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The One That Got Away

The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner was an evening newspaper, which eventually closed in 1989.

Big Eddie, Beacon Hill Give CBS Aug. Jump on Season

by Morton Moss, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Tuesday 10 June 1975, pB-5

As long as we're talking about people getting the jump on people, we ought to confide the plans of KHJ-9 with Space: 1999, the plush sci-fi series it has purchased from ATV of London.

This is the one that returns Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, as a team, to American television. KHJ, afraid of being blotted out by network openers, will unveil the initial hour of Space: 1999 Saturday, Aug. 23, from 7 to 8 p.m. The strategy, of course, is to let the viewers know there will be such a series upcoming on KHJ. Open in the midst of the network barrage, and the presence of the Bain-Landau epic might as well be placed in the classified file.

Two or three weeks later it hasn't been determined yet Space: 1999 will roll on a weekly basis. The series has been expensively assembled. Conceivably, KHJ has a body of work that can challenge more than one network series for quality.

Moon Is Off And Running

by Morton Moss, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Thursday 21 August 1975

It's getting tougher and tougher to grab the attention of the television audience from the baits the competition is dangling. Space: 1999, the sci-fi series made in England, with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, goes to the lengths of exploding the moon out of its orbit around the earth in the premiere Saturday night, 7 to 8 o'clock, on KHJ-9.

This is the climax of the first episode. It's accomplished noisily, dizzily and weirdly by special effects director Brian Johnson and the skilful cutting of director Lee H. Katzin and producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson.

You do have the sense that something momentous has happened. The amalgamation of sound, horrified faces and the play of light and colour on the moonscape miniatures, swollen in photographic scale to the illusion of reality, collaborate to stimulate emotion.

That accident, caused by accumulated magnetic radiation, dispatches Moonbase Alpha on the voyage into outer space that sets up the circumstances for the succeeding plot and counterplot of heroism, villainy and gadgetry. KHJ-9 strategy - call it the yearning for survival - decided on this early screening of the opener of "Space: 1999." There was the fear that, otherwise, the syndicated series, would be lost amid the torrent of network openings.

The fear was intelligent. We wonder, though, if so long a gap should be left before the second episode, Saturday, Sept. 20, which inaugurates the weekly appearance of the remainder of the 24 shows. Now that premature burial is avoided, the next worry is audience amnesia.

Landau, as Commander of the Base; Bain, as the medical overseer, and Barry Morse, as professor-in-chief, follow the sketchy characterizations of George Bellak's teleplay. This isn't the sort of series to which you come for solid, realistic human portraits. Environment furnished with technological wonder and possibility is the focus of the major viewer concentration. In a way, the people, if not exactly adjuncts, are dwarfed by surroundings and instruments that give the humans their chance at significance and drama. Mission: Impossible, the previous series habitat of the Landaus, similarly had an overarching format that out- weighed the particular members of the cast.

The appurtenances of outer space lore have been presented with lavish gloss. Presumably, the science fiction buff and the still activated Star Trek alumni will feel perfectly at home. When we look at such a background of enamel, metal, glass and plastic, it stirs a latent fantasy in us of being ambushed by a warehouse full of refrigerators.

This is straightaway space melodrama. Dependence isn't upon richness of emotion. What will be essential to hype a steady flow of interest is great ingenuity of plotting and an imaginative application of the mechanism of galactic exploration. The time-machine, to employ the appropriate idiom, will reveal whether Space: 1999 has a sufficiency of those ingredients.

There's a lesson here in pollution. The catastrophe comes about because the dark side of the moon is being used as a nuclear waste dump by the people on earth. On the other hand, no pollution no dump, no dump no catastrophe, no catastrophe no series. Score one for pollution.

The One That Got Away

by Morton Moss, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, "TV Weekly" magazine, 23 August 1975, p5-6

This earthling suggests that the networks may find that Space: 1999 is the big one that got away.

It's a science-fiction series of 24 episodes, with the Made in England Label of Sir Lew Grade's Associated Television and the dramatics of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain as recommendation. Husband and wife, they toy with the instrumentalities of space exploration this time instead of the disguises and the devices of Mission: Impossible, their last series together.

Neither Grade nor International Television Corporation. ATV's United States arm, could land a sale with a network. The webs don't relish the notion of purchasing a lavishly budgeted series of prime, time quality, which Space: 1999 threatens to be, when they haven't been in on it from the beginning.

