Besides being blamed for the demise of movie serials, television was also thought to be the primary cause of declining comic book sales. Whereas estimates of National Comics’ annual comic book sales stood at over 8 million in 1951, by 1962 sales dropped to 6,650,058 comics.8 The drop in sales was also exacerbated by the anti-comics fervor spurred by Dr. Frederick Wertham. In 1954, Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a book that pointed out the violent nature of many comics, the seemingly amoral content and the advertising that often promoted guns, knives and other weapons kids could order through the mail. Wertham blamed comic books for a nationwide rise in juvenile delinquency while labeling Wonder Woman a lesbian and Batman and Robin homosexuals.
After Wertham testified before Estes Kefauver’s Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, the comic book industry, fearing censorship, adopted the self-regulatory Comics Code. The Code provided that “good shall in all cases triumph over evil,” and that “females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.” Within three years of the Code’s enactment, 24 of the original 29 subscribing members went out of business.9 The controversial horror and crime comics of EC disappeared, and the type of superhero comics published by National Periodical Publications became even more simplistic. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the Batman comics became less like film noir crime thrillers and more like sci-fi tinged fairy tales, with Batman and Robin time traveling, turning into aliens, becoming giant-sized, or presented as crime-fighting mummies. There were also additions to Batman’s crime-fighting family, in the form of Ace the Bat-Hound, Bat-Woman, Bat-Girl, and Bat-Mite, a Batman fan who just happened to be an alien from another dimension. The Comics Code erased all traces of Batman as a revenge-driven vigilante. Comics were now sanitized, homogenized, and safe for kids.
The consequences of these changes did not bode well for the Caped Crusader. Sales dropped steadily each year. Editors struggled to find ideas that could inspire covers that would compel kids to purchase the comics. The more absurd the cover, the higher the sales. This led to a vicious circle: someone needed to come up with a story to match the cover, and the stories rarely lived up to the ludicrous cover art. As a result, the attempt to gain short-term sales led to more and more steady readers getting fed up and abandoning the character because of what they saw as silliness. By 1964, it looked as though National Periodical Publications might pull the plug on its Batman comic book title, leaving the Caped Crusader as the star of only one monthly title, Detective Comics (Batman was still also continuing in World’s Finest Comics, where he teamed with Superman).
The live-action series Adventures of Superman had ended its television run in 1958, but the show remained a huge success in syndication, often broadcast daily during the afternoon hours when kids returned home from school. Ed Graham, an ex-advertising executive who became a producer of Saturday morning cartoon fare such as Linus the Lionhearted, saw the appeal of superheroes in the kids market. He optioned the TV rights to Batman from National Periodical Publications in the early 1960s. Graham envisioned Batman as a live-action show that he hoped would have an extended life in syndication, like Adventures of Superman. He struck a deal with CBS to produce a Batman TV series for kids that would run on Saturday mornings, and cast 6’2” Los Angeles Rams linebacker Mike Henry as the Caped Crusader. Reportedly, National Periodical Publications arranged for publicity photos of Henry in a Batman outfit, but these have never been made public.
As months passed, CBS failed to put the show into production. Meanwhile, Batman comic sales continued to fall across all three Batman titles, leading some to wonder why the network would even consider making a show with a character that seemed to be fading. With the project stalled, Mike Henry moved on at the end of January 1964, when producer Sy Weintraub tapped him to play Tarzan for a proposed CBS TV series;10 instead, Weintraub produced three Ape Man movies starring the former linebacker. After the abrupt dismissal of CBS president Jim Aubrey on February 27, 1965, the Batman Saturday morning series was scuttled. Graham then took it to NBC, but they passed. Graham’s attempts to bring Batman to TV had reached a dead end.
