That Fine American Hand

Back in the day, an elementary school teacher chose to chastise us students on the poor quality of our handwriting. Pointing to the alphabet displayed over the blackboard, she said, “Look at those letters! Look how perfect they are! Do you think they were drawn by a machine? They weren’t. A person wrote those.”

Which simultaneously shamed and puzzled youthful Joe. The green-and-white sheets of cardboard were clearly printed by a machine. Beyond that, some part of me must have received her meaning. A human being had shaped those letters, even the weird Q that looked like an overwrought numeral two.

Timothy Matlack, Master Penman
courtesy Wikipedia

Five-plus decades later, I blame her tirade for my lifelong obsession with fountain pens, stationery, calligraphy videos, and a late-life interest in books about how adults can improve their penmanship.

Which leads us inevitably to the summer of 1776.

One of the enduring factoids about the origin of the United States is that we’ve gotten our national birthday wrong. (That is so you, America!)

Citizens here embrace the Fourth of July as a holiday, when in fact July 2^nd was the day of the vote that severed the colonies from the Crown. July 3^rd was spent quibbling over the document Thomas Jefferson had spent 17 days drafting in his boarding house on Seventh and Market streets in Philadelphia. Finally, on July 4^th, Congress accepted, or adopted, the language of the Declaration of Independence.

Congressional printer John Dunlap was authorized to print broadsides for the general public of the (now former) colonies. Only 26 copies of these are known to exist today. In 1989, a man perusing a flea market bought an ugly $4 framed picture and discovered an original Dunlap tucked inside. It sold in 2000 during a live Sotheby’s internet auction for $8.14 million to the late television producer Norman Lear.

Yet those broadsides are not the document Americans carry in their collective memories. The document preserved behind bulletproof glass at the National Archives is known as the engrossed Declaration. That’s the word used in the 18th century for an official handwritten legal document.

The man whom historians consider most likely to have put quill to parchment to create this piece of calligraphic history was named Timothy Matlack.

He was a political radical, a brewer, and the founder of the Society for Free Quakers, an organization for like-minded individuals who had been booted by the Friends for the bellicose stance they took during the Revolutionary War. After two Quakers criticized his sons for taking up arms in the conflict, Matlack had them caned. People openly mocked Matlack for wearing a sword around town, which was admittedly weird in an era of flintlocks.

A clerk in the Pennsylvania State House, Matlack was known for his lovely penmanship. He had engrossed the papers commissioning George Washington as general of the Continental Army.

For the Declaration, Matlack picked out a piece of parchment that was close to a square. He might have used a pin to mark off his margins and a straight edge to keep his lines straight, though the document bears no evidence of those standard techniques. His quill would have been dipped in handmade, iron gall ink.

The document contains only 1,337 words, excluding the signatures. So far as I know, Matlack only made two errors, spelling the word “Representative” wrong in the fifth grievance, and omitting the word “only” in a later sentence. Jefferson may have inserted the corrections careful readers will find in the document.

Members began affixing their signatures to the engrossed parchment on August 2, 1776. (The last signer may have signed as late as 1781. Col. Thomas McKean of Delaware was off fighting the war.)

Americans who grow up seeing reproductions of this document often don’t realize that it is handwritten; Matlack’s lettering looks too consistent and too florid to be “real.” The heading—“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America”—resembles a classic black letter, or “Gothic,” font, and reappears in four other spots in the text. The rest of the document is written in what we can only assume is Matlack’s standard fancy hand.

Brian Willson

Which brings us to 2003, when a gentleman named Brian Willson tracked down a copy of the Declaration he’d acquired as a kid, on replica parchment, and began studying it intently.

By then, Mr. Willson had become one of the world’s leading typeface designers. Since 1993, he has created an impressive library of fonts, often culled from handwritten documents. He has, for example, created typefaces based on the handwriting of Abigail Adams, John Paul Jones, Stephen F. Austin, Frederick Douglass, Sam Houston, and John Quincy Adams, just to mention a few. He created one, dubbed Professor, that mimicked the handwriting of his father, who was a professor of Germanic languages. And once, after spotting the hasty scrawl of a handwritten diner menu in Maine, where he lives, he produced Oak Street, the “messy-looking” typeface of his dreams. (You can inspect all of these at his main web site: 3IP Type Foundry.)

