Hulk (Documentary)

there was a title card that I put at the beginning of the pilot of the Incredible Hulk which said something to the effect of within each of us oft times dwells a mighty and raging fury and I think that that's something that everyone has felt at one time or another that sense of just wanting to explode there's a visceral connection that people have to that feeling of anger I think that's part of the the original thing that people connected to what I was anxious to do though was to connect people with the humanity of the the leading character when Universal first came to me with the idea of doing one of the Marvel Comics superheroes Frank price called me and said we've just acquired the rights to five of them which one would you like to do and I said gene none of them Frank I just don't connect to people in spandex and primary colors and my wife Susie had given me a book and I was in the middle of reading it and this is Victor Hugo's lemis Rob the story of Jean Valjean being pursued by Inspector Javert and living life as a fugitive I'm a Jack McGee from the National Register I'm checking some stories that a huge hulking creature was seen in this area so I had all of that sort of Victor Hugo story in my head and and I realized that now there was a way to take a little bit of Victor Hugo a little bit of Robert Louis Stevenson and this ludicrous thing called The Incredible Hulk and turn it into a serious psychological adult drama I wanted it to not be comic-book II in any way one of the things I first things I did was change david banners name from bruce banner why because the bruce banner thing is like Lois Lane Peter Parker it's all alliterative eat it all harkens back to comic book roots and I was trying to do everything I could to get the show away from comic book roots and that kind of feeling the show had to live in the real world I fought endlessly and unfortunately lost the battle about the color of the Hulk I called Stanley he was a wonderful guy and I said Stan what is he the envious Hulk why is he green you know does he the jealous Hulk you know I said when people are angry they get red with rage you know the color of Rage is red he would be flushed with anger and also PS of course it's a human color green is not so I was anxious to try to pull it that way and Stan said well you know why we made him green was because he started out gray but the printer couldn't make a good gray and thought he could make a pretty consistent green so they said we could make green and and I said okay and I said gee Stan that's really organic you know and I couldn't win that battle so the Hulk unfortunately had to remain green there was no green makeup available and we finally found some in Germany and it was grease paint as opposed to the pancake makeup that people use most generally in film and television the difference is that grease paint is waterproof which is nice if you happen to be in the water but it also is grease and it comes off on everything I have sweatshirts upstairs that still have smudges of green where I bumped into Lou Ferrigno you know 30 years ago and everybody on the crew I guarantee you has clothes that are like that and it was it was a nightmare because Louie first had to get the prosthetic makeup put on that was design by werner kepler and then he would have to get the green make up on top of that and then he would get you know this wonderful wig that we never never got right I was always so frustrated at no matter what we do it and did it ended up looking like a fright wig you know and then he had to get the body makeup which took two people half an hour 45 minutes to put on every day and that long to take off and he had to be cleaned up between each between each take and and it came off in his dressing room his whole inside of his motor home was completely covered in plastic because we had to be able to hose it down every night and start over the next day but from the standpoint of the actors doing the Hulk was was great Bix was there was prepared there was never any of that I'll be in my trailer nonsense and Lois was it was his first gig so he was anxious to be there and really do the best he possibly could Bix and Lou were not on the set together a whole lot of the time because generally they would overlap Bix would come on into a scene in the morning and take it to the point where he would reach a Hulk out and then Lois would take over and Bix of course you know could go home because we didn't need him for the rest of the day in season two I think we really hit our stride married was a very strong opening piece for us to start with and Bix and I looked long and hard to find the right woman to play opposite him and we had seen some film that Mariette had recently done her agent sent her the script and Mary had said I don't have anything called The Incredible Hulk I'm really very sorry her agent said read it this is your Emmy and Mariette read it and went on of course to win the Emmy for Best Actress in a Drama Series oh my god a friend of mine was a psychologist who was doing hypnotherapy utak work on people with cancer he was actually using hypnosis to help people control their cancer and I realized wow this is great I can put Bill Bixby under hypnosis and go inside his mind and for the first time I can have Bix and Louie in the same frame one of the challenges of shooting married was I needed a internal landscape I needed a place where they could meet together and I sort of envisioned as I wrote it a surreal kind of desert landscape it's not a lot of those around Southern California I mean I was thinking sand dunes and then we discovered this area near Brawley just north of the Mexican border which is a small state park which is indeed sand dunes I got down there in the morning to shoot and at Jeffers my location manager came up to me and said Kenny we have a real problem there's a man here that says we can't it's his land and we can't film on it and I said what are you talking about this a state park he can't they said Kenny I'm telling you this he's livid he tells us we cannot fill me with I said well Edie talked to him you're the location manager and she said look please just if you just please come talk to him so I reached the edge of the sand dunes