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Date and Issue: Number 22.
Lee Goldberg recently published a reference book called Unsold TV Pilots which lists hundreds of potential series that never made it beyond a single episode.
William Dozier, of Batman and The Green Hornet fame, commissioned a pilot script in the mid 1960's for a television series based on Charles Moulton's famous comic book heroine, Wonder Woman. Sets were constructed, actors were cast, and filming commenced at Culver City Studios.
But you will not find any mention of William Dozier's Wonder Woman in the Goldberg book.Hollywood is well known for not taking any chances, and if there is one thing less expensive to produce than a single half-hour pilot (a fantasy show can be quite costly), it is to create what is known as a "presentation." A presentation film usually takes one of three forms.
One type utilizes colorful concept sketches, library music and narration mixed with limited live action footage to tell a story in as little time, and with as little money, as possible. Irwin Allen, who also held office space at Twentieth Century Fox at the same time as Dozier, was a master at creating something from nothing, and used this technique to pitch several different science-fiction stories, including Land of the Giants.
The second approach utilizes new live footage intercut with stock footage and sets re-dressed from productions already underway at a studio. Allen used this approach for his Man From the 25th Century and City Beneath the Sea presentations, borrowing from Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottomof the Sea, and The Time Tunnel. Al-though this direction yields greater continuity (and viewer empathy through its use of actors), it ultimately cannot help but look unimaginative and cheap.
The third technique is to film only a portion of a completed script. This method works best when a script relies heavily on dialogue and character, particularly comedy, instead of action and special-effects. In this way, a single scene develops the flavor of what a net-work can expect when the series be-comes reality. Continuity of story is thrown out the window when the presentation comes to an abrupt halt.
The latter approach was deemed appropriate for the Wonder Woman script. Unlike the campiness of Batman or the straight-lace approach given The Green Hornet, Dozier felt Wonder Woman should play for out-and-out broad comedy. His production company, Greenway Productions, had hired writers Stan Hart and Larry Siegel to produce a half hour teleplay. When their version was deemed in need of a rewrite, Dozier brought in Stanley Ralph Ross, a screenwriter who had penned some of the best, not to mention funniest, episodes of Batman.
"I had been writing the Batman show," Ross remembered. "I wrote 27 or 30. I don't recall. I was basically the Catwoman writer. And Bill Dozier wanted to do Wonder Woman. He had a script by Stan Hart and Larry Siegel. It was a half hour comedy whereby Wonder Woman would be played by two different people: she would be played by an attractive girl as Wonder Woman, and by an ugly girl as Diana Prince. It was pretty funny (the original script), actually, but they asked me to do the rewrite, which I did. "
The 4-1/2 minute presentation opens with a shot of an original Wonder Woman comic book. The cover blows open and the pages whisk by. The story unfolds inside the home of Diana Prince (Ellie Wood Walker), where she is doted upon by her ever-present, but well-meaning, mother. Diana is homely and a bit of a klutz, unable to open the pages of a newspaper without toppling off her couch. As Mother Prince helps her daughter from the carpet, Diana realizes the thunderstorm that rages out-side their window will ground the plane of Steve Trevor. With the fate of the free world at stake (the viewer never gets far enough through the plot to find out what exactly the menace is), Diana concludes she must fly to Steve's rescue. But her mother will hear nothing of it, insisting she stay for one of her delicious home cooked meals.
Diana downs a few helpings of the food while her mother frets about how all the neighborhood is talking about her as-yet unmarried daughter. Finally, Mrs. Prince gives in. "All right, Diana, save the world," she intones. "But don't forget to wear your galoshes!"
With that, Diana enters a closet through a revolving door, reappearing moments later as Wonder Woman. As in Batman, the use of overly melodramatic narration, read by producer Bill Dozier, smooths the transition and guides the audience through the proceedings. Wonder Woman, we are told, knows she has the strength of Hercules, the wisdom of Athena, and the speed of Mercury. But she thinks she has the beauty of Aphrodite. Decked out in her star-spangled costume, she parades in front of a mirror, eyeing with affection what she imagines as her in-credible, irresistible figure, played by another actress.
As Flight of the Valkyries plays in the background, Wonder Woman climbs out a window onto a roof. She springs into the air and flies skyward. As thunder and lightning continue to rock the scene, Mrs. Prince calls out the window, reminding her daughter to call home when she gets a chance.
"We took a different approach to Wonder Woman, " recalled Charles FitzSimons, who produced the presentation for Bill Dozier. "It was really a satire on the comic strip. Every time she would look at her reflection, she would imagine she was seeing the comic book ideal of Wonder Woman. We played the 'mirrored character' with Linda Harrison, who was married to Dick Zanuck. And she was gorgeous. She was the character from the comic books come to life. Much more so than Lynda Carter. Just incredible.
"The pilot story, had we gone ahead with it, had (Diana Prince) as Steve Trevor's secretary, and he couldn't believe that he was plagued with this ugly secretary, and then on topof that, this dreadful Wonder Woman! That was the bane of his life.
