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ABSTRACT
Through intertextual analysis, this article focuses upon the concept of friendship – the affective and relation dimensions of which function as a type of biographical narrative capable of being discerned and derived from actors performing together. The case study for this examination is the close and longstanding friendship and working relationship between Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, and Ben Gazzara. Its intertext is composed of the television series Columbo, memoirs by Falk and Gazzara, the collection Cassavetes on Cassavetes, the friends’ talk-show appearances while they were promoting the Cassavetes film Husbands, and documentary footage concerning Cassavetes’ films. The article argues that by setting such texts alongside one another, the ineffability of love and friendship is rendered tangible on screen. Its method, moreover, models those ways in which Celebrity Studies provides not only an analysis of key figures but is a field that can be designed in conversation with the subjects we explore.
Acknowledgements
To Mark Quigley at the UCLA Film and Television Archives, the author says thank you! Thank you for helping to expand this byzantine study and for generously and perceptively reading a draft of this article. With gratitude also to Martin Gostanian of the Paley Center for Media Study in Los Angeles and to Mike Pepin of the library at the American Film Institute. For conversations about Columbo and this project, many thanks to Robert Butler, Nancy Meyer, Alexandra Seros, and Kyle Stevens. For their editorial insights, a big thank you to Pooja Rangan, Chon Noriega, the anonymous reviewer, and, most importantly, Mary Desjardins. Finally, with thanks to Maeve McNamara for her research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. As cited in Kiselyak (2000).
2. As cited in Gazzara (Citation2004, p. 259).
3. Created by Richard Levinson and William Link, the original iteration of Columbo ran as part of the NBC Mystery Series wheel series from 1971 to 1978. A prototype in the form of a live teleplay, Enough Rope, appeared as part of the Chevy Mystery Show on 29 May 1960; Peter Falk first appeared as the detective in the made-for-TV movie remake of that play, ‘Prescription: Murder’, in February 1968. The pilot for the NBC wheel entry, ‘Ransom for a Dead Man’, was broadcast on 1 March 1971, while the first episode of the series, ‘Murder by the Book’, premiered on 15 September of the same year. In the body of the text I will refer to episodes by season and number. ‘Playback’ was broadcast during season four, as episode five (4:5).
4. Falk himself describes his awe towards Rowlands’ performance in an interview they produced for Criterion’s release of the 1974 film.
5. Through my historiographical and intertextual focus, however, I hope I am not merely duplicating what George Kouvares importantly critiques as the ‘tendency among film writers to take the director too much at his word by interpreting too literally his remarks concerning his lack of interest in film’ (Kouvaros Citation2004, p. 28).
6. As Gazzara claims, ‘John wasn’t afraid to change the script’ (Gazzara Citation2004, p. 142). Both Falk and Cassavetes discuss writing the work in tandem with one another.
7. Granted, Falk plays the lieutenant as more tenacious than warm in Prescription: Murder. In the March 1971 pilot, ‘Ransom for a Dead Man’, he begins to warm up, and by the first official episode of the season, ‘Murder by the Book’, he has quickly become the character (and performer) who invites deep affection from his fans.
8. On the heels of this interaction between them, the next scene also smacks as an homage to Cassavetes – although this time as a television actor, rather than an infamous film director. Following a commercial break, Columbo appears on a balcony of a club as jazz music wafts towards him. This scene – consciously or not – echoes a common image of Cassavetes as eponymous character Johnny Staccato, ‘jazz detective’. A throwaway detail, perhaps, but one that nevertheless resonates when we watch it with Cassavetes in mind.
9. Is it a coincidence that Janice is the name of Ben Gazzara’s wife at the time?
10. In ‘Playback’, two seasons later, the lieutenant sets two video monitors side by side in the killer’s surveillance chamber; he watches them with the murderer Van Wick.
