Film and Television

Who Was The Best TV PI?

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Someone asked me this question in an email today and I thought I’d share my answers with you.

For me, it’s a toss-up between Jim Rockford (THE ROCKFORD FILES) and Harry Orwell (HARRY O).  The runner-ups would be Joe Mannix (MANNIX),  Thomas Magnum (MAGNUM PI) and Spenser, though he’s not truly a TV character, since the series was based on the Parker novels.

HarryoI also have fond memories of Darren McGavin as PI David Ross  in the short-lived series THE OUTSIDER, sort of a no-nonsense precursor of THE ROCKFORD FILES. McGavin also starred in one of the worst PI shows ever, as a detective who’s partner can shrink to microscopic size (SMALL AND FRYE).  While we’re at it, Tony Franciosa starred in two of the worst PI shows ever made — MATT HELM (yeah, he was a PI!) and FINDER OF LOST LOVES.   

What are your picks for best and worst TV PIs ever?

How Not To Sell a TV Series, Again

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I received this email:

I’m looking for someone to work with to spice-up and sell shows with. If you are in
the area I’d love to get together and see if we could make something happen with
a few ideas I have.

I replied:

Thanks, but no thanks. I’ve got plenty of ideas… and I’m busy enough just
trying to sell my own stuff. But I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors!

He replied:

You’re busy, I understand. Thanks anyway. If you could just tell me one thing…how do you promote your ideas? The
reason I ask is that from the people I’ve talked to, I mean, from what they’ve
told me, it’s wonder how any shows get made…I get this vision of a dog chasing
its tail.
 
For example, A&E TV, the parent network for History Channel says, "we
do not review unsolicited submissions." Are they saying that they come up with
every show? Does a writer have to sell a production company on the idea who then
produces the show, show it at a festival in hopes that someone buys it? Or is
that whole "we do not review unsolicited submissions" stuff crap? What’s the
deal?

I replied:

First off, and no offense intended, but if you don’t already know the
answers to those questions, you probably aren’t experienced enough to be
pitching TV shows to networks now  anyway.
 
I have no idea how the non-fiction/reality show game is played. When it
comes to dramatic series, I recommend you read chapter 17, "Your Really Great
Idea for a TV Show," from my book SUCCESSFUL TELEVISION WRITING.

TV Marathon

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As part of my physical therapy, I have to spend four to six hours a day with my arm in a machine that forcibly bends and extends it… so I have been watching a lot of television lately.

First, I went on a big GUNSMOKE binge… which is easy, since the color episodes play on TVLand every day and the black-and-white episodes air on Western Channel. Plus both networks have been running mini-marathons. You gotta love Tivo.

Anyway, besides noticing what a great, under-appreciated show GUNSMOKE was (though there were a few seasons in the mid-60s you can skip)… I was struck by how often it has been subtly imitated over the years. The key characters on the show are Marshal Matt Dillon, his deputy Chester (and later Festus), his friend ornery Doc Adams, and his girlfriend Kitty, the saloon-keeper (and, let’s be honest here, proprietor of the whore house). But that central triumvirate…  lawman, deputy, and doctor, have been repeated ever since in many series…including one very popular example.

Gene Roddenberry described STAR TREK as "WAGON TRAIN in space." It probably would have been more accurate to call it GUNSMOKE in space. Captain Kirk is Matt Dillon, Mr. Spock is Chester, and Doctor McCoy is, well, virtually the same character as Doc Adams. All the STAR TREK shows have repeated that triumvirate in some form or another…

I also caught up on the first season of NIP/TUCK on DVD… a show that deserves all the praise it has been getting. I can’t wait for season two box set to come out. And I watched the first season DVD set of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT… which left me cold. I can see why it’s struggling to attract an audience, despite its Emmy awards.

I’ve also caught a bunch of movies…among them THE BIG SLEEP (love the movie, though I still can’t follow the plot at all), TONY ROME and LADY IN CEMENT (two fun Frank Sinatra PI movies based on Marv Albert novels), THE GOOD THE BAD AND UGLY special edition (a classic), MISSING (the Tommy Lee Jones western, the DVD is loaded with deleted scenes and alternate endings), all the Bond films for the millionth time, and two PINK PANTHER movies.. in addition to my usual primetime viewing.

The Joys of Stock Footage

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I was channel-surfing last night and stumbled on SUBMERGED,  a schlocky Fred Olen Ray movie from 2000 about a hijacked plane that crashes into the ocean, and the attempts to rescue the passengers. If the plot sounds identical to Universal’s cheesy AIRPORT  ’77, that’s not surprising. SUBMERGED was built entirely around AIRPORT ’77 stock footage. There’s nothing illegal about it… Fred simply bought/licensed the footage from Universal. What’s surprising is that Universal sees so little value now in their AIRPORT franchise that they’d allow a virtual remake to be made by another studio using their footage.

