Angels Assemble!

For a concept so solidly bedded in the 1970s, CHARLIE’S ANGELS keeps coming back. This year’s film, the latest in a series of twenty-first century revivals, will once again see a trio of adventuring female private investigators do the bidding of the mysterious Charles Townsend, with Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott, and Ella Balinska as the titular troika. But how did this concept, equal parts women’s liberation and male titillation, get off the ground in the first place? And what in the blue hell was the Alley Cats? STARBURST does some investigating of its own…

- Alan Boon

CHARLIE’S ANGELS was the brainchild of Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, a pair of jobbing screenwriters who won accolades in the forties and fifties for the James Cagney gangster flick White Heat and the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (also starring Cagney). By the sixties, Goff and Roberts had turned to television, and had their first small screen hit with The Rogues, a show about a trio of conmen who could be hired for the right price and for the right mission. The pair had their first big hit with Mannix, a show they joined from its second season, revitalising the flagging series with significant stylistic and narrative changes. Mannix was notable for its often unlikeable hero, and Goff and Roberts installed an assistant rather than a boss, played by Gail Fisher, who became one of the first female black actors to be given a regular series role on US TV. When Mannix ended, the duo became lead writers on the TV spin-off of Logan’s Run, before being given the greenlight to develop Charlie’s Angels in 1976.