Celebrating 50 Years of Kolchak: ‘The Night Stalker’—Remembering Darren McGavin’s Iconic Role
By Ed Gross,
5 hours ago
Every Christmas, television audiences are reminded of actor Darren McGavin thanks to his portrayal of "The Old Man" in the holiday perennial A Christmas Story (1983), and while that may be the character that the late actor is likely to be remembered for by modern audiences, there are many others who recall him as the star of Kolchak: The Night Stalker , which is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary.
The "Kolchak" in question is actually reporter Carl Kolchak, first introduced in the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker as a down-on-his-luck newspaper man in Las Vegas who stumbles upon the story that promises to revitalize his career: a string of murders that he discovers is the work of vampire Janos Skorzeny (Barry Atwater), much to the chagrin of his editor, Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland), and the Vegas P.D. But Kolchak turns out to be right and it all culminates in his driving a stake in Skorzeny's heart. The threat is over and old Carl's a hero, right? Depends on who you ask.
The story is buried and Kolchak is driven out of town, but The Night Stalker quite unexpectedly delivered record-breaking ratings, resulting in the 1973 TV movie The Night Strangler. In that followup, McGavin's Kolchak is in Seattle just in time for a new series of murders, these the handiwork of one Dr. Richard Malcolm (Richard Anderson, the future Oscar Goldman on The Six Million Dollar Man ), who is using his victims to keep himself rejuvenated in a form of immortality. Things play out pretty much the way they did for the reporter as they did in the first film, including in terms of the ratings.
Flash forward to fall 1974, and Darren McGavin and Carl Kolchak were back for what would be 20 episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker , set in Chicago with Carl and Vincenzo working at the Independent News Service (INS), each week seeing the unstoppable reporter investigating supernatural cases, ranging from zombies to headless motorcyclists, witches, werewolves, robots and much more. Admittedly the formula wore thin, but McGavin as Kolchak remains one of television's most endearing characters and a source of inspiration for writer Chris Carter and The X-Files .
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Kolchak: in the beginning
Carl Kolchak is the creation of the late Jeff Rice, who was himself a reporter, resident of Vegas and wrote an unpublished novel called The Kolchak Papers, which gave birth to all that followed (including comics and novels still being published by Moonstone Books ).
"Kolchak was the first to blend the newsroom and horror fiction genres," said Rice in an exclusive interview, "but that wasn't my main consideration when I started the actual drafting. I just wanted to create a 'good read,' something for people to use to kill time in airports, on planes or in hotels when stuck overnight in a strange town. I also felt I could use the book to say a few serious things about my town — to use it as an intrinsic part of the story rather than as a background setting, while making a few comments about the misuse of power."
As to the enduring popularity of Kolchak: The Night Stalker , he suggested, "Maybe its appeal remains because it was then, and remains now, a very different kind of show. Maybe people see, in the monsters and the way public knowledge and discussion are stopped, symbols for all those things various government entities wish the people not to know about. Maybe people — fans — admire Kolchak because he just keeps on trying to do what he sees as work that has value; trying to keep the public informed about what is going on.”
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All of that is certainly true, but another undeniable element is, of course, actor Darren McGavin. "If you were to read Jeff's original book, you would not picture Darren McGavin as the character," says journalist and author Mark Dawidziak, a friend of both Rice and McGavin and whose books include A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe . "But then, when Darren comes in, it's the perfect fusion of actor and part, with the actor making the part completely his own. I don't think it's a mistake that two of the characters I've written books about are Columbo and Kolchak."
“They have a lot of similarities,” continues Dawidziak, also author of the currently being revised The Night Stalker Companion as well as The Columbo Phile: A Casebook , speaking of the detective famously brought to life by Peter Falk. “They’re both shabbily dressed, sons of immigrants with European surnames who drive dilapidated cars and get there through sheer determination. And in our minds, these characters were brought to life in a way we can never imagine any other actors in the roles. With Columbo , [creators] Richard Levinson and William Link did not picture a younger actor looking like Peter Falk playing the part. They pictured an older Irish actor. And the same thing happens with Kolchak in that Darren shows up, Darren looks at it and says, ‘This is the motivation for this, this is how the character would dress.’ Darren was the one who put him in the seersucker suit; he came up with the hat and the sneakers, he’s the one who came up with the reporter’s tie, because he remembered that’s what reporters wore in New York in the summer when he was an actor there.”
In the pages of The Night Stalker Companion , McGavin explained, “There was a line in there about him wanting to get back to New York, so I got this image of a New York newspaperman who had been fired in the summer of 1962 when he was wearing a seersucker suit, his straw hat, button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and reporter’s tie, and he hasn’t bought any clothes since. Well, I knew that was the summer uniform of reporters in New York of that time, so that’s how the wardrobe came about. I added the white tennis shoes and that was Kolchak. It might have been totally at odds with what everybody else was wearing in Las Vegas, but he hasn’t bought any clothes since then. You need goals for a character and Kolchak’s goal is to get back to the big time. He always wanted to get back to New York and work on the Daily News .”
McGavin, Dawidziak says, essentially merged his own personality with that of Kolchak’s. “As a result,” he points out, “it has bits and pieces of Jeff, it has all of the essential DNA of Jeff’s character, but is now a Kolchak who is unforgettable, because of this. So what Darren brought to the part is just incalculable. Kolchak is an incredibly watchable, vibrant character even in the lousiest episodes of the series, and that’s because of Darren. Darren always was able to make that character stand up and dance. It’s like the later Columbo episodes; some of them were not very well written, but it was always a kick to see Peter in that raincoat. Well, it was a kick to see Darren in that seersucker suit.”
The final episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker in 1975 was the last time McGavin put on that seersucker suit, though, obviously, the audience’s memory of it has never faded.
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