In Pursuit of Spenser (23 page)

Of the show’s sixty-five episodes, only one—the two-part pilot—was based on a Parker novel: the 1977 Edgar-winner
Promised Land
. After that, Spenser’s cases came courtesy of top television writers, including producers John Wilder and William Robert Yates, and such pros as Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin.

In a
TV Guide
article, Parker said,

Some of the differences between their Spenser and my Spenser are dictated by the demands, real or imagined, of an enormous mass market . . . Thus, their Spenser is the
spokesman for a Norman Rockwellesque version of apple-pie America, about which my Spenser would murmur, “Isn’t it pretty to think so” . . . But these are mere policy changes. Their Spenser differs fundamentally from my Spenser because television differs from books . . .

And what of me? As I watch the somewhat different characters on television, am I influenced to change the books? Their Spenser, Robert Urich, is big, graceful, good-looking, and young (a runner-up in the Robert B. Parker look-alike contest). Will I change my Spenser to match? No. The books are mine. They were here before the series, they will be here when it’s gone.
Spenser: For Hire
has no more effect on my writing than
Monday Night Football
.

In short, I like the show, and I like the novels. If I were you, I’d watch their Spenser and read mine and enjoy them both. A thing is, after all, what it is, and not something else.

The four mid-90s movies found Parker—initially—exerting more influence. Parker and his wife Joan wrote the first two scripts, and all four films were based on Spenser novels.

As noted, Urich and Brooks were back, but this time veteran Canadian TV actress Barbara Williams portrayed Susan Silverman in the first two films,
Ceremony
and
Pale Kings and Princes
, replaced by Wendy Crewson in
Judas Goat
and
A Savage Place
. All four movies are readily available on DVD from numerous sources, although a boxed set is out of print and pricy.

Ceremony
is set in Boston’s “Combat Zone,” an area known for prostitution and its high crime rate. A student from Susan’s school is missing, and Spenser sets out to find the girl. He and Hawk encounter numerous lowlifes, some in high places. A straight-ahead tough guy movie, the film stays fairly true to the plot of the ninth Spenser entry. One major plot
point differs from the novel but actually adds to the suspense, lending the film a particularly nasty final twist.

The script, credited to Robert B. and Joan Parker, is somewhat talky in the way many screenplays by novelists sometimes are, but it is nonetheless effective and surprisingly unflinching in treating its brutal subject matter. The couple’s son, Daniel, has a bit part (he appears in all four films in a rather typical TV-style humorous recurring character, a motor-mouth waiter). The version of the film available on DVD is apparently a variant cut intended for foreign release (perhaps theatrical) and includes nudity and a level of violence not seen in any other Spenser adaptation. Of the four,
Ceremony
feels the most like a real movie.

USA Today
, in its review, said, “The movie script is better than the majority of the (
Spenser: For Hire
) TV episodes . . . crisp with classic Spenser one-liners that are such an integral part of the novels, but were often missing from the series. Robert Urich turns in his best Spenser effort yet.”

Filmed in Canada, due to budgetary constraints,
Ceremony
was at least made to look like it had been filmed in Boston, with some limited second-unit filming in the actual setting. To a lesser extent, the same was true of
Pale Kings and Princes
.

In the first film, the Spenser and Hawk take-on-the-world variety of Parker’s fiction is well-portrayed; in the second film, Spenser and Susan as Nick and Nora Charles is similarly well-portrayed, though the feel is more TV than film this time around, with the screenplay even talkier. Some of Parker’s one-liners go flat, even with Urich’s throwaway style (when a car explodes, Spenser’s comment that “There should be marshmallows” is an eye-roller); but on the whole it’s a tense, involving telefilm.

Spenser and Susan leave the city for the bedroom community of Wheaton, where they investigate the death of a reporter
and the cocaine trade. Hawk helps, and together the group manages to save the life of a character who didn’t survive the original novel, as well as (of course) solving the crime.

