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“She’s intelligible for the most part, but she just can’t think in English,” Monash said. His lips seemed set in a self-deprecating half smile. “So it’s really slow. I talked to Bryan on the phone and he’s having a terrible time. She doesn’t come off badly. I mean, she’s got a lot of presence, but it just takes so many takes.”
“Can we dub her?” Zanuck said.
“Not without her permission,” Monash said. “That’s her deal.”
“What’s Bryan say?” Zanuck said.
“He thinks he’s got an out,” Monash said. “He says he’s going to tell her she’s got 500 loops and when she hears that, maybe she’ll get discouraged and let someone else dub.”
Zanuck methodically folded a piece of paper and slit it open with a letter opener. “She’s not going to be that easy to dub,” he said finally. “I’ve been watching her in the dailies. Her mouth just kind of fumbles around. It’ll be tough, real tough.”
The following week, Monash called and asked if I wanted to drive out to the Desilu lot in Culver City, where the Studio rented space for the filming of his TV series, Judd. Monash divided each day between the Fox lot in Westwood, where he spent mornings working on Peyton Place and Deadfall, and Desilu, where he went after lunch every afternoon to oversee Judd, a melodrama whose hero was a peripatetic lawyer in the F. Lee Bailey mold. Judd was a new show, scheduled to begin on the ABC Television Network that fall, and Monash was hopeful that, within the limits of television’s taboos, it could dip into social criticism in much the same manner as had The Defenders, another earnest liberal series about the legal profession.
“I’ll make $500,000 this year,” Monash said from behind the wheel of his blue Corvette Sting Ray on the way over to Culver City. “Maybe five-fifty. And I’ve got all the deals going for me. I only take $2,500 a week and spread the rest of it out. And now I’m going into depreciation. There’s a multi-million-dollar apartment project I’m involved in down in Fort Worth. You can spread the depreciation out to avoid the tax bite. If the project burns down, what the hell? So much the better.”
The Sting Ray halted at a stoplight. Monash let the motor idle. A car pulled up alongside. When the light turned, Monash gunned his motor, leaving the other car in his wake.
“I’ve got a house in Mandeville Canyon, I walk in the peace marches and I worry about Watts,” Monash said. “How can I improve things?” He laughed dryly at himself. “It’s academic to worry about the rats in Watts when you’re making half a million a year. You think you’re being realistic, but how many Negroes are going to move into Mandeville Canyon?”
It was a ten-minute ride to Desilu. Monash parked his car in his space and walked into his bungalow. His office was austere to the point of anonymity. There was a typewriter at his desk along with a Roget’s Thesaurus and the American College Dictionary. In the bookcase was a twenty-volume set entitled Speeches and Papers of the Presidents. There was also a small kitchen stocked with diet soft drinks. The sink was littered with dirty dishes.
Monash opened a Fresca and collapsed into a chair. “You know, I’m in therapy,” he said. “It’s an old story, but it’s given me an insight into myself. I’m a big producer, but what do I do? I’m not doing anything on Deadfall and the TV shows take care of themselves. Bryan Forbes says he’s directing Deadfall for the money, to give him the loot to do a good picture. So much for Deadfall.” His eyes and lips crinkled wistfully. “Maybe I should write a book. I’d like to take a year off and do a book on the Detroit riots.” He pulled on the soda bottle. “Of course, there wouldn’t be any motion picture rights for something like a book on the riots. But it would give me the feeling of accomplishing something. Maybe I will.” He shifted his position in the chair. “A friend of mine got $175,000 paperback for a book he wrote.”
Monash kicked off his alligator loafers and began rubbing his feet. “Hollywood gets to you after a while,” he said. “My wife went to Europe to visit her family and so I went to the bank and got her some traveler’s checks to cover her expenses. She comes back and I asked her if she spent it. ‘Not all of it,’ she says. I ask for it back. ‘No,’ she says, ‘It’s mine.’ I say it’s ours. Well, it’s been a running situation ever since she got back. This morning she takes the checks and showers them on me.” He seemed to consider the scene and its possible effect on me. “It’s a real Hollywood story,” he added.
