Karl Malden, who played the utterly square middle-aged detective to young Micheal Douglas’s hipper character on “The Streets of San Francisco,” is dead at age 97.
Last year there was some talk of reviving the “Streets of San Franicsco” franchise. But it’s hard to imagine it without Malden.
One of the most critically-acclaimed films of the great era of the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, will be adapted for television by AMC, the same network with the hit Mad Men.
The 1974 film, starring Gene Hackman as a nerdish, inhibited surveillance expert, was shot entirely in San Francisco, and features extensive scenes in the pre-remodeled Union Square, the newly built Embarcadero Center, and the Cathedral Hill Hotel on Van Ness, then called the Jack Tar Hotel. The plot concerns Hackman becoming overly-interested in a conversation he’s recorded on behalf of shadowy corporate figures. As in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (and its American adaptation, Brian DePalma’s Blow-Out,) Hackman’s interest in small, unnoticed details of his record of the meeting get him into trouble.
The series would be set in the early 1970s, the same era as the film, according to the news report. Whether it would also be shot in San Francisco remains to be seen. AMC’s Mad Men, set in early 60s New York, is filmed entirely on a Southern California movie lot (as shown in this blog entry by Mad Men cast member Rich Sommer).
There’s KPIX’s Roberta Gonzalez forecasting a “trof” (sic) of low pressure on this evening’s six o’clock news. Watch it yourself on their site.
CBS will release a new version of the 1970s TV series “The Streets of San Francisco.” The original series, starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas (seen at left), ran for five seasons from 1972 to 1977.
Producers of the new show suggested the old cop-young cop pairing of the series — to be duplicated in the new show — was similar to the 2008 presidential race. “One, like Obama, wants to be active and believes in rehabilitation, while the other one, like McCain, doesn’t quite believe in rehabilitation and believes that the enemy is the enemy,” said one of the writers.
