Remembering ‘The ABC Movie of the Week,’ From ‘Brian’s Song’ to ‘The Night Stalker’ and Beyond

Seeing Actors in a Different Light

Explains Michael, “The other thing about the TV movies is that it gave people who were in regular-running TV series something of a second career. You always see the most familiar faces on television, because they are recognizable. You know, the audience watches a clip and they say, ‘Oh, Lou Grant is in a TV movie. I’m going to watch that.’ So it does become very insular in a way.

“For example,” he continues, “there’s a TV movie in 1971 called Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring, and it stars Sally Field as a young girl who runs away with her hippie boyfriend to a commune. The reviews noted that people would tune in to see Sally Field be a hippie and a bit of a drug user when they had known her for Gidget and The Flying Nun.”

Darren McGavin: King of the Movie of the Week

“Darren McGavin made some really remarkable movies of the week,” Michael reflects. “First of all, he’s in The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler as reporter Carl Kolchak who goes up against a vampire. In another movie called Tribes, he plays a drill instructor and Jan Michael Vincent is a hippie who ends up being drafted and sent to Marine boot camp. It’s really good, because it gets into the generation gap and the culture of the time. But then Darren McGavin is also in the original Six Million Dollar Man movie and he’s the sergeant in The Rookies, which also goes to series.

“On top of that,” he continues, “in a movie called The Challenge, he plays some type of mercenary who has single warrior combat on an island to decide some Cold War dispute. So he’s got a fairly remarkable career on the Movie of the Week.”

Lee Majors Before He Became Bionic

For Michael, there are certain standouts of the ABC Movie of the Week — one of which was 1969’s Ballad of Andy Crocker, starring Lee Majors. “He’s a Vietnam vet struggling to get back into civilian or ‘normal’ life,” he details. “That was important, because they weren’t doing a lot of those movies in 1969 and Vietnam was, of course, a controversial issue. It was fairly sensitive with the culture clash of the Vietnam vet with a crew cut running into hippies on Sunset Blvd. and that sort of thing.

“One of the things that TV doesn’t get the credit for is dealing with issues, sometimes long before feature films were dealing with Vietnam, which they would do later with things like The Deer Hunter and Platoon.”

‘The Feminist and the Fuzz’

There were many instances in which the response to one of the films would surprise ABC. Case in point was the Barbara Eden and David Hartman starrer, The Feminist and the Fuzz from 1971. “It lands at No. 1 in the ratings,” Michael laughs, “and it’s huge, because it’s 1971 and it’s got the word ‘feminist’ in the title, so you think it’s going to get a large female audience and it’s going to be somewhat of the time. Now as it turns out, it’s kind of a light, fluffy rom-com, but the idea is that people would be drawn to that because of the era in which they lived, but it’s success was unexpected.”

And Then There’s Steven Spielberg’s ‘Duel’

The flip side of the ratings story in terms of expectations and success came with Steven Spielberg’s TV movie Duel, with Dennis Weaver as a guy driving a car engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse with an insane — but never seen — trucker. Michael points out, “Duel is huge in terms of people remembering it. Ironically, when Duel comes out, the network and Universal, which had produced it, thought it was going to be very big. They had a big premiere party, which they never gave for TV movies. Some of this may have been because they saw the talent of Spielberg and said, ‘Let’s get really close to this guy.’ But then Duel doesn’t do all that well in the ratings; in fact, it’s not in the Top 10. But after the fact, if it was 1979, let’s say, and you saw that at 11:00 at night, you would sit there and watch, because it was Spielberg and you could imagine how great it was going to be.”

‘That Certain Summer’

Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen starred in this TV movie that was the first to deal with themes of homosexuality. “At the time,” Michael emphasizes, “that was a big risk to take and there was a lot of concern about putting that movie on at 8:30 at night. There were a lot of preview screenings so that critics could get out there and say, ‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing shocking in it. There’s nothing all that titillating about it and it’s just a movie about a relationship which is something that goes on in American life.’

“Ironically, the major protests to the film came from the homosexual community, or the gay rights community, because they were angry that the actors in the film showed no affection to each other. That essentially it was like they were roommates. The anger was, ‘Could you show them be somewhat affectionate? Could they not hug or do something in the film?’ They thought it was a bit of a whitewash. But just showing that film, I think, is a monumental moment. You’ve got to remember the time — you just didn’t do that. And if there were depictions of a homosexual character, they were usually insulting. This was also a family movie, because the son is having a hard time dealing with it. So it’s more of a family relationship film that just happens to have a homosexual plot to it.”

