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As the end of the summer approached, the Studio’s television arm was working at top speed getting ready for the fall season. Fox had more shows and more programming hours than any other studio. One of its new shows was an hour-long Western called
Custer
. The title part in the series had been assigned to an unknown young actor named Wayne Maunder. Maunder’s contract was an exclusive seven-year pact and called for an initial salary of $250 a week, with a $500 bonus for every segment of the series in which he appeared. The initial word-of-mouth on the series was that it was a hit (the new season was supposed to start another Western cycle on TV) and Maunder’s agents, the Ashley-Famous Artists Agency, were beginning to get restive at the terms of his contract. So that the series could get into production, Maunder had signed what is known as a “short-form contract,” which is in essence a letter of agreement that functions legally until a standard contract, with all its clauses and provisos, can be prepared. Late one afternoon in the latter part of August, two AFA agents, Ed Rothman and Robert Wald, walked into Owen McLean’s office. Their mission was to pry better terms for Maunder out of the Studio before letting him sign the long-form contract. With McLean were Jack Baur and two Studio attorneys, both with copies of Maunder’s short-form contract on their laps.

A short young man with a strained and husky voice, Rothman sat down on the couch, pulled out a pen and balanced a yellow legal pad on his knee. McLean leaned back in his desk chair, a set negotiating smile on his face. He and Rothman exchanged pleasantries about the difficulty of finding parking spaces on the Studio lot since the beginning of construction on the
Hello, Dolly!
set. “Well,” McLean said finally.

Rothman, who was also an attorney, sighed. “Well, going in we didn’t have a lot of bargaining power,” he said.

“What makes you think you have now?” McLean said.

“You know what the standard Fox contract is called in the trade?” Rothman said, fencing. “A slave contract.”

McLean examined his fingernails, smiling benignly. “I don’t recall you calling it that before the boy was signed,” he said. “And you seem to have forgotten that we exercised our option before the series was even sold, So I don’t think it’s exactly a slave contract.”

“But he’s the star of a series now,” Rothman persisted. “There are all kinds of ancillary rights when you’re the star of a series, and you’re not giving them to him.”

“Ed, explain ancillary rights,” Baur said.

“Come on, Jack, you know what I mean,” Rothman said. “The series is a hit, he’ll get invited on all the variety shows. I mean, do you have the right to put him on the Dean Martin show, say, for $250, charge Martin $7,500 and pocket the difference?”

“We sure do,” McLean said.

“Well, we think there ought to be a bonus clause for things like radio and television guest appearances,” Rothman said.

McLean placed his elbows on his desk and sucked his lips tight against his teeth. “Ed,” he said patiently, “let’s not try to renegotiate this contract now. Look, the boy was happy when we brought him out here and happy as hell when we picked up his option. And don’t forget, we paid his dental bill—which we didn’t have to do.”

“I was told you didn’t,” Rothman said. “I was told you loaned him the money for the dental work and took it out of his salary.”

“You were told wrong,” McLean said equably. He was obviously enjoying the session. “We paid $2,000 for the dental work. Out of
our
pocket. His mouth was in such lousy shape he probably couldn’t even get out of bed by now. Every tooth in his head was infected, his gums, everything.” He shook his head distastefully. “And this happened even before he came to Fox.”

Rothman raised his hand. “All right, all right, I’m overwhelmed by your charity. It’s not unusual for a studio to try to keep everything and it’s not unusual for a good agent to try and loosen up the contract a little.”

McLean smiled. “No chance.”

Rothman perused his notes. “What about loanouts?” he said. “We want him to have a piece of what you get if you loan him out to Metro, say, for a picture.”

“Negative,” Baur said. “It’s inherent in all our term contracts that we can loan an actor out anywhere we want.”

“We haven’t asked the boy to guide any tours yet,”
McLean said. The proceedings seemed to amuse him vastly.

“We have an exclusive deal,” Baur said. “If we want to send him down to the beach to ride a surfboard, we can do it.”

“And he doesn’t get anything, I suppose,” Rothman said.

“Correct,” Baur said.

“Look, Ed,” McLean said, “have you ever heard of a Fox contract where a guy participated in loanouts?”

Rothman shrugged sadly. “I can’t recall,” he said.

“And you won’t,” McLean said. “And you know and we know you wouldn’t be in here if this series hadn’t sold, right?”

Rothman nodded his head back and forth. For a moment, no one spoke. Then Rothman seemed to catch his second wind. He said that as
Custer
was a Western, Maunder would very probably be inundated with rodeo offers on weekends and when the show was not shooting. A rodeo appearance meant merely that Maunder would ride around the arena in costume, but many rodeos offered television stars up to $5,000 a day just for showing up. Rothman contended that a clause should be written into the contract guaranteeing Maunder any rodeo earnings.

McLean shook his head. “The first time someone offers this boy $5,000 a day for a rodeo, you’re going to come in here bitching like hell trying to renegotiate this contract.” He sucked on his glasses and smiled again. “It hasn’t happened yet, so let’s save something for then—if he gets it.”

Rothman hunched his shoulders and folded up his
notes. “You guys are tough people to deal with,” he said.

McLean shook his hand. “You’ll be back,” he said. “I can count on it.”

When Rothman and Wald were gone, McLean put his feet on the edge of his desk. “They were just fishing,” he said. “It’s a rule of nature. You put an unknown in a series, you sell the series, automatically his agents are going to be in here trying to get a new deal, they want this, they want that. If we start giving them all those things, we’ve got no place to go, we’ve got no leverage. Say we gave this boy the bonus, the rodeos. Then if he started getting difficult, he won’t do this, he won’t do that, he won’t make this appearance, he won’t do that picture, we’ve got nothing to lean on him with. Look, we’ll let him do a rodeo or a guest shot if it doesn’t conflict with his schedule, we’ll let him do it and let him keep the money.” He tapped his chest. “But out of the goodness of our heart. We won’t write it in any contract. You do that, you lose your leverage.”

A few days later, Maunder signed the long-form contract. The terms were as stipulated in the short form—$250 a week initial salary with a $500 bonus for every show in which he appeared. He would receive no contractual remuneration for such ancillary rights as rodeos or radio and television guest appearances. His salary would be raised every option period. “It really doesn’t mean that much,” McLean said. “If the show’s a hit, the contract will have to be renegotiated. There’s just too many ways the star of a series has you over a barrel. He can claim he’s sick and not show up, he can show up late, he can make trouble on the set. What are
you going to do? You build a series around a star. He’s not there, you don’t have a show. A series is bang, bang, into the can, start the next segment. There’s not any time for temperament. So when the star gets balky and his agents come to see you, you renegotiate and try and get the best deal you can.”

“Most TV shows are what I call Donna Reed’s living room,” Irwin Allen said during a break in the shooting on Stage 18. “Donna goes to the door, opens the door and there’s the milkman. ‘Oh, hello, John,’ she says. ‘Two light cream, three heavy cream.’ But John’s got a problem, so they go into the living room, sit on the couch and talk for seven pages. ‘Oh, John, you found out your wife is giving you a surprise birthday party and you don’t want her to know you know.’ They shoot the seven pages and then they go home for the day. Me, if I can’t blow up the world in the first ten seconds, then the show is a flop.”

Allen was not blowing up the world in the show he was preparing, but in the first moments of the initial segment of the series, he was planning to crash a space ship on an uncharted planet populated by giants. The name of the series was
Land of the Giants
; it was created by Allen and, as with all his projects, he was directing the first episode. The show was scheduled as a midseason replacement on the ABC Television Network in the event that any of its fall entries faltered in the ratings; if there was no need for a replacement,
Land of the Giants
would go on the air the following fall.

Allen drank some orange juice and patted his stomach, producing a loud belch. On the adjoining stage, his
crew was setting up the crash shot. The passengers on the space ship included the pilot and co-pilot (who was a Negro), a stewardess, an orphan, an international con man with a bagful of swag from his latest caper, a Howard Hughes-type businessman, and a girl described in the script as a “socialite-swinger.” On the strange planet, they would be in effect Lilliputians; all the props were built on a scale of twelve-to-one—tree trunks were thirty feet in diameter, safety pins four feet long, tables thirty-six feet high.

