From Star to Slump to Second Act

Five days after the death of American television and film actor Robert Forster, I still think one of his best obituaries was also one of the first to appear: Chris Koseluk’s piece in The Hollywood Reporter.

Koseluk began by noting that Forster, aged 78, perished at his Los Angeles home as a result of brain cancer; that he had “made his film debut opposite Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), then sparkled as an ethically challenged cameraman in Haskell Wexler’s ultra-realistic Medium Cool (1969)”; and that following starring roles on TV (in NBC’s Banyon and ABC’s Nakia), Forster’s career had slumped to the point of his taking “supporting roles in such low-budget efforts as [1993’s] Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence.” Finally, Koseluk recalled the story of Forster’s “heartwarming comeback”:

“I went 21 months without a job. I had four kids, I took any job I could get,” Forster told the Chicago Tribune in 2018, raising and then lowering his hand to indicate his fortunes. “My career went like this for five years and then like that for 27. Every time it reached a lower level I thought I could tolerate, it dropped some more, and then some more. Near the end I had no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. I was taking whatever fell through the cracks.”

A fan of Forster since he was a kid, [movie director/screenwriter Quentin] Tarantino had brought the actor in to audition for the part of aging gangster Joe Cabot in 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, but he had his heart set on casting Lawrence Tierney. Tarantino never forgot Forster, however, and as he was crafting the screenplay for Jackie Brown (1997)—an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s 1992 novel, Rum Punch—he wrote Max Cherry with him in mind.

“Years had gone by and I ran into him in a coffee shop. By then my career was really, really dead,” Forster recalled in a 2018 interview with Fandor. “And we blah-blah’d for a few minutes, and then six months later he showed up at the same coffee shop with a script in his hands and handed it to me.

“When I read it I could hardly believe that he had me in mind for Max Cherry, except that nothing else made any sense. So when I asked him about it, he said, ‘Yes, it’s Max Cherry that I wrote for you.’ That's when I said to him, ‘I'm sure they’re not going to let you hire me.’ He said, ‘I hire anybody I want.’ “And that’s when I realized I was going to get another shot at a career.”

Of course, that led to Forster receiving an Oscar nomination for his work on Jackie Brown. He went on to appear in the motion pictures Psycho (1998), Mulholland Drive (2001), and The Descendants (2011). Forster also had a regular role as Carla Gugino’s ex-cop father on the underrated small-screen drama Karen Sisco (2003-2004), featured in the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad, and in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks he played Sheriff Frank Truman, the brother of Michael Ontkean’s lawman character from the original show.

(Right) TV Guide’s 1972 Fall Preview write-up on Banyon. Click to enlarge.

My earliest and perhaps fondest memory of Forster, though, comes from Banyon (1972-1973). Introduced by a 1971 pilot film, which co-starred Darren McGavin (and which I liked much more than did Mystery*File’s Michael Shonk), that Friday-night series found Forster as Miles C. Banyon, a rough-and-tumble private investigator in 1930s Los Angeles. The character had an office in downtown L.A.’s landmark Bradbury Building, a regular girlfriend—nightclub singer Abby Graham (played by Julie Gregg)—and a police contact/antagonist, Lieutenant Pete McNeil (portrayed by Richard Jaeckel in the weekly drama; McGavin played basically the same role in the pilot, though his character was named Lieutenant Pete Cordova). I tend to think of Banyon as having been inspired by Jack Nicholson’s 1974 film, Chinatown (much like Wayne Rogers’ 1976 NBC show, City of Angels), but in fact that NBC series debuted two years before Chinatown, so was—as Max Allan Collins writes—“a pioneering period private eye show.” Some years ago, I managed to locate a DVD copy of the Banyon pilot online, but am still hoping to see a DVD release of all 15 episodes someday soon. If you’d like to revisit the opening title sequence from Banyon, click here; the very different credits from the Banyon pilot can be enjoyed here.

While The Hollywood Reporter’s recap of Forster’s diverse career may be the best one to date, let me also point you toward Marty McKee’s interview with the actor, which appears in the blog Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot. It features a nice, if too-short section about Banyon. Worth looking up, too, are obituaries in The New York Times and Slate. Another fine remembrance, in The Washington Post, includes this memorable bit of background information:

Robert Wallace Foster Jr. was born in Rochester, N.Y., on July 13, 1941. (He later added an “r” to Foster after learning another actor shared his name.) His father was a Ringling Bros. elephant trainer who became an executive at a baking supply company; his mother was a homemaker.

