Two Hundred A Day - Episode 25: I Still Love L.A.

Episode Date: January 14, 2018

Nathan and Eppy celebrate a year of the podcast by discussing the first 90s Rockford Files TV movie, I Still Love L.A. Fifteen years after the end of the original show, we catch back up with our friend Jim Rockford as he tries to (gasp) sell his trailer and leave L.A.! Amidst race riots, fires and earthquakes, Jim takes a case from his attorney ex-wife to discover the truth of the murder of a wealthy socialite. But when one of Jim's childhood baseball heroes turns out to be a possible satanist (!), he has to sort through a sordid web of lies to figure out what's going on and who's to blame. It's an interesting change of pace for us to take on this generation of the show, and we loved how the essential Rockford-ness was maintained. Unfortunately, the actual mystery seemed underbaked, and some of the plot points resonate very differently with us in 2017 than they were probably intended in 1994. That said, this was a fun change of pace for us and we look forward to watching more of these movies! Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files! Support the podcast by subscribing at patreon.com/twohundredaday. Big thanks to our Gumshoe patrons! Check them out: Richard Hatem Victor DiSanto John Adamus, The Writer Next Door Lowell Francis's Age of Ravens gaming blog Kevin Lovecraft and the Wednesday Evening Podcast Allstars Mike Gillis and the Radio vs. The Martians Podcast And thank you to Dael Norwood, Shane Liebling, Dylan Winslow, Bill Anderson, Adam Alexander and Chris! Thanks to: zencastr.com for helping us record fireside.fm for hosting us thatericalper.com for the answering machine audio clips spoileralerts.org for the adding machine audio clip Freesound.org for the other audio clips Two Hundred a Day is a podcast by Nathan D. Paoletta and Epidiah Ravachol. We are exploring the intensely weird and interesting world of the 70s TV detective show The Rockford Files. Half celebration and half analysis, we break down episodes of the show and then analyze how and why they work as great pieces of narrative and character-building. In each episode of Two Hundred a Day, we watch an episode, recap and review it as fans of the show, and then tease out specific elements from that episode that hold lessons for writers, gamers and anyone else interested in making better narratives.

Welcome to 200 a Day, a podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. Or should I say 70s and 90s. I'm Nathan Paletta. And I'm Epidiah Ravshaw. I should not have been sipping my coffee at that very moment because I knew Nathan Palletta. And I'm Epidaeus Ravishaw. I should not have been sipping my coffee at that very moment because I knew that was coming up. Well, we're getting off to a rollicking start here as we are celebrating a year of 200 a day's existence. Yeah. With a venture into the 90s TV movies follow upup to The Rockford Files.

Which one are we talking about today, Epi? Yeah, we're talking about the first one, I Still Love L.A. And this came out in 94, and we're going to find out as we talk about it that it really wants you to know that it's set in the year 1994. I don't know if they thought maybe that you got a little confused by Dennis's youthful looks and thought it was still taking place in the 70s. But no, we're in 1994. Like all of these movies, this aired in a two-hour time slot uh on cbs and so there's an hour and a half of actual screen time um compared to the 50 to 52 minutes uh of a 70s episode so because we wanted to do

something a little different and special to celebrate our podcast and hopefully do something interesting for all of our listeners we are going to take a little more holistic approach to this episode and kind of talk about things as we get to them, as opposed to keeping them to the discrete second half. Yeah. There's some interesting stuff kind of around and in this episode, even while, not to spoil our final thoughts, but even while the central tension mystery is a little lackluster, actually.

Yeah, I mean, there's some things to say about the story that's being told at the center of it. But I think what you really want to get out of this is the love of the Rockford files. Right. And we'll get to our thesis about it in a little bit here. It's hard to start this one though. And let me tell you why it's hard to start this one. I don't know if you noticed this or felt this, but there is no opening montage.

Oh, that's right. So I'm like, what do we do? 200 a Day is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our gumshoes. For this episode, we say thank you to John Adamas, the writer next door. Find his go-to resources for storytellers and creatives who want to tell better stories at writernextdoor.com.

Mike Gillis, a host of the Radio vs. the Martians podcast, the McLaughlin Group for nerds, radiovsthemartians.com. Kevin Lovecraft, part of the Wednesday Evening Podcast All-Stars Actual Play podcast, found at misdirectedmark.com. Lowell Francis with his award-winning gaming blog at ageofravens.blogspot.com. Shane Liebling, Dylan Winslow, Dale Norwood, Bill Anderson, Adam Alexander, and Chris. And finally, big thank yous to Victor DeSanto and to Richard Haddam, who you can find on Twitter at Richard Haddam. We've recently updated our Patreon with new opportunities for sponsorship.

So check out patreon.com slash 200 a day and see if you want to be our newest gumshoe. So some of the background leading up to these movies, the studio, Universal, who still own the rights basically, wanted to do something with Rockford. The series ended in a very messy set of lawsuits between Universal and James Garner. So it took from the late 70s to the early 90s before he came around to deciding that he was willing to work with Universal to do more Rockford stuff.

There's a quote. i recently acquired a great book called 30 years of the rockford files thanks to our patrons at patreon.com slash 200 a day but this book by by a fellow named ed robertson uh and he has a quote in there from james garner where he talks about how he needed to do them at the time that these were made the early 90s because he was getting too old. He wasn't going to be able to physically do the role if they waited another three or four years. But he still refused to film anything at the Universal Studios. He was willing to do the show as long as he didn't have to walk through the gates.

Wow. Part of the idea was kind of not cashing in necessarily, but riding a wave of nostalgia TV. There have been some TV movies for other 70s shows, and they did well, and it was kind of part of that thing. And when it aired, it did really well. It followed Murder, She Wrote, which was one of the most popular shows on the air at that time on a Sunday evening. So it went Murder, She Wrote directly into I Still Love LA. Yes. Apparently, all the networks were competing to air this movie. The other lead in shows at the time in 1994 would have been Roseanne or Seinfeld.

That is so 1994. or Seinfeld. That is so 1994. Garner wanted to go with CBS because he thought that the audience for Murder, She Wrote was the appropriate audience. Yeah. And thus, I think we get to the whole direction of this kind of feeling like a feel good, look at the band back together kind of feel. That news breaks my heart just a little bit because we never then got a Murder, She Wrote, Rockford Files crossover episode. Now, I remember the 90s a little bit more vividly than I do the 70s. I don't actually remember watching these shows when they came out in the 90s. So I was not the target audience at that time. Again, there were eight movies. They were released on a pretty staggered schedule

because even though this one did really well in the ratings, the next couple didn't do so well. And then they started going into like death slots during the week instead of on weekends. Yeah. Unless you were a TV guide aficionado, you probably weren't really tracking. No one was on tenterhooks waiting for the next Rockford Files TV movie. There's something to what happens with schedules when you can't just reach out and grab whatever episode you want and binge however you want like we have nowadays. And this is in no way a nostalgic, like kids have it so easy these days. They don't even know what it's like to have to wait for an episode. I'm just, it's just kind of interesting to think about how something like that really like has such a supreme effect on how well something went over or whether anybody noticed it.

But yeah, put yourself in this mindset. You just watched murder. She wrote your, one of your, your favorite shows. Uh, and then it leads right into a synth version a synth interpolation of the rockford

files theme and the panning camera over the uh beautiful 1994 or 1992 i should say malibu yeah as we see some of our title credits coming up over the beginning of this TV movie. This music. Yeah. No, this is the perfect synthesis of the original theme with the era that it was aired in. I can't really describe it any better than that. And it's the same composers. They got a lot of the same crew back together for this as well. We should say Juanita Bartlett did the script with input from Cannell. Cannell was a producer. David Chase was a producer david chase was a

producer a lot of the production crew like directors and like the stunt people and stuff were the same people that did the original show which is a testament to the i guess the tight knittedness of the crew from the rockford files we get brought straight in with nods to things that fans of the original show would know, right? We see the Firebird, but it's all junked up and broken down on the bed of a truck. We come to a trailer on the beach and we hear the answering machine go off, but it's under the music. His answering machine pick up with a message about how his sewer is backed up. his answering machine pickup with a message about how his sewers backed up.

And that is unfortunate because as we shortly learned, Jim Rockford is looking to sell his trailer. And then we get the title giving us our time. It is April 22nd, 1992. So Jim's place. He's done well for himself. He's in a double wide. Yeah.

I kept thinking every time we went inside the trailer, like, oh, this is nice. Yeah. Right. It's it's open and spacious. It looks like he doesn't even know what to do with that kind of space, though. But it should be noted that he is indeed trying to sell it. So he's clearly has it in the ready to sell state. True. It's kind of staged yeah and that becomes a joke almost immediately so we start off this episode with a gag where um gus uh the driver of this truck is trying to drop off this firebird but rockford very specifically wanted it tomorrow not today and then they go back and forth about whether he'll pay for delivery or not. He finally gives up and says, no, just leave it here. And Gus just drops off his broken down poor, poor thing on the asphalt. Oh, it hurts to watch.

