Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  As early as 1963, ABC-TV vice-president of daytime programming Harve Bennett had been interested in doing a Batman TV series as “a kind of a show like Dick Tracy.” Bennett proposed the idea to the network’s director of program development, Doug Cramer. The idea kicked around for the next two and half years, with the network eventually buying the rights to the character from National Periodical Publications.29

  Finally pushing forward with a Batman series, ABC decided now was the time to make good on an old debt. “I was in New York on a routine business trip, and the Vice-President in Charge of Program Development at ABC, a bright young man named Doug Cramer, asked me to have lunch with him,” William Dozier told Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Fletcher Markle in a TV interview, adding, “and he told me that ABC had recently bought the rights to Batman, not knowing exactly what to do with it or how to do it, just having a kind of seat-of-the-pants hunch that it might be a good television series. And he asked me if I would be interested in producing it in my company at 20th Century Fox, and I was little taken aback because I had never had a Batman comic book in my hands.”30 Dozier quickly rectified that situation; he bought about a dozen Batman comic books, and boarded a flight back to Hollywood. “And I was sitting in an aisle seat,” said Dozier, “doing my homework with five or six copies in my lap, and reading one, not thinking how this would look to somebody, and sure enough a friend of mine who was in the ad agency business in New York who was on the same flight tapped me on the shoulder and he said, ‘Well, I guess those scripts do get dull after a while.’And I couldn’t tell him why I had a lapful of comic books, because it was a big secret, you know, this approaching series.”31

  “He worked all his life, he worked his way through everything, he didn’t have time to read comic books as a kid,” said Potter. “And he got on an airplane with this stack of Batman comic books—and my father’s very dapper, he was probably very well-dressed, wearing hand-made London shoes and some sort of very expensive Alpaca sweater—anyway, there he is with this stack of comic books, and he was laughing out loud and the stewardess was giving him the strangest looks, and when he was reading the comic books, he had the idea to do the show just like the comic books. He was kind of almost the inventor of camp humor, because it was his idea to do them just like the comic books and not try to make it sexy or romantic or high-tech or anything.”32

  When Bob Kane heard that Dozier was producing Batman, he wrote him a letter: “It seems Batman has caught his second wind and is ‘red hot’ now,” wrote Kane. “Judging from the many articles and unsolicited tributes being paid to us this year, I am sure that it will burn up the TV tubes when my ‘cult’ of Batman fans tune in. I really feel this is breaking at a most opportune time.” He closed his letter, “Bats wishes.”33

  As Dozier thought about the idea, he knew who he wanted to write it—the man he called “the most bizarre thinker I knew.”34 Lorenzo Semple, Jr. recalled, “I’m living in the south of Spain with my family, working on a play, and no phone in the house or anything, and I got a cable from Bill, saying, ‘Fly up and meet me at the Ritz in Madrid.’ So I flew up to Madrid and met Bill in the garden of the Ritz, and he pulled something out of his pocket, and he actually was rather shame-faced about it. He said, ‘This is what they have given us,’ and it was a copy of a Batman comic. And I have to say, Bill was very chagrined. It seemed a great comedown to do a comic.”35

  Semple, although not a huge comic book fan, had read some Batman comics in his youth. Looking at the comic book Dozier plopped on the table in front of him, he began to see a way to go with Batman that would be fun. “I said, ‘Terrific idea. I’ll do it.’ And Bill said, ‘How? What are you gonna do?’ And this is the truth, I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll write it, you go back to L.A.’ And Bill went back to L.A. There was no further discussion except that I would write a pilot using one of the four main villains, the Joker, Riddler, Penguin and Catwoman.”

