John Beal as Juror 5, Edward Arnold as Juror 4, Norman Fell as the Foreman, and Joseph Sweeney as Juror 9 (the only cast member who would carry the role over to the 1957 feature). The teleplay was the seventh-season opener for Studio One.

"The broadcast was watched by something like ten million people, which was a small audience by Studio One standards but a huge one by any later television metric. The American family of 1954 sat together for an hour and watched twelve men decide whether to kill a teenager. That was prestige drama in 1954." — Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (1990 edition) (book; archive.org scan)

The teleplay came from Rose's jury service

Rose had served on a Manhattan jury in 1954 on a manslaughter case — by his own account, the most absorbing experience of his life. He drafted the teleplay during and immediately after the trial, working from notes he had made during the deliberation itself.

"I was overwhelmed by the staggering responsibility of jury service. The atmosphere in the room was tense. It was a hot summer day, no air conditioning... I knew at that very moment I had to write about this." — Reginald Rose, Television Academy Foundation Interview (1996)

The case Rose served on was not the case dramatized in the teleplay (Rose changed the facts and the defendant), but the deliberation he drew from was. Several details in the screenplay — the heat, the broken fan, the foreman's procedural fumbling, the early procedural vote — are direct from his real experience.

The teleplay won three Emmys

The 1955 Emmy ceremony recognized the production:

• Best Original Teleplay — Reginald Rose
• Best Director — Franklin J. Schaffner
• Best Actor — Robert Cummings

The Emmy run gave the teleplay enough cultural prominence that Henry Fonda, hearing about it from a colleague, sought out a kinescope and watched it. He approached Rose immediately afterward about turning it into a feature film. The 1957 picture is the result. See Henry Fonda.

The teleplay's structure is the screenplay's structure

The narrative spine is essentially identical between the two versions. The same first vote (11-1), the same ten-vote progression, the same midpoint stopwatch, the same eyeglass-marks climax, the same torn-photograph wind-down, the same Davis/McCardle name exchange on the steps. Rose did not significantly alter the deliberation in expanding to ninety-six minutes. The added material is mostly atmospheric — the courthouse exterior, the judge's instructions, the jurors' arrival in the room, the small talk about the heat, and the gradual build to the secret ballot. The ninety-six-minute feature is, structurally, a sixty-minute teleplay with thirty additional minutes of room-establishment and pacing relief.

"What I added for the film was air. The teleplay was sixty minutes, the film is ninety-six. Most of the difference is the establishment — getting the jury into the room, settling them, building the heat. The deliberation itself is what it always was." — Reginald Rose, Television Academy Foundation Interview (1996)

The 1955 stage adaptation

Sherman Sergel adapted the teleplay for the stage in 1955, with Rose's collaboration. The play has had a longer life than the teleplay — it is performed annually in American high schools and law schools, and has had multiple major Broadway, West End, and London revivals across seven decades. Notable productions include the 1964 London staging with Leo Genn as Juror 8, the 1996 Roundabout Theatre Off-Broadway revival with George Wendt as the foreman, the 2004 West End production with Tom Conti, and the 2018 Old Vic production with Roger Allam. The Penguin Classics edition of the 1955 play remains in print.

The kinescope's survival status

The 1954 Studio One broadcast was preserved only on kinescope (a 16mm film recording made by pointing a film camera at a television monitor during live transmission). Like much live television of its era, the kinescope has not survived intact. The UCLA Film & Television Archive holds the most complete surviving fragment — approximately 38 minutes of an estimated 53-minute broadcast — and the Paley Center for Media holds an additional partial copy that overlaps with the UCLA holdings. A complete reconstruction of the broadcast is not currently possible from extant materials.

"The 1954 Studio One broadcast is one of the great lost American television performances. We have most of it, but not all of it. The complete original viewing experience — Robert Cummings as Juror 8, the live-broadcast tension, the period commercial breaks — is not recoverable." — Stephen Bowie, Television Obscurities (2018)

The Criterion 4K UHD release (2023) of the 1957 film includes a short documentary discussing the survival status of the original broadcast. See Physical Media Releases (12 Angry Men).

The 1997 Showtime remake

In 1997, Showtime broadcast a remade 12 Angry Men, directed by William Friedkin from a Reginald Rose teleplay, with Jack Lemmon as Juror 8, George C. Scott as Juror 3, James Gandolfini as Juror 6, Tony Danza as Juror 7, and Edward James Olmos as Juror 11. The remake racially diversified the cast — four of the twelve jurors were Black — and updated the setting to the 1990s. Rose received teleplay credit for the third time on the same material, forty-three years after the original Studio One broadcast.