Mateja Djedovic Abstract

Lt. Columbo and Case Studies of Ageism in Hollywood

“Columbo” had been a television staple for 40 years when Universal and Peter Falk finally agreed, after five years of refining, on a screenplay for the lieutenant’s final outing, to be entitled simply “Columbo’s Last Case”. But sadly the episode never came to fruition. Why? The 80-year old Falk was deemed an unacceptable and unmarketable leading man by all the major and minor TV networks who uniformly refused to pick up the movie. Of course, this year “The Irishman” starring three men over 70 is one of the Oscar favourites but even that film took 12 years to produce as no major studio wanted it. Now, while the case of “Columbo’s Last Case” could be seen as clear proof of ageism at work and “The Irishman” a pep-story of how to overcome it, the story of the torrid development of Alfred Hitchcock’s final project “The Short Night” could be seen as the cynical flipside as it is a story of an ailing Hitchcock furiously raging against the dying of the light by continuing development on a film he knew he could never finish and in the process alienating many of his collaborators and friends. Either way you look at it, ageism plays a major part in Hollywood and this paper seeks to examine its impact on unrealised projects and present a case of underrepresentation for the elderly in major studios’ outputs.