This afternoon, I attended a luncheon of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters, an L.A.-based group of folks who've been involving in radio or TV for a couple of decades or more. Several times a year, they have these ceremonies that honor a great in the field of entertainment and today, the Guest of Honor was Peter Falk. Is there a more respected, beloved actor out there than Peter Falk? I sure can't think of one.
This was an unusual P.P.B. luncheon. Usually, the dais is packed with everyone they can get who ever worked with the honoree, and everyone talks so long that the proceedings threaten to become a dinner in their honor. This time, there were only a few speakers and they all kept it short. "They," in this case, were Joe Mantegna, Robert Culp, Ed Begley Jr., Dabney Coleman, Paul Reiser, Hal Kanter and Shera Danese. Ms. Danese is also known as Mrs. Peter Falk.
All of the speeches were warm and wonderful. Dabney Coleman was properly acerbic, Robert Culp told a funny story about being upstaged by Falk in one of the latter's first stage role, and Ed Begley surprised everyone by doing the best Peter Falk impression most of us had ever heard. As a matter of fact, when Falk finally got up to thank everyone, he sounded less like Peter Falk than Ed Begley did. After the festivities, Falk signed copies of his new autobiography, Just One More Thing: Stories from My Life, for those of us willing to buy a copy and wait in line. I, of course, was. Flipping through it, which is all I've had time to do, it seems like a nice, anecdote-filled overview of a stellar career.
As I think of it, one of the things missing from this afternoon was a full sense of how stellar that career was been. While we ate, they ran a montage of highlights from Falk's film work. (In his acceptance speech, he said his favorite part of the afternoon was when all his actor friends who were present were forced to watch his clips.) It was an amazing reel, not because of what was in it but because of what wasn't: No clip from Pocketful of Miracles or The Princess Bride or Murder, Inc. or Murder By Death or any of his TV work except for Columbo. They didn't even have time for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. How many actors have so much fine work to their credit that you have to omit stuff like that? No one even mentioned a 1966 TV series Falk did called The Trials of O'Brien, which I'd love to view again, just to see if they were all as good as I remember. I know he was. He's always good. He's Peter Falk.