Lorenzo Semple Jr.

Lorenzo Elliott Semple Jr. (born Lorenzo Elliott Semple III; March 27, 1923 – March 28, 2014) was an American screenwriter and sometime playwright, best known for his work on the campy television series Batman and the political/paranoia movie thrillers The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). 2Biography 3Early work Semple's writing career started in 1951, as a short story contributor to magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's Weekly. Semple also tried writing for the theatre and had a play produced on Broadway, Tonight in Samarkand (1955), a melodrama adapted from the French. He wrote an episode for The Alcoa Hour called "Archangel Harrison" (1955). He wrote another play, Golden Fleecing, which was filmed for Matinee Theatre in 1958 and premiered on Broadway in 1959.Semple wrote "China Boy" for the TV series Buckskin (1958), "Four Against Three Millions" and "Money Go Round" for Target (1958), and "Epitaph for a Golden Girl" for Pursuit (1958). "Golden Fleecing" was bought by MGM and produced under the title The Honeymoon Machine (1961), starring Steve McQueen, following which Semple relocated to Hollywood and established himself as a writer for several television shows, including Kraft Suspense Theatre ("Knight's Gambit" 1964), Breaking Point ("Never Trouble Trouble Till Trouble Troubles You" 1964), The Rogues ("Death of a Fleming " 1964), Theatre of Stars ("The Fliers" 1965), Burke's Law (several episodes)'. 3Batman From an interview with he and Jon Dambacher, "I wrote a pilot called Number One Son about Charlie Chan’s son. A story set in San Francisco. I wrote the script which was okay, everybody liked it, which is about all you can expect, and we were thinking about casting and everything then ABC called William Dozier saying, 'This is very embarrassing but word just came down we’re not to do any program with an ethnic lead.' They didn’t want a Chinese person in i