by Stephen Vagg
Examining a little-known TV pilot from genre legend Walter Hill.
We have been doing a series on great unfilmed screenplays. Dog and Cat does not fit in with that as it was filmed, and aired in 1977, as the telemovie pilot for a short-lived cop show. However, we felt that Dog and Cat deserved an essay because it was written by none other than Walter Hill during his great period as a screenwriter, where his work also included such masterpieces as The Getaway, Alien, Hard Times, The Warriors and The Driver. Furthermore, although written for US network television during a conservative era, Hill did it in his famous (famous among screenwriters anyway) haiku, terse style – the one inspired by Alex Jacobs’ script for Point Blank (1967), which he first used on Hard Times, and went on to employ on his screenplays for The Driver, Alien, The Last Gun, Alien 3, The Warriors, and others (including his un-filmed version of The Fugitive).
Dog and Cat was a buddy cop story, a genre popular in the 1970s both in cinemas (Freebie and the Bean, Busting, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot) and on television (Starsky and Hutch). The gimmick for Dog and Cat was that one cop is a man and the other is a woman (apparently “dog and cat” is a slang term for a mixed-sex cop partnership). This device had been used in the 1976 Dirty Harry sequel, The Enforcer, the success of which presumably helped Dog and Cat get the green light, as might the popularity of series like Angie Dickinson’s Police Woman and Charlie’s Angels (American television networks at the time didn’t mind being progressive about female detectives as long as said detectives went undercover as hookers every now and then).
The executive producer of Dog and Cat was Larry Gordon, who had produced Hill’s 1975 directorial debut, Hard Times.
Hard Times had done quite well at the box office and it’s surprising in a way Gordon and Hill went into television almost straight afterwards – the gap between the two mediums was bigger in the mid 1970s, with the small screen having far less street cred than it does now. Still, a pay cheque is a pay cheque and Hill was never snobby about television – for instance, he later worked as a producer, writer and director on The Tales of the Crypt series.
We read a copy of Hill’s pilot script at The Writers Guild Foundation library in Los Angeles. Hill’s Dog and Cat starts with two cops, Jack Ripley and Earl Seagram, being given a tip off about a porn racket by Roeann, a former porn actress turned born again Christian. They arrange a meeting with a porn operator, only to have a hit man, Shirley, killing Seagram. Ripley’s police captain assigns him a new partner, JZ Kane, who turns out to be a woman.
The duo’s attempts to find Roeann lead them to businessman Nicholas Evans, who points them to a man called Doty. By the time Ripley and JZ get there, Doty is dead, killed by Shirley, who it turns out was hired to kill one of the men meeting Roeann that night but didn’t realise they would be police, and is on his own mission of vengeance.
Ripley tracks down a shonky dude, Kaufman, who works for a criminal, Traven, who admits that he hired Shirley as “light muscle” but never wanted him to kill anyone. JZ and Ripley eventually figure out that the baddy is Evans, who is the banker for these various criminals; Evans smooth-talked Roeann to lure the police into a trap and arranged for Shirley to murder a cop and not get paid, thus triggering a Yojimbo-style response where the cops and/or Shirley would take out all the criminals, enabling Evans to keep all the money for himself.
JZ and Ripley blackmail Traven into helping them lure Evans into a trap at a train station (a favourite Hill location – he used it for key scenes in Lloyd Williams and His Brother, The Driver, Streets of Fire, The Warriors, The Getaway, etc). Traven gets money from Evans to pay Shirley but Evans double crosses Shirley by paying him with paper. Shirley kills Traven, Ripley tries to arrest Evans who pulls a gun, so Ripley shoots him dead, Shirley is about to kill Ripley when JZ shoots him dead.
Ripley asks JZ out for dinner and says he will request a new partner so they can date. JZ says she won’t sleep with cops, so Ripley agrees that JZ will be a partner and things will be platonic between them.
Dog and Cat is, for all of Hill’s stylistic uniqueness on the page, a perfectly serviceable ‘70s American cop show. It moves along at a brisk pace and is logically worked out; the device of the cops and a hitman both trying to figure out who the baddy is works very well. The script is full of familiar tropes that Hill (and others) would repeatedly use in cop stories: partners at loggerheads who come through for each other, exasperated police captain, wronged hitman on a trail of vengeance, manipulated teen, betraying someone by paying them with paper notes instead of cash. These are tropes because they work, and they do in Dog and Cat.
Its chief flaw, in our opinion, is that Hill doesn’t do much with the central concept – Ripley’s a guy and JZ’s a girl and he finds her hot and she doesn’t really like him and… that’s it. JZ is depicted in very progressive way, incidentally (for the era) – she has a casual but also sexual relationship with a handsome guy (David Storey) and is not punished for it, she gets to drive the car in a chase, she shoots someone dead. This “Hawksian” style of woman was a hallmark of much of Hill’s work, eg Sigourney Weaver in Alien, Amy Madigan in Streets of Fire, Pamela Reed in The Long Riders, Rachel Brosnahan in Dead for a Dollar). Which is all great, but it’s not that exciting dramatically since JZ’s basically the same character as Ripley, which means there’s no room for conflict between the characters, which you need for a series. If JZ was, say super chatty and Ripley was taciturn (or vice versa) you’d have more tension and fun – ditto if she was super liberal and he was uber conservative (or, again, vice versa), there would be a point of difference. Hill was normally a lot better at making sure his buddy stories featured contrasting types of buddies (Hard Times, Southern Comfort, 48 Hours, Undisputed, Bullet to the Head), although not always. For instance, we have always felt that the biggest flaw in his 1988 action movie Red Heat was that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Russian cop was too similar to Jim Belushi’s Chicago police officer: both were gun blazing let’s-ignore-the-law types when the film needed to lean into the promise of the premise more, namely the differences between communism and Capitalism (imagine Red Heat with Arnold as a Russian cop having to team up with, say, a fully capitalist crook like Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours – then you’d have a fun movie and it might have been the blockbuster everyone expected it to be). Hill made the same error with Dog and Cat.
The casting for the series didn’t help this issue. When Dog and Cat hit the screens, JZ was played by a 24 year old Kim Basinger, fresh off the catwalk (she made this only one year into her acting career – that’s how charismatic she was) while Ripley was depicted by 43 year old Lou Antonio, a super experienced actor and TV director blessed with looks that might best be described as “cuddly character actor”. Not only is Antonio old enough to be Basinger’s father, he’s not handsome enough for her. For Dog and Cat to really work, either Basinger needed someone younger and hotter (Robert Urich, say) or Antonio needed someone older and less supermodel-ly (eg Barbara Bain), or, if they were wedded to casting Antonio and Basinger, they should have made it more of a father-daughter vibe. To be fair, maybe the show settled into its rhythm – we’ve only seen the pilot not any of the six episodes made. The show didn’t last long – it debuted in March 1977 and was axed by May.
When the pilot aired, incidentally, it changed several key things from Hill’s script – relocated some scenes, removed others, adjusted a few stories. The changes weren’t huge – it’s still recognisably the same story and characters – but the adjustments seem to have annoyed Hill: the pilot gives him a “created by” credit but the story is credited to “Owen Morgan”, a nom de plume. The writing credits go to Owen Morgan, Henry Rosenbaum and Heywood Gould – presumably the latter two rewrote Hill. This didn’t seem to affect the relationship between Hill and Gordon, who continued to work together (The Warriors, The Driver, 48 Hours, Streets of Fire, Brewster’s Millions, Another 48 Hours). Kim Basinger, of course, went on to greater things, as did Gordon, and the executive who oversaw the project – Brandon Tartikoff, who wound up being a phenomenally successful head of NBC in the 1980s before dying of cancer aged 48.
Another unexpected influence of Dog and Cat – according to producer Joel Silver – is that a young Shane Black got a copy of Hill’s original script and found it so inspirational it led to Black writing Lethal Weapon. So even if Dog and Cat is a blip in television history, it’s a classy blip.
