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SEMPLE, LORENZO,
JR. (1922– ). American writer.
Script consultant: Batman (tv series)
(1966–1968).
Film based on his work: The Honeymoon
Machine (Richard Thorpe 1961).
Appeared in documentary: Dino de
Laurentiis: The Last Movie Mogul (Adrian Silbey 2001).
I am still not sure
entirely sure when he was born—he is evidently dedicated with religious fervor to
suppressing all knowledge of his date of birth, since every reference book I
consulted was silent on the issue—but a passing
mention that he was a sophomore at Yale University in 1942 indicates that he
was born around 1922, the date I originally gave and now accepted by the
Internet Movie Database. One assumes that he was the son of Lorenzo Semple,
incorrectly described as a wealthy Southern lawyer—he was actually a graduate of the Naval Academy and a New York
businessman—and one further assumes that his
elder sister was the man's daughter, Ellen Semple, who married noted playwright
Philip Barry and perhaps provided the connections that led to his later work on
Broadway—an assumption that has not yet been
challenged. Despite what one might reasonably think, he did not volunteer to
serve in World War II as an ambulance driver simply to avoid more dangerous
military action, but was instead inspired by the example of his uncle John, who
had been an ambulance driver in World War I. Furthermore, his unit suffered
many casualties in Africa, and after Semple lost part of his leg, he continued
to serve his country during the rest of World War II as a member of Army
Intelligence. All of these grim and heroic experiences, however, did not seem
to have much of an impact on Semple, since his later writings would
consistently suggest to any amateur biographer that he was only the carefree
scion of a rich and prominent East Coast family who never had to worry about
getting anything he wanted, and hence was perfectly prepared to go through life
regarding the worldly travails of others as nothing more than elaborate jokes.
Semple began his career in 1951 by
contributing stories to The Saturday Evening Post, Argosy, and Ladies
Home Journal, but soon was focusing more on playwriting, with two
lightweight Broadway shows—Tonight in Samarkand (1955) and The Golden
Fleecing (1959)—to his modest credit. He also dabbled in New York television
with an odd episode of The Alcoa Hour, "The Archangel
Harrigan," about a man who claimed he could fly—foreshadowing his later
involvement with superheroes. By the 1960s, undoubtedly after a few more phone
calls on his behalf, he was well established in Hollywood, contributing to
programs like Kraft Suspense Theatre, Burke's Law, The Rogues,
and The Rat Patrol, and soon, he was planning to spend the 1966-1967
television season contributing scripts to a new fantasy series he had
co-written the pilot for, featuring veteran clown Bert Lahr as Thompson's
Ghost. However, after the pilot was unexpectedly rejected and recycled as
an episode of Vacation Playhouse, Semple was available for assignments
when he received a phone call from producer William DOZIER, desperately seeking
someone to help him with the daunting project ABC had placed in his lap—a
weekly series starring the comic-book hero Batman. And this, of course,
became the work that would make him famous, or infamous, depending upon your
perspective.
By writing most of the series' early
episodes, Semple indelibly set the tone for the program's campy combination of
exciting adventures for the kids and knowing wisecracks for their parents, and
one must acknowledge that the results, at least initially, were strikingly
entertaining, even brilliant. His humorous dialogue, and Frank Gorshin's
frenetic overacting, transformed an obscure villain, the Riddler, into a major
figure in the Batman mythology, and he significantly helped Burgess MEREDITH
and Cesar ROMERO revitalize their careers by establishing distinctive
personalities for their performances as the Penguin and the Joker. Still, the
program's success cannot be credited entirely to Dozois and Semple, for the
regular actors played key parts as well—especially Adam
WEST—by imbuing the cardboard
characters with their own sort of surreal conviction, making them seem like
real people forced to confront absurd situations and allowing audiences to
become genuinely involved in their contrived plights. This is an important
point in explaining Semple's later failures in filmmaking, as actors in
two-hour movies would not enjoy the same sustained opportunity to overcome the
mind-numbing effects of the often incessant frivolity in his plots and
dialogue.
Although Semple did help out Dozier with one
episode of his next series, The Green Hornet, the success of Batman
otherwise enabled Semple to move up the ladder to writing feature films,
beginning (obviously) with his splashy but strangely enervated Batman
movie, and soon followed by the overlooked Raquel Welsh spy thriller Fathom
and what remains his most memorable work, the quirky and unsettling Pretty
Poison (1968), which uncharacteristically conveyed some genuine pain amidst
its jokey melodrama . In the 1970s, he first seemed to be playing it straight,
churning out popular mainstream fare like Papillon (1973), The
Parallax View (1974), The Drowning Pool (1975), and Three Days of
the Condor (1975); but when producer Dino de LAURENTIIS hired him to update
King Kong, the old fratboy silliness returned to center stage. The
celluloid disaster that resulted must be attributed principally to Semple—no
matter how tempting it is to instead blame its overbearing producer, shoddy
special effects, unassertive director, and miscast, ineffectual actors—because
Semple, utterly unable to discern anything profound or evocative in the story
of King Kong, regarded it only as a pretext for a succession of lame
witticisms. The moment when Jessica Lange, finding herself suddenly in the hand
of a giant ape, screams out "You goddamn chauvinist pig ape!"
epitomizes everything that was so irksomely miscalculated about the film.
King Kong spectacularly launched Semple's decline. Someone searching
for nice things to say about subsequent efforts might argue that Never Say
Never Again was tolerable enough, no doubt due to Sean
CONNERY's sobering influence, and
that Flash Gordon can be moderately amusing if you are in the right
frame of mind and are mentally prepared to waste two hours of your precious
time on brightly colored nonsense. But absolutely nothing can be said in
defense of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, another colossal bomb that probably
inspired whispered conversations all around Hollywood to the effect that Semple
was losing his touch, the sort of feedback that can sink the career of even the
most charmingly sociable and well-connected screenwriter.
For whatever reason, Semple since that time
has been credited only with two television movies, Rearview Mirror
(1984) and Rapture (1993), although a few journal entries in a 1997
issue of the online magazine Slate suggest that he remains very active on the
Hollywood scene, still trying to peddle scripts to interested producers. Perhaps, always an
inveterate prankster, he now enjoys himself at home by pretending to be his
brother and sending grouchy e-mails to chroniclers of his career who aren't
quite getting everything right. But one would prefer to think that he has
settled into profitable semi-retirement as an anonymous script doctor, the
reliable old standby one calls upon to add a few jokes to an expensive script
that somehow doesn't seem to be touching every conceivable base in its quest to
please every conceivable audience. I wouldn't be surprised to hear, for
example, that Semple made a few uncredited contributions to the mess that was
the American Godzilla, like the scene where some technicians about to
confront Godzilla are observed watching Barney the Purple Dinosaur on
television. It is this sort of lighthearted satirical humor, Semple's forté,
that one can properly appreciate and celebrate, as long as it is only taken in
small doses.
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