Gemini Man: RIP Harve Bennett

Harve Bennett saved STAR TREK.

STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE was a big moneymaker for Paramount on its 1979 release, but it was not highly regarded by critics, general audiences, or the studio. So when Paramount decided to make another STAR TREK film, it cut the budget by almost 75 percent and hired television producer Bennett to keep costs under control.

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, released in 1982, turned out to be one of the finest science fiction films ever made and a decent box office hit. Perhaps more importantly, it convinced Paramount that making STAR TREK movies was a viable franchise. If not for Bennett, who went on to produce STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK, STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME, and STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER, there would have been no STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and all the spinoffs and films that series inspired.

Bennett's background was in television, where he produced THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, THE BIONIC WOMAN, SALVAGE I, THE MOD SQUAD, and THE INVISIBLE MAN. He won an Emmy for producing A WOMAN CALLED GOLDA, for which Leonard Nimoy was nominated as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or a Special. Bennett also produced the outstanding RICH MAN, POOR MAN, which was nominated for 22 (!) Emmys, winning five.

And then there was GEMINI MAN.

After the David McCallum-starring THE INVISIBLE MAN flopped in 1975, NBC took another shot at H.G. Wells. Both THE INVISIBLE MAN and GEMINI MAN were about invisible secret agents working for a scientific thinktank, and Bennett and Steven Bochco (NYPD BLUE) produced them. THE INVISIBLE MAN lasted twelve one-hour episodes, but NBC cancelled GEMINI MAN after only five (eleven were filmed).

ALIAS SMITH AND JONES cowboy Ben Murphy starred as Sam Casey, a macho American agent first seen using a helicopter to fish for sharks. Macho. While diving to retrieve a Soviet satellite, Casey is caught in an explosion which renders him invisible. Luckily, his fellow INTERSECT agent, Abby Lawrence (Katherine Crawford), invents a super wristwatch that makes him visible again.

Obviously, an invisible secret agent gives INTERSECT boss Driscoll (Richard Dysart, later to work with Bochco on L.A. LAW) a major boner, so he convinces Casey to use his power to complete spy missions. By pressing a button on his watch, Casey can render himself invisible, but only for as much as fifteen minutes every 24 hours or else he’ll die. His clothes also disappear, and I wouldn’t spend much time pondering the science behind any of this.

Later syndicated as CODE NAME: MINUS ONE, the pilot, written by OUTER LIMITS creator Leslie Stevens, gives Casey a personal mission for his first as an invisible man: to find out who sabotaged his dive and caused the underwater explosion. Except for the 15-minute gimmick, GEMINI MAN is exactly the same show as THE INVISIBLE MAN, though Murphy’s laidback charisma is more appealing than McCallum’s more cerebral approach. Universal, which produced THE INVISIBLE MAN in 1933, was more than capable of creating believable visual effects.

Harve Bennett died Wednesday, less than one week after Leonard Nimoy passed away. Bennett was 84 years old.

One last tidbit. Bennett narrated the opening of THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN: "Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive."

Ben Murphy Rides With Death

When THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN became an instant ratings success for ABC in 1974, all three major television networks followed suit in attempts to do similar superhero-type programs. One such example is GEMINI MAN, which aired only five times on NBC in the fall of 1976 before it was cancelled. Eleven episodes were shot, and all were later aired in syndication and on the Sci-Fi Channel in the 1990s.

GEMINI MAN should have been better, considering the talented men who brought it to the screen. It was created for television by Leslie Stevens, who created the magnificent OUTER LIMITS of the early 1960s; Harve Bennett, who produced THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN and, later, the early STAR TREK movies; and a young Steven Bochco, who went on to create NYPD BLUE, L.A. LAW, and HILL STREET BLUES, among other classic dramas. Bochco and Bennett had just produced THE INVISIBLE MAN, a shortlived series for NBC in 1975 that was undoubtedly the inspiration for GEMINI MAN.

THE INVISIBLE MAN (starring MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. David McCallum) was cancelled in January 1976 after 13 weeks. In March of that year, NBC telecast GEMINI MAN, a 90-minute pilot that starred Ben Murphy (ALIAS SMITH AND JONES) as Sam Casey, an agent for a government thinktank called Intersect.

On an underwater mission, Casey is caught in an explosion and rendered invisible through mysterious radiation. A pretty doctor (played by Katherine Crawford) creates a super wristwatch that makes him visible again, but only when it is attached to his wrist. By pressing a button on the watch, Sam can make himself invisible again, but only for up to fifteen minutes during a 24-hour period. Under the watchful eye of gruff, middle-aged boss Leonard Driscoll (William Sylvester), Sam uses his invisibility powers to undertake secret missions for Intersect.

Frankly, THE INVISIBLE MAN had the exact same premise, and I wouldn’t be surprised if unused scripts for INVISIBLE MAN turned up as GEMINI MAN episodes, especially considering both were produced by Universal Television for NBC.

I have a weird attraction to stupid-looking robots, and GEMINI MAN delivers big time in its episode, “Minotaur,” one of the few episodes that were actually seen on NBC. Ross Martin (THE WILD WILD WEST) guest-stars as Carl Victor, a mad scientist and vengeful ex-employee of Intersect who builds a killer robot and demands $500 million from the U.S. Secretary of Defense or else he’ll use the robot, named “Minotaur,” to zap a skyscraper with its built-in laser and level it.

To prove he’s not kidding, Victor lures Sam to an abandoned warehouse and uses Minotaur to blow it up. Following Victor’s daughter (BLUE SUNSHINE’s Deborah Winters) to his secret laboratory, which appears to be located at Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power (one of L.A.’s most ubiquitous low-budget film locations), Sam spends the episode dodging Minotaur’s laser blasts and sensor probes.

“Minotaur”’s story was co-written by Robert Bloch, a noted horror author whose book PSYCHO inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 motion picture. Staff producers Frank Telford (THE VIRGINIAN) and Robert F. O’Neill (QUINCY, M.E.) wrote the teleplay, and Alan J. Levi, who later replaced director Richard A. Colla during filming of the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA pilot for Universal, helmed the episode, which closely resembles a segment of THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN in terms of story, structure, look, and tone.

“Minotaur” is—let’s be honest—not really all that great, but it does have a clunky-looking robot that talks and shoots lasers. So what’s not to love?