THE CONVERSATION: The Series

4 comments August 7th, 2008

According to a report in Variety, AMC is developing a TV series based on the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola movie THE CONVERSATION. To quoth the article…

“The TV project will be set in the early 1970s — emulating the time period of the original thriller — and center on electronic surveillance expert Harry Caul, played in the film by Gene Hackman.”

If you’ve never seen the movie THE CONVERSATION, you’re missing out. It’s one of the best films of the 1970s, easily ranking right up there with Coppola’s more well-known films of that era, THE GODFATHER and THE GODFATHER PART 2. Hack gives one of his best performances as Harry, a withdrawn expert in audio surveillance. The cast also includes the late John Cazale (who played Fredo in the GODFATHER films), a young Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and Cindy Williams, a few years before she became a TV star on LAVERNE & SHIRLEY.

The movie also co-stars a woman named Phoebe Alexander, an actress with very few film credits but whom I actually knew briefly as a kid. She taught a bit of theater to my church’s youth group, and we worked on a never-staged play. If I had known she’d worked with Coppola and Hackman, I would’ve asked her about it, but back in the late 1970s, I was just some dumb kid who’d never heard of THE CONVERSATION. Too bad.