  Semple wrote a pilot pitting Batman and Robin against the Riddler, who sues Batman in an effort to get him to reveal his true identity in court. With it’s absurd leaps of logic and general loopiness, the script set the tone for the series to come. Semple’s Batman/Bruce Wayne is an earnest, overgrown Boy Scout, motivated by the murder of his parents but certainly not tortured by the memory of it. He’s also not quite as bright as Robin, the Boy Wonder, who is usually the first to decipher the wacky clues left by the various villains. The TV Robin’s constant exclamations of “Holy (fill in the blank)” were a Semple addition to the character. “I made up that holy something stuff,” said Semple. “That was never in the comic books. That was based on something from Tom Swift books I’d read when I was a child.”36

  When the pilot script was completed, Semple sent it off to William Dozier. “I have to emphasize, because it’s amusing if you know anything about television, I sent it by mail,” said Semple. “I mean, there was no other way of sending it, except by ordinary mail. I mailed the script from Torremolinos in the south of Spain to Bill, just Air Mailed it. And he got it, and he liked it a lot. He had no suggestions of any kind. He just said, ‘This is great. I love it.’ And he sent it to ABC. And they liked it also a great deal but they were kind of thrown by it. And so I flew to New York, Bill came from L.A., and we met with ABC, once. And Doug Cramer was the guy that was in charge of the project at that time, and the script was very much like the finished thing. I mean it had all those ‘bams’ and ‘pows’ and stuff all written into the script. And they said, ‘Well, good.’ And I went back to Spain, and there never was any notes given or anything, I never had another meeting, with Bill or anybody, but they decided to shoot the pilot. Almost unheard of. No notes from Fox or anybody.”37

  Semple’s script showed a way to approach the material that appealed to the cultured, erudite Dozier, who already had one show on the air—a Western called The Loner created by Rod Serling and starring Lloyd Bridges—and four others in development: Journey Into Fear, an Eric Ambler espionage series; a comedy series for Broadway comedienne Tammy Grimes; They Went Thataway, a Western produced by Dozier’s son; and now Batman.

  “The fairly obvious idea,” recalled Dozier, “was to make it so square and so serious and so cliché-ridden and so overdone, and yet do it with a certain elegance and style, that it would be funny, that it would be so corny and so bad that it would be funny.”38 Though ostensibly a kid’s show, the intent was never to make Batman a program that would only appeal to children, since the purpose of TV programming is to put money in the sponsors’ and networks’ pockets, and children have no real buying power. As Dozier told Judy Stone of The New York Times, “This is a merchandising medium, not an entertainment medium.”39

  “From the very beginning,” said Semple, “Bill Dozier and I had seen millionaire Bruce Wayne and his Bat regalia as classy comedy, hopefully appealing to kids as an absurdly jolly action piece and to grown-ups for its deadpan satire, entirely nonfraught with psychological issues.”40 Dozier was sold on Semple’s take on the material. “That appealed to me,” said Dozier, “and I then began to enjoy it, and I began to enjoy working on it.”41

  By August 25, 1965, Daily Variety was reporting that ABC and 20th Century Fox Television were developing Batman as an “hour-long action-adventure series” for television. The trade paper revealed that the pilot script had been written by Lorenzo Semple, who was due to arrive from Spain at the beginning of September for revisions. Filming was due to begin in October.42

  When Bob Kane got wind of the script, he was baffled by the choice of villain. In another letter to Dozier, he lamented, “The Joker is by far the better known villain to my fans and is truly the arch-enemy of Batman, such as Dr. Moriarty is to Sherlock Holmes. In fact, the Joker was the one who created ‘riddles’ for Batman to solve. In a sense he was the original Riddler and to my thinking is the wildest and most bizarre- looking villain of them all. I can picture him in color, with his chalk white face, green hair and blood-red lips—a combination to chill the most ardent
mystery lovers. I can only hope that you use him in future scripts.”43

  Dozier assured Kane that the Joker would appear in a future episode. But when Kane read the pilot script, he had a few more suggestions for the producer, writing, “I read the shooting script for the pilot and although it is not the mysterious and grim Batman that I have lived with all these years, I realize that your version is an updated ‘camp style’ that is in keeping with today’s TV market a la James Bond and U.N.C.L.E. and that if I were to produce it today, I would do it very much the way you are handling the concept; tongue-in-cheek; along with the pop art feeling. The only suggestion I would like to make is perhaps a combination of a bit of the old, mysterious along with the new ‘camp style.’ This is to say, that when the opportunity in the script affords itself, have a giant shadow silhouette of the Batman cast up on a building or a room, preceding Batman’s entrance. I have done this quite a bit in the comic strip and it is quite effective in establishing an eerie mood, especially with appropriate mysterious music for accompaniment. In keeping with a mysterious mood, Batman could bring his cape up around his face when lurking in dark shadows.”44