They divorced when Mr. Forster was 8, and his mother later killed herself after Mr. Forster received his draft notice in 1966. In part, he told the New York Times, “she was hysterical about the thought of my going to Vietnam.” Mr. Forster received a deferment, partly through medical statements describing the “devastating psychological effects” of his mother’s death.

Mr. Forster studied history and psychology at the University of Rochester, where he was mulling a career as a lawyer, when he spotted a young woman in a black leather raincoat. “As I was trying to think of what to say, I followed her into an auditorium,” he recalled in a Rochester alumni magazine interview.

Students were auditioning for a production of “Bye Bye Birdie”; the woman, June Provenzano, was a crew member. Mr. Forster landed a role in the chorus and fell in love with both acting and Provenzano, whom he married in 1966. They later divorced.

Rest in peace, Mr. Forster. You deserve it.

READ MORE: “Pilot Programs,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

Bullet Points: Chasing Down Leads Edition

I just returned from a few days away, spent in a place where (thank heavens!) I had absolutely no access to computers but plenty of opportunities to shop used bookstores. In other words, it was a most welcome break. But now it’s time to return to business, starting with this compilation of curious and interesting Web links.

• Lest we forget: “Friday is Global James Bond Day,” mentions Bill Koenig in The Spy Command, “the event that was invented six years ago for the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Dr. No.” One obvious way to celebrate this occasion is with a rewatching of the 1962 Sean Connery film based on Ian Fleming’s original novel. But Koenig suggests, instead, taking in a handful of episodes of Hawaii Five-O and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that boast “significant 007 connections.” Not a bad idea.

• Peter Stone, author of the new young-adult novel The Perfect Candidate, has selected what he calls “12 Essential Political Scandal Thrillers” for CrimeReads. His choices include Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Jason Matthews’ Red Sparrow, and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. They’re quite different from the books featured in another list, one that I put together for CrimeReads a few months back, of U.S. presidential mysteries and thrillers.

• This is certainly good news! New Mexico mystery-fictionist Steve Brewer (Cold Cuts) and his wife are preparing to open a new independent bookstore in Albuquerque this coming November. As he explains in his blog, “Kelly and I signed a lease yesterday for space in the historic Nob Hill Business Center on Route 66. In keeping with Nob Hill’s all-natural hipster vibe, the independent bookstore will be called Organic Books. Our two sons, Max and Seth, will work at the store, so it’ll truly be a family business.” Brewer says the store will “feature new books by New Mexico authors as well as a curated selection of thousands of used books.” (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• January Magazine reports that Israeli actress Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) has joined the cast of Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, his film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 Hercule Poirot novel of that same name. The movie, a box-office sequel to Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017)—best recalled for Branagh’s scene-stealing ’stache—is set for release in December 2019.

• I confess, I haven’t yet watched any episodes of Strike, the BBC One TV series based on J.K. Rowling’s novels (which she writes as “Robert Galbraith”), featuring modern-day London gumshoe Cormoran Strike. However, I see in The Killing Times that more episodes of that drama, starring Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger, are to be made. This time, it’s Rowling’s Lethal White that will be adapted for the small screen, in four parts. The Killing Times explains that the plot finds “Billy, a troubled young man, com[ing] to private eye Cormoran Strike’s office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child … While Billy is obviously mentally distressed and cannot remember many concrete details, there is something sincere about him and his story. Strike and Robin [his assistant, played by Grainger] set off on a twisting trail that leads them through the backstreets of London, into a secretive inner sanctum within Parliament, and to a beautiful but sinister manor house deep in the countryside.”

• In Reference to Murder alerts us to news that “Emmy-nominated writer and producer Frank Pugliese (House of Cards) has been set as showrunner for TNT’s The Angel of Darkness, a limited series based on the sequel to [the] best-selling The Alienist by Caleb Carr. The Alienist’s lead cast, including Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning, will return for The Angel of Darkness with a new story line that finds Sara Howard (Fanning), who has opened her own private detective agency, enlisting the help of Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (Brühl) and John Moore (Evans) to hunt down an elusive killer.”

