#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
The James Bond site MI6 is celebrating the 20th anniversary of A VIEW TO A KILL by giving my old articles about the movie (written for Starlog and the LA Times Syndicate among others) a slick, new presentation. First up is an interview I did with Roger Moore. Soon they’ll be posting my visit to the set… as well as some of my other 007 coverage.
My God, has it really been 20 years? I can’t believe I’m old enough to have written anything 20 years ago.
Anthony Lane in the New Yorker:
The general opinion of "Revenge of the Sith" seems to be that it marks
a distinct improvement on the last two episodes. True, but only in the same way
that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.
The special effects, however, were amazing.
I don’t what what it is, but Friday seems to be a big day for email. Here’s one I got today, which read, in part:
Television series air and are eventually canceled. What
happens to them? Obviously I wouldn’t be asking if I weren’t interested in
a particular series."Search," an adventure series that aired in
1972 lasted one season and has never aired since. Do you
have general knowledge of what might of happened to a series such as
Search?Any information that you
might be able to provide that would assist someone like myself in finding
out more about the disposition of the series, or how to be able to maybe
have the opportunity to actually view the episodes once more would be
invaluable.
The simple answer is that cancelled shows end up in a film vault somewhere. Unless the series had enough episodes to syndicate (which SEARCH didn’t), and there’s a real demand to see the reruns (which there isn’t), the show will just stay on the shelf forever. There are literally thousands of series like that, and not all of them are one-or-two season flops. . There really is no opportunity for fans to get episodes, except bootlegs from collectors. There’s some room for hope…the success of TV show collections on DVD have given some obscure old shows new life. Whoever thought you’d be able to buy the complete DUSTY’S TRAIL (and who would want to?) Whether SEARCH will ever come out on DVD remains to be seen…but there are a lot of other, better known and more successful shows in the Warner Brothers vault that are likely to come out first. I’m still waiting for SPENSER FOR HIRE…
The plugged-in folks at TVTracker are circulating the new UPN schedule. Gone: KEVIN HILL and ENTERPRISE. Back: VERONICA MARS. New: SEX LIES & SECRETS (Denise Richards is a relationship drama) and EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS (Chris Rock’s childhood experiences become a sitcom). The schedule is on the jump.
The fine folks at TVTracker are circulating the Fox schedules for both fall and midseason, too, when 24 and AMERICAN IDOL return to the air. The new drama series include BONES (about a forensic anthropologist), THE GATE (about deviant criminals and the cops
who pursue them), HEAD CASES (Chris O’Donnell as a mentally-disturbed lawyer) and PRISON BREAK ( a guy breaks into the prison he designed to help his falsely accused brother escape).
The complete schedules are on the jump.
I got this email today…then again, it seems like I get it every day:
I have a great idea for a TV cop show but I’m not a writer. How can I sell it?
I can’t remember if I’ve posted this before, but here goes anyway. This is a column I wrote several years ago for Mystery Scene about an experience I had with a woman who wanted me to sell her Really Great Idea For a TV Series. Parts of it will be familiar to those of you who’ve read my replies to this question before…
I was a guest at Sleuthfest in Florida a few years back and after one of my panels, a woman approached me saying she had a great idea for a television series. Even better, she already had 22
scripts written and a list of actors she felt were perfect for the parts.
All I had to do, she said, was sell it and we’d both be rich.
CBS has announced their fall schedule. The highlights: The network is jumping on the LOST and MEDIUM-inspired speculative fiction bandwagon with two shows — THE GHOST WHISPERER (Jennifer Love Hewitt talks to dead people and solves crimes) and THRESHOLD (aliens invade from STAR TREK producer Brannon Braga and BLADE screenwriter David Goyer). Cancelled: JOAN OF ARCADIA, JUDGING AMY and Jason Alexander 43rd awful sitcom since SEINFELD.
The schedule, as printed by USA Today, is on the jump.
Okay, I admit it. I can’t resist Frank Sinatra as private eye Tony Rome. He made two movies about the Miami-based private eye, TONY ROME and THE LADY IN CEMENT, and I love them both. They are based on books by Marvin Albert and owe, at least in the film versions, a large debt to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. Rome is an ex-cop who lives on a boat and barely scrapes out a living. I find it impossible to channel surf past either movie, even though I’ve seen them both a hundred times. The stories aren’t all that well-plotted, but there’s something about that Rat Pack take on the hard-boiled detective that I find irresistable. Now Hugo Montenegro’s soundtrack to LADY IN CEMENT is out on CD. I bought it as fast as I could click. Like I said, it’s an addiction. I’m even easy prey for Sinatra’s other cop movies — THE DETECTIVE, CONTRACT ON CHERRY STREET, and the awful SEVEN DEADLY SINS. Is there any hope for me?
PS – They tried to turn TONY ROME into a TV series. Twentieth Century Fox did a short demo film/pilot that never aired called NICK QUARRY. Jerry Goldsmith did the music, which is terrific and has been released as bonus material on his STRIPPER soundtrack CD.
A sample of the NICK QUARRY theme is posted on the BuySoundtrax site, but you can listen to it here:
The WB announced their schedule today. The highlights: Don Johnson returns to primetime as a lawyer in JUST LEGAL and director David Nutter continues his amazing winning streak — his pilot SUPERNATURAL made it on the sked. Out of 11 pilots he’s shot, 11 have sold. Midseason shows include BEDFORD DIARIES, a series about sex educators at a NY college, comes from HOMICIDE & ST. ELSEWHERE writer/producer Tom Fontana.
You can find the complete schedule, as reported by TVTracker, on the jump.
There have been a lot of final episodes this season — NYPD BLUE, JAG, ENTERPRISE and EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND — and they have all shared several things in common: they were boring, bland, and truly anti-climactic. It was as if the writers were making a conscious effort not to tie things up in a meaningful and emotionally-resonant way. Or simply didn’t want to make the effort. None of these finales came even close to matching the impact of the last episodes of shows like THE FUGITIVE, LARRY SANDERS, MARY TYLER MOORE, MASH, CHEERS, NEWHART, STAR TREK: TNG, ST. ELSEWHERE, THE FUGITIVE, DALLAS, WHO’S THE BOSS, THIRTYSOMETHING, BUFFY, HOMICIDE, THE ODD COUPLE, or even FRIENDS.
Granted, there have been stinker finales before (MIAMI VICE, HILL STREET BLUES, MacGYVER, DESIGNING WOMEN, HAWAII FIVE -O, COSBY, MAGNUM PI, SEX AND THE CITY, SEINFELD, QUANTUM LEAP, MURPHY BROWN, NORTHERN EXPOSURE, etc), but at least they made an effort at leaving viewers with something special.
If the writer/producers aren’t going to bother doing something really terrific with their final episodes, then how about this: Don’t do one.
Maybe we should go back to the way things used to be, when most shows didn’t do final episodes, even if they knew the ax was about to fall.
GUNSMOKE never had one. Neither did BONANZA, STAR TREK, MURDER SHE
WROTE, MARRIED WITH CHILDREN, LOST IN SPACE, THE ROCKFORD FILES,
MAVERICK, THE BRADY BUNCH, MANNIX, I LOVE LUCY, to name a few.
In a way, not doing a wrap-up episode makes sense. Most series are designed to be open-ended, to go on forever. Isn’t that how we really want to remember our TV characters, living on as we remember them best?
Do we really need, when the time comes, "Final Episodes" of LAW AND ORDER, ER, ACCORDING TO JIM, CSI, GROUNDED FOR LIFE, CROSSING JORDAN and TWO AND A HALF MEN?