Hollywood Q&A

Q: Sometimes on “The Golden Girls,” Dorothy says she’s from Queens, but sometimes she’s from Brooklyn. Which one is it and why does it vary?

A: “The Golden Girls” has been rerun so often on so many channels that the chronology is a little foggy, to say the least, and so it’s easy not to notice the fact that it’s only in the show’s pilot that she says she’s from Queens.

That timing means the network can ask for alterations to the show’s formula, but the changes are usually small enough that the network figures it can get away with airing the existing pilot and continuing the story from there with the minor tweaks in place. Dorothy’s hometown was one of those tweaks.

NBC switched it from Queens to Brooklyn, presumably hoping viewers wouldn’t notice, and few have.

The network execs never offered an explanation for why they asked for the change, however. Did they figure Brooklyn was more famous than Queens in the rest of America? (They certainly weren’t thinking of the international audience at this point, even though the show would soon become a global hit.) Maybe they thought Brooklyn seemed more Italian (Dorothy’s Italian heritage was a huge part of her character) or that its streets just seemed a little meaner (Dorothy was the tough city girl of the group, and Brooklyn had a tougher reputation at the time).

We may never know.

Q: They used some outdoor scenes in the original “Perry Mason” series, but the overwhelming majority of those scenes appear to be in near-darkness. Why?

A: Short answer: Because of the “noir” in film noir.

“Perry Mason” is widely seen as an attempt to translate the film-noir style of big-screen crime dramas (think 1944’s “Double Indemnity” or 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon”) to the small screen.

According to film blogger and critic Terence Towles Canote, “Perry Mason” often used “the same techniques as film noir, including harsh lighting, extensive use of shadows and even low angles.”

“Noir” in this context literally means “dark.” Of course, the French film critics who developed the term film noir were mostly referring to themes that were figuratively dark — every character in a classic film noir is either corrupt or cynical or both, and they all seem to do a lot of murdering. However, the filmmakers often echoed that metaphorical darkness through a literal lack of light.

The cast of “Perry Mason,” most notably its star Raymond Burr (“Rear Window,” 1954), had a lot of experience doing big-screen film noirs. The same is also true of the directors and cinematographers. Frank Redman, the cinematographer for the first four seasons of the show (and therefore the guy with the most say over lighting choices), was behind the camera for a bunch of film noir classics, including “Conspiracy” (1939) and the landmark classic “Dick Tracy”

(1945).

Q: I recently saw a documentary on TV called “The Kings,” about Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns, but wasn’t there already one with that title about Muhammad Ali? Was it a series or something?

A: A sport with a history as long as boxing should be able to come up with more metaphors — you’re actually thinking of two different documentaries with very similar titles.

“The Kings,” which aired over four nights last year on Showtime, was indeed about Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns, as well as Roberto Duran and Sugar

Ray Leonard. They were collectively known in boxing circles as The Four Kings, because they all fought in the same weight class at the same time and helped revive popular interest in the sport.

But before that, in 1996, a feature-length documentary called “When We Were Kings” was released. It received a lot of attention and a best-documentary Oscar for its account of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s famous Rumble in the Jungle fight in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the

Congo).