Isnam777, you said it all. Miguel Ferrer was so good at portraying a completely unlikable, neurotic prick that you actually liked him! That's a sign of a talented, skilled auteur when he or she can generate strong emotions in the audience.
ADVICE TO RICHARD DEES ON TALKING WITH COPS
In the movie, Richard Dees mouths off to a rural sheriff patrol man while morbidly taking photos of automobile accident victims. He just doesn't mouth off, he gets really belligerent and loud.
I can say this with all accuracy. Do the same thing to a Los Angeles policeman, like Richard Dees did in the move THE NIGHT FLIER, and you (and Richard Dees) would have ended up forced to lie stomach down on the road, spread-eagled. Then Richard Dees' hands would have been roughly handcuffed while the policeman pressed his whole body weight on a knee into Dees' back or on a kidney. Then Dees' would have been hauled to his feet, painfully, and shoved into the back of a black-and-white. Then Dees' would have been transported to Los Angeles downtown and booked for obstruction of justice, interference with a police investigation, and resisting arrest (yep, that's right; Dees would have a hard time proving otherwise). The Los Angeles police and California Highway Patrol have been battling the numerous Los Angeles County and Orange County ethnic gangs for decades now. Those guys would not only laugh at a polite policeman (like the one who backed off of Richard Dees in the movie), the gangbangers would construe it as weakness and fear in the police. As a result they would become even more belligerent and the result might be more violence. Yeah, there were times when the cops went overboard and turned bad like the Rodney King incident, for which they were in the wrong. But in dealing with vicious gangbangers in the southern California region who do things like shoot people as an initiation rite, the cops have to be harder than nails and take absolutely no insubordination or talk back from potential suspects. It's just the way it's become. Now that's not to say that the cops would not treat an obviously ordinary, passive citizen differently. They would show much more deference than to a gangbanger. But in LA, you start becoming belligerent with a cop and they stop becoming deferential to you fast and then in their eyes you look just like another vicious gangbanger out to commit mayhem and violence. And they'll treat you accordingly.
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