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On Night Stalking Frank Spotnitz
May 28, 2006
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 and stars Stuart Townsend and Gabrielle Union<br />
will be signing copies of <i>Night Stalker</i> and chatting with fans at the<br />
West Hollywood Best Buy (1015 North La Brea Avenue) at the corner of Santa<br />
Monica and La Brea, from 7-9 p.m. Though it was felled too soon, the ABC series<br />
releases on DVD this coming week, with four unaired episodes that help extend<br />
the story of obsessive crime reporter Carl Kolchak, out to track down his wife’s<br />
murderer.</p>
<p>Joining <i>The X-Files</i> as a writer in 1994, Spotnitz quickly became<br />
involved not only in developing the series’ stand-alone episodes, but also its<br />
elaborate “mythology” storyline dealing with government conspiracy and aliens.<br />
He directed two episodes and wrote or co-wrote more than 40 installments,<br />
including the Emmy-nominated “Memento Mori.” He also co-produced and co-authored<br />
the story for the 1998 feature film <i>The X-Files: Fight the Future</i>. For<br />
him, the serial format of television has an inherent allure. “If you’ve picked<br />
an interesting enough arena to explore, you have the years to find all these<br />
different things to take these characters through. In <i>The X-Files</i>, for<br />
instance, the whole idea of why we believe in something larger than ourselves,<br />
and the sense of mystery in the universe, is something that’s really<br />
interesting. And <b>the longer that I got into the mythology of <i>The X-Files</i>,<br />
the more I came to see the belief in extraterrestrials as a substitute for a<br />
belief in God, really. It’s like another type of faith.</b> For <i>Night Stalker</i><br />
I picked out a personally interesting arena, which is, what is the quality of<br />
goodness and what is the quality of evil?” </p>
<p>It certainly didn’t hurt that Spotnitz was such a fan of <b>the original<br />
<i>Night Stalker</i></b>. “The first TV movie, at the time, was the highest-rated TV<br />
movie ever. <b>This was back in the three network universe, and you <i>never</i><br />
saw anything scary on TV — you just didn’t.</b> But this thing was really scary,” he<br />
recalls. “In that version of the show, Kolchak was a down-on-his-luck reporter<br />
in his 50s. He’d been in the big time and fallen out of grace and now he was in<br />
Las Vegas scrambling for a story that would get him back in a major market for<br />
newspapers. He hits on this story about a vampire killing women, and it’s his<br />
ticket to the big time. Darren McGavin was really charming and irascible, and it<br />
was scary and funny. And the second one was also very good. And then they did<br />
this TV series, because the movies had been so successful, and honestly it<br />
wasn’t as good. McGavin was still fantastic, but a lot of things that worked in<br />
the movies didn’t work in a series — the idea of Kolchak as a (scrambling,<br />
underdog) reporter doesn’t hold, it’s a one-note idea. And I sort of signed on<br />
to do this remake without having really understood all the problems that were<br />
inherent in making the series. So the more I examined it, the further I went<br />
from the original series.” </p>
<p>One major departure came in the casting of Townsend (<i>Queen of the<br />
Damned</i>, <i>The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen</i>), who wasn’t even born<br />
when the first TV movie bowed. “I thought he was fantastic in the role,” says<br />
Spotnitz. “He was completely different, obviously, than the McGavin version of<br />
Kolchak, and I knew there’d be a lot of people who would be unhappy about that —<br />
that he’s a younger guy, a good-looking guy. But with the new configuration of<br />
the show, and the mythology that was unique to this version of <i>Night<br />
Stalker</i>, he was the perfect guy because he’s charming and winning, but he<br />
does have that sort of darkness that makes you wonder. You can flip it; you can<br />
think he’s a good guy and also maybe a bad guy.”</p>
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