and I look out and I see this guy writing toward me dressed in Arab robes and he's waving the scimitar and he's riding on a donkey coming toward me over the sand dunes shouting get off my land whoa filming on my land and I'm good what and I he gets closer and I realized that it's Bob Steinhauer who was my unit production manager producer on the credible Hulk who had decided that this would be a funny way to welcome everybody down to Brawley and none of the crew will ever forget the visit by the Ayatollah Steinhauer looking back on the Hulk and it is something that I look back on very very fondly because we did some really extraordinary work it's very hard to do an episodic television series and have every single episode be as good as it possibly can be and as good as all the others certainly you have some that are just not as good no matter how hard you work but for the most part our batting average was was really good I don't know somehow something about the whole thing just doesn't seem right mr. Magee the man you're looking for this dr. banner is dead right burned to death as we ended season two we were rolling along very well in the ratings and we knew pretty well that we were going to get a pickup for season three which we did so we went into season three with a sense of what could we do that was going to build off of everything we've done already but at the same time might move us into some different ground you start doing things in the third season like bringing in people from the past or trying to put David Banner into situations that were verboten in the first two seasons you try to find new ways to peel the onion that was david banners life there was always because he was a mystery man it was always something new to discover about him so you try to plumb those kinds of ideas and see if you can keep the show relevant and vibrant there were basically two kinds of hulk episodes one was the episode where vixx was on the way to try to find somebody who might cure him and got involved with people that he met on the road I had made dr. David Banner a doctor to begin with so that as a physician he would have entree into various people's lives the other type of Hulk episode was where he was at a particular place where he was involved with someone who was trying to heal him in one way or another where he investigated various possible cures for the the condition that he had what about the x-ray we have to wait a few seconds till the serum starts work we never thought of it as a comic book the word was never mentioned we were constrained by having in turn green twice an episode but that was it the show was about a man with a condition that was out of his control we used the word duality a lot the duality of a brilliant doctor scientist who has the worst kind of a monkey on his back it's not drug addiction it's not alcoholism that was all about David's inner demon we were the only show on the air at that time that was basically an anthology most shows in that period where franchise shows they were cop shows they were medical shows they were lawyer shows but we had the ability to take in every man a human being and put him in any situation even if it was something as simple as putting out a fire the people he met had these issues had these problems and that gave us such freedom as writers to really explore every aspect of not only human society but the human psyche so those kinds of things kept it interesting I think it kept the show a surprise even if you didn't like it it still allowed you not to know what to expect the next time you saw it it's interesting because the whole raise on debt for the series was trying to end the series you know that here was a man who was seeking to find a way to end the curse there was anything that happened during season 3 and that was that this British fellow came over from England where apparently he couldn't get much work and convinced Universal to hire him to oversee production he said he could save them millions and millions of dollars a universal bought into his proposal and they hired him at that time Universal had something like 20 shows going or 18 TV shows going at the time you know so you know we were just one of many but we happen to be a very successful one and we were not an inexpensive show did to this British fellow again calling all the producers on the lot he called me and said listen Kenny from now on you have to produce The Incredible Hulk exactly for the licence fee exactly for what CBS is paying this per hour for the show The Hulk budget was around six or seven hundred thousand dollars and I said okay no problem he said oh that's great and I said now are you going to call CBS or am I to tell them that they'll only be one Hulk out per show instead of two he said no no no you have to do exactly the same show and I said can't be done we never did a show with one Hulk out and I think he took the stance if you want one Hulk out why don't we not have any and let's just walk away from it he said well no you must do it I said I can't it physically can't be done so well then are you saying you won't I said I'm saying I can't I said well then you're suspended I said okay all the producers I discovered on the lot were going through this exact same circumstance and the priests and the English guy went back to England and we went on doing the shows the way we'd always done them and everybody was happy Kenny was very very cost conscious as well as being creatively aware and not compromising what he had started with there's a wonderful photo of vixen me that was taken on the set that was the very first day that Bix had ever had the white eyes in we put them into tests to see how they would look and I saw him walking down the hall toward me with those white eyes in that was the key moment when I really knew that we really had something because seeing Bill Bixby with that altered persona I knew was just going to reach out and grab an audience by the throat and that go the demographics were interesting our largest audience was adult women and then adult men and then teens and lastly kids and it wasn't because I set out to pander to a female audience it was just that's the way we wrote the show I have to be honest it for my very first job I was way too excited