THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1965, part 3

Written By:

Alan Boon

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

1965-66

Six years into its eventual fourteen-season run, Bonanza was the king of TV in the 1965-66 season with a massive 31.8 rating, four ratings points higher than its nearest rival – Gomer Pyle, USMC – but five points lower than the previous year. It was a downturn that would continue in 1966-67 and, aside from the adventures of the Cartwrights on the Ponderosa ranch, NBC did not enjoy the best of years, their second highest rating show coming in at twelfth, as wacky spy show Get Smart debuted. CBS had much better form across the board, with Gomer Pyle joined in the top ten by The Lucy Show, The Red Skelton Hour, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and new arrival Hogan’s Heroes, while ABC looked to Bewitched and new sensation Batman, two high rating genre shows in a fertile period for such fare.

Other notable shows making their debuts in the 1965-66 season included talking pig sitcom Green Acres, eventual soap juggernaut Days of Our Lives, quiz shows Supermarket Sweep and The Newlywed Game, and a clutch of new genre outings as The Wild Wild West, Lost in Space, and I Dream of Jeannie all made their bows. They joined The Addams Family, The Avengers, The Flintstones, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Munsters, My Favorite Martian, and The Man from UNCLE as America embraced the fantastic, but those were all shows that made their mark on the annals of TV history: what about those that didn’t make it past the pilot stage? This is the story of four unsold pilots…

Who Goes There? (CBS): The 1950s heralded a new era in American film, one where science fiction expanded into feature length movies rather than the serials of the 1930s and 1940s. Although many of these films were B-movies (a term which came to denote a genre rather than its original use of a supporting attraction), several broke through into the national consciousness, no doubt helped by the fact that they were all allegories for the fear of Communism, anyway. In 1953, Jack Arnold directed It Came from Outer Space, a film based on a script by Ray Bradbury, which doubled its budget at the box office and saw Barbara Rush win a Golden Globe for best newcomer. Arnold followed up with Creature from the Black Lagoon a year later, and 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, after which he left the sci-fi genre, priced out of the market by cheap imitators.

After working in England on The Mouse That Roared, Arnold turned to TV, directing episodes of Peter Gunn and Mr Lucky, also turning his hand to comedy with Gilligan’s Island, where he was also executive producer. It was in this vein that he worked with scriptwriter George Beck to create Who Goes There?, a proposed sitcom for CBS that starred Pat Hingle as the ghost of Lieutenant Colonel George A Custer. Beck was a founder member of the Writers Guild of America West, with several successful films under his belt before he, too moved into TV in the 1950s.

Hingle was an interesting choice for comic leading man, given his roots lay in the Actors Studio, where he enrolled in 1952. Hingle made his Broadway debut in End as a Man in 1953 and was uncredited as barman Jocko in Kazan’s On the Waterfront in 1954. He appeared in the original Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, and was originally cast in Richard Brooks’s Elmer Gantry, only to suffer an accident at his apartment building and Burt Lancaster ended up playing in the role. Hingle went back to the stage, making guest appearances in TV shows such as The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone, and the odd small film role before answering Arnold’s call.

Hingle’s ghostly Custer was accompanied by his Native American sidekick Running Dog (comedian Ben Blue) as they haunted a house that used to belong to one of his descendants, emerging from a painting to cause mischief for the new owners, the Woodly family. Dad Tom and mum Helen (Curtis Taylor and Lisa Gaye) are soon frustrated by their visitors, but children Liz and Larry (Kym “Gretl von Trapp” Karath and Randy Whipple) enjoy the hijinks. The pilot wasn’t one of those taken to series, but Whipple starred in one that was, My Mother the Car, and probably wishes he hadn’t. As for Arnold, he continued to direct films and TV into the 1980s, including a long stint on The Brady Bunch, but he never again returned the genre where he broke so much new ground.

Hercules (ABC): While most were probably satisfied with whatever technicolour escapism was projected onto their drive-in screens, some 1965, moviegoers no doubt wondered why the latest “sword and sandal” (known in Italy as péplum) epic, Hercules and the Princess of Troy, came in at just forty-seven minutes long. There was a solid reason, but it probably wasn’t available to many outside Hollywood at the time, and that’s that the film was originally made as a pilot for a proposed Hercules TV series on ABC. As with many sword and sandal films, Hercules was an Italian and American co-production, a combination which would also result in the classic spaghetti westerns in the 1960s and shlock horror movies into the following decade.

Hercules was Joseph E Levine’s baby. A dressmaker turned restauranteur from Boaton, who married a dancer and opened a movie theatre in Connecticut, Levine founded Embassy Pictures in 1942, and the distributor hit the big time in 1956 when they bought the US rights to the Japanese film Godzilla, dubbing most of the footage into English and shooting new scenes with Raymond Burr. The re-titled Godzilla, King of the Monsters brought in over $1 million at the box office from a promotional outlay of less than half that, and he followed the formula with French film Attila in 1958. A year later, he imported an Italian movie titled Le Fatiche di Ercole (or The Labours of Hercules), which starred American bodybuilder turned actor Steve Reeves.

Again re-dubbed and edited – the roar of the Cretan bull at the end of the movie was borrowed from Godzilla – the movie became a huge hit, earning over $5 million at the box office. Reeves had already made a sequel for the Italian market, which was duly bought by Embassy, and the studio also imported films by Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman in a most unlikely mix of art-house and low-budget action. Schlock was still their bread and butter, though, and – returning to their most valuable cash cow – Embassy sought to break into the TV market with a TV series starring Hercules.

