Happy New Year, Hoping for a Great 2018

Our annual greeting

It’s the end of another year. Here’s hoping for a great 2018 for readers of The Spy Command.

And, as Napoleon Solo reminds everyone, be sure to party responsibly this New Year’s Eve. Happy New Year, everyone.

 

Our favorite stock shots of 1960s, ’70s TV shows

Television shows from 1950s through the 1970s meant doing a lot. A typical season meant 39 episodes in the 1950s into the early ’60s, 30 or more into the mid-60s and 26 or so in the 1970s.

It also required working on a leaner budget than feature films. A show may have stories around the world, but you didn’t have the resources films did.

To stretch the budget, production companies utilized “stock shots,” taken from sources available to more or less everyone. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was common to see some of the same stock shots on different shows.

With that in mind, here are some of the blog’s favorite stock shots. Note: The episodes listed are not a comprehensive list. You may remember these from other series and episodes

Stock shot of airplane exploding during a missile test, used in The Man From UNCLE and Hawaii Five-O.

Airplane/helicopter exploding in mid-air: Based on the longest clip of it the blog has seen, this appears to be some kind of U.S. Defense Department film. An airplane (presumably radio-controlled) is shot down by a missile.

Said longest version appears in The Quadripartite Affair, the third episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. You actually see the missile launched and see it hit the airplane.

Examples: The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Quadripartite Affair, The Love Affair (first season; supposedly the villain’s helicopter explodes after Solo has placed a bomb aboard), Part Two Alexander the Greater Affair (airplane exploding in mid-air).

Hawaii Five-O: Death Is a Company Policy (fifth season, supposedly a helicopter with syndicate killers is shot down by police, led by Steve McGarrett), Death Thy Name Is Sam (eighth season, villain John Colicos shoots down a helicopter piloted by undercover cop George Takei with a portable surface-to-air missile).

Frequently used stock shot of a landing aircraft

Aircraft about to land: One of the most common seen stock shots during the period was of the underside of a aircraft about to complete a landing.

It was used a number of times in Hawaii Five-O (the image at right is from the episode Three Dead Cows at Makapuu Part I), where characters were flying into Hawaii all the time.

I know it was used more frequently than that, but tracking them all down in daunting. The whole idea was to communicate movement to the audience. Sometimes, the lead character might be traveling somewhere and this shot would be used to demonstrate he or she had arrived.

Stock shot of exploding car.

Car Exploding on side of mountain: It costs money to blow up a car or truck. One way to save costs was using a stock shot of one going up in flames.

The image at right was used at least twice. In the first-season Mannix episode Deadfall Part I, an Intertect investigator (Dana Elcar) fakes his own death with his car exploding. Mannix (Mike Connors) investigates and finds out his Interect colleague was was involved in an industrial espionage operation involving a new laser.

The stock shot also was used in an episode of Ironside, Poole’s Paradise.

At the start of the series, the wheelchair-bound detective (Raymond Burr) rode in the back of a 1940 truck. Early in the third season, the truck had to be sacrificed (to throw a corrupt sheriff and his thug deputies off the trail). The stock shot was used to show that vehicle exploding.

The sleuth rode (and eventually drove) a more modern van for the rest of the series.

UPDATE: The exploding car shot also shows up in Nine Dragons, the first episode in Hawaii Five-O’s ninth season.

Arch-villain Wo Fat is at the University of Hawaii, posing as an academic who defected from China in the late 1940s. However, a university faculty member who knew the real academic confronts Wo Fat.

Bad move: Wo Fat has his goons kill the Hawaii faculty member. They put him in a Lincoln Continental, shove the car down a ravine and the car blows up.

Roger Moore: Let’s just say, ‘Au Revoir’

Roger Moore in a 1980s publicity still

By Nicolás Suszczyk, Guest Writer

On Dec. 31 2016, I spent New Year’s Eve alone. I decided it was a way to say goodbye to my late father who – among other things – introduced me to James Bond.

So, breaking all the known traditions, I popped in the BluRay discs of Live And Let Die, The Man With The Golden Gun and Moonraker starting around the afternoon and ending minutes before midnight, to bid farewell to him with those three classic films he always told me about before we watched them on blurry VHS tapes after he picked me up from school.

Little I knew that I was bidding farewell of their protagonist as well.

Painful Year

2017 will be remembered as a painful year for the James Bond community. On May 23, we lost our most remarkable ambassador: Sir Roger Moore, the longest serving James Bond actor in the official cinematic series starring Ian Fleming’s secret agent.

