From our recent correspondence:
Do you remember when we used to watch some of our favorite shows on TV, we’d see the end credit for Stephen J. Cannell Productions?
It showed a guy sitting at a typewriter, typing fast. Then he’d pull the paper up out of the machine, and it would float into a big “C” in the air, and the caption would read: Stephen J. Cannell Productions.
This end credit appeared on a great many of my favorite shows over many years. To get an idea of how many hugely popular and well-written shows, and which ones, look on Cannell’s web site, here. Wow. The whole site is worth looking at to get a picture of Cannell’s continuing attainments. And there’s a recent interview with him in Success magazine, here. I was astonished, reading that interview, to learn he was dyslexic — like another great writer, Agatha Christie, as the article pointed out.
Somewhere in the early 90’s, I learned, the networks geared up their own production studios, rather than buying from outside studios, and thus the networks — the buyers — put themselves into competition with the sellers like Cannell’s studio. About that time, Cannell said in the interview, he saw the writing on the wall and stopped trying to produce shows. Thus, we haven’t seen his production company end credit at all for some time.
He started as a writer, was a writer all through his career, and ended as a writer, publishing mystery/suspense books. He had seen early on that the only way to maintain some control over how what you wrote was used was to become your own production company; when that no longer was viable he got out. But he never stopped writing. And he never stopped teaching and helping other writers.
After his recent death, the show Castle, on which he had occasionally appeared as himself, used his end credit one more time. This time when he pulled the paper up, the caption below the picture said “Colleague. Mentor. Friend.” This time the paper, instead of forming the letter C, floated slowly down, then out of frame completely. As the Cannell productions fanfare music reached its end, the next card came up, saying, “We’ll Miss You, Pal.” You can view these last end credits here.
I’ll miss him too, even though I knew him only as a viewer and a fan of his work. He wrote and produced great shows, entertaining me and millions of other for decades. I loved that clever end credit, too. Thank you, Castle people, for that elegant tribute.