Monash took the bottle of soda and deposited it in the kitchen on top of the dirty dishes. He came back and sprawled into the chair again.
“Are you happy?” he said suddenly.
5
“I’m Tomo from Andro,”
Irwin Allen said
By the end of the summer, the Studio’s television department had eight series in preparation for the upcoming season: two new ones, Judd and Custer, the latter a deodorized Western about the life and times of General George Armstrong Custer: and six holdovers from previous seasons, Peyton Place, Batman, Felony Squad, Daniel Boone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space. Even then, however, the television department was making plans for the season a year hence, calculating how many shows might be canceled during the forthcoming season, estimating what formats the networks might favor a year or even two years in the future (was the campy Batman cycle played out, were Westerns or detective series coming back into vogue, what kind of hero needed a Negro sidekick?). Scripts were read, prospects weighed. The stakes were high. The cost of making a pilot film for television had become so prohibitive—sometimes in excess of $500,000—and the chances of selling that pilot to one of the three networks so slim—roughly one chance in ten—that a few errors in judgment could cost a studio several million dollars and the executive who made the errors his job. Many studios tried to cut their losses by showing the networks a “spinoff” episode from an existing show, using the new characters and plot situation within the framework and budget of a show already on the air, or simply, if their past track record was good, going to the networks with only a package and a pilot script and presentation.
Either possibility posed enormous problems for Irwin Allen, who created and produced two science-fiction series for the Studio, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space. Allen’s sci-fis were so enormously complicated and utilized so many special effects that it was difficult to visualize a concept for a new series from a script. Rather than shoot an enormously expensive pilot, he had settled on the solution of showing the network a ten-minute presentation film that sketched out the main situation and visual highlights of the proposed series. The presentation films had no plot and were only ten minutes long, but each one cost in the vicinity of $100,000.
One afternoon late in the summer, Allen assembled his production staff in his office to discuss a new science-fiction project that he was presenting to CBS called The Man from the 25th Century. The color scheme in Allen’s office on the second floor of the Old Administration Building is based on a rather lurid orange. The couches and chairs are orange leather, and by the window, casting its baleful red globular eyes over the office, is a large robot, a prop from Lost in Space. On one wall are graphs, sketches, charts and paintings of new sci-fis that Allen has in preparation—Aladdin, Safari, City Beneath the Sea and The Man from the 25th Century. A bookcase was filled with promotional material for each segment of the two shows Allen then had on the air, Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea—toy robots, miniature submarines, rubber fright masks (for a segment of Voyage titled “Man of Many Faces,” Allen had sent every major television editor in the country a rubber mask used by the Man of Many Faces). On the floor below, Allen had a full-time crew of artists sketching storyboards for each segment of his shows, as well as a staff of researchers compiling all available information on time, space, the ocean and giants, for possible use as both effects and plot points on his current and proposed series. In the presentation script of City Beneath the Sea, there was an eight-page appendix of “new underseas projects and discoveries to be used in combinati
on or alone as premises for City Beneath the Sea episodes.” Among the projects and discoveries were:
Bubble curtains for use as fish pens;
Acoustical barriers, electrical fields and temperature fences for the same purpose;
New methods for tagging fish using radioactive markers to help discover secrets of migration;
Extracting oxygen from water by use of a silicone membrane.
In all, the researchers had compiled sixty possible discoveries. “I’ve tried to take the lunacy that exists in television and reduce it to a quiet panic,” Allen told me one day. “There’s only one thing to remember about television: it’s a business.”
