Hart to Hart, Charlies Angels

Those were grim years for TV.

Hart to Hart was an amateur detective series about a wealthy couple, Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers, who go around solving murders they keep stumbling onto. I didn't like rich people so I never watched it, but I did watch the beginning of one episode.

The Harts are going to a fancy French restaurant that just opened. They're friends with the chef, so they want to support him. They go to the restaurant which seems to be a storefront. They go in and sit down in a booth. The place has booths and cheap wood paneling on the walls. I don't remember if they had napkin dispensers on the tables. Apparently the chef is the only one who works there. There's cheap hollow door with a door knob that leads from the dining room to the kitchen.

The Harts hear something. They rush back to the kitchen and find the chef has been murdered.

For the restaurant kitchen, they used the set for some cooking show. It was made up to look something like a home kitchen with brightly colored appliances, a four unit electric stove and a double oven. There were frilly curtains on the fake window. This was what was supposed to pass for a restaurant kitchen.

Charlies Angels

I didn't watch the old Charlie's Angels when it was on in the '70's. I watched a little of one episode, realized it was a scene-for-scene copy of an old Mod Squad episode which I hated in the first place---it was the one where Julie is shot in the head by an autistic kid she nicknamed "Cricket". This so offended me I never watched it again until years later when it was on in syndication.

One of the "angels" was going undercover in a women's prison. The scene where she enters the prison was apparently filmed in a dentist's office waiting room. It was decorated with commercial "wall art", there was the window to the receptionist desk and chairs and tables around the room. They may have removed the magazines.

The scenes in the prison yard were filmed at a public swimming pool. Pools have high fences topped with barbed wire to keep drunks and teenagers from climbing in at night and drowning, so it looked a little like a prison, I guess. But they made no attempt to conceal or explain the presence of the swimming pool. The "angel" gets in a fight with another inmate and knocks her into the pool.

I would admire their thrift if the show hadn't been so bad.

But zero-budget filmmakers should look at '70s TV for inspiration in much the same way that The French New Wave looked to American B movies from the 1930's.