I received the news of his passing with great shock on the afternoon of that fateful day, during my lunch break. It was a simple text message saying “RIP Roger Moore.” My immediate reaction was, simply, to ask “What?!”

Of course, it sounds silly. One should expect an 89-year-old man to depart soon. Maybe I was among those who thought he would live forever and that’s where my surprise and astonishment of sorts came.

Sir Roger Moore became the first (official) film Bond to visit the ultimate location no other Bond has been in: heaven.

My first touch with Moore’s Bond came shortly after I discovered GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies, almost 20 years ago.

It was my dad – whom I hope he has meet Roger up in the borderless skies by now – who once told me (in another lunch break, this time from school) about a Bond movie where a car made a 360 degree jump over a bridge.

Some days later, we were watching The Man With The Golden Gun on a VCR. And months later, we were enjoying Live And Let Die and Moonraker, in that order.

The days went on and as much older people than me explained that Roger Moore was also a relevant figure in The Persuaders! and The Saint, I managed to get a glimpse of those two wonderful TV series thanks to a retro channel that broke the barriers of time.

And as kids of my age were on Dragon Ball Z or Knight of The Zodiac, I was into the globe-trotting adventures of Lord Brett Sinclair and Simon Templar.

Personal Connection

I’m sure I’m not the only one who will feel Roger’s departure as something personal. He joined us on our childhood, teens and adult life.

He retired from the role of James Bond in 1985, exceptionally looking good at 58 years old and he went on to work in comedies and doing small appearances on TV shows like Alias. Much more important, he joined UNICEF and has been actively working as a Goodwill Ambassador, helping children in need.

Still, he always showed gratitude to the role he played in seven films over twelve years. He never refused an autograph. “I’m here because of them,” he told his daughter Deborah when she noted that he took so much time to sign photos, posters or DVD covers.

But more than that, he has been the only one true Bond Ambassador. Having his word on every released 007 film on his many published books or his Twitter account.

The Ambassador

He didn’t go to premieres often, but he cherished every time a new Bond adventure was released. He was the one who bid farewell to the many members of his cinematic family like Richard Kiel, Geoffrey Holder or Guy Hamilton, and a man that retained the same charm, style and sense of humor he had when he portrayed the role.

The truth is… I don’t see any of the other five actors fully acting as “Bond Ambassadors.”

Sean Connery seems out of the spotlight and has barely reconciled with the character that brought him to fame. Timothy Dalton remembers Bond from time to time. George Lazenby and Pierce Brosnan would be the closest ones as they often share an anecdote of their time as 007.

Lazenby had a funny biopic titled Becoming Bond and we see Brosnan sharing some publicity stills on Instagram although he’s clearly focused on his current projects. Yet, nobody had the panache of remembering James Bond as Sir Roger Moore did.

While the others portrayed Bond as another job, Moore was Bond until he died. That day, I felt as if James Bond –the unbeatable secret agent– had died. I never stopped feeling that at any age he still had the charm of the James Bond of the 1970s and 1980s.

Roger Moore was a very much important part of my time as a Bond fan. It’s fair to admit that I owe much of my good taste and my sense of humor to him.

It may be a cliché to say this at this point but, truly, nobody did it better.

Good-bye Roger, or – as I’ve learnt from you in that film of 1977 – let’s just say ‘au revoir.’

Thanks for being part of my life.

Happy 95th birthday, Stan Lee

Stan Lee on a 1971 episode of To Tell The Truth

Dec. 28 is the 95th birthday for Stan Lee, the long-time editor and writer at Marvel Comics. More recently, he has been part of the marketing of Marvel Studios movies.

Stan (born Stanley Martin Lieber) has outlived many of his collaborators, including Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, Gene Colan, Don Heck and John Buscema. Others, including Steve Ditko and John Romita Sr. are hanging in there. Also, Stan’s wife Joan passed away earlier this year.

As the blog has remarked before, Stan’s legacy is a complicated one. He has been depicted as the creator of the Marvel Universe while Kirby, Ditko, et al. did considerable work in devising those stories.

That legacy remains complicated today. There’s plenty of time to analyze that again later. Today? The blog wishes Stan a happy birthday.

With that in mind, here’s one of Stan’s many comic book cameos (along with Joan) in an issue of Daredevil from 1971:

Stan Lee (and his wife Joan) make a cameo in Daredevil No. 79, written by Gerry Conway, drawn by Gene Colan and inked by Tom Palmer

1966: Lone Ranger adapts WWW, Batman

Lone Ranger and Tonto in the 1966 cartoon series that aired on CBS.

