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Lorenzo Semple Jr. (March 27, 1923 - March 28, 2014) a gifted screenwriter has died at age 91. He was perhaps best known for his work on the 1966 - 68 'Batman T.V. series'. His film credits include the excellent screenplay adaptations of 'Pretty Poison' and 'Super Cops'. Other notable screenplay contributions included 'Papillon', 'The Parallax View', 'Three Days of the Condor' and 'Never Say Never Again'.
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I didn't, but I thought you'd want to!
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Yeah, I agree on both counts, especially Lange, and Barry's music. Maybe Bob will grace us with some posters of Semple's work...
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Posted: |
Mar 31, 2014 - 2:51 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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Born in 1923, Lorenzo Semple, Jr. was 18 when the U.S. entered World War II. During the war, he earned a Croix de Guerre after surviving a battle in the Libyan desert driving an ambulance for the Free French forces. He returned to the U.S., was drafted into the American Army, and ultimately earned a Bronze Star.
Semple's writing career started in 1951, as a short story contributor to magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's Weekly. In 1955, he had his first script produced on television, on The Alcoa Hour. Semple also tried writing for the theatre and had two plays produced on Broadway, "Tonight in Samarkand" (1955), a melodrama adapted from the French, and "The Golden Fleecing," a comedy that opened in New York on 15 October 1959. The latter was bought by MGM and produced under the title THE HONEYMOON MACHINE, starring Steve McQueen.
Semple relocated to Hollywood and established himself as a writer for several television shows, including The Rogues and Burke's Law.
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Posted: |
Mar 31, 2014 - 4:46 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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"I wrote a pilot called, Number One Son about Charlie Chan’s son," said Lorenzo. "A story set in San Francisco. I wrote the script which was okay, everybody liked it, which is about all you can expect, and we were thinking about casting and everything, then ABC called William Dozier saying, 'This is very embarrassing but word just came down we’re not to do any program with an ethnic lead.' They didn’t want a Chinese person in it. So they said, 'We’re very embarrassed but we owe you one.'"
While living in Spain in 1965, Semple was approached by producer William Dozier to develop a television series for ABC based on the comic book "Batman." Semple wrote a pilot which was promptly picked up, and the series was put on the air, premiering on 12 January 1966. Semple wrote the first four episodes, and also served as Executive Story Editor, in which capacity he put his writing imprint on all of the first season's scripts. Semple also provided the screenplay for the 1966 BATMAN feature film version, which opened during the summer following the first season.
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Posted: |
Mar 31, 2014 - 5:05 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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In 1968, Semple scripted the Anthony Perkins-Tuesday Weld thriller PRETTY POISON. The screenplay was based on a novel by Stephen Geller.
SEMPLE's script for PRETTY POISON won the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best screenplay of its year. "20th Century Fox, hated the movie," said SEMPLE. "They really hated it. They released it at only one theater in New York on the upper west side. Just one theater without any press screening. It happened that Pauline Kael was independently a friend of mine. She called up Joe Morgenstern who was a critic at the Wall Street Journal. She said, 'Joe, there’s a movie that’s so terrible that Fox won’t let us see it and put it out at one theater. Let’s go see what kind of movie that was. Maybe we can really beat Fox over the head' and they loved the movie. So, naturally, they wildly over-praised it, in my opinion. They started a movement for it"
PRETTY POISON was remade for television in 1996, but Semple did not write the script for that adaptation.
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