THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1972, 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!

1972-73

The 1972 season would turn out to be a disastrous one for ABC, with no shows in the top twelve, which was evenly shared between CBS and NBC. Marcus Welby, MD – which had been the number three show of the 1971-72 season – was their highest placing show, with their next best effort coming in at number seventeen. ABC did have two promising new shows making their bow in Kung Fu and The Streets of San Francisco, but it would be another few years before the Alphabet Network could hold its own in the race for ratings. The sitcom still ruled the roost, with All in the Family, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show all doing good business for CBS, alongside new arrivals Maude and Bridget Loves Bernie (which would end up having just a single season despite good ratings due to threat from the Jewish Defense League over its inter-faith couple).

For NBC, Sanford and Son was a strong number two to Archie Bunker in the ratings, while The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie – a “wheel” show with four rotating features – gave audiences another taste of Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife, alongside less popular newcomer Hec Ramsey. Other new arrivals included The Bob Newhart Show, M*A*S*H, and The Waltons, with Bonanza, Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In all entering their final seasons. Those were all shows that made it to air, though: what about those that fell at the final hurdle? This is the story of 1972’s unsold pilots…

The Eyes Of Charles Sand (ABC): Born Charles F Myers in California in 1920 (and having his first short stories published under that name), Henry Farrell wrote his first novel – The Hostage – in 1959. It was adapted into a movie starring Don Kelly and Harry Dean Stanton in 1967, by which point Farrell had moved into screenwriting himself, scripting episodes of Bus Stop and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as adapting his own unpublished story, “What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte?”, as Hush.. Hush, Sweet Charlotte alongside Lukas Heller. It was through Heller that Farrell earned his big break when the German screenwriter adapted Farrell’s 1960 novel Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? for Robert Aldrich in 1962, the movie earning five Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress for Bette Davis.

Farrell wrote his final novel, Sucha Gorgeous Kid Like Me, in 1967 but kept writing for the screen, delivering original scripts for What’s the Matter with Helen? and for TV movie The House That Would Not Die, as well as adapting more of his previous work, with 1970’s How Awful About Allan, starring Anthony Perkins, again produced as a TV movie for ABC. All were scripts for standalone productions, but Warner Bros Television producer Hugh Benson recognised the potential in another of Farrell’s unpublished short stories for a continuing series, selling ABC on a pilot for consideration for Fall 1972.

The Eyes of Charles Sand starred Peter Haskell as the eponymous successful businessman who wakes from a nightmare, during which he saw his Uncle Edward rising from a coffin and beckoning to him. A phone call informs him that his uncle died during the night and Sands continues to have visions of his dead relative, confused as to their meaning until he is told by his aunt that he has inherited the family gift of “The Sight,” an ability to see premonitions. Approached by a beautiful young woman he saw at his uncle’s funeral (Sharon Farrell, no relation), Sands must use his gift to help her solve the mystery of her brother’s disappearance and possible death at the hands of her brother-in-law…

With backing from Joan Bennett, Bradford Dillman, Ivor Francis, Barbara Rush, and Adam West, and direction from TV veteran Reza Badiyi, The Eyes of Charles Sands premiered on Tuesday February 29^th 1972 as an ABC Movie of the Week, a slot that did huge numbers for the Alphabet network. Its timing couldn’t have been worse, with ABC debuting the similarly premised The Sixth Sense a month earlier, and an ongoing strike by the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America resulting in no music score being credited. Unfortunately, Henry Mancini realised that the producers had used much of his soundtrack for 1967’s Wait Until Dark and sued, winning damages and possibly souring the network on the idea of a continuing show. Whatever the reason, the Eyes of Charles Sand wasn’t picked up and Farrell never wrote for the screen again, leaving behind an unfinished novel – A Piece of Clarisse – when he died in 2006.

