Night Gallery 01x00: Eyes

This is my post for the Joan Crawford Blogathon, celebrating the life and work of one of Old Hollywood’s most legendary actresses. It’s an event well worth checking out, full of great entries looking at all aspects of her career, hosted by the wonderful In The Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.

Steven Spielberg was only twenty-one years old when he was hired to direct a segment for Rod Serling’s new series, Night Gallery. It was Spielberg’s very first paid directing gig, and he was going to be working with Joan Crawford on the story of a blind woman receiving an ocular nerve transplant.

Joan Crawford.

The grande dame of the classic era. Mildred Pierce. Sadie Thompson. Daisy Kenyon. The woman F. Scott Fitzgerald had once written about as “the best example of the flapper.” The legendary rival of Bette Davis and chairwoman of the Pepsi Cola board of directors.

It was a little intimidating.

Sid Sheinberg, head of Universal’s television division at the time and the guy who’d given Spielberg the assignment, suggested it might be a good idea for the young director to take his star to dinner. So, Spielberg, under-dressed and fresh-faced, found himself ringing the doorbell of a bona fide legend.

A voice called to him from inside, telling him the door was open and he could come right in. So that’s what he did, and he found Joan Crawford with bandages around her eyes, getting a feeling for how a blind woman would work her way around a room. Neither producer William Sackheim (producer of Night Gallery) nor Sheinberg had told Crawford her director was going to be a guy who, according to Spielberg, “looked like he was fourteen.”

“She was hoping they would hire George Marshall, Henry King, or Henry Hathaway, or King Vidor,” he told TheHollywood Reporter.

“She finally walked over to me,” Spielberg remembered in a 1982 interview with Gene Shalit, “Undid her wrappings, and she looked at me, and she almost screamed, and she said: ‘My god! We can’t go out for dinner! People will think you’re my son!’”

By this point in her career, Crawford was taking fewer and fewer acting jobs. She was mostly focused on her work at Pepsi, and she’d had an absolutely terrible experience on Hush… Hush Sweet Charlotte, which resulted in her being replaced by newly minted centenarian Olivia de Havilland. She’d experienced illness and personal turmoil through the 60’s, and now in 1969, she was willing (and excited) to take the part of Miss Menlo for the Night Gallery pilot.

By all accounts, she was the consummate professional on set, treating Spielberg with respect and encouraging the crew to do the same. Also by all accounts, she had tried in vain up to the eleventh hour to get him replaced with someone more experienced.

“I think he’ll be great someday,” she told Universal, in most versions of the story, “But can’t we get somebody who’s great right now?”

When all was said and done, she was pleased enough that she did a small cameo for him on his episode of The Name of the Game, and the two of them corresponded on and off until Crawford’s death in 1977.

First Aid Tips from Kevin Tighe

I'm allergic to everything.

Okay, not really, but it feels like it today. The backs of my eyeballs are itchy, it's awful.

Proof reading and taking screenshots are not my favourite things to do at the moment, which means the recap I'm working on is being pushed to Thursday, and we're all going to learn whether or not to put butter on a fresh burn.

This is a PSA Kevin Tighe (Roy on Emergency!) did back in the day, and it's both amusing and informative:

Now, as the little scrawl says at the beginning, this is old first aid, but it's also not particularly harmful stuff, so take it with a grain of salt and learn how the TV paramedics did things in the 70's.

Mrs. Columbo 01x05: Caviar with Everything

It’s more than fair to say that Kate Mulgrew is best known for appearing as Captain Katherine Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. But, well before that, in 1979, she got the lead in a very strange spin-off series called Mrs. Columbo.

There’s a lot to explain about all of this, which is amusing because the series only ran for thirteen episodes. It was an eventful misfire.

It started with the end of the first run of the regular Columbo series. NBC decided that they wanted to do a weekly hour long spin-off revolving around Lt. Columbo’s previously unseen wife being an amateur sleuth. (Why she would try to solve a murder on her own when she was married to the greatest homicide detective in history is the real mystery.) The creators of Columbo, Richard Levinson and William Link, said that it was a horrible idea for a show and they didn’t want to do it.

So, NBC did it without them.

Tabatha (Unaired Pilot)

A little while ago, we took a look at the first episode of the short-lived Bewitched spin-off Tabitha, starring Lisa Hartman. That show aired in 1977, and it was a retooling of an unsold pilot for a series called Tabatha starring Liberty Williams.

We learned on Mother’s Day that spelling it “Tabatha” is painful to Elizabeth Montgomery’s soul, but that’s how they chose to spell it for this production, and we have to respect that? I guess?

Surprisingly, I like this pilot way more than the one that was actually sold. I’m of the opinion that it’s better to mimic story elements rather than character dynamics if you’re going to ease people into a show by knocking off your source material. This first pilot, helmed by Bewitched director/producer William Asher, captures the spirit of a ‘70s single girl update while keeping some fresh ideas in there, and he does this not by trying to recapture the “types” of characters, but by calling back to structure of “I, Darrin, Take This Witch, Samantha.”

