The Comics Journal

Filmation and Duke Ducovny

CATRON: I wanted to talk about your TV stuff. Because you did work for —

HANEY: Duke Ducovny. [Allen “Duke” Ducovny began his association with DC Comics when, with Robert Maxwell, he was involved with the creation of the Superman radio show in 1940. When the animated series The New Adventures of Superman premiered on CBS Television’s Saturday morning lineup in 1966, he was executive producer. He went on to produce a number of other DC Comics-based animated television series. He was, at different times, head of CBS’s Saturday morning programming and head of Filmation Studios.] Yes. Well, that was fun.

CATRON: How did that come about? And how did you manage to do it from the East Coast?

HANEY: Well, we did all of it from the East Coast. The writing part. Duke came in in the ’60s to be the producer of the new TV stuff that DC was getting into. He was cozy with Jack Liebowitz. Duke was a pro, I liked Duke. We got along fine. This is a guy, he had some background in the business. I don’t know too much about his background. George started writing for him and he’s looking around the office for other talent — because here’s this office full of talent, you know. The editors and freelancers. And he’s about to produce, out on the Coast, the various animated series.

CATRON: Superman, Batman — The Superman/Aquaman Hour, as I recall.

HANEY: Well, I wrote that because Aquaman was one of my main books. I forgot. That’s one of the titles I keep forgetting. That was one I was a main writer on for some time. Nick Cardy, blah, blah, blah.

CATRON: With Mera and Aqualad and all that?

HANEY: All those characters. I created the brother, the half-brother. What the fuck’s his name?

CATRON: The bad guy? Ocean Master. I read this stuff, Bob. [Laughs.]

HANEY: Yeah, right, you were just a kid.

CATRON: I was your audience!

HANEY: Yeah, you were! Anyway, Duke — I was like the second writer he hired after George. Because I think George had been fired by that time or whatever. I was very happy to work with Duke. You know Filmation, the studio, right? Well, DC and Liebowitz and Duke put them in business. The guy who was the founder of Filmation. He had nothing. He didn’t even have a studio. But he and Duke made a deal. He got the rights to these famous characters. After all, at that point Superman and Batman are household names, right? And the Super-Friends. And Aquaman. All that stuff. So they put Filmation in business by giving him the rights to go ahead and capitalization and blah, blah, blah. And they began to churn them out. Duke would go back and forth between — but all the writing and conceptualizing was done at the DC offices. It was an in-house product. George and I wrote most of them and then there were a couple other writers. I guess Jack Miller wrote some. There were other writers outside the office that Duke knew. Friends of his, or accomplices of his. There were other writers. But all the writing and creative — because, after all, we had the whole library of characters. And Filmation, of course, made them out on the Coast. I did a fair number. I did a fair number of the Batman and some two parters and I did some Aquaman. I did a couple of Super-Friends, I think. One or two Flash. A variety of them.

I was happy to work with Duke. He treated me right. I’ll tell you, the check — you got, not a big check — actually we were underpaid but that was Liebowitz’s stinginess. But you could churn those out and I liked working in the — if comics are frozen movies, here we were actually doing a movie script. Therefore the actual timing of things was more exacting. But they were simple, short scripts. So the money, in a way, was a little bit better. I was building my house at the time, so I was pouring the money I was making, the extra money, into that. Then Duke and I tried to get 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea off the ground as a series. I did the pilot for that. It was a longer script and I got a better check. That never did sell, though. Freddie Silverman was a 29-year-old wunderkind at CBS. Head of Children’s Programming. Of course, he was who we were selling to. He was our client. He was the one who was going to put it on the air. It was made by Filmation out in L.A. but it was emanating out of New York. But the client, the buyer, was CBS. And we went up and had meetings. And I heard about this guy, Freddie Silverman, the wunderkind of TV. Duke loved this guy. Duke was old enough to be his father. But he was attaching himself to this wunderkind. We went up and had meetings with him. I didn’t find him a wunderkind. What I found out about him in one hour was that he had more balls than anybody else. And that’s important. He could make decisions and he had opinions. I liked that. But he and Duke — I was in conferences with them. George and I and so forth. That was to get the series off the ground. And going up into the Tower of Fear, going up to the 33rd Floor and meeting with Silverman, it was sort of heady.

Arnold Drake and glory days

HANEY: Anyway, those were the days, Mike, when in New York, in the ’60s — and of course the Vietnam War was on and all that — but there was an awful lot of money around. There was no inflation and the country was booming. George and Arnold and I’d be in a bar, sometimes — Kenny’s Steak Pub — and we’d be talking. And some guy standing behind you you didn’t know, would say, “Hey, I got a couple hundred thou I’m not doing anything with.” We’d be talking ideas, you know, scripts and projects. Those were great days. Things like that would happen. Or the guy would buy you a drink and you’d sort of con him along. [Laughter.] And I was writing those. And I was writing my books. And I was always building my house. I was doing a seven-day week for months and months and months.

