The Survivors ABC 1969

[Paul Raven]

Thought that this ill fated primetime soap deserved its own thread, rather than being buried in the primetime soaps  thread. 

 

Some background from the book The Business Behind the Box

 

Paris 7000 was the other ABC  Thursday night entry, a hasty foreign intrigue series which was created in the first place because ABC was under firm contract to Universal Television to produce a full season of The Survivors, the 1969-70 season's one real fiasco.

The case history of that is worth a digression. The Survivors began on bravado. It was one of those announcements for the future—when ABC was at a particularly low point in the standings—that seemed to say: don't lose heart in ABC, great things are ahead, the network is on the move with a spectacular sure-fire idea for the season after next. Why the long delay to bring it off? Because it is such a perfect idea involving such an enormous investment that it must not be rushed. The pieces have to be put together carefully. The idea was born in a meeting between ABC corporate president Leonard Goldenson and one of the most commercially successful writers of trash fiction in this century, Harold Robbins. An operator of theaters before he came into broadcasting, Goldenson was convinced that motion pictures were the most reliable barometer of public taste in mass entertainment, and he was determined to give the ABC television network the benefit of the ABC theater chain's experience with the paying public. The movies based on the novels of Harold Robbins were nearly always powerful at the box office, so it seemed to follow that a television series written by Robbins could not help but be a hit.

 

The project was trumpeted as the first television novel, each chapter to be a complete TV drama in itself but at the same time advancing the continuing central story. Robbins would write the pilot episode and outline the remaining chapters for the first season, and those would be scripted by Hollywood writers. Ostensibly he was to oversee the development of the basic story. Robbins was the first sure-fire element; the second was money—it would be about wealthy and powerful jet-setters. The third was glamour and foreign locales, almost all of it to be shot on location, and the fourth stars—Lana Turner and George Hamilton, with Ralph Bellamy playing a temporary role as their father, who would die in one of the early episodes. Fifth, it would have the time slot that launched Peyton Place a few seasons earlier on the network, Monday night at nine, perfect for the target audience, which was women. And finally, the most important element of all, implied in the involvement of Robbins: sex. Sex, money, glamour, exotic scenery, big stars, Robbins' name, proven time slot—ABC executives confided they did not see how it could possibly fail. No less confident was Universal Television, which agreed to produce it, although that would involve deficit financing of $50,000 per show.

 

The Survivors premiered as ABC's great expectation of the season in September 1969 and never drew enough audience to have the faintest hope of succeeding. For all the supposedly sure-fire elements, the public gave it a massive rejection. Possibly the cynicism behind its creation showed. The series was in trouble before it left the author's head. Robbins had prepared a story about the spoiled and headstrong progeny of an American business tycoon, who disliked each other and their father, and were sure to be disliked in turn by the audience. There were three protagonists, none of them sympathetic. The only sure-fire thing in that, for a simple-minded melodrama, is noninterest. If as a star of yesteryear Lana Turner epitomized glamour, the series received precious few benefits from her beyond that. There was clearly the miscalculation that she was a strong draw. Further, in the production of the series, there was the discovery that she had not lost the star temperament that was indulged in the picture business during the thirties 40 A Sprig of Hollywood and forties but was an embarrassing anachronism in television of the sixties. It drove three producers off the project.

 

The next blow to the series was Senator John O. Pastore of Rhode Island, who, as head of the Senate Communications Subcommittee, had been conducting hearings on television violence. The networks were quickly reforming at his behest, clearing their schedules of programs that depended on acts of brutality and ordering scripts about mental conflicts rather than physical. Then without warning, triggered apparently by the Noxzema "take it off" shaving commercial, Senator Pastore extended his war from violence to sex and violence, holding over the broadcast industry a bill he proposed to introduce which would safeguard their station licenses against challengers promising to do better programing for the community. Nearly every station operator in the country was anxious for the bill to be passed, so the networks were forced to comply with the Senator's wishes for all-round cleaner television. Sex had to go, and The Survivors went in for a rewrite. The series lost one of its selling points.

 

During the summer of 1969, while the series was in production, word of strife on the set of The Survivors spread throughout the business. It began with Miss Turner's refusal to wear paste jewelry. She couldn't get into the mood of her part, as a person of enormous wealth, unless she wore the real symbols of opulence. The diamonds had to be rented from a jewelry dealer in the south of France, with guards hired to move them back and forth. Then it developed she would not wear the same jewelry in any two scenes, and so the logistics of the jewelry was added to a production that was otherwise not going well. For assorted reasons, the producers left, one after another. After the premiere show, Bellamy could not wait to be written out of the story. By December Miss Turner was out of it, too, the story drastically changed, and all that remained of the original scheme was the title and George Hamilton. The dying enterprise was costing Universal Television A Sprig of Hollywood 41 $50,000 an episode, and there was clearly no point in continuing it. But Hamilton had a firm twenty-five-week contract that had to be honored, and so a new and far less costly series, Paris 7000, was devised for him. On January 23, it became Dean Martin's new competition on Thursday night. The series was not really expected to run beyond the duration of Hamilton's contract, but there was always the chance that it might be a sleeper. Although hastily produced on a modest budget, it was at least an improvement on The Survivors. 

