When I talked to David Carradine last week while working on a story about how older TV stars are doing startlingly well right now despite working in a medium that's obsessed with finding younger viewers, he admitted the paradox has crossed his mind. He thought about it a great deal on the set of The Golden Boys, a film scheduled for release in the next few weeks in which the 71-year-old Carradine plays a romantic lead opposite Mariel Hemingway.
"I wonder, ‘Where's the appeal of this,' '' Carradine told me. "But it's been showed a couple of places now and it had a huge audience response. Somebody explained to me that the Baby Boomers are getting old, and they'd like to see a movie about themselves. They aren't that interested in seeing a movie about kids trying to get a date. The idea of a movie about an older man falling in love and getting married appeals to them."
That's fine in movies, where producers are simply trying to lure in anyone with the price of a ticket, as opposed to TV, where they have to please demographics-obsessed advertisers. But Carradine doesn't have any trouble getting TV roles, either. His latest, that of a martial-arts-trained zen master (does that ring any bells?), airs Wednesday night on the new Hallmark Movie Channel: Son Of The Dragon.
"It's a dream of a character," says Carradine. "I had not actually read the script when I said I was interested in doing it. They said ‘It's based on The Thief Of Baghdad and [chuckle] I knew what that was. I didn't think there was any hopes of me playing the Doug Fairbanks part, but it just sounded like the greatest idea."
Carradine plays a soldier who comes out of a peaceful retirement to stage a grand jewel theft that involves a series of cons and deceptions. Because he's playing a character playing a character, he deliberately hams it up, which Carradine says was a lot of fun.
"I get to overact, because I'm supposed to be acting, and that's something nobody has ever accused me of," he says. "Part of my mystique is I try never to let you catch me acting. That's what the critics always say, anyway -- that I'm reserved and quiet and holding back. To a certain extent, it's true, but they say it whether I'm playing an Oklahoma folksinger [Woody Guthrie in Bound For Glory] or the guy who started the Civil War [plantation owner Justin LaMotte in North And South] or a Chinese-American martial arts monk."
That monk, Kwai Chang Caine, is the role that most resonates with Carradine's name. He was the lead character in Kung Fu, the smash hit ABC martial-arts Western that aired from 1972 to 1975. Carradine has revisited the character or his clones countless times in TV sequels, movies and most recently in a series of phonebook commercials.
The character's eternal fascination to audiences, Carradine thinks, is linked to the fact that the show went out on top. The decline that led to its cancellation was not in Nielsen ratings but in Carradine's interest.
"To be honest, I didn't know when I was doing the show that it was so popular," he recalls. "I was so busy -- I was working an enormous number of hours, living in a little cabin on a hill with no TV set, no newspaper or magazines. I didn't know the show was popular -- I hardly knew anything about anything at the time. In the final season, I guess, it was pointed out to me that we had been running in the top four Nielsen shows since the first episode.
"But I left anyway. I walked. I had had always intended to do Kung Fu for three years. They used to say that you do a TV show for one season, there's kind of a stigma attached -- you failed. You do it two years, you're a success. Three years, a hit. Four, you're rich; five, you own the studio. I thought to myself, a hungry fighter's a good fighter. I don't need to get rich; I don't need to play the same character for years. I want to do movies."
Warner Brothers, the studio that produced Kung Fu, and ABC, with aired it, made it easier for Carradine to leave by quarreling with him constantly.
"The network was using us as cannon fodder, placing Kung Fu before any show they wanted to push -- a show that was in trouble, a new show, whatever," he says. "They weren't treating it with the respect it deserved. So I called a meeting in my dressing room and told everybody, ‘Let's throw in the towel.' They did a nice job of wrapping it up -- he finds his long-lost brother and the story is over."
Carradine was determined to leave Kwai Chang Caine behind that he deliberately chose a karmic opposite for his character: the murderous, gladiatorial race-car driver Frankenstein in the cult flick Death Race 2000. "It didn't work," he laughs. "There is nothing I can do to wipe that guy out."
Everybody in Paris had told him Boston was one of America's most cosmopolitan cities, but he could hardly find a theater screening the films of Claude Chabrol, Pedro Almódovar or any of the other European directors he liked so much.
Such a great idea that Perioche finally tried it himself. And now his video-on-demand brainchild Eurocinema is in 20 million homes and adding half a million more every month -- and doing it by defying practically all conventional wisdom about the tastes and habits of American television viewers.