It really does. I mean, like, he just, just dumps it there. What did you think about our first shot of sunglasses on full uncle mode Jim Rockford coming out of his of his double wide so okay so there's good things happening here i think the double wide at this point i mean we've talked about it but we haven't actually seen the inside of it at this point i don't think right yeah it's just we just see it that it's bigger and there's like a little porch and stairs it's not like just a little ladder yeah that's all hung on a trailer There's a beautiful thing happening here where he does have prime real estate. He's right on the beach.

Right. But it's also a parking lot. And this is a little bit of gym all over. Like, yeah, it's got a porch. It's been built up. But it's still a trailer. Like, it's just aluminum siding and all that. There's all these 90s signifiers of affluence that aren't really luxurious. So we see Jim and his outfit is, it's wonderful.

And it may even be from the 70s. Like it feels. It seems like he's been wearing the same clothes or at least the same cut of clothes since his heyday. And then we get to position that with the Firebird. Jim is old now and that's pretty evident. He's looking spry, but he's looking old. We'll see some other characters that may not have aged quite as well. But that Firebird is, you know, we make a point of earlier episodes about how the Firebird,

it's the latest model each year. This is not a new Firebird. This is. No. Yeah. I mean, it's clearly there both to show us how things have changed, but also we learn that he actually found it in a chop shop.

Right. Like there's no wheels. All the windows are broken. Like he's, he's recovered it. He still loves his car, but it is in terrible shape. I cannot help but read this as a sort of dialogue

with the audience in the show. This is the same old show, but it's old and we're hurting. Rockford has an important meeting coming up and that's why. Andford has an important meeting coming up and that's why, and it's important to him not to have a broken down car

directly in front of the trailer for this meeting. But then to enhance his agitation, we get our good friend, Angel Martin, showing up in what I describe in my notes as an even more broken down Columbo car. Angel's in one of those, a convertible version, but with a gear shift that does not work. It's a pretty obvious metaphor that they're hitting us with here. What would have been an expensive car if it worked or anything,

but it doesn't. And this is Angel's taste to a T, right? Like it's this very sort of superficial and whatever he can get away with kind of thing. Angel, Stuart Margolin. I don't have words. He's beautiful. It's just... He's beautiful. He's aged perfectly, I guess. If you sat down forensics artists and had them draw Angel 20 years older,

they wouldn't have been as perfect as this. This was... Yeah. I particularly... I like how he has the shoulder length hair, but the bald spot on top oh that's great so angel's in some kind of trouble of course is vaguely specified because rockford wants him to leave because he has this important meeting and he can't have angel uh

hanging around for it this is when we do go into the trailer and we get our first look of the interior and it's looking pretty nice angel says that it's that it's nice in there and he's like oh you even have some trail mix out and then he eats a handful of potpourri literally had this discussion recently about when potpourri became a thing because i feel like that happened during our life like i know potpourri is old but like people putting it in bowls and having it out in their houses yeah that wasn't my experience of the 70s, but certainly by the time we hit the 90s, it was everywhere.

I associate that with something that my mom would do when I was of the age of the 90s, early to mid 90s. We definitely have like little dishes with potpourri in them like on countertops and stuff like that. I'll chalk this one up to a 90s reference before we can really find out what's on angel's mind uh this meeting that rockford is waiting for happens so this couple the the emin thalers arrive but they are in a state of agitation

themselves uh the guy gets out of the car it's unclear whether it's his wife or his mother it doesn't really matter. But the woman in the passenger seat is she's about to vomit. She's freaking out. She just wants to get out of there. Rockford was very excited because on the phone, this guy had had as much as said that he was going to buy his trailer. And they're just going to come over to do the paperwork and sign the check. But on their way over, they drove right through it, right through the riot.

And there's bullet holes in the back window of their car. You can't hold me to that. What I said on the phone. Right. After getting here, I don't want to live around here. And this leads into talking about and then turning on the TV to see the riots that sprung up after the Rodney King verdict. Yeah. This is the day that that came down.

So this is, I feel like, one of the two or three issues that will show up in this episode that really wants to let you know that Rockford is taking place now, and that now being the early 90s when it was released. This obviously was giant news and something that's on everybody's mind nationwide. But in particular, if you lived in and around L.A., it would have been. I don't

know if I'm doing a history lesson here or not, because this episode is going to hit these. This was a little I was a little young to really be paying attention to stuff on the news at this time. So I don't have a particular memory of the LA riots, but I imagine that it might've been a bigger deal for you at the time. Rather than looking particularly about what was going on with me at the time, let's talk about what's going on with us as we're watching it today. Sure. Yeah. Okay. So here, here we go. This is,

uh, Rockford files is not, uh, is no stranger to moralizing. Jim Rockford has a moral core, uh, that's interesting at times, but he does have a moral core and he, he acts on that quite a bit.

I had a fear watching this episode that I have now anytime I see anyone I like, their name in the news, right? Right. Because you're expecting them to come out as some horrible something or other. Watching this episode, I did not want Jim to moralize about these riots for fear of what stance he was going to take. Yeah, I felt that tension as well. And I do know at the time when they happened,

like these are ratcheted up racial tensions, specifically for people who, for white people who've been insulated from that for quite a while. Right. I think that was a lot of, a lot of the reason it stood out was because it impacted white people in a way that racial violence had not impacted white people in a while. So at that time, I remember in the 90s, like a lot of fiction that dealt with that, a lot of fiction that came out of that and dealt with that dealt with it from sort of a high and mighty distance this isn't how you affect change this isn't how you fix the world or whatever and like

from a current perspective that distance is definitely not the high ground in in in the discussion that that it placed itself as fortunately i feel that this episode doesn't hit that that way no it uses the so the the riots are the backdrop to the first part of the movie yeah but we don't get much reaction from the characters other than being worried about each other's safety yeah uh here to get us started, the Emmentalers leave. Jim gets a call from his dad, Rocky, and goes into the trailer to talk to him. And then he doesn't want Angel to leave yet. But Angel is now mad at Rockford because this is the first that he's heard that Rockford is planning to move.

Yes. And then he heads out, heads home himself. So Rockford is yelling at Angel not to leave. Like, hold on while I deal with the phone call. And it's this sort of back and forth. And I cannot, in the beginning, I have written in my notes here, why doesn't he want Angel to leave?

Yeah. And then my answer to it is, oh, friends. Yeah. They play the thing, the sort of joke where Angel shows up and he wants nothing more than Angel to leave. Yeah. and Rockford turns on the news coverage of the riots on TV. And then we get a little montage where we see that he has ordered Chinese food and is eating it by himself, keeping strong with Rockford only eating garbage food. He does call Angel's phone number and leaves a message

because he wants to make sure you got home okay. And then he sees a clear shot on the news coverage of Angel Martin hauling boxes, looting merchandise, essentially, and hauling it into a truck, taking advantage of the chaos. Yeah, this is a footage that Rockford's watching on TV that's obviously from a police helicopter. I have a whole adventure in my notes here because in my notes I write, is that Angel's car as it's panning through? And then it was. You see his bald spot with his curly locks coming out from it. And then he just looks straight up and it's perfectly framed for the news. It's exquisite.

It is good Angel work there. It is good angel work there. We cut from there to seeing a fancy woman in a very nice convertible who turns from news coverage of the riot to like classical music or something. Comes up to the gate of an obvious mansion, a very fancy building. She gets out to open the gate because it doesn't open automatically for her. And then suddenly there's a shot of a gun and she is shot and then we transition to crime scene with cops all over the place um of this mansion so do you know okay because you you read a little bit about this you know if they did these episodes and then shopped around for when they were going to air okay the reason why i ask is that this setup, this murder mystery, is such a murder-she-wrote murder mystery that I wonder if that was like, okay, well, we'll make it a good murder-she-wrote victim.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know where in the process they shopped them. They made the deal to make them, and then they erred. So I don't know. Maybe. and then they aired. So I don't know, maybe. But yes, at the crime scene, we have the arrival of attorney, attorney at law, Haley Kittredge, our co-star protagonist of the episode,

played by star of stage and screen, Joanna Cassidy. This is a good character. I want to say that from upfront, but like my notes, I've referred to her as not Beth throughout my notes. She isn't a very Beth-like role. Yeah.

So I don't want to mischaracterize her and I want to treat her as her own character. But I do want to acknowledge that I felt like they probably wanted Beth in this role. Your feeling about that was shared by many people who saw the episode but apparently that was not the intention interesting it's not like they tried to get uh gretchen corbett and couldn't she comes back in some of the later movies but this whole thing was like was cast without trying to get her or anything like that wow that is which is a little weird huh yeah that is a little odd the idea was that they didn't't want Beth because in the elapsed time, it was important to show that Rockford had had some other,

some life. Right. And so as we will learn later, Rockford and Kit, as she's referred to most of the episode, were married and then divorced. Yeah. So part of the intention was to specifically be like,

Oh, Rockford had other things going on in his life between the end of the show and this movie yeah but yeah so she is the attorney for the woman uh who we learn is uh uh a an old movie star named leela lansing she was her attorney and friend and leela's kids dory and josh are in the mansion they've been questioned by police. They're distraught. And Josh says that she was coming back from some party. He heard the shot.

