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MissCrazyFool
BerichtGeplaatst: 03-07-2007 19:53:33  Reageer met quote


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CSIsara schreef:
ik zit met smacht te wachten op dat interview over banaceck


Me too. Embarassed
Ik ben heel erg benieuwd.

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The Survivor
BerichtGeplaatst: 07-07-2007 22:06:48  Reageer met quote


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Hier nog een interview met George uit een Britse talkshow.

This is a transcript of an interview with George Peppard from an old On The Jazz newsletter . I decided to republish it here as I think it's an excellent article, and a good insight into life whilst filming The A-Team.

George was interviewed last on the program after Edward Woodward and Michell Letrice, who are all sitting comfortably together along the sofa.

Terry Wogan: You're looking terrific, very slim.

George Peppard: Well, I work at it, yes er...

TW: Do you have to work at keeping the old figure trim?

GP: Well its more than that. On the series, because of er..exhaustion and giving up smoking I gained weight, gained about 30 pounds and lost 30 pounds, without exercise and on the schedule that we had - I don't know if you had as bad a one as we were on (to EW) - but I was up at 4 in the morning to do my exercises before I left at 5:30 or 7:00. And ten more pages the next day and I got into the habit of exercise and er.. since the series has been over with shooting for about 90 days I have been exercising with a vengeance like a man who has been denied his rights.".my body is my own and I can do what I like with it"!

TW: Did you enjoy making that series?

GP: Well initially I had an awfully good time, I mean I got a chance, a rare chance for me, to do character parts, you know, wigs and false noses and at times... as a matter of fact we had a co-producer of the series, Frank Lupo, who wrote a part as a two hour show as an opening to the season where I played - where the part of Hannibal took over - the part of a hood and he introduced the part of the hood first, so I played the hood and then I played the part of Hannibal putting on the makeup to play the hood and later the hood came back into the scene and I was talking to myself (laughter) and at that point I realised that I'd come to the end of the line..(more laughter) where I realised that I really wanted another actor to play that part, but I did manage in that part to fool some people who knew me, and there's a great joy in that. Different from a lot of straight parts as I've done most of my life.

TW: Its an ensemble of course, I mean your play in with three other people, I mean how did you all get on together, we have a picture of all four of you together (shown) yes there you are, were you all one happy team, or are you gonna tell us the truth? (laughter)

GP: Ah well the show is playing here in England I wouldn't wanna say anything to make it less pleasurable for the audience. We did have some difficulty, er.. because.. er.. Mr T got into a quarrel with the producers and executive producers and, er, he wanted to fire some of the crew, and that included a wardrobe lady, co-incidently who was born and raised in Britain, a very nice lady, and the sound crew, the second camera crew (laughter) and the unit manager.

TW: There wasn't a chance he was getting too big for his necklaces was there?

GP: Well you know, nobody likes to rock the boat in televeision and er.. Stephen Cannell who was the owner and co-creator of the series was prepared to replace thee people. We were all in a boat in the Mexican waters and when we got back they told me about it and I'd heard about it. He'd [meaning Mr. T] refused to shoot, and, um, I went into Mr Cannell's office and said, "If you have a list of 6, you may put George Peppard's name down as number 7, if you're going to fire them." He elected not to do that and er..that er, that was the right thing to do because, as you know and as we all know, the power of stardom is really a load of crap - and should be dealt with, properly and as a fellow worker. It did irritate me, um, I didn't speak to him for 16 weeks.

TW: He doesn't say a lot anyway.

GP: No. there's not a lot to say, but we got over that and we went about the show. The show comes first.

TW: There's obviously criticism with children watching the show, the violence...

GP: Yes... I don't think so. I think... The A-team are either the worst shots in the world... they take a machine gun and blow everything up... but it's good because it tells everyone to begin with, "We're out for fun.. there's going to be no blood, there's going to be no horror here." Er, you know what we intend, you know we don't like the bad guys, and we do defeat them, I think its good. It also gave us some leeway into farce, because bascially, the best thing about the A Team to me was when we came close to what I just think is the funniest people in the world - Monty Python - ...when you have something that is utterly ridiculous that's treated with absolute seriousness, and when we did that well, I thought we were very funny.

(here Edward Woodward comes in with his own ideas on TV vioence and agrees with G's assesment of The A-Team)

GP: yeah there's a strange rule NBC has, that if you have a pistol in your hand and your gonna point it at somebody, you may point it at their heart, but you may not point it at there head; now there is a piece of network logic. There's a joke in Californaia, I don't know if you have it on this side of the ocean but I'll repeat it quicky: The difference between a dead cat in the raod and a dead Televison Executive are there are skid marks in front of the cat.
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Banacek
BerichtGeplaatst: 19-07-2007 19:34:10  Reageer met quote


Korporaal
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Geregistreerd op: 12-6-2007
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MissCrazyFool schreef:
CSIsara schreef:
ik zit met smacht te wachten op dat interview over banaceck


Me too. Embarassed
Ik ben heel erg benieuwd.