Based on the fourteenth book in the series, this script was also penned by Parker and his wife. Some fans rate it as the finest of the four Lifetime movies (the writers of this piece would give the nod to the first, which holds its own with many a theatrically released crime film of the period).

Discussing his hero in a 1985 interview in
Connecticut Post
, Parker said, “Spenser may expound philosophically on things from time to time, but he always chooses—and I will always choose—the individual rather than the group.”

He added,

I would not sacrifice you for the greater good. I think it was E.M. Forster who once said that if he had the choice between betraying his friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. I’ll buy that. Someone else, I think it was Pound, said that if there were a fire in a museum filled with great works of art and there was also a cat in there, he’d try for the cat. I agree with that, too.

This second film reflects Parker’s (and Spenser’s) point of view well. In its original review of the novel
Pale Kings and Princes
, a
Newsweek
critic wrote, “Like Philip Marlowe, Spenser is an honorable man in a dishonorable world. When he says he will do something, it is done . . . But it is the moral element that sets them above most detective fiction.”

Budgetary issues, including filming in Canada, became much more apparent after the second film. While the first two had at least attempted to reflect Boston and Massachusetts, the last two simply gave in to financial considerations,
writing in Canada itself as the locale, no matter what the original novels had depicted. Also, the Parkers were no longer the sole screenwriters.

And, by the third film,
The Judas Goat
, Barbara Williams was out as Susan Silverman, replaced by fellow Canadian Wendy Crewson. Fresh from big-screen film roles in
Corrina, Corrina
and
The Santa Clause
, Crewson was likely seen as a bigger draw than Williams. As was the case with Barbara Stock in the original series, however, the writers found it difficult to find anything for her to do. Nonetheless, Crewson made a winning and intelligent Susan, and managed to do very well in a thankless role.

In the novels, Susan serves to draw out Spenser’s true nature, both for the reader and the character himself. In later books, her Harvard education allows her to make insights into the behavior of characters that actually aid Spenser in his investigations. With the exception of
Pale Kings and Princes
, those aspects of their dynamic are missing from the movies.

No fewer than five writers have credits on the DVD jackets of
The Judas Goat
. The Parkers are “writers,” while Nahum Tate and Carol Daley are credited with the teleplay. Monte Stettin receives credit under both headings.

The novel, the fifth in the series—and an especially strong entry—revolves around a wealthy businessman seeking justice against a terrorist group that killed his family, and involves a massive plot to disrupt the 1976 Olympic Games. Spenser and Hawk travel from Boston to London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and finally Montreal to root out the conspirators.

The film’s budget could not manage this kind of travel. Instead, we have an African ruler facing assassination (not in the novel), we lose the Olympics, and globetrotting is reduced
to Ottawa, Canada. The theme becomes one of greed run amok, a frequent topic of Parker’s, and a nasty twist is added to the end.

While many avid readers of Spenser were frustrated by the significant reworking of the plot, the film, taken on its own terms, remains a strong, viable tale. As usual, Urich and Brooks shine while the supporting cast is able (if not “capable”), and Crewson does well with a role reduced to alternating between cheerleading and mere eye candy. It’s a strong telefilm with a crisp script that may strike some as tighter than the banter-heavy, novelist’s approach of the first two by the Parkers.
The Judas Goat
is perhaps more likely to appeal to
Spenser: For Hire
fans than readers of the novels.

The fourth of the mid-90s films,
A Savage Place
, once again alters the plot for the sake of finance, changing the novel’s Los Angeles setting to Toronto.

In the novels, Spenser sometimes broods about lives he is unable to save. He feels responsible for someone involved in the case getting killed when he thinks he could have—and should have—prevented them from dying. Just as he was spared that pain in the adaptation of
Pale Kings and Princes
, he dodges the bullet again in
A Savage Place
when a main character murdered in the book manages to survive the film.

