"I read a few of those when I was younger and they bored the shit out of me and I won't write them for you." "I'll be honest with you," Sawyer said, speaking in the blunt mode he says was typical of Hollywood types of the era.
"Like, Agatha Christie puzzle mysteries." "So what kind of mysteries are these?" Sawyer asked.
Sawyer looked at the man he hoped would be his new boss.
It was a big opportunity for Sawyer, a former commercial illustrator who had landed in Hollywood a few years prior, lying about his age and dyeing his hair to get himself under the magic age of 30, above which there were no opportunities for screenwriters at the time.Īnd now he was in a meeting with Fischer, a former writer for "Columbo," who had teamed with that show's creators for "Murder, She Wrote." Poirot at 100: the refugee detective who stole Britain's heart But I did have to face the fact that it wasn't happening there for me."īoth the show's creators and its star went in with some reservations, but the magic was clear from the beginning: 20 minutes was all the network had needed to order 22 episodes, and 20 was all Sawyer needed to see to know he wanted to write for it. As she put it in a 1984 TV interview promoting the first season of the show, "I love the musical theater and to leave that was very hard for me, very hard. TV hadn't been Lansbury's first choice either. She hadn't been the first choice for the show, but CBS approached her after Jean Stapleton of "All In the Family" fame turned the part down.
He walked into Peter Fischer's office, past the cocktail table to the desk, and sat down to discuss what he'd just watched: the first 20 minutes of the pilot of "Murder, She Wrote," a new mystery series starring Angela Lansbury, a 59-year-old film and stage star making her TV series debut. It was 1983, and Tom Sawyer, that's his real name, had just stepped out of a screening room in the producer's building at Universal Studios.
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