Het eerste gedeelte:

George Peppard in TV Guide #517, volume 20, number 39, September 23-29, 1972

Private Eye, Polish Style
George Peppard ad ‘Banacek’ may put an end to all those jokes

At lunch, George Peppard explains why he sits with his back to the door of the commissary at Universal Studios, where his series, Banacek, is filmed. Ï don’t like to give autographs while I’m eating”.
Even so, a teen-aged boy comes up to Peppard and asks for his autograph. Peppard obliges. As soon as the boy has gone Peppard says “Let’s haul it.”He races to a table in the rear of the commissary.
He moves like the hero of a B-movie. Indeed, that is what his fate had become before Banacek. In Banacek Peppard plays an elegant Bostonian of Polish descent, a free-lance private investigator who recovers stolen property for a percentage of its insured value. In his spare time, Banacek dallies with young lovelies or goes sculling on the Charles.

Why is Peppard doing Banacek, as if over a quarter-million dollars this first season isn’t reason enough? “If you’ve climbed as many hills as I have, in as many films, carrying as many different weapons, for as many years, you can imagine my pleasure at delivering an intelligent line”. In Banacek, he delivers an occasional intelligent line when he isn’t delivering karate chops, like –well, like the hero of a B-movie.

So life doesn’t become automatically beautiful when you star in and own a piece of a television series. At lunch the broiled swordfish arrives. Peppard tastes it. He pushes it away. “I hate this!” he says to the waitress. The swordfish vanishes: a salad replaces it. Peppard eats between swigs of white wine; the drinks three glasses of wine at lunch and chases them with a seven-ounce can of beer in his dressing room later in the afternoon. Some days he needs other chasers. One morning Banacek is obliged to drink champagne in a scene with a young lovely. It’s too early in the day, and Peppard’s stomach acts up. He pops antacid pills the rest of the morning. At lunch he can manage only two glasses of red wine. At 5 that afternoon he says: “this is sag time. And I don’t mean Screen Actors Guild. I sag around now. I feel the fatigue.”

He drives himself not to show the fatigue. He clears his reddened eyes with eye drops. He smokes pack after pack of cigarettes – three, four packs a day. “Being a leading actor” he says “is like going to jail. The sense of confinement is terrific. You always want to break out, achieve release”. The way Peppard used to achieve his release was by way of the bottle. Now he drinks beer or wine, a few years ago he was putting away a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every night of the week, plus a half-bottle or more of wine, plus cognac. He drank heavily for five years. He spent seven years with a psychiatrist. One day he complained to the shrink about his childhood foul-ups, how his mother did this or his father said that. The psychiatrist nodded and said: “Drinking is the real foul-up isn’t it?”
That was then. “Now I’m enjoying life”. he says. “No panic. None of what my daughter Julie calls ’spas attacks’”. A spas attack, Peppard explains, is a siege of the jitters, brought on by panic. Spas is short for spasm. Being alone brought on spas attacks. “Today”, he says “I accept being alone. That’s how you’re born and that’s how you spend 80 per cent of your life and that’s how you’ll die. Alone”

The aloneness began early. Peppard was born an only child in Detroit on Oct. 1 1928. (Later, MGM would make him five years younger. Today Universal continues the pretense. His studio biography lists his birthdate Oct. 1 1933. Peppard will be 44 in October; his blond hair has now silvered.)
Peppard’s father was a building contractor who briefly went broke in 1930 and became a travelling salesman. The family moved quite abit. “I was always the new kid on the block, the new kid in school. Other kids used to chase me home.”
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Banacek
BerichtGeplaatst: 19-07-2007 20:44:46  Reageer met quote


Korporaal
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Deel 2:

By high school they couldn’t have caught him. He co-captained the track team at Dearborn High, and played end on the football team. Which made it easier for his schoolmates to accept the fact that he also enjoyed acting in school plays.

After high school he spent 18 months in the Marine corps, during which he nearly lost the middle finger of his right hand, catching it in the breechblock of a 105-mm. Howitzer at Camp Lejeune. A Navy surgeon sewed it back on. Peppard must have a thing about his right hand. He fell on a broken milk bottle when he was 11 and ripped open the chopping edge of the palm; he still has the scar. Later he tore off the nail of the index finger on a construction job. And later still, in a spas attack, he drove is fist through a window, slicing up the little finger.

Peppard entered Purdue University to study civil engineering so that he could join his father’s contruction business. One day he realized he had no desire to build houses. He quit Purdue and enrolled at Carnegie Tech, as a drama major. His education was interrupted in December of 1951, when his father died of cancer. The elder Peppard had 15 houses under construction when he died. George came home and looked at the partly completed buildings. “Snow was drifting over the sills” he recalls “You can’t let that happen to houses. Frost tears them apart”.

A $50,000 loan was about to be foreclosed by the bank. His mother suffered a heart attack. “I didn’t know what to do” George Peppard recalls “I went inside our house and turned on the TV and I began to drink rye and ginger ale, alone”Then he went to work. He arranged for new financing. He completed the building on all 15 houses. He sold them all, it took just a year.

