Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  Dozier himself was enough of a car enthusiast to realize the value of creating a Batmobile that would be more memorable than the nondescript sedans of the serials. He spent $30,000 to create what would become one of the decade’s most iconic automobiles. Custom car maker George Barris, who began designing cars for movies and TV after one of his hot rods was used in 1958’s High School Confidential, knew just the right car for the job. In 1955, Ford’s Lincoln division had developed an experimental concept car called the Futura that was hand-built in Italy at a cost of $250,000. However, although it had been prominently featured in the 1959 Glenn Ford film It Started With a Kiss, the car had never been put into production, so Barris obtained it for the TV series. After meeting with the show’s producers and preparing sketches, Barris was given a contract to create the Batmobile on September 1, 1965. He had just over a month to make the modifications and deliver the vehicle to the studio, where the pilot would begin shooting in October. He delivered the finished vehicle, with its bucket seats and Plexiglas bubble windshields, on October 11. Two months later, on December 21, 1965, he made one of the best car deals in history when he officially purchased the Futura from Ford for $1. After the show premiered, the Batmobile was valued at $125,000; after four decades, it is now valued at $2 million.98 A second Batmobile was created in July 1966 exclusively for touring the classic car circuit.99

  Jan Kemp designed the Batman and Robin costumes, as well as outfits for the show’s villains. Kemp turned to the comic books for inspiration. “I soon realized that the series would require a whole new approach to the question of color and I decided to introduce a new and brighter combination of colors than had heretofore been used on television, and by so doing give my actor characters the same vivacity that their comic strip counterparts had,” said Kemp. “At that time this approach was somewhat radical since the TV medium had been keeping to a sober middle-of-the-range color scheme in most of the shows and productions.”100 Creating the outfits for Batman and Robin, Kemp had to find materials that would be reasonably comfortable for the actors to wear and also durable enough to last through filming of all the action scenes. “For the basic outfit on Batman I decided on Helenca tights and leotards of a good stretch fabric similar to those used in ballet dancing since I knew that these would take a lot of hard work,” said Kemp.101 Since the tights were only available in white or black, he got white ones and dyed them to the gray hue he wanted. He made a cape of blue polished satin and found a similar fabric in stretch satin for the trunks, gloves and boots. The cowl consisted of a plastic bowl-like helmet that fit tightly to Adam West’s head, so that it wouldn’t shift in fight scenes, which was covered in blue stretch satin, except for the upper face portion, which was black satin with white eyebrows painted on. The ears were deliberately made shorter than in the screen tests, so they wouldn’t be out of frame when Batman was seen in close-ups—although it must be remembered that in the 1950s, the Batman of the comics also had short, cat-like ears on his cowl. Instead of the big black bat silhouette seen on the chest of the uniform in the screen test, the TV outfit reflected the “new look” of the then-current Batman comic books, with a smaller bat silhouette encased in a yellow oval. In the end, this was the most accurate live-action representation ever of the Batman outfit from the comics.

  Burt Ward and Adam West ready to leap into action, in their "new look" costumes (Twentieth Century Fox Television/Photofest, © Twentieth Fox Television).

  Robin’s outfit was also spot-on. Kemp again used Helenca tights for Robin’s legs, dyed in a flesh-tone color. The vest was made of gabardine. “I decided on a red fabric I had used some four years previously when I worked on a Fox film in Canada about the Canadian Mounted Police,” said Kemp. “The fabric for the police uniforms was exactly right for Robin’s vest. Finding a yellow satin for the cape and green wool for the trunks was relatively easy, and a leather supply store in downtown Los Angeles had the right leather skins for his gloves and boots.”102 Both Adam West and Burt Ward found their outfits itchy and uncomfortable under the studio lights. “That helmet echoes all my words, and the worst thing for an actor is to hear his own voice,” said West. “And that suit—it’s hot as hell under the lights, and it picks up all the cold at night.”103 West, who wore glasses off-screen, also had difficulty seeing while wearing his cowl, which limited his range of sight like a horse wearing blinders.