 

[dc11786]

I have an early outline for this show somewhere. It was suppose to be very different. As I remember, Baylor Duncan, George Hamilton's character, was the main focus. I also feel like there may have been more of an action/adventure story going on. I think some of the original was filmed because they scrapped the original concept when there was a change in producers. The material was repackaged as sold in Europe as "The Last of the Power Seekers." 

 

I didn't know that Lana Turner had left the series. 

[Paul Raven]

Transferring this from the primetime soaps thread

An article about the behind the scenes strife of The Survivors.It only makes me want to see it more!

 

 

Lana Turner knew only too well that she was the model for the lurid 1962 novel Where Love Has Gone, and stopped talking to its author, Harold Robbins (The Carpetbaggers). But by two years ago, she had made peace and signed to star in Robbins' The Survivors, an ABC television series about the jet set he concocted for the forth coming season. That, it turns out, may be grounds to break off relations permanently with Robbins — and just possibly is the worst decision of Lana's 45-movie, seven-husband career. The Survivors has so far proved to be the most overpriced and troubled TV series ever. In the ten months since shooting began, the show has run through three producers.

 

Also down the chute went one director, the costume designer, the executive story editor — and the original Robbins story line itself.

 

Says Lana, one of the few charter members of the company left on the set last week: "If we were to film what really has happened behind the cameras, no one would believe it."

 

The narrative is, so to speak, pure Robbins. He conceived The Survivors for a couple of reasons. Though he has sold more than 40 million books, Robbins has long lusted for a larger audience: he figures that "even if the show is a failure, more people will view it in one night than all the people who have ever read or seen The Carpetbaggers." Secondly, he has always felt that two-hour movie adaptations of his novels were too truncated and that 100 hours were really needed.

 

Sophisticated Saga.

 

 

So Robbins went to the production brass of ABC, and spieled out a scenario. There is this banking family, he winged — Morgan or Rothschild types, with the second generation vying among themselves for command after the death of the patriarch. The saga would unfold in novel form, not with self-contained weekly story segments but chapter by chapter. The Survivors would also be more sophisticated than conventional television — "A story," as Robbins put it, "of today's morals.

 

If people go to bed together, they'll go to bed together on the show. We are not bowing down to TV in any way."

 

ABC was sold, with nary a script or a pilot, and commissioned Universal to produce it. Robbins would get a percentage of any profits, plus $10,000 a show. Furthermore, he says, he was guaranteed a full 26 weeks the first year instead of the customary 15 or 17, and payment for a second season of 26 shows "whether it bombs or not." For that unprecedented, sweet contract, Robbins gave ABC only a nine-page "treatment," conferred a few times with Universal, and then took off for his Riviera home.

 

Journeymen Hollywood scriptwriters would hack out the weekly chapters from the Robbins outline and flesh out such supporting characters as Louis Armond St. Verre, described in the scenario only as "the debauched scion of an old French family whose main claim to fame is that he has made love to 3,000 women and has had gonorrhea 26 times.

 

The first producer, William Frye, was allocated the highest series budget in the history of TV—nearly $8,000,000 for the 1969-70 season. That bought not only Lana but also George Hamilton, who seemingly has given up his escort service for serious acting ("Commitment," he proclaimed last week, "is 90% of life"). Some $200,000 was spent on the set—four times the TV average —and another $100,000 on wardrobes, $50,000 of it for Lana. But that didn't stop her from quarreling with Producer Frye over the jewelry provided. Frye couldn't be bothered, he said, and got a slap across the face. He slapped back —on both cheeks—and she told the producer he was through.

 

Thus, after two months of shooting (most of it on location on the Riviera) and $1,000,000 of expenses, Universal still had to get its first usable episode.

 

After another producer passed briefly through the chaos, old TV Hand Walter Doniger (Maverick) was called in and wrote a 40-page, single-spaced critique of what was wrong with Robbins' nine-page outline and the scripts to date. He became the third producer.

 

Harmonious Sex Life.

 

 

In Doniger's view, a fight over a banking empire run by a family patriarch (Ralph Bellamy) would not keep TV viewers tuned in for very long. So he decided instead "to deal not with the abstracts of wealth but rather with the emotional problems of rich people. Our stories will be about human beings faced with all kinds of swirling emotional forces, told against an enormous backdrop, but with the same kind of problems as you and I." Translation: kink it up.

