McDonald clearly aspired to join their ranks. Thompson, Truman Capote, George Plimpton-would all become bestselling authors and avatars of the Nixon-era zeitgeist. The best-known practitioners of this form-Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S.
His start in newspapers roughly coincided with the beginnings of the New Journalism, which employed novelistic devices, outright invention, and first-person stories in which the reporter was an active participant. After he graduated from Harvard in 1958, McDonald became a schoolteacher for a few years before taking up journalism and spending six years (1966–73) as a staff reporter on the Boston Globe. The son of a CBS Radio newsman, McDonald was born in 1937 and grew up in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, an upscale community about 40 miles west of Boston. It never came to pass, which is a shame taking Fletch back to his 1970s origins still strikes me as a great idea.įletch was the creation of novelist and journalist Gregory McDonald. When Universal lost the rights to the property, they were scooped up by Miramax in the early 2000s, and Smith was assigned to midwife the project-possibly an origin story starring either Jason Lee or Ben Affleck. In the mid-1990s, the studio approached director Kevin Smith to make a threequel, but that effort ended in development hell. Nevertheless, it was still reasonably profitable and Universal was eager to make a third film. The 1989 sequel (also starring Chase and directed by Ritchie) was not as successful, earning 10 million dollars less at the box office on an identical budget. And I actually spoke to a class at one of those colleges by speaker phone! Here I was, talking to a class of 200 people-and you know, it’s not ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’” “I would get calls from colleges like Amherst and Williams when I was back in L.A.
In 1999, the New York Post’s Jonathan Foreman reported that Fletch had become all the rage on American college campuses: “It’s huge,” Chase tells The Post. Confidential, Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, and The Player. Ritchie’s 1985 film Fletch is now widely regarded as a cult classic, and in 2008, a group of Los Angeles Times writers voted it the 23rd best film set in Los Angeles over the previous quarter-century, alongside gems like L.A. Earlier this month, Miramax brought us Confess, Fletch, the latest cinematic incarnation of the wise-ass investigative reporter first brought to the screen by Chevy Chase and director Michael Ritchie in the 1980s.
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