Hollywood Q&A
Q: Was Sandra Bullock in “Working Girl”? I don’t remember seeing her in it, but I read somewhere that she was.
A: Sandra Bullock (“Gravity,” 2013) was, in fact, the star of “Working Girl” — just not the one you’re thinking of.
When most people think of “Working Girl,” they think of the 1988 bigscreen smash starring Melanie Griffith (“The Bonfire of the Vanities,” 1990) as an office worker struggling to succeed in the male-dominated business world, not the TV spinoff that aired two years later, with Bullock taking over Griffith’s character.
They don’t think of it because it was basically a ratings disaster (it premiering in April 1990 and was canceled before the summer was over).
It mostly exists now in the form you encountered it — as a surprising bit of Sandra Bullock trivia. It’s one of the number of roles she had before making it big in the ‘90s with a run of romanticcomedy and action hits.
Here’s another weird one for you: Before “Working Girl,” she starred in the 1989 telefilm “Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman,” a continuation of those two hit series, playing a newly created bionic woman named Kate Mason.
Q: The final episode of “Project Blue Book” shows them on a submarine in the North Atlantic, investigating a UFO sighting. Is this a factual story based on the real Project Blue Book or fiction for the show?
A: As you point out, History Channel’s “Project Blue Book” was based on a real project of the same name run by the U.S.Air Force to investigate UFO sightings (back when they were still called UFOs and not Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, as the military currently prefers).
But, of course, anyone who’s watched the show, which aired from 2019-20 (History canceled it after its second season), knows that the creators took some liberties in the name of making a thrilling, dramatic show. You can’t bring in celebrated Hollywood director Robert Zemeckis (of 1985’s “Back to the Future” fame) as an executive producer and not expect him to have some fun with it.
That’s why it might surprise some to hear that the Season 2 finale, “Operation Mainbrace,” was itself based on a real sighting — actually a series of sightings.
Exercise Mainbrace is the title given by the U.S. Air Force to a real North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military exercise held in September 1952 off the coasts of Denmark and Norway.
Military personnel from more than one country reported seeing aircraft they couldn’t explain. Danish naval officers saw “an unidentified object, triangular in shape, which moved at high speed toward the southeast,” according to records held by the nonprofit National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Meanwhile, crew on the American aircraft carrier reported seeing “a silvery, spherical object” flying across the sky. And there were others as well.
The episode of “Project Blue Book” flies into fancy from there, with a storyline of a rogue admiral threatening to start a third world war. But even that is building on the real circumstances — the real Exercise Mainbrace was viewed by the Soviet Union as a provocation and risked increasing tensions in the region.
Q: I’ve been watching “This is Us” and I know I’ve seen the guy who plays the football coach in a few episodes, but maybe not in a while. Who was it?
A:Actor George Eads played Investigator Nick Stokes, a young, all-American-type character on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” and viewers later find out in the Season 10 episode “Bloodsport” that Stokes also played football as a kid in Texas.
So, it’s only fitting that, 20 years after getting that part, he graduated to the part of a football coach in “This Is Us.”
Granted, the two parts are hardly comparable on his resume. He played Nick on “CSI” for 15 years and more than 300 episodes, whereas he only appeared twice, months apart, as the unnamed coach on Season 5 of “This Is Us.”
It seems like it was just a little something he did to stay busy after his previous full-time gig ended. Just a year after leaving “CSI,” he was back on CBS as a chief supporting star on “MacGyver” in 2016. He stuck with that for the first three seasons before leaving in 2019.
There’s no word on what he’ll be doing next. “This Is Us” ended for good earlier this year, so there’s no chance of coming back to his coach character.
Fans, of course, are hoping that Eads will show up on the “CSI” revival series “CSI: Vegas,” which debuted last fall. It currently features his old co-stars, William Petersen (“Manhunter,” 1986) and Jorja Fox (“Memento,” 2000), with pop-ins from some of the other original cast members as well.
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