His professional acting career began with the Pittsburgh Playhouse. He met a young actress Helen Davies and they were married in 1954 and Bradford was born a year later. The three Peppards went to New York where Peppard looked for acting jobs by day and mopped out office buildings by night. In 1956 he played an 18 year old in a Broadway comedy. “The girls of Summer”. He was 28 at that time. He didn’t like playing a juvenile. He swore he’d never play another. “I’d rather starve” he said “Which unfortunately I proceeded to do”
The uncertainty of his career put a strain on the marriage. Helen went to New Jersey, to get a job; Peppard moved into a cold-water flat in Greenwich Village. They’d live together, and then apart. A second child Julie was born in 1959, but the marriage, though it lasted 10 years, was doomed.

Peppard moved to Hollywood. “I had a five-year contract with Columbia. I did one picture. They didn’t pick up the option, I never heard from them again. My first starring film ‘The Subterraneans’ in 1960 was a turkey. I didn’t work for 18 months. I fought with MGM. They wanted me to do a thing called ‘Operation Crossbow’. I wanted to make a film for Paramount, ‘Judith’, in which I’d play a Jew, a kibbutz leader in Israel. MGM finally gave in. Then I read the rewrite of ‘Judith’ it was a disaster.: So he went back to MGM, which did not endear him to Paramount. Peppard likes to tell how a produces swore Peppard would never work another day, as long as he –the producer- lived. “In the next 10 days I had three offers”Peppard says.

So he has worked steadily, 21 films in 15 years. But never the blockbuster, never the shimmering stardom. Peppard insists he has never cared much about attaining blockbuster stardom. “I always was sufficiently successful. That satisfied my ambition. “ Pressed , he will admit some regret. “Every actor goes through a period when he can develop his talent if he gets the right roles. I didn’t get these roles. Nor did I work for the directors I’d have liked to work for”. So he carried weapons up hills in Greece and Spain, playing – he says- “tight-jawed men of action”.
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Banacek
BerichtGeplaatst: 19-07-2007 21:06:15  Reageer met quote


Korporaal
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Deel 3:

He was divorced in 1964; he met actress Elizabeth Ashley and they were married and had a son, and now they are divorced. He drank heavily, he visited a psychiatrist, three to five times a week for the first two years, tapering off for the next five years. He sums it up: “I had a troubled spirit”.

Now the troubles are fewer. In August of 1971, after he’d finished “The Groundstar Conspiracy” Universal offered him two series, one a private-eye show based on the John D. MacDonald suspense novels, the other Banacek. Peppard weighed the two series against a film in Egypt. The film would earn him $100,000 more than either series.

“The pivotal factor was I would miss seeing my children. I’ve been awzy a lot. My son, Bradford, who lives with me, will go away to college in January. I wanted to spend time with him, I hate living in foreign hotel rooms. I’ve lived in too many I decided to do Banacek. I liked my character, a Pole , the son of an immigrant. My father came from Canada. I am the son of an immigrant. Banacek reflects all minorities. In this country we’ve absorbed most minorities, but not the Poles. They have become the minority’s minority”.

It appealed to Peppard. He signed on. But things are seldom simple for Peppard. In January of 1972 while shooting the pilot in Boston, he suddenly found himself in deep trouble. One evening a young woman phoned Peppard and came up to his Boston hotel suite. After she left she accused him of assault and battery and assault with intent to commit rape. The second charge carried a possible 20-year prison term. Peppard says he could have settled the matter out of court. He refused. “It cost me three times as much to fight it, but the charges were false and I wanted to prove them false”Under oath the young woman changed her story. The judge dismissed the case.

So Peppard is enjoying himself. “The character, banacek has intelligence, some humor, the edge of intellectual wit. He has a good relationship with himself”.
Peppard is comfortable playing Banacek. “His hair is cut the way I like it. He smokes the cigars I like. His attitude towards life is like my own”

But mainly he likes Banacek because Banacek is a loner, a free-lance operator who enjoys doing things on his own, alone. George Peppard likes to think of himself that way. He remembers how he used to experience spas attacks when he’d enter an empty house alone. “I’d have to take a Librium. Them I’d wait 20 minutes for the tranquilizer to work, before I could relax”.

Not any more. Today he takes pride in his aloneness. “I am” he says “a minority of one”

By Arnold Hano, [pages 26-28, 30, 32.]
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CSIsara
BerichtGeplaatst: 23-07-2007 19:11:12  Reageer met quote


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leuk interview.
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MissCrazyFool
BerichtGeplaatst: 23-07-2007 19:42:51  Reageer met quote


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Interessant interview.

Thanks for sharing! Wink

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Daphne
BerichtGeplaatst: 23-07-2007 20:46:22  Reageer met quote


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vet cool intervieuw,heel erg leuk

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Shinja
BerichtGeplaatst: 08-10-2009 18:13:06  Reageer met quote


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Bedankt om de interviews te posten, leuk om te lezen. Smile

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