the watch of time

“In the first draft of the script, Kolchak was wearing Bermuda shorts, socks and brown shoes, a Hawaiian shirt and a golf cap.  Apparently, somebody thought that was the uniform for a newspaperman in Las Vegas. But there was a line in there about him wanting to get back to New York, so I got this image of a New York newspaperman who had been fired in the summer of 1962 when he was wearing a seersucker suit, his straw hat, button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and reporter’s tie, and he hasn’t bought any clothes since. Well, I knew that was the summer uniform of reporters in New York of that time, so that’s how the wardrobe came about.  I added the white tennis shoes, and that was Kolchak.  It might have been totally at odds with what everyone else was wearing in Las Vegas, but… You need goals for character, and Kolchak’s goal is to get back to the big time.”

Excerpted quote from Darren McGavin re portraying Carl Kolchak in “The Night Stalker” from The Night Stalker Companion (1997)