to think about things like demographics I really was it didn't I was writing for me I was writing what I wanted to see if I were going to you know watch this show what stories did I want to see that's what drove me sure the young kids sometimes would tune in to see the big green guy crashed through the wall but what happened was very quickly the adults in the household so wait a minute there's something else going on here this is a draw this is a real drama this is a little morality play this is a character that I want to know more about and be involved with we were also not in a great time period Friday nights and Saturday nights are notoriously the you know the dumping ground for television shows it's very hard to get an audience because so many people go out on Friday and Saturday night but we managed to find the audience into to hang on to them in that time period that was also in the days of the 8 o'clock hour being the family hour in spite of the fact that the creature never hit anybody it was still look the violent show because you know Louie was picking people up and throwing them or pulling the rug out or slinging them aside or something and so there was a lot of property damage going on so I pacifically said we got to be a 9:00 o'clock show I don't want to try to have to fight the rules of the eight o'clock family hour I mean nowadays maid o'clock you can put on eviscerations and nobody cares you know but it's funny that we did very well at 9:00 and it was it was a good time period because of the nature of the show which was David Banner moves from town to town we didn't have a permanent set a lot of the locations we had were you know in small towns you know forests or countryside a lot of stuff at Vasquez rocks which is out and I think Santa Clarita where it would look like scrub desert would go to downtown LA we'd shoot in alleys we'd shoot in the back lot as well we would constantly walk around the back lot at Universal trying to find sets that we could steal trying to find sets that somebody had just used for a movie or another show where we could write a scene to fit into those sets and my producer friend Jim Perry it and later Nick Correa and production designer Chuck Davis and I spent many many hours scouring the stages in the back lot at Universal just finding places we could write scenes into so that we wouldn't have to build them because you didn't we didn't have a whole lot of money what was the most fun was we used to have the trams go by they would wave and Lou would wave back that was always fun for them to see the Hulk it was that was a kick we stopped using the back lot because of the trams the tool was getting very very popular Lou Allison would not stop the tourist trap we would say it's it's costing us time it's costing us money he said I don't care I'll shut the whole place down and just make it a tourist slot which is practically what he's done I mean the back lot at Universal is not one big amusement park guest stars were not that important as much as if we could get a big-name fine but it was like who would be best for the role and the person playing opposite bill you know whoever my Beautif male or female you know he was very into who was going to play opposite him Jack Colvin had been a contract player at Universal working under contract on a lot of the universal shows and when he was suggested to me I said that sounds like a great idea let's do that I don't think I even read anybody for it he was an interesting guy he was the ultimate professional he would show up he knew his lines he knew what was expected of him he didn't ask much I took him for granted because they always knew he would know his lines he would be there for wardrobe fittings he would never be late he was the consummate professional I think he recognized that he that he had a really good job I mean he was the only regular on the show Bixby was the lead and Lou is the Hulk and Jack and he was delighted we loved writing for him he was a real actor he loved that part he really gave it life after the show was over he was very involved with his theater group people loved him as a teacher and he passed away a few years ago he was quite beloved by the actress that he meant heard Lu was already cast when I came on the show but I feel very grateful that he had this you know job and I'm then on top of it to be recognized the way he was it was an opportunity for Louie as an actor to do some different things we began exploring the Hulk as a character who could have moments as he'd come out of the anger when he was just sort of this simple character that that people could interact with in a whole different way we also finally gave Lewis speaking role playing a bodybuilder on the beach in Santa Monica Karl you did get here old man yelling at you again small lunch crowd it was so incredible to watch the bravery of this man who learned to speak by reading lips and so but he transcended that it was more than just that technical accomplishment because he also became an actor as well this isn't a suicide this is an execution powder the creature has gone beyond the courts I must be the judge and the jury I was very anxious to cast exactly the right person in the leading role I needed someone who would bring an adult following to it who was a serious actor and who would not be thought of as being in something that was anything other than first class and Bill Bixby was my first and only choice we sent him the script his agent gave it to him bill said what are you crazy I'm not going to read anything called the Hulk and his agent said read it and Bix read it and called me the next day and came over and said this is what we're gonna do I mean bill was always very intense right on your face all the time oh I see are we really gonna do this we're gonna be this dramas gonna be like this it's excitement this there's real human stuff I said yeah he said I had all comic book II I said no no no big says this is what I want to do he said will you stay with it for as long as I stay with it and I agreed to be part of the show as long as he was part of the show and indeed we were pals from then on bill bixby is the only actor I can think of who could have pulled it off and I think a lot of it besides his talent was his