"In the script, Wonder Woman is going to go out to California where there is a Russian spy. And of course Trevor is assigned to go out there also. But in the rainstorm his plane can't take off. So she picks him up, as Wonder Woman, in her arms, and flies him to California. There's a very funny sequence in the pilot (script) where she lands like an airplane with this poor guy in her arms. And when she gets to California she immediately knows which character is the spy and the bad guy. In the seduction scene she does the Dance of the Seven Veils. And this poor Russian is so confounded by this terribly plain woman doing this grotesque sexual dance, that he gives up!
"But the whole point was not to do a straight Wonder Woman series," Fitz-Simons continued. "We were doing a satire. Adults would watch it and find it very funny. Because, as you know, wedid Batman so that it would be funny for everyone from seven to seventy.
"We sold Batman really from the tests of Batman and Robin," FitzSimons said. "We did a test sequence. The net-work wanted us to test actors. Bill Dozier and I talked and said if we do tests with actors just in plain clothes playing Batman, we're dead. The net-work is never going to go with this. So we got the art director at the time to build these sets -- a phony, inexpensive Bat Cave -- and we did versions of the costumes. We did the tests in costumein a set. The result was we got the commitment for the series from the test. And actually, what was to be the pilot be-came the first episode. We felt we could do the same with Wonder Woman. We thought our idea of the satire was so good, that if we did a little presentation we could get a deal for a series. Well, we were wrong."
The presentation for Wonder Woman made the rounds to the three major networks, but all passed. The ratings for Batman had begun to wane, The Green Hornet was up for cancellation and the Dick Tracy pilot remained unsold. The actors were notified of the decision not to continue with the show, and everyone went their separate ways.
"Ellie Wood Walker was, in my opinion, another Ruth Buzzi," Fitz-Simons said. "And she just disappeared, She was a dancer as well as being a wonderful comedienne. We felt she had a big future. I'm sure she went on and married and had ten kids, or something like that. "
But for Charles FitzSimons and Stanley Ralph Ross, life with the Amazon princess had only just begun. Warner Bros. Television acquired the rights to the character and hired John Stephens to produce a 90 minute movie- of-the-week. Cathy Lee Crosby was chosen to twirl the golden lasso and Stanley Ralph Ross was again approached to write a teleplay.
"(The producer) called me up,' Ross recalled, "and he said, 'I remem ber you did the first one, and we would like to do one with Cathy Lee Crosby. And I said, 'That won't work."Why not?' they asked. 'Cathy Lee Crosby i: blonde. Wonder Woman's got dark hair."So what?' he said, 'What's the difference?' I said, 'It's like making Superman a redhead. It's just not right Wonder Woman's got dark hair.
'Stanley don't be silly,' I said, 'I'm not interested.' So he went and he got John D.F. Black to write it" Ross' s judgment proved correct. Television critics at the time panned the movie almost solely on the fact that Crosby was physically inappropriate for the role.
But Warner Bros. Television and ABC TV did not give up. "The guy in charge at Fox at the time (the Dozier pilot was produced) was Doug Cramer," Ross continued, "and he didn't like it, so that was the end of that. The second one was also produced by Doug Cramer, the very same guy who turned down the first one." Cramer commissioned a second script, entitled The New. Original Wonder Woman, this time hiring Stanley Ralph Ross. Ross wisely relied on original stories from the January 1942 issue of Sensation Comics and the summer 1942 premiere issue of Wonder Woman comics. With Lynda Carter cast as the physically correct" super heroine, a hit was born.
The network believed, however, that some additional tinkering was necessary to open up the stories and make the series more economical to produce. Enter Charles FitzSimons. "They had originally started doing it back in World War II," FitzSimons said. "With the Nazis, and so forth. Which I felt was a great mistake. So I came in and we updated it to the Seven-ties. I think they did about eleven of them before I came in. But they weren't done as a regular series, they were done sporadically. When I came in it was done as a regular series and became very successful. I think it went another 40 episodes."
"Interestingly, the two actors I had tested for Batman were Adam West and Lyle Waggoner. And Adam West got Batman, and Lyle Waggoner got Wonder Woman (as Steve Taylor). They were the two actors, and the only two, I had tested for that role. Waggoner was already cast when I came in to do the show. "
With the second revival now a distant memory, the future of Diana Prince's return to the screen remains unclear. But Stanley Ralph Ross's interest in the character continues to this day. "I tried recently to get the rights to it," Ross said. "To do it as a feature. And they (DC) were not interested. They didn't want to do anything with it. They said, 'We have our own person that we're talking to,' and that was the end of that. They're really not giving any kind of activity to anyone over 40. There is a terrible Grey List. "
With the phenomenal hype given the introduction of Catwoman in Bat-Tran Returns, it can only remain a matter of time before DC resurrects its premiere comic heroine. One can only imagine who would be cast in the part today (Sherilyn Fenn? Debra Winger?) and what approach would be taken by the film makers. But if the past is anyindication, the material lends itself to a variety of interpretations. Can a darker, psychologically-probing version be far behind? With scholars having tied the adventures of Diana Prince to every-thing from lesbianism to sadomasochism, a dramatic, big-budget Hollywood production seems like a safe bet.
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