Comic duos Stiller, Wilson revive 'Starsky & Hutch'

LOS ANGELES -- Ben's Starsky and Owen's Hutch.

This is the story of how the bumbling comic duo of Stiller and Wilson came to stand in for the hip and able grandpappies of buddy cops in "Starsky & Hutch," the big-screen version of the 1970s TV series.

Real-life pals Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson have teamed up on half a dozen movies, "Meet the Parents," "Zoolander" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" among them. "Starsky & Hutch" makes the most of the on-screen personalities each actor has cultivated -- Stiller the tightly wound fanatic, Wilson the laid-back bad boy.

When the TV show premiered in 1975, curly-haired brunette Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) and blond Hutch (David Soul) already were amigos, a team whose strengths and weaknesses nicely complemented each other.

Back to the beginning

Set in the '70s, the movie version goes back to the beginning to show how Starsky and Hutch first partnered up and the growing pains as the salt-and-pepper pair struggled with their wildly different approaches to crime-fighting.

"We just kind of did it almost as if this was the original pilot of 'Starsky and Hutch,' and then they ended up firing us and hiring Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul," Stiller told The Associated Press in an interview alongside Wilson. "Two cooler guys. That was sort of the idea behind the tone of it."

The series had comic undertones but essentially was a straight-ahead police show with two long-haired, street-chic undercover cops standing in for the prim, polite officers of earlier crime stories such as "Adam-12" or "Dragnet."

The movie aims for laughs, putting Starsky and Hutch through action-comedy paces as they are reluctantly hitched by their captain and set out to pursue a drug dealer (Vince Vaughn) peddling a dangerous new type of cocaine.

Huggy Bear and the Torino

Snoop Dogg plays Starsky and Hutch's flashy underworld snitch, Huggy Bear. And of course, the movie co-stars the coolest of cool cop cars -- Starsky's red Gran Torino with the white stripe.

The car becomes the centerpiece of some key sight gags, and Starsky and Hutch come across more like Curly and Moe as they blunder through some less than stellar police work.

"Some of the comedy maybe in our movie came from the fact that in Glaser and Soul's Starsky and Hutch, there was some kind of inherent coolness in the way they work that I don't think we quite have," Wilson said. "Ben and I try, but in trying to kind of match that, maybe we fall a little short, and that's where some of the humor comes from."

Stiller, 38, and Wilson, 35, grew up with "Starsky and Hutch" in the '70s. The son of actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Stiller recalls playing "Starsky and Hutch" on the streets of New York City. Wilson had a "Starsky and Hutch" lunchbox and the Hot Wheels Gran Torino as a boy in suburban Dallas.

They are among millions of men worldwide in their 30s and 40s who got early lessons in the school of cool from watching "Starsky and Hutch."

'You're the man'

"I can't walk the streets of London without some guy in his mid to late 30s coming up to me and saying, 'You're the man,"' said Soul, who lives in England. "These people just identified with these two characters. They were new. They weren't cops first, but people first."

"They were multidimensional characters, and also, this was the advent of the buddy show. The two friends who did things together in all aspects of their lives, not just work," Glaser said.

The movie includes several nods to the original actors, including Wilson crooning "Don't Give Up On Us," Soul's 1970s pop hit. Glaser and Soul turn up briefly in their Starsky and Hutch personas, hesitantly passing the baton to Stiller and Wilson.

A look at some other past police partners from movies and television:

DRAGNET: The 1950s version of the TV series paired Jack Webb's Joe Friday with officer Frank Smith (Ben Alexander), while the late '60s incarnation had officer Bill Gannon (Harry Morgan) riding shotgun for Friday.

ADAM-12: The show that debuted in 1968 presented Martin Milner and Kent McCord as uniformed cops cruising through beat-patrol scenarios more realistic than most Hollywood police offerings.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION: Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle and Roy Scheider's Buddy Russo were the ultimate bad-cop, good-cop partnership -- Doyle's coarse bigotry offset by Russo's nice-guy demeanor.

HILL STREET BLUES: Bobby Hill and Andrew Renko, Neil Washington and J.D. LaRue, Lucy Bates and Joe Coffey. The 1980s series produced a parade of great cop partnerships.

BEVERLY HILLS COP: Eddie Murphy's streetwise Detroit detective headed west in the 1984 action comedy and its two sequels, forming an unlikely buddy-cop trio with two mannerly local detectives (Judge Reinhold and John Ashton).

LETHAL WEAPON: The 1987 caper and its three sequels established Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as THE buddy cops. Gibson's initially suicidal Martin Riggs and Glover's conservative Roger Murtaugh proved an inseparable opposites-attract friendship.

NYPD BLUE: Since the series debuted in 1993, it seems as if Dennis Franz's Andy Sipowicz has gone through more partners than Elizabeth Taylor. He's had four sidekicks, played by David Caruso, Jimmy Smits, Rick Schroder and Mark-Paul Gosselaar.

RUSH HOUR: East met West in Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker's 1998 action comedy and its sequel. Chan played Hong Kong inspector Lee, reluctantly teamed with Tucker's motor-mouthed Los Angeles detective James Carter.

-- The Associated Press