The episode opens with scenes of steep hills and charming cable cars, letting us know that the newly grown-up Tabatha Stephens now lives in glamorous San Francisco. (When we see the size of her apartment, you’ll know that a hell of a lot of witchcraft is involved in keeping her rent down.) Tabatha herself looks every inch a career girl of the times, with her Dorothy Hamill haircut and her brown pantsuit, as she races across the street to hail a taxi.

I feel like I should explain that in days of yore, when our mothers were teenagers, there was a major Battle of the Haircuts. You were either a Dorothy – a variation on the short wedge cut made popular by figure skater Dorothy Hamill, or a Farrah – barrel curls and volume in the style of Farrah Fawcett. The Dorothy was shorthand for being practically minded, while the Farrah meant you liked to have more fun. This was a serious conflict, and I’m shocked that it isn’t taught in history class.

Ghost Story/Circle of Fear 01x06: Alter-Ego

1972’s Ghost Story is a complicated show.  

For the first thirteen episodes, it’s what I like to think of as “relaxedly paranormal” – there’s not a lot of blood or trauma, and the endings are usually more depressing than ironic. And there are framing segments featuring Sebastian Cabot as your host Winston Essex, a mysterious author who lives in a great big mansion full of weirdos who come to be his guests and tell him spooky stories.

Then, all of a sudden, Sebastian Cabot is gone. The show’s title is changed to Circle of Fear, and the promotional materials insist that there’s less emphasis on the supernatural. Just things like cursed wooden horses, a satanic office cult, more ghosts than ever before, and some elemental demons trapped in glasswork. Straightforward, scary situations anybody could find themselves in.

Producer William Castle – responsible for some of the most fun you can have with Vincent Price – had decided that a change was needed. While he’d patterned the host segments on his idol Alfred Hitchcock, he quickly had second thoughts. The radical changes to the genre brought about by Rosemary’s Baby in 1968 were trickling into television, and nobody could make up their mind what that would look like.

Tabitha 01x00: Tabitha

Recently, we watched a kind of follow up to I Dream of Jeannie where Barbara Eden disguised herself as a Middle Eastern princess to trick her neighbours into not reading her mail. (Find it here.) It reminded me of Jeannie’s unofficial sister show Bewitched, and it’s depressingly lackluster sequel, Tabitha.

So that’s what we’re doing today! Put on your witch hats and forget everything you know about the Stephens clan!

And I mean everything…

Despite being made in 1977, Tabitha has the daughter of Samantha and Darrin Stephens all grown up and owning a car and wearing bikinis in the title sequence. But wait, you might be thinking, didn’t Bewitched end in 1972 and wasn’t Tabitha like eight years old or something? How is this possible?

It’s not. You can’t even use the excuse of magic, because we all know that Darrin was big on doing stuff the most difficult ways possible, and I’m pretty sure that would include growing up. Besides, they’re witches, not Klingons. They live a long time, but – if anything – it takes them longer to age than normal people.

Longstreet 01x05: Elegy in Brass

Have you ever looked at a recipe and lifestyle magazine for February? Everything is about making the most of your Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day explosion of fun month. And with all the snow and general misery that February actually has to offer, these cheerful distractions are good enough for me! So this week, we’re celebrating Mardi Gras with classic shows that take place in the Big Easy.

Yesterday, we traded Cabot Cove for New Orleans with Jessica Fletcher. Today we're looking at one of the city's resident detectives in Longstreet.

It’s a show that’s often overlooked when people talk about classic detectives, despite being genuinely ground-breaking. James Franciscus plays Mike Lonsgstreet, a blind insurance investigator who’s part Johnny Dollar and part Matt Murdock. Along with his adorable Seeing Eye dog, a white German Shepherd called Pax, Mike ends up solving a lot of murders. That’s right! Prime 1970’s era James Franciscus and a dog! Best show ever!

Columbo 02x03: The Most Crucial Game

The Super Bowl is tomorrow (go Broncos!) and I thought it was a perfect time to celebrate with one of my favourite episodes of one of my favourite shows. So we’re watching a Columbo that’s all about football, murder, and Robert Culp’s crazy moustache.

It’s almost too much fun.

Alright, really quick in case you aren’t familiar with the show: Columbo was a series of TV movies that ran from 1969 to 2003. Columbo was described by Peter Falk, the actor who played him, as such: “What if there was a guy who was just like everybody else in all ways except one – he happened to be the world’s greatest detective?”

The only other thing to know is that you solve these bad boys backwards. It’s not about who the murderer is, it’s about the clue that catches him. Your job is to figure out the mistake that’s going to send him to jail, and you have to pay attention to everything. Champagne corks, pencil types, light switches, scuff marks, the fingerprints of non-murderers, any detail could be the one that sinks the killer.