• Eight years ago, I put together a small succession of posts for The Rap Sheet called “Killed in the Ratings.” My focus was on “American TV crime dramas that debuted with fanfare, but are now largely forgotten.” One of those programs was Griff (1973-1974), starring ex-Bonanza patriarch Lorne Greene as a Los Angeles police captain turned P.I. At the time, I was unable to track down the opening title sequence from Griff; I wound up including in my post just a short video clip from one of the episodes. But recently I finally found on YouTube the hard-charging theme from Griff. I understand it was composed by Elliot Kaplan, though the version at the link comes from John Gregory & His Orchestra. I’ll add this to my original post at some point.

• Speaking of YouTube finds, a poster calling herself Izolda Orlovskaya has uploaded there two hour-long episodes—to be found here and here—from the 1965 CBS-TV legal drama For the People. Broadcast a year before the debut of Star Trek, For the People also starred William Shatner, only in this latter series he had the role of David Koster, an assistant district attorney in New York City. Among the cast, too, was Jessica Walter, who played Koster’s wife, Phyllis (and would much later re-team with Shatner in the underappreciated 1974-1975 NBC Mystery Movie series Amy Prentiss).

• One more video treat: “The Murder Game,” the December 15, 1972, episode of Banyon, a largely forgotten NBC-TV series that imagined Robert Forster as a gumshoe in 1930s L.A. “The Murder Game,” which guest-starred Skye Aubrey and Kaz Garas, was the 13th episode of Banyon; only 15 were shot in total. As I always recommend when dealing with YouTube, watch this show soon, because you never know when the YouTube police will find cause to delete it.

• From Down These Mean Streets: “Of all the actors to play private eyes and gumshoes during the Golden Age of Radio, William Gargan may have been the most uniquely qualified. Ironically, while success as a detective seemed to elude him, he enjoyed a great deal of success by playing detectives on film, television, and radio. Chief among his sleuth shows was Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator—the adventures of a sardonic private eye that premiered on NBC today in 1951.” If you are interested, you’ll find episodes of Barry Craig by clicking here, here, and here.

• Although the Seattle Mystery Bookshop closed a year ago, members of its former staff continue to produce a blog—updated once a month, so far—that’s filled with mini-reviews and tidbits of interest to readers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. For instance, the October “newzine” passes along this link to a BBC story about how Agatha Christie shaped the way the world now sees Great Britain.

• Another once-a-month offering is Mike Ripley’s delightful “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots. His October wrap-up includes word of CrimeFest’s move to a different venue in 2019; a crowd-funding project to republish Adam Diment’s vintage Philip McAlpine thrillers (e.g., The Dolly Dolly Spy); new novels by Dominick Donald, Robert Galbraith, and John Simpson; and forthcoming works by the likes of Jane Harper, Christian White, and Ben Pastor.

• Max Allan Collins is touting a brand-new edition of Primal Spillane: Early Stories 1941-1942 (Bold Venture), “a much expanded collection of Mickey’s comic-book filler prose stories, written in the early to mid-’40s, mostly for Timely, the precursor of Marvel.” I could have sworn that I owned a copy of the 2003 edition of Primal Spillane, which Collins edited with Lynn F. Myers Jr., but I’ll be damned if I can find it anywhere. I might have to resort to buying a copy of this revised edition, especially since Collins says that it contains a never-before-published Spillane filler piece.

• And while we’re on the subject of Mickey Spillane, let me point out that Evan Lewis has posted the Mick’s first two Mike Danger comic stories in his blog. He explains that they were “written in 1946, but unpublished until 1954, after Mickey had hit the Big Time.”

Bullet Points: Serene Saturday Edition

• It appears there will be no 2016 Tony Hillerman Prize competition, while a new partnership is being established to organize that annual contest. The Hillerman Prize, you will recall, promotes debut mysteries based in the American Southwest. A press release carried in the Crimespree Magazine blog explains that “Minotaur Books/A Thomas Dunne Book and Wordharvest are delighted to announce that we have joined forces with Western Writers of America, who will host the Tony Hillerman Prize going forward. With this change come a new submission deadline, an option for electronic manuscript submission, and a new venue for the announcement of the winner at the annual Western Writers of America convention. In order to prepare for these changes, we have made the decision to suspend the competition for 2016. The deadline for the 2017 competition will be January 2, 2017. You can view the guidelines and online submission form online at http://us.macmillan.com/minotaurbooks/tonyhillermanprize.” A list of previous prize winners is available here.

