Trivia: Actor/director/producer William Conrad started his professional career as a musician. After World War II service, he began building his reputation in films and on Hollywood-based radio programs. Due to his bulk and shifty-eyed appearance, he was cast in films as nasty heavies, notably in The Killers (1946) (his first film), Sorry Wrong Number (1948) and The Long Wait (1954). On radio, the versatile Conrad was a fixture on such moody anthologies as Escape and Suspense; he also worked frequently with Jack "Dragnet" Webb during this period, and as late as 1959 was ingesting the scenery in the Webb-directed film 30. Conrads most celebrated radio role was as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, which he played from 1952 through 1961 (the TV Gunsmoke, of course, went to James Arness, who physically matched the character that the portly Conrad had shaped aurally). In the late 1950s, Conrad went into the production end of the business at Warner Bros., keeping his hand in as a performer by providing the hilariously strident narration of the cartoon series Rocky and His Friends and its sequel The Bullwinkle Show. During the early 1960s, Conrad also directed such films as Two on a Guillotine (1964) and Brainstorm (1965). Easing back into acting in the early 1970s, Conrad enjoyed a lengthy run as the title character in the detective series Cannon (1971-76), then all too briefly starred as a more famous corpulent crime solver on the weekly Nero Wolfe. Conrad's final TV series was as one-half of Jake and the Fatman (Joe Penny was Jake), a crime show which ran from 1987 through 1991.

Trivia: Most of actor Steven Keats' earliest film appearances were in such New York-based productions as 1974's Death Wish (in which he played Jack Toby). It was in one such film, director Joan Micklin Silver's Hester Street (1975), that Keats was top-billed as Jake, the young progressive Jewish-immigrant husband of traditional old-world bride Carol Kane. Other films to Keats' credit include the memorable The Gambler (1974) and such forgettables as Turk 182 and Eternity. Steven Keats was also seen in the leading role of garment czar Jay Blackman on the 1977 TV miniseries Seventh Avenue.

Trivia: Actor Peter Haskell has from time to time showed up in theatrical films (he was in two of the three Child's Play flicks), but the lion's share of his work has been on television. Haskell has starred or co-starred in such made-for-TV films as The Ballad of Andy Crocker (1969), The Eyes of Charles Sand (1970), The Phantom of Hollywood (1973), The Night They Took Miss Beautiful (1977) and The Cracker Factory (1979). His many regular weekly series assignments include Bracken's World (1969-71), as producer Kevin Grant, and The Law and Harry McGraw (1987), as assistant district attorney Tyler Chase; he was also seen on a daily basis in the soap operas Ryan's Hope and Rituals. In all of his appearances, Peter Haskell seems to have been born sitting behind an mahogany desk while wearing a three-piece suit.