Rescuing the Survivors

Lana Turner knew only too well that she was the model for the lurid 1962 novel Where Love Has Gone, and stopped talking to its author, Harold Robbins (The Carpetbaggers). But by two years ago, she had made peace and signed to star in Robbins' The Survivors, an ABC television series about the jet set he concocted for the forth coming season. That, it turns out, may be grounds to break off relations permanently with Robbins -- and just possibly is the worst decision of Lana's 45-movie, seven-husband career. The Survivors has so far proved to be the most overpriced and troubled TV series ever.

In the ten months since shooting began, the show has run through three producers.

Also down the chute went one director, the costume designer, the executive story editor -- and the original Robbins story line itself.

Says Lana, one of the few charter members of the company left on the set last week: "If we were to film what really has happened behind the cameras, no one would believe it."

The narrative is, so to speak, pure Robbins. He conceived The Survivors for a couple of reasons. Though he has sold more than 40 million books, Robbins has long lusted for a larger audience: he figures that "even if the show is a failure, more people will view it in one night than all the people who have ever read or seen The Carpetbaggers." Secondly, he has always felt that two-hour movie adaptations of his novels were too truncated and that 100 hours were really needed.

Sophisticated Saga. So Robbins went to the production brass of ABC, and spieled out a scenario. There is this banking family, he winged -- Morgan or Roth schild types, with the second generation vying among themselves for command after the death of the patriarch. The saga would unfold in novel form, not with self-contained weekly story segments but chapter by chapter. The Survivors would also be more sophisticated than conventional television -- "A story," as Robbins put it, "of today's morals.

If people go to bed together, they'll go to bed together on the show. We are not bowing down to TV in any way."

ABC was sold, with nary a script or a pilot, and commissioned Universal to produce it. Robbins would get a percentage of any profits, plus $10,000 a show. Furthermore, he says, he was guaranteed a full 26 weeks the first year instead of the customary 15 or 17, and payment for a second season of 26 shows "whether it bombs or not." For that unprecedented, sweet contract, Robbins gave ABC only a nine-page "treatment," conferred a few times with Universal, and then took off for his Riviera home.

Journeymen Hollywood scriptwriters would hack out the weekly chapters from the Robbins outline and flesh out such supporting characters as Louis Armond St. Verre, described in the scenario only as "the debauched scion of an old French family whose main claim to fame is that he has made love to 3,000 women and has had gonorrhea 26 times."

The first producer, William Frye, was allocated the highest series budget in the history of TV--nearly $8,000,000 for the 1969-70 season. That bought not only Lana but also George Hamilton, who seemingly has given up his escort service for serious acting ("Commitment," he proclaimed last week, "is 90% of life"). Some $200,000 was spent on the set--four times the TV average --and another $100,000 on wardrobes, $50,000 of it for Lana. But that didn't stop her from quarreling with Producer Frye over the jewelry provided. Frye couldn't be bothered, he said, and got a slap across the face. He slapped back --on both cheeks--and she told the producer he was through.

Thus, after two months of shooting (most of it on location on the Riviera) and $1,000,000 of expenses, Universal still had to get its first usable episode.

After another producer passed briefly through the chaos, old0 TV Hand Walter Doniger (Maverick) was called in and wrote a 40-page, single-spaced critique of what was wrong with Robbins' nine-page outline and the scripts to date. He became the third producer.

Harmonious Sex Life. In Doniger's view, a fight over a banking empire run by a family patriarch (Ralph Bellamy) would not keep TV viewers tuned in for very long. So he decided instead "to deal not with the abstracts of wealth but rather with the emotional problems of rich people. Our stories will be about human beings faced with all kinds of swirling emotional forces, told against an enormous backdrop, but with the same kind of problems as you and I." Translation: kink it up.

Out went eight different story outlines, three finished scripts and five more in the works. In the original, for example, Lana and her husband (Kevin McCarthy) hymned their harmonious sex life with lines like "It's only good with you." Now it's bad, bad, bad, and in fact their 19-year-old son turns out to have been sired by a Greek named Krakos, who was at the time a poverty-stricken tourist guide but has since become richer than Onassis. Naturally, the son has some S.D.S.-type campus friends. Also hastily written in is a South American revolutionary conservatively patterned not after Guevara or Castro but Simon Bolivar.

Despite all the frantic script doctoring and transplants, Universal claims that shooting is about on schedule. Lana and the old sweater-girl figure are holding up pretty well for her years (49). She is getting along swimmingly with Producer du jour Doniger, who himself professes to be having "desperate fun" with the cast and show. "It is like having a cocktail party on the wing of an airplane." Lana does make her daily 5:45 a.m. calls, and has difficulty only in getting a fix on her unraveling character. "There have been so many story versions that I am still trying to figure out what kind of woman I am," she complains. Last week, for instance, Lana had to shoot the sixth chapter, though the third chapter still lacks a final script.

Treat or a Treatment. One of the principals of the cast--who signed on in hopes that the show "might convey the real emptiness of our life and become an American L'Avventura"--now fears that it is degenerating into high-priced prime-time soap opera. Producer Doniger vehemently disputes the charge, though he just as determinedly denies that his last show was soap. It was Peyton Place.

That series, at least, made ABC a lot of money, and the real cliffhanging question in The Survivors melodrama is whether Robbins has given the network a treat or a treatment. With his two-year guarantee, he has less to lose than the network if the show doesn't survive the second season. No matter what happens, Robbins will continue to be as rich as Krakos.

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