He is a large, myopic, hirsute man with hair like Brillo and a bowl-shaped paunch that leaks out between the bottom of his shirt and the top of his trousers. He has a raucous voice and he is richly sarcastic, but it is largely a performance without a cutting edge. He supervises even the most minute details of his shows. There were a half dozen people present at The Man from the 25th Century meeting and each had a copy of the presentation script Allen had written:
THE MAN FROM THE 25TH CENTURY is a one-hour weekly television series of science-fiction, high adventure and action. It is the eerily horrifying tale of Andro, our nearest planetary neighbor, whose source of power is being used far more quickly than it can be created and whose need to attack the Earth and replenish such power is of the highest priority. An Earthling, kidnapped in infancy and transported to Andro for indoctrination, is returned to Earth to start its downfall. He is repelled by his assignment and defects to the Earthlings. Each week the non-humans from Andro arrive in flying saucers and create havoc with Earth. Each week the Earthlings, aided by THE MAN FROM THE 25TH CENTURY and his weaponry, succeed in dissuading the enemy.
On succeeding pages, Allen’s script spelled out the show’s theme (“The basic theme dramatizes man’s earliest hidden fear—the appearance of seemingly extraterrestrial beings from another planet”), its major settings (“The planet Andro, two-and-a-half light-years from Earth, the super metropolis of the future in the year 2467” and “Project Delphi, most mysterious of all undertakings in the history of the United States government,” buried underground deep beneath Glacier National Park and dedicated to combating the attack from Andro), and its leading character, Tomo, The Man from the 25th Century (“Tomo—twenty-four years old—the kidnapped Earthling. Dark, handsome, six feet, three inches tall. He is the most unusual of men. Graduate of the sciences of Nali, the great technological studies offered by the scientists of the planet Andro. Brilliant, trained to kill, and a master in the art of self-defense. Hidden deep within is a warm friendly nature. But so penetrating was his indoctrination, even he is unaware of his second personality”).
The problem before the meeting was whether to spin The Man from the 25th Century off a segment of Lost in Space or to go with a ten-minute presentation film. The discussion was scarcely underway when there was a knock on the door and the unit production manager for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea entered the office, muttering apologies. A Voyage episode scheduled to start shooting the following week had a character called Lobster Man, and the wardrobe department had been unable to make his costume as specified in the designer’s sketches.
“Irwin, the antennae on Lobster Man’s suit are supposed to vibrate, but the suit isn’t rigged for it,” the production manager said.
Allen threw up his hands in resignation. “Is it a big story point?”
“No,” the unit man said.
“Then forget it.” Allen thought for a moment, rubbing his hands over his paunch. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Ask the electrical department if they can put two little blinking lights in the antennae.”
“Okay,” the production man said. “That’s a good idea, Irwin.”
“That’s what I’m sitting in the boss’s chair for,” Allen said. “You got a little problem about Lobster Man, you come to see Irwin.”
Allen turned back to The Man from the 25th Century. On an easel at the end of the table were color sketches of Andro and of the “interrogation room” at Delphi. The art director, a young man named Dale Hennesy, lifted the overlays from the sketches and displayed them for Allen.
“If we spin off from Space, we’re going to have to get a script written quick, Irwin,” said Hal Herman, one of Allen’s production managers.
“No problem,” Allen said. “Irwin knows how to do it. The Space Family Robinson”—the family in Lost in Space—“turns up on another planet. They settle down for dinner and then all of a sudden this beautiful man appears. They reach for their ray guns and this guy says, ‘I’m Tomo from Andro,’ and to pay for his supper, he tells a story. Dissolve—The Man from the 25th Century.” He patted the presentation script. “It’s all here. Easy, right?”
“Right, Irwin,” chorused the table.
Allen doodled for a moment with a pencil. “Say we do spin off,” he said. “We spin off where?”
“The twenty-second segment,” Hal Herman said.
“That starts shooting twenty-five working days from now,” Allen said, checking his production schedule. He turned to Dale Hennesy. “Dale, using spit and glue—and with a start date that close, that’s what you’re going to have to use—can you get these sets together by then?”
Hennesy whistled softly. “Can do,” he said finally.
Allen asked to see the rest of the sketches. One drawing showed the concrete living quarters at Project Delphi. Allen shook his head. “It doesn’t send me,” he said.
