Columbo's Path from TV to Stage to TV

TVC 561.2: David Koenig, author of Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV's Rumpled Detective, discusses how Prescription: Murder (the original pilot for Columbo) evolved from the original TV production that Richard Levinson and William Link wrote in 1960 to a full-length stage production starring Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, and Thomas Mitchell (with Mitchell essaying the role of Lieutenant Columbo), and how Levinson and Link weathered a series of clashes with the actors behind the scenes; the memorable scores that Oliver Nelson and Gil Melle provided for the NBC series; and the influence that actor/director Patrick McGoohan and writer/producer Richard Alan Simmons had on Peter Falk and the Columbo series, both on NBC and on ABC. Shooting Columbo provides a blow by blow account of Peter Falk's endless battles with Universal Studios over the production of the series, a treasure trove of behind the scenes production information, a look at how the various locations in Beverly Hills were chosen, the answers to such burning questions as "What was Columbo's first name?"

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