CATRON: You and Arnold Drake spent a summer writing a movie script?

HANEY: Well, we didn’t spend a summer. What did he say?

CATRON: I think he said a summer.

HANEY: Part of a summer, yeah. Well, wait a minute. That’s right. He came up. I know what he means. He came up and rented a little summer place for his wife and kid. They were right here in Woodstock. Of course we saw a lot of each other. We were good friends. Yeah, we worked — we did a script on Hitler’s son. Hell of a good idea and way ahead of its time, at the time. I hear now there’s a big book coming out with the same theme. We did a movie script on Hitler’s son, Chase the Crooked Cross. We also did a script on the Kennedy Assassination.

CATRON: That’s the one he told me about.

HANEY: Which was way ahead of its time. That got read in Hollywood and a lot of stuff was stolen out of it later — or maybe it was just coincidence. We did that one and I think we did — oh, we did Doom Patrol. I think we may have done another movie script together. I can’t remember. Arnold’s done several movie scripts. He did a film that has become a cult classic, now. Who Killed Teddy Bear? Did he tell you about that?

CATRON: No.

HANEY: They revived that.

CATRON: Mainly we were talking about you. So I didn’t go too far with him.

HANEY: Oh, you were doing this in research for this one?

CATRON: Right, right. Yeah, he’s another interview I should do one of these days.

HANEY: Yes, you should. He’s had a more interesting career than I ever had. Arnold’s a very talented man. Anyway, he did a cult film called Who Killed Teddy Bear? in the ’60s starring Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse. It was a crime movie. Thriller/crime movie. Kind of sleazy but very effective and the film didn’t do much at the time. Arnold got like 10 or 15 thou for it, which was pretty good for a script that he wrote, probably, in a few weeks. They made the movie and now they revived it. They showed it again in New York. They had a special showing of it at one of the art theaters earlier this year. I almost went down to see it. I hope Arnold went to it. It’s interesting, ask him about it. The film’s now kind of a cult film. Because he put some stuff in there that was ahead of its time. Arnold wrote and produced a couple of films with a partner of his who later died. He’s written a lot of other stuff. He’s a real jack-of-all-trades in the writing game. How did he sound when you spoke with him?

CATRON: Oh, he sounded fine.

HANEY: Good. He’s only a year or two older than I am. He also is a great war hero. He’s a combat veteran of Patton’s 3rd.

CATRON: Right, he was telling me about that a little bit.

HANEY: Yeah, he saw some shit.

CATRON: Yeah.

HANEY: He’s a mensch.

Cave Carson and grinding it out

From “The Fury of the Fiery Avenger” in Showcase #49. Art by Lee Elias. ©1964 DC Comics Click to view larger image

CATRON: We haven’t even talked about Cave Carson.

HANEY: Oh, golly. The Inside Earth. I enjoyed that. Eddie Herron had done the early stuff on that. He did a nice job. I didn’t create any of it, to speak of. He really created it. Eddie was a sweet guy and a talented guy. There’s a lot of stories about him, too. Anyway, he created it and I — I guess Jack or somebody assigned it to me. I did several issues of that. Inside Earth. That was fun. Any variety — there’s an awful grind in those years.

CATRON: Was it really?

HANEY: It was, yeah. People don’t appreciate it. The fans never appreciated it. They didn’t know how the comics were really created.

CATRON: Well, it doesn’t take very long to read them, you see.

HANEY: [Laughs.] It doesn’t take that long to read them! No, but not only was it the hours you spent actually writing them. It was the grind of just constantly churning them out. I was so happy to do other things, like the PR films and stuff, and building houses up here and so forth. Anything, any change of pace was welcome. So then, through the ’70s, I kept pretty much the same drill. I was doing a lot of building at that time up here, in the ’70s. I built a dozen houses.

CATRON: Tell me about that part of your life.

HANEY: Well, I built my own house in the late ’60s, and moved into it, right?

CATRON: OK.

HANEY: Then a friend of mine asked me to do his house. He’s a movie producer who lives here and I did his house a couple of years later. I started doing that because the income from the comics — although I wrote all through the ’70s for DC — things were more and more expensive all the time. And to pay off my house I started doing building. I enjoyed the building. I was working a seven-day week through some of the ’70s. I would do two or three days comics and three or four days building. I built houses for friends, mainly, around here. And additions, and a pool house, and so forth and so on.

Then in the early ’70s, also, I did my book, Woodstock Handmade Houses. It was a best seller. It sold 150,000 copies in paperback and that was a triple best seller in ‘74. It’s a nice book. It’s a photo book of funky Woodstock houses.

CATRON: Why didn’t you go to Marvel? I get the impression you were unhappy at DC.

HANEY: Oh, well —

CATRON: And Stan offers you a job at the up-and-coming company.

