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Adrienne Barbeau: A Bold New Chapter in 70s Television:
In the 1970s, television actors like Adrienne Barbeau faced significant barriers when transitioning to feature films; no one would consider hiring you, as the prevailing mindset was – why would audiences pay the price of a movie ticket to see an actor when they could just turn on their television and see them at home, for free.
Adrienne had a steady job from July through February every year and worked in New York for eight years prior without having had an agent, but once nominated for a Tony, she signed with Marvin Josephson at the Agency for the Performing Arts who negotiated the deal for Maude.
When she moved to L.A., her journey through various agencies was tumultuous and marked by a series of coincidences. She was told that she should be doing other things than Lear’s television series, like the popular viewing experience at that time, for instance, the movie of the week.
Adrienne meets Johnny Carson for the first time in a 1973 guest appearance.
Adrienne, during her 1976 hiatus from Maude, was now working with the Creative Artists Agency (one of the industry’s most powerful firms at the time). She demanded a commission for a gig opening for Roy Clark at Harrah’s, which she secured directly from Clark’s manager despite the fact that singing engagements were not part of her contract. She changed agencies once again.
Mike Ovitz, the cofounder of Creative Artists Agency (Ovitz transformed the negotiation of major deals in film, TV, music, and corporate media from the 1970s to the 1990s), was a major male chauvinist who considered women – “˜chattel.’ This was another reason she didn’t feel comfortable being represented by CAA.“Every time we spoke on the phone, I hung up, enraged or in tears. He didn’t have a clue, of course.”
Adrienne Barbeau on the gameshow in 1974 hosted Dick Clark with Tony Roberts appear on The $10,000 Pyramid New York NY ABC Studio Elysee Theater – Photo by ABC getty images-1231784707.
The Tonight Show – Adrienne Barbeau, John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope with host Don Rickles: photo by Fred Sabine 1974 NBC UNIVERSAL via Getty Images.
Adrienne started singing again and appearing on live talk shows. Working on The Tonight Show was a big career boost, and she did many interviews with Johnny Carson. Adrienne recounts in her book how the co-originator working on the pre-interview for Carson’s show would scream and put pressure on Adrienne to show up early. It made her break out in hives. However, all the other cohosts, including Roy Clarke and George Carlin, were wonderful. Singing was the hardest part of her various guest appearances. She hadn’t sung since Maude’s telethon episodes or Grease.
Adrienne Barbeau as Daisy in the television biopic The Great Houdini in 1976.
In 1976, Adrienne Barbeau appeared as Daisy White in her first TV movie, The Great Houdini, which is a slight supernatural dramatization of the life and the rise to fame of the iconic magician and escape artist. The movie starred Paul Michael Glaser (80s television’s sensitive action hero cop Dave Starsky) as Harry Houdini and featured Adrienne as his beautiful assistant. This TV movie included Ruth Gordon and Peter Cushing. Adrienne had no scenes with these two great actors, so she didn’t get to spend any time with them. However, she did know Sally Struthers because of her work as Gloria on Norman Lear’s All in the Family. It also features Vivian Vance, who played Ethel Mertz, Lucy’s loyal and comedic sidekick in the iconic comedy series of the 1950s, I Love Lucy.
“The first job they (Creative Artists Agency) got me was Houdini, a TV movie with Paul Michael Glazer and Sally Struthers; I was to play Houdini’s mistress. After I accepted the offer, the agent called back to say they wanted to do a semi-nude scene for the European release. I was so concerned about being shot only from the waist up and no one seeing my big butt that it never dawned on me to ask for more money. The agent didn’t either. Mike Ovitz was one of the partners in the film. This was the 1970s. I was a strong believer in the Equal Rights Amendment.”
from an interview with The Terror Trap in 2010-“It was the first film I had ever done and I knew nothing about film. I had only done stage and tape up until that time. We did Maude the same way you do a stage play. We just rehearsed for 4 1/2 days and then did it for an audience straight through, no stops or anything. So we did the master…the first establishing shot… on Houdini… and I didn’t know that people did close-ups. I went off and started to change clothes to do the next scene! It was my first film experience and a real learning process.”
Adrienne has appeared in many TV movies, particularly Crash in 1978. One of the little details out of so many I found interesting in reading her memoirs was one of the only things that sticks out about working with director Barry Shear on that film. He was a screamer; he constantly yelled at everyone on the set and cursed up a storm. As Veronica Daniels, the shattered stewardess in a minor disaster flick, Adrienne once again shows that she is a very serious actor.