• Mike Ripley’s latest “Getting Away with Murder” column in Shots features remarks pertaining to the 50th anniversary of the death of Margery Allingham, the upcoming Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival (September 9-11), Walter Satterthwait’s New York Nocturne, a theatrical staging of John Harvey’s Darkness, Darkness, and the Sicily-set novel Ripley declares is “the feel-good-Euro-read of the summer.” Read all about these matters and more here.

• By the way, I’m not sure that I mentioned Ripley’s June 2016 column on this page. You should look that one up here.

• The Los Angeles Times carries this interesting look at the new eight-part HBO-TV miniseries, The Night Of, which is set to premiere tomorrow evening. “Created by acclaimed writers Steven Zaillian and Richard Price, and starring John Turturro and Riz Ahmed, the New York-set show examines what happens when the 23-year-old son of a Pakistani-immigrant cab driver is tossed into the criminal justice system for a murder he may or may not have committed,” writes the Times’ Steven Zeitchik. Wikipedia will be rolling out individual episode synopses as the series progresses.

• Based on a UK series titled Criminal Justice, The Night Of was “the passion project of the late James Gandolfini,” according to this 2014 piece from Deadline Hollywood. Following Gandolfini’s sudden death in 2014, Robert De Niro was brought in to fill his role in the miniseries, playing “ambulance-chasing New York City attorney” Jack Stone. But De Niro later had to withdraw from the project for “scheduling reasons.” John Turturro (who is starting to look a lot like Al Pacino as he ages, don’t you think?) was ultimately brought in to star. I look forward to seeing what he can do here.

• What a great, humorous title for a work of crime fiction! On the left you’ll see the cover from a 1950s edition of Colin Calhoun Detective, a digest-size pulp periodical published in Australia. The cover story, “The Stripper Died Dressed,” is credited to one Conrad Paul. Also in that issue were the stories “Redheads in Jeopardy” and “The Callgirl and the Cop,” both by Benn Raymond. (Hat tip to The Seattle Mystery Bookshop Hardboiled blog.)

• The shortlist of nominees for this year’s first-ever HWA (Historical Writers’ Association) Goldsboro Debut Crown award, recognizing excellence in historical fiction, includes a work of crime fiction, so it merits mention here. The half-dozen contenders are: Death and Mr. Pickwick, by Stephen Jarvis (Jonathan Cape); Eden Gardens, by Louise Brown (Headline); The Hoarse Oaths of Fife, by Chris Moore (Uniform Press); Mrs. Engels, by Gavin McCrea (Scribe); Summertime, by Vanessa Lafaye (Orion); and Wolf Winter, by Cecilia Ekbäck (Hodder), described as “a powerful, beautifully written gothic murder mystery in a remote area of 18th-century Lapland.” The winner is expected to be declared during Britain’s Harrogate History Festival (October 21-23).

• Sad news. Omaha, Nebraska’s Mystery Bookstore, founded back in 1995, will shut its doors at the end of September. Owner Kate Birkel wrote in a Facebook post: “As many of you know, I am located next to the Bohemian Café, an Omaha landmark for many decades. (They also happen to be my landlords—the greatest landlords anyone could ever hope to have.) Like many of Omaha’s traditional, family-owned restaurants, the Bohemian recently decided to close. The current generation running the Café is more than ready to retire and none of their kids wants to buy them out. (The common explanation is: “Hell, no! I’m not working my butt off 60 to 80 hours a week! I want a life!”) Much of my walk-in traffic comes from the Bohemian. Sales at the bookstore have been nose diving for the past several years, and I just see no way forward without that walk-in traffic from the Café. Between now and 30 September, I will be selling books, embroidery supplies, and beads on eBay; my seller name is mysteries-to-go. Please check in occasionally. You’d be surprised what I have laying around after nearly 25 years.” Minnesota writer William Kent Krueger mentions in his blog that he will be signing copies of his new Cork O’Connor mystery, Manitou Canyon (Atria), at Birkel’s shop on September 17—“the store’s last official author event.” He adds, “I’ve decided to use the occasion to throw Kate a ‘Goodbye and Thank You’ celebration.”