Stock footage is a wonderful thing, especially if you’re working on a tight budget.  I’ve certainly used my share of stock footage over the years, particularly on a  low-budget  syndicated action series called COBRA, starring Michael Dudikoff, that we wrote & produced for Steve Cannell up in Canada. We had virtually no money… so we relied on stock footage from the vast Cannell library to make our show look bigger than it was.  For example, we took an action sequence from the WISEGUY episode…used the same Vancouver location, matched the cars and the wardrobe, and crafted a new sequence using the same footage.  To make our scene a bit fresher, we used alternate takes not used in the WISEGUY episode.  The new footage and the stock matched perfectly.  The trickery was unnoticeable to the untrained eye, or someone unfamiliar with the WISEGUY episode.

For another episode, our hero’s car was trashed…so he drove a Corvette Stingray…which allowed us to use lift several action sequences from Cannell’s series STINGRAY.  That was probably our least creative use of stock…on the same level as SUBMERGED. But we saved a huge amount of money and it made us heroes around the Cannell building.

In still another COBRA  episode, we used stock footage from an action sequence in RIPTIDE, which used stock footage from an episode of HARDCASTLE AND MCCORMICK, which used stock footage from a STINGRAY. So our sequence was created from footage patched together from three other series.  I remember Steve Cannell watching the sequence in the screening room with a huge grin on his face… he’d never seen stock footage used so well. We looked at it as a challenge…and had a wonderful time.

My favorite use of stock footage was for a two-hour sweeps episode of  DIAGNOSIS MURDER about a plane crash in a corn field. We used stock footage of a plane crash, and sweeping, overhead shots of the wreckage, from the movie FEARLESS. We then bought out a cornfield in Oxnard, set it aflame, and  filled it with scorched airplane wreckage.  We also put our actors in the cornfield.  Our original footage matched seamlessly with the stock.  It gave our episode a scope we never could have managed on our tight budget…and I doubt the average viewer was the least bit aware of our trickery, even if they were among the few who’d seen FEARLESS.

I see stock footage used all the time in feature films and TV shows…mainly because the best stock (mostly explosions, battle sequences, car chases, establishing shots, etc.) gets used over and over again.  When it’s used well, the viewer rarely notices. When it’s used badly, it makes whatever you’re watching look like hack work… which, of course, it probably is or they wouldn’t have needed the stock footage in the first place!

Living Hell

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Today I experienced something more painful and unpleasant than having a surgeon hack away at my arm with a knife…

I sat through the BRIDGET JONES sequel. Unlike my surgery, I would have welcomed anesthesia during this ordeal.

Oh, the things a man will do to please his wife.

Back to the Beach

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Baywatchtitlecardop The studios must each have an exec who does nothing but troll through old TV guides, looking for series to resurrect. Variety Reports that Dreamworks — that’s Steven Spielberg and company — are fast-tracking a feature film version of BAYWATCH, a show I worked on (though I don’t usually admit it publicly).

The rights package was brought to the marketplace by CAA late last week, and before other studios could get a toe in the water, DreamWorks took the plunge with a guarantee of $1.25 million that had the lawyers finalizing a deal over the weekend.

DreamWorks’ John Fox and production president Adam Goodman spearheaded the bid; Fox will supervise the pic.

It is unclear whether any of the series regulars will be involved. The stars included Pamela Anderson, Carmen Electra and Yasmine Bleeth. Bolstering them was a batch of buff hunks led by David Hasselhoff, who starred in the series from 1989-2000 and became exec producer after the series became a global sensation. He is not at this point part of the film package.

The deal calls for "Baywatch" creators Michael Berk, Doug Schwartz and Greg Bonann to produce the pic, while Michelle Berk will be exec producer and Eli Roth will co-produce.

Can THREE’S COMPANY: THE MOVIE be far behind?

Crossovers

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Tonight, the second part of the CROSSING JORDAN/LAS VEGAS cross-over airs. Jill Hennessey, star of JORDAN, is no stranger to cross-overs, as she told the folks at zap2it. When she was on LAW AND ORDER, she did a cross-over with HOMICIDE. But this cross-over was her idea…

Hennessy takes some pride in the fact that the whole thing was her idea. At a pre-upfront meeting for advertisers, NBC bigwig Jeff Zucker trotted Hennessy and the "Las Vegas" cast out as proof of the network’s recent success stories. Hennessy looked around at the glitzy "Vegas" set and suggested to that show’s creator, Gary Scott Thompson, that a meeting of the minds would be a great idea. Although she claims she threw out the idea in jest, there were ulterior motives. "From what I’ve heard, they have a very strong young male following and we’ve got a very strong young female following, which works very well for both of us," she notes. "Put them together and they can procreate. I’m all for that."

