Archive for the ‘Mannix’ Category

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Obit watch: October 27, 2021.

Wednesday, October 27th, 2021

Mort Sahl.

Gregarious and contentious — he was once described as “a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily” — Mr. Sahl had a long, up-and-down career. He faded out of popularity in the mid-1960s, when he devoted his time to ridiculing the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; then, over the following decades, he occasionally faded back in. But before that he was a star and a cult hero of the intelligentsia.
He had regular club dates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with audiences full of celebrities. He recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record,” the album “At Sunset.” (Though recorded in 1955, it was not released until 1958, shortly after the release of his official first album, “The Future Lies Ahead.”) By 1960, he had starred in a Broadway revue, written jokes for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, hosted the Academy Awards, appeared on the cover of Time and been cast in two movies (he would later make a handful of others).
An inveterate contrarian and a wide-ranging skeptic, Mr. Sahl was a self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy who cast a jaundiced eye on social trends, gender relations and conventional wisdom of all sorts. Conformity infuriated him: In one early routine he declared that Brooks Brothers stores didn’t have mirrors; customers just stood in front of one another to see how they looked. Sanctimony infuriated him: “Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they can feel good for 10 minutes.”

…

His own political leanings were difficult to track. The left wanted to claim him, especially early in his career, but they couldn’t quite do so. Among other things, he could be crudely sexist and, though he supported civil rights, he was acerbic in confrontation with knee-jerk liberal dogma on the subject. Over the course of his life he kept company with politicians of varying stripes, from Stevenson, Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Alexander Haig and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He said he had voted for Ross Perot; he praised Ron Paul and defended Sarah Palin; he cast a skeptical eye on Barack Obama’s presidency and was as scathing about Hillary Clinton as he was about Donald Trump.

…

Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was an obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, and who accused a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence, secret or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw’s trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.
“I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,” Mr. Sahl wrote in “Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. I don’t think Gene McCarthy is bad company. I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don’t think that Garrison is bad company.
“I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.”

Richard Evans, actor. He was “Paul Hanley” in the first season of “Peyton Place”. Other credits include a lot of 1970s cop/PI shows, “Lancer”, “Bonanza”, one episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series…

…and “Mannix”! (“Bird of Prey”, season 8 episodes 20 and 21. He played “Victor Valdek”.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 24, 2021.

Sunday, October 24th, 2021

Two different people sent me this one, and neither one mentioned my hot button.

Val Bisoglio, actor.

He began acting under the tutelage of Jeff Corey and appeared on the New York stage in productions such as “Kiss Mama,” “A View from the Bridge” and “Wait Until Dark,” as well as in New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park with Arthur Penn.

He has 65 credits in IMDB. High points include: “Saturday Night Fever” (he was the father of Travolta’s character), “Cover Up” (ahem), “M*A*S*H” (he played “Sal Pernelli”, the cook. Not Igor, the guy who served the food, but the cook.), “B.J. and the Bear”, “Rockford Files”, “St. Ives” (the Charles Bronson movie based on a pseudonymous novel by Ross Thomas), “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (“The Zombie“: if memory serves, he was a lower level mob thug), and “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”.

His most famous role (and the hot button one): he played “Danny Tovo”, the restaurant owner, on 138 episodes of “Quincy, M.E.”

And yes! He did do a “Mannix”! (“Run Till Dark”, season 5, episode 7.)

Paul Salata. He originated the “Mr. Irrelevant” award for the last player drafted in the NFL college draft.

He wanted to celebrate the unheralded honor of being picked last because players at the end of the line rarely get noticed — even though one might have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than of being picked by an N.F.L. team. Mr. Rozelle blessed the idea, and Mr. Irrelevant was born.
“Everyone who is drafted works hard, and some of them don’t get any recognition,” Mr. Salata told The New York Times in 2017. “They do their work and should be noticed.”

…

Starting in 1976, Mr. Salata and his friends in Orange County raised money to fly the last player picked in the draft to Southern California, where he would receive a champion’s welcome. In the years since, the players — some of whom who had never been to California — have been paraded through Newport Beach, taken to Disneyland and feted at a banquet, where they received the “Lowsman Trophy,” which depicts a player fumbling a football.
Mr. Salata and his team also fulfilled some of the players’ requests, including surfing lessons, visits to the Playboy Mansion and being a guest announcer on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Many Mr. Irrelevants never made it past their first season or even past their first training camp, but a handful have stuck around in the N.F.L. In February the Tampa Bay Buccaneers kicker Ryan Succop became the first Mr. Irrelevant to score in and win a Super Bowl. He had been drafted last in 2009 by the Kansas City Chiefs.