credibility with the audience they knew that he wasn't going to take them somewhere that would make them foolish I know an actor in a series knows his character better than a visiting director but at the same time the director has his vision and bill was always very receptive to that you know so the directors did not have the problem that sometimes they have on a show where the actual states my it wasn't that way with bill bixby and I remember our very first meeting with him we went into his motor home to get his notes on the script that we'd written and so we sat down and he said you know ion courtship I used to send writers crying from the room what oh no we're in for it but he was always he loved us I really think he was very fond of both Jill and I and there were times you wanted to kill each other but but it was all it was a good it was a valiant fight you couldn't be esta man the show is running long we can cut the scene you're not cutting that seen that scene tells the audience this about me and it's going to stay he wouldn't say it's not good he never he never insulted us that way but he would say this could be better this doesn't make sense this doesn't track for my character what am I feeling here what am I supposed to you know what can you give me on the page that I can translate on onto the screen so he was very good that way and sometimes we'd get annoyed and like he's making us work harder but he was right ultimately he kept at that point of view I wanted to hit him over the head at the moment but he made a writer out of me he really believed in the show worked very very hard and purely from a production standpoint made very little demands he was an interesting man and very smart and and almost too smart it it affected his life you know in so many ways that were troubling and and I had a great deal of compassion for the pain he lived in and for you know some of the tragedies that strike his life and trying to cope with them on a public stage is very difficult thing Bix had gone through a very very difficult divorce from Brenda Bonet so there was a lot of angst going on personal angst they had had such antagonism toward each other during the divorce times it was funny you could see the Hulk coming out of Bix the this anger that he felt toward toward Brenda during the divorce was was very much on his sleeve and you could really feel it bill wanted to it's okay if I say this right pics wanted a show so his son could see that his mom and dad even though they were going through a divorce could get along so he wanted us to write a show for Brenda Bonet and I came up with the psychic which was the first show that I wrote on my own and was about a woman who could read minds and and I was thinking about suicide because a young boy had died that she couldn't save season four came the real tragedy when byxis six-year-old son Christopher died unexpectedly and then Brenda killed herself out of out of guilt and that one was such a glaring bizarre set of circumstances that everything else pales in memory goodbye David you'll be good to yourself oh it was interesting because after the death of Christopher and then the death of Brenda that anger of course was was sort of dissipated and yet still Bix was such a consummate actor that that he could always go to wherever he needed to get to to give you the performance that you needed he would laugh to me sometimes and say which I do you want me to cry out of like the right eye with the left but because Bix was able to do that but but ultimately it all came from a wellspring of talent that was deep within him that really showed itself all the way through the series I was looking for somebody to play the Hulk we talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger he was busy doing Conan at the time and he suggested we talked to Louis Ferrigno and I met with Louie and he was a very sweet guy had had absolutely no acting experience at all you know and that I was concerned about being able to make that happen so I sort of kept moved in my hip pocket but I decided to try to go with Richard Kiel who later on would play jaws and the James Bond movie dick is a is seven foot five is massive and is an actor and we actually filmed a week with dick but as we sat in the dailies and more and more it just became apparent that this was not the right image for the Hulk it was someone who had the height but not the bulk and not the presence tall and thin just didn't cut it and lumbering it was just too much like you know the abominable snowmen my daughter who was about seven at the time so Ken he asked if I'd bring her to the rushes the dailies and he showed film of Lou as the Hulk and someone else and he wanted her opinion and she liked Lou better I don't know I'm sure that's not the only reason he got the job Lou didn't have the height but Lou had the bulk and Lou had the eyes he had very sweet eyes even though we had to put white contacts in them and he had a gentleness about him so you paint him green and you put on the prosthesis and you do all that stuff but there's still a quality that comes through from him I went back to Lou and I brought him in and we did some improvisation stuff together to try to see if I could get a performance out of him and and he did okay not great but okay but Louie was an impassioned guy that I felt had the inside stuff to make it happen I mean he was a kid that had made himself into this you know hugely amazing muscle man and I got the thing in well if he's if he's got the inner strength and fortitude and passion to do that then I bet make this work there are some scenes in the Hulk that still chuck me up and Lou did a really really wonderful job and and got better and better as the show went on I don't think at the time I appreciated what a tough gig it was for Lou I must have been really hard you know to come off out you know with the ripped jeans and and and with the crazy wig I wouldn't want to be painted in that green makeup every time we came I mean it it was a chore the contacts I think were were difficult for both of them and he had to wear his for much longer Bixby could wear his first shot and take him out in those days contact lenses were technologically primitive and really tough to wear and they have we had the