He naturally underestimates Lieutenant Columbo, believing the police force ‘has no subtlety at all’, and makes him an unwitting star of the documentary. Lee’s arrogance is such that he films the crime as a documentary and essentially keeps the tape in plain sight in his home. Lee is happy to kill Downs, because Lee himself, mirroring De Palma, has nothing but disdain for the medium of television – despite regular guest appearances on Downs’ show. His victim is talk show host Duane Downs – a victim that Lee selects at random by throwing a dart at a list of celebrity tenants who share his swanky apartment block.
“The chief protagonist is an erudite crime documentary maker whose plan of creating the perfect murder goes a step further than most.” Without going into intricate detail, the chief protagonist is Quentin Lee – an erudite crime documentary maker whose plan of creating the perfect murder goes a step further than most in that he films it himself on a video camera. As it turns out, JP Gillis was actually a pseudonym for TIME magazine fim critic Jay Cocks, a close friend of De Palma, and between them they cooked up an excellent yarn. Gillis – not to be mistaken for Columbo regular Jackson Gillis. The co-writer was credited as being Joesph P. Just shows what sort of impact Columbo had on the collective psyche of the day.ĭe Palma co-wrote a script for an episode entitled Shooting Script, which was submitted in July 1973, suggesting it was mooted for Columbo Season 3.
#COLUMBO UNDERCOVER FILMING LOCATIONS TV#
I don’t pretend to be a student of De Palma’s techniques and backstory, but I sure know his body of work (indeed The Untouchables is one of the my all-time favourite films), and I’m aware that TV was a medium he had little regard for. Brian De Palma and Columbo? Close but no cigarĪmazing as it seems to us today, Brian De Palma was at one point very interested in getting a slice of Columbo on his directorial resume – and he even went as far as filing an on spec script for an episode in 1973.
0 kommentar(er)
