Fame Is the Name of the Game (1966) is an American TV-movie, that aired on NBC and served as the pilot episode of the subsequent series The Name of the Game. It was directed by Stuart Rosenberg. It was produced by Ranald MacDougall, who also wrote the teleplay, from the novel Three Women by Tiffany Thayer.
The film stars Tony Franciosa as investigative journalist Jeff Dillon. It also presents the screen debut of 20-year-old Susan Saint James as Peggy Chan, Dillon's new editorial assistant. (In the series, St. James's character is renamed Peggy Maxwell, and she is the research assistant to all three of the rotating lead characters.) In the film, Jeff Dillon writes for Fame magazine, a publication of Janus Enterprises, and Glenn Howard (George Macready) is just the managing editor. In the subsequent series, Dillon writes for People magazine, a division of Howard Publications, and Glenn Howard (Gene Barry) is head of the whole company.
The telefilm also features Jill St. John, Jack Klugman, and Robert Duvall.
In the weeks before the telefilm's first broadcast, NBC ran an unprecedented blitz of TV ads which erroneously billed Fame is the Name of the Game as television's first "world premiere" of a "major motion picture". The film garnered phenomenal ratings leading to the spin-off series.
Read more about Fame Is The Name Of The Game: Principal Cast
Famous quotes containing the words fame is, fame, the and/or game:
“To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)