Waldo Lydecker

I'll, I'll do a brief recap.

There's, the movie opens, and you're in this apartment, and there's a voiceover, and it's the voice of Waldo Lydecker, who's, like, a, a radio commentator and col- newspaper columnist.

So immediately you can tell he is witty, he's intelligent, he's clever, um, and he's snobby.

He's kind of above it all.

One of the opening shots is him talking about this grandfather clock in his apartment, and he says that, "There's only two of these, and I gifted Laura the other, the other one of this pair.

This clock is also in her apartment," 'cause that comes back later.

So we open, and we meet the detective played by Dana Andrews, and he is going to Waldo Lydecker's apartment, basically to interview Waldo because Laura has been found murdered in her apartment, shot in the face with a shotgun, which is pretty violently graphic for that time.

Even though you don't see it, just to have to think about it.

And there are so many fictional examples of this, uh, throughout the years.

Waldo Lydecker in Laura, or Paul Gerard in the Columbo episode Murder Under Glass.

And then you had the power of real-life gossip columnists like, uh, Walter Winchell or Louella Parsons.

These were individuals who had a reach and an authority in this mass media age they lived in that's really gone by the boards as media sources have become more diffuse, and the reach of any individual columnist or host is quite limited.