color to them Lou for some reason either it didn't bother him that much or he suffered in silence when he was walking around being low people would talk to him when he was made up as the Hulk they wouldn't talk to him he didn't seem human in a way so that bothered him because he spent the entire day in makeup and he felt invisible in a lot of ways felt that you know he was treated as though he couldn't understand and he couldn't communicate and it was it wasn't intentional but I don't think he was wrong I don't think he was wrong to feel that way I think there was a sense of how can you communicate with him he's green and he's huge we went down to the desert in Brawley but it was August in the desert and it was a fascinating experience for all of us it was a hundred and twenty degrees the sand temperature was a hundred and sixty degrees and because of the heat Lou's makeup kept separating instead of being green he'd be blue and yellow it with the instrument and what the makeup people would have to do is just before we would shoot each take they'd have to run in and rub him down real quick to smear the blue and the yellow back together and that would make green just long enough for us to take the shot Lu had expressed at least to me that he really wanted to try acting you know not just be an action type actor Lu began to get the bug of he wanted to do a speaking role the challenge with Lou was that he was mostly deaf I mean he was hard of hearing but it was beyond hard of hearing it was it was a condition from childhood it was obvious that the way to best serve him so that he could come off as good as possible was to make the role as close to his own life I wrote king of the beach and it was very very satisfying for me because I knew that I was touching something important to him he came into me after he'd read the script and he was in tears and he said it's like you're inside my head there was a scene in a locker room where he talks to David Banner if I go through with the competition South Diamond were all me but only as a professional bodybuilder it was really lovely and I'm very very proud of it and I was proud of him when I was doing the Bionic Woman I did a show called return of Bigfoot and I found Ted Cassidy who was wonderful actor and I went to Ted and I said would you do the voice for me of the Incredible Hulk I needed the deep voice and on the dubbing stage we made it even deeper by changing the pitch solder would always more than than 10 and at the same time I said Ted would you narrate the main title for me as well dr. David Banner physician scientist searching for a way to tap into the hidden strengths that all humans have then unfortunately when Ted was 46 in 1979 he died and I remember them asking do you still want his voice in the main title and I said absolutely you know don't change it and we kept it throughout the run of the series and my friend Charlie Napier who is an actor whose face you would recognize in an instant wonderful character actor who's also got a big deep voice um Charlie came in and did the Hulk for me after that I know my daughter as a child watcher she couldn't wait to see the Hulk out I mean every week that's what she wanted to see and she always like wanted to know she would get so involved in a why didn't the underpants rip the metamorphosis that we had to do from Bix to Lou were were frustrating frustrating because in those days we didn't have the computer morphing technology that we have now every week it was like okay how is he good we got to figure out to all Kouts every week for 22 episodes sometimes I got a little silly trying to you know come up with the Hulk outs to make them work and also they had to be clever they had to be creative they had to be story relevant there was a list in everybody's office of possible hulk outs and i remember that that became an obsession is thinking of hulk outs that would fit in stories and sometimes you would get an idea for a hulk out and build you know then build the the characters around that i once came up with an idea out of desperation will put bill bixby on skis and he's skiing down a slope and he's going to hit a tree and he helps out and well it's before computer graphics and whatever and it's like I don't know how we shoot it but it's an idea obviously was never done the transitions into the Hulk of course began with the white eyes and I came up with that trigger effect because I wanted to be able to have a place where the audience knew they were at a point of no return once the audience saw the white eyes we knew there was no going back to dr. David Banner the Hulk was about to come out the other side and part of the reason I did that was because it gave me the dramatic ability to see the white eyes and to have Bixby get thrown in a closet and we knew who was coming out of the closet but we didn't have to see the whole transition there were other times when we wanted to see the the physical transformation from small meek Bix into great big beefy Lou we tried all kinds of different things and finally I said look I think the thing to do is just to get shirts that are too small for Lou and squeeze them tight on his back weaken the fabric so that as lue tightened up you know we could make that rip go up his back and we would look for different ways to do it I remember throwing challenges to the associate producers and the the insert crews where we'd write things like his feet expands out of his shoes you know how I could do that I'd go I don't know you figure it out and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't so the transformations were were something that the audience always watched for but which we as creators always tried to duck as much as we could because really I just knew that I couldn't do them as well as I'd like to I mean nowadays of course with CGI and and morphing technology it's would be so easy to do I was very lucky to have a wonderful writing staff working with me Jim Perry it was my producer on the first season of the Hulk and then Nick Correa and Jim Hirsch after that and then two ladies who wrote their very first script for anybody on the Hulk Karen Harris and Jill Sherman I was working as an associate producer at in public television and on a PA and freelancing and also