Obviously, Reeves would have been the first choice for the role, but the star had significantly upped his fee after receiving injuries filming The Last Days of Pompeii for Sergio Leone in 1959 and would soon retire from acting. In his place came former lifeguard Gordon Scott, who had starred as Tarzan in six Sol Lesser productions in the previous decade before moving into the Italian péplum market. With director Albert Band helming a script by Larry Forrester and Ugo Liberatore, the Hercules pilot sees the legendary hero saving Diana Hyland’s Princess Diana and the city of Troy from a sea monster, but ABC were ultimately uninterested. Levine wasn’t a man who would waste a finished product, however, and the re-titled Hercules and the Princess of Troy (or Hercules versus the Sea Monster in some markets) was presented as a third film in the Hercules series, released theatrically as part of a double- or triple-bill.

Dream Wife (CBS): Second only to Bonanza in the 1964-65 Nielsen ratings, the debuting Bewitched worked its magic on the American public right out of the gate. Eventually running for eight seasons, the “suburban housewife is secretly a witch” sitcom broke new ground with its depiction of a woman as an active rather than passive character and may well have been an allegory about a having to pretend to be straight when you want to be gay and fabulous, but most viewers probably stuck around for the snappy dialogue and, well, have you seen Elizabeth Montgomery? With Bewitched such a hit for ABC, the rival networks scrambled to find their own magical love stories, with NBC’s I Dream of Jeannie debuting on September 18^th 1965, two days after Bewitched season two began. CBS, though, didn’t have their own take on Samantha and Darrin’s domestic drama but that wasn’t for want of trying…

Stanley Chase was an aspiring writer with a passion for the theatre. After graduating from New York University, he produced an off-Broadway production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera which ran for an incredible 2,600 performances, launching the careers of actors such as Bea Arthur, Ed Asner, and Leonard Nimoy. Chase went on to produce several Broadway hits but moved to Los Angeles with ex-model wife Dorothy Rice, where he met screenwriter Robert Kaufman, a writer on The Bob Newhart Show, while Rice was making a cameo on the show.

Inspired by the success of Bewitched, Chase and Kaufman cooked up a script about an ordinary housewife with a husband and young boy, who also happens to have psychic powers. Titled Happily Ever After, the script was picked up by MGM who sold CBS on a pilot. Shot at the MGM Studio, with actor turned director Don Taylor behind the camera, the pilot starred Shirley Jones, the first and only singer to have been under contract to Rodgers and Hammerstein in the mid-1950s, starring in Carousel and Oklahoma! and later winning an Oscar playing against her wholesome type in Elmer Gantry. A reliable leading lady in big screen romantic comedies, Happily Ever After was her chance to break out as a star in her own right.

Alongside Jones’s Lisa Michaels, Don May – who would go on to appear in a massive 2,769 episodes of long-running soap opera The Edge of Night – was cast as her husband, Paul, with Kelly Corcoran as their son, Tommy. They are unaware she has psychic powers, her secret known only to the wacky Professor De Pew (John Abbott), and her abilities are as liable to get her into kooky escapades as they are to prove useful, although they do eventually, of course. A change of title – to Dream Wife – was made ahead of the final presentation to CBS, and Hedda Hopper’s gossip column in the Los Angeles Times suggested a series had been greenlit for September 1965. By that point, though, Jones was pregnant with third son Ryan and Dream Wife remained a fantasy.

Steptoe And Son (NBC): Joseph Levine was the ultimate “fingers in pies” man, and as well as bringing Japanese monster movies, sword and sandal epics, and art-house classics to the USA, he was also almost responsible for the US version of Steptoe and Son, seven years before Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson opened their junkyard in Sanford and Son. The British show was spun out of an episode of Galton & Simpson’s Comedy Playhouse, a weekly showcase for writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson after their association with Tony Hancock had ended and the comedian had moved to ATV. Episode four of the new series, which went out in January 1962, was titled “The Offer,” and featured the now familiar pair of old man Albert Steptoe and his son, Harold, who yearns to escape the junkyard life his father has seemingly trapped him in.

A claustrophobic and hilarious two-hander, “The Offer” led to a full series, which duly began in June 1962. Steptoe and Son eventually ran for eight seasons –from 1962 to 1965 and 1970 to 1974 – and became one a beloved British comedy institution, and it is a rarity in early British TV history that every single episode still exists. Until a few years ago, that wasn’t the case with the 1965 US version of the show, although some would argue that nothing of value was lost.

Having secured the rights to adapt “The Offer” as a pilot for NBC, Levine entrusted Phil Shuken – a reliable hand with multiple credits including The Beverley Hillbillies and The Real McCoys – with revising the screenplay. Screen veteran Lee Tracy, who began his film career in 1928 and almost derailed it five years later while filming in Mexico and allegedly urinated onto a military parade from his hotel balcony, was cast as the duplicitous Albert. Tracy had just been nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Best Man and so was quite a get for the production, but there was more of a question around their Harold, Aldo Ray, who’d only just returned to acting after a two-year break, his move to the UK in 1960 at the end of a prize contract with Columbia not panning out.

Whereas the original script was a two-hander, Tracy and Ray were joined in the pilot by guest stars including Jonathan Harris (about to star in Lost in Space) and future The Hills Have Eyes star Cordy Clark, and other differences saw Albert carousing with beatniks, and he manages to trick, rather than guilt, Harold into staying with him at the end of the show. The magic wasn’t there, though, and NBC passed on a series. It was to be Tracy’s last screen credit before his death three years later and it was thought the footage had been lost until it was discovered in Ray Galton’s basement, having been gifted to him by Levine in 1971. Subsequently cleaned up and released on DVD, what could have been is now available for all to see.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Up and at ‘em? Saturday mornings in 1965!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1965 (part 1, 2)

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1967 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1970 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)