Brad Pitt, Robert Zemeckis, Kirk Douglas, and the most star-studded failed pilot episode in TV history
With the current ‘Golden Age’ of television showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon, more and more of the industry’s biggest and most prestigious names will continue taking their talents to the small screen, but don’t count on Brad Pitt being one of them.
Alongside the likes of Tom Cruise, Christopher Nolan, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Denzel Washington, Pitt has never shown any interest or inclination to follow former collaborators and fellow heavy hitters Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, or Al Pacino to the small screen.
The last time the two-time Academy Award-winning actor and producer played a recurring role on the tube came in 1990, when he appeared in six episodes of Glory Days, and beyond the odd cameo or guest appearance on things like Friends and Jackass in the decades since, he simply doesn’t do television.
However, back in the early 1990s, before he became a star, Pitt played a leading role in one of the most ludicrously stacked and star-studded rosters ever assembled for a pilot episode. And yet, despite the murderer’s row of talent on display, it wasn’t picked up for a full series order, which boggles the mind.
How stacked are we talking, here? Well, beyond Pitt, 1992’s anthology experiment, Two-Fisted Tales, was split into three segments that were directed by Robert Zemeckis, Fright Night‘s Tom Holland, and Lethal Weapon‘s Richard Donner, respectively, and that’s merely the tip of an incredibly prestigious iceberg.
Zemeckis and Donner also served as executive producers, where they were joined by action movie savant Joel Silver and The Warriors‘ helmer Walter Hill, in the hopes of establishing the format as a spinoff to the fellow EC Comics adaptation, Tales from the Crypt, but for whatever reason, nobody took a chance on it.
As for the cast, Donner’s western-inspired segment, Showdown, Holland’s street-racing, Pitt-led King of the Road, and Zemeckis’ war story, Yellow, roped in Kirk Douglas, David Morse, Lance Henriksen, Dan Aykroyd, and more, not to mention The Shawshank Redemption‘s Frank Darabont scripting Showdown and Predator scribes Jim and John Thomas penning Yellow.
The big names still weren’t done there, either: Warren Zevon composed the score for Holland’s instalment, Zemeckis brought in his regular composer, Alan Silvestri, for Yellow, while Donner also recruited a familiar face to have four-time Grammy winner Alan Kamen write the music for his contribution.
Despite a murderer’s row of past, present, and future household names, Two-Fisted Tales aired once in January 1992 on Fox before the network passed on the chance to make it an ongoing thing. Instead, all three segments were repurposed and incorporated into Tales from the Crypt episodes, and it’s hard to imagine any executive turning down so many big names in the current era of prestige TV, where the bigger the stars, the more likely viewers are to watch and subscribe.