Simultaneously with the near-miss activity in television, Batman experienced a remarkable transformation. In early 1964, with sales falling, Julius Schwartz became the editor of Detective Comics and its sister publication, Batman. He engineered an overhaul that instituted “the new look.” Gone was the angular artwork of Bob Kane’s ghost artists; Batman’s new lead artist, Carmine Infantino, drew the Caped Crusader in a more realistic way, with a modified costume that enclosed the bat silhouette on his chest in a yellow oval. Schwartz jettisoned Bat-woman, Bat-Girl, Bat-Mite, and Bat-Hound. Time travel and sci-fi fantasies disappeared from the pages; detective stories returned. The first “new look” Batman appeared in Detective Comics #327, featuring a new red banner. Robin looked 16-years-old rather than 12, and—in order to introduce a female presence in Wayne Manor and, hopefully, stave off further charges of homosexuality—Alfred the butler died valiantly saving the dynamic duo, soon to be replaced by Dick Grayson’s Aunt Harriet.
Between April and May 1964, Batman underwent a transformation in the comic books. The "new look" not only brought Batman's artwork up to date, but also changed the direction of the stories. Detective Comics #326 artwork by Sheldon Moldoff and Joe Certa; Detective Comics # 327 artwork by Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella. (© 1964 National Periodical Publications/DC Comics).
During this time, another force developed that was beginning to shape the world of comics, a force that would ultimately shape the fate of the industry—collectors. The Academy of Comic Book Arts and Sciences was formed in 1962, changing its name to The Academy of Comic Book Fans and Collectors by the time its charter was ratified by 92 fans in 1963. The Academy began giving an annual Alley Award for comic books and published the fanzine The Comic Reader. By 1965, the Academy’s membership had grown to two thousand.11 Like stamps and coins, comic book values rested on their rarity and the demand for them. Wastepaper collection drives during World War II destroyed many comics from the “golden age” of the 1940s. As a result, just over twenty years after they first hit newsstands, early editions of Batman and Superman fetched as much as $100 apiece.12 Speaking to The New York Times in 1965, National Periodical Publications president Jacob S. Liebowitz said the upsurge in comic book trading grew from pure nostalgia, adding, “Many men in their twenties and thirties are having a rebirth of interest in their costumed fantasy heroes.”13
As comic book collecting came of age, so did the influence of pop art. A movement that began in Britain in the mid-1950s and in the United States a few years later, pop art was predicated on the idea that the images and items of common culture—comic books, advertising, even cigarette packs and toilet seats—could be considered works of art. Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings inspired by comic book panels and Andy Warhol’s screen prints of movie stars and Campbell’s soup cans became the most famous examples. By the mid-1960s, the influence of pop art could be seen in magazine and billboard advertising.
The Camp movement also gained media attention in the mid-1960s. In the fall 1964 issue of Partisan Review, Susan Sontag wrote an article called “Notes on ‘Camp’” that was briefly recapped in the “Modern Living” section of Time magazine, and later appeared in the Sontag collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). Though some considered Camp—which seemed to revel in things considered to be “so bad they’re good”—another label for plain bad taste, Sontag admitted that she was strongly drawn to Camp. “Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature,” she wrote. “It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of ‘character’...Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as ‘a Camp.’ They’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.”14
Thomas Meehan, writing in The New York Times in 1965, noted that New York intelligentsia had made a parlor game of labeling t
hings “Camp” or “not Camp,” and had divided Pure Camp into subdivisions—high Camp, middle Camp, low Camp, intentional Camp and unintentional Camp. As examples, Meehan listed Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (high Camp), Winnie the Pooh (middle Camp), Batman comic books (low Camp), Barbra Streisand (intentional Camp) and Lana Turner in Love Has Many Faces (unintentional Camp).15 Meehan noted that Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Uncommon English said that Camp, in the sense of meaning “pleasantly ostentatious,” was part of London street argot as early as 1909.16 Around 1925, Camp came to be a term for “homosexual” in England. Meehan writes, “This is hastily not to say, however, that all those with Camp tastes are homosexuals or that all homosexuals have Camp taste, but rather, as Miss Sontag put it, that ‘homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard—and most articulate audience—of Camp.’”17 Meehan concludes, “Camp not only involves finding fun and delight in things that others find banal, boring, worthless or hopelessly out-of-date, but also involves a certain amount of parody (especially unconscious parody) and what is colloquially known around New York as ‘the put on.’ Anarchic, anti-Establishment and often infuriatingly perverse, Camp is frivolous about serious things and serious about frivolous things, celebrating, as Miss Sontag put it, ‘the contrast between silly or extravagant content and rich form.’”18
While the influence of pop art could be seen in British films of the early 1960s, especially the Beatles’ films A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), and while the James Bond films Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965) introduced a Camp sensibility to moviegoers worldwide, it took Batman to introduce American TV viewers to a potent concoction of comics, Camp, and pop art all in one.