It’s impossible to overstate how important typefaces are to the modern world of design. One of Mr. Willson’s fonts was used to represent the handwriting of Severus Snape in the potions book shown in the movie

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. His work has appeared on the cover of a book by Nicholas Sparks, the design of The Spiderwick Chronicles book franchise, the cover of an album by the Dave Matthews Band, and a Ken Burns parody shown on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. My personal favorite was the appearance of one of his text fonts in a throwaway-but-critical scene in the comedy series, Arrested Development. Another interviewer dubbed Mr. Willson’s work “crazy famous,” and I’m inclined to agree.

Acting on a hunch that Matlack’s hand would prove popular with designers, Mr. Wilsson spent a “tedious” six months transforming Matlack’s handwriting into 608 characters. It’s not enough for a type designer to replicate the look of the letters that appear in their primary source. They must also extrapolate from the primary source. How would Matlack, in others words, have written a dollar sign ($), the at symbol (@), or the trademark symbol (™)? His process, Mr. Willson says, went like this:

1. Pore over the old scripts, looking for the most typical and legible letters of the upper- and lowercase alphabets, along with numerals, punctuation marks, etc.
2. Scan each of these glyphs and bring the saved digital scans into a program with vector graphics tools (usually Adobe Photoshop), then begin tracing.
3. Export the traced outlines as PostScript files that can be imported into a font design application (Fontographer or FontLab), where each glyph can be tweaked, perfected, and (in the case of cursive scripts) made to seamlessly connect with every other.

The result is a font which Mr. Willson dubs American Scribe. (Naturally, that is the font I'm using to illustrate this post.)

“Matlack did indeed have lovely, legible penmanship,” says Mr. Willson. “Whereas I don’t recall thinking things like, ‘Oh, he must’ve dipped his pen here,’ it’s always gives me pause to see the occasional ink blot or inserted word (as “only” inserted by Jefferson in the Declaration) or cross-out or underscore in some of these old documents.”

The font set he created actually replicates those ink blots…

I asked him what it’s like to trace the words of a long-dead person and then presume to write like them. “In all the old pen fonts I’ve designed,” he says, “I feel like I’m somehow ‘inside the head’ of the writer whose script I’m replicating. You can seemingly get a feel for the emotions based on pen pressure (or lack thereof) and the like. There’s something extra there, too– as when you recognize the handwriting of a beloved family member in the address on an envelope you might receive in the mail (or used to receive, as handwritten letters aren’t anywhere near as common as they used to be).”

Now, you might well ask who buys such a product, and how do they use them? The most logical clientele are designers who work at historical sites associated with the Revolution, such as Colonial Williamsburg, who need reliable fonts to create a library of replica documents. Mr. Willson hears from users and fans often.

“It’s one of the finest rewards of this work,” he says. “And, yes, some folks likely wish to give the feel of the Revolution in their use of American Scribe, but others simply like the look of the font and their use is entirely unrelated (as when it appears on wine labels, say).”

I take perverse glee knowing that someone took so much time to remember Matlack’s work. The great irony, of course, is that his original parchment is so badly faded at this point in history that we must all rely on the 1823 Stone engraving to see what the Declaration looked like during its first century. The U.S. Constitution, written just 11 years later, is in much better shape. Both repose in darkness in the rotunda in Washington, DC.

Visitors who want a peek must press a button, which illuminates the documents for a little while. All day long, as tourists traipse through, the sacred principles of a nascent nation wink on and off, as if saying, We’re still here. We’re still here. We’re still here…

---

• My full interview with Mr. Wilsson lives here.
• Investigate American Scribe and his other fonts at OldFonts.com and 3IP Type Foundry.
• His novel, about a typeface designer who acquires a haunted house in Maine…
• A documentary recommended by Mr. Willson:

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

JosephDagnese.com

The Dog Days of Summer

(Locked in the middle of another July heatwave, so this repost from LAST July seems really timely. See you in two weeks!)

Happy Mid-July! Hot enough for ya?

Funny story- I grew up in a literal suburban cul-de-sac. But Instead of a couple of split-level ranch houses at the endpoint where our little slice of suburbia eventually expanded into the inevitable dead-end circle, there was a large corral that served as a home for several llamas.

The cloven-hooved, Inca-pack-animal-kind.

Not the robe-sporting, enlightenment-spewing kind.

This kind.

So of course the residents of our court (it wasn't a "street," or a "place," or a "drive," but a "court.") had to accustom themselves to a seemingly never-ending, slow rolling procession of people out for their daily walks, who liked to come down and look at the llamas. It could make our quiet side street pretty busy, especially in the summertime.

Now, this was the late-‘70s/early ‘80s. The time of the After School Special, Kool-Aid commercials, and Bert Convey hosting Match Game. To say, “It was a different time,” would be a massive understatement.

And not least because we never ever locked our front door.

Ever.

Well, okay. Maybe when we were going out of town.

Because it was the ‘70s?

Nah.

Because three of our neighbors on our cul-de-sac were cops.

Yep. The guy to our right, and the guy to our left, and the guy across the street.

One patrol officer. One detective. One long-time undercover operative.

Lived next to all three of them for a couple of decades. I guess that this experience has helped hone both my tastes as a reader and my writing style when it comes to crime fiction.

I’ve said it before elsewhere and it certainly bears repeating: Ubervillains BORE me. Unrealistic. Usually a crutch for laaaaaaaazzzzzzyyyyyy writing, and just not at all my thing.

Turns out the same holds true for me when it comes to cops. Or for all law enforcement types, for that matter. Superheroes BORE me!

Is this because the neighbor who worked undercover as a fake biker, sitting in biker bars and eavesdropping on biker gang members doing drug buys looked an awful lot like a young Wilford Brimley unless he had a week’s worth of beard going? Or that the beat cop on the other side was a lousy gardener who took inordinate pride in the hedges he mutilated? And that his son was a stiff-necked jock who barely tolerated his dad, his wife detested him and his elder daughter was kinda messed up? Or that the detective across the way never touched either coffee or cigarettes? Or that all three o them were certainly scofflaws when it came to the 4th of July, and the county-wide ban on fireworks such as M-80s?

Maybe. Or maybe, like my Vietnam War hero helicopter pilot father, I just have a hard time suspending disbelief when seeing something in a story, fiction or otherwise, that directly contradicts my own lived experiences? (For my dad it was stuff like seeing Jan-Michael Vincent turn on “whisper mode” in his stealth helicopter in the 80s TV action-adventure show Airwolf. Boy did that crack him up!).

I like to think that my lived experience has helped make me a more discerning reader and a better writer. For me, the character has to be believable. The guys who lived around me were hardly Dirty Harry. But they also weren’t cops from the “Files of Police Squad,” either.

And I guess that’s how I like my characters. Realistic.

Anyway, that’s it or me this go-round. Happy Dog Days to you!

The Pen of the Teller

Because I write reviews a publisher occasionally offers to send me a novel. I usually respond that I only review short stories, not novels, so no thanks. I made an exception recently, because Akashic Press wanted to send me the new crime novel by Penn Jillette.

In case you don't know, the author is the tall loud half of Penn and Teller, certainly one of the best magic acts in history. Teller, the short one, is silent on stage. He is a walking encyclopedia of magic tricks and a master of sleight of hand. Penn, on the other hand, describes himself as carny trash and a juggler. They have been the subject of some controversy, being rejected by the Magic Circle because of their habit of showing how tricks are done. For example:

They have their own theatre in a Las Vegas casino. They also have a delightful TV show called Fool Us in which some of the greatest magicians in the world are invited to try to, uh, fool them. On average, slightly more than 1 in 4 succeed.

I have seen them perform twice in their fifty years together, as recently as last year. (One interesting fact: if you see the same trick twice, once on TV and once live, you may discover that something that seemed random isn't. Hmm...)

Oh, they are also active in the skeptic community, mocking pseudoscience in its many forms. They made this film many years before COVID. I doubt if RFK Jr. would approve.

So I was eager to read Penn's novel (normally I would call an author by his last name, but I can't think of him as Jilette). And it is a treat.

The narrator is Poe Legitte, and he is a tall, loud juggler. Does that sound like someone we know? The first question we face is how much of this book is autobiographical. The answer appears at the end of the novel. (I should say an answer, because Penn, as he cheerfully notes in his act, lies a lot. Talk about an unreliable narrator.)

The first almost-third of the book traces our hero in the seventies from high school on through various adventures. (He wanted to follow the cross-country wanderings of Bob Dylan, not aware that Dylan made them up.) But one day in Philadelphia he gets involved in a crime and that turns his life upside-down. He goes on the lam, trying to create a new life for himself and wondering if he dares to risk exposure by doing the thing he is best at: juggling. You can probably guess that his guilty past catches up with him, although not in the way you might expect.

But this book is not really about plot. It's more a chance to spend some time with a fascinating character who is never at a loss for words: funny, vulgar, fascinating words. Here is Poe talking to a very angry criminal who could have him killed:

"I don't want to be caught. The... do you use the term 'pigs,' or is there some other colorful term you use nowadays for law enforcement? Is it now 'five oh?' Is 'pigs' too old-fashioned collegiate? Is it like I just said, 'You're the bees' knees?'"

I do have a few quarrels with the book. Most important, I don't believe how easily Poe was convinced to participate in the crime. And the distribution of loot makes little sense. But those are small issues that won't stop you from enjoying a roller coaster ride through the mind of Penn Jilette.

Hearsay, I Say

 

The good folks at Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine have included my story, “Slow Burn,” in the current issue. I’d like to say thanks.

Perhaps more fitting for the story, I'd like someone else to say I said thanks.

There is a brief description of a courtroom scene in “Slow Burn.” The prosecution seeks to admit some evidence, and the criminal defense attorney objects as “hearsay.” That’s it, the section doesn't run more than a sentence or two. Don’t avoid reading the story because you don’t care for legal thrillers. “Slow Burn” isn’t one of those. 

But this blog is legal stuff. Stop now if that's not your jam. I’d like to use today’s space to talk about hearsay evidence. I find the topic interesting. Hearsay is an essential element of criminal evidence. Writers often get it wrong.

Most authorities define hearsay as an out-of-court statement offered for the truth of the matter asserted. To illustrate, assume Abel is on trial for murder. His friend, Bob, takes the witness stand and testifies that Abel told him that he couldn’t have committed the crime because Abel was in Tahiti on the date and time the offense happened.

The prosecutor should object, and the court should prevent Bob from being allowed to testify to what the defendant said to him concerning his whereabouts on the night of the killing.

To be clear, if Bob testified that he and Abel were in Tahiti on the day of the killing, that would be an alibi and a different scenario. Here, however, Bob is saying what Abel told him. He is merely the playback recorder for the statements offered to prove Abel’s innocence. Abel’s statements presented through Bob shouldn’t be admissible as evidence.

The criminal justice system likes confrontation. The system strives to enable the opposing side to conduct a meaningful cross-examination of the declarant, the person making the statement. Legal writer John Henry Wigmore called cross-examination "beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth."

The opposing side doesn't really get to ask the meaty questions if all Bob can say is "that's what he told me."  If Abel wants to give the Tahiti defense, as a defendant, he will have an undeniable right to testify. But he will have to answer the opposing party's questions. And advising the client on that strategic decision is where defense lawyers earn their keep.

Sometimes, a statement like Abel's Tahiti trip comes in for some collateral purpose. Assume for a moment a side issue arises in the case on trial about, whether, on the day he made the statement, Abel was allegedly unconscious or unhinged. The fact that he was able to converse with a friend and speak in complete sentences, regardless of their content, is the pertinent fact. The statements, then, are not actually being offered for their truth, but rather as proof that Abel was capable of making them. Bob, likely, gets to keep testifying under those circumstances. The judge may, however, instruct the jury about the limitations on the use of the evidence.

This is a rare exception. Typically, one side of the case or the other wants the meat of the statements to be admitted. And the opposing side frequently wants to keep them out of the jury's ears. 

The courts have traditionally held that the right to confrontation applies to some out-of-court statements but not to all of them. Where that line gets drawn is a constitutional battleground frequently fought in cases before the United States Supreme Court.

Many of the hearsay exceptions are “firmly rooted.” That’s constitutional speak for old. Without bogging readers down in the minutiae of evidence law, these exceptions became rooted because they were believed to have particularized guarantees of trustworthiness.

An example is a dying declaration. Vicky Victim has been shot. The emergency doctor places the stethoscope to her chest, listens, then shakes his head and says in his best medical terminology, "You're circling the drain, Vicky. Any last words?"

Vicky gasps, “Bob shot me.”

Her heart monitor emits a single unbroken tone.

If Vicky Victim is unavailable for trial, usually because of death, that statement is generally admissible in court. The criminal justice system assumes that people have no incentive to tell a lie when convinced that they are facing imminent death. (This, wise readers recognize, is the weak spot in the analysis. If the dying declaration is swept away, it will likely be because challenges to its inherent credibility highlight the need for confrontation.)

Dying declarations are statements made by someone who believes that they are about to die and relate to the cause or circumstances of the death.

The shorthand rule: If the person says I need a doctor, the statement may not be admissible. But if they say, I need a priest., the better the chances that the statement will be heard in court.

The dying declaration illustrates the general rules for exceptions to the prohibition against hearsay testimony. It's a time-old exception, dying declaration precedents date back to at least the year 1202. John Adams used the dying declaration to help secure an acquittal for one of the British soldiers charged following the Boston Massacre. One of the victims, on his deathbed, told his doctors that the soldiers had been provoked. The dying declaration began and persisted because of a social belief in the inherent trustworthiness of those statements.

In the evolving world of constitutional law, it can’t be predicted whether the dying declaration will continue. 800 years may be long enough. For purposes of a brief exploration, the dying declaration exception illustrates the lens through which to view hearsay exceptions.

Other exceptions include present sense impressions, excited utterances, statements for medical diagnosis, and records of routine business activity. I won't beat you down today with analysis of those. Just remember that they've been around a while and society believes that they are the sort of statements that are foundationally trustworthy. 

As mentioned at the beginning. You don’t need to know the exception to understand the story. The publication of “Slow Burn,” however, provided me with the opportunity to talk about hearsay. I hope the discussion will make your legal writing more informed.

Until next time.

In the end, you make your own luck. Good, bad or indifferent. — Loretta Lynn

           There’s a line from Kismet, a largely forgotten musical, that has stuck with me since I first heard it back in the 60s:  “Fate is a thing without a head.”  It’s a more poetical way of saying luck is luck.  It can be good or bad. 

            I feel like a lucky person.  To feel that way, you have to have had things frequently cut your way, for no reason other than they just did.  It also helps to have some unlucky moments, which provides perspective. 

           In the business world, you often hear “Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity.”  I don’t like this cliché very much, because it isn’t very poetic, but it’s essentially true.  I’ve known lots of people who refused to have good luck thrust upon them, then go on to feel put upon by life.  I’ve known others who seem to draw bad luck like Ben Franklin’s key drew lightning.  But those who can recognize good fortune when it appears, in time to exploit it, are the luckiest of all.

I also don’t like how the word privilege is used to scorn people, especially white/middle-class/suburbanite people like me.  It suggests that whatever achievement one may have had, it was all just a gift of social standing.  If that’s the case, I wish it hadn’t come with so much stress, grief, sleepless nights and utter exhaustion.  I prefer to say I had some luck along the way, including in my choice of parents, brother and personal associations.

            And DNA.  Somewhere in those long helical strings resides the compulsion to write.  It started when I discovered words at about four and has continued unabated into old age.  I was a lousy student.  In retrospect, I probably had a raging case of ADHA.  I couldn’t sit still or listen to anyone talking at me for more than a few minutes.  What I could do was write, so my academic career was entirely the result of writing my way out of trouble. 

           

          It got me my first job and every job after that. 

            I’ve known writers who are much luckier than me.  On the list are bestsellers, who don’t appear to be very good writers.  Sometimes quite awful.  They might have gotten started because their aunt ran acquisitions for Random House, but they kept succeeding because there’s a market for what they write.  I don’t begrudge them anything, even if the scales are balanced by a lot of incredibly gifted authors who barely claw their way on to the midlist. 

            It has a lot to do with luck and everyone has their allotment, both good and bad. 

            I could have been born with a gift for hitting baseballs.  This would have made for a much better Little League career, and perhaps a fruitful run with the Boston Red Sox.  But it’s not something with broader applicability.  I could be playing for the Senior Softball League, but that relies on good weather and available playing fields.  And dosing on Advil. 

I could have asked for more musical talent.  Though I’ve been engagingly involved in performing for most of my life, I always feel that the people on stage with me are a lot better at it than I am.  As with luck, good looks or a penchant for picking the right racehorse, musical talent is not evenly distributed across the population.  And wanting it to be so is a waste of emotional energy.   Just ask Salieri. 

When it comes to the talent lottery, I’m happy with writing.  It’s a lot more versatile than almost anything else.   Aside from the novels, TV commercials, corporate brochures, short stories, billboards, feature articles and speeches for the company’s CEO that can sustain ones lifestyle, it helps with angry letters to your congress person, grandchildrens’ birthday cards, anonymous tips to the police hotline and coherent sticky notes.  You can do it your whole life - as long as your brain stays intact - and reap the rewards at every stage. 

            Can’t get any luckier than that. 

Normal and Enjoyable

Watching what’s going on, I’m flabbergasted.

I began this article by writing about some of these things and then realized that the crucial problem is actually people's reactions.

Some people are overwhelmed and stick their heads in the sand because it’s too much.

Some people aren’t overwhelmed - they just haven’t bothered looking.

Some have looked and simply can’t find it within themselves to care.

I've had two different types of conversations lately.

Regarding infectious diseases we put to bed with vaccines but are now on the rise, I've been told that we should just live normal lives. Regarding political events that have increased suffering, I've been told that we should enjoy ourselves.

Of course, we all want to wake up, drink our coffee, chat with whoever is around, go to work, care for our children, hang out with our pets, travel and go to dinner with friends. All that is truly the stuff of life. What makes it enjoyable is liking ourselves - thinking we are good people - and the companionship of people who we care about and who care about us. Without that, we're just an engaging in a bunch of actions with no meaning.

The crux of all that is normal and enjoyable is respect for ourselves and the true companionship of others, all of which depends on empathy; who can see themselves as a good person without empathy and who can have relationships without mutual empathy?

If someone has no empathy for others - unable to put themselves in someone else's shoes and seeing that person as they would their daughter, son, mother, father and not just a stranger who is a data point - then there is no point in listing atrocities. It becomes just a list of things that people don't care about. This is why a very long article became this simple one about our growing lack of empathy.

No empathy? People will argue they have empathy for others - their friends, family, even their pets - they just don't want to look at events around the world. True empathy isn't a choice. If we see a child writhing in pain alone after being hit by a car, turn away, happily go home to our own child to play catch and hug them if they're hurt, then calling ourselves an empathetic person is a low bar.

True empathy isn't a choice - it extends to those who are suffering. Without that empathy to guide us, without empathy to stop the worst of the worst, the number of those suffering will grow and how many of us will care?

The fear of being overwhelmed should pale in the face of fear of what we will become if we turn away. We can look and care, from the comfort of our lives, and not fall apart. 

Give 'Em the Rock and Roll: Irwin Allen, Part 1

Back in the Network Era of television, directors used a particular camera shot to simulate an almighty kinetic shock or battle damage. The camera tilted one way while on cue the actors threw themselves in the opposite direction. Back and forth they went, the actors seeming to tumble--though nary a chair moved or a piece of paper ruffled. Hey, this was the 1960s. No CGI, no virtual artists, just production ingenuity and choreographed camp. 

There is an industry name for that stumble-about shot: the Irwin Allen Rock-and-Roll.

Fifty years after his height of heights, Allen is a surprisingly quiet figure in Hollywood history. Here was a writer-director-producer and film biz insider for decades. The Rock-and-Roll was Allen. If you've ever uttered the phrases "Danger, Will Robinson!" or "Crush, kill, destroy," that was Allen, too. He would come to style himself the "profit of doom," and he wasn't wrong. 

A PROFIT IS BORN

Allen--Irwin Cohen, by birth--grew up in Great Depression New York City. His Plan A was a career in journalism or advertising, but his family couldn't swing the college tuition past one year at Columbia. In 1938, he packed up and moved to Los Angeles, where an industrious young man might had a better shot --and Allen was born a self-promoter extraordinaire. He had brains, charisma, and pure sales guile. 

Allen caught on quickly as a magazine editor and studio publicist. Soon, he'd build a major L.A. literary agency--P.G. Wodehouse was a client--and was matching authors with studios. Allen's punchy gossip column, The Hollywood Merry-Go-Round, dished movie industry dirt in 73 newspapers on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In 1941, he leveraged his contact list to launch a radio quiz show version of his column. It only ran in L.A. and targeted that insider audience--and it was a hit. 

In 1949, he expanded the show to television, in a celebrity panel format. Here, and wisely, Allen sensed his limits. Print and radio were one thing, but television demanded a more versatile and lightning-witted host. He turned to rising talent Steve Allen (no relation) to front the show while Irwin stayed behind the camera to produce.  

This was 1950. Allen was 32. He had presence, instinct, a massive platform, well-placed friends, and all the insider skinny. He'd spent a decade hobnobbing with studio bosses--and watching the bosses lose power to independent producers. In this new game, the independent producer bought rights, commissioned a script, convinced a director and lead actors to sign on, and pitched the package deal to the highest bidder. 

And now Allen had production experience.

ACADEMY AWARDS AND MONITOR LIZARDS

Allen's first packaged sales were a catch-all, a noir picture with Robert Mitchum and comedies with Groucho Marx and Frank Sinatra. With a few projects under his belt, Allen took a shot at directing. A documentary, of all things, but the departure was smart. He wouldn't be directing actors so much as controlling the visuals, and as was his gift, he was on trend. 

The post-WWII years marked a leap forward in ocean exploration. Ships were more capable. Submarines braved deeper depths. This was the Jacques Cousteau heyday, and conservationist Rachel Carlson had written the best-selling and award-winning The Sea Around Us (1953) that captured these new oceanographic insights. Allen bought the rights and put it on the big screen.  His version played up the gore and toned down the poetics, which infuriated Carlson but scored at the box office. 

Independent producers self-financed, and sending film crews out to sea cost a small fortune. Instead, Allen contacted marine organizations and scholars worldwide for their ocean film. In all, he assembled 1.6 million feet of stock footage and edited the contributions down to a 62-minute narrative without ever getting wet. The Sea Around Us won an Oscar. 

Warner Brothers took note. Allen sold them not one but three packages. He delved deep into their stock footage vaults to stitch together The Animal World (1956) and its scenes of grazing herds and hungry lions. For his dinosaur segment, Allen had to be talked out of stationary plastic models and actually animate a dino fight. For his high-concept The Story of Mankind (1957), Allen hired Grade A-actors like Hedy Lamarr, the Marx Brothers, Vincent Price, and Peter Lorre--for one day's work each. Everyone breezed through a key historical figure spliced in around stock footage. The movie revels in thin excess and reached that near-reverent status of delightfully bad cinema.

But it was a spectacle, and Allen was the happy sidewalk barker. 20th Century Fox was looking for spectacles to spice up their summer sci-fi adventure. These were the drive-in years, when the blockbusters got held for winter. Allen sold Fox a three-package deal. First up would be another run at Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1960). 

The 1925 film version is remembered for its innovations in stop-motion. Fox even brought in that same stop-motion team to create a modernized dino battle royale. Allen, though, had been upsold on dino action before. Too expensive, too much production schedule lost. Instead, he insisted the crew dress up young monitor lizards and alligators as dinosaurs. His lost jungle was stock-footage Brazil, his plot not much more than a premise. The drive-in crowd loved it; critics and city theatres, not so much.

For his part, Allen was playing to the crowd. More importantly, he'd introduced what would become his most winning formula: complicated disaster scenario, large cast getting bumped off one by one, a show for the show's sake.

A FANTASTIC VOYAGE

Allen's follow-up, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), leaned into public interest in new super-cool subs and the dawning of the Space Age. A synopsis: Admiral Harriman Nelson and his high-tech submarine battle saboteurs, bureaucrats, and a giant squid to save Earth from the Van Allen Belt caught on fire. Importantly, the Van Allen Belt cannot possibly, under any scenario, catch on fire. It's in space. In an Irwin Allen movie, it's best not to examine the holes. Seriously, icebergs sink. This time, though, Allen crafted an A-ish movie. The Lost World had made Fox a small profit. Voyage's $7 million haul tripled its budget.

Allen was going bigger, bolder. His budget asks grew accordingly, but Fox was getting nervous. They hadn't signed him to swing for the fences. His next film, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962), proved Fox right to worry. The Jules Verne adaptation only recovered half its $2.4 million cost.  

But television was booming. Fox needed bold, weekly adventures, and Allen had been thinking ahead. When the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea production wrapped, he'd put the expensive submarine sets in storage for future use. Voyage the television show didn't just have the glow of a recent winner. It had paid-for, movie-grade staging. 

Season one of Voyage (1964) found a solid audience in its ABC Monday night slot. The light sci-fi, Cold War-esque format earned decent reviews. It made money, too, despite Allen's insistence on movie-like production value to match his sets. It was aboard the Seaview that the Rock-and-Roll came alive.

Network execs were listening when Allen pitched his second series. Imagine, Allen told CBS, the Swiss Family Robinson, but as space colonists hopelessly off-course. Such a family could navigate weekly crises and yet manage to grow closer. 

Great, CBS said, until they saw the pilot. Goose the conflict, CBS said, and add more tech. Allen wrote in an antagonist, Dr. Smith, and a talking robot full of warnings. Toss in more impossible science and a lot of production sharing with Voyage, and Lost in Space was born.

Allen's shows clicked with audiences. Until they didn't.

SOCKED

In 1966, Batman hit television as a craze no one expected. Batman ran opposite Lost in Space and quickly stole Allen's prized young viewership. Allen was forced to fight camp with camp. He turned to catchphrases and wackier plots, but that only stemmed the bleeding. 

Voyage also had lost steam. It'd devolved into creature-of-the-week romps, with Allen recycling costumes between his shows to keep costs down. Meanwhile, Lassie was winning the time slot while definitely not battling sea monsters. Then there was the fact that Allen ran the two priciest television sets in town. Voyage was scrapped. Allen wrapped Lost in Space rather than accept the network's cost-cutting demands.

His third series, The Time Tunnel (ABC, 1966), scored an Emmy but not an audience. The fourth, The Land of the Giants (ABC, 1968) set the production budget back $250,000 per episode despite Allen's penchant for stock footage. The network cuts its losses after two seasons.   

Four shows, all respected for their ambition and entertainment value, all quick to develop a cult following, all too expensive for television. 

What Allen needed was another run at the big screen--and his timing couldn't have been better. Audience tastes were shifting back toward event movies, what he dubbed a movie movie. 

Allen's next act had arrived. It would definitely rock and roll.