There have been many versions of The Lone Ranger, but a forgotten one aired on CBS in the fall of 1966.

That was a cartoon series, produced by Format Films. The series apparently was influenced by The Wild Wild West series that aired on CBS and the Batman  series that was broadcast on ABC.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto, as depicted in the cartoon, very much followed the Clayton Moore-Jay Silverheels model that debuted on television in 1949 and starred in movies in 1956 and 1958.

However, the villains the heroes confronted in the 1966 film were different.

The Iron Giant, built by Tiny Tom to menace the Lone Ranger in a 1966 cartoon.

In a number of the cartoons, the Ranger and Tonto faced Tiny Tom, a a very short scientist, sometimes aided by a giant assistant named Goliath. That was similar to Dr. Loveless (Michael Dunn) and his extremely fall assistant Voltaire (Richard Kiel).

Beyond that pair of villains, other of the Ranger’s foes had familiar capers to viewers of The Wild Wild West.

In particular, a Ranger cartoon titled Quicksilver had a villain who, after consuming a formula, moved so fast he was practically invisible. This was practically the same plot of the first-season episode of The Wild Wild West titled The Night of the Burning Diamond.

Format Films, the maker of the Ranger cartoons, had earlier produced the title sequence for I Spy.

One of the company’s principals was Herbert Klynn (1917-1999). Klynn was an alumnus of UPA, the cartoon operation that produced Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing theatrical shorts as well as a memorable adaption of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, with James Mason as the murder-narrator.

Meanwhile, Format’s version of The Lone Ranger featured villains with elaborate lairs, similar to the Batman television series with Adam West and Burt Ward that debuted in January 1966.

One of the Ranger’s foes in the cartoon series, the Black Widow (in the episode titled Cult of the Black Widow), had thugs in outfits similar to the henchmen in a typical Batman outing. The Black Widow was voiced by Agnes Moorehead, who would later win an Emmy for an appearance in The Wild Wild West.

Today, there’s a term, “steampunk,” definted as “a genre of science fiction that has a historical setting and typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology.”

The Wild Wild West featured steampunk. So did the 1966 version of The Lone Ranger.

When character genders change

Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson with Cary Grant as editor Walter Burns in His Girl Friday

Every so often, the idea is raised about having James Bond be played by a woman. It came up again just last week, raised by none other than British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Her comment was prompted, in part, by how Jodie Whittaker is the new Doctor Who.

“I think it’s a great move forward for girl power that there is going to be a female Doctor Who,” May told reporters on board her RAF plane Voyager, according to The Guardian. “And one day there should be a female James Bond.”

Other British newspapers ran similar accounts. And when it’s coming from the PM, it’s naturally going to be reported widely. Just as certain, many James Bond fans complained, in effect saying, “Here we go again….”

The thing is, male characters do get transformed into female ones on occasion.

His Girl Friday (1940) was the second film adaptation of the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. In the Howard Hawks-directed movie, newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) became a woman and the ex-wife of editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant).

There was a similar setup in 1988’s Switching Channels, also based on the Hecht-MacArthur play, but transporting the story to television and changing the character names.

Meanwhile, Whittaker has come aboard as Doctor Who. The BBC even posted the end of a Doctor Who Christmas special on YouTube:

 

For now, changing 007’s gender isn’t on the table, with actor Daniel Craig announcing in August he’s coming back for a fifth Bond film. But chances are the idea will get raised again at some point.

Dominic Frontiere, prolific TV composer, dies

Dominic Frontiere’s title card for Probe, the TV movie that resulted in the Search TV series.

Dominic Frontiere, a busy television composer for series such as 12 O’Clock High and The Invaders, has died at 86, according to a funeral notice in the Los Angeles Times.

Frontiere had a long association with television producer Leslie Stevens. The two were collaborators on the series Stoney Burke, The Outer Limits, the first season of The Name of the Game and Search. Frontiere was a production executive, as well as composer, for Stevens’ Daystar Productions.

After the end of The Outer Limits, Frontiere (along with other Daystar alumni) landed at QM Productions. Frontiere was the main composer for QM’s 12 O’Clock High. He also conducted music for other QM shows such as The FBI during its first two seasons.

While still at Daystar, Frontiere scored an unsold pilot titled The Unknown. That would be shown as an Outer Limits episode. Frontiere’s Unknown theme would be used as the theme for QM’s The Invaders.

Dominic Frontiere’s title card for an episode of The Name of the Game that was produced his long-time collaborator, Leslie Stevens.