• Anyone who has ever tried to compose a crime-fiction blog knows just how difficult it can be to remain active and relevant in the game. So author James Reasoner deserves hearty applause for 12 years of writing Rough Edges. Thank you, Jim.

• PBS-TV host Tavis Smiley talks with Walter Mosley about his excellent new, 13th Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins novel, Charcoal Joe.

• Meanwhile, Eric Beetner revisits Mosley’s first Rawlins tale, 1990’s Devil in a Blue Dress, in a nice piece for Criminal Intent.

• Pennsylvania educator and writer Brian R. Sheridan has started a petition on Change.org, asking that Warner Archives release the 1971-72 NBC-TV series Banyon in DVD format. “The show was created by Ed Adamson,” Sheridan explains, “and became a Quinn Martin production starring the outstanding actor Robert Forster as a 1930s private eye, Miles Banyon. The show lasted only 16 episodes [including a 1971 pilot film] but is highly regarded by detective-show fans. The outstanding pilot used to turn up on TV stations but, like the series, seems to have faded into obscurity. We are asking the show to be a MOD-DVD release.” I don’t know whether a petition such as this can have much impact on bottom-line-focused Warner execs, but I do remember Banyon fondly, and I’d love to watch that series again. So I signed. You can do so here. What’s the harm?

• Given the shootings earlier this week in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas, I’m not sure The Guardian’s rundown of the “Top 10 Novels About Deranged Killers” will find widespread readership in the States, but the piece is out there for your delectation.

• It’s nice to see that readers are still discovering Arthur Lyons’ 11 novels about Los Angeles private investigator Jacob Asch, even eight years after the author passed away.

• This last April 18 brought the 110th anniversary of San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, a disaster about which I have written on more than one occasion. What’s really amazing about the downtown destruction is that so much film footage of its aftermath exists. Silent footage, yes, but dramatic nonetheless. Here’s one “haunting” example.

• A few interviews worth noticing: John Farrow, aka Trevor Ferguson, answers questions from Criminal Element about his new Émile Cinq-Mars novel, Seven Days Dead; Benjamin Whitmer (Pike, Cry Father) survives interrogation by S.W. Lauden; Dana King (Dangerous Lesson, The Man in the Window) fields queries lobbed his way by New Mystery Reader Magazine; Speaking of Mysteries’ Nancie Clare talks with Mark Billingham (Die of Shame) and Martin Walker (Fatal Pursuit); and crime analyst-turned-author Spencer Kope chats with Criminal Element about Collecting the Dead.

• Thanks to a recommendation from John and Muriel Higgins, who operate The Victor Canning Pages (devoted to the life and work of that prolific 20th-century writer), I have added a link from The Rap Sheet’s Author Web Sites/Blogs page to this tribute site focused on British journalist-novelist Desmond Bagley (1923-1983), the author of such thrillers as 1967’s Landslide and 1971’s The Freedom Trap (later filmed as The Mackintosh Man). Check it out.

• Finally, Elizabeth Foxwell informs us of an “effort by Edgar winner LeRoy Lad Panek (Introduction to the Detective Story) and Mary Bendel-Simso (McDaniel College, MD) to compile”—for the Westminster Detective Library—“an online repository of short detective works published in the United States prior to 1891 … The pieces include 87 stories by 48 female authors, and Panek states, ‘There are no doubt many more as the majority of the stories we have catalogued have no author listed in the original.’” Foxwell’s post provides some direct links to individual stories, but you can access the Detective Library’s new Web interface here. What a splendid resource!

The Master of Cool

Today is the 68th birthday of TV and film actor Robert Forster. Born in Rochester, New York, Forster first gained wide renown for his role in the 1969 movie Medium Cool. He went on to star in the underappreciated TV detective series Banyon (1972), playing a hard-fisted but compassionate private eye in 1930s Los Angeles, and later took the lead in Nakia (1974), playing a Native American lawman in New Mexico.