She’s thinking like a producer. She just went up a notch in my estimation.

The only reason to do a cross-over episode is to goose the ratings, get some extra publicity… and bring new viewers to your show. I’ve done it a couple of times

But it’s complicated, especially if the two shows are done by rival studios.

On DIAGNOSIS MURDER, we did a cross-over with the show that led into us, PROMISED LAND, to create a promotable event on Thursday night.  We were the higher-rated of the two shows and, arguably, the better show from a creative stand-point as well. So the motivation for us was purely the one-time ratings spike the event might get.

Unfortunately, because the show was shot in Utah, we weren’t able to do a "true" cross-over… the only cast the two shows shared were guest-stars, none of our principals guested on each other’s series, which I think was a mistake. The hardest part of doing a cross-over is crafting a story that would begins on one show and ends on another… but that stays true to the tone of each series. We worked closely with their writers who, as it happened, were old friends of ours, as managed to craft a story that meshed well. The ratings bump wasn’t as big as we hoped…but I attribute that to the fact the stars didn’t cross-ovver.

We toyed with cross-overs with JAG and NASH BRIDGES, but we couldn’t pull either of them off for various reasons. We did, however, bring back MANNIX and MATLOCK for stunt episodes that scored enormously well… though those weren’t crossovers, more like TV reunions.

On MARTIAL LAW, we did a crossover with the show that followed us, WALKER TEXAS RANGER. We came up with the idea and CBS went nuts for it. The cross-over made a lot of sense. It not only created a promotable Saturday night "event," and one that could get some WALKER viewers to sample our series, but the two shows were perfectly compatible from a creative stand-point… (unlike, say, the MARTIAL LAW/EARLY EDITION cross-over that the previous showrunner tried the season before).  As it happened, two of our writers had written for WALKER before and we were friends with the show-runner, so crafting the storyline and the two scripts was suprisingly smooth. The hardest part was having to watch a half-dozen WALKER episodes so I had a feel for the show. We made sure Sammo sounded right in their script, and they made sure Walker sounded right in ours. And most important  of all, our stars guested on each other’s show. Chuck Norris spent a few days on our show, and we sent Sammo down to Dallas for a few days as well. We even used the WALKER theme when Chuck first shows up on screen… and they did the same for Sammo when he first appeared in their show.  We got a lot of press and the ratings were terrific… the highest ranking episodes on both series that season.  We got a big bump from the stunt…but not big enough. We were canceled that season anyway.

There’s a long history of cross-overs on television… so many have been done, there’s even a site dedicated to them. Check out what they had to say about the Diagnosis Murder/Promised Land cross-over, the Martial Law/Walker crossover, and, of course, everybody’s favorite, the Manimal/Nightman crossover

Testing Hell

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The network just tested a friend of mine’s pilot in front of an audience. He writes to me that it didn’t go well. 

Death and devastation.  Surely one of the worst focus group tests ever.  They hated everything about it. 

We’ve all been there. I remember observing a focus group discussion after the audience screened a couple of DIAGNOSIS MURDER episodes. Several of the audience members said they didn’t find the guy playing "Steve Sloan" believable at all as Dick Van Dyke’s son. Fair enough. Except the guy who played Steve was Barry Van Dyke.

During testing, the audience members hold a dial, and they twist it one way or another throughout the show to indicate whether they like what they are seeing or not. In the backroom, we see a read-out of these dial reactions that reads like an EKG. You can literally see your show dying… or getting a sudden jolt of life. It allows you to get instant feedback.

We tested some episodes of MARTIAL LAW and, of course, the scores went way up whenever there was an action sequence. That was no surprise. What was a surprise was that the scores went up even higher when Kelly Hu walked into a room. She didn’t even have to say anything.

So… what did we learn? We could have scrapped every single one of those expensive action sequences and simply asked Kelly Hu to stand in front of the camera for five minutes. Naturally, the network immediately asked us to get her in front of the camera as often as possible… which infuriated our star Sammo Hung, who already felt threatened by her. But that’s another story…

Rob Lowe and Joe Pantoliano

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Both Rob Lowe and Joe Pantoliano have starred in two TV series in two consecutive seasons… IN THE LIONS DEN (Lowe), THE HANDLER (Pantoliano) and DR. VEGAS (Lowe & Pantoliano).. and all three shows bombed. Do you think anybody will be hiring them to star in a TV series any time soon?

Merry Christmas

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Novelist Victor Gischler has posted “Eleven Silver Johnnies,” a horror story, on the net, that begins like this:

I knew this guy, Johnny Christmas, from the garage. Of all the grease monkeys, he was best, a big, thick-necked, hammy-handed man, and he could spit and smoke and cough up phlegm like it was a career. He farted and swore and laughed, and he could bring down a charging rhino with his salami breath. That was Johnny Christmas.

To read more, click here.