11. Interestingly, in both ‘Etude in Black’ with Cassavetes and ‘Playback’ with Rowlands, the final clue hinges on the wife’s refusal to lie for her husband. In ‘Etude in Black’, at least Benedict tells his wife to tell the truth (not unsurprising, given Cassavetes’ emphasis on ‘truth’ as a director), and he whispers to her that he loves her just before he turns himself over to the detective. The killer Van Wick, on the other hand, implores his wife to lie for him, while she sits in the doorway, crying and speechless, except for the utterance ‘No’.
12. Transcript of AFI conversation, p. 38. Cassavetes goes on: ‘That was a different situation. I don’t care about Dick Cavett and I know he don’t like me’ (ellipses in original). It is possible the threesome just did not like Cavett all that much because he was a blonde-haired blue-eyed Yalie and ethnic counter to the trio.
13. He also repeatedly attempts to acknowledge their wives throughout the appearance, and, as the show begins to wind down, ultimately announces ‘I would like to preserve my marriage’. In fact, Cassavetes was the only one of the three to sustain his marriage; both Falk and Gazzara were divorced within a few years of their appearances and soon after in second marriages that lasted until their respective deaths.
14. Cassavetes (2001, p. 246) notes, ‘There wasn’t a minute, a second during the making of Husbands when I felt like a charlatan or phony, but there isn’t a minute during the selling of Husbands that I don’t feel like a charlatan or a phony’.
15. In his combined aloof and confessional style, Gazzara describes his work in later life, after the death of Cassavetes: ‘I had to make peace with the fact that I might never have a full and collaborative experience with a director again. That might have its advantages, though. There’s a lot less stress when you’re less involved’ (Gazzara 2009, p. 269).
16. Cassavetes tells this same story in the AFI seminar, and Falk repeats it in his memoirs as well.
17. Within two years, he quickly overshadowed Rock Hudson, who was initially seen as the star anchor of NBC’s wheel series, ‘The NBC Mystery Movie’, of which Columbo was a part. It was announced in trades that ‘Peter Falk, who plays the title role of the detective in Columbo earns $100,000 for each of the 90-minute shows he does, for a maximum of eight shows a year’ (Broadcasting, 1 October 1973, p. 17). In an issue of the same publication on 17 September, it was reported that Falk ‘signed new agreement with network that his agent claims is “largest contract ever negotiated by an actor in a continuing series”’ (Broadcasting, 17 September 1973, p. 36). Several months later, on 1 July 1974, Broadcasting reported that Falk walked off the show, claiming that Universal owed his own production company $132,777 (Broadcasting, 1 July 1974, p. 38). Contractual problems with Falk continued to be reported in 1976 by Broadcasting (1 March 1976, p. 7).
18. Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara all note that their film together was not strictly ‘improvised’. Gazzara writes that the notorious bar scene in Husbands ‘was the only scene in the picture that was entirely improvised’ (2009, p. 147). In their 1971 interview with the American Film Institute seminar, Falk and Cassavetes say much the same. Cassavetes contends that the process they followed was not ‘improvisation’ because ‘nobody knows what improvisation is’ (pp. 15–16). And Falk at one point interrupts Cassavetes’ discussion of a scene to declare it was ‘95% written’ (p. 42).
19. He also notes that he had been physically lucky (this claim by a man who had cancer as a child that took his left eye).
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Amelie Hastie
Amelie Hastie is founding Chair of the Film and Media Studies Program and Professor of English at Amherst College. She is the author of Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection and Film History (Duke UP) and The Bigamist (a BFI ‘FIlm Classic’). Her research and teaching focus on film and television theory and historiography, feminism, and material cultures. Currently she is the author of ‘The Vulnerable Spectator’ column in Film Quarterly and is finishing a book on the 1970s television series Columbo for Duke University Press. She has edited special issues of Film History, journal of visual culture, and Vectors, and she was a proud member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective for over a decade. Of late, she has published essays on Ida Lupino’s television work, Tomboy (Céline Sciamma 2011), and film criticism in the first decade of Ms. magazine.