One can only guess at the motives for changing these events—in one film Parker himself co-wrote the script, and in the second, he did not. Another change in the plot has to do with the client: a stranger introduced to Spenser by a mutual acquaintance in the book, she is transformed into a former flame for the movie, probably an ill-advised, even inane, attempt to help put some meat on the bones of Susan’s character.

Though this ploy should add tension to the story, it really doesn’t; the two women only share one scene that resolves nothing. The plot has the former flame, a TV reporter, being
threatened but not going to the police, and behaving in an illogical, even stupid, manner throughout. Spenser seems to have wandered onto the wrong film set.

As with
The Judas Goat
, a veritable laundry list of writers receive credit: the Parkers and Monte Stettin as writers, while Nahum Tate and Carol Daley get credit for the teleplay along with Donald Martin.

Not quite a fiasco,
A Savage Place
represents an ignoble end for the entertaining version of Parker’s character and his world represented by
Spenser: For Hire
. That Urich retains his dignity—and Spenser’s—is the best that can be said for this somewhat sorry finish.

In 1996, Urich, filming his eleventh TV series (
The Lazarus Man
), was diagnosed with synovial cell sarcoma, a rare disease that assaulted his joints and tendons. The fifty-year-old fought the illness head on, changing gears and working hard to raise both money and public awareness, taking his fight against cancer to a wider battlefield.

On
The Larry King Show
, Urich said,

I cannot spend a second of time going into a “woe is me.” This is where I am and if this is going to happen to me, how can I find a way to make this a positive thing? Worrying is kind of a wasted energy, you know? It’s okay to be afraid—let that in, it’s part of the experience.

About his favorite television role, he said,

Spenser is an old-fashioned hero. He’s a throwback to the days of chivalry, knights in shining armor, and super-heroes. He believes in old-fashioned values and the family unit, and he deals with its disintegration . . . He represents what we would like to be when push comes to shove. We’d
like to be loyal, doggedly determined, never to give up, and see things through to the end. That’s Spenser!

Urich succumbed to cancer on April 16, 2002.

Spenser’s screen counterpart, minus Urich, made three more appearances. These TV movies were created for A&E, and once again Robert B. Parker was writing scripts based on his novels.

The first, 1999’s
Small Vices
, was based on the twenty-fourth novel in the Spenser canon. Replacing Urich and Brooks were veteran actor Joe Mantegna and relative newcomer Shiek Mahmud-Bey.

Mantegna, whose professional career began in 1976, had appeared on many TV shows and in several films including
The Godfather III
and David Mamet’s
House of Games
. Though still a smart-ass, the Mantegna Spenser was more world-weary than Urich’s. Both actors brought interesting qualities to the character. It might be argued that Mantegna is a better actor than Urich ever was; it might also be argued that he was not the better Spenser.

The new Hawk, Shiek Mahmud-Bey, had just completed a nineteen-episode run on
Profiler
before
Small Vices
. Although he was a physical specimen, former Golden Gloves boxer Mahmud-Bey could not bring the gravitas to Hawk that Brooks so effortlessly had.

Marcia Gay Harden, already a Tony Award nominee, assayed the role of Susan Silverman. She had an easy chemistry with Mantegna, and the two seemed as close to the “at-home” Spenser/Susan dynamic as was ever achieved on screen. Within a year she would win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for
Pollock
and in 2003 would collect another Academy Award nomination for her work in
Mystic River
.

In 2000, Mantegna and Harden returned for their second
Spenser film,
Thin Air
. Based on the twenty-second Spenser novel, this one found Spenser searching for the kidnapped wife of Frank Belson. This was the only Spenser film not to have an appearance by Hawk. Joined by respected actors Jon Seda (
Homicide: Life On The Streets
), Miguel Sandoval (
Clear & Present Danger
,
Medium
), and Luis Guzman (three-time Screen Actors Guild Award nominee for
Boogie Nights
,
Magnolia
, and
Traffic
), Mantegna and Harden slogged through a film most viewers considered merely average.