That's my pal Dan Castellaneta above right as he appeared in the role of TV mogul Aaron Spelling last night in Behind The Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Charlie's Angels, a tv-movie that I watched mainly for Dan. He was very good, striking the perfect note between serious and parody. One of the reasons I thought the original Charlie's Angels show worked (when it worked) was that the folks behind it knew it was a lightweight put-on, even if some of those in front of the camera did not always concur. That was one of the main sources of dramatic conflict in the tv-movie: Co-star Kate Jackson and show runner Barney Rosenzweig trying to make a statement that would improve the image of women while Spelling and other execs wanted more skin 'n' jiggle. Anyway, if you could get past the utter trivia of its topic, the tv-movie was fun.
The three ladies playing Farrah, Kate and Jaclyn were uncanny facsimiles…and I think that was Orson Bean doing a good off-camera impersonation of John Forsythe's off-camera Charlie voice. There were also enough in-jokes and tongues-in-cheek to keep it interesting…though if I were Farrah, or especially her then-husband Lee Majors, I don't think I'd have enjoyed it much. As it was, I enjoyed it more than the original show, which I could never quite bring myself to watch from start to finish.
It dawned on me as I watched last night's stirring docudrama — and I know Dan won't mind me saying this — that he seemed a bit young to be playing Aaron Spelling. Mid-movie, I looked it up and discovered that Dan is only eight years younger than Spelling was when Charlie's Angels went on the air. Okay, but he seemed a lot younger. Actors often belie their actual ages, usually (but not always) skewing younger than their actual years. I worked on a pilot once where they cast two people to play a couple and once they got them together in a rehearsal hall, they realized the man looked a good twenty years older than the woman. They were actually about the same age…in fact, I think the woman was older. But even with all the make-up assistance in the world, the actor seemed more like a father than a mate, and that undermined some key aspects of the script. The producers didn't want to make the actress look older so they paid off and dismissed the guy, replacing him with someone who was actually older but looked younger, if you follow me. Real age doesn't matter on screen. It's how you come across.
Actual years aside, Dan did come across a bit young as Spelling and I wonder if that wasn't deliberate on the part of whoever cast him. It's a little unbecoming for an older man to be ordering young women to wear bikinis and act out roles that might be called "male fantasies." I don't think Mr. Spelling (for whom — full disclosure — I briefly worked) ever had anything more on his mind with Charlie's Angels than concocting something that would win its time slot. Casting a guy with a young twinkle allowed the tv-movie to be about that and not about something more lecherous. So if that's what they had in mind in hiring Castellaneta, it was a good idea. If that's not what they had in mind, then it was a good idea, anyway. The guy's terrific and it's nice to see him flexing different muscles. Some of the best actors in Hollywood have always been people known mainly for animation voicing.