Lorenzo Semple Jr. Discusses the BATMAN TV Series
by Andre Soares
Lorenzo Semple Jr., creator of the 1966 TV series Batman, discusses his bat-writing days in Variety:
"When I first heard, some time ago, that Sir Michael Caine had been engaged to portray Alfred the Butler in the latest Batman movie, I was frankly disturbed. Full disclosure: I was the piloter of the 1966 Batman TV series, aired with spectacular if short-lived success on ABC and arguably responsible for rousing millionaire Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson (and his Batmobile and Batcave and myriad other Batgadgets) from the quiet pages of DC Comics into the savage glare of filmed entertainment.
"As such, I am often asked what I think of the string of Batman features which has followed. My answer disappoints. Truth is, I think only rarely about Warner’s bigscreen charades, for they are related to our antique effort in little beyond the eponymous title."
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In the TV series, veteran Alan Napier played Alfred. In addition to Batman, the British-born Napier appeared in nearly 150 features, and television series and movies, from the early 1930s to the early 1980s. He died of a stroke in Santa Monica, Calif., in 1988.
Among Lorenzo Semple Jr.’s film screenplays are those for the routine comedy The Honeymoon Machine (1961), with Steve McQueen and Jim Hutton; the cult classic Pretty Poison (1968), starring Anthony Perkins and an excellent Tuesday Weld, and which earned Semple Jr. a New York Film Critics Circle best screenplay award; and the paranoia thrillers The Parallax View (1974), with Warren Beatty, and Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sydney Pollack, and starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, and Cliff Robertson.
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I’m still not sure which incarnation of Batman is better - the whimsical version, or the dark one. It’s all a part of the problem in adapting comics to the screen.