Whipped Cream Difficulties

Carol Serling, Rod Serling’s wife.

She was the associate publisher and consulting editor of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, a monthly magazine, in the 1980s. She was a consultant to “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983), a segmented film adaptation whose four directors included Steven Spielberg. In one segment she had a cameo role as an airline passenger in a remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the 1963 episode in which a terrified fellow passenger believes he has spied a gremlin cavorting on the wing outside his window.

…

Ms. Serling cemented Rod Serling’s place in the academy by donating many of his television scripts and movie screenplays to Ithaca College in upstate New York, where he had taught courses in creative writing and film and television criticism. The gifts helped the college establish its Rod Serling Archives. She also helped create scholarships and an award at the college, where she was a trustee for 18 years.

Jo Shishido, Japanese actor.

After plastic surgery to fatten the cheeks of the handsome young actor, Shishido became known for playing prominent heavies in action films.

He was in a whole bunch of Japanese films, including Seijun Suzuki’s “Branded to Kill” and something called “A Colt Is My Passport“. (I can’t lie: I love that title.)

He also played “Captain Joe” in a Japanese TV series called “Star Wolf“. And if that rings a faint (or even not-so-faint) bell for you, I’m so, so sorry: “Star Wolf” was later cut together and dubbed into two movies: “Fugitive Alien” and “Fugitive Alien II“, which, in turn, became MST3K episodes.

(I thought about embedding the forklift song here, but it was Ken, not Captain Joe, that they tried to kill with a forklift.)

Sonny Grosso, legendary NYPD detective. One night, Mr. Grosso and his partner, Eddie Egan…

…out for drinks at the Copacabana nightclub, spotted known drug dealers adulating an unidentified man, whom they later discovered owned a greasy spoon luncheonette in Brooklyn.
They followed him on a hunch, and the trail led to a French smuggler who was shipping 100 pounds of heroin — some of it stolen from a police vault — to the United States. Mr. Grosso determined the magnitude of the cache by weighing the Frenchman’s 1960 Buick Invicta when it arrived by ship and again when it was about to be transported back to France.

At the time, this was a record seizure. And speaking of bells ringing, yes, this was the “French Connection” case. Mr. Grosso’s character was “Buddy Russo” (played by Roy Scheider). (Eddie Egan was, of course, renamed “Popeye Doyle” and played by Gene Hackman, just in case you haven’t seen the movie.)

A product of East Harlem and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Grosso rose to the rank of detective first grade in the New York Police Department faster than any predecessor. He followed his 22 years on the force with a second career as a television producer and consultant for television shows about law enforcement, including “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Night Heat,” and for the movie “The Godfather,” in which he played a detective named Phil.
Until he died, Mr. Grosso carried his off-duty .38-caliber Colt revolver, the very same gun that was taped to the tank of a toilet and fired (using blanks) by Al Pacino in a mob hit in “The Godfather.”

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Yes, he happened to be a regular at Rao’s, the tiny cliquish eatery on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem that has occasionally had unsavory associations. But it also happens to be a neighborhood hangout, just around the corner from where he was born.
Even there, drama intruded one night before Christmas in 2003, when a patron who objected to the singing of one of Mr. Grosso’s dinner guests was shot dead by another customer.

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Recalling the crime-ridden city of decades earlier, Mr. Grosso explained how the police, and his partner in particular, had responded to the drug dealing that stoked homicides to record highs.
“It was a war then, and you had to act differently,” he said. “The junk epidemic was bursting out of Harlem.
“That’s why Eddie acted crazier than the people we were chasing. He had one philosophy: ‘It’s our job to put the bad guys in jail; don’t worry about the prosecutors and the judges.’ He was a madman, but he made sure I got home every night.”
“Those days,” Mr. Grosso said a little nostalgically, “we were just allowed to be cops.”

(Eddie Egan died of cancer in 1995.)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 24th, 2020 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Cops, Law, Movies, NYPD, Obits, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.