John David Carson - Film Career

Film Career

Carson's first feature film was Pretty Maids All in a Row in 1971, a sex comedy set in a high school, also featuring Rock Hudson. Carson portrayed "Ponce de Leon Harper", a nerdy and sexually inexperienced young man who is tormented with lust at the pretty young women around him at school and suffers from chronic priapism. Ponce is eventually "mentored" by his guidance counselor, played by Hudson, an expert at seducing younger women, who takes him under his wing and persuades an attractive female teacher to sleep with him. This film was directed by Roger Vadim and the screenplay was written by Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame. Besides Hudson, the cast also included Telly Savalas, Angie Dickinson, Roddy McDowall and James Doohan – by all rights, an "all-star" cast both behind and in front of the camera. Nevertheless this was an anomaly of Carson's career, and he was thereafter relegated mostly to background roles despite his standout performance.

Aside from Pretty Maids All in a Row, Carson's most notable role was in the 1976 film Stay Hungry, alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jeff Bridges and Sally Field. He portrayed the notorious troublemaker "Halsey", whose obnoxious antics and mockery of Joe Santo (Schwarzenegger) touch off one of the primary conflicts of the film.

Carson appeared in a great deal of television productions, including Hawaii Five-O and Charlie's Angels, typically playing bit parts. He portrayed "Jay Spence" on Falcon Crest, a prime-time soap opera. He played "Larry Burns", a television repairman who is framed for a woman's murder by a corrupt sheriff, on Murder She Wrote and an Irish jockey named "Kevin Ryan" on Charlie's Angels. He appeared in various B-movies such as Empire of the Ants – an adaptation of an H. G. Wells story about gigantic, man-eating ants – and The Creature from Black Lake, and acted alongside George C. Scott in The Day of the Dolphin. He again appeared opposite Scott, playing his character's son, in The Savage is Loose. Carson continued acting in small parts up until 1990, appearing in the Julia Roberts hit Pretty Woman, which marked his very last appearance on film. He voluntarily retired from acting after this role.

He wrote a screenplay while living in Las Vegas, which was semi-autobiographical and reflected the trials and experiences of his life as an actor. George C. Scott was to be featured in it, though the character representing Carson would be played by a young, "unknown" actor with the same background as himself. Scott, who was close with Carson, was to help produce the screenplay; after Scott's death, the plans for production were abandoned. The current whereabouts of the screenplay are not known.