James Michael Tyler, “Gunther” on “Friends”. I’m sorry if I am giving him the short end of the stick here, but this just came in, and I have never seen an episode of “Friends”.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Really, really dumb trivia.

Wednesday, October 13th, 2021

What started this: McLean Stevenson was on one of the “Match Game” reruns last night.

I got to wondering: what was the motivating concept behind “Hello, Larry”? I knew he was a single dad raising two daughters, but was he a widower, or divorced?

(I also knew that this is more thought than my entire readership combined has put into “Hello, Larry” since I started this blog. Onward!)

Answer: he was divorced, and his ex-wife (played by Shelly Fabares, who is still alive, and a “Mannix” alumnae) shows up in season 2.

But that’s not the dumb trivia. Here’s the dumb trivia: “Hello, Larry” was not a “Diff’rent Strokes.” spinoff.

Even though there were “Diff’rent Strokes”/”Hello, Larry” crossover episodes, “Hello, Larry” was not conceived of as a spinoff. The crossover episodes were intended to increase “Larry”‘s ratings, so the showrunners decided that Larry Alder and Mr. Drummond were…

…wait for it…

…Yes! “old Army buddies”! (“with Drummond’s company becoming the new owners of Larry’s radio station”).

I wonder if they got the idea from Shelly Fabares.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 12, 2021.

Tuesday, October 12th, 2021

Bob Herron, stuntman. He was 97.

His career began in the 1950s working on “Winchester ’73” and “The Flame and the Arrow.” He would work steadily over the years on across TV and film. One of his earliest film credits was as an actor was “Four Guns to the Border,” directed by Richard Carlson. In TV, he worked on hundreds of shows including “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Rockford Files,” “The A-Team” and Kojak.” In film, he also worked on “Pale Rider,” “The Goonies,” “Rocky” and “Earthquake.” With over 342 credits to his name including “Airwolf,” “The Green Hornet” and “Stagecoach,” much of his work went uncredited.

Other work included “L.A. Confidential”, “Diamonds Are Forever”, “Bearcats!”…and “Mannix”! (“Deadfall: Part 2”, season 1, episode 18. “Eight to Five, It’s a Miracle”, season 1, episode 21.)

Ruthie Tompson, Disney animator. She was 111.

Over time, she worked on nearly every one of Disney’s animated features, from “Snow White” to “The Rescuers,” released in 1977.

…

Ms. Tompson joined Disney as an inker and painter. She later trained her eye on the thousands of drawings that make up an animated feature, checking them for continuity of color and line. Still later, as a member of the studio’s scene planning department, she devised exacting ways for its film cameras to bring those flat, static drawings to vivid animated life.
“She made the fantasies come real,” John Canemaker, an Oscar-winning animator and a historian of animation, said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “The whole setup then was predigital, so everything was paper, camera, film and paint.”
Among the totemic films into which Ms. Tompson helped breathe life are “Pinocchio” (1940), “Fantasia” (1940) and “Dumbo” (1941), along with countless animated shorts, including the anti-Nazi cartoon “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” which won a 1943 Academy Award.
In 2000, Ms. Tompson was named a Disney Legend, an honor bestowed by the Walt Disney Company for outstanding contributions. (Previous recipients include Fred MacMurray, Julie Andrews and Angela Lansbury; later recipients include Elton John and Tim Conway.)

…

In 1948, she was promoted to the dual role of animation checker and scene planner. As an animation checker, she scrutinized the artists’ work to see, among other things, that characters literally kept their heads: In the animators’ haste, different parts of a character’s body, often done as separate drawings, might fail to align.
The scene planner was tasked with working out the intricate counterpoint between the finished setups and the cameras that photographed them: which camera angles should be used, how fast characters should move relative to their backgrounds, and the like.
“She really had to know all the mechanics of making the image work on the screen as the director, the layout person and the animator preferred: how to make Peter Pan walk, or fly, in the specified time,” Mr. Canemaker explained. “What she did ended up on the screen — whether you see her hand or not — because of the way she supported the directors’ vision.”
In 1952, Ms. Tompson became one of the first women admitted to the International Photographers Union, an arm of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees representing camera operators. She retired in 1975 as the supervisor of Disney’s scene planning department.

Iohan Gueorguiev. I had not heard of him previously, but he had a popular YouTube channel.

