Last year on Super Bowl weekend, "Taken," the hard-boiled action film starring Liam Neeson as a former CIA operative trying to track down his kidnapped daughter, became a surprise box-office hit that ended up grossing more than $145 million domestically. Nobody was more surprised at the film's success than its director, Frenchman Pierre Morel, who suddenly found himself fielding calls from a handful of industry executives eager to hire him.

Tom Braden, a former CIA operative who became a syndicated newspaper columnist, liberal co-host of the CNN talk show "Crossfire" and author of "Eight Is Enough," a 1975 memoir that spawned the popular television series, died of natural causes Friday at his Denver home, his family said. He was 92.

Braden was the father of eight children whose misadventures provided amusing grist for many of his newspaper columns and led to the ABC comedy-drama "Eight Is Enough," which aired from 1977 to 1981 and starred Dick Van Patten as Tom Bradford, a Sacramento columnist with a brood of children ages 8 to 23.