  Ward found his flesh-tone tights fit so snugly that he referred to them as his “python pants.” “The costume was uncomfortably hot,” he told Steve Swires in a 1987 Starlog interview. “Man was not meant to wear tights! God forbid if I ever went outside in the sun—I would quickly get a layer of water between my legs and the tights. There is nothing worse than sweating in tights.” Additionally, the tights had a tendency to wrinkle at the knees, so when Ward walked onto the set, he used a stiff- legged gait not unlike that of the Frankenstein monster. Like West, Ward also had issues with his mask. “The mask completely restricted my field of vision,” he said. “Worse than that, my eyelashes touched the mask, which made me blink and irritated my eyes.”104

  On the strength of Lorenzo Semple, Jr.’s pilot script, ABC committed to make sixteen episodes of Batman, with the idea of putting the program on the air in the 1966-67 TV season. However, the network’s current season was a ratings disaster. Their rock music showcase, Shindig, broadcast twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays, fizzled, and the venerable The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which had been on television for thirteen seasons and occupied a Thursday night slot, was also dragging. To win back viewers, ABC settled on a novel idea—the “second season.” They would drop their lowest-rated programs and premiere a handful of new series in January, mid-way through the current TV season. To make room for Batman, they decided to cancel Shindig, move The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet into Shindig’s Saturday time slot, and put Batman on two nights a week, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30 PM.105 “Batman, the series, was scheduled for immediate production even without shooting the pilot script, which now would be simply the series opener,” said Lorenzo Semple, Jr. “Only the most trivial production rewriting was requested, and I was to immediately begin writing the next three scripts, each featuring one of the remaining Big Four villains.”106

  Filming of the initial episode got underway on October 20, 1965,107 with Fox leasing space from Desilu’s Culver City studio, previously the Selznick Studio, where Gone With the Wind was filmed nearly three decades earlier.108 The format of the show called for one-hour adventures to be shown in two parts, the first half-hour on Wednesdays, and the second half-hour on Thursdays. The Wednesday episodes would end with a cliffhanger, with either Batman, Robin or both in mortal peril, as in the serials. And, as in the serials, a narrator would introduce each episode, and provide an overheated closing narration designed to make the viewers tune in the next night, “Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.” When asked who did the narration, Dozier said, “We call him Desmond Doomsday, when we have to tell his name.” Deborah Dozier Potter recalled, “As a kid they’d go to the movie theater and see all these serials, and he wanted a voice like that to be the narrator of the series. And he auditioned all these guys, and none of them could do it, they weren’t old enough. They didn’t know what sound he was looking for. So, he decided to do it himself.”109 When pressed, Dozier admitted, “I do the narration, and I kind of backed into this. We started to do a promotional reel for the network, so they could have something to show advertisers before the show went on the air, and we were putting together a few scenes from the first film, and we needed narration to plug the gaps in it, so I did it. Then when we ran that for the network officials, they quickly said, ‘Who’s that narrator? Have we got him signed for the series?’And I said, ‘No, I don’t think we can get him for the series.’ I strung them along for a few minutes. But then I was stuck, so I had to do it. So I had to join the Guild then, too.” Joining the Screen Actors Guild posed a conundrum for the producer. “I’m just waiting for the day the Screen
Actor’s strike,” said Dozier, “and then I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”110

  Semple claims that he didn’t really discuss much with Dozier, except for the opening teasers, which concerned Dozier because—as executive producer—he received special perks. “As you may remember,” said Semple, “each show started with sort of a teaser in which Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were playing with darts or electric trains or something, and we decided what the teaser would be because Bill wanted to have those toys for himself in his house.”111

  The first episode, called “Hey Diddle Riddle,” co-starred Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. “He was my first notion for the Riddler and never anybody else,” said Dozier.112 “At first, I wanted to turn it down,” Gorshin told Don Page of The Los Angeles Times. “It seemed like a joke—like that old Superman series. But once I saw the script, I flipped. I could see they were going all the way to make Batman good and the idea of bringing a cartoon character to life became appealing.”113

  Though he strove to be taken seriously as an actor, Gorshin was best known as an impressionist, a talent that won him many bookings on TV variety shows and in nightclubs. “I discovered early in my career that I had the ability to do impressions, or assume the attitudes of famous people,” said Gorshin. “I needed money to survive in the business, so I did impressions professionally in small clubs. My first break came when Steve Allen saw me and signed me for his variety show. I did many shows after that and became characterized in TV as a variety performer. Naturally, I went into every producer’s file as a comedian. You see, they haven’t got time to find out if a performer can handle something else, something dramatic.”114 On February 9, 1964, Gorshin landed what he thought was a prime booking—an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. However, the next day, all anyone remembered was the name of the musical guests: the Beatles.115

