John Keel’s adventures in Hollywood
BRIAN J ROBB investigates how the author of The Mothman Prophecies tried to break into Hollywood in the 1960s and tried writing for Lost in Space.
You won’t find many of Keel’s Hollywood credits in IMDb
W riter and ufologist John Keel was perhaps best known as the man behind
The Mothman Prophecies. His 1975 book highlighted the mysteries surrounding the December 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River (see FT156:26
54). The story was most widely disseminated through the 2002 film adaptation directed by Mark Pellington and starring Richard Gere. That, however, was far from Keel’s first involvement with Hollywood.
Keel had a variety of professional experiences before writing his fortean classics. Born in New York in 1930, he was an early fan of sleight-ofhand magic; his first published writing was on the subject, appearing while he was still at school. Upon leaving, he worked for newspapers before joining the US Army during the Korean War, as part of the Armed Forces Network in Germany. One of his Forces radio shows was entitled Thing in the Sky: The Flying Saucer Story. In his book Operation Trojan Horse, Keel categorised this experience as training in propaganda techniques and psychological warfare.
In the mid-1950s, after leaving the Army, Keel travelled (financed by his magazine articles), wrote for men’s adventure magazines, and focused on radio work. In the later 1950s, he was working for publisher Funk & Wagnalls as an encyclopædia editor. It was in the late 1960s, after his Hollywood escapades, that fortean subjects (especially UFOs) came to dominate Keel’s writing.
What is less well known about Keel is that he made repeated, often unsuccessful, forays into Hollywood. You won’t find many of his Hollywood credits in the IMDb, however. A member of the Writers Guild of America, Keel got his start by writing material for comedian Merv Griffin on partially scripted game show
Play Your Hunch. Produced by Goodson and Todman Productions, it primarily ran on the NBC network between 1958 and 1962. Griffin presented all but the final year of the couples’ game show, where Keel was the Head Writer, a role he described on a resumé as “wrote special material for many performers”. 1
The better part of three years on Play Your Hunch led to further television writing work, including for children’s shows such as Mack
and Myer for Hire and The Chuck McCann Show. Airing between 1963 and 1964, Mack and Myer
for Hire was a sitcom produced by Sandy Howard Productions for Trans-Lux Television. It starred Mickey Deems ( Three’s
Company, Get Smart) as Mack and Joey Faye (Phil Silvers’s one-time Broadway comedy partner) as Myer, a pair of bumbling handymen who travel from job to job on a motorcycle and sidecar, causing havoc. Each episode ran for about 12 minutes (designed to be featured within longer Saturday morning variety shows) and over 100 instalments were produced. Keel functioned again as Head Writer, as well as Associate Producer, on the show, describing the stories as “slapstick comedies”. For some episodes, Keel adopted crazy pseudonyms (presumably to hide the fact that he was writing so many of them), including the delightful ‘Darwin Fudwopple’ and the telling ‘Fillmore Zilch’.
During 1964, Keel also wrote a television pilot for a proposed series called The Keystone Kops, modelled after the old Keystone silent comedies and drawing upon his Mack and Myer slapstick experience. Keel also wrote skits for Candid Camera and drafted the text for a children’s record about the history of manned flight (according to his friend Doug Skinner, Keel was “a lifelong aviation buff”).
Keel even developed several story pitches for (of all things) the biggest animated show on American television prior to The
Simpsons, The Flintstones (19601966). The show was a rarity in the 1960s, a primetime animated comedy series about the adventures of a Stone Age family. Along with a sample script from
Mack and Myer for Hire (#64), Keel submitted five story outlines to The Flintstones’ producers, animation house Hanna Barbera, in the Fall of 1965. ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ was modelled after a Western, complete with a mysterious stranger arriving in town hunting for Fred Flintstone, while ‘Pop Art’ saw Fred take up painting, becoming a Beatnik figure. Keel attempted to introduce computerisation to The
Flintstones’ prehistoric world in ‘Automation’, while ‘Wilma, Stage Mother’ was a behind-the-scenes Hollywood exposé in which Wilma attempts to make a movie star of Pebbles. Perhaps the most interesting (given Keel’s later obsessions) was ‘Walk in Space’, which saw Fred and Barney testdriving an amusement ride that simulates being a pilot – only they actually end up in orbit. He resisted the urge to include flying saucers or aliens, but it must have been difficult. All his story outlines were rejected. 2
Keel had a particularly productive period in 1965, but many of the ideas he proposed failed to take off. These included an animated series called Snooper
Scope, about a detective and his trio of sidekicks who set out to thwart the schemes of the evil ‘Disc Spicable’ who is out to steal the world’s water. Written for Copri Films, a company that
dubbed and distributed Japanese animation in the US, this was possibly a script to be used on a repurposed pre-existing Japanese property. He also drafted a pilot episode script for a German TV series called The Outer Space
Explorers. Projects that did pay off during this period include scripts for The Clay Cole Show and a game show pilot, Face the Music, with Sammy Kaye.
