Hickey & Boggs
| Hickey & Boggs | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster
|
|
| Directed by | Robert Culp |
| Produced by | Fouad Said |
| Written by | Walter Hill |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Ted Ashford |
| Cinematography | Bill Butler |
| Edited by | David Berlatsky |
|
Production
company |
Film Guarantors
|
| Distributed by | United Artists |
|
Release date
|
|
|
Running time
|
111 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1 million |
Hickey & Boggs is a 1972 neo-noir detective movie written by Walter Hill and directed by Robert Culp.
Culp and Cosby play weary, hard-luck private eyes Al Hickey and Frank Boggs hired to find a missing woman. Their enquiries bring death to almost everyone around them, culminating in a violent and downbeat conclusion.
The script was an original of Walter Hill's who sold it to John Calley of Warner Bros. Hill said he wrote it with Jason Robards and Strother Martin in mind. "It wasn't intentionally written for a black and a white actor," he said.
Calley sent the script to Bill Cosby who agreed to star in the film if Bob Culp would direct. Culp agreed and the film was greenlit. However Culp and Calley disagreed over the budget - originally put at $2.2 million - so Calley sold the script to Culp, who tried to raise the money himself. The budget was revised to $1 million; Fouad Said agreed to provide half the money; the other half came from Film Guarantors, a film financing arm of Taft Broadcasting.
Culp then rewrote Hill's script. Hill said the script changed "by about twenty percent - not in terms of characters but the plot. I did advise the people involved not to play around with the plot because I thought it was a delicate structure, and if you pushed it, pulled it and tugged on it, a lot of it would fall down. But I think the characters help up pretty well."
Walter Hill later said he felt the film "had some nice moments, but it was cast much differently than it was written. I wasn't too excited about it."
When the film was released, the staff at Variety magazine questioned the film's screenplay, writing, "Culp makes his directorial bow and Fouad Said, who started in the industry as cameraman on I Spy series, debuts as a producer. Latter should have paid more attention to story line of the Walter Hill screenplay, which suffers through audience never being entirely certain as to the identity of some of the characters...Somehow, the femme is connected with missing loot but audience is never let in on secret."
In the same vein, The New York Times also panned the screenplay, writing, "...while Robert Culp, who is also making his directorial debut with this caper, shows a flair for action and eye-catching composition in sordid and serene views of Los Angeles where all the shooting takes place, Hickey and Boggs is not involved in a story or with characters really worthy of a full theatrical treatment. Let's say, that Walter Hill, a newcomer to the screen, has written a script that's long on complexity and short on character definition..."
...
Wikipedia