‘Go Ask Alice’

Details Michael, “It was 1973 and Go Ask Alice was based on a very popular book. It does reveal how terrified people were, particularly the older generation, of the mainstreaming of drugs and how drugs were now beginning to permeate American life at every level. It’s the story of a high school girl who goes from straight A’s and participating in the band and doing all the straight-lace things, and then at the end of one summer she starts hanging out with the wrong people. Before you know it, she’s a drug addict and she gets into prostitution and her life just unravels. It’s a bit melodramatic, but it also is somewhat reflective of the time.” Starring is Jamie Smith-Jackson as Alice and Andy Griffith as her father.

‘Brian’s Song’

One of the great achievements of The ABC Movie of the Week came in the form of 1971’s Brian’s Song, about Chicago Bears players Brian Piccolo (James Caan) and Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams), who broke racial barriers and became the best of friends — this during the civil rights era of the mid-1960s. Later, both men are devastated — but their friendship strengthened — by the news that Brian has developed terminal cancer.

“More than any other television movie that preceded it,” muses Michael, “Brian’s Song legitimized the genre as an art form capable of matching the social and cultural significance of almost any feature film. The ABC Movie of the Week executives had no idea it would explode the cultural landscape the way it did. It drew almost half of the entire viewing audience in its time slot, becoming the highest-rated TV movie in history at that point.”

“The almost universal critical acclaim lavished on Brian’s Song was matched by a string of awards and honors, including five Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award and citations of accomplishment from various organizations. The film even garnered a limited release in a small number of first-run movie theaters, mostly in the Chicago area.”

‘The Night Stalker’

One of the other big successes was The Night Stalker, which aired on January 11, 1972. It starred Darren McGavin as veteran reporter Carl Kolchak who is desperate to get back to becoming a reporter in New York again. Currently he’s in Las Vegas, where he investigates a series of murders that uncovers the existence of a vampire. This film, with a script by Richard Matheson from an unpublished novel by Jeff Rice, scared the living hell out of the audience and turned out to be McGavin’s most popular character. Suggests Michael, “The Night Stalker is short on special effects, but has an eerie feel and a strong atmospheric score that produces some genuinely scary moments. The vampire is also effectively menacing, with pale greenish skin, dark doll eyes, and an intimidating presence.

“McGavin’s portrayal is the other key to the appeal of the film,” he continues. “He is not a superhero, but a comically annoying opportunist who is easily scared, but remarkably likable.”

The ratings success of The Night Stalker led to the 1973 sequel The Night Strangler followed by 20 episodes of the 1974 weekly series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Diversity Was the Key to Success

In writing the book, Michael realized that one of the strengths of The ABC Movie of the Week was the sheer diversity of the films it presented over the course of its run. “There’s something for everybody,” he reflects. “If you like Westerns, tune in, in two weeks and there will be a Western. Want something harder? Come back two weeks after that. What’s remarkable is that you were in the era of three networks, which means that your options were somewhat narrow, and yet you could tune into the Movie of the Week and get something different every week. If you didn’t like a particular character, it didn’t matter, because they weren’t going to be on the following week. So it gives you that sense of diversity that almost foreshadows what pay TV is going to be like where there’s always a new movie on and it’s always different.”

“The other part, as I said earlier, that I think has really been lost, is the great utility in understanding how important these films were in reflecting American life,” he adds. “Feature films get a lot of attention, right? There are entire majors at universities dedicated to film study, but not that much about television. And certainly even less about TV movies.”

A Far Larger Audience For TV Movies Than Features

Elaborates Michael, “If you think about the impact alone, there are a lot more people watching TV movies then than watching feature films in the 1970s and ’80s by far. And what I realized is that if you really wanted to understand the American public, TV movies was the way to do it much more than Oscar winners. When you watch a TV program, you’re connected to the character, particularly when they use the same actors over and over again from other series that you link up with in a way that you maybe don’t with the major film stars. So I think the utility of the Movie of the Week is so great when it comes to understanding American life and American culture in that era.”