`They just wanted me to play a harried business guy. They wanted me to portray a guy who had to do the same thing every day, day after day — a guy who is sitting there in traffic, and is stuck in the monotonous commute he’s stuck in every day. And then he looks out the window of his car and he sees someone who gets to live a different way.”
The person speaking — Stu Klitsner, 74 — was telling me about a small part he played in a pilot for a television series more than 30 years ago. As you know if you visit this space every day, the TV pilot turned into a series — “Then Came Bronson” — that ran for only one season: 1969-’70. I loved that series — and especially the brief scene that opened every episode.
Through the craziness of current-day communications, a reader in Salem, Ore. — Bruce Bjorkman — read, on his computer screen, my recent ramblings about “Then Came Bronson,” and wrote me that he knew the man who had played the middle-age businessman in that opening scene. The man, Bjorkman told me, had been a counselor at the northern California junior high school where Bjorkman had been a student in the late ’60s. The counselor had also been an aspiring actor — his name was Stu Klitsner. One day he had been hired for a brief part in a new TV show.
So one thing led to another, and I was able to find Stu Klitsner in Walnut Creek, Calif., where he and his wife of 49 years live in the house where they have lived for more than 40 years. He was surprised that anyone would take the trouble to look for him — but he remembered well the scene that was so indelible to me and, or so I am hearing, to a lot of other people.
“We shot it in San Francisco, on Lombard Street,” he said. “I wore my own clothes — I think I may have driven my own car. We got it in two or three takes.”
In the scene, Klitsner, playing the tired businessman, pulls up to a red light. There he encounters Bronson — played by actor Michael Parks. Bronson is on his motorcycle, heading out to find whatever he can find in America. Their brief conversation at the traffic light — I described it in Tuesday’s column — set the tone for the show.
“I don’t think the producers knew they were going to use it to start every episode,” Klitsner told me. “But then I guess they realized that it summed up the essence of the show in a very few words.
“That scene represented what a lot of guys would say, if they could express their feelings about what they want in their lives, and what is missing. That yearning to try something that will set them free — that one thing they want to do but they’re afraid to do. They’re scared — they’re tied into the security they have worked for, so they don’t go after the dream. The guy I played — the guy at the traffic light — represents who they are. Bronson represented what they wished they could be.”
Klitsner said that, at 74, he is pleased with how his life has turned out. He spent all his adult years working as a school counselor, and was able to do some acting on the side on days off; he and his wife raised three children, and he has few regrets. But does he ever wish that he had pulled a Bronson — that he had defied convention, and given everything up to chase a distant dream?
“Sure,” he said. “I was envious of Bronson, and the chances he was taking. To live freely, without being tied down to a routine. But he was just a TV character — and I was just the other character in the next car.”
I thanked Klitsner for his time, and said that I had to ask him a big favor. It might sound stupid to him — but I had waited all these years, and I had finally found him.
I asked him to run through that opening scene with me.
More Top Picks Dewalt Dcs391b
“On the phone?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Who plays who?” he said.
“You be you,” I said. “I’ll be Bronson.”
And so we did it. Same exact dialogue.
MR. KLITSNER: “Takin’ a trip?”
MR. GREENE: “What’s that?”
MR. KLITSNER: “Takin’ a trip?”
MR. GREENE: “Yeah.”
MR. KLITSNER: “Where to?”
MR. GREENE: “Oh, I don’t know . . . wherever I end up, I guess.”
MR. KLITSNER (after a pensive pause): “Man, I wish I was you.”
MR. GREENE (sounding a little surprised): “Really?”
MR. KLITSNER: “Yeah.”
MR. GREENE: “Well . . . hang in there.”
You know, there are days when I really love this job.
———-
Bob Greene comments on the news of the day Thursdays on the “WGN News at 9.”