Film pays comic tribute to hip, serious '70s duo

Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson play the pair with their trademark bumbling style.
By DAVID GERMAIN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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 & amp; 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 & amp; 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.
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."
Serious series
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.
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 those guys [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."
Grew up with show
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" lunch box 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."
"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.