  While the TV series was in development, Batman also got a boost from Playboy. Chicago was then the headquarters of the Playboy empire, where publisher Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy Club on 116 E. Walton Street in 1960. He also opened a movie house, the Playboy Theater, which began showing individual chapters of the 1943 Batman serial daily beginning July 9, 1965.45 The screenings became a Camp “happening,” attracting people from all walks of life who came to laugh at the low-budget heroics. “The response was tremendous,” Jerry Dukor, manger of the Playboy Theater, told Clifford Terry of The Chicago Tribune. “People actually walked away from the box office if the serial wasn’t on that night. Woody Allen saw a chapter and he flipped. He came back three times in one week. The audiences were mostly college students or people in the 21-35 age bracket. Some came just to laugh—the film is bad—and some came for sentimental reasons and there was even a hard-core of serial buffs who viewed it as an art form. We showed all 15 chapters through twice and then went into the really good chapters again—the Best of Batman.”46

  The return of the 1943 Batman serial, which became a camp hit in 1965 (© Columbia Pictures).

  On October 9, 1965, Dukor presented all the chapters back-to-back in a marathon that began at midnight and ended at 4:45 AM. By 12:15 AM, all 654 seats were sold out. The price of admission was $1.25, with each patron getting a bat symbol stamped on their hand that would allow them to exit and reenter as they pleased. Daily Variety reported that the screening set a new confectionary record for the venue; in the first three hours of the showing, the theater sold $200 worth of popcorn, along with an almost equal amount of candy bars, peanuts, mints and soda. One man arrived dressed in a Batman costume; at first, filmgoers thought it was Hugh Hefner, but it turned out to be the manager of a rival theater. Approximately 400 patrons stayed till the end. Variety reported one man leaving the theater “flushed from excitement hoarse from shouting,” mumbling, “Man, that was longer than Gone With the Wind.” The screening grossed $850 for the theater.47

  The surprise box-office success of the serial led Columbia to distribute it in other major cities, under the title An Evening With Batman and Robin. Riding the wave of Camp hysteria, it opened at Cleveland’s Continental Theatre on November 24, where it was shown in one four-and-a-half hour marathon, with intermissions after chapters 5 and 10. Posters and newspaper ads for the serial said, “Come to Jeer! Stay to Cheer!—and Vice Versa!”48 It was also booked into the Champaign Art Theatre in Champaign, Illinois where, as in Cleveland, it was held over due to popular demand. Based on the popularity of those tryouts, Columbia booked the serial into theaters in New Orleans, Kansas City, Louisville, Akron, Springfield, Tucson, Toledo, Fullerton, Denver, Dayton, Columbus, Santa Ana and other cities, where it played particularly well among college-age audiences.49 In a Madison, Wisconsin theater, the film grossed $3,204 in one day.50 It was set for a Christmas run at San Francisco’s Presidio Theater.51 On December 22, it opened at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village and the Liberty Theater on West 42nd Street in New York.52

  Legend has it that an ABC executive saw some of the Batman chapters at the Playboy Theater, noticed the audience reaction, and began thinking about a Batman TV series as a mid-season replacement. Harve Bennett’s statements that the show had been in development for two and a half years negate this, as does the fact that the films didn’t begin screening in Chicago until about the time that Lorenzo Semple Jr. was beginning work on the pilot script for the series.

  With the pilot budgeted at $400,000, Dozier set about assembling his cast. Although Alfred the butler had been killed off in the comics, he was resuscitated for the TV show (he was later also brought back to life in the comics). To play the faithful servant, Dozier immediately thought of Alan Napier. “Alan Napier to me has always been the absolute essence of the perfect English manservant or butler,” said Dozier.53 The English actor, a cousin of former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, came to Hollywood in 1939, appearing in a host of films from The Invisible Man Returns (1940) to Lassie Come Home (1943) to Tarzan’s Magic Fountain (1949).

