THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 - PART 4

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 – PART 4

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!

1979-80

Brand new for 1979, ABC’s That’s Incredible was became the third most watched show in 1979, completing a top three that also saw the alphabet network’s Three’s Company come in at number two, well behind the current affairs juggernaut of 60 Minutes. Otherwise, CBS dominated the ratings, even if it was saying goodbye to Hawaii Five-O. From Alice in fourth, down to the debuting Archie Bunker’s Place in eleventh (and taking in M*A*S*H, Dallas, and The Dukes of Hazzard, the Tiffany network was riding high, something that really could not be said for NBC, who had just three shows in the top twenty-five for the year and would soon bid farewell to old favourite The Rockford Files as it entered its final season.

There was no let up from CBS, either, with Flo, Dallas spin-off Knots Landing, M*A*S*H spin-off Trapper John MD, and the Salem’s Lot mini-series all arriving. ABC countered with Benson and Hart to Hart, while the peacock network pinned their hopes on The Facts of Life, The Misadventures of Lobo, and Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century. For genre fans, Buck joined Fantasy Island, Mork & Mindy, Salvage-1, and The Incredible Hulk, but those were all shows that made it to air… What about the ones that fell at the final hurdle? This is the story of four more unsold pilots from the 1979 season…

Doctor Franken (NBC): With a twist of fate, the short-lived Struck by Lightning may not have been the only 1979 TV show inspired by Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, but rather than a whimsical sitcom (albeit one built around a possibly homicidal monster), Doctor Franken would have been very serious business indeed. Initially titled The Franken Project, the show was the brainchild of Jeff Lieberman, a writer-director who had made a sensational start to his career with 1976’s Squirm, a low-budget horror flick about electrically charged carnivorous earthworms. Lieberman followed that up with Blue Sunshine a year later, where a series of murder victims are linked by a batch of LSD they took a decade before.

His script for The Franken Project centred on Dr Arno Franken, a brilliant yet reckless surgeon at a New York hospital, who keeps a comatose “John Doe” patient alive in a secluded hospital room, periodically adding body parts and spare organs to prolong the patient’s life. After the hospital becomes suspicious, Franken moves the patient to the basement of his house, but it is discovered by a rival doctor, whose attempt to kill the experiment ends up with Doe revived and the doctor dead. With John Doe wandering the streets in search of the families of those whose body parts he inherited (and presumably righting wrongs as he goes), the scope for a wandering the Earth-style show is established, one with a very inhuman human angle.

The Franken Project was picked up by Titus Productions, a company founded by producers Herbert Brodkin and Robert Berger in 1965 and which had recently produced the Emmy Award winning mini-series Holocaust. Titus sold NBC on a pilot and Lieberman was hired to direct, with Robert Vaughn – who had just starred in the Colorado-specific mini-series The Centennial – cast as Franken. Joining Vaughn in the cast were Dark Shadows’ David Selby as the evil Dr Foster, Teri Garr (who’d appeared in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein five years earlier) as the girlfriend of the man who gave the patient his eyes, and virtual unknown Robert Perrault as Doe himself. As the pilot neared completion, Berger and Brodkin began to voice concerns about Lieberman’s direction, eventually bringing in Holocaust director Marvin J Chomsky to oversee the completion of the project, for which he was given a co-director credit.

NBC wound up passing on taking The Franken Project to series but did seek to recoup their losses by airing the pilot as a TV movie, part of The Big Event – their renamed NBC Sunday Night Movie slot – in January 1980. It met with a generally favourable response, but the ship had sailed by then, with Vaughn extremely busy, Lieberman going back to his roots with slasher camp schlocker Just Before Dawn, and Titus Productions preparing for a sale to Taft Broadcasting, but not before trying pretty much the same thing again with 1981’s The Henderson Monster, starring Stephen Collins as a maverick scientist tinkering with DNA, only with more talking and Christine Lahti.