“I think I was hired for a Quincy. If anyone is old enough to remember, Quincy, and I played a dramatic role there. Then suddenly, oh ok, she can do drama. She can do comedy. She’s a TV actress, but in 1978, feature producers did not think that anyone would pay to see a television actor on the big screen. So, no movies were coming my way. You know, because she’s on TV.” (from There Are Worse Things I Can Do)
Adrienne met John Carpenter in 1978 when he was casting his first network television film after Warner Bros hired him to write the screenplay and direct Someone’s Watching Me!
Her agent called and told her that this young, up-and-coming director wanted to meet her. She read the script and thought it was one of the best scripts for television that she had read. Adrienne wound up auditioning for the part of Lauren Hutton’s best friend and was offered the role. Carpenter was funny and relaxed, and she instantly felt at ease. There was an instant attraction. Her memoirs include a colorful description of her first meeting and the intense relationship that ensued with John Carpenter. Again, There Are Worse Things I Could Do is a must-read.
“He watched me in Maude, liked the character I played, and was hoping I had her same sensibilities; It was that kind of character he wrote, the Howard Hawks-type woman. Strong, smart, quick, witty. He was nervous it was his first studio film, and he was having to answer to “the suits.'” (Pg 14)
In one of director John Carpenter’s earlier works after his first feature film, Dark Star, in 1974, Someone’s Watching Me! 1978 was his television debut. This TV movie is a well-crafted woman-in-peril TV thriller centered on obsession, voyeurism, and the fragility of safety in urban life. It stars Lauren Hutton as Leigh Michaels, the lead heroine, a TV director who is under surveillance by a voyeur who is stalking her in her L.A. high-rise apartment. Originally titled High Rise and filmed in eighteen days, it was also scripted by John Carpenter; it is a bit of a tribute to Hitchcock’s Rear Window 1954 and would showcase a number of the director’s techniques that would emerge in his subsequent films. In particular, his gliding camerawork, point-of-view shots, and unexpected shock cuts.
Someone’s Watching Me! was based on a Sun-Times story called “Terror in a High-Rise” by Paul Galloway and Basil Talbott Jr. The story was about a woman living in a high-rise apartment who believed she was being spied on in her home and threatened by an anonymous stalker, which led to her suicide.
Adrienne Barbeau’s character is somewhat of a transformational role for a made-for-TV movie in 1978 because she is a lesbian who was treated very matter-of-factly. Adrienne ends up getting thrown off her apartment balcony while Lauren Hutton watches helplessly through her telescope.
Leigh (Lauren Hutton) becomes terrorized by threatening phone calls and letters from a mysterious man who seems to know her every move as she tries to convince the police that she’s in danger.
Adrienne Barbeau plays Sophie, Leigh’s co-worker and friend, who is casually revealed to be a lesbian during a conversation about ex-lovers. Being Leigh’s supportive friend – Sophie steps in to help her deal with the growing threat, and it gets her killed for her trouble.
Adrienne’s performance has been praised for its lack of sensationalism and is considered pretty progressive for a 1978 television. Sophie has been recognized as an early example of positive queer representation in media. “The first scene I did for John Carpenter in Someone’s Watching Me! was a scene where I revealed to Lauren Hutton that I’m gay. John wrote it beautifully.”
Adrienne herself has spoken positively about her role in interviews, acknowledging the significance of playing a casual, positive lesbian character in a 1978 TV movie, especially given the era in which it was produced. This was one of Adrienne Barbeau’s first collaborations with John Carpenter before the couple married, and she would go on to star in her first feature film.
To Adrienne, after years of doing musical theater and a major TV sitcom, the idea that she can “˜do less,’ those two words made all the difference in terms of the work she was now doing
“It wasn’t until I did my first film. It was with John Carpenter, and it was a television film called Someone’s Watching Me! Up until that point, I had done a massive amount of stage work, and I had been on the sitcom Maude. I had been in television movies, which were usually with a director who’s not taking the time to adjust your performance. So, we did the first scene, and John came over and said, ” That was great. That was great. Let’s do it again and do less. I said Do less?” And all of a sudden, it was like, okay, that’s the last piece of the puzzle. That’s the light bulb going off.
