Local Child Actor (not Macaulay Culkin) Missing
We can't recall ever seeing the Beethoven movies and we're not rushing to get them into our Netflix queue right now either, as much as we love sordid local child actor stories. Apparently Joe Pichler, labeled "former child actor" by the AP, is whereabouts unknown with only a suicide note to feed speculation. The suicide note was found in his car along with two pages of poetry, actually. Port Madison Narrows is the reported location of the seemingly abandoned automobile and for the purposes of this post we're calling that local enough.
That same AP report claimed that Pichler appeared in two of the dog movies, but he doesn't appear to be in Beethoven TOM or Beethoven's 2nd which leaves Beethoven's 3rd where he appears behind only Judge Reinhold and Julia Sweeney. Conspicuously absent from that list is the series star Charles Grodin. Aha! Beethoven's 4th actually exists and does contain the missing Joe Pichler. He also appears in the DeNiro/Snipes 1996 film The Fan.
From the P-I:
Kathy Pichler said the last outgoing call on her son's cell phone was placed at 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 5 to a friend who told her they had been drinking alcohol earlier that day and had written some poetry together."There was no goodbye," she said of the cryptic note.
A native of Bremerton, Pichler was in a commercial for a Seattle department store at age 6. He moved to Los Angeles and appeared in "The Fan" in 1996, "Varsity Blues" in 1999 and the third and fourth installments of the "Beethoven" series, featuring the humorous adventures of a St. Bernard, in 2000 and 2001.