Samurai (ABC): The kung-fu craze that gripped the US in the early 1970s had largely subsided by 1975 when James Clavell reignited popular passion for the Orient with Shōgun, his bestselling novel about a 17^th century Englishman who travelled to Japan and rose to high rank in the service of a shōgun, a military ruler appointed by the emperor. Although it was the third in Clavell’s series of novels set in feudal Japan, the novel became a sensation, selling six million copies by 1980, when it was adapted into a blockbuster TV mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain.

Beating Shōgun to air by a year would have been Samurai, created by Jerrold L Ludwig, a seasoned scriptwriter with credits for Hawaii Five-O, Police Story, Mission: Impossible, and more on his résumé. Since creating short-lived spy series Assignment: Vienna in 1972, Ludwig had written several unsold pilots, including Wheeler and Murdoch, The Log of the Black Pearl, and early Tom Selleck and Robert Ulrich project Bunco, often in conjunction with Eric Bercovici, who would go on to write… Shōgun. Ludwig’s concept for Samurai, however, was much nearer to the stories of the earlier kung fu craze, the story of Lee Cantrell, a young Asian American lawyer from San Francisco who prosecutes criminals by day and fights them at night, grabbing his gi and his samurai sword to dispense the justice the courts often cannot provide.

Produced by Danny Thomas (The Mod Squad) and Fernando Lamas, and directed by Le Mans director Lee H Katzin (who’d also worked with Ludwig on Mission: Impossible), the pilot saw Cantrell do battle with a crazed businessman who has built an earthquake machine that could trigger the San Andreas fault and destroy California. Cast in the lead role was Joe Penny, an English-born actor with just a handful of roles under his belt, mostly as the best friend or sister’s boyfriend character, but who would go on to co-star in Stephen J Cannel’s Riptide and become Jake alongside William Conrad’s Fatman in the long-running eponymous series. Back-up came from a checklist of “what was he in?” actors, including James Shigeta as Cantrell’s mentor Takeo, Dana Elcar as District Attorney Boyd, and Norman Alden as Lieutenant di Nito, Cantrell’s friend on the force, while Charles Cloffi played Amory Bryson, the villain of the piece.

ABC were interested enough to order a pilot but rather than take it to series, they burned it off as TV movie in April 1979 in the hole in their schedules between Monday Night Football ending and the start of Monday Night Baseball. Richard Chamberlain and Shōgun would arrive fifteen months later, by which time Katzin had returned to Police Story and Ludwig was working on Jessica Novak, a series about a human-interest TV reporter that did get picked up by CBS, although only seven episodes aired before it was cancelled. Today’s FBI fared slightly better at nineteen episodes, but it was work for hire thereafter, including stint as a producer on MacGyver and Murder, She Wrote.

S*H*E (CBS): The release of Dr No in 1962 made James Bond a household name, launching a craze for spy films, TV shows, comic books, and novels that exploded in the mid-1960s. Dozens of movies were released each year, all featuring their own take on the debonair spy. A distaff version of the suave secret agent appeared a year later in the comic strip Modesty Blaise, although Honor Blackman’s Cathy Gale had slunk her way onto The Avengers in September 1962, with Emma Peel and Tara King following in her footsteps further into the 1960s. Modesty Blaise herself received a film adaptation in 1966, and The Girl from UNCLE enjoyed a solitary season that same year, but otherwise the vast majority of cinematic and televisual spies continued to be white males like Bond himself.

In 1974, Police Woman became the first hour-long TV police drama to feature a female main character and networks began scrambling for similar, XX-chromosome thrills. Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts created Charlie’s Angels for ABC in 1976, with the three principles veering from private detective to outright espionage work, and NBC’s The Bionic Woman was a very action-oriented female hero, but CBS wanted their own slice of the woman spy pie, which is where Richard Maibaum comes into – or rather, back into – the story. A prolific screenwriter either side of service in World War Two, Maibaum was hired to script Dr No alongside his friend Wolf Mankowitz. Their original script was rejected after they made Dr No a monkey and Mankowitz walked, but Maibaum submitted a second draft, filmed with further tweaks by Johanna Harwood and Berkely Mather.

