Remembering Carl Kolchak
“If by chance you happened to be in the Windy City between May 28th and June 2nd, you would have had good reason to be terrified, for during this period Chicago was being stalked by a menace so frightening, so fascinating, that it ranks among the great mysteries of all time. It has been the fictional subject of novels, films, plays, even an opera. Now, here are the true facts.”
So went the off-camera narration by “Carl Kolchak” for the September 13th, 1974 premiere episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker entitled “The Ripper”, as in Jack the Ripper. The Jack the Ripper, still very much alive and now stalking Chicago. Intrepid newspaper reporter Kolchak covers the brutal series of murders committed by a maniac with a sword for his boss Tony Vincenzo, who is the managing editor of something called the Independent News Service. The Ripper is possessed of superhuman strength and seems to be indestructible, until cops chase him into an electrified fence. That stops him, but not permanently. It is left to Kolchak, a modern-day Van Helsing, to track the Ripper back to his lair and finish him off.
One week later “The Zombie” aired. Tame by today’s standards, the climax of that episode was a little on the gruesome side and was edited during its summer re-run.
Sometimes an actor gets the part of a lifetime, one that he will always be associated with. He and that character become inseparable. Think Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey. John Wayne as well, John Wayne. George C. Scott as Patton. Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker. Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden. Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock . They are married.
In 1971 veteran tv tough guy actor Darren McGavin was cast as Carl Kolchak in a ninety minute “movie-of-the-week”, a new format that was working quite well for the ABC network. Set in Las Vegas, The Night Stalker told the story of a real vampire terrorizing that city by killing young women, draining every drop of blood from them. City officials quickly put a lid on the story, even after the vampire single handedly defeats a dozen police officers in a night time melee’. Bullets don’t stop him either. Kolchak’s gruff, no-nonsense editor Vincenzo is impressed by the story he has uncovered but is powerless to help him when he is run out of town on a murder charge. You see, Kolchak killed the vampire by pounding a wooden stake into its heart.
The movie aired in January of 1972 and much to the network’s chagrin became the highest rated tv movie that season. They quickly called for a sequel. In January of 1973 the two hour The Night Strangler told the strange story of a bizarre series of murders carried out over eight decades by a demented super killer at least one hundred years old. Kolchak and Vincenzo are re-united but again the story is suppressed and this time both of them are sent packing. The Night Strangler—featuring as the first movie did a jazzy, kitschy score by Robert Cobert--did very well in the ratings. ABC ordered up a third movie, and that’s when the problems began.
Director John Llwellyn Moxey had done a terrific job with The Night Stalker. Producer Dan Curtis directed the Night Strangler but not nearly as effectively as the first one had been. He was determined to direct The Night Killers, from a script by Richard Matheson, who had written good scripts for the first two films, but McGavin wanted Moxey back. Neither of them would budge. ABC, meanwhile, still wanted more Kolchak. At some point Universal television came in with the suggestion of a weekly series. ABC, always badly in need of a hit, quickly agreed, and hastily added Kolchak: The Night Stalker to its fall 1974 schedule.
In “The Vampire”, Kolchak goes to L.A. to investigate a series of murders committed by a female victim of the vampire from the first movie. “The Werewolf”, filmed aboard the Queen Mary, featured a very effective original music score by veteran composer Jerry Fielding, as an ocean liner is terrorized by a maniacal, hairy killer. In “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be” aliens are responsible for some strange deaths. These early episodes would be among the series’ best, for the show went down-hill fast.• Up against the new hit series Police Woman on NBC, Kolchak was getting clobbered. So much for a sure-fire hit. ABC’s whole Friday night lineup was in bad shape and was quickly sorted out. Kolchak was moved back to eight o’clock against Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man, also on NBC, two Top Ten shows. Brilliant move, huh? And yet the ratings crept up enough to get The Night Stalker through the rest of the season.
The network was not happy with the intensity of some of the early episodes and now in “family hour” ordered the show to lighten up. It was no longer scary and rarely suspenseful. McGavin, who put in long hours on the set and on location, disliked his new producer and disliked the way ABC was handling the show. He also disliked the scripts he was getting. Afraid that the network would pick The Night Stalker up for a second year he asked to be let out of his contract. Programming whiz Fred Silverman, fresh in from CBS and just a year or so away from making ABC number one agreed, cancelling the show with two scripts left un-filmed.•
When Kolchak: The Night Stalker started I was fifteen years old and fell in love with the guy. So did some of my buddies in high school. We could relate to him because he had no respect for authority. We did, but our faith had been badly shaken: Richard Nixon resigned the presidency just a month before. We had followed Watergate with interest. We also knew that the government hadn’t been entirely honest with us about the Vietnam War and suspected that they knew a lot more about UFOs than they were letting on. The Night Stalker played right into those suspicions, although Kolchak rarely sparred with an authority figure higher than a police captain. He never went hunting for monsters. Rather he dug and followed the story where it took him. Of course Vincenzo would never print any of it. The one time he did, in The Night Strangler, the Furies were unleashed upon both of them.
Kolchak himself was something of an anachronism, clad in a white, pin-striped seersucker suit, tennis shoes and a cheap pork pie hat, the ubiquitous cassette recorder and flash camera slung over his shoulder. In a 1974 interview McGavin said that he had Kolchak nailed from day one, that the guy had been fired from a big New York newspaper in the late fifties and he was still wearing the same suit of clothes and still trying to get back to the big time. He thought the vampire story would do it in the first movie but instead he got booted out of town. In the weekly series he seemed to have no such aspirations. We knew next to nothing about him yet he was in almost every scene, and no matter how weak or silly the episode we tuned in anyway because we dug the guy and his “Screw you!” approach to life.
By all standards the Kolchak tv series was a failure, though it quickly developed a loyal cult following. Darren McGavin would enjoy a long career working in tv and films, winning an Emmy award for Murphy Brown, guest starring on the Night Stalker inspired The X: Files and playing “The Old Man” in the wonderful movie A Christmas Story, the part he is probably best remembered for. Hey, this guy was directed by Otto Preminger opposite Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak in 1955’s The Man with the Golden Arm. What a career! To me, though, he’ll always be the indefatigable but all-too-human Carl Kolchak, the down but not out reporter determined to get his story, even if it never gets printed. I can’t help but wonder how many real Kolchaks there have been over time, and what stories of theirs never saw print. Think about that.
--by James Lynch for James Lynch’s Next Halloween Reader.
My Halloween Night Fantasy tv schedule would be: 6-:00 p.m. Outer Limits pilot with Cliff Robertson, 7-8:00 p.m. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea with underwater alien ship, 8-9:00 p.m. two Twilight Zones, the one where they captured Satan and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", 9-10:00 p.m. The Invaders pilot episode, 10-11:00 p.m. The Night Stalker "The Zombie", 11-12:00 a.m. The Night Stalker "The Vampire". Kewel?
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