typing scripts for five dollars an hour in between my freelance assignments to pay the rent Jill was working as a journalist she also reviewed movies Karen knew someone at Universal and and we got an interview with Ken Johnson as they were looking for new blood and we were green new blood and Ken was nice enough to give us a shot so we wrote the beast within is our very first paid for script it was our entree to writing it was the door that opened it was a wonderful opportunity to to see a writer grow and help the show grow and bring new ideas to us that's something we're always looking for in episodic what's what can we do that's new you're always looking for a spark of an idea that that you can take and run with as far as the show's concerned it was my first mainstream job I'd spent my early 20s playing piano in bars at night and tarring roofs and raising babies and I had a couple of scripts optioned by majors and not made and my agent he had given one of those option scripts to the producers of The Hulk specifically Nick Correa who was just a wonderful writer and a wonderful human being he was my champion and he went to Kenny and Ken he read me as well and Kenny told Nick go ahead and from there I was thrust into the joys and rigors and fun and camaraderie of everyday production a bob Steinhauer had been my second assistant director on the Bionic Woman I moved him to unit production manager on the Hulk and then to producer and then ultimately the supervising producer Kenny got a crew together and it didn't happen overnight of people who thought differently who felt things differently who visually saw things differently but yet we somehow all kind of bonded together in this one thing and the majority of us stayed with the show the entire time when you have a crew that's in sync with each other knows each other's strengths and weaknesses and are all pulling towards a common goal then then they will get things done and that's what that crew was and it was a crew that genuinely liked each other as story editor I was on the set quite frequently making changes making cuts either for production or for artistic reasons and everyone adapted very very easily we all were endowed with a lot of freedom to put our own voices into the one common voice of the show there was another factor that was also really important for the Hulk's success and that was the visual look of it I didn't want it to look like normal universal television fare I wanted to have a real cinematic quality and I looked at a lot of work from a lot of directors of photography so I was lucky enough to find a young guy named John Macpherson who had been a lighting designer lighting technician a gaffer for 13 years and really came to cinematography from the standpoint of light I remember when John first came in to interview with me most people come in sort of bright and cheery to you know try to get a job and and John was sitting in this sort of fetal position in this chair in my office all curled up and he was going out Kenny I'm an artist I I paint with light but okay I said this guy is too neurotic not to hire and Johnny and I became fast friends immediately and I think that's part of the reason that the show was successful was because it had a look that really differentiated it from so many other shows they were on the air then my friend Steven Bochco introduced me to Harve Bennett who was producing a show called the Six Million Dollar Man Harve convinced me that in television it was the producer that controlled the whole medium the producer hired the writer the producer hired the director I said stop I'll take the job because I could then immediately hire myself to write direct you know which is what I did Kenny is really one of the most incredible directors that I've ever run into a man who is so familiar and comfortable with the grammar of film and also related so well that actors and had such a great sense of storytelling he's just truly a great artist and when he directed no one said we can't do it not out of fear but out of respect he wanted it somehow we had to make it work and we did just because he made us all feel very very comfortable I can't think of any shows that I don't think of him as directing and having a very pleasant way of making sure that his eye and his voice was gently overriding the Machine Universal we had released my pilot of the Incredible Hulk overseas as a theatrical motion picture and I got a call from the one day saying congratulations you have the top-grossing motion picture in Europe I said what are you talking about they said all over Europe the Incredible Hulk is the number one movie in the box office and so a year later they released married as the bride of the Incredible Hulk not my title and it did very very well also the Hulk around the world has been a phenomenal success I get emails from people literally everywhere who write in about how they've been touched by it I do remember that Nick Carillo was in line at a restaurant and the reservations were backed up and we had just started and someone was in the line saying if they don't call my name soon I'm going to Hulk out and he said I were going to be a hit it had become part of the lexicon at that time so it was it must have been relatable because people are still saying that I say it occasionally I think it has to do I know it's going to sound corny but with the humanity of the show and the problems that were addressed in the 80s on that show were problems they were universal and they're still problematic today in many people's lives Ken Johnson had a philosophy from day one that we should always never speak down to the audience never write down to the audience never think that you're writing a comic book write drama write real stories write real people and that was the basis for the show and those are our marching orders the music in the Hulk they were a cue for the audience the audience can anticipate when a Hulk out was going to happen ah when we were going to turn away from you know the action and go into plot story character the music kind of got the audience ready for what was coming helicopters really eat up a soundtrack and and so to have music going while helicopters are going is very difficult because the music usually gets swallowed