Word: levinson
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...usual 13-week series schedule. He finally consented when the network proposed a seven-segment miniseries, rotating Columbo with three other shows under the collective title NBC Sunday Mystery Movie. When the show was aired in March 1971, "that rare match between character and actor made it a hit," Levinson recalls. "Who can say what another actor might have done with the role? Now Peter is Columbo, and it is hard to imagine anyone else...
Although the false exit, followed by the innocently lethal "one last question," was dreamed up by Levinson and Link', Falk has so perfected the business that it has become a Columbo trademark, often occurring more than once in a single scene. Trademark No. 1, the magnificently grubby raincoat, was Falk's own stroke. The coat is his, bought in New York for a European trip years ago and stuffed away in a trunk until he fished it out to wear over the studio wardrobe's baggy brown suit. Falk worries like a mother hen over the coat...
...work, Falk is an obsessive perfectionist, "a tenacious worker capable of wanting to repeat a take 200 times to get it right," says Ben Gazzara. That tenacity led to some bitter arguments with Levinson and Link in the beginning, but when the writer team reminded Falk of those blowups recently, he protested. "Those were just getting-acquainted fights." In private, Falk is noticeably more even-tempered. "Nothing really touches his equanimity," says Lee Grant. "You could explode a bomb next to him, and he would just look at it with extreme interest." His wife describes...
HAIL! TO THE CHIEF Directed by FRED LEVINSON Screenplay by LARRY SPIEGEL and PHIL DUSENBERRY...
...Director Levinson, a former cartoonist and animator, gets off a few broadly effective visual gags (the president of the steelworkers union taking a bubble bath in his hard hat), but he has all the ironic sense of a divorce-court magistrate, and the sort of teary sentimentality that allows him to present scenes of federal troops sacking a hippie camp in slow motion while Judy Collins sings Amazing Grace on the sound track. Nevertheless, one admires the vigor, if not the style, of his attack...