Herbert Solow, who helped revive Desilu in ’60s, dies

Herbert F. Solow title card from a second-season Mission: Impossible episode

Herbert F. Solow, an executive who helped revive Desilu in the mid-1960s, died this week at 89, Variety said.

Desilu, one a major producer of TV shows, was primarily leasing studio space by the middle part of the 1960s. Solow was brought in to revive production.

The executive sold Star Trek to NBC and Mission: Impossible to CBS for the 1966-67 season.

“This was a particularly sweet time for me,” Solow said in the 1996 book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, co-authored with Robert H. Justman. Justman worked as associate producer on both pilots and was on the crew for most of Star Trek’s original three-year run.

“Star Trek and Mission were the first projects I’d put into development after I joined Desilu,” Solow said in the book.

Both would be complicated shows to make, especially for a studio that had been relatively inactive. “I’d fought the budget battles and the casting problems, the network egos and the studio’s old-fashioned polices,” he wrote.

A year later, Solow sold another series, Mannix, a private eye drama, to CBS for the 1967-68 season. That would be the final Desilu series. Gulf + Western, then Paramount’s parent company, purchased Desilu from Lucille Ball. Desilu became Paramount Television.

Solow stayed for a time but departed. Paramount management put on more pressure to cut costs.

“It wasn’t the same, so I asked out of my contract,” Solow told Patrick J. White, author of The Mission: Impossible Dossier. Solow ended up at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as an executive.

UPDATE: Here is a YouTube video of Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman reading from their 1996 book. h/t @Stingray_travel for the heads up.

New book examines never-made Dalton 007 films

A question asked by James Bond fans is what would have happened if Timothy Dalton made more than two 007 films.

A new book, The Lost Adventures of James Bond, may provide answers. A press release for the book says that author Mark Edlitz “uncovers different scenarios for Timothy Dalton’s abandoned third and fourth Bond movies.”

Edlitz previously wrote the book The Many Lives of James Bond.

In 1990, a treatment for Bond 17 was written by Michael G. Wilson and Alfonse Ruggeriro that took a bigger, more science fiction take compared with Dalton’s Licence to Kill movie. The treatment included robots, including a robot that could pass for a woman.

The treatment was turned into a script by other writers and this gets examined in the new book.

A third Dalton movie ultimately was derailed when Danjaq, the parent company of Eon Productions, got into a legal fight with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Bond would not return to theater screens until 1995’s GoldenEye, with Pierce Brosnan as Bond.

The Edlitz book also looks at other Bond-related events, including the James Bond Jr. animated series and a “lost” performance by Sean Connery as Bond.

For information about ordering, CLICK HERE.