  For Aunt Harriet, Dozier selected another veteran, Madge Blake. The Kansas native entered films in 1949 playing Spencer Tracy’s mother in Adam’s Rib, though Tracy was less than a year younger than she. Her numerous TV appearances included recurring roles on The Real McCoys and Leave It to Beaver. Dozier said, “She had to be very carefully cast because she had to be not a stupid woman, and yet she had to be stupid enough so it never occurred to her that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson could possibly be doing something besides fishing when they say they’re going out fishing.”54

  To represent the boys in blue of the Gotham police force, Semple created the character of Chief O’Hara. “He’s the all-time bumbling Irish cop,” said Dozier, “up from the beat who’s now become chief, worked his way up in the ranks. He’s so stupid he finally became chief.”55 The role was played by Stafford Repp, a San Francisco-born character actor who began as a sound effects man in live television. Repp, who made a career of playing Sheriffs and bartenders in Westerns and policemen and detectives in numerous TV sitcoms, adopted a thick Irish brogue as Chief O’Hara.

  The role of the Gotham police commissioner went to an actor Dozier had worked with previously. “I never at any time saw anybody else in the role of Commissioner Gordon but Neil Hamilton,” said Dozier. Hamilton was a true industry veteran, having begun his career as the star of D.W. Griffith’s silent Revolutionary War epic, America (1924), though late-show viewers remembered him most for his role as Harry Holt opposite Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan and Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and Tarzan and His Mate (1934). “To me, he was the all-time square public servant, dedicated, un-swervable, honest, exemplary and monolithic almost in his dedication to his job,” said Dozier.56

  ENTER LAUGHING

  Casting the pivotal role of Batman was a no-brainer. Dozier knew exactly whom he wanted for the part—Ty Hardin, a 6’2” New York-born actor who had won acclaim on television as the star of the 1958-62 series Bronco, a spin-off of the popular Western series Cheyenne. However, Hardin wasn’t available; he had gone to Europe in search of better roles. “So his agent then very enterprisingly showed me some stills of another client he just happened to have,” said William Dozier, “and I was impressed by this man’s looks, whom I had only seen once in a commercial, and didn’t know his work at all, really.”57 The commercial that Dozier had seen was one for Nestle’s Quik, in which a young, handsome actor with a smooth voice named Adam West played Captain Quik, a spoof of James Bond. Almost a parody of an ad, it ended with the line, “Some people will do anything to get rich...Quik,” which West delivered perfectly.

  Long before he became Adam West, the actor was known as William West Anderson, or Bill to his friends. A product of the American northwes
t, he was born in Seattle, Washington on September 19, 1928. While attending Walla Walla High School and Lakeside School in Seattle, he spent his summers working on ranches or in canneries, saving money for college. After graduating high school, he went to Whitman College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature with a minor in Psychology. During his final year of studies, he married for the first time, to 17-year-old Billie Lou Yeager. Now with a wife to support, he got his first taste of show business as a disc jockey at a local radio station, where he began to think about a career in acting.

  He received an education in the new medium of television when he spent two years in the Army as part of a team assigned to set up military TV stations in San Luis Obispo, California and Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Once out of the service, his childhood friend Carl Hebenstreit invited him to come to Hawaii, where Hebenstreit was co-hosting a comedy variety TV series called The Kini Popo Show with a chimpanzee named Peaches. During the run of the show, Bill Anderson’s first marriage ended in divorce. He soon remarried, to Tahitian beauty Ngatokoruaimatauaia Frisbie Dawson, with whom he had a daughter in 1957 and a son in 1958.

  Besides playing various characters on The Kini Popo Show, Anderson also appeared in small roles in films that shot in Hawaii, including the Boris Karloff thriller Voodoo Island (1957) and Ghost of the China Sea with Jon Hall (1958). When Hebenstreit left The Kini Popo Show, Anderson took over the hosting reins. He also continued acting in local theater productions, and was spotted by a Hollywood agent visiting the islands who thought the young man would be good in Westerns.58