Following a succession of B-movie roles and guest shots on shows such as Police Story and Magnum, P.I., Forster was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in the 1997 Quentin Tarantino flick, Jackie Brown. He’s since appeared in the films Me, Myself & Irene, and Mulholland Drive, as well as in the TV series Karen Sisco (2003) and Heroes.

Pilot Programs

It seems there are many things that piss me off these days. Drivers who seem congenitally incapable of using their turn signals, for instance. People who walk in front of me while I’m browsing grocery aisles, without so much as an “excuse me.” Reality shows that presume I care a tinker’s damn about the private lives of narcissistic celebrities. Illiterate advertising slogans. Aggressive salespeople. And presidential contenders who think I’m stupid enough to believe that they’re “mavericks,” after they’ve just spent years kissing the fat asses of people who might help them get elected.

Oh, and it pisses me off, too, when critics pontificate about the “best” of anything, even though their memories apparently don’t seem to stretch back further than 10 or 15 years.

Case in point: TV Guide senior writer Damien Holbrook’s recent rundown of what he insists are the “top 10 television pilots.” According to his LinkedIn profile page, Pennsylvania writer Holbrook graduated from college in 1994, which probably puts him in his mid-30s--old enough to know that more TV history occurred prior to George W. Bush’s occupation of the White House than since. Yet of the 10 shows he lists, only three--The Sopranos (1999), ER (1994), and Saturday Night Live (1975)--debuted before 2001. And with a single exception (the unsold 2007 pilot for something called Football Wives), the remainder of Holbrook’s list holds no surprises, but is simply a reminder of what Nielsen-ratings families supposedly watch most often these days.

Yawn.

I’m not the first person to take issue with this list. (Others have weighed in here, here, and here.) But allow me to suggest my own alternative selections of memorable TV pilot films, focusing on crime dramas. There are lots of options, but these are the four teleflicks that seem to have stuck most firmly in my mind:

• Banyon (1971). Despite its cancellation, the 1972-1973 NBC-TV series based on this teleflick was pretty good. It featured Robert Forster as a raw-around-the-edges private eye working the tough but star-studded streets of 1930s Los Angeles. However, the pilot, which also starred Darren McGavin as Lieutenant Pete Cordova (a role taken over in the series by the far less engaging Richard Jaeckel), was exceptional, a moody rumination on fraud and loyalty. The New York Times calls that pilot “a number-one detective yarn ... Robert Forster, emulating John Garfield in virtually every scene, plays private eye Miles C. Banyon. Right now he’s in dutch because a beautiful young woman has been found murdered--and Banyon’s gun was the murder weapon. This state of affairs plunges the detective into a maelstrom of deceit and double-cross involving (among many elements) a [Walter] Winchell-style radio commentator (José Ferrer), a paroled big-time gangster, a scar-faced assassin, and a Nazi Bund camp. Once he solves the main mystery, Banyon is faced with the unhappy Maltese Falcon task of exposing a close friend as a murderer.” Well worth watching, if you can get your hands on a copy. So far, Banyon hasn’t been released in a DVD set. (UPDATE: Learn more about the Banyon pilot here.)

• The Rockford Files (1974). Along with Harry O, The Rockford Files represented a high-water mark for American private-eye TV series of the ’70s. Much of this NBC show’s appeal was attributed to its protagonist, played by James Garner, who brought a bit of his previous role as con man/card sharp Bret Maverick, and a bit too of Philip Marlowe (who he’d played in the 1969 film Marlowe), to the character of a violence-shy, habitually impecunious Los Angeles gumshoe. The pilot (later repackaged as a two-part episode called “Backlash of the Hunter”) did an outstanding job of introducing Jim Rockford as an ex-con who won a pardon from California’s governor, now lives in a rundown trailer home in Malibu, and only takes cases that the cops have been unable to solve. (That theme was eventually dropped from the series.) This story has him being hired by lovely Lindsay Wagner (then only 25 years old, in her pre-Bionic Woman days), who works in a bikini shop, as I remember it, and wants Rockford to look into the death of her father, a derelict whose death the police have written off as the result of natural causes. Not being the trusting sort, Wagner wants to involve herself in Rockford’s work, which drives him to distraction--especially when she questions his methods (such as printing phony business cards on a machine stored in the glove box of his Pontiac Firebird). Their repartee is both realistic and entertaining, and Rockford’s warmth shines through quite clearly, even when he’s frustrated by his client’s inability to pay her debts. Stephen J. Cannell, who created The Rockford Files with Roy Huggins, wrote this pilot. Most of its characteristics would be translated smoothly into the series, though Robert Donley, who played Rockford’s father in the pilot, was replaced by the more avuncular Noah Beery Jr. The pilot is included in the DVD set The Rockford Files: Season Two.

