I like this old show-I catch it on METV. Anyway, I had a few questions:
-Jim Rockford lives in a decrepit old trailor parked in a lot in Malibu Beach-is this for real? (Malibu has the most expensive real estate in the USA!)
-Is the little restaurant nearby still in existence?
-Malibu Pier- who owns it? Is it free to the public?
A down and out PI living in Malibu on a shoestring-is such a scenario even possible?
- It’s parked in a parking lot, not on a private lot.
- Yes. It is now called “Paradise Cove Beach Cafe.”
- IIRC the pier is owned by the State of California
- Sure.
Was Malibu the most expensive real estate in the US in the 70s?
Great book on the subject with lots of behind the scenes stories and trivia: Thirty Years of The Rockford Files
If you like The Rockford Files, you should check out the movie Marlowe. Garner plays Philip Marlowe in that movie but for all practical purposes he’s playing the character that would become Jim Rockford.
I was about to ask how he could afford that cool car when he was living in a trailer in a parking lot.
Then I realized I was confusing RF with Mannix.
And James Garner with…the guy that played Mannix.
Man, I am so old.
Mannix drove a cool car … like Rockford’s gold Pontiac? :dubious: 
I never wondered how he could afford one gold Pontiac, but it got destroyed at least twice. I always wondered how he could replace it.
Googling the Mannix car it appears that there were more than one. I was thinking of the green sixties Dart with mild customization. It doesn’t do much for me now but when I was a kid it seemed cool.
IIRC he mentioned insurance in at least one episode.
He generally spent a scene or two yelling at the person he held responsible for the damage and getting them to agree to pay the bill (sometimes in exchange for some favor he had done or would do for them).
That is a pretty cool car, but I don’t remember Mannix being identified with it the way Jim Rockford was with his Pontiac. Not only was it wrecked more than once, he was continually abusing it with rough high-speed chases and whatnot. One memory I have of my dad’s last visit to Minnesota is him watching Rockford and moaning “That poor Pontiac!”
Mike Connors (I actually remembered this)
Maybe so. But at least we’re younger than James Garner (84) and Mike Connors (87).
I loved this show when I was a kid - I was way too young to be allowed to stay up late enough to see it, and way too young for this grownup a show when it premiered, but since I was in the hospital and there was no one around to tell me not to, I saw the premiere, and somehow managed to keep watching it when I got home.
The two cases I’m thinking of are when he used it to help slow down the truck carrying T.T. Flowers and Rocky, and the time it got blown up by the dock workers who thought Rocky knew about their plan to hijack a shipment of furs. I don’t remember the perps paying either time, and Jim’s insurance premiums must have been through the roof.
His trailer got (partially) blown up once, too; Korean-era grenade in the skylight over his bed, but it was fine by the next episode.
Don’t forget the time his brakes were cut and he had to drive into a mound of dirt to stop.
Actually, I think that happened more than once.
Someone put a tank of nitrous oxide in his car, he got loopy, and (I think) drove through some hedges and into someone’s yard to stop. And there was the time Fred Beamer stole his identity while he was on vacation and dented every corner of the Firebird, but I don’t think it was totaled either time.
We used to love the show back in the day, but we tried watching recently and found it tedious and predictable and … well, boring. We started with season 1, I think, and maybe we should look again at a later season?
Probably not - I don’t recall the show changing much over the years. I watched a couple seasons while home sick last year and enjoyed, but a lot of the pleasure was vintage car-spotting.
I remember his gold Pontiac being chased by two hitmen in a Vette. Rockford escaped by power sliding up next to a police car stopped giving a ticket.
Stuart Margolin and then Noah Beery Jr. were two pretty likeable co-stars of his. Margolin was known from Kelly’s Heroes and Love American Style and Beery from westerns like Red River.