The results of the rebuff by ABC, CBS and NBC are several. Space: 1999 will be released here on KHJ-9, an independent owned by RKO General, Inc. Lest the show be smothered by the rush of network openers, Channel 9 will put the first episode on the screen Saturday, between 7 and 8 p.m.

The start isn't exactly low key- the moon explodes and Bain, Landau and Barry Morse are sent on their adventurous way through space. After the No. 1, "Breakaway," Channel 9 doesn't go with it on a regular weekly schedule until Saturday, Sept. 20.

ITC has syndicated the show in some 130 American markets, most of them affiliates of the webs, not to speak of a substantial global sell. What concerns the networks is that a number of affiliates have chosen to slot "Space" in primetime rather than access time, and take a network series on a delay. The more doubtful network shows are jeopardized.

"We lived in London 20 months." Landau said. "When we originally went over, it occurred to Barbara and me that we were the foreigners there. We didn't know whether that was too good a situation. But, really, it turned out to be an unusually compatible period for us.

"The ice was broken quickly and the tea was hot. The tea trolley came around twice a day. The day we got to Pinewood Studio, Norman Jewison. making Rollerball, was sitting at a corner table. The day we left the studio, with the 24 episodes finished. Jewison was still sitting at that table."

Landau is Commander of Moonbase Alpha, Bain the chief medical officer and Barry Morse, whom you may remember as the pursuer of David Janssen in The Fugitive, a professor skilled in the remarkable feats of space technology.

Rudi Gernreich created the topless bathing suit and other sartorial wonders in a lifetime preparation for clothing the cast of Space: 1999. The special effects, purported to be truly special, have been provided by the technicians who worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Star Trek was cancelled quite a long time ago: Yet, its ghost remains very much present in the minds of sci-fi fandom. They've gone so far as to form societies which regularly lament the absence of their favourite program. There's a potential windfall that Space: 1999 could catch in all that nostalgia apparently wrapped up in these tireless rites of mourning.

"We were sitting at home one day in August of 1973," said Bain when the Andersons - Gerry and Sylvia, the English producers - and Abe Mandell, who heads ITC, burst in on us. They asked us if we wanted to do a series. They came ready with all sorts of materials prospectus. drawings, outlines.

"As they explained it. it sounded exciting. We had been offered separate series after the trouble that caused us to leave Mission."

They mentioned a regret that their exit from Mission, occurring at the time of a change in management at Paramount, had been painted as an unsuccessful rebellion for more money. Martin attributed his withdrawal to a policy shift away from major control by Bruce Geller, whose creation Mission fundamentally was. Bain, as a consequence of her husband's decision. was plunged into litigation for a year. Finally, there was a settlement out of court. Since then, she has been visible in a few television movies.

"There was a stretch there," Landau laughed, "where we made a lot of deals but no film. We were paid large amounts of money to hold us, meanwhile. We were developing a series with the people who had produced I Spy. We had many meetings."

Barbara took up the recital. "We had all those meetings and never shot any film. Once, when we sat down together, I said. Let's shoot the meeting. That would have given us film on something, anyway."

"Nothing ever came of it." Landau said. "It was supposed to go to a certain executive at one of the networks. He was favourable toward it. He left the network and the whole idea got hung up. I've still got the script."

Landau eventually discovered himself in front of a camera. He had to travel abroad to have it happen Yugoslavia. Sicily. "I did pictures with Pete Falk. Telly Savalas, Jason Robards and Robert Shaw. Some of the pictures got here and some didn't." He shrugged. indicating he would have experienced small disappointment if none had reached this country.

They assured us. the series had been given the plush treatment. The cost ran to $6.5 million, which figures closer to $8 million if a comparable luxuriance had been supplied here.

Space: 1999 lives or dies by the American market returns. That's the direction in which its efforts have been aimed, as witness Landau and Bain, consultation with Lee H. Katzin. American TV director, and collaboration of George Bellak. U.S. writer, in the scripting.

Barbara, incidentally, will be trying for four - Emmys, that is. She won three straight with Mission, which isn't bad for a girl hit. in her dispute with Paramount, by such wicked four-syllable words as "recalcitrant" and "obstreperous."