HANEY: I have no answer for that, Mike. I probably should have. Looking back. The great humorist S.J. Perelman said he was going to write his life story and call it The Hindsight Saga. [Laughter.] Like everybody else, you look back and say, “Well, I should have made that turn, or done that.” Well, I didn’t. I don’t know the reasons. Oh, one reason might have been at that moment at DC I had all the work I could handle for a change. And was getting some credit and more money. I was working for Duke, too. You know. I was working, as I said, a seven-day week, part of it because I was building my house. But was Stan going to offer me more money? Who knows?

Probably more credit. Because the credit change didn’t come until Jenette [Kahn] came in. Carmine didn’t push hard enough — he was on the freelancer’s side, to be fair to Carmine. And he treated me decently. But he never really made the revolution that Jenette and Paul did when they came later. Because they were forced to by the changing conditions of the business. Now, you get your name in the credits and ownership and —

CATRON: You get royalties!

HANEY: Royalties — oh, I get royalties. But ex-post facto, in a sense. At that time, even in the mid-’60s, the late ’60s, we were still not getting — Then there was the union we tried to form at that point.

Union, yes! Clout, no.

CATRON: Yes, we need to talk about that. Tell me the story of the union that you tried to form. Who was involved and what happened?

HANEY: Well, Arnold was the main instigator. And I was, somewhat, although Arnold was the main one. Who else? Poor Bill Finger was involved briefly. I guess he was still alive. And one or two others. Gardner Fox came to a couple. We had about — oh, I don’t know — four or five meetings in people’s apartments. I don’t know the year exactly, I know it was in the ’60s when all this stuff was happening. I guess it’s around ’67? I don’t know. You may be able to check on this.

CATRON: My guess would be ’67, ’68.

HANEY: You can ask Arnold.

HANEY: I think you’re right. Arnold would maybe know better. But Arnold was the main instigator. We’d all been talking for years about how to get some kind of better treatment. I’ll tell you a story. A little earlier than that, like ’65-6, Arnold and I and the guys were unhappy, the writers, with the page rate. They were the same page rates for a decade.

CATRON: What was that rate at that time?

HANEY: Oh, Jesus. It was terrible. What was it? $15? Some artists had moved up. Of course, artists were more important. They always had more clout, right? They were getting better money. They made more money, even though it takes you longer to do an art page than a writing page, of course. But they still grossed more money every year. We guys were grinding this stuff out and they’re still selling. And we went in to Donenfeld, young Donenfeld, for a pay —

He had a problem about money, that man. There’s two stories about him. One when he turned 13 in his bar mitzvah year, right? And his father, Harry, old Harry the drunken live-it-up guy, gave him $25 to go out and have a good time, right? He’s a 13-year-old boy, $25 in whatever year it was, 1940 or so. That’s a lot of money in 1940 when you’re 13, right? [Chuckles.] What he should have done was gone out and gotten laid or something. Got drunk. I don’t know. He comes back and he gives his father back $24.75. He spent a quarter. [Catron laughs.] And Harry, who loved to spend money, turned to Herbie Siegel, his flack and said, “What kind of a kid have I raised here?” [Laughter.]

He was weird about money. I saw him try to beat a waitress out of three dollars one time. That she would have to pay later. Anyway, we go in to him to get a raise, right?

CATRON: Right.

HANEY: And he starts to — the sweat runs off his nose. Here he is, this millionaire, with this company that’s still going strong. We’re asking for a raise. We figure we’ll ask for $5 a page more. Which would have been — considering all the years we hadn’t gotten one, would have been nothing, really. It should have been $20 more a page, that would have evened out the years.

Anyway, we argue with him back and forth, you know. Finally he starts to give in. He says, “OK, I’m going to give you a dollar more.”

And I go, “What the fuck is this?”

Arnold’s sitting there and I’m sitting there. And he says, “But I’ll only giving it to you, Bob, to start with. And you can’t tell the other guys.” Well, and Arnold, of course.

I was ready to quit at that point. I was ready to walk out and say, “You son of a bitch.” Just walk out. Then I remembered that I had all these commitments and I was making fair money then. And I thought, well maybe he was kidding. But he wasn’t. [Laughter.] So I said, “Well, I can’t take it under those circumstances. The other guys, you know.”

So, as my memory serves, he said, “To you and Arnold.” Just the two of us. And we’re not to tell the other guys. So that was like — that’s pretty close to accurate. True. And we walked out. Arnold and I walked down the hall and I was like, “What kind of people are we dealing with here?’’

That’s when we tried to form the union and Arnold was the mainspring. We got John Broome, Gardner Fox, Bill Finger, me, Arnold. I think George came to a couple of meetings because I think he was no longer editor. A few other guys. They were all writers.

We had Kurt Schaffenberger come to one meeting because he’s a good guy. But we could never get the artists interested. They were all reasonably happy with their situation. Artists are a bunch of conservative guