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.