• Last Hours Before Morning (1975). Among unsold pilots, this is one I remember best. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to track down a copy of it through any of my usual Web sources. But maybe someday I’ll be able to catch it again on a late-night TV broadcast. The New York Times provides a pretty good synopsis of the film: “Prolific character actor Ed Lauter enjoys one of his few starring roles in this made-for-TV mystery yarn. Set in the 1940s, the film casts Lauter as Bud Delaney, a former policeman who was bounced from the force after being framed by a mysterious higher-up. As he tries to track down the person responsible for his firing, Delaney keeps food on the table by working as a house detective in a seedy Hollywood hotel, moonlighting as a private eye. Along the way, he gets mixed up in the theft of a movie star’s jewelry and the murder of a pompous gambler--two seemingly diverse crimes that are actually, and inextricably, linked together. Originally telecast by NBC on April 19, 1975, Last Hours Before Morning was the pilot film for the unsold weekly series Delaney.” That’s one series I would’ve been glued to every week. Damn those network execs!

• Miami Vice (1984). Curious, I just realized that all three of the previous teleflicks were made for NBC. And here’s yet another one. Although the two-hour introductory installment of Miami Vice (titled “Brother’s Keeper”) is often considered just another episode of the series, it was really a pilot. According to Wikipedia, creator Anthony Yerkovich (formerly with Hill Street Blues) “devised the concept after learning about asset forfeiture statutes that allow law enforcement agencies to confiscate the property of drug dealers for official use. The initial idea was for a movie about a pair of vice cops in Miami. Yerkovich then turned out a script for a two-hour pilot, titled Gold Coast, but later renamed, Miami Vice. Yerkovich was immediately drawn to South Florida as a setting for his new-style police show.” As well he should have been. This pilot, which found Miami-Dade vice squad detective James “Sonny” Crockett (Don Johnson) teaming up with Manhattan cop Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) to pursue a Colombian drug dealer, set the tone for the six-year series that was to follow: lots of stylish pastel-colored clothes, slick and shiny streets, fast cars, curvaceous beachgoers, and enough armaments to take Fort Knox. Oh, and of course there was the music--lots of pop and rock hits from the Reagan era, plus Jan Hammer’s synthesized instrumentals. “MTV Cops”--that was one NBC exec’s synopsis of the show, and it fit perfectly. “Brother’s Keeper” is packaged with the DVD set Miami Vice: Season One.

Anyone out there care to offer more nominations?

UPDATE: In a May 2010 profile of actor Ed Lauter, The Screen Lounge mentioned that Delaney, the series that was supposed to have been introduced by the 1975 pilot Last Hours Before Morning, was solidly in the running to be picked up by NBC, “but the network optioned Ellery Queen over his show at the last moment.” I don’t think I’ve heard before that Ellery Queen, which starred Jim Hutton and was also set in the 1940s, had anything to do with Delaney’s failure.

READ MORE: “The First Episode,” by Lee Goldberg (A Writer’s Life); “The Six Best (and Five Worst) Failed TV Pilots,” by Todd Ciolek (Topless Robot); “7 Great TV Pilots That Never Got Off the Ground,” by Aaron Koehn (OMG Lists).

Killed by Creative Differences

I haven’t yet got my hands on a copy of the new biography Quinn Martin, Producer: A Behind-the-Scenes History of QM Productions and Its Founder (McFarland & Company), by Jonathan Etter, but I did recently stumble across some pages from that book that are available on the Web, and what they contain is pretty fascinating. I was especially interested in what Etter has to say about the history of Banyon, a 1972-1973 QM (Quinn Martin) Productions show for NBC-TV that starred Robert Forster. I remember the series fondly. Forster played a classically sardonic Depression-era Los Angeles private eye, who had an office in downtown L.A.’s landmark Bradbury Building and was supplied with assistants from a secretarial school located down the hall.

