Lorenzo Semple Jr established the tone of the 1966 Batman television series, which fixed the character as camp in the public mind for two decades and which later filmmakers spent enormous effort undoing.
He then wrote The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, two of the defining paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, which is an unlikely pivot from the same writer.
He also wrote Flash Gordon and the Bond entry Never Say Never Again, and the camp and the paranoia turn out to be two sides of the same distrust of institutions.
Lorenzo Semple Jr.Flash Gordon (1980) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Dino De Laurentiis spent twenty-seven million dollars on a deliberately camp space opera, hired Queen to score it, and produced something no serious film could get near. The…
David RayfielThree Days of the Condor (1975) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man who reads books for the CIA goes out for lunch and comes back to find everybody he works with shot. The film changed…
Dalton TrumboFranklin Schaffner's 1973 Henri Charriere memoir. Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman.
Lorenzo Semple Jr.Thunderball remake by rights-holder Kevin McClory. Never Say Never Again is Irvin Kershner's 1983 British spy film operating outside the official Eon Productions Bond franchise through specific rights arrangements.
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