Frontiere later worked on the 1977 mini-series Washington: Behind Closed Doors as well as the TV series such as The Rat Patrol, Vega$ and Matt Houston.

Frontiere also got into the legal trouble. He was married to Georgia Frontiere, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams.

Dominic Frontiere ” pleaded guilty to charges that he willfully filed a false income tax return and lied to Internal Revenue Service investigators to cover up his role in scalping” tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl, according to a 1986 story by the Los Angeles Times. 

UPDATE (9:45 P.M.): Jon Burlingame has written a more detailed obituary for Frontiere in VARIETY. 

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays from The Spy Command

The accompanying graphic has been the blog’s annual Christmas/holiday season greeting since 2011. It’s a tradition and it wouldn’t be the same without it.

The graphic was designed by Paul Baack (1957-2017). It’s just one sample of his artistic handiwork. He designed it when the blog was part of the Her Majesty’s Secret Servant website (1997-2014).

So this year, there’s an additional reason for the greeting. It’s a reminder of the life he led — and how he made things interesting for those who knew him. This isn’t being melancholy. It’s celebratory.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone.

 

William Read Woodfield: Photographer, magician, writer

William Read Woodfield title card for a Columbo episode, Colmubo And The Murder of a Rock Star, which he also wrote.

Another in a series about unsung figures of television.

It’s said that writers inevitably bring their life experiences into their work.

In the case of William Read Woodfield, he brought varied life experiences into his: Magician, photographer as well as accomplished scribe.

In a 2001 obituary, Variety described his work in photography.

Born and reared in San Francisco, Woodfield carved his photo niche during the 1950s and ’60s with published works being exhibited alongside Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton. His most famous series of photographs were made May 23, 1962, when Marilyn Monroe performed her famous nude swimming scene on the 20th Century Fox lot for the uncompleted feature “Something’s Got to Give.” The photos made the covers of magazines worldwide and proved to be Monroe’s last hurrah as she was fired from the picture shortly thereafter and died 10 weeks later.

The obituary added this:

“A magician since childhood, Woodfield founded the magazine Magicana and employed his knowledge of magic on ‘Mission: Impossible,’ ‘Columbo’ and ‘Sea Hunt.'”

Frank Sinatra as photographed by William Read Woodfield.

As a writer for television, Woodfield, by himself or in collaboration with Allan Balter, specialized in intricate plots. The Woodfield-Balter team was formed during the first season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Woodfield wrote for the series and Balter was an associate producer.

The Woodfield-Balter duo perhaps gained their greatest fame writing for Mission: Impossible. Barbara Bain, when accepting her second (of three) Emmys for the show, cited the Woodfield-Balter scripts as one reason why the show was popular.

In Mission’s third season, the duo were promoted to producers. But they ran afoul of creator/executive producer Bruce Geller. They departed early that season, but not before writing a two-part story.

The team stayed together into the 1970s, including producing a TV adaptation of Shaft for the 1973-74 season. After that, they went their separate ways.

In the late 1980s, when Universal revived Columbo (this time broadcast on ABC), the premiere story, Columbo Goes to the Guillotine, was written by Woodfield. The plot included a magician (Anthony Zerbe) who sought to debunk a man, Elliott Blake (Anthony Edwards), posing as a psychic who is pulling a con on the CIA.

However, it turns out the magician and the phony psychic have a secret past. Blake kills the magician. That brings Columbo in the case. One of the highlights of the episode is the magician’s funeral, where Woodfield brings his magician into full play.

Woodield died Nov. 24, 2001, at the age of 73.

Roger Moore part of TCM Remembers 2017

Turner Classic Movies has unveiled the 2017 edition of its TCM Remembers video, honoring actors and crew members who passed away during the year.

Roger Moore, who played James Bond in seven 007 films from 1973 to 1985, was part of the video. At around the 3:10 mark, the video includes a clip of Moore from 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me.

Other notables in the video include:

–Martin Landau, who played a henchman in 1959’s North by Northwest (used for one of two clips in the video) and gained fame in the Mission: Impossible television series.

–Veteran character actor Clifton James, whose many credits include playing redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper in Live And Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun.

–Fred Koenekamp, an Oscar-winning director of photography who had earlier honed his craft photographing 90 episodes (out of 105 total) of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. television series.

–Daliah Lavi, an actress whose credits included the first Matt Helm film, The Silencers, and the 1967 Casino Royale spoof.

–Bernie Casey, a busy actor who, among other things, played Felix Leiter in 1983’s Never Say Never Again, the non-Eon 007 film starring Sean Connery.

You can view the video below.