Question: What was the last show Brian Keith did? The one with the car, I mean. Thank you.
Answer: Well, that's really two answers, Mary Pat. The late Keith's last show wasn't ABC's Hardcastle & McCormick, which ran from September 1983 to July 1986. That would be NBC's sitcom Walter and Emily, which was on the schedule for a year beginning in November 1991, and even that was preceded by CBS' 1989 comedy Heartland and ABC's Pursuit of Happiness.
Hardcastle was a hit for ABC for a short while, and it's funny that you remember it as "the one with the car." I'm sure Keith, who played crusty retired judge Milton Hardcastle, and costar Daniel Hugh-Kelly, who played sidekick and crack driver "Skid" McCormick, would have much preferred their show to be remembered as a buddy comedy. In fact, in a 1984 TV Guide interview, the equ
read more
Question: I recently saw and loved the movie Crash, and was especially intrigued by the way all the stories intersected and converged. Could you possibly give me a list of some other films whose stories are structured in the same way? Answer: I certainly can: First, for the benefit of readers who haven't seen Crash (2005), its structure is one in which multiple narratives are developed simultaneously and overlay or intersect at key points before converging at the end. Unlike ensemble movies in which there's a main plot and a series of subplots, films like this give more or less equal weight to all the story strands and derive a significant part of their thematic power from the apparently random way in which different characters' destinies come together. To my mind, the greatest of all multiple-story narratives is
read more
