HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE (1991) STARRING GREGORY PECK’S SON

HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE (1991) – I want to be very clear – this review covers the six-episode Arts & Entertainment Network original program Hollywood Detective, NOT the 1989 Telly Savalas made for TV movie The Hollywood Detective.

Hollywood Detective is set during the Prohibition Era and featured a fun, clever gimmick. Gregory Peck’s son Tony Peck starred as Barkley Nunn, a private detective in late 1920s and early 1930s Hollywood. Nunn’s cases find him involved with famous writers and other figures of the time. And speakeasies. Lots of speakeasies.

The stories are played straight but there’s always a tongue-in-cheek air about the proceedings because the nostalgia and quasi-historical events are more than half the appeal. Some critics complained about the less than trail-blazing mystery writing in the series but that’s like complaining about how the shows Columbo or Monk didn’t reflect authentic police work. Or how the Moses Wine novels had the detective interacting with pastiches of recognizable 1960s and 1970s public figures.  

Barkley Nunn’s escapades were valentines to hardboiled detective tales of the 20s & 30s and to Old Hollywood lore. The mysteries are fun but are only part of Hollywood Detective‘s charm.

In my opinion, the series always stayed well enough on this side of seriousness to avoid lapsing into farce, just cleverness. For instance, Barkley Nunn has an incomplete screenplay he’s been working on, reflecting the trope about everyone in L.A. peddling a script, from the waiters on up.

The creative team behind Hollywood Detective based Nunn’s personality on Tony Peck himself, like Kojak’s character was based on Telly Savalas’ real-life personality. Peck even remarked that he was convinced to take the role when he was told “It’s you. You don’t even have to act.” 

Tony has a reasonable level of charm with his “Bruce Willis on Moonlighting crossed with Sonny Crockett on Miami Vice” performance but has wisely stayed mostly behind the camera in the decades since his detective role here. He was married to model Cheryl Tiegs when Hollywood Detective was being produced and she has a small role as a standard “tough dame” in one story.

The series was filmed in Utah in order to have smog-free skies and highways that weren’t bumper to bumper traffic most of the time. Barkley Nunn’s requisition police contact was Lt. Carstairs St. John, played by Timothy J. Nelson. 

THE EPISODES:

THE MUSE (April 8th, 1991) – Barkley Nunn is hired by author F. Scott Fitzgerald to prove that he wrote a screenplay when the studio is trying to rob him of credit and money for the work. A murder based on part of the script puts everything into a new light and ups the danger level for our glib gumshoe.

Ian Buchanan played Fitzgerald and other cast members were Donald Glover, Philip Bruns, Don Shanks and Tony Peck’s sister Cecilia Peck. 

THE WRITE STUFF (April 15th) – Barkley is hired by actor John Barrymore, Drew’s grandfather, to find out who has been trying to kill him. Our detective goes undercover as a screenwriter to carry out his investigation. 

He must dig through the many suspects, ranging from jealous husbands and outraged parents, to his ex-wives to the countless industry people that Barrymore has angered with his bitchy behavior. The reliable William Sargent portrayed the volatile John Barrymore. 

ROMANOFF A CLEF (April 22nd) – It’s a deeper than usual dive into Old Hollywood trivia in this murder mystery that involves famed imposter Mike Romanoff, who went from a con job posing as a survivor of the Russian Romanoff family to being exposed, then thriving as a restaurateur.

Embracing the fraud he grew infamous for he called the restaurant Romanoff’s and it became a favorite spot of Hollywood bigshots for years. Barkley Nunn gets hired by THE Dorothy Parker (Marissa Berenson) to clear Romanoff of a murder charge. Sargent turned in another tour de force guest spot as John Barrymore.

BLIND FAITH (April 29th) – Barkley Nunn gets hired by author Sinclair Lewis for a “safe, simple job” of infiltrating the Pentecostal cult of famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Lewis simply wants background information on such organizations as he writes Elmer Gantry. 

Things don’t remain safe and simple for long when Nunn gets caught up in mysteries tying into Aimee’s notorious five-week disappearance back in 1926.   

CHASING THE GOOSE (May 6th) – Fans of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries plus the Tom Swift stories, this is the episode for you! The Hardy Boys, etc. author Edward Stratemeyer hires Barkley Nunn.

Our detective is charged with finding an enigmatic young man who goes by the alias “the Goose.” Multiple pen names and owed royalties among the Stratemeyer Syndicate writers play into the case.

BARRING DISASTER (May 13th) – My least favorite episode, this one plays too fast and loose with details. The writers of Hollywood Detective seem unaware that Ernest Hemingway investigated the Kingston Penitentiary jailbreak himself as a reporter.

Barkley Nunn is presented working for Hemingway on such a case, a case which also includes murder and a vanished politician. This episode sadly fell into the pitfalls that the other ones successfully avoided.   

*** Hollywood Detective didn’t catch on, unfortunately, and no other episodes were produced. Reviews were very mixed, with People showing it got the show’s vibe by calling it “Impossibly jumbled and silly. And irresistible.”

The Orlando Sentinel‘s reviewer, on the other hand, didn’t seem to understand that what he saw as liabilities were actually the program’s entire point – “There just isn’t a mass audience out there for a series that follows the escapades of a writer-cum-private-eye in Hollywood in the 1930s – especially one that’s longer on atmosphere than action … but the sleuthing is secondary. Hollywood Detective is about 30 percent mystery and 70 percent artful ambience and nostalgia.”

Each episode of Hollywood Detective filled an hour timeslot with commercials. That means there was enough footage of this production for three movies, so even at just six episodes I feel that shows like this and Sam Waterston’s Mastermind (aka Q.E.D.) are deserving of much larger cult followings. 

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