Evil Roy Slade (NBC): Jerry Belson was a rookie scriptwriter working his first sitcom job on The Joey Bishop Show in 1964 when he was teamed with Garry Marshall, another young hopeful who’d broken into TV in New York on the Dick Paar Show before moving to Hollywood to work for Bishop. The two hit it off immediately and began a fruitful partnership that included scripts for Gomer Pyle USMC, I Spy, The Lucy Show, and The Dick van Dyke Show, before they created their first original show, 1967’s Hey, Landlord, which starred Will Hutchins as a man who inherits a New York brownstone from his uncle. Hey, Landlord lasted for just one season and the pair had little luck with their next project, a pilot titled Sheriff Who? Starring The Addams Family’s John Astin as ruthless outlaw Roy Slade, it was so named because it would feature a new Sheriff in each episode, the previous incumbent having been offed by Slade and his gang.

Belson and Marshall continued their partnership with their first movie – 1968’s How Sweet It Is, starring James Garner and Debbie Reynolds – and on anthology sitcom showcase Love, American Style, also churning out sensual adventure The Grasshopper and The Murdocks and the McClays, a Romeo and Juliet comedy set in the Appalachians. TV adaptations of Barefoot in the Park and (especially) The Odd Couple brought them success and the confidence to revisit earlier failures, opting to bring back Roy Slade in a more human guise than his previous outing.

Evil Roy Slade again starred Astin as the titular outlaw, but this time he was in love. The meanest villain in the West – as legend tells it, raised by buzzards (and a teddy bear) – had fallen for pretty schoolteacher Betsy Potter (the Perils of Pauline‘s Pamela Austin) and vowed to go straight. Of course, things are never so simple and railroad tycoon Nelson L Stool (Mickey Rooney) wants revenge for all the times Slade robbed his trains, hiring legendary singing lawman Marshall Bing Bell (Dick Shawn) to bring him to justice. The pilot was directed by regular Belton and Marshall collaborator Jerry Paris and came with a supporting cast that also included Edie Adams, Milton Berle, Dom DeLuise, and Henry Norman, airing as part of NBC’s World Premiere Movie showcase on February 18^th 1972.

Despite critical praise, NBC passed on taking Evil Roy Slade to series, and Belson and Marshall dissolved their partnership. Belson had another project – 1973’s Cops – fail to get beyond the pilot stage and wrote beauty pageant social comedy Smile, which starred Bruce Dern and Barbara Feldon. Marshall, meanwhile, recast an episode of Love, American Style he wrote called Love and the Happy Days and managed to sell ABC on a series featuring the Cunninghams, a 1950s Milwaukee family, and their motorcycle riding lodger. Evil Roy Slade became something of a cult classic, especially in the advent of home video, and is still available on DVD for new audiences to fall in love with Astin’s rascal.

Madame Sin (ABC): Bette Davis earned the first of eleven Academy Award nominations as a write-in in 1934 for Of Human Bondage, winning the Best Actress award a year later for Dangerous, and again in 1938 for Jezebel, the role that really made her a star. By the 1950s, though, her career hit a serious decline, matched only by her troubled personal life, and it wasn’t until 1962’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, when she played a demented former child star opposite Joan Crawford as her more successful sister, that she got things back on track. Dead Ringer and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (which was also written by Baby Jane author Henry Farrell) followed but things began to slide once more, and The Decorator, a sitcom she made for Aaron Spelling, got only as far as the pilot stage.

With Hollywood about to enter the savage cinema decade of the 1970s, Davis remained focussed on securing a weekly TV show and in 1972 she made two pilots with the hopes that one of them might stick. The Judge and Jake Wyler was written by Richard Levinson and William Link, co-creators of Columbo and Mannix (and later Murder, She Wrote), and starred Davis as Meredith Leland, an alcoholic former judge who runs a private detective agency with her ex-jailbird partner, played by Doug McClure. NBC decided against taking the show to series, and a further pilot featuring Judge Meredith – with Lee Grant in the role – was rejected by CBS a year later.