One of Keel’s more ambitious projects at this time was a proposed horror movie titled
World of the Living Dead, drafted for Goodwill Productions Inc. This might have been a proposed remake of the 1932 Bela Lugosi classic White Zombie, but little is known about it – the title certainly anticipates the influential 1968 George Romero film, Night of the Living Dead. One film proposal where Keel’s outline survives is The Nudist
from Outer Space, an attempt to jump on the nudie-cutie cheapo film bandwagon. The outline featured a canoodling couple harassed by four nude female aliens who emerge from a “strange ball of light” that has descended in the forest. Keel described what transpires as being in the manner of a “bedroom farce” crossed with The
Twilight Zone, in which the nudist aliens are in pursuit of a fugitive from their own world. Amazingly, there were no buyers for this masterwork. 3
Although Keel was reputed to have written for both Get Smart (1965-1970) and The Monkees (1966-1968), none of the credits reads like a Keel pen-name; perhaps these were rejected storylines rather than finished scripts. The closest his work came to the screen in a dramatic series in the 1960s was through his involvement with Lost in Space. Recently rebooted by Netflix,
Lost in Space (1965-1968) lasted three seasons (a total of 83 episodes), beginning in black and white with fairly serious dramatic storylines before concluding in lurid colour and with pantomime monsters like the ‘carrot-man’ (from penultimate episode ‘The Great Vegetable Rebellion’). Keel, a science fiction fan from his youth, decided to have a go at drafting a Lost in Space storyline during the show’s early episodes.
His notes begin with a handwritten list of the series’s regular characters, and a notation of some of the gadgets used by the crew of the Jupiter 2 spaceship, and the name of their ‘space pet’, Bloop. His outline is entitled ‘Circle of Time’ and concerns the arrival of a ‘space jelly’-like creature from a group of meteors that crash onto the planet where the ‘Space Family Robinson’ are stranded. It’s not a bad attempt, notably better than some episodes that actually made it into production, and features young Will Robinson trapped in a different ‘time track’ to the rest of the family, which leads to the haunting vision of him returning to an aged and derelict Jupiter 2 with the rest of his family long gone. 4 There’s no indication among Keel’s extant papers as to why the storyline was rejected (or if it was even submitted), but later episodes of Lost in Space echo some of Keel’s story suggestions. In the third season instalment ‘Flight into the Future’, Will Robinson and Dr Smith fall asleep only to reawaken 270 years into the future, where they meet their own descendants. A late first season episode, ‘The Space Croppers’, features another future descendant of Dr Smith, a werewolf creature curiously called ‘Keel’. If it was sent in, his story may have been rejected due to the rather adult emotions faced by young Will Robinson finding himself trapped in the future and mourning the rest of his family, or perhaps because Keel’s characterisation of the ever-cowardly Dr Smith was somewhat ‘off-model’.
As the 1960s wore on, Keel was growing ever more unhappy with the television business. In a January 1966 letter to Senator Robert Kennedy, Keel complained of having worked “in the wasteland of television”. 5 Keel’s failures in Hollywood led to a period of introspection. In a 1967 letter to Jerome Clark, Keel lamented his time spent in television and the path down which it had led him. “A few years back, while wallowing in television, I decided to enter psychotherapy,” he writes. “In those days, I found myself making daily compromises with my cumbersome ideals and it was tearing my soul out… [Therapy] enabled me to kick the TV business and return to more worthwhile, though less profitable, pursuits.” 6
Much later, Keel had a beef with creator Chris Carter over the 1990s incarnation of The
X-Files that he felt was trading on material he’d made famous. A 1997 episode made direct reference to Keel’s Mothman. “They stole a lot of stuff,” Keel told the Daily Sentinel in 2003. The then 72-year-old Keel held a grudge, but as ever was quite willing to write about fortean matters – for a pay cheque. “They had the audacity to write to me, and see if I had any more material. Screw them… If they wanted me to write an X-Files, I’d do it for the usual fee!” 7
John Keel died in 2009, aged 79. His writing and his reputation as a chronicler of high strangeness live on, but he may not be remembered in the way he had hoped. “Nobody is an authority on UFOs,” he said in a 1985 interview. “I expect to be remembered as an author and playwright, if I am remembered at all.” Perhaps in that statement there lies a clue to the truth behind the fusion of Keel’s screenwriting experiences and his later fortean works: he simply knew how to tell a good story. 8 For much more on John Keel and his wayward life, you can do no better than to consult his friend Doug Skinner’s John Keel: Not an Authority on Anything blog at http://www. johnkeel.com/. See also FT253:38-42.