Best known for his role as Moe Green in The Godfather, Rocco won an Emmy for his role as a talent agent in The Famous Teddy Z, starring Jon Cryer (of Two and a Half Men and Pretty in Pink fame), one of those shows that critics loved but that could not find a durable audience.
You know why The Godfather has achieved the status it has? Every great movie has two, three, four iconic, memorable scenes. Virtually every scene in The Godfather is memorable: for its dialogue, for the shift in the power dynamic, for some bit of bravura acting, for ratcheting up the tension just so. Every single scene. There is no fat in that script; it’s all meat and muscle. Never has a film done better by a novel than this one.
Here’s a clip from just one of those scenes, where Alex Rocco made his acting bones (although, quite frankly, he makes a gesture that seems false to Moe Green but true to a guy named Rocco).
And here was the original CBS promo for The Famous Teddy Z:
ANTHONY SACRAMONE 