I had been working on stage for most of my life, It’s a film, not stage, not a four-camer sitcom. Even situational comedy on Maude, we did it like a play. We did it for an audience. And now, John was telling me how to let the camera do the work and keep it small. So, I added that to my education.”
“All I knew about John was that he made horror movies; I’d heard about his Assault on Precinct 13, I think. I walked in expecting some kind of hard-boiled guy, and here was this sweet, salt-and-pepper, gentle man… I think I began to fall in love with him right then and there. But I heard that he was seeing somebody else, and so all during the filming of Someone’s Watching Me!, I kept my distance, and I tried to discourage my emotional feelings.”
“And then, on the last day of shooting, John said he wanted to have dinner with me and discuss something. I thought maybe it was his next screenplay. He sat down and said, ‘I’ve fallen in love with you.’ Well…we were married Jan. 1, 1979.” (Interview with Roger Ebert)
The couple wed and moved into the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, purposefully remaining “totally outside Hollywood’s social circles.” (Roger Ebert) They remained together for five years but separated shortly after the birth of their son, John “Cody” Carpenter, on May 7, 1984. The couple divorced later that year.
1979 marked a pivotal year in John Carpenter’s career, propelling him to new heights of success. His film Halloween, released on October 25, 1978, became a box office phenomenon in 1979, establishing itself as the most profitable independent production in Hollywood’s history at that time. At the time the couple was starting out, and before his breakthrough, Adrienne had been the more prominent figure because of her Broadway success with Rizzo in Grease and her long-standing role in Maude. Halloween opened new doors for John Carpenter, which led to a lot of industry interest, getting calls and offers, and this newfound recognition translated into tangible opportunities and elevated his status in Hollywood. Now, he was able to secure financial backing for his next project, The Fog, in 1980.
The Fog is based on Carpenter’s idea that nothing more than a horror movie could be made with Fog as a leading character, and it provided Adrienne Barbeau with her first major movie role. But first, a year after Someone’s Watching Me! Adrienne appeared in another spooky made-for-TV movie.
Adrienne Barbeau and Robert Foster in the television horror/sci-fi flick The Darker Side of Terror 1979.
In an early foray into horror, before Adrienne Barbeau introduced us to Stevie Wayne in Carpenter’s The Fog, she appeared in the television movie, The Darker Side of Terror, a chilling chronicle of scientific hubris and a potentially intriguing doppelganger scenario, which crept onto television screens on April 3, 1979. At its heart lurks the aging Professor Meredith, played by Hollywood great Ray Milland, who by this time became his own brand of the cantankerous curmudgeon trope in these types of B-horror/sci-fi narratives. In this movie, his unorthodox ambitions lead him down a twisted path; with a daring act of genetic manipulation, he creates a carbon copy of his star pupil, a brilliant young academic, Paul Corwin (Robert Forster). The only way you can tell the difference between the two Pauls is when the clone’s eye suddenly turns a ghostly white as sudden, murderous impulses strike him.
After Paul’s clone escapes from the lab, he falls in love with Adrienne, playing Paul’s unsuspecting and neglected wife, Margaret, who becomes seduced by Paul’s doppelganger, unaware that all this newfound passion and attention is coming from the wrong man.
Adrienne Barbeau stars with Greg Mullavey, Jessica Walter, and Ronny Cox in the TV movie Having Babies 1976: photo by ABC via Getty images-1228129255
Adrienne Barbeau in THE LOVE BOAT Hollywood Royalty/The Eyes of Love/ Masquerade 1978 seen here with Juliet Mills ABC Photo Disney via Getty Images.
Adrienne’s other credits: Her appearances in 1970s television movies and series, including the TV movie Having Babies in 1976, the TV movie Red Alert in 1977, and the TV movie Crash in 1978. She also appeared in an episode of Eight is Enough in 1977 and a very intense episode called Let Me Light the Way for Jack Klugman’s popular television series Quincy, ME 1977. On the light side, she appeared in episodes of The Love Boat in 1978 and Battle of the Network Stars in 1978.
In Adrienne’s autobiography, she said, “I actually thought CBS asked me to be on Battle of the Network Stars because they thought I was athletic. My husband clued me in: Who cared if I won the race, as long as I bounced when I ran?”
Adrienne Barbeau: The 1980s and The Rise of a Horror Icon:
