Sad to hear that the man who gave us the immortal line "Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb" - writer Lorenzo Semple, Jr. - has passed away at the age of 91.
Apart from being a driving force in the creation and tone of the classic 1960s BATMAN television series (and its 1966 off-shoot feature in which the above line was featured), Semple also wrote the screenplays for THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), Dino's KING KONG remake of 1976, FLASH GORDON (1980), the renegade 007 flick NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN (1983) and - at the lower end of the scale - the 1986 missfire spy pastiche NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE starring John Stamos, Vanity, George Lazenby and Gene Simmons from KISS as
the ugliest looking evil hermaphrodite in cinema history!
But apart from his work on BATMAN, what I'll remember Semple most for is his screenplay for PRETTY POISON, a stunning and criminally underrated psychological thriller from 1968, starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld in a performance that's almost as chilling, subtle and disturbing as what Perkins' was in PSYCHO eight years earlier. If you can find it, watch it.
http://www.emmytvlegends.org/news/remembering-lorenzo-semple-jr