He went out. He saw two guys in ski masks jumping in her car. And they must have done it for the car. They could have just taken it. Why did they have to kill her? All that kind of stuff. He is convinced that these cops aren't going to do anything about it. Because they're just standing around. And they have the whole riot to deal with.

So why would they care? And he wants to go private. He wants the best there is. I was suspicious of Josh immediately. Yeah, no, this actor was chosen, I think, for his ability to play just the kind of douchebag you would expect to be matricidal kit happens to know a pi so rockford and kit meet for coffee possibly breakfast at a fancy cafe he wears a tie for the occasion which is a nice touch and i guess they haven't seen each other for eight months but she wants his help for her her clients she asks him why he's limping, and he says that he has a story about how he was essentially carjacked

and shot in the leg in the process, but now at least he can tell the weather. This exchange is such good classic Rockford. I can imagine if you've had a 15-year dry spell between Rockford and this, if you've had a 15 year dry spell between rockford and this that this is the tall glass of fresh water that you just you know his ability to be blasé about it like she's like oh you could have been killed and he's like no he's a worse shot than he was a driver you should see what he did to my car like just yeah it all and it ties together with the with the car being wrecked already yeah yeah it's it's a nice little scene also we get to see why they split up because he manages to

get her back up without even trying yeah she keeps on referring to the kids um how old are these kids are they even old enough to hire me casting aspersions on her motives and establishing the classic rockford setup which is i'm not going to do this case that i'm clearly going to do she she does tell him to to go ahead and order breakfast he asks what she's having and she says that she's having flashbacks and that's when we learned that they were they were married but are now divorced. We do not actually see Jim order any breakfast, however, because we cut from there to the mansion where they have come to talk to Josh and Dory. Most of the scene is establishing that these kids are real pieces of work. Josh is a writer of some kind or a musician, screenplays, etc.

He clearly thinks he's hot sh**. And just with some basic questioning, his story already starts to break down. He refers to the carjackers as south of the border types and then Jim asks him, well, how could he tell if they had masks on? Well, you heard him speaking Spanish. You sure it was Spanish? Rockford is not buying any of it.

This is a nod, of course, to the farnsworth stratagem with a central point is that in brazil they speak portuguese not spanish so um dory's very flighty and nervous and she wants to get out of town but she doesn't realize that the place that she's talking about is actually part of mexico and she would need a passport so rockford uh is not impressed but kit kind of argues him into just checking it out for her sake essentially and she makes the point that she uh you know she was good friends with uh lila she loved her kids and yeah so kit it's important to kit that justice is served. And in some nice camera work at the end of the episode, or at the end of the scene, we see Rockford seeing a security camera that is at the scene.

So far in the episode, I'm actually really loving it. I'm not suffering from a lack of Rockford in my life, obviously. Yeah. But it is, it's fun watching him be an older version of himself, which is just himself, right? He was always this kind of grumpy old guy. But there's like even less veneer to it. Yeah.

Like it's closer to the surface. Yeah. And the handling of these kids is so, so Rockford. Rockford has no time for your bullshit, but old Rockford hasford has no time for your bullshit, but old Rockford has less than no time for your bullshit. I think thematically, a lot of this episode is about the tension between young and old. Yeah.

And I'm sure that's on purpose. And a lot of it's because they know the cast is old. Yeah. James Garner was 66 when they filmed this movie, when they started filming this movie. Yeah. And the cohort, you know, I'm sure is around that age. So they're contrasting our heroes essentially with these wet behind the ears, spoiled, rich brats.

Right. In a way that I found pretty, pretty effective. Rockford's world is changing in some ways. He wants to move out of LA, but he's having trouble because LA is just falling apart. But in other ways, it remains rock solid. Angel's always looking for money. Yeah. Anyways. Well, speaking of Angel always looking for money, our next scene is Rockford pulling up behind a flaming car in like post-riot stricken section of LA where Angel has a crew moving a bunch of looted stuff into a warehouse. Angel has invited him down there to share in his bounty. Look at this great thing

I've managed to do. And Rockford has no patience for the fact that he looted a bunch of stuff. Rockford saw him do it on TV. Angel's defense, of course, is that, well, the doors were open when I got there. Other people were doing it. Yeah. Angel's defense, of course, is that, well, the doors were open when I got there. Other people were doing it. Some of us have to look for bargains where we can. I love how Angel's defenses quite often are just like a line that kind of address what was said, but in Angel's a little off-center point of view, a little off-center moral standing. But then the rest of his defenses are always trying to normalize what he's doing, right? It is business as usual,

no matter what. Yeah, he has a scheme to, he says that he's a retailer like anyone else. And he has a scheme to sell stuff on the home shopping network. Jim says that his idea is so stupid, he's not even going to try

to talk him out of it. But that he came down just to make sure he was OK. We get that little touch of their friendship again. Yeah, yeah. And he does ask him to keep an eye out for the car that was stolen. Lilo's fancy convertible, which I thought was going to end up going somewhere. But this scene actually is mostly just about giving us a little more Rockford Angel screen time.

giving us a little more Rockford Angel screen time. Another thing is it gives a little bit of story for Angel in the intervening years where he was working for the newspaper but then his brother Aaron, his brother-in-law Aaron retired and sold the newspaper and so he's out of a job. Yeah. And that's why he's

boosting hot merchandise. Angel's involvement in this episode is interesting. It's kind of introducing Angel to a new audience in a way because he's not super important for the plot, but he is very important for it feeling like a Rockford Files. Yeah, his importance to the plot is kind of similar to Gandalf, not Gandhi, but Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings, where he just shows up to push things along from time to time. It's fun i think the movie is better for him being in it for sure even though he plot wise he only kind of he's not as mad or tightly tied into it yeah yeah so uh speaking of things that benefit this movie we go to the police station and we get to catch up with our good friend dennis becker in the first shot of him, I was like, he looks the same.

How is that possible? But then as we spend more time with him, it's like, oh, he must have an ulcer at this point, right? The lines on his face are long suffering. I didn't, did Joe Santos get his nose broken? There's something about his nose in now now whether that's just an exaggeration of what already existed just exaggerated by age or if i don't know what but like i love it i love his face i can't not love his face everyone clearly you know put the character back on like a night

like a comfortable little coat right of all of them becker is the one that feels least like an actor playing a character, actually, to me. Like he just lives in that world. He just spent the last couple of decades method acting. Like I can imagine James Garner not as Jim Rockford. Like I know they're very similar, but I can imagine him not in the role. I can't imagine how Joe Santos behaves when he's not Dennis Becker. One of the highlights for me was just seeing him do his thing. So he before Jim can really talk to him about anything, we get a whole little morality play.

Yeah, here we go. Where Becker is mad because he so he's a lieutenant now, which is great. But he was planning to take this corner office. Which is great. But he was planning to take this corner office. But now there's this new hot sh** tenant. His name's McCool. Who is swooping in because Becker didn't think that the Rodney King verdict was going to be a particularly big deal. But this other guy, McCool, who happens to be black, saw that it was going to happen and warned the department about it. While Becker let the afternoon shift go early because he didn't think it was going to be a big deal

and they're always harping on him about overtime. Yeah. However, the riots did happen. So now McCool is getting the coroner office, even though Becker has seniority and thinks he deserves it. And this culminates with McCool with a stack of stuff he's taking to his office. He drops a stapler. He stares at Becker and says, you're going to get that for me, Becker. And Becker just kicks it down the hall and says, I'm a sore loser.

And then they part ways. Dennis says, feels better to kick something. Yeah. And then we never hear of this again. So McCool's reaction to that, by the way, is not shock and horror i i feel like he knows that he's rubbing it oh yeah he's doing it on purpose yeah so here's here's let's talk about this so this scene uh i have written in my notes in quotes economic tension here is a black man who understood the situation on the ground, who absolutely deserves the promotion that he got.

We get nothing but Becker's story. That's all we get. And we know that he's an unreliable narrator in the situation. But we do see, I don't know, another lieutenant or someone praising McCool and then saying, Becker, you got it wrong. Right. You know, like very specifically giving us third person. He's right. Becker is wrong.

Yeah. He did the right thing. Point of view. I wonder how this was supposed to be read at the time. Yeah. So I think the reason that this scene is here is because it gives Rockford the leverage to say, hey, Becker, I have a hot tip for you. You can come out looking really good and gives Becker a reason to go with him because he just got kicked down and he's in the doghouse. What's weird to me is that it gives us a portrait of Becker as an aging racist that I

do not want to be part of my conception of Dennis Becker. And again, it doesn't come up again and it's not touched on later. So it feels, it just feels weird. It feels like an off note to me. The charitable way to read it is that we're dealing with Becker's raw emotions because this just happened. And Becker himself is trying not to be racist about it. But he's mad about it, right? that's a hard tension to be in and it's exactly the kind of hard tension that i like seeing rockford files characters in so what the

episode doesn't do is it doesn't come out and say that becker is wrong right like it doesn't say he's right it just leaves it yeah so that's it's a little uneasy uh there's gonna be one more thing coming up with angel that hits in the same way and i'm like oh if only they'd i don't know if only they'd done a little something to to just be like you could be upset about the situation but you're dancing really close to embracing racism. I don't think the show is. It's a choice that they made for this scene to give Becker something to be mad about, which I think is fine. But the fact that it very directly and intentionally was a conflict with

a black coworker over something that arose out of the la riot yeah charges it in a way that never gets resolved yeah it's just dropped and we don't talk about it again exactly all right moving on so i don't know if that's meant to make us reflect on that or if it's just something that out of context doesn't work or if it was a bobbled play right like creatively um we have a brief scene where uh rockford tracks down the the kids they're looking for a church that is big enough for the funeral because there's going to be so many people that want to attend josh uh bobbles a uh a raymond chandler dashiell hammett reference um that Rockford corrects him on, which I liked as a little nod towards the noir roots of the Rockford files. But then Becker arrives and he needs to get them all back to the station.

