![]() He married Melanie Griffith (twice), set a world record in powerboat racing and released two hit singles (one with his then-girlfriend Barbra Streisand). They have, in fact, been the stuff of legend - not all of which is verifiable, and not all of which he remembers. The decades since “Vice” first made Johnson a star, in 1984, have given him plenty of material. “But he’d think about it first, and make sure it was coming from a good place.” “He would still slap the crap out you,” he adds, using a cruder term. “I imagine him to be wiser, and more thoughtful about things.” “I imagine him to still be very fit, and very capable,” Johnson says of Nash. Ideas derived, perhaps, from his own experience. He wanted to know what Nash - an amiable police inspector and amateur magician who patrolled San Francisco in an early 1970s bright yellow Plymouth Barracuda - would be like 20 years down the road. Those reasons included love, money and the curiosity befitting a man who, at 71, is naturally given to reflections on the ways people change - or don’t - over time. Johnson, who wrote the new movie with Bill Chais, based on the original series created by Carlton Cuse, speaks candidly about his reasons for revisiting the ’90s procedural, in a wide-ranging conversation that also touched upon some of the stories from his younger, wilder days. ![]() “I wouldn’t have been so excited about it if I had to write it for someone else,” he said. ![]() Thompson.įor Johnson, it is also his first time leading a police procedural in two decades. In syndication, the series has found audiences in dozens of countries.Īnd it’s a trivia lover’s dream, with origins tracing back to writer Hunter S. At its peak, Bridges had a sweet prime-time slot and a then-and-still-whopping $2 million-an-episode budget, with a weekly audience of more than 8 million viewers. “And I was curious to see if I could capture that kind of lightning in a bottle again.”Īt first blush, a leading role in the two-hour TV movie revival, Nash Bridges, debuting Saturday on USA, may not seem like the most obvious - or necessary - move for Johnson.īut as with many a CBS procedural, the show’s popularity, and pedigree, belie the relative lack of attention it has received from the chattering classes. “I liked his nimbleness, how he could be funny one moment and dead cold serious the next,” Johnson says on a recent afternoon. ![]() Twenty years on, Nash remains one of Johnson’s favourite roles. The hit series transformed what a police procedural could look, sound and feel like - according to Hollywood lore, the show was pitched as "MTV cops" - and made Johnson an international star.īut there is another, perhaps less appreciated contribution to Johnson’s global celebrity, one that predates his recent supporting roles in critically acclaimed films like Knives Out and TV series like Watchmen.įrom 1996 to 2001, he played the title character in Nash Bridges, a CBS police procedural that, like “Vice,” was set in a gorgeous city (San Francisco) and featured a buddy cop sidekick - played this time by Cheech Marin, one half of the stoner comedy duo Cheech & Chong. In Miami Vice, Don Johnson, as undercover cop Sonny Crockett, tooled around in speedboats and Ferraris, busted gunrunners and dope dealers and somehow made going sockless look good.
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