The shot was finally ready, and Allen, still drinking orange juice, checked the camera. A cutout of the spacecraft’s cockpit was canted on a platform that the crew would roll forward through the giant-sized prop underbrush, simulating the crash landing. Allen’s camera was placed to the rear of the platform and would photograph the crash over the space ship’s control panel and out the cockpit window. Allen was in good humor and began feeling the muscles of the crew members who would push the platform.

“Okay, fellows,” he said. “When I say go, shake, rock, roll and return. This is jiffy productions, instant crashes of ultramodern space ships.” He yelled for some fog and a prop man laid a coverlet of artificial fog over the set.

“Action,” Allen shouted. “Shake. Rock. Roll. Return.” The crew pushed the platform, their muscles straining. The spacecraft scuttled through the underbrush and the fog. “Cut,” Allen said. He stood with his hands on his hips, a look of displeasure on his face. “Fellows,” he said deliberately, “it wasn’t fast enough. This is a space ship. It is not a Spad. You remember the Spad. It’s an old World War I airplane. A Spad is not supposed to go
faster than a space ship. But it just did.” He beamed. “You’ve got to push, fellows. You’ve got to put your hearts into it.”

The cockpit was rolled back and the greenery replaced. The old fog was blown away and new fog laid down. The bell rang and the stage went silent. Allen called for action and the platform moved slowly forward, the crew straining, the ship gathering speed. “Push,” Allen shouted. “Push, put your heart into it, think of the beer tonight, push, push.” The platform ground to a halt. “Beautiful,” Allen said. “Print it. One space ship crash.”

As Allen walked back onto Stage 18, his secretary handed him another glass of orange juice. He sat on a stool in front of his desk and looked at the storyboard of the next shot. The “socialite-swinger,” played by actress Deanna Lund, and the pilot of the spacecraft, played by actor Gary Conway, stumble into a laboratory run by a team of giant scientists. Everything in the lab is outsized—pencils eight feet long, books fifteen feet high, file drawers eighteen feet high. The shots of the space travelers would be photographed on the giant set; shots of the scientists would be filmed on an exact duplicate of the set built to normal scale. Use of the two sets demanded the most precise planning. Allen had dozens of Polaroid snapshots of each set so that he could match every camera setup exactly. If both giants and space travelers were to appear onscreen at the same time, the individual shots of each were processed into one strip of film by the optical and special effects department, using a variety of matte, process and split-screen techniques. In the scene scheduled next, Conway and Deanna Lund
were supposed to hide behind an outsized insect box when they heard the footfalls of the giant scientists approaching the lab. The insect box shot would be filmed as a separate insert; then, in the Studio’s special effects department, this shot would be reduced and laid over the insect box as it appeared in the setup of the normally scaled lab.

Allen yawned and faked a punch into the midriff of
Land of the Giants
’ associate producer, Jerry Briskin, who had two actors in tow. Briskin winced and straightened up. “Irwin, what do you think of these two?” he said.

“Beautiful, Jerry,” Allen said. “Who are they?”

“We need two guys for later, Irwin,” Briskin said. “One for the guy smoking the pipe, one to play the scientist.”

“Fine, Jerry, fine,” Allen said. “If you like them, I’m not going to examine their teeth, I trust your judgment.” He took one of the actors by the arm and pointed to the storyboard. “Stick around,” he said, “I’ll show you how to make movies.”

Allen climbed on a camera crane and was hoisted up near the rafters. He lined up the shot, using a bullhorn to instruct Conway and Deanna Lund on how to skulk across the giant desk and shinny up the pigeonholes to the top, where they were to hide behind a spool of thread. The thread was to be their means of escape. They were to knot it around an oversized needle, stick the needle into the desktop, and let themselves down hand over hand to safety.

“Let’s run through it once from the top,” Allen shouted down.

Conway and Deanna Lund started across the desk top. It was so large that it took up nearly a third of the sound stage. “Good, good,” Allen said. “Now up on the drawers. Good. Start knotting the thread. Deanna—now! You hear the giant. Hide, hide, hide. Beautiful, beautiful. Behind the jar now.” Allen was peering through the camera. “I’m picking up your fanny, Gary. Move in farther. Deanna, I’ve got your fanny now. It’s lovely, but not for home consumption. Beautiful, we get all this in the master, we’re a bunch of geniuses.”