The Lieutenant’s final curtain call came in 2003’s Columbo Likes the Nightlife, set against the backdrop of LA’s rave and club scene. I was lucky enough to get a copy of the script on eBay, and if you’d like to read the whole thing yourself, you might find a copy too. If you’d like to find out more, please read this excellent, informative article, which was written by my Twitter pal and which first turned my attention to the De Palma Columbo script. Inclusion in Season 4, as a Jack Cassidy vehicle, would have ROCKED. Admittedly, Exposure is a superior story, but it seems rough justice that Shooting Script never saw the light of day. Cannell also submitted an on spec script during the writers strike, and this one was filmed and included in Season 3 in the form of the wonderful Double Exposure, starring Robert Culp. It can’t be the only reason, though, as Stephen J. The rush to get the other approved stories filmed swiftly may be one reason why De Palma’s on spec offer was declined. Only two episodes were complete by the time De Palma’s script came in. A writer’s strike in 1973 had held up production of Season 3. So if it was so good, why didn’t it get made? That’s the $64,000 question. Jack Cassidy was born to play Quentin Lee Who knows if it was any sort of influence, but thematically it’s pretty close. There are similarities, too, between the help Columbo gets from the film students, and the way he harnesses the ideas of the student body in the much later Columbo Goes to College. “So if it was so good, why didn’t it get made? That’s the $64,000 question.” It may well be that the ‘Spielberg’ character here was so enjoyed by producers that they decided to name the boy genius from Mayhem ‘Steven Spelberg’ as an homage. Maybe not one of the very best, but it’s a more satisfying mystery than Lovely But Lethal and Mind Over Mayhem from the same season. Would this have made a good episode? Certainly. Basically, all the little ingredients we’ve come to know and love about Columbo are here. When filming, Lee gets a distinctive ring around his eye, which Columbo notices at their first meeting, and is enough to tip him off. For one thing, there was a witness to the crime, who Lee spots on film while watching his handiwork back, and who he later has to bump off as well. Columbo even admits that ‘What he can do with a camera is just incredible’.ĭespite his intention of immortalising a perfect killing on celluloid, Lee’s mistakes catch him up. In a nice nod to Murder by the Book, one of the students is named Spielberg. Years before Columbo Goes to College, the Lieutenant was hanging with students in ‘Shooting Script’Ĭolumbo, meanwhile, is being tailed throughout by three film students, who have been given approval by the department to create a field study of the Lieutenant, who, they say, has an extremely ‘high arrest percentile’. 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.
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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.
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