  Gorshin signed on to play the Riddler at the end of September 1965.116 His contract with 20th Century Fox Television allowed him to walk away from the Batman role whenever he wished, while at the same time guaranteeing him the first chance at playing the role whenever the character was used.117 When he took the role of the Riddler, he was also doing the lead in a pilot called Mr. Z, a spy spoof in the vein of Get Smart!, for Jackie Gleason Productions.118/p>

  Though Gorshin’s high-pitched giggle as the Riddler was thought to be an impression of Richard Widmark’s maniacal Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947), Gorshin sometimes said that he developed it from listening to his own high-pitched giggle at Hollywood parties.119 A more honest answer was the one he gave to Norma Lee Browning of The Chicago Tribune, saying he worried about the laugh a lot at first. “The Riddler is such a bizarre character and I was trying to figure out how to laugh in a way that would be in keeping with his character,” said Gorshin. “I practiced different ways of laughing just to listen to the sound. Then I found I didn’t need to concern myself with the way the laugh sounded. I just had to believe in what I was doing, throw myself into the role, be honest with it, that’s all.”120

  After the first three days of shooting, Burt Ward wondered if he’d live through the initial sixteen episodes. On the very first day of filming, the first scene shot showed the Batmobile roaring out of the Batcave. The location, Bronson Canyon on the southern edge of Griffith Park, was an old rock quarry until the 1920s, and since then had been used in practically every movie or TV show that needed a cave entrance, including Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937), The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), and countless TV Westerns. Ward suspected something was amiss when he got into the Batmobile and realized that the man in the Batsuit behind the wheel was not Adam West but rather Hubie Kerns, West’s stunt double. As Kerns raced the car out of the cave and made a sharp turn, Ward’s door flew open. To keep from being flung out, he reached his left arm behind and snagged the gear shift with his pinkie—which dislocated. The following day, the back of his neck was burned when an incendiary device was ignited too soon. On the third day, when Robin was tied to a table and Batman was to blow a hole through the wall coming to his rescue, the three sticks of dynamite used to blow the wall out blew a two-by-four into Ward’s face that left a gash on the bridge of his nose. On the fourth day, for a scene where the Riddler gasses Robin, who is in the passenger seat of the Batmobile, and tries to steal the vehicle, the fireworks that shot out of the missile launchers on the back of the car spewed red-hot ash that scorched Ward’s forearms, singed his hair, and left a first-degree burn on his scrotum. In the first four days, he’d been to the hospital four times. Ward, who rode his motorcycle back and forth to the studio, wrote in his book Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights that “it was ironic that Greenway Productions made such a big deal about how dangerous they thought it was for me to ride my motorcycle to work and consequently took out a $3 million insurance policy to protect their interests. The truth is that I never suffered from the danger of riding to work. I suffered after I got to work! At one point, with all the ‘accidents’ on the set, I almost believed the producers were trying to collect on that policy.”121

  Deftly directed by Robert Butler, whose long list of TV directing credits included The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Untouchables, Hogan’s Heroes, and The Fugitive, the pilot set the offbeat tone of the show from the very beginning. When Batman, in his full costume, enters a nightclub called What a Way to Go-Go, one woman faints, and the coat-check girl asks if he’d like to check his cape. A maitre d’ then approaches, and the following exchange ensues:

  Maitre d’: “Ringside table, Batman?”

  Batman: “Just looking, thanks, I’ll stand at the bar. I shouldn’t wish to attract attention.”

  Batman goes to the bar and orders a glass of orange juice, which the bartender calls a “Batman special” when he hands it to him. Molly, the Riddler’s moll, played by the voluptuous Jill St. John, then entices Batman into a dance, and Adam West launches into the weird maneuvers of what would come to be known as the Batusi. St. John had the distinction of playing the only female character in any Batman episode to die. When Molly falls into the Batcave’s atomic reactor, Batman sadly sighs, “What a way to go...go.”

