RICK McGINNIS AT STEYN ONLINE: Dracula in Sin City: The Night Stalker and Prime Time Horror.
[Darren] McGavin bounced back and forth between TV, theatre and movies (forgettable films like Bullet for a Badman (1964), The Great Sioux Massacre (1965) and Mission Mars (1968)) before being cast by producer/director Dan Curtis as Carl Kolchak in a TV movie based on an unpublished novel. Curtis had just come off the peculiar notoriety of Dark Shadows, a vampire soap opera that ran for five years on ABC, but thought he was done with both television and the movies after directing two Dark Shadows movies for MGM.
Curtis was approached by Barry Diller, the creator of ABC’s Movie of the Week, who told him he had a script by Richard Matheson he wanted him to make. Matheson was something of a legend among writers working in Hollywood, and his scripts for The Twilight Zone (notably “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”) and Star Trek (“The Enemy Within”) were much admired. Curtis was a huge fan, but after Dark Shadows he wasn’t interested in directing and told Diller he wanted to produce the picture.
Curtis had McGavin in mind from the moment he read Matheson’s screenplay, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. There’s his voice – smarmy and cocky, a man who’s used to getting away with far more than he should. But McGavin’s Kolchak did a lot to create the picture of the lowly journalist, bouncing from newsroom to newsroom, a few notches below the reputable hacks at a major daily like the New York Times, or earnest young college boys like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, soon to remake the public image of the reporter.
Kolchak owes more than a bit to misfits with a byline like Hunter S. Thompson, right down to his white sneakers and khakis. McGavin accessorized these with a rumpled seersucker jacket and a straw hat with a wide blue and red band. (You can buy replicas of the Kolchak raffia hat online.) He travels with a manual typewriter in a case and goes everywhere with his Sony TC-40 tape recorder and various cameras – a Pentax Spotmatic and a Nikon in The Night Stalker, a Rollei 16mm subminiature in the movie sequel and the TV show that were spawned by the success of the film. Fun fact: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was published in 1971.
Earlier: Mark Judge on What Journalists Can Learn from The Night Stalker. “Carl Kolchak might seem crazy, but as Lucas observes in the audio commentary, ’pause to consider what historians now tell us about what was really going on between the White House and journalists at this particular time.’ It was a paranoid time in the United States, but people were afraid for good reason. Lucas cites Poisoning the Press, Mark Feldstein’s book about Richard Nixon and the media. Nixon planted stories and letters in the press to try and undermine the reporting of Jack Anderson. The President even considered plans to poison Anderson. ‘Ratf**king,’ the precursor to today’s opposition research, was destroying lives.”