Nero Wolfe (1979)

Interesting facts

• Based on: The Doorbell Rang
• Filmed in: New York City

Nero Wolfe is a 1979 American made-for-television film adaptation of the 1965 Nero Wolfe novel The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout. Thayer David stars as Wolfe, gourmet, connoisseur and detective genius. Tom Mason costars as Archie Goodwin, Wolfe's assistant. Written and directed by Frank D. Gilroy, the film was produced by Paramount Television as a pilot for an ABC television series, but it was shelved by the network for more than two years before finally being broadcast December 19, 1979.

Production

Disappointed with the Columbia Pictures films based on his first two Nero Wolfe novels, mystery writer Rex Stout was leery of further Hollywood adaptations in his lifetime. "I've had offers," Stout told author Dick Lochte in 1967, "but I haven't been to a movie in 30 years and I despise television. ... Anyway, the money, in addition to what the books are bringing in, would put me in a tax bracket where I wouldn't see much of it.

In 1976 Paramount Television purchased the rights for the entire set of Nero Wolfe stories for Orson Welles. Paramount paid $200,000 for the TV rights to eight hours of Nero Wolfe. The producers planned to begin with an ABC-TV movie and hoped to persuade Welles to continue the role in a mini-series. Frank D.

"I was told to discover someone for the role since no other name actors were acceptable to them (ABC/Paramount) or to me," Gilroy wrote in his memoir, I Wake Up Screening (1993). "After a bicoastal search, which acquainted me with just about every corpulent middle-aged actor available, I, close to giving up, encountered Thayer David. No sooner did he start to read than Emmet Lavery, the producer, and I exchanged a look: We'd found our man."

At a cost of about $1.5 million, Nero Wolfe was filmed in March, April and May 1977, in locales including Van Nuys and Malibu, California, and New York City. The scene in which Mrs. Rachel Bruner (Anne Baxter) goes ice skating was filmed at Rockefeller Center.

In June 1977, UPI reported that the two-hour film would air during the 1977–78 season, with the possibility of it becoming a weekly series in January 1978. But the film had still not aired when Thayer David died in July 1978. In a November 1979 interview, Gilroy mildly complained to the Associated Press that Nero Wolfe had still not been broadcast by ABC, and praised the performance of David.

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