Interview
with William Dozier in 1968 about the ending of the Batman Series.
Interview
with William Dozier in 1968 about the ending of the Batman Series.
Toronto Telegram
To the sad-faced man who puts the Pow! Wham! Zowee! in the
Batman series, one cliche is just a cliche but 15 are good for a
laugh -- and millions of dollars.
His formula lasted three years -- and full year longer than
Batman producer Bill Dozier ever hoped for.
Network rivals were "betting Batman was just a hoola
hoop craze," said Dozier, in Toronto yesterday to tape an
interview for CBC's Public Eye. "They gave it only 90 days. I
gave it two years."
The 60-year-old television and film executive, who put the
camp in Batman, says his biggest surprise, after Batman's phenomenal
first impact, was the fact it lastest as long as it did.
So now, winding up its third and final season on the ABC
network, Batman is being readied for pasture. It leaves the network
at its 7:30 p.m. prime-time slot to go into regional distribution
with probable afternoon airing aimed at the kids.
At its peak, Batman attracted 55 percent of the viewing
audience, a surprising two-thirds of it adult. Now, adult viewers
have dwindled to 10 percent. Network and sponsors agree the show no
longer rates prime-time telecasting.
But aimed at the children's market, Dozier predicts "it
will go on forever. There's always a new crop of children growing up."
And it will mean almost pure gravy for Dozier and the rest
involved in translating the comic book hero to television. The
greatest cost of producing a series is amortized over the first two
years. After that, income from repeats, foreign sales or syndication,
is mostly pure profit.
When network officials first approached Dozier about
producing the series, he "thought they were out of their
skulls." He'd never seen a Batman comic. But after looking them
over and pondering the idea, the man who made his television
reputation as CBS's top West Coast executive during the heyday of
Playhouse 90, determined the answer was to operate on two levels.
For adults, Batman would be high humor, for kids, high adventure.
Collaborating with Hollywood screenwriter Lorenzo Semple
Jr., ("the most bizarre thinker I knew") Dozier came up
with a $500,000 pilot that had the ABC brass "rolling in the
aisles." The network, harassed by low ratings, keen competition
and scarcity of ideas, scheduled 16 shows before the pilot was even
in the can.
The result is history. It made the cover of Life and
Newsweek. It was Dozier the title of "King of Camp" even
though at the time he had never read Susan Sontag's definitive
article on the phenomenon and he thought camp was where you sent your
kids in summer.
The Batman craze hiked ABC ratings and boosted comic book
sales. And in the first year it resulted in revenue close to
$75,000,000 for sale of Batman capes, toys and gimmickry.
To the big names in show business, an appearance on Batman
became the "in" things. "Even Eli Wallach phoned me
up," recalls Dozier. "He said he was a flop with his
grandchildren because he'd never been on Batman."
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