“What I was trying to do here, Irwin …” Hennesy began.
Allen shook his head vigorously. “Dale, it doesn’t send me,” he said in measured tones. “Let’s just accept that. It wastes time to argue and time is what?”
“Money, Irwin,” Hennesy said.
“Right,” Allen said.
He perused the rest of the sketches. Gradually he began to abandon the idea of spinning The Man from the 25th Century off a Lost in Space segment. While the production problems of a spinoff were not insurmountable, they would pose certain difficulties and furthermore would strain the already tight budget of the show. As the meeting wore on, Allen began to think in terms of the ten-minute presentation film. He asked Hennesy for the storyboard sketches of the originally proposed spinoff segment.
“I don’t like these much, Dale,” Allen said. He was beating time on the conference table with his knuckles. “They’re okay for a storyboard, but not for a presentation film. We need something flashier.”
Hennesy nodded.
“And I think it’s a mistake to show story continuity in a presentation film,” Allen said. “We’re not trying to sell a story, we’re trying to sell a concept.”
“How about using paintings?” Hennesy said. “I mean, the paintings of the various sets?”
Allen slapped his hand on the desk. “Great,” he said. “We can use the camera to get a sense of movement. Move in, pan, hold, dissolve through. Great. The paintings are static, but the camera moves.” He turned to Hal Herman. “How long will it take five artists to do thirty paintings from our sketches?”
Herman figured on a pad. “Twelve working days,” he said finally.
“Figure fifteen,” Allen said. “Now I’m a sucker for blue, so if you want to win me over, use a lot of blue. Allen Blue, I call it.” He got up from his chair and wiped his glasses on his shirt. A secretary brought him a glass of orange juice and told him that the unit man from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea had returned and wanted to see him.
“Now what’s the matter?” Allen said when the unit man came into the office.
“About Lobster Man, Irwin,” the unit man said. “The lights in the antennae won’t work.”
“I don’t believe won’t work,” Allen said.
“There’s too much voltage, Irwin.”
“Then Lobster Man will fry?” Allen said.
“Right, Irwin.”
Allen patted the unit man on the shoulder. “Paul,” he s
aid, “you figure something out. You be Irwin for a while. I trust you implicitly, Paul.” He dismissed the unit man with a wave of his hand and turned back to the conference table. “Okay, we’re agreed,” he said. “The presentation film, right?”
“Right, Irwin.”
“We’ve got $100,000 to work with,” Allen said. “Not a penny more. Not a penny. Right? Right.”
The next day was Wednesday, and, as on every Wednesday, there was a conference in Jack Baur’s office of all the Studio’s casting directors for both features and television. A handsome, sedate man who looks like a bank vice president, Baur is the assistant head of the casting department. His daughter, Elizabeth, was one of the young actresses in the Studio’s New Talent Program. Present at the meeting were Bill Kinney, casting director for Judd and Felony Squad, Joe Scully for Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls, Larry Stewart for the Irwin Allen shows, Ross Brown for Daniel Boone and Custer, Carl Joy for stunt men and extra talent, and Curt Conway and Pamela Danova of the New Talent School.
“I need two 7⅜ heads,” Larry Stewart said.
“Two what?” Baur said.
“Two 7⅜ heads,” Stewart said. “To play monsters on Lost in Space. The art department has already whipped up the heads and they happen to be 7⅜. Now we just need the actors to fit them.”
Baur shook his head. “All right, everyone keep a lookout for 7⅜ heads,” he said. He shuffled through the papers piled in front of him. “Okay, we’ve got a lot of commitments on play-or-pay deals, so let’s see if we can place them.” He picked up one of the papers. “Charlie Robinson,” he said. “He’s got a $10,000 guarantee and we’re converting it to a term contract at $500 a week. Any pictures or TV shows we can use him on? It’s play-or-pay, remember.”
“No go on Felony Squad,” Bill Kinney said. He drew a square in the air with his fingers.
“How about Peyton Place?” Baur asked.