Mr. Gueorguiev made his name overcoming challenges hurled at his body and spirit. He was a star in the world of “bikepacking,” long-distance bike travel conducted off main roads. Calling himself the Bike Wanderer, he stood out for his Beatnik-like romanticism about the open road, in contrast to the competitiveness of many bike jocks and gear heads.
Though Mr. Gueorguiev’s exact movements could be hard to pin down, it seems clear he spent from April 2014 to March 2020 biking from the Canadian Arctic Circle to its South American antipode, the icy mountains and valleys of Patagonia. It was not a straight path. Mr. Gueorguiev occasionally flew back to Canada to earn money planting trees, he said. While biking, he would get sidetracked by serendipitous encounters and eccentric trails.

…

He shot his videos with a simple GoPro camera charged by a portable solar panel. He would sometimes position the camera at a distance, making it appear as if he traveled with a cinematographer. He earned about $3,000 a month through the funding website Patreon and received bikepacking sponsorships, enabling him to exchange the basic touring bike he started with for one with fat tires designed for riding off-road.
However much Mr. Gueorguiev tried to cast the obstacles he encountered as part of a grand adventure, his videos showed genuine hardships. Headwinds on desert plains required him to take long breaks sheltered behind rocks and make a campsite in a stray shipping container, which itself shook from powerful gusts. He would go as long as 30 days without seeing a fellow cyclist and, when biking was not feasible, could wait two days on the road to get picked up as a hitchhiker.

…

With the onset of the pandemic, Mr. Gueorguiev found himself stuck in Canada, unable to cross borders because of travel restrictions. His videos grew shorter, and he ceased appearing onscreen as an enthusiastic narrator of his own experiences. Abiding by social distancing guidance, he avoided his habitual short stays at the homes of new friends he had met on the road. In his online journal, he described biking in the cold for days on end and spending nights without indoor heating.
“I had big expectations for the Farewell Canyon,” he wrote about a scenic area in British Columbia a few days before he died, “but it was very empty, gloomy and void of all traffic.”

…

Mr. Gueorguiev (generally pronounced gyor-ghee-ev) died on Aug. 19 in Cranbrook, British Columbia, where he had been using the home of friends as a base for travel during the pandemic. He was 33.
The cause was suicide, said Matthew Bardeen, a friend who was helping to oversee Mr. Gueorguiev’s affairs. His death was announced on biking websites late last month.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources. The Canada Suicide Prevention Service. La prévention du suicide et le soutien.

Posted in 1970s, Cycling, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 10, 2021.

Friday, September 10th, 2021

Art Metrano.

He was apparently most famous for “Police Academy 2” and “Police Academy 3”, but he had a pretty lengthy career before those. He was prolific on TV, appearing on “Movin’ On” and a lot of ’70s cop shows…

…including “Mannix”. (“Deathrun”, season 2, episode 13. This is one of the ones with an old Army buddy of Mannix: however, Mr. Metrano was not the Army buddy.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 18, 2021.

Friday, June 18th, 2021

Frank Bonner.

He was, of course, most famous as Herb Tarlek on “WKRP In Cincinnati” (and “The New WKRP in Cincinnati”, which I don’t think I ever saw an episode of).

But he had other credits.

His second credit in IMDB is “Equinox“, an odd film that we watched one Halloween season. I remember us saying, “Hey, is that Herb Tarlek? It sure looks a lot like him. Wait, it is!” (His first credit is “The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural”, the short film that was expanded into “Equinox”.) And somewhat oddly, he has some pre “WKRP” cop show credits…

…including, believe it or not, “Mannix”. (“Catspaw”, season 5, episode 13. He’s listed in IMDB as “Hypnotized man (uncredited)”.)

Heidi Ferrer, writer for “Dawson’s Creek”. She also wrote “The Hottie & the Nottie”. According to her family, she had been fighting COVID-19 for over a year, and took her own life.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Janet Malcolm, who you may remember from “The Journalist and the Murderer”.

Her essay began with one of the most arresting first sentences in literary nonfiction: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
Her pronouncement enraged the journalistic firmament. Many writers insisted that this was not how they treated their subjects and accused Ms. Malcolm of tarring everyone with the same broad brush.
But what galled some journalists about the piece the most, The Times reported in 1989, “was her failure, and that of her magazine, to disclose that Miss Malcolm had been accused of the same kind of behavior, in a lawsuit filed against her by the subject of an earlier New Yorker article.”
That earlier article, a 1983 profile of the flamboyant psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, led to a libel suit against Ms. Malcolm that hung over her during a decade of litigation and clouded her reputation even longer.
The legal allegations were different: The MacDonald suit accused Mr. McGinniss of fraud and breach of contract; the Masson suit accused Ms. Malcolm of libel. But both suits raised serious questions about journalistic ethics — Dr. MacDonald’s about the nature of writers’ obligations to their sources, and Mr. Masson’s about what constitutes quotations and what license, if any, reporters may take with them.
The journalistic community generally judged Ms. Malcolm harshly, mostly for the finding in the Masson case that she had cobbled together 50 or 60 separate conversations with the loquacious Mr. Masson and made them appear as if he had spoken them in a single lunchtime monologue.
“This thing called speech is sloppy, redundant, repetitious, full of uhs and ahs,” Ms. Malcolm testified in her defense in 1993 during the first of two jury trials. “I needed to present it in logical, rational order so he would sound like a logical, rational person.”