Maibaum worked on most of the Bond films that followed, receiving sole writing credits for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Live and Let Die, and was one of many writers who contributed to the script for The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977. When the series producers decided to give Moonraker to Christopher Wood, Maibaum instead wrote his own spy script, one featuring a female version of 007 instead. Maibaum’s script for S*H*E: Security Hazards Expert was bought by Martin Bregman, a former night club agent who’d moved into movies with 1973’s Serpico, which he followed with Dog Day Afternoon in 1975 and The Next Man a year later.

Envisaging S*H*E as the first in a series of TV movies, or as the pilot for a weekly network show, Bregman went big on the cast, hiring Omar Sharif to play the villain of the piece, and bringing Anita Ekberg back to the screen for the first time in seven years. Bregman cast his then-wife Cornelia Sharpe in the lead role of Lavinia Kean, aka S*H*E, touring Europe to thwart the machinations of Sharif’s Italian blackmailer. Maibaum had already written a follow-up, but CBS – and the cinema-going audience when it was later released theatrically – were just not interested in a sexy female Bond. Instead, Maibaum returned to the real thing, working on every Bond film until his death in 1991.

Young Guy Christian (ABC): It’s quite possible – probable, even – that a few things might be omitted when Shelley Long talks of her long career in TV and movies, a career which exploded thanks to her role in Cheers as Diane and took in box office hits before returning to TV in Modern Family. After making her dramatic debut in an episode of The Love Boat in 1978, Long guested in an episode of family yarn Family a year later, and then appeared in a TV movie alongside Natalie Wood in The Cracker Family. If things had gone slightly differently, her next role might have been her first as a series regular, leaving her unavailable to for Cheers and altering the course of history as we know it. Of course, that would also have needed for Young Guy Christian to be actually funny, so it’s fair to say that the universe got this one right.

Young Guy Christian was created by Jerry Belson and Michael Leeson, two experienced scriptwriters who had first worked together on the TV version of The Odd Couple. Belson had broken into TV with his original writing partner Garry Marshall (who would go on to create Happy Days) and was one of several uncredited writers on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while Leeson had written for The Partridge Family, Happy Days, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-offs, Phyllis and Rhoda. The pair concocted a show whose title character, although ostensibly the hero of the piece, was an inept socialite, who bumbled his way through to a successful climax, thwarting the villain of the week with plenty of slapstick along the way.

Starring as Guy Christian was Barry Bostwick, a fascinating character who started out as a part of a rock theatre troupe before the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus hired him to be part of a clown-themed rock band called The Klowns. The Klowns produced just one minor Billboard hit – “Lady Love” – and Bostwick went into musical theatre, becoming the original Danny Zuko on Boradway in Grease. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (in which he played uptight Brad) followed, but Bostwick found it hard to secure major roles and went back to TV, appearing in an episode of Charlie’s Angels before being cast as Guy. Pat Morita – in between stints on Happy Days – co-starred as Professor Mishugi, with Long playing Mishugi’s daughter Mia, and the regular cast would have been rounded out by Richard Karron as Guy’s hulking android assistant, Junkman.

The thirty-minute pilot saw Guy tackle the evil Dr Gasss (played by Charles Tyner, Boss Higgins in Cool Hand Luke), who has kidnapped six Miss Planet contestants and will only agree to return them in return for the components to build a hydrogen bomb. Needless to say, after some smooching and plenty of misunderstandings, our hero succeeds in saving the day, but despite Junkman promising there would be plenty more catastrophes that would need their attention, Guy Christian was never called upon again.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Yet more failed pilots! What was going on in 1979?!?

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

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

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

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)