I was a regular fan of this talk show; and it was fun to see Regis become Numero uno several decades later with his own hit show. The episode I recall in vivid detail was when Robert Culp was a guest; I had been a fan of his as well from the I SPY series. This was in 1969 and Culp was going on a mile a minute about Sam Peckinpah -he had just seen a screening of THE WILD BUNCH and was quite accurate in prognosticating its soon to be historic nature in film history. What was most interesting to me was Culp's outspoken politics on this segment -he was perhaps the first person to take the tack that THE WILD BUNCH was about the Vietnam War and how important it was for filmmakers to take a stand. This really impressed me, because ordinarily Bishop and most of the other entertainment/talk shows of the day, were rather frivolous (Culp's segments were more like watching a guest on Irv Kupcinet, Lou Gordon or Alan Douglas, among the serious talkers).
I later discovered that Culp had worked quite a bit with Peckinpah and was a fan going in. But I shared his enthusiasm for THE WILD BUNCH and have had a lifelong interest since in Sam's work, both his TV episodes and body of feature films. I remember a couple of years later defending (to the death!!) what I consider to be Sam's masterpiece on the subject of the territorial imperative, STRAW DOGS, but to this day I remain in the minority on that one. I advise anyone interested to do what I did: read the novel SIEGE AT TRENCHER'S FARM, which has sketches of the house's layout and is very explicit about what is being defended, actually and symbolically, in the film; I read the paperback while the film was in production and it helped set me up for what apparently remains cryptic and pointless to the majority of film fans, who routinely reject it as "not up to his westerns". Ignorance of film (and TV) history runs rampant: Cornel Wilde's films on the subject: THE NAKED PREY and to a lesser extent NO BLADE OF GRASS remain woefully unknown compared to the latest flavor of the week.