Right. Oh, more gorgeous Becker here. Yeah. No, I like the nod, too. I felt like it was also another moment where Rockford is like, you can't even get the imaginary stuff right. So Becker gets them all back to the station. Josh's agent is there, which we'll find out why in a second. She's mad because she was in Oliver Stone's office for an actual appointment.

His outer office. I think she probably didn't get that close either. But Becker gets the kids plus Kit and Rockford into his office. And then he says that he has to read them their miranda rights and this is when everyone starts kind of freaking out and asking what he's doing and rockford just keeps going like well if you just give him a second to tell us why he brought you here you'll find out yeah so becker looked at the tape that rockford tipped him off to it was a security camera that was on an adjacent property so so it wasn't on theirs.

And I guess the cops' initial investigation missed it? Whatever. The agent is there to confirm that Josh called her an hour after his mother's murder from the car phone of the car that has disappeared. They've discovered the car and it's covered in Josh's fingerprints. And the surveillance tape doesn't show the actual murder but it shows the kids i was unclear whether it was both of them

or just john yeah leaving in driving the car away and then you see her body in the driveway finally there was nothing wrong with the motors someone must have turned off the automatic so that she had to get out of the car to open them which which means it's premeditated, which means it's murder one. Yeah. Commercial break. All sorts of tension. Yeah. So that all comes up.

My thoughts are equally like, OK, yeah, like, yeah, this seems about right. What we were expecting. But also, so what's the what's the twist? Right. So this clearly went to a commercial and then it comes back and there's a title card that now it's november 2nd 1993 i was like wait a second the way this episode uses time is interesting it wasn't it wasn't bad but it surprised me yeah we come back it is november 2nd 1993 uh and we're uh with kit and josh in prison and where he says it's been 19 months and uh the the worst thing about being

in jail is that it's boring they've been they've been delaying the trial and pushing it back but now they're they're actually going to trial uh the next tuesday it's coming up so it took me a little while to adjust to the concept of there's still going to be a mystery here but now i need to wait to find out what it right is going to be as audience members there's no mystery left yeah the only person that aside from the the two children who are now in jail the only person who feels like an injustice has been done is kit part of it i think is the format right like we have more screen time so the structure has to be a little different but uh yeah it just took me a little while to be like okay i need to settle in there's there's more to come we uh quickly find

out a prison official of some kind comes in to say that dory the sister who has also been in jail uh is in the medical ward because she attempted suicide and josh freaks out and has to be restrained by uh some of the the guards and then we cut back to rockford's trailer drama drama drama and then back to the trailer uh where apparently his realtor perhaps maddie right who arrives in a bright red sports car coming to tell rockford that she has a client who wants to buy his place as a little fishing shack and that he's going to be coming up from San Diego,

I think she said, to check it out and sign the paperwork. She asks him why he wants to leave L.A. and he says that there's the quality of life. There's none of it.

Grumpy old man Rockford. But Maddie mentions that she has to be somewhere. She's going to get going because who knows what the fire is going to do to the traffic. Then there's a phone call. It's Kit calling Rockford to come to the hospital ward. So he also is heading out into whatever this traffic situation is. But we cut from there to the hospital where we get the weirdest scene or the most uncomfortable scene, perhaps I should say,

at least for me. Oh yeah. There's a lot of reasons why it's uncomfortable and not the least of the reasons is the actor that plays the psychiatrist or doctor in this. If you want an evil psychiatrist, this is the man you would go to. You're absolutely right. He does not seem like a responsible practitioner to me. Dory attempted suicide.

They brought in this psychiatrist to evaluate her. She has some repressed memories that she's started talking about. The doctor allows them to come in and overhear what she has to say. The doctor allows them to come in and overhear what she has to say. And when they all go in, she's restrained on a cot and starts mumbling in response to his prompting. She basically is speaking as if trying to get someone to get away from her and talks about being brought downstairs. And he did all these things and she just let him. And then we get a more clear recap.

She has these repressed memories about being sexually abused by Lilo's husband at the time, a baseball player named Mickey Ryder. I came up before, but this is when it becomes important. The main thing about where he's come up before is every time the name has come up, Rockford knows of him and is a little starry-eyed about him. Yeah, Rockford remembers Mickey Ryder as this iconic baseball hero from his youth. So she has these repressed memories. Both her and her brother were not just abused by him, but abused as part of a satanic ritual. Yes. She talks about there are these pentagrams on the floor and that Mickey Ryder is a Satanist

in addition to an abuser. Rockford, his knee-jerk reaction is to say, this is ridiculous. Right. How can you believe this stuff? But then there's something about, this must be the most terrible thing you've heard all day to the doctor.

And the doctor's like, nope, the most horrible thing I've heard all day is that my house in Malibu might get burned down so this is super awkward transition yeah and then we get though and then rockford's like what and he says oh didn't you hear the fire jump the highway it's burning all the way to the ocean yeah i'm not transition segue it's a super awkward segue so before we get to that let's talk about this scene a little bit yeah so this is another moment where the movie is trying to say we're taking place right now 1990 whatever this is the menendez brothers right this is the same defense that the menendez brothers had uh

that their parents had abused them and that's why they killed their parents and the menendez brothers had uh that their parents had abused them and that's why they killed their parents and the menendez trial is taking place right now maybe while they're filming this uh 93 is when the trial yeah so that's when this that's when this scene is set so the movie was shot i forget i might have misstated earlier but uh i think they started production on this movie in 94 right so this scene is set in 93 and this is like that is exactly what's happening plus the whole 80s satanic panic repressed memory problem so while dealing with issues of its day watching it now it's real weird yeah uh as we record this and as the time during which you and I have watched this movie is in the middle of a potentially unending series of revelations of celebrities and people well known in the public sphere being sexual abusers and being habitual harassers and people finally coming forward and being believed about these allegations

that they have made in the past, but just were not believed or were downplayed or were passed off. So my inclination in this moment is to believe the victim. Right. That's where we are now. Like, believe victims. It is important. we are now like believe victims it is important but this scene is coded with a bunch of indicators that we shouldn't believe her but then the knee-jerk response of of rockford is the same

response that people use to defend these celebrities which is oh but they have a clean record he's never even had a parking ticket he was a childhood. There's no way he could have done this. Right. And we know that's not true. Like people who have good, clean public images can also do bad things. Right. So, okay. So that's our dilemma right now as modern viewers. And part of that dilemma is that what is kind of being discussed here are some tragic cases like the the satanic panic these people were accused of more crimes than it was like physically able to happen in the time like it was it was nuts it was not true and it was okay so here's the thing at that time the things that it's commenting on with the repressed memories and the stories of Satanism,

these were actual stories of people being wrongly accused and being really publicly destroyed by these accusations. And so there's that legitimate fear that's being addressed by the show. Fast forward to us today, now we have the opposite situation well opposite is maybe too much of a simplification but we have a different situation where rockford's reaction is utterly inappropriate and this is this is tough yeah and this is certainly a a way in which this just hasn't i'm not even going to say hasn't aged but it's just a way in which the context of this kind of storytelling has changed in a really significant way. As an audience member watching the rest of this movie, I'm kind of like, all right, which way is this going to break?

Right. You know, like where where does the movie come down on this issue or the set of issues? I will say that the villains of the piece are the ones who are lying. Right. So I'm glad that that's the case. peace are the ones who are lying right so i'm glad that that's the case and not that the people that we're supposed to be identifying with as our heroes are the ones who end up in what we would consider the wrong now right because that would make it worse uh but yeah this makes for tough viewing so with that said we'll continue on with the with the movie but uh i was not expecting to

have that set of right reactions yeah to this but uh where we come back to is rockford heard about the fire uh going all the way to the ocean so he heads back to his place um he's apparently able to get there and he pulls up right as a couple of jackals are hauling his tv out of the trailer they run away and drop his TV and it breaks and they run into a boat and the boat takes off. Then Maddie, the realtor or whoever arrives to tell him that his buyer backed out because he doesn't want property. That's going to get burned.