and I said to Joe harnell who is my composer Joe you know what let's synthesize the sound of a helicopter blade and let's make that we'll use that instead of the helicopter sound effect and you can make it in sync with the music so that the rhythm of the helicopter blades is also the rhythm of the music that we're doing and we can balance it everything then joe said what a great idea he loved it because it would protect his music and indeed that's what we ended up doing and if you listen carefully at the end of part 1 of Prometheus you can hear that that that helicopter blade and how it's absolutely in sync with the music it's because it's part of the music in those days most every universal show ended with a big rousing orchestral conclusion and Johar now said is that what you want for this and I said no I said this is a lonely man by himself it ought to be a piece of music that is as poignant as as we can make it without getting sappy and that really plays into the pathos of this character and so I said Joe it ought to be a solo piano at the end of the pilot and at the end of every episode and that's indeed what we did Johar Mel's beam was touching because it really embodied the loneliness of David Banner so well it was so poignant the theme is deceptive in its simplicity it's us for notes people know it I mean it became really recognizable I understand that for a minute there were like lyrics to it but I can't waste we used to make up our own lyrics yeah I think was I am The Hulk I ripped my clothes off but it's like some that was the first two lines and we used to sit there in Postgres post-production and just make up our own lyrics to the music we loved it it never failed to give you goosebumps it never failed and we always that was one of the things this that you could count on us at the end he was going to be alone again and it just was beautiful Joe did a great job the music is one of the things that people mentioned to me most often about when they think about the Hulk and what drew them to it was the sadness that they felt for for this wonderful loveable accessible character played by Bix underscored by that simple musical piece that Joe wrote for it and it's it's really sort of been a seminal experience in the lives of a lot of people who saw the show for the entire length of it I don't remember an event or whether the ratings were terrible or why we were canceled I just remember that it ended I look back and I isn't that funny I just think of it as this fabulous five years and I don't think of I certainly remember the beginning but I don't remember how it went down well I as I remember it we were good no one thought it was going to be over and then we got worried the show was canceled the cancellation of the show did come as a surprise it was a fellow named Harvey Shepherd who ran CBS for about 20 minutes but in that 20 minutes Harvey decided that the Hulk was getting tired I don't know why he decided that because the ratings were still good so if there was something going on I was not aware of it and I don't think any of us really were I don't think Universal was we had seven shows in the can that we had not yet aired and I and I said Harvey by six more and you'll have a half a season and thirteen episodes you'll really give it a run let's see and I said besides I got a great idea for opening the the fifth season I said I want to do a show where David banners sister whom we had to set up in one of the earlier episodes is dying of a congenital blood disease and the only thing that can save her is a transfusion from a sibling now what happens when Hulk blood gets into somebody else and I said and I'm telling you America will tune in in droves and no he didn't think that was going to do much of anything I was also frustrated because it didn't give us the opportunity to bring the show to a conclusion which so many people write me about and have asked me about over the years what would you have done and there was no final show written the lost episode does not exist anywhere there was certainly an idea in my head to bring the series to a satisfactory psychological conclusion for the character of dr. David Banner it was important for me that he got to the end of his quest that he found a cure essentially and unfortunately because we were just some arrow Lee shuffled off we never had the chance to to do that final that final episode which I think was a shame in a lot of ways by accidentally ending open-ended was sort of sort of a nice metaphor for his anger but I yes I do wish we could have written an episode that had that had a bit of closure to it I would have liked to have seen it go and end and it's unfortunate it didn't you know and I think you know the loyal fans of the show they got cheated I think but not because of us I don't know that there would be a good way to end to end it I think the ending is he's walking off all by himself just like always and you know that those stories continue to go on after were off the air that he's still out there looking for his cure after the Hulk ended I would read in the trades many times it seemed for 20 years that there was always a mention of a halt movie and the one great director Angley finally directed it I know the Gale Anne Hurd had been trying to get the movie made for about a dozen years there had been about ten or eleven different writers on it one of them called me after the movie opened and said I just wanted you to know that in all the screenings that I have been in after all the writers that have worked on this show the only line that gets a rise out of the audience is Allegra steady everyman so I was flattered I'm stunned in the in the turnaround of Hollywood now that they are I mean it used to be 30 years between you remaking a movie and now they're remaking the Hult with Ed Norton if it weren't for Ken and Bixby that I don't think we'd be contemplating a remake of the movie and I think that the TV show is pivotal to the legs that it has told you I'd make it we're all gonna make just by virtue of the the medium that television really brought it into everyone's everyday life my greatest memory is being in that room for the first time with all of them and being scared out of my mind and having six or seven people really make