03-01-2006
Brad Kern
Brad
Kern is a writer, director and producer for the television industry. He
originally graduated in marketing and economics, but after winning
about 20 awards in film festivals for a student movie he made, he
decided to become a movie writer. His carrier started in 1981 when he
wrote a script for the series Hill Street Blues. In 1984, he joined the Remington Steele's crew (see interview below) and quitted in 1986 at the end of the 4th season. Then he worked on The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, Nash Bridges, Loïs & Clark. He now writes, produces and directs episodes for Charmed.
Here is an exerpt from an interview made in February 2006. Brad Kern talks about how he started to work on Remington Steele.
"Let's jump back to the start for a second. How did you get involved in TV? How did you break into television.
I
wrote and produced and directed the Steven Spielberg-like student film,
sold everything I had, went broke, won 22 international film festivals,
amateur film festivals, and thought at 21 years old that I was ready to
have someone give me a feature to direct, and when reality hit me in
the face I couldn't afford to make another student movie so I picked up
a pencil and a piece of paper and I wrote a Hill Street Blues spec script which got the attention of Hill Street, and at the time MTM, which made Hill Street, and there wasn't any room on Hill Street so they sent my script over to Remington Steele, and they hired me. I got the job even though I hadn't seen Remington Steele
before I got the job... I lied. I couldn't pay my gas bill, so I had to
get a job - I sold everything, I was broke and they said, "So, what do you think of Remington Steele?" I said, "I love it!" So
that's how I got into it, kind of backed into it. I wanted to be a
film-maker and became a writer, and then I realized quickly in
television if you can write you can actually become a film-maker,
more-so than in the film world. As I worked my way up the ranks I was
able to produce, and then I was able to direct, and right now I'm just
doing more expensive versions of what I started off to do in film
school."
To read the whole interview (mainly about Charmed), click here.
02-23-2006
Glenn Gordon Caron
Glenn Caron started his carrier as a TV writer at the end of the 70s on Taxi and Breaking Away. The Remington Steele
adventure began in 1982: he wrote the first 10 episodes of season 1.
Then he quitted and became executive producer, director and writer of Moonlighting, the show that introduced Bruce Willis. Recently, he worked on Now & Again and Medium.
Below
is an exerpt from an interview dated September 2002. It mainly concerns
Caron's experience on Moonlighting, but he also mentions his
collaboration on Remington Steele.
Diane: "We know that you
wrote for "Remington Steele" before you did "Moonlighting." Did the
inspiration come from seeing what you could do, what you thought you
could do better with a detective show, or did it come from elsewhere?"
Glenn Caron: "Obviously, I used some of
the experience that I gained on Remington Steele. I was with Remington
Steele for a very, very short time. I was there really just for the
first 10 episodes. And I was there largely because I sort of made it a
mission in my life to work with a guy named Bob Butler who directed the
pilot for Remington Steele. And really, he sort of came up with the
premise for Remington Steele. He'd been carrying it around for years.
Michael Gleason developed it for television, but the original idea was
actually Bob's. And I really wanted to work with Bob Butler. I got to
Remington Steele, worked with Bob. At a certain point, Bob was leaving.
I decided to leave. So I really wasn't there as long as a question like
that would suggest, although I did contribute a tremendous amount of
writing to those first 10 episodes. I think they all, if not all, then
most, certainly went through my typewriter at some point. And I still
am very fond of my friendship with Pierce. And we were both sort of new
to television, so we, you know, he and I developed a relationship. I
think I was also really the first writer over there who recognized that
he could be funny. In the original conception, I don't think he was
thought of as particularly funny. I think Stephanie was thought of as
sort of the person who was going to lead the charge of the show, and
she's a wonderful actress. But, it just became clear to me hanging
around with Pierce, that he had a huge funny bone and so I really tried
to write to that."
To read the whole interview, click here.
02-20-2006
Steele Music
Henry Mancini
He composed the main theme of Remington Steele.
Or I should say *the main themes*... He was born in 1924 and started
working for Universal in 1952. Since then, he composed various themes
that became very famous: The Pink Panther, Abbott & Costello, Murder She Wrote, The Invisible Man, Peter Gunn, Charlie's Angels, Columbo, Dumb & Dumber... Some of his compositions were reused in Waterworld, The Big Lebowski, Ocean's Eleven, Minority Report and Farenheit 9/11. Mancini died in 1994, and his name counts among the most talented TV and movie composers.
Richard Lewis Warren
He composed the music of Remington Steele episodes. He also workd on various shows: Dynasty, Hart to Hart, Dallas, Moonlighting and The Love Boat.
Donald Nemitz
Donald Nemitz has a big and beautiful carrier. As a composer and orchestrator, he joined the Remington Steele crew in 1982 and left in 1985. He worked for television (McGyver, Moonlighting, Dallas, The Simpsons, Dark Angel) and cinema (The Pacifier, Spy Kids, Jimmy Neutron, Scary Movie, Alien: Resurrection, Tombstone, Junior...).
02-17-2006
Interview with Michael Gleason
Click on the link below to read a terrific interview with Michael Gleason, who was the co-creator of Remington Steele. It happened in September 2005 for the season 1 DVD release.
02-16-2006
The Founding Fathers
Robert Butler
Born
in 1927, Robert Butler met TV series very early and started to work for
the TV industry in the 50s. Here is a list of some TV productions on
which he took part: Bonanza (featuring Michael Landon), The Fugitive, The Untouchables, The Twilight Zone, Hogan's Heroes, Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, Hawai Five-O, The Invaders, Hill Street Blues and Columbo. It was Butler who first had the original idea of Remington Steele.
He wanted to create a TV series about a female private eye who could
not work because she was a woman. He then contacted Michael Gleason who
added the character of a fictitious male boss. In the very beginning,
Butler was only director but he soon became executive producer with
co-creator Gleason. After the end of Remington Steele, he then worked on various TV shows like Moonlighting and Lois & Clark (he directed the pilot).
Michael Gleason
He is the other figurehead of Remington Steele. He was scriptwriter, director and above all executive producer on the series. He wrote the pilot, License to Steele. About Stephanie Zimbalist, he said that "it was a pure delight working with her". As far as Brosnan is concerned, he compared him to a "Cary Grant of the 80s" and
noted that he immediatly found Brosnan amazing when he saw him
auditioning for the role of Remington Steele. And he added, in an
interview published by the Chigaco Sun Times in July 2005: "Laura Holt was the brains. Remington Steele was the sex object".
Furthermore, Gleason is responsible for the movie lines Remington
systematically refered to in the series. After the end of the show,
Michael Gleason worked on Moonlighting, Lois & Clark and Charmed.