The other pilot Davis made in 1972 was part of a deal that ITC Entertainment had with ABC to develop properties that could work on both sides of the Atlantic. Filmed on location in London and the Scottish Highlands, and at Pinewood Studios in London, Madame Sin starred Davis as the eponymous international crime maven, with a script by Barry Orringer and David Green, who also directed and would later adapt Godspell for the big screen. Robert Wagner played Anthony Lawrence, an ex-CIA agent abducted by Sin and taken to her headquarters in Scotland, where she demonstrates her latest technology. Showing him evidence that his partner (Catherine Schell) was killed on the orders of his superior, she recruits him into her organisation, but he later discovers it was a ruse and secretly plots against her.

By the end it is revealed that Madame Sin was one step ahead of him the whole time and, if it had been picked up as a series, Madame Sin would have been unusual (if not unique) in featuring a villain as its protagonist. Despite some decent scenery chewing by Denholm Elliott and Gordon Jackson, ABC passed, showing the pilot as a TV movie in January 1972, with a theatrical release in the UK following in April. Davis tried again a year later with Hello Mother, Goodbye, playing the unsupportive mother of an engineer launching his own mail-order company and thereafter settled into guest roles in both film and television, right up until her death in 1989.

Baffled (NBC): Post-Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy spent two seasons as a replacement for Martin Landau on Mission: Impossible, a show he had been strongly considered for the original cast before ultimately deciding to go with space bound adventures as Mr Spock. Once his stint with the Impossible Missions Force had ended, Nimoy made a Western with Yul Brynner (1971’s Catlow) and appeared in an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, but he clearly wanted to find a regular series of his own, one where he could be the star rather than the sidekick.

In 1972, that chance arose thanks to Norman Felton, a British-born producer domiciled in the US since he was a teenager, where he directed what is considered to be the first daily soap – These Are My Children – in 1949, and later developed the Man from UNCLE and Dr Kildare for NBC through his Arena Productions company. Felton and Arena had partnered with ITC Entertainment on Strange Report in 1969 and despite a disagreement over the second season of that show being filmed in the US (it wasn’t, bringing an early end to the show), they remained open to working together again. That chance arose with Baffled!, an inappropriately titled psychic powers yarn scripted by veteran TV writer Theodore Apstein, who had worked with Felton on The Eleventh Hour and Dr Kildare.

Apstein’s story centred around race car driver Tom Kovack (Nimoy), who – in the middle of a race – starts having psychic visions of a manor house, of a woman coming down the stairs, and of himself being pushed off a cliff. After crashing his car, he gives a post-race television interview which is witnessed by paranormal expert Michelle Brent (Susan Hampshire), who is just about the only one who believes his story of extra-sensory perception. They attempt to solve the mystery of his visions, a quest which leads them to a remote manor house on the English coast and a young American film star and her mother, all already very familiar to Kovack…

Nimoy’s Kovack is miles apart from his Spock, a laid-back playboy who favours emotion (and pretty women) over logic, and backing comes from Ray Brooks, Vera Miles, Rachel Roberts, and country singer Jewel Blanch. The whole thing is taken very seriously by all involved, even when it liberally borrows its denouement from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, but NBC weren’t convinced that the set-up was worthy of an ongoing series and passed. Nimoy tried again a year later, starring alongside Henry Fonda and Larry Hagman in The Alpha Caper, a prospective pilot for a series called Crime for ABC, but that, too remained unsold, and he instead reprised his Mr Spock role in Star Trek: The Animated Series, as well as making his first steps into directing on another episode of Night Gallery. Baffled!, meanwhile, was aired as a TV movie on NBC in January 1973 and was given a theatrical release in the UK with a cut that runs ten minutes longer than the US version.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Schoolhouses rock with 1972’s new kids’ shows!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

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

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

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: 1971 (part 1, 2)

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