ORIGIN OF THE SERIES
In the early days of television, there were those who believed it would become a great tool for educating the masses, bringing them cultural programs like operas and Shakespeare plays to which they might otherwise never be exposed. Then there were those who saw the proliferation of game shows, sitcoms, Westerns and violent dramas and pronounced TV a “vast wasteland.” William Dozier, who had been involved with television since the early days of its development, saw things another way. Dozier knew that from a network’s standpoint, television was all about the commercials, and the surest way to get the largest audience to view a commercial was to appeal to their basest instincts. “Maybe,” Dozier told Los Angeles Times reporter Charles Champlin, “television is just not supposed to be what we think it ought to be. After all, you don’t expect Woolworth’s to carry Tiffany merchandise.”19 A clear insight into Dozier’s feelings about the television viewing audience can be gleaned from an editorial he wrote in the July 16, 1967 issue of The Los Angeles Times, in which he said, “It is fashionable these days to say television underestimates the taste of the American audience. Nonsense. Time and again it has been proven that the taste of the great majority is pretty low. Given two competing programs, they will invariably watch the bang-up Western or the broad comedy and tune out the show which attempts something better. During my several years tenure as head of production at Screen Gems, one of the series we produced was Dennis the Menace, hardly an intellectual milestone. Nor was it intended to be. It was on the air four seasons, and the night it achieved its highest Nielsen rating in four seasons was the night it was opposite the first half hour of Macbeth. That was George Schaefer’s memorable production with Judith Anderson and Maurice Evans which deserved and won several Emmy Awards. Brilliant as it was, it drove millions of viewers to Dennis the Menace, for the first time, and possibly the last. So much for the public appetite for so-called quality television.”20 A few months later, when Dozier addressed the Publicity Club of Chicago, he said that television was “primarily a merchandising medium, not primarily an entertainment medium. It has been allowed to entertain only if it has sold merchandise. There are countless examples of this in operation. At the peak of its success in the ratings, the original I Love Lucy show was canceled by Philip Morris when its research demonstrated the show was not reaching cigarette buyers. On the other hand, Lawrence Welk has never been a particularly high-rated show, but for a long time has reached an audience which has purchased one hell of a pile of Geritol.”21 It was this sophisticated man, with a supremely pragmatic approach to television production, who would guide the development of Batman on television. Born in the rolling hills of Omaha, Nebraska on February 13, 1908, Dozier attended Creighton University, then sold real estate in Buffalo, Toronto and Indianapolis before moving to Los Angeles in 1934. There, he joined a talent agency and represented such writers as Lost Horizon author James Hilton, Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner, F. Scott Fiztgerald, Dalton Trumbo, Sinclair Lewis, Ketti Frings, and Cornelia Otis Skinner. In February 1941, he became head of the story and writing department at Paramount Pictures, where he stayed for three years before joining RKO Radio Pictures as an assistant to the vice president in charge of production.
William Dozier at a 4th of July celebration in 1965 (© Deborah Dozier Potter).
When his boss fell ill with leukemia, Dozier took over his duties, supervising production of classic films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946). In 1947, he moved to Universal-International as head of production. He had now married actress Joan Fontaine, and started a production company with her, Rampart Productions, through which he executive produced the films Letter From an Unknown Woman, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands and You Gotta Stay Happy (all 1948) while still at Universal. Unfortunately, Dozier and Fontaine did not stay happy; after the birth of their daughter, Deborah, the couple divorced in January 1951.
