Beginning at the 6:21 mark, you will see Peppard navigate a 1941 Packard convertible (certainly his character’s classiest vehicle) down the snow-bordered thoroughfares of Boston’s tony Beacon Hill, and turn into the gated driveway at 85 Mount Vernon Street. I have embedded that full pilot atop this post. It appeared briefly in a number of the show’s episodes, but featured prominently in the Banacek pilot (aka “ Detour to Nowhere,” broadcast originally on March 20, 1972). After that filming wrapped, he recalls, “I removed the brass plaque that was on the front door of Beacon Hill residence”-and kept it as a memento.īanacek’s home (middle) was commissioned by a Boston pol.Īnyone who has watched Banacek will likely remember the gleaming plate to which Marks refers. As Marks tells it, he was on the set of Peppard’s series when its 16th and final regular episode (“ Now You See Me, Now You Don’t”) was shot. Banacek was one of Universal’s properties.
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He told me that, from the 1970s through the early ’80s he worked as “a driver captain in charge of picture cars and drove stunts in many of the cop shows” made by Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Not long ago, I was contacted via e-mail by 73-year-old Stan Marks, who lives in the western Pennsylvania city of Hermitage.
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Instead, they are repurposed for future Hollywood productions or, if they’ve been designed too specifically to use again, they are trashed or reshaped into something different.īut as it turns out, there’s no mystery as to the fate of a brass plaque that once supposedly welcomed guests and clients to the pricey BostonĪbode of a small-screen sleuth named Thomas Banacek, the insurance investigator protagonist (played by George Peppard) in the 1972-1974 NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series Banacek. Unlike, say, the piano played by Dooley Wilson in Casablanca (which was auctioned off a few years ago for $3.4 million), or some of the downed airplane fuselage that backdroppped scenes in Lost (and was purchased for $3,000 in 2010), most such set decorations aren’t recognizable enough to merit collecting.
It’s not often that we learn what happened to the props used on TV shows and in movies.