When all three networks showed the Amy Fisher story in the mid ’90s, I knew it was reaching a nadir.” “The ripped-from-the-headlines approach can be tawdry and tiresome. “I was very sad to see the genre fade away, but it deserved to fade away for a while,” he said.
There got to be too many of them, and the quality deteriorated.”īefore becoming executive vice president and head of programming for TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies, Michael Wright worked at CBS for eight years he recalled 100 films being made in the course of two of them. “But I think like most things, television eats its young as an absolute predictive. “It was one of the best movies ever made for any medium - it was astoundingly made,” Mr. The apex was perhaps “Brian’s Song,” the Emmy Award-winning 1971 drama starring James Caan and Billy Dee Williams as a dying Brian Piccolo and his Chicago Bears teammate Gale Sayers. The phrase reeks of mid-’70s Brady Bunches munching popcorn over avocado shag as low-rent predicaments play out on the tube.
29, is the first entry of TNT’s “Mystery Movie Night,” weekly adaptations of novels by Sandra Brown, Lisa Gardner, Richard North Patterson, April Smith, Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark, starring veterans like Dermot Mulroney, Anne Heche, Judd Hirsch and Jane Alexander. Instead “Scott Turow’s Innocent,” which now places Sabich behind the murder of his wife, brings its pedigree to cable television, increasingly the home for Hollywood types who crave adult-oriented drama. Turow himself, who, despite initial resistance to writing a sequel, revisiting the Sabich saga some 20 years later.īut these days it’s exactly the kind of movie a studio probably wouldn’t touch.
Alfred Molina as the defense lawyer Sandy Stern. Marcia Gay Harden as Rusty’s brilliantly deranged spouse. IT’S a scene a movie studio might once have spilled a little blood for: Bill Pullman, stepping into the shoes of Harrison Ford as Rusty Sabich, the prosecutor turned suspected murderer in “Presumed Innocent,” the 1990 hit based on the thriller by Scott Turow.