 

Out went eight different story outlines, three finished scripts and five more in the works. In the original, for example, Lana and her husband (Kevin McCarthy) hymned their harmonious sex life with lines like "It's only good with you." Now it's bad, bad, bad, and in fact their 19-year-old son turns out to have been sired by a Greek named Krakos, who was at the time a poverty-stricken tourist guide but has since become richer than Onassis. Naturally, the son has some S.D.S.-type campus friends. Also hastily written in is a South American revolutionary conservatively patterned not after Guevara or Castro but Simon Bolivar.

 

Despite all the frantic script doctoring and transplants, Universal claims that shooting is about on schedule. Lana and the old sweater-girl figure are holding up pretty well for her years (49). She is getting along swimmingly with Producer du jour Doniger, who himself professes to be having "desperate fun" with the cast and show. "It is like having a cocktail party on the wing of an airplane." Lana does make her daily 5:45 a.m. calls, and has difficulty only in getting a fix on her unraveling character. "There have been so many story versions that I am still trying to figure out what kind of woman I am," she complains. Last week, for instance, Lana had to shoot the sixth chapter, though the third chapter still lacks a final script.

 

Treat or a Treatment.

 

One of the principals of the cast—who signed on in hopes that the show "might convey the real emptiness of our life and become an American L'Avventura"—now fears that it is degenerating into high-priced prime-time soap opera. Producer Doniger vehemently disputes the charge, though he just as determinedly denies that his last show was soap. It was Peyton Place.

 

That series, at least, made ABC a lot of money, and the real cliffhanging question in The Survivors melodrama is whether Robbins has given the network a treat or a treatment. With his two-year guarantee, he has less to lose than the network if the show doesn't survive the second season. No matter what happens, Robbins will continue to be as rich as Krakos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Paul Raven]

`The Survivors' doesn't survive

Replacement show to star holdover Hamilton; ABC -TV's clearance problem discussed

The Survivors, billed in advance as "the most ambitious program" in ABC -TV's 1969 -70 schedule -a billing generally translated to mean the most expensive as well -has had it. ABC announced last week that the program (Mondays, 9 -10 p.m. EST) would not go beyond its Jan. 12 appearance. It will be succeeded by a new program starring George Hamilton - the last surviving key performer in Survivors-in the Thursday 10 -11 p.m. time period for which Survivors had been destined in mid-season shake -up plans disclosed a few weeks ago.

The new program, described as an action -dramatic series played against the background of the American embassy in Paris, is called Paris 7000 and will start Jan. 22. It will be produced by Universal Television, producer of Survivors, and the executive producer will be Richard Caffey, currently working on the departing show in the same capacity.

Survivors, based on a story idea by author Harold Robbins and reportedly budgeted at $250,000 an episode, has been plagued at every turn. It has had trouble in production, trouble in reviews, big trouble in the ratings. Trouble on the set, widely reported as stemming from personality clashes with star Lana Turner, led to three changes in producers. Critics for the most part gave the program low marks. In the latest National Nielsens (Nov. 17 -23) it was 85th in a field of 87 programs and the lowest -rated entertainment program of the lot.

A few weeks ago, in a salvage effort, ABC planned to shift the program to Thursday nights at midseason and drop both Miss Turner and co-star Kevin McCarthy, retaining only co-star Hamilton. Now it's to be a whole new program. 

ABC lost a bundle along the way, including having to pay Universal to end the 26 week contract and agreeing to buy 4 2hr TV movies from that studio.

The Survivors (ABC -TV, Monday, 9 p.m. EDT). . . cheesy hokum ..." Jack Gould. New York Times

. . .abomination ..." Kay Gardella. New York Daily News

. . . was introduced last night without the slightest apology ..." Bob Williams, New York Post

. . star -packed hour of trashy troubles of the very rich." Lawrence Laurent, Washington Post

. . .excessively talky." Bernie Harrison, Washington Star.

Monday, Sept. 29 Survivors debut

7:30 -8 p.m. Rating Share

ABC -Music Scene 9.1 15

CBS -Gunsmoke 17.1 28

NBC -My World And Welcome To It 22.4 37

8-8:30 p.m. ABC -Music Scene 9.8 15

CBS- Gunsmoke 17.7 27

NBC -Laugh In 30.9 46

8:30 -9 p.m.

ABC -The New People 11.9 17

CBS -Lucy 16.4 23

NBC -Laugh In 35.8 50

9-9:30 p.m.

ABC -The Survivors 20.5 29

CBS - Mayberry RFD 12.1 17

NBC- Monday Movie 25.0 35

9:30-10 p.m.

ABC -The Survivors 22.7 31

CBS -Doris Day 14.3 20

NBC- Monday Movie 25.2 35

10 -10:30 p.m.

ABC -Love, American Style 18.7 27

CBS -Carol Burnett 16.4 24

NBC -Monday Movie 25.4 37

10:30 -11 p.m.

ABC -Love, American Style 16.1 24

CBS -Carol Burnett 15.0 23

NBC- Monday Movie 26.6 40