Articles

Found: Lost Actor - Tony Franciosa returns to TV after years in Europe
by Michael E. Hill - Washing Post - November 4, 1984

Each week in Finder of Lost Loves, Tony Franciosa sets out or find someone with whom someone else is aching to be reunited.

For the last five years, Franciosa's fans might have been anxious to send someone in search of him. The place to look would have been across the Atlantic.

"In the last five years I've done plays and movies in Europe," said Franciosa. The work has ranged from the musical to the macabre and has taken Franciosa from London to Rome to Berlin.

Franciosa, sounding a bit like one of the searching characters from his new show, said,"As much as I adore Italy and England, I live here - all my roots are here."

After five minutes on the phone with producer Aaron Spelling, Franciosa cut a deal that would bring him home to his wife and three children - at least for this TV season.

The assignment was for Franciosa to play an independently wealthy man whose wife has died and whose avocation becomes finding the lost loves of other people.

Sometimes the lost love is an old flame (in a recent episode it was a woman's former boyfriend who had since become a priest) and sometimes not (for example, a Vietnamese child seeking her American father).

The series replaces another Spelling effort, Fantasy Island. Much of the network promotion for Finder made it sound like another series designed to deal somehow with fantasy, and the extensive promotion during the Olympic Games, featuring Franciosa taking pensive walks along the beach, gave the series a moody, nostalgic feel.

"In some segments there's a softness and nostalgia," Franciosa said. "But I don't think that's the style of the piece."

Franciosa's son, Marco, saw the beach-walk promo and was struck with another idea: "Dad," he said, "the promo looks like a life-insurance commercial."

"If there's a style to the show," Franciosa said, "it is to give it a good feeling, upbeat - but to give it a hard edge where it gets soft and a soft edge where it gets hard ... . I see the show as a romantic drama. I'm trying to make the character as real as possible."

The word in Hollywood is that a Los Angeles-area detective does in real life the sort of thing Franciosa does on TV and that his operation provided inspiration for the series.

However, listeners to vintage radio may recall a popular series that inspired both the Los Angeles gumshoe and the ABC series: Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons.

Franciosa, who has kept his hand in American television in recent years through occasional guest shots, was a virtual fixture on the tube as a series star from the mid-60s to mid-70s. In 1964-65, he starred as publishing executive, Farrow Valentine in Valentine's Day, a show in which he was constantly chased by women whenever his mother, played by Helen Traubel, wasn't watching.

In 1972 and 1973, he starred with Hugh O'Brien and McClure in Search, the three playing secret agents who each wore a transmitter and earphone implanted in one ear. And in 1975-76, Franciosa played Matt Helm, a detective surrounded by fast cars and faster women, tailored after the Dean Martin movie series.

Franciosa did his most lasting work in The Name of the Game (1968-71), a series that in some stylistic ways was years ahead of, its time.

"Shows now copy the music from Name of the Game a lot," he said, "and other aspects, too," such as the appearance of many guest stars.

Game co-starred Franciosa, Robert Stack and Gene Barry, each of the three being featured, in turn, in the week's episode. It was, in a sense, three series in one, focusing one week on Barry, head of a publishing empire, then on Stack, who played an editor, and on Franciosa, a reporter. Susan Saint James was assistant to all three.

To some extent, the series was a forerunner of a popular format today in which characters in a series are involved in story lines that stand independently of the others.

"Three separate crews shot eight shows apiece" each season, Franciosa said. "Time could be taken with the scripts. That was extremely helpful. That's why the quality, if I may say so, was on a high order.

"One of the nemeses of TV entertainment is time - there's not time to do things. You go from one thing to another. It's a medium that is voracious."

So far, Franciosa said, Finder is shaping up well despite the constraints. "The front office is very enthusiastic, very up about it," he said. Some of the story lines are a little weak," he acknowledged, "but we're trying to goose those up a bit."
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