In the book, Etter recalls:

Banyon creator-producer Ed Adamson had developed Banyon as a showcase for his pal Robert Forster. In 1969, Adamson had seen a Gregory Peck Western called The Stalking Moon. In it, Forster played an Indian. Reveals Forster, “Ed saw a scene in that movie with me and a young Indian lad. He wrote my name down when the credits came up and said, to himself, ‘I’m gonna hire that guy someday,’” which Adamson did for the March 15, 1971, movie-pilot, Banyon.

Directed by Robert Day, the well-produced 1971 Warner Bros. pilot had former cop turned private detective Miles C. Banyon trying to clear himself of a murder charge after his young female client is found dead in his office, killed by his own gun.

Unfortunately, the transition from the pilot to the Friday night TV series meant the recruitment of producer Quinn Martin--a veteran of such shows as The Fugitive, The F.B.I., The Streets of San Francisco, and Cannon. His management of a program that he had not created apparently stirred up more than a bit of tension.

Film noir made sense in a show whose title character was a detective in the Sam Spade-Philip Marlowe tradition. In other words, a down-on-his-luck private detective who’d take almost any kind of case, and was often beaten up by thugs. As evidenced by the series’ pilot, “Ed Adamson was very much into all of that,” says pilot director Robert Day. “He really was into the Maltese Falcon and all those 1930s and ’40s shows. He was into that very much, and he wanted to keep it almost verbatim. I really liked his original script. He was a clever writer.” As was the pilot’s co-writer, Richard Alan Simmons. He and Ed Adamson had their own ideas on how to do the Banyon pilot. Those ideas weren’t the same. The two men did not get along.

So, when NBC decided to do the Banyon series one year later, with Quinn Martin as their producer, Ed Adamson was not happy. “Ed felt ownership of the idea at the very least,” says Robert Forster. “He created the show. He was the primary source and the link.” “Ed Adamson really resented any interference from the QM organization,” remembers [director] Ralph Senensky. “There was an air of hostility between him and the QM people. I didn’t have any actual out and out problems with it, but Quinn did make it a point to come to me and thank me after I’d finished one of the shows. He very seldom did that. Ed Adamson was a real problem. He was caught in the fact that this was his baby, and that he was doing it under Quinn’s umbrella. Ed didn’t want to be told what to do. Especially since he was ill at the time. So he figured he was gonna do it his way, which he did.”

Etter explains that doing a period drama created a number of challenges, not the least of which were location shoots that required camouflaging modern elements of L.A. and keeping out-of-period pedestrians from walking through the scenes. Re-shooting drove up the cost of Banyon. But, notes Etter,

[I]t wasn’t really the expense of doing Banyon that killed the show. It was the sudden loss of its creator, Ed Adamson. “Ed died during the shooting of the show,” recalls [casting director] Meryl O’Loughlin. “It was such a shock to everybody. One day he was there, the next day, he was dead.” “We had an order of fifteen episodes,” adds Forster, “and on the thirteenth episode, Ed died. He died at home. He was at my house Saturday night. Sunday I got a call from his wife, Helene. She told me Ed had just passed away. We talked about keeping the show going with Dick Donner running and producing the show, but we were sort of on the edge with the ratings.”

Given the loss of its creator-producer Ed Adamson, its weak ratings, and its powerful competition (the last hour of the CBS Friday Night Movie, ABC’s popular hour-long sitcom, Love American Style), NBC opted to cancel Banyon.

Too bad. Banyon debuted during the first year I became interested in TV crime dramas, but I wasn’t able to see all of the episodes during their original broadcasts, and I haven’t been aware of their being shown since. Within the last year, I was able to procure a good-quality DVD copy of the pilot film and a lesser print of the series’ first episode; but I hold out hope of Banyon one day being resurrected as a DVD full-series set.

By the way, Jonathan Etter’s biography of Martin deals also with that producer’s other series, including Barnaby Jones, The Invaders, and the Burt Reynolds vehicle, Dan August.