Bill Danch’s Finest Hour And Five Minutes

One of the first people I met when I started working for Filmation Studios in 1978 was an irascible old reprobate named Bill Danch.

And I say that with the greatest affection possible.

Bill wrote for radio in the 1940s, most notably on the old Fibber McGee And Molly show.  The way they wrote weekly radio sit-coms back in the day was to come up with a central theme or plot for an episode, then assign different writers different characters the star/s would interact with (the head writer / story editor / producer would then do the final pass over the script to smooth out all the bumps).

Bill handled the character Tini, a perpetually precocious 6-year old neighbor who periodically dropped in to contribute to the silliness.

I forget how he got involved in writing for radio, but I seem to recall he also wrote a few big-little books in the 1930s for paltry fees.

Before that he worked a number of hard scrabble jobs, including stripping the paint off Pullman cars with buckets of turpentine during the Depression.  Corporations then and now showed the same concern over the health and safety of their employees and Danch’s crew needed to work without gloves.

The constant exposure to turpentine on his bare skin destroyed the oil glands in his hands and forearms, so for the rest of his life he needed to constantly massage moisturizers into his gnarly, claw-like hands.

He was born in Hammond, IN in 1910 and died in Ojai, CA in 2004.  He may have acquired a wife or two along the way (I seem to recall mention of a son but may be misremembering) but when I met him he was unmarried and living alone.

He would have been 68 when I met him at Filmation Studios, but he looked a lot older, bent and balding but full of piss and vinegar.  He told me he began writing for animation during the 1940s, contributing stories and gags to Tex Avery cartoons until Tex remade one of his cartoons without paying him.

His first noted animation writing was for the legendary UPA studios but he also wrote episodes on a number of early TV shows, of which The Real McCoys probably marks his high water mark in live action.

Bill seemed to bounce around from gig to gig, not really getting a solid footing under himself until the 1960s when he became a staff writer on The Jim Backus Show and a couple of animated series.

He washed up -- er, landed at Filmation in 1970 when signed on to write for Archie And His New Pals.  He stayed at the studio through to 1982, writing primarily for Fat Albert and the various Archie shows.

He ran a side hustle self-publishing a book on how to win mail-in contests and store drawings.*

I lost track of him around 1980 when I left Filmation and wound up at Ruby-Spears.

Believe me, two years was a lifetime’s worth of exposure to him (and again, I write that with affection).

A couple of Bill Danch stories pop to mind:

Bill was drafted during WWII and assigned to the glider corps.  As he and his squad lined up for a practice flight, he noticed the glider pilot wore a parachute.

“Why do you get a parachute and we don’t?” he asked.

“They need me,” the pilot said.

Bill immediately called in as many favors as he could and before his unit shipped out for D-Day managed to get reassigned to the Army’s public affairs office.

In Hollywood.

A lot of Hollywood types pulled strings to get assigned in and around Los Angeles during the war.  Bill and the rest of the office -- all radio and screenwriters in civilian life -- pounded out Army press releases during the day and scripts for studios at night.

They were located near Hollywood and Vine, operating out of a rented house in the neighborhood bordering Hollywood Boulevard.

Their neighbor was an angry lady -- what we’d call a Karen today -- who resented them because her son was actually serving overseas.

When the lease ran out on the house, the Army relocated them to the Westwood / UCLA area, about 8 miles west of Hollywood and Vine.

As they were loading their office equipment on a truck for their move, their bitter neighbor came over to smirk.

“I see they finally caught up with you goldbricks,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Bill answered.  “They’re moving us closer to the Pacific front:  Westwood.”

Bill could be a righteous bastard when he put his mind to it.

The main story I want to write about is Bill’s 1954 magnum opus:  Monster From The Ocean Floor.

Bill had written a spec script called It Stalked The Ocean Floor and showed it to a young assistant agent he knew, Roger Corman.

Monster… was Roger Corman’s second feature film, his first solo effort as a producer. 

According to Bill, his original script was more expansive than the final film, and that may be true.  The non-monster parts don’t seem badly done for the era, but aren’t the epitome of the motion picture art.

The most interesting thing about it is that the heroine, instead of being arm candy and / or a helpless victim, takes the lead in trying to catch the monster.  She’s rescued in the end by the hero ramming his mini-sub into the monster’s cyclopedian eye, but that’s because she donned scuba gear to go confront the beast in its own lair.

Corman financed the film with money off his first feature, Highway Dragnet, and getting Bill and director / co-star Wyatt Ordung to accept deferred payments.

Exactly how much Corman spent on the film varies with who’s telling the story, but the low ball figure of $12,000 certainly seems plausible / bordering generous when one actually sees the movie.

It clocked in at 65-minutes, making it perfect fodder for a drive-in double-bill, literally a B-movie.

According to Bill, it played for years on the drive-in circuits, often being teamed up with older A-movies such as Ben-Hur.

The way distributors broke down revenues from double-bills was to split the revenue evenly between the two films.

It’s safe to assume very, very few people came to the Ben-Hur / Monster From The Ocean Floor double-bill to see Bill’s movie, but nonetheless Corman got half the take.

However…

Hollywood distributors -- being even more ruthless and less ethical than Medellin cartel drug lords -- typically expected an under the table kickback from the B-movie producers if the B-movie producers wanted their next film to get distribution.

Bill and Wyatt Ordung waited and waited and waited for their deferred payments but never received them (Ordung was in even deeper than Bill; he invested his life insurance in the film).

They eventually sued Corman in the late 1950s / early 1960s, demanding to see his accounting books to determine how much they were owed.

Corman said sure and in the discovery phase of the trial told them to go to the local Bekins warehouse.

There Bill and Ordung found three china barrels filled with loose papers, all the paperwork associated with every film Corman made in the 1950s.

Corman mixed the papers up and divided them among the three barrels, meaning Bill and Ordung would need to pay for very expensive legal and accounting time to make heads and tails of it.

Realizing they’d never make enough to recoup what they’d spend, Bill and Ordung dropped the suit.

. . .

I stated Monster From The Ocean Floor was Bill’s magnum opus, but he did work on another produced live action screenplay.

I’m not sure what Bill contributed to the Mary Tyler Moore / George Peppard movie What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? but having seen that movie, I can attest Monster From The Ocean Floor is the more respectable credit.

© Buzz Dixon

*  His system actually worked!  Not every time, of course, but often enough to dramatically improve one’s chances.  He researched how mail in contests selected winners and gave viable tips on how to make one’s envelope more likely to be picked.  And his hack for winning random drawings was simple:  Crumple up then unfold your entry slip and the bumps and crinkles will migrate to the middle of the entries, greatly increasing one’s chances of being drawn when somebody reached in to grab one at random.