Man with a Camera | |
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Original title card
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Genre | Crime / Drama |
Written by | James Edmiston Paul David Wilton Schiller |
Directed by | Paul Landres Gerald Mayer |
Starring | Charles Bronson |
Theme music composer | Herschel Burke Gilbert |
Composer(s) | Leon Klatzin |
Country of origin | USA |
Original language(s) | English |
No. of seasons | 2 |
No. of episodes | 29 |
Production | |
Producer(s) | Don W. Sharpe Warren Lewis For MWC Productions, Inc. |
Location(s) | Hollywood, California at Desilu Studios, doubling for New York City |
Cinematography | Paul Ivano Robert B. Hauser Black-and-White |
Running time | 30 minutes |
Release | |
Original network | ABC |
Original release | October 10, 1958 – February 8, 1960 |
For other uses, see .
Man with a Camera is an American 1950s television crime drama starring Charles Bronson.
Throughout the 1950s, Bronson spent most of his early acting career performing in TV shows as well as small parts in films, until he landed the lead in this ABC series. This is the only series in which he played the lead role. He would go on to have supporting roles either as a guest star or a recurring character in dozens of TV shows after this series was cancelled.
Bronson portrayed Mike Kovac, a former World War II combat photographer freelancing in New York City who specialized in getting the photographs that other lensmen could not. He usually assists newspapers, insurance companies, the police and private individuals, all of whom want a filmed record of an event.
By often acting as a private eye, Kovac gets himself into plenty of trouble involving criminals of every kind, helping with cases the police could not handle.
Besides an array of cameras for normal use, for surreptitious work Kovac employs cameras hidden in a radio, cigarette lighter and even his necktie. He also has a phone in his car, and a portable darkroom in the trunk where he could develop his negatives on the spot.
Kovac's police liaison is Lieutenant Donovan (James Flavin), though he frequently seeks advice from Anton Kovac (Ludwig Stössel), his immigrant father.
Man with a Camera was filmed on locations in Hollywood (doubling for New York City) at Desilu Studios. The series had two abbreviated seasons in 1958-59 and 1959–60 and was aired on the ABC-TV network, Friday nights at 9:00 pm. The entire run of the series' 29 episodes was released in 2007 by the Infinity Entertainment Group, in collaboration with the Falcon Picture Group and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, from which the source prints were obtained.
Alpha Video has released three individual volumes on DVD, each containing four episodes from the series. A fourth volume is slated to release on February 25, 2014