A Novel Sleuth : Hollywood Is Seen Through Eyes of a Detective-Writer in TV Series

The Hollywood of an earlier day, when literary legends tippled at Musso & Frank’s, is the setting for a new cable TV series.

Premiering at 7 p.m. Monday on A & E, “Hollywood Detective” is television for people who read.

Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald is a character in the first episode, titled “The Muse.” The show has the droll, literate spin one would expect from cable’s self-styled “arts and entertainment network.” Distinctions are made between authors and writers. And the script is full of Amusing Things English Majors Know, such as Hemingway’s riposte to Fitzgerald’s observation that the rich are different from you and me (the answer, sports fans: “Yes, they have more money”). At one point, a waiter even cracks an Aristophanes joke.

The Depression-Era gumshoe of the title is one Berkeley (pronounced like the London square, not the Northern California university) Nunn. Nunn is not your ordinary private eye, even by Hollywood standards. An aspiring screenwriter with an awful case of writer’s block, Nunn is a sleuth with a novel specialty: He helps literary figures who have come to Hollywood to make big bucks writing movies, only to find their screen-writing efforts stymied by their imbibing or other exigencies. His cards could read “Berkeley Nunn, Private Eye and Script Doctor.”

Star Tony Peck says he took the role after he was told “it’s you. You don’t have to act.” Peck, who recently sold his first script, says he understands Nunn’s anguish at being unable to get further on his script than “Fade In.”

“I know what it’s like to look at that blank page,” Peck says.

An Amherst College alum, Peck also identifies with Nunn’s verbal agility. “He thinks on his feet,” Peck says. “He’s fast. He’s nosy. He knows how to talk his way into a jam as well as out of one.”

Peck, who has completed six episodes of the show, says he loved playing a part so like himself, one that required little artifice on his part. “Nothing could make me happier. You don’t want to see those gears spinning, do you?”

Peck, the son of actor Gregory Peck, says he is a fan of both mystery fiction and true-crime stories. He especially likes Raymond Chandler, one of the writers who helped make Los Angeles the primordial landscape of the American mystery. (There is something irresistible about the notion of evildoing under sunny skies, of unspeakable acts committed in close proximity to palm trees).

Although set in Hollywood, home of fictional Granite Studios, “Hollywood Detective” was shot at the Ventura Media Center in Orem, Utah (the former Osmond Studios). Utah didn’t have an abundance of Bel-Air-style mansions to choose from, but there were lots of authentic-looking motor courts and other buildings, Peck says. The makers of the series found a cache of period costumes at Brigham Young University. And there was no smog. “In our show, we have blue skies,” says Peck. “It’s a color people haven’t seen on their TV screens for a long time.”

The Hollywood of the series is the Los Angeles of the imagination, the one that writers and other artists constantly reinvent.

William Tannen, who directed four of the episodes, including “The Muse,” knew the look he wanted despite a girdle-tight budget. To make sure everyone involved understood what a first-rate period-piece looks like, Tannen sent them off to the video store. “I made them all rent ‘Tucker’ and turn off the audio,” he says.

Like Peck, the director (who lives in Santa Monica) found Utah surprisingly rich in resources. It was tough, however, to shoot exteriors in Utah in winter that could pass for balmy Hollywood. “When you talk, smoke comes out,” he notes.

One of the pleasures of the project, Peck says, was the opportunity to work with his wife, Cheryl Tiegs. (His sister Cecilia Peck is featured in “The Muse.”) Tiegs appears in one of the shows as Blondie, whom Peck describes as “a busty, bar-broad type.”

Nunn is sitting in a speak-easy when Blondie appears at the top of the stairs. “She ends up handcuffing me to the bar rail,” Peck recalls. “It sort of leaves me speechless.”

It left him speechless in fact. Peck was so entranced by Tiegs, he forgot his next line.