According to THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, actor George Wendt passed away earlier today at the age of 76.
Despite the fact that the majority of today's new reports have focused on Wendt's role as Norm Peterson on the popular television sitcom, CHEERS, I primarily associate him with two parapolitical-centric roles. The first is that of murderer Graham McVeigh in COLUMBO: STRANGE BEDFELLOWS (1995). Yes, indeed, Wendt portrayed a killer named "McVeigh" in an episode of COLUMBO that aired only 19 days after the Oklahoma City Bombing and only 16 days after Timothy McVeigh was first publicly connected to the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The plot of this particular episode of COLUMBO involves Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) of the Los Angeles Police Department forging a conspiratorial alliance with organized crime in order to create an elaborate psychological warfare game that will force McVeigh into confessing to an unsolved murder.
Wendt's other parapolitical role came a little over ten years earlier in the 1984 science fiction film DREAMSCAPE, produced by Roger Corman's New World Cinema, in which he plays a novelist/conspiracy theorist named Charlie Prince who helps the main character, Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid), uncover a plot to assassinate the President of the United States (Eddie Albert, another COLUMBO murderer) that involves dispatching a psychic assassin to invade the nuclear-tinged nightmares of the POTUS. Here's the trailer for DREAMSCAPE...
No comments:
Post a Comment