There was nobody cooler in the 70s than Rockford, or for that matter, the guy who played him - James Garner. With his Firebird and beachside L.A. trailer, no one could touch the wrongly accused ex-con turned detective on The Rockford Files. And if his on-screen counterpart Jim Rockford had some tough breaks, off-screen actor Garner had some lucky ones. He was signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1956, with only a small non-speaking part in a Broadway play and a few commercials to his credits. In his first film role, The Girl He Left Behind (1956), Garner so impressed director David Butler in his small part that Butler helped Garner land the lead in the TV series Maverick. Garner's work in movies took off as well, with parts in Boys' Night Out (1962), The Great Escape (1963) and Support Your Local Sheriff (1969). And in 1974, TV came calling once again with an offer for The Rockford Files, the show that would finally help Garner shed his Maverick cowboy image. The series ran six seasons on NBC, peaking at number twelve in the ratings for its first season. After that, The Rockford Files began to drop down in the Nielsen ratings, falling out of the top 20, but Jim Rockford did find his place among TV's best loved detectives. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the six Rockford made-for-TV movies filmed since the series ended in 1980, with the most recent being The Rockford Files: If It Bleeds... It Leads (1999). It seems neither fans nor Garner want to let Rockford retire.