Yeah. Seems fair. When she arrives, Rockford is sitting there with a garden hose, spraying his, his trailer down, which is a tactic. And we see the fire on the like highway

over where his trailer is angel then does arrive the next day right uh apparently he's all panicked because he got as he says robbed so again it's been 19 months he had four holding areas full of merchandise but his number two guy paco apparently managed to get him set up or something and kicked out of the deal. It's very vague. He says he had to get a loan and now he doesn't have his stuff anymore. No details about how it all went down. I think this is the spot. This is the other just, but there's this moment where Angel just mutters that he, well well he says that i wish he was an illegal right so i could report him but he was born in yes eagle's nest yeah or something like that i mean this isn't quite as an it's uncomfortable because it's like again why would you say something like that

it just keeps hitting hot button issues today this is not necessarily out of the scope of the kind of things that angel would do but god damn it hand us a bone episode like just why are all the people we like being racist yeah please stop well rockford lets that one go by without comment yeah but to say that he has he does have a job for angel since he appears to be out of work again he remembers that angel had like a bunch of tchotchkes basically that he would sell to occult shops and he wants angel's help to uh check him out because he can't believe that uh mickey is a satanist the only place he can think of to to go with this information is to somehow figure out from an occult store whether mic Mickey has some connection to their business or not, I guess. This does feel like the act of a desperate man, right?

Yeah. So Angel takes Rockford to Hecate's Habitat, an occult shop in an alley somewhere in LA. So good. Rockford has cold feet as they approach. He doesn't want to tarnish Mickey Ryder's name with this stuff, but he doesn't know what else to do. tarnish mickey rider's name with this stuff but uh he doesn't know what else to do and then we just have a set piece for laughs of rockford and angel wandering around in a cult shop full of toads and jars and uh candles and incense and uh voodoo dolls not talking to dave

dave doesn't like to talk dave is not going to get paid. And then leaving without having any interaction with anyone else in the store. It's a fun piece to watch. It's Angel trying to be discreet. It's Rockford just getting frustrated with Angel as the whole thing's going on. And Angel getting embarrassed by Rockford. Yeah, it is a fun little character piece that doesn't have much to do with the plot. It's mostly just seeing them play off each other, which is fun. Yeah. They leave and Rockford tells Angel that if he could, he wants to find Mickey to warn him that these

allegations are going to come out, but he doesn't know how to find him. But Angel remembers that when before the paper got sold, they did a where are they now feature on mickey rider he was he was doing some stuff out in las vegas uh we get the first mention of big al minette out of the their golf courses as part of that they interviewed him in his in his house so angel knows where he lives and he only charges rockford 20 to give him the information. And this is when I learned that I don't think they ever specifically show Rockford being hired. Like they say that she is going to hire him and then he does stuff. But this is actually the first money that changes hands. Yeah, no, I had trouble figuring out what was going on. He couldn't have been hired this whole time. 200 a

day would have been, we don't even know if he makes 200 a day anymore. I know. What is that? $90 in $90. Like we don't know. I can definitely rack up some bills as you watch the firebird and, uh, and all of that. But he seems to be doing all right just based on his uh trailer right exactly so uh yeah it's hard to tell so in case anyone was wondering 200 in 1974 would be 631 in 1994 imagining that he's probably rounding and uh dealing other expenses, he could potentially be charging people six or $700 a day if he was maintaining his purchasing power with his fee. There's no way she kept him hired on till now, right? Right.

And she, I'm sorry, Kit is the original client, or at least... They do clarify later that he was working for her on behalf of her clients and that she wants her money back because his information led to them being arrested. And then he refuses to give it. So one or two days seems fair. And then it's not like he's been working on the case. Now he's in it personally because he feels like Mickey is going to get brought up on these false allegations and he doesn't want to see a childhood hero go down like that. And we'll find out soon that he's been calling Kit trying to get a hold of her to quit.

Yeah. He can ethically make this choice of going to Mickey and telling him what's what. So that is what he does in the next scene. He goes to Mickey Ryder's house. This is a good scene. I think this actor is really good like i think this is a well-cast role and i think he does a good job with it where he denies it of course he says he swears to god he never did anything like that because uh in addition to no one should do that but he loved the kids because

they were part of leela and he loved her yeah that would be hurting her and i couldn should do that. But he loved the kids because they were part of Leela and he loved her. Yeah. That would be hurting her. And I couldn't do that. Even though he says he does, however, want them to fry in hell for what they did because they killed, as everyone assumes. Right. You know, they killed their mother. Rockford has a very awkward presentation of the fact that he is going to be accused of these things.

Mickey takes him downstairs to show him where he worships Satan. He starts kind of freaking out. You can find all the secrets in my desk. Pulls out the drawer. And what about all these books? He starts pulling them off. And I thought that I thought he was going to have like a heart attack. Like that's where I thought this was going.

This basement here, it's a fully furnished basement den kind of thing with all of this memorabilia from when he was a baseball player and there's something about this i'm gonna get a little personal here just between you and me and our listeners this reminds me so much of the basements of the households of my friends whose parents were well-to-do like not wealthy but right this isn't a mansion like lila's lived in a mansion this is just a house but the basement is pretty nice as a kid i thought that's what that's what success looks like and looking at it now i was like that's depressing something so much different with that basement you have all that space and all you did

was a beige carpet there's some leather furniture like anyways it's also memorabilia of his right glory days including a picture that rockford picks up and looks at and says like something vegas golf association tying back to what angel said about him and also this is will come up later uh but we end the scene with Mickey kind of clutching his chest and he's overcome with emotion and that's when he says that he swears he didn't abuse them.

He loved them because they were part of Leela. Then we get Rockford going to Kit's office. He's been calling her to try and tell her that he's quit. He still doesn't believe their story. Convenient timing on this memory coming up right before a murder trial. But Kit, she believes her clients.

She wants to be the best attorney she can be. And she thinks that Rockford is just, he can't let go of this idea of this childhood hero of his. They both have a lot of sense in what they're saying, I think. Neither of their motivations are pure. Right. And this has a bit of the heart of their kind of relationship where she's like, he, you know,

you've always been my cheering section. And he says, well, she's always been on the side of, I don't remember if it's exactly in this scene or maybe it's a little later, but yeah, we get the seeds of a conversation that goes on through their next couple of scenes.

He's going to support her as long as she's doing the right thing, but he thinks that she's doing the wrong thing. That scene happens in a car. I remember. You're right. Yeah. That's a little later. This, He's going to support her as long as she's doing the right thing. But he thinks that she's doing the wrong thing. That scene happens in a car. I remember. You're right. Yeah. That's a little later.

This is this the scene he's in her office. Do we get the television broadcast? Speaking of convenient timing. Right. Well, part of it in this scene specifically is that he tells her that she doesn't want to win a case if it's based on lies. Right. He thinks she's better than that. But yes, the press conference is about to happen and they turn on the TV and Mickey Ryder's lawyer is reading a prepared statement where he confirms the story and says that yes,

he did those things. He has since repented of what he did. They will not be taking questions. Rockford is aghast. Yes. And so are we. We just witnessed this is like a complete 180. This is a moment. This is like a classic. What you're talking about is on the news. It's not as awkward as those usually are, but it wasn't too weird to me because it was set up a little bit by Kit's secretary coming in and saying exactly. Yeah. Press conference is happening in five minutes. It's less randomly turn on the tv and more like you know it had a scheduled sense to it that felt less hackneyed to me uh but yes i was like oh didn't see that coming yeah and then we go black for clearly there's another commercial break here

and speaking of commercial breaks perhaps we will take our break sounds good and then come back in our second half uh to continue talking about I Still Love L.A. as we get into the beating heart of the mystery and into what I consider to be the most Rockford feeling part of the movie. Sounds good. While we have you here, there's three ways you can support us. First, rate and review on iTunes or whatever service you use for podcasts. Second, you can support us directly for as little as $1 an episode at patreon.com slash 200 a day. If you want to help us shape the direction of 200 a day, the Patreon is the best place to go. And finally, both of us have other

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back to the show welcome back to 200 a day we're in the middle of our discussion of the 90s made for tv movie i still Still Love L.A. And if you don't know that, you haven't listened to the first half of this episode and you're really going to be lost. We left off at a bit of a commercial break. We're going to come back from that commercial break. And the year is what, Nathan? So we come back to January 13th, 1994, with a beautiful shot of a restored Firebird parked next to Jim's trailer.

So we've done another forward jump in time in a similar way where there's a big revelation and then we move forward. Though in this case, it's only been a couple months, which is reinforced to us in a second. but we do go from fall 93 to winter 94 kit has come to rockford's trailer she wants to talk to him about this case and he brings up what you you waited two months to talk to me so i have to comment on this she wants to bring pick up the conversation where we last left it just before the commercial break two months ago right right this is the you're having a conversation you get in the car you arrive at conversation where we last left it just before the commercial break two months ago, right? Right. This is the, you're having a conversation, you get in the car, you arrive at the destination

and you're continuing the conversation problem, but it takes place over two months. Yeah. I don't want to just sit here and nitpick the writing in this episode or anything like that, but this one was jarring to me. Yeah. I feel like maybe if there had even been a line of something like you've refused to answer the phone since you stormed out after the press conference or something without the title card, we wouldn't know that any time had elapsed until Rockford says it's been two months. Yeah. And it just seems like what's the point of the time lapse? And it makes you also wonder about these title cards that tell us the time.