me feel you know what we don't know you really yet we don't know who you are but we're going to give you a chance that's my greatest memory it was the beginning of my adult life I was 28 and everything in my life as an adult started then and came out of that I look back with great fondness I call it my college years you know met the great love of my life on the set I found a career through Kenny looking back I treasure every single day and it's my favorite credit I do know that we all spend a lot of time I've told Kenny this what we call chasing the experience that you remember it as so lovely even the tough times even the hard times in the fights and all of that and the misunderstandings you remember it as such a special time and that you never duplicate it again looking back on the Hulk it's very interesting because it was not a project that I had wanted to do to begin with I didn't see it as being something I could do and do well with my heart in it but once I hit on the idea thanks to my wife Suzy of incorporating a little bit of Victor Hugo's Lamy zurab a little bit of robert louis stevenson's jekyll and hyde and i really saw that there was a way into it to mine the human condition and to do stories that were about what it was like to be cursed with something like this I knew I was on the right track once I was lucky enough to get Bill Bixby to come on board to play the character that I had created and for him to be supported by people like Louis Ferrigno and Jack Colvin and all the wonderful actors whom we worked with over the five years that we did the show to be able to work with crew people like my cinematographer John Macpherson like Claude Riggins my sound man to be able to have such wonderful talented people behind the scenes like my editors George Ohanian Bob Richards Allen Marx and Jack Shawn Garth the hundreds and hundreds of people that worked on the Hulk have to share in the success of it with me and it is something that I look back on very very fondly because we did some really extraordinary work it's very hard to do an episodic television series and have every single episode be as good as it possibly can be certainly you have some that are just not as good no matter how hard you work but for the most part our batting average was was really good and it was because of the team that I had been lucky enough to put together particularly the writing in the producing team that worked with me over the years all of those men and women who brought all of their talents to the Hulk are the reason that it was so successful and the reason that I can now look back at it with such fondness and such gratitude and such joy at having been a part of it my god banner you're alive you can call me David oh my god go mark if you just help me if you just tell me if you just if you if hmm do you know what you're doing yes I do believe me we are not gonna kill yourself in my laboratory well you're being pretty shitty about it aren't you sit down sit down you fool around yeah it's the only way to be believe me glad you're cold Oh everything is wonderful mom's living with me now and and I'm working hard and taking classes and you said all you do that's all I do how are you doing Dave I'm all right you fool around only on the weekends how about your mother did she pull round Monday through Friday only Tuesday from 2:00 to 4:00 okay it's gonna be very difficult I guess I'll have to get them made in the off days yes well Juanita doesn't mind anytime oh I'm like she does prefer the closet one that she is a closet case you know yes it's tried heard that oh oh sorry you and your Indian birth control oh [ __ ] am I glad this is over huh are you doing sound and here the tram behind me clearly so that we can loop it to the other profit-making organization for this company keep going well here you go my dear with the radical technical got plane bound god of them there was an older really horny nurse pardon me I'm looking for Heidi she's not a break probably at the cafeteria you another doctor another doctor she's dated half the Medical Center then she must be a great piece I don't what the hell my line is stop it jack is a good man he's also an eggbeater and then makes him very dangerous thank you you're missing your clip y'all-y'all yeah you're just dribbling down your leg now oh that's great so that's that's that's great oh yeah I had to ask a question oh let me see your other one when a crash to the door your left anger it's half healed I know it's one of the characteristics of a metamorphosis of my metamorphosis I've seen other metamorphosis so if I go into a banana was it's not amorphous ease of a change that that happens inside my body I had an overdose of Radiology was actually radium treatment it was I was in a lot in Chapter 1 of this rest I'm sorry I didn't mean to do interview I didn't mean to interrupt I mean I didn't I have a problem doctor don't you get any sleep at all last night oh no no in the banner tradition if you can't screw it piss on it see if you just tell me where he lives we could save dr. Rene no man not me I think you know what pardon me Hey ah I think you know if you'd help if he laughs again if you'd help me you would have to fear the babalao anymore you know eASIC he's the guy you kick he's got he's got claws and stuff ah screw you I don't think that that's what Whitley I don't I do you understand what I'm saying so far Oh time so load yeah Haleh I the 30 what [ __ ] rojak down hey bad road we can't even find you is it hard to drive oh good morning ah not yet hi close the door end of series

Channel: blast from the past

Views: 853,822

Rating: 4.8659263 out of 5

Keywords: Hulk (Film), Hulk (Comic Book Character), Comics (Comic Book Genre), Comic Book (Comic Book Genre), Hulk, Hulkout, Bill Bixby, LOu Ferrigno, Marvel Comics, Avengers, David Banner, Bruce Banner, Spiderman, Avengers (Organization In Fiction), Story, Action, Adventure, 70's, 80's, Intros, Incredible Hulk, Documentaries, Documentary (TV Genre), History

Id: TtCyyLKXFec

Length: 58min 13sec (3493 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/gerbil_111]

I had read decades ago, that it was sent to coloring with the typo gr (for green) instead of the intended gy (for grey). And they just ran with that after.