By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff
PASADENA, Calif. -- "Chicago Hope," arguably CBS' finest new show last season, survived its bruising loss to NBC's "ER" on Thursdays last fall by moving to Mondays, where it finally found that elusive audience. As this season begins, "Chicago Hope" (tonight at 9 on KUTV Channel 2) takes another one on the chin with the departure of its nominal star, Mandy Patinkin (Dr. Jeffrey Geiger), who will exit the show after eight episodes.
Some creative teams might panic, and go hunting for an actor to pick up where Patinkin left off. Not executive producer David E. Kelley, who appears to be headed down an altogether different highway by hiring Christine Lahti to replace Patinkin.
"I heard Mandy was quitting," Lahti said, during a cocktail party on the lawn of the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel during the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour. "And a girlfriend called and said, 'Why don't you replace Mandy in "Chicago Hope"?' They were thinking of replacing him with a man. I called my agent, my agent made some calls and suddenly they took the ball and ran with it."
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| John Grisham |
By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff
PASADENA, Calif. -- Perched atop the publishing world, author John Grisham is refreshingly candid about the relative worth -- both literary and economic -- of his novels, and perfectly willing to offer an assessment as to why "The Client" is his only book to make it to the small screen.
"Most of my books sort of end with people on the run," Grisham said at the Summer Press Tour in Pasadena, Calif. "You know, with bullets and dead bodies and that kind of stuff. This is the only one that would lend itself to an ongoing series with people who are in one place, and who are not running."
OK, that's simple enough. Then comes the real reason the novel "The Client" has become the TV series "John Grisham's The Client":
"The TV rights to 'The Client' were included in the movie deal, which happened three years ago," the author explained. "And ... these movie contracts are eight inches thick, and buried somewhere in the contract was the TV rights -- and a lot of other rights -- that I signed away when I signed the contract and took the money."