  Batman was innovative in two other ways. Whenever the villains were seen in their lairs, the shots were filmed with the camera tilted in what is known in the industry as a Dutch angle. This was a visual pun, a suggestion that the bad guys were “crooked.” Another visual joke was the superimposing of words like BAM! and POW! to accentuate the fight scenes. Though inspired by the words used in comic book drawings, these superimpositions had a more practical use—it meant that the crew didn’t have to film as many shots for each fight scene, and it didn’t matter if the punches missed by a mile—they’d be covered by words, anyway. These visual gags, as well as the Bat-symbol wipes between scenes and the old-time serial-style cliffhanger endings, became part of the signature visual language of the Batman show, setting it apart from other series on TV.

  “These are very funny, ridiculous things,” said Lorenzo Semple Jr. “And that was the show. That was for grown-ups, in other words, but at the same time the kids, without getting that humor, could enjoy all the running around and the Batmobile and punching people, you know, all that silly stuff. So it’s always had more appeal to grown-ups than kids.”122

  With his deadpan delivery, West made the humor work. “Playing Batman is an actor’s challenge,” he said. “You have to reach a multi-level audience. The kids take it straight, but for adults, we have to project it further...When Batman was a comic it wasn’t camp, but the show is.”123 Although he found the role tremendous fun to play, West said, “You have to take it seriously. I want to do it well enough that Batman buffs will watch reruns in a few years and say, ‘Watch the bit he does here, isn’t that great?”’’ However, to Bob Smith of The Los Angeles Times, he said, “This whole thing is an insane, mad fantasy world, and my goal is to become America’s biggest put-on. Everyone on the set is just a little demented.”124

  By December 1965
, three weeks before its premiere, the commercial advertising slots on the Batman show were 90% sold. Kellogg’s, which had previously sponsored the Adventures of Superman TV series in the 1950s, committed to two minutes of commercials every other week at a price of $31,000 per minute. The show’s other sponsors included Procter & Gamble, Colgate, Dodge and Bristol-Meyers.125

  Batman premiered on ABC on the evening of Wednesday, January 12, 1966. To help kick off the show, ABC invited a cross-section of Manhattan socialites to a Batman “cocktail and frug party” at Harlow’s, a discothèque on East 79th Street. Afterwards, guests were bused to the York Theater on 1st Avenue at 64th Street to see a theatrical screening of the show timed to coincide with its TV broadcast. Val Adams of The New York Times reported, “The room was jam-packed. Andy Warhol, the pop artist, was there. So was Harold Prince, president of the League of New York Theaters. Burgess Meredith was there, too. He portrays one of the guest villains in a future Batman episode.” Jacqueline Kennedy had been invited, but was a no-show. Broadway actress Tammy Grimes, who was soon to debut in her own William Dozier-produced TV series, did appear. One gate-crasher showed up in a Batman outfit, and was allowed to stay. Adams wrote, “Theater guests were served champagne and popcorn, a combination not to be found in most Broadway movie houses. There was no applause when the world premiere of Batman ended, which may or may not be significant. It was reported that one of the pop artists present commented that he thought his kids would love Batman but he didn’t know if adults would get it. Walter Wanger, the motion-picture producer, said: ‘I loved it. It’s my type of art.’”126

  The next day, everyone was talking about the show. Was it art? Was it camp? Was it simply a great kids show with a wink to intellectuals? The New York Times wrote, “Bob Kane’s heroes of the comic strip came to television last night as real-life people, and it looks as if the American Broadcasting Company has something going for it. The show was amusing in spots, though the avant-campists might contend it really wasn’t bad enough to be excellent...The true test for Batman won’t be this week or next, but in a couple of months when the novelty of his cape and expertise begin to wear off.”127 On the opposite coast, Don Page of The Los Angeles Times proclaimed, “If the aim had been satire, Batman would be hanging by its feet as a critical flop. But producer William Dozier wisely brought Batman to television as a live comic book and ABC probably has its biggest hit in many seasons.” Page said that Adam West and Burt Ward were “flattering reproductions of cartoonist Bob Kane’s paper heroes...Gorshin’s portrayal was classic. He is the first in a list of impressive guest star villains to come...Critically, Batman is kicks, even though the intellectuals will call it ‘in’ and ‘camp’ (a device which allows them to lower themselves to enjoy it) and the kids will love it like when you and I were young.”128