Relocating to New York, Dozier became head of dramatic programming for CBS and was involved in some of the most prestigious anthology series on television, including Suspense, Danger and Studio One. He also produced the innovative educational series You Are There. In 1953, he married actress Ann Rutherford, and two years later returned to Hollywood as west coast director of television programs for CBS. He briefly returned to RKO as vice president in charge of production in 1956, turning out 12 films in a 14 month period. Then he went back to CBS, supervising series such as Perry Mason, Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke, Playhouse 90 and Rawhide.22
“My father was a very well-educated man,” recalled Dozier’s daughter, Deborah Potter. “He read constantly and he was a major debater in college. He wasn’t the kind of person you usually find in the film business. In those days, you tended to find people who were more interested in literature than you do today. The medium that my father grew up in wasn’t as commercial as it is today. The focus was on trying to recreate culture and put it on television. They put things like Shakespeare on television, and couldn’t understand why the ratings were so low. They were opening up a new medium, and they were trying to transfer theater and other mediums they knew to television. It was in its infancy, really, when my father started out in it.”23
When James Aubrey became president of CBS in 1959, Dozier moved to Screen Gems Inc., the TV subsidiary of Columbia Pictures.24 “When he was at Screen Gems, the shows that he oversaw were Hazel, Route 66 and some of the first generation of shows that were made just for television as a commercial medium, and were tailored just for that medium,” said Potter. “Television went into another phase then, in the early ‘60s. The Donna Reed Show was one of the series he oversaw. Donna Reed and her husband Tony Owen were very close friends of the family. And then my father was approached by Fox to be head of television for Fox, and Screen Gems wouldn’t let him do it. They wouldn’t release him from his contract. Not too long after that, Abe Schneider brought in his son Bert Schneider to run Screen Gems and they phased my father out. It was really unkind. But then, you don’t get into this business for kindness.”25
In 1963, Dozier was running his own production company, Greenway Productions (named after the Beverly Hills street on which he lived), and developing TV shows to pitch to the networks. He worked frequently with a young, quick-witted writer named Lorenzo Semple Jr., a New York playwright who also worked
in early television as a writer on The Alcoa Hour in the 1950s. According to Semple, Dozier “lived in Hollywood but was basically a New Yorker, a highly sophisticated man. He was almost like no other television producer, certainly very few television producers or movie producers. He was an exceptional guy, with a sense of humor, very funny.”26
Semple had contributed short stories to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly and had two plays staged on Broadway, Tonight in Samarkand (1955) and The Golden Fleecing (1959). When the latter was produced as the 1961 film The Honeymoon Machine by MGM, Semple went West and began writing for television. “Bill Dozier was a producer and I knew him socially,” said Semple, “and we tried two or three half-hour comedy pilots that I wrote, and we were unable to sell any of them. So sometime after that, ABC proposed to Bill doing an hour series called Number One Son about Charlie Chan’s son.” The show, according to Semple, would have focused on the famous Chinese detective’s son, now a private detective himself in San Francisco. “So I wrote a pilot, an hour script, and I don’t think it was the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but it was adequate,” said Semple. “We sent it to ABC, and they liked it. And so we were waiting around, and then about two weeks later, ABC called Bill, and said, ‘We are horribly embarrassed, but orders have come down from on high that we don’t want to do anything with an ethnic character.’ And so that sort of put paid to Charlie Chan. And they said, ‘This is very bad of us. And so, we owe you guys one.’”27
Semple returned to writing plays, eventually moving with his family to Torremolinos, Spain, far from the hullabaloo of the TV and film industries. Meanwhile, Jacob Liebowitz, president of National Periodical Publications, was looking for ways to gain exposure for the company’s most popular comic book heroes to help increase comic book sales. He made deals to bring Superman to Broadway as a live show and to Saturday morning television as an animated character. And though the deal with Ed Graham to do a live action Batman for Saturday morning had fizzled, he was still pursuing the idea of launching a Batman TV series similar to the Adventures of Superman series of a decade earlier, which was still a moneymaker in continuous syndication.28
Billion Dollar Batman Page 11