In every single one of those cases, it's come up diegetically. Like somebody has said something to mention the time lapse. Well, and I think the first two also matter because they're dates on which a thing happened. Like the first one at the beginning of the movie is the date that the Rodney King verdict happened, I think. And the riots happened. And then the second one was date that the Rodney King verdict happened, I think. And the riots happened. And then the second one was when that fire jumped the highway. And that was a big deal. That was a big story.

This one is just, as far as I know from what they tell us in the movie, is just advancing the timeline for the plot of the movie. I guess there's one more event. Maybe it's to move it closer to what happens at the end. Yeah, I think that might be it. But we'll get to it. I mentioned before the break from here to the end feels most like a Rockford episode to me. I have a theory about that. All right. So we kind of come back into it with the, you know, someone Rockford knows comes and wants to talk to Rockford. They have some conflict. He says that he hopes she loses the case because he thinks that her clients are guilty. And then Rockford gets a phone call from Mickey. He needs help. He tells

Rockford on the phone while Kit is there overhearing Rockford's side of it that the confession was false. And I guess this is why we need a little bit of the time lapse. He's been living with it since he made it, but he can't live with it anymore. It's a lie. He never did those things. There's some people in his house. He's frightened. His lawyer coerced him into making that confession. And Rockford's the only person that he can turn to for help. This is probably why I had trouble with this sort of transition because she shows up, they continue the conversation they had two months ago, he happens to get this phone call and the phone call has the same convenient timing that the news broadcast does it's just a little too much for me i love the rock for trials i really enjoyed this this made for tv movie but this i was a little face palmy about yeah the the skeleton was a little too

close to the surface of the mechanics of getting things from a to b yeah yeah i believe that yeah i also feel like you don't kind of like i just mentioned the the idea of having mickey sit for two months with this lie and it finally comes to be too much that makes sense to me no that does but also if it wasn't there and this was just happening the next day i wouldn't be like why did mickey change his mind if he's just like my lawyer forced me into it you're the only person i can talk to like it could happening the next day, I wouldn't be like, why did Mickey change his mind? If he's just like, my lawyer forced me into it. You're the only person I can talk to. Like it could be the next day. You don't need to wait two months for this.

Yeah. In any case, Rockford has an emergency. He has to go. Kit knows he won't tell her who he was talking to, but she knows it was Mickey. And she insists on going along. And we get a classic, one of my favorite Rockford Files transitions

where she wants to go with him. I'm going with you. Jim says, no, you're not. long um and we get a classic one of my favorite rockford files transitions where uh you know she wants to go with him i'm going with you jim says no you're not and then we cut to jim and kit in what's clearly rocky's truck yes this is the 1994 version of rocky's big uh ford 4x4 yeah going to uh to mickey's house i have in my notes you're not written. When you said one of my favorite transitions, I was like, oh, that's what this is. That's yeah. Classic. So they're at Mickey's house. It's dark. All the lights are off. Rockford clearly has a bad feeling about it. He wants Kit to stay in the truck, but she, I think very realistically is like, I'm not staying in the truck in this creepy dark yard while you wander around by yourself uh the door is open he tries to knock and it just opens they poke around the house then go downstairs the basement which we've seen as

audience which was full of the 90s signifiers of wealth and success is completely stripped down to the concrete yeah bare walls bare floor and then rockford turns and we see the hanging body of Mickey. And he tells Kit to go call the cops. And in a very, this feels like a Jim Rockford thing moment. He doesn't let her come all the way down. He says, go, you know, I found him. Go call the police. No, seriously.

Yeah. Go. Because he doesn't want her to see it. Another kind of important thing that happens here is I used to have that same jacket that Rockford's wearing. That kind of technical jacket for when it's really cold outside. Grayish brown, but the color is a different color. Just saying, don't mean to brag, but. You and Rockford have good fashion sense. I've always said that about you.

All right, so the house is now a crime scene. Becker is there. So Becker and Kit are both making the case for clearly this was a suicide. He had a psychotic break. He couldn't handle the guilt. He recreated the basement like it was when he did those things. It's as good as a suicide note. A lot of armchair psychology. Yeah. Rockford knows that it's murder. Why would he call me and then hang himself why is the basement stripped i was down here you know there's a bunch of stuff where did it all go and this is another of the things that made me feel like we were getting more classic rockford stuff he recalls the picture that he saw there was this picture of mickey with his lawyer and this big Al Minette in Vegas. And so big Al Minette, who I am sure is a reference to another villain.

Yeah. Minette is a familiar name, but I forget which episode. But we get a good line from Becker where he says that Al Minette went legit. Yeah. And Rockford's like, well, how do you know that? But the point is, Rockford feels like that connection is shady. He thinks this was a murder. He's going to keep looking forward who did it.

This is, by the way, my pet theory for why you feel like this. We throw Satanism out the window and we bring the mob in. And it feels so comfortably Rockford. It feels like we're coming home a little bit. It's like, okay, we got the mob. It's the Rockford unifying field theory is what it is. We got the mob and we also got Rockford spinning out an entire conspiracy based entirely on a hunch. That turns out to be correct.

Yes. In the original series, there were other mob characters named Minette, plus mob characters named Pinette, Frechette, Binette, Gillette, and a few others. Okay. Oh, I remember Frechette. So, all right. That makes sense. Maybe someone can go through the 200-a-day Rockford Files files and fill in all the Minettes, and we can see if they're related or not. So, outside the house, Kit and Rockford continue this argument over believing her believing the kids or believing mickey and this is where rockford reveals that it's

because of him that becker got the tape yeah she demands her money back and threatens him with and his license i'm sure you're in violation of some statute you always are yeah but he says that it was it was revealed pursuant to him doing his investigation he didn't know that it was going to implicate her clients it's not his fault that they're guilty so there's a lot of hay in this episode made out of the tension between the two of them right they're at odds throughout the episode and like you mentioned when we first see her we learn very quickly that they can ramp each other up pretty badly yeah and i and like there's not really evidence of that in this scene but i do feel like and i want to just

kind of point out that if it does feel legit i feel like that there is enough chemistry between james gardner and and uh joanne cassidy that you don't spend like it's easy to then spend time wondering why do these people even know each other you know why are they so tangled up but you can see that they do actually care about each other they're just disagreeing about this this issue where lives are at stake and that they both know each other's weaknesses or or blind spots like they they talk about blind spots a little bit um in one of these arguments. She has a blind spot about her clients because she was so close with her mother.

And he has a blind spot about Mickey because he, you know, worshipped him as a kid, as a sports idol. They're not wrong. Yeah. You know, but the story only goes one way, right? It makes one of them right and one of them wrong in the end. And along with the blind spots, they know the buttons to push. Well, and they end the scene with getting back into the car and going like, this is going to be an uncomfortable ride. Yes, exactly. Yeah, because the blowout is so big. But they have to be forced physically because he needs to take her back to her car. So they go back to his trailer.

He doesn't want her to leave quite yet because he wants to get so the lawyer his name is corn bloom yeah so uh rockford wants to get corn bloom's address because he intends to follow her home to make sure she gets home okay and then he thinks that the lawyer is mixed up in whatever is going on that ended up with mickey dying uh this is where we get the lines about how he used to be her cheerleader but he can't cheer for her when she's in the wrong right he basically he wants justice for mickey he doesn't really care about the kids he does a nice move where he's like unless you know where he lives you know i'll find out about it somehow so why don't you just tell me and save us all trouble and she's like why would i want to do that but then at the end she does end up telling him that it's apparently

his kids bar mitzvah and that all the you know all the big lawyers are going to be there and that's where he is this particular night rockford gets in his car to go to said bar mitzvah but well what do you know angel is hanging out in the back seat and this i noted there's an amusing music cut here where there's like somber serious like getting down to business music and then when uh angel pops up it just stops it just cuts mid-music which was funny ah so good another way in which angel is like a tolkien wizard where he just comes out of nowhere uh angel uh got two flats on the highway so he walked to rockford's trailer but no one was there three miles so he so he waited in the car but of

course rockford's not going to leave him alone in his trailer. So he takes him with him to the country club where Kornblum's kid's bar mitzvah is occurring. We get some good bits of Angel wanting to go in and party. He could claim to be a visiting rabbi from the old neighborhood. Everyone comes from somewhere. And there's whitefish right through that door. Yeah. Jim goes, which old neighborhood?

Clearly pointing out that his con can be taken apart. Would not stand up to scrutiny. And yeah, Angel has the line where he says, everybody's from some old neighborhood. Why get technical? This is just a great illustration of the difference between how jim runs a con and how angel runs a con it's it's a lovely little microcosm there i also like how rockford has i think probably wised up to the majority of angels little griffs yeah he's like okay you're not going to stay with me all night you you can take the bus angel kind of threatens him or you could give

me cab fare it's like or he's gonna go disrupt this party right but rockford instead of just giving him money walks over to call a cab and gives the cabbie the money to take angel wherever he wants to go because he knows he's learned yes from from that walk he gets a look at this this gift wrapped car that's there as a bar mitzvah present obviously for this kid but kid. But it's a present from Uncle Al Minette. Yes. But yeah, Rockford follows his plan to follow Kornblum home from the bar mitzvah. And we cut to them talking in Kornblum's house. Where he apparently got himself in the door somehow.

Rockford accuses him of being involved with the murder. He sees there's a signed baseball on the mantelpiece that he last saw in Mickey's basement. So there's a piece of physical evidence. Yeah. Kornblum denies everything, of course. So Rockford ends by, in the morning, I'm going to go to my friends at the police department and tell them all the things I just told you. He kind of just lays out all the circumstantial evidence. I don't think he has anything new other than like, I know he called me.

I know he was pressured into it you know i know that his basement wasn't was stripped i know you had something to do with it and i bet almanet did too we're gonna find out in just a moment what his plan is but it's uh i think this is another one of those moments where it does feel like a classic rock for files episode where i don't have enough to do anything but but I got enough to set someone going. I got enough to unbalance them. And let's see what that does. So he leaves.

We get a brief shot of Kornblum calling someone named Sanders. And then we go to Rockford and Dennis at Rockford's trailer. Dennis reveals what this plan is. Can't believe that you've set yourself up for a hit. He doesn't have anything else to go on, but he can, he thinks he can smoke out a corn bloom and Al with this threat. And Dennis will be there to back him up.

Uh, when it happens, he says something about like, we need to get them on attempted murder, not spitting on the sidewalk. So be sure to see, you know, be where you can follow the gorillas.

And I appreciated the reference to gorillas as i believe the first episode we ever recorded was where we settled on the use of gorillas as a general use goon descriptor for the rockford files you think this is a reference to our first episode yes i think it is well and dennis says you're sure he has gorillas uh he gives dennis the keys to the firebird because who knows if his government issue can keep up. But then to complicate things, Kit shows up. But Dennis goes out to stake out the trailer. Kit knows that Rockford's up to something.

He tries to get her to leave. But then when they both go out the door, sure enough, two gorillas with guns are waiting for them. They grab them and they stuff them in the trunk of their sedan. Now we get the beginnings, the groundwork for the old man defense, which is great. Rockford complaining. He complains about his leg. And like playing up that sort of sympathy. Their intentions are clear and there's no reason why they should have sympathy for him if what they intend to do is to just kill him. But he still plays that up and it's great the two of them

snipe at each other in the trunk the one of the gorillas who we learn is is sanders later you know yells at them to shut up so another kind of classic feeling moment where it's like the end game is you killing me so why shouldn't i just annoy you and try and get some kind of advantage in between now and when you decide to kill me they They head off. Becker runs to the Firebird to follow them. But when he goes to pull out, oh no, the tires on one side are gone. The Firebird just crashes off of a jack into the parking lot. So I wrote down in my notes, Angel! And I underlined it with an exclamation point. Me too.

I love that payoff. That was great. Becker has his normal car, though, and he's able to pursue. Though they are gone by the time he gets to the main road. So he picks a direction and goes. We are in the middle of nowhere where our two gorillas pull up and are ready to pull our heroes out of the trunk. Once they get Kit out, Rockford says that he can't get out on his own. He threw out his back and he starts moaning.

The other guy's like, all right, well, let's just do him right here. And Sanders is like, what? Can't kill him in the trunk of my car. This whole bit is great because there's that going on. And then when he reaches down to pull Rockford out, he's like, I need help. And Rockford's like, he needs help. Completely ignoring the fact that he's about to be executed. It's just treating this like two young men are trying to help him out of the trunk of a car that he happens to be in.

Good comedy and also good like Rockford strategy. He uses what he has, which is him being older than these guys, to get them into a situation where they're both supporting him. So they're helping him away from the car, presumably to then kill him. But that's close enough to the edge of this bank that he yells for Kit to run and then can just shove all three of them off the edge of the embankment. Kit, however, follows them instead of running away. And we get a big brawl down the side of this slope.

Kit manages to get one gun away from the goons. Rockford gets a couple of good punches in, but then Sanders manages to get free with his gun. I like how Kit gets the gun away too. She's, I think she's wearing heels. Yeah, I think she steps on his hand his hand to the ground in her heels which is i don't know just good it was just a nice way of doing that yeah but we end up with um sanders with the gun and uh rockford and kit in his sights he uh says

that he's really this is going to be really satisfying he's going to tell corn bloom that this one's on the house yeah which is when becker arrives in the nick of time, charging down the slope. Sanders drops the gun and Becker takes them into custody. He said that he was able to call an air support and a helicopter spotted them. That's why it took him so long. We saw that helicopter briefly. Rockford and Kit are so relieved, Kit in particular, that this danger is over that they share a kiss. Yeah.

Weird that they share a kiss, but Rockford and Dennis don't. If only. All right. So now we get into our denouement, I suppose. The three of them confront Kornblum in his office. Sanders and the other guy, Warshaw, confess they talked to the police. They told him the whole story. They know that Kornblum ordered the hit on Mickey and also on Rockford. Kornblum, this got a little confused to me, and I don't know if it was the writing or I was just kind of like waiting to get to the next part. Kornblum says that he's not

confessing to anything, but he did arrange to put sensitive material of some kind in Ryder's basement. And that Ryder couldn't afford to have his basement be searched. And that's why he did the confession. Yeah, I was a little confused by what was happening here, too, because Kornblum is an attorney for the mob. Right. And he is folding like a cheap chair. And he is folding like a cheap chair. So I was trying to figure out if he was strategically trying to fold in a way that told the cops that he had material that they may want.

So that he could maybe go state's evidence or whatever without implicating himself in what he was saying. So he was like playing really careful with his words. That's how my brain later put it together. That's not exactly what I was getting watching the scene. In the scene, I was waiting for it to get to the reveal. Right. And where it's going is that he has a manila envelope of something that has to do with Almanet. And that's what was hidden in the basement.

But now he has it because part of the hit was stripping the basement and getting it and recovering it yeah so he goes to his wall safe to get it when these two new guys bust in and they're federal agents and they've gotten the whole story from sanders and warshaw and now they're taking over the case becker's like this is my case and like who are you i'm lieutenant becker I'm the one who busted him. Good work, Lieutenant. And then they take this big, thick manila envelope. This is a federal case now. We'll leave a receipt with your secretary.

Yeah. And they leave. And that's the end of the scene. Yep. So we'd never find out what's in the envelope. Yeah. It's an interesting mystery, but I feel like it's more of just like kind of a joke. It's a bit.

Yeah. Because if the envelope had been introduced much earlier, more of just like a kind of a joke. It's a bit. Yeah. Cause if the envelope had been introduced much earlier, it would have been a kind of a fun, like, ha ha. Nobody will ever get to know what it is, but it's introduced just before it's taken away. So it's a little,

so it's like, why is it even there? Yeah. Oh, and there was a little bit of play in the middle of it while he's going to the safe where they're like, what could it be? Right.

Maybe it's drugs. Maybe they're drug running. Oh, it's counterfeit. Counterfeiting is really big now. They play out all these things that it could be. And then we never find out what it is. Right. And I think that's the joke.

Counterfeiting is really big right now was a really good joke. Like, I love that moment where they're like discussing what it is. And they're in Rockford's all up on the current trends of what criminals are enjoying and whatnot but yeah so we never find out we never find out what the deal is we just know that the feds are now involved we then go to back to the the jail where kit is talking to the two kids but now she knows that they lied to her yeah and dory spills that it was all josh's idea he was impatient to get their mom's money and then they came up with this story to deflect suspicion and that's pretty much it they're a couple of shits they're they're horrible people yeah so dory's like so what happens now

and it's like well like you're entitled to the best representation that you can have but it's not going to be me yep and she she fires them basically as uh as clients then we go back to rockford's trailer where he's on the phone with rocky while he's looking at the big picture of him on the desk and they're just having a little chat before bed um and then kick comes on in there's been an ongoing bit where everyone comes in without yeah and saying like oh should i have called first like that's happened pretty much anyone has come into his trailer so she does that again and they have kind of a putting a button on the whole thing conversation she apologizes for being so nasty to him yeah which i mean i guess is warranted but also he was nasty too yeah he could have apologized to her too but he's being

presented as the one who was right all along right Right. She didn't want the kids to be guilty, which seems totally fair. And he kind of accepts her apology. They have a little bit of light flirting, kind of. And then she's tired and doesn't want to go home. She'll take the couch if that's OK. They have a back and forth about who's on the bed and who's on the couch. Yeah. Ends up with her on the couch.

They both want to be the one that's on the couch. They don't want to put the other one out. But she gets her way. Yeah. This thing kind of transitions into night and then there is an earthquake. Yes. It's supposed to be a particular earthquake. I don't recall which one, but it's the one that would be happening in 1994.

And it's probably why they waited another two months to continue the story because they needed this year. So there's this earthquake they get out of the house before the trailer splits in half from the aftershocks but they're okay and then our last scene is the two of them in beach chairs the next morning uh with the grill going cooking breakfast i assume could just be coffee uh We don't really see it. It's a nice grill, though. Yeah, it is. The whole setup was really idyllic. Yeah, and he has this great hat.

His, like, trucker hat that's from some, like, Save the Bay initiative. And yeah, they kind of have a little bit of banter, I think, to show us that they do care for each other at the end of the day.

Yeah. This whole thing hasn't destroyed their friendship. Kit confesses that she never introduced Rockford to Layla because she was afraid that they would like each other more than they liked her. A little revelation that kind of makes her a little more human, I think. Yeah. Which is nice.

Yeah. And Rockford says that he's changed his mind about the move out of L.A. between the riots and the fire and the earthquake. Can you imagine all the things he'd be missing? Yeah. And then we end on a big James Garner smile. Yeah. As he decides to stay in L.A. Because as the title of the episode says, he still loves L.A.

Our final little bit after the initial end credits is they do a dedication screen for Noah Beery Jr. who played Rocky. And that's also why that last little conversation with rocky was in there a little tribute to him um he was in ill health and wasn't able to be in the movie and then he actually died a month before the movie aired yeah a sad thing but also as rockford viewers yeah we we did not get to see super grandpa Rocky. Yeah, yeah. Old, old Rocky. Yeah. But it was a nice little moment and everyone really legitimately loved him.

It sounds like. Like on the crew and on the cast. And he and James Garner were really close. So it was a little sad, but glad that he was appreciated. Exactly. Yeah. So that's the movie. That is.

I still love LA. I still love Rockford Files. We went over. It's a little tough. I'm reminded of like when bands get back together and you listen to the album and you're like, yeah, that's what you sound like, kind of. Again, I'm not suffering from a Rockford Files gap like you would have been. I liked it well enough. I'm excited to see the other ones. The line on them is that they get better towards the end, actually.

Some of the scripts get tighter. But if I had loved this show, not seen it for 20 years, and then this came on, I can imagine being very excited about it and really liking all the things that they did. There's a lot of good, like, oh, yeah, I remember that stuff. Reintroductions of Angel and Dennis. So, yeah, I think that that was all good i think it was very interesting watching it now i mean okay so we did you know we discussed quite a bit about some of the different areas where it feels a little out of place with today i can't

look at it and know if it fell in place with the 90s right I cannot recall that time period well enough. Because at that point, I was in my early 20s. So probably at the height of my stupidity. And just completely oblivious to the world around me. So it's hard to tell how well it handled the issues that it was tackling at the time. Like, I think it certainly was concerned with the issues of the day yeah but it was kind of interesting in that they were the backdrop but the actual text of of the mystery kind of could have been whatever yeah spoiled rich kids kill their mother try to deflect responsibility and that happens to intersect with a mob scheme of some kind right yeah that we never hear what it

actually is. Aside from that being like, it has to be a reference to the Menendez brothers, right? Like that's the one bit where- Oh sure, yeah. But it seems like, and I think that this is classically a Rockford Files kind of thing.

It seems like around the time where they're doing it, they realized that all of these big things are happening. They have the riots, they have the fires, they have the Menendez brother trial. They have the earthquake. So they saw that as an opportunity to belabor our hero with these. Yeah. They weren't engaging them so much as issues, but more as wasn't this a frenetic year?

It feels like the agenda of the movie was very much to bring Rockford and his cohort as characters up to date with the modern audience without feeling like they were retreading the original. So they're like, we're going to locate this with all these events and kind of take advantage of the fact that it's like, okay, these people people are older they've had all this other time that they've been doing things their stations in life have changed so if that's the priority then it did a good job yeah a lot of the things that i that are my favorite things in the rockford files weren't really as strong as a standalone piece right i mean other than the kids i guess we didn't really have well-drawn side characters. We didn't really have any con stuff going on.

The mystery was not particularly engaging. I wanted to see what Rockford was going to do next. Right. But I wasn't blown away by the tension inherent in the mysteries as presented. The moment you meet Josh, you're like, yeah, that guy's guilty. That's the one. Yeah. And then I guess the tension is kind of like, yeah, that guy's guilty. That's the one. Yeah. And then I guess the tension is kind of like, how is he going to weasel out of it?

Yeah. But that's not really that fun to watch for me. So I think it's pretty typical of a longstanding thing to care more about the characters in the relationship when you bring it back than to pay attention to sort of the technical side of the fiction, how it was written. How did you craft your plots and made them tight? How did you make those side characters or whatever? Those are things that I feel like really draw you in and really make the Rockford Files worth having a podcast about. But the relationships, I love them. We comment on them every time. But I think that they're not why I'm anchored to the series.

So I guess my sort of point that I'm getting at here is that when you come back, there's this temptation to assume that it's the characters in the relationship that is the core of what's enjoyable about something. Sure. It's how those characters and relationships were crafted and what's around it that draws me into a thing. So quite often when we come back to something, which has happened a lot nowadays, I'm like, you're not crafting the same type of story and I'm not getting into it. You don't want it to be exactly the same, especially with actors being older and everything like they're just not going to be able to do exactly the same things and we saw that in this episode where it's much less active um there's

the brawl at the end which i think was mostly done with stunt people yeah but like rockford isn't running around and driving around at the same pace that he did yeah i think that was handled well i think it felt like these people are of a certain age why would they be super active the parts of the movie that i like the most were actually the parts that were least plot important i think which was most of him palling around with angel as longtime viewers we see how it's the same kind of friendship that we're used to seeing but we also see how it's changed rockford seems to feel more responsible for angel yeah yeah he's checking up on him more he's worried that angel is going to do something and get himself hurt or killed so i thought those scenes were good and like they you know they've

always had great chemistry uh but yeah so definitely interesting definitely a nice change of pace there's a thing with time in this that's that i thought was kind of interesting they jump forward in time it's that's not unusual for the rockford files we've seen that a few times but okay so it is taking place long after the series has ended. So we've got that. We have to acknowledge that. And we do by, again, in the beginning, you see the Firebird, which is an old Firebird. It's not a new Firebird.

And it's in such a bunch of trite 90s pop culture stuff like it'd be just past vanilla ice right which would have been the worst fashion for rockford to run into in fact they expertly avoided redoing the theme song as a crappy vanilla ice song they 80s did up more than anything else which is fine because it's early 90s and a lot of the signifiers or a lot of the just stuff like the dressing and everything was modern to the time without being roffer is gonna pick up his space phone right like his phone was like a corded wall phone like you would have at that time at the end we saw it was one of those

high back leather chairs with the wings that come out and he sits in it and it just reclines back, which is not what you, you know, like it looks like this old Victorian chair and then, oh yeah, that's a nice lazy boy there. That's what that is. Yeah. So it was interesting in how it avoided being stuck in the time that it was in, despite making all these references to the time it was in. This might be a weird thing to say, but it feels like it was made at the time it was made, which is the same way that the series felt. Yeah. It feels like a film made in the early 90s, set in the early 90s, that has aged like the early 90s have aged for better or worse it wasn't trying to capture the same feeling as the 70s show yeah because that probably would have aged poorly

like that wouldn't look good now but neither was it saying the point of this show is to demonstrate that we're in this future world that's different from the past that you expect. Yeah. It treated the world like a lived in contemporary world, which is the most true to the series feeling that I think you could get. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So we'll have to watch a couple more of these movies and see what else they do. The longer format is also a little interesting because I feel like we did get to have more scenes that were just about characters bouncing off each other.

Yeah. And didn't have plot stuff. But it did feel like the third act was the Rockford part to me. So I wonder if the other movies managed to distribute that more evenly. Or if it's an artifact of the format. Yeah. You said that they were all pretty much done around the same time too. Because if you don't feel like you have to reintroduce

the characters each time you you might start going elsewhere with it too like i feel like that's uh both a product of how much time they had and also the necessity to build those characters back up they weren't all shot in those couple years the first six were done kind of in that couple years 94 95 uh and then they got two more movies but the last one the eighth movie was finished in 97 and didn't air till 99 all right we'll have to see how they do as they uh keep going yeah so i think we were both looking forward to checking out the movie see what they see what they did i guess my final takeaway is that i was certainly not disappointed by any of the actors yeah i think like i said earlier they they put the roles back on like a like an old comfortable overcoat and it was really nice to see how smooth

that was i felt like they all did a great job i wasn't a huge fan of the plot and i look forward to other ones being more rockford-esque in their mystery. But, you know, it's nice to see the band back together and embracing the changes rather than trying to pretend like there were no changes. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that they handled it quite well. Speaking as someone who has watched quite a bit of Rockford Files recently. The movies are available on two DVD sets. They're not particularly expensive. So if you want to check them out,

find them wherever your finest DVD sets are sold. We were able to take a look at these thanks to the generosity of our patrons over at patreon.com slash 200 a day. So if this was fun for you, check that out. Throw us a dollar an episode

and we'll keep on doing this for the next year. Yeah, thank you very much. Who knew? Who knew we would be here a year later still talking about the Rockford Files? Yeah, I did not expect it. It's like getting into your car

and having an angel just pop out of the backseat. Well, I guess with that, it's time to sign off. We've earned our maybe $600 for today. Whatever he's... Still unspecified. Maybe we'll find out in the next movie. Maybe we will. uh until next time

when we talk about another episode of the rockford files