…

In the Masson suit, the jury ruled that while two of five disputed quotations that Ms. Malcolm had attributed to Mr. Masson were false and that one of those was defamatory, none were written with reckless disregard of the truth, the standard under which libel damages would have been allowed.

Posted in 1970s, Boats, Mannix, Media, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 14, 2021.

Monday, June 14th, 2021

Ned Beatty. THR. Variety.

Damn. 165 acting credits in IMDB. The man worked. And as far as I’m concerned, he classed up everything he was in.

I apologize, but this is the best Big Man scene I can find on the ‘Tube.

John Gabriel, long time actor on “Ryan’s Hope”. He did a decent amount of other stuff, including several appearances on “77 Sunset Strip”. Interestingly, he was also one of the (uncredited) newsreaders in “Network”.

Lawrence forwarded me an obit for Douglas S. Cramer, TV producer. I wasn’t really planning on noting this, but Lawrence pointed out that his credits do include “Mannix”…

Mudcat Grant, pitcher for the Twins and the Indians.

Grant led the American League in victories, winning percentage and shutouts in 1965 and pitched for 14 major league seasons.
He was remembered as a leading right-hander of his time, but also for his intriguing nickname, his second career singing and dancing at nightspots, and his book profiling outstanding Black pitchers.
Grant, a two-time All-Star, was a mainstay in the starting rotation for the Indians and the Twins for much of his career, then became a reliever, most notably with the Oakland A’s and Pittsburgh Pirates.
The Indians traded Grant to the Twins in June 1964. His best season came the following year, when he went 21-7, turned in a winning percentage of .750 and threw six shutouts. He pitched two complete-game victories against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, losing once, and hit a three-run homer as the Dodgers went on to win the series in seven games.
Cited by Sporting News as the A.L. pitcher of the year, Grant headed a staff that included Jim Kaat, Jim Perry and Camilo Pascual, backed by a lineup featuring Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Bob Allison and shortstop Zoilo Versalles, the league’s most valuable player.

…

As a youth Grant performed in a choir. Following the 1965 World Series, he founded Mudcat and the Kittens, a song and dance group that played at nightclubs and hotels during the off-seasons and that also gained international bookings.
“First his musicians — up to seven of them — begin, playing dance music and jazzier stuff, and then the Kittens, some very sexy girls in spare feline outfits, take over the stage to sing and dance and purr,” Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1968. “Then Mudcat comes on. He sings — everything from show tunes to rock ‘n’ roll — and tells jokes and dances.”
“I made way more money in music than I did in baseball,” Grant once said.

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Obit watch: June 2, 2021.

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021

Arlene Golonka. She did a fair amount of Broadway work, and a lot of TV. She was “Millie Swanson” on “Mayberry R.F.D.”, and did a lot of guest spots on other shows.

Noted:

Golonka played several characters on a 1965 comedy album, You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, which soared to No. 9 on the Billboard charts. When she couldn’t do the follow-up record, she recommended [Valerie] Harper for the job.

Also:

She portrayed another prostitute opposite Clint Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High (1968) and was the wife of a CIA agent (Peter Falk) in The In-Laws (1979).

Robert Hogan. Man, he was in every damn thing: as the headline notes, his career stretched from “Peyton Place” to “The Wire”, with stops along the way at the various “Law and Order” franchises, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Alice”, “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, the good “Hawaii Five-O” and many other series…

…yes, including “Mannix”. (“The Crime That Wasn’t”, season 4, episode 18)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 17, 2021.

Monday, May 17th, 2021

Sometimes I want to put up an obit just because the writer clearly had fun writing it.

In Canada, it’s possible to find a man lounging on a chesterfield in his rented bachelor wearing only his gotchies while fortifying his Molson muscle with a jambuster washed down with slugs from a stubby.

That’s the lead from the obit for Katherine Barber, founding editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. She was 61.

Chuck Hicks. He has 197 credits in IMDB as an actor…and 110 as a stunt person. He worked a lot with Clint Eastwood, was in “Cool Hand Luke”, “Dick Tracy”, and played the robot boxer in the “Steel” episode of “The Twilight Zone”…

…and among all of his other movie and TV credits, he appeared seven times on “Mannix”.

Posted in 1970s, Books, History, Mannix, Obits, TV, Wordplay | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 10, 2021.

Saturday, April 10th, 2021

James Hampton. He was “Hannibal Dobbs”, the bugler on “F-Troop” and knocked around movies and TV quite a bit: “The Rockford Files”, “Sling Blade”, “The Longest Yard” (the original)…

…and, yes, “Mannix”. (“Hardball”, season 8, episode 24, the very last episode.)

Ramsey Clark, attorney general under LBJ.

He went beyond lawyering. In 1972, with the war in Vietnam dragging on, Mr. Clark met with Communist officials in Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, and publicly criticized American conduct of the war. That began a pattern: In 1980, months after Iranian revolutionaries had attacked the United States Embassy in Tehran and taken Americans hostage, he went to that city with nine other Americans, in violation of a travel ban, to help resolve the crisis and participate in a conference in which he criticized the United States for having supported Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi before he was deposed.
Six years later he met with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and denounced United States airstrikes against that country.
In November 1990, as the United States prepared for the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Clark, who had criticized the American deployment of forces in the gulf, consulted with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The next year he filed a complaint with the International War Crimes Tribunal accusing President George Bush of war crimes.
In 2011, he condemned NATO’s bombing campaign against Qaddafi’s government. In 2013, he said Iran had no intention of building a nuclear bomb and denounced sanctions against that country. Later, he protested lethal attacks by unmanned American drone aircraft on other nations.

Martina Batan, NYC contemporary art dealer. But there’s a bit more to the story than that.

Her brother was murdered at 14. His death devastated Ms. Batan: the case has never been solved.

When she was 53, Ms. Batan decided to kick up the dust of her past and hired a private detective to look into the 1978 murder case. The events that transpired were documented in “Missing People,” directed by David Shapiro, who followed Ms. Batan for four years. The investigation uncovered vital new information about the murder, but it also added to her despair.

Posted in 1970s, Law, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 26, 2021.

Friday, March 26th, 2021

Bertrand Tavernier, noted French film director.

The Saturday Night Movie Group has watched “In the Electric Mist“, which is an interesting but flawed adaptation of James Lee Burke’s In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (affiliate links). And I’ve seen “Coup de Torchon“, which is likewise an interesting adaptation of Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 (ditto). It seems to me, just looking at his filmography, that he was one of the more interesting French directors.

Jessica Walter. Damn.

I have never seen an episode of “Arrested Development”, but the Saturday Night Movie Group has watched quite a bit of “Archer”. We’ve also watched “Play Misty For Me”, which I think is a swell Clint Eastwood directed film.

And she appeared in every damn thing at some point, too: “Quincy, M.E.”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “Banacek”, “McCloud”, “The F.B.I.”. “Cannon”, “Mission: Impossible”…

…and she did a guest shot on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, in the episode “Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger”. Really, that’s the title, and if it comes up in reruns, you should seek it out (assuming you have a taste for black comedy). She’s basically playing a live action Mallory Archer: a social climbing woman who’s obsessed with her grandson attending the right pre-school. (“If it wasn’t for me, he’d be eating yams and watching ‘Jerry Springer'”.)

…and, yes! She was a “Mannix” three-timer. (“The Danford File”, season 6, episode 24. “Moving Target”, season 5, episode 18. “Who Is Sylvia?”, season 3, episode 19.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: March 16, 2021.

Tuesday, March 16th, 2021

Yaphet Kotto.

Man, what a career. “Alien”, “Live and Let Die”, “Raid on Entebbe” (he was Idi Amin), and tons of TV work. Including the good “Hawaii 5-0″…

…and “Mannix” (“Death in a Minor Key”, season 2, episode 18. He plays a jazz musician who is dating Peggy, and gets arrested and extradited to a Southern town. Mannix goes down to help him out. We watched this episode recently, and while I haven’t seen all of “Mannix”, I think I’d put this one in the top ten. Without going into spoilers, it goes in some surprising directions.)

…and, of course, one of my favorite roles: Lt. Al Giardello on “Homicide: Life on the Street”. (He also crossed over to “Law and Order”. And he made an unaccredited appearance on “The Wire” as a different character.)

Thing I did not know: that there were two TV movies based on Edna Buchanan’s true crime books (affiliate link), in which he apparently has a starring role.

I hear good things about “Badge of the Assassin”, a TV movie that you can find (for the moment) on the ‘Tube, in which he co-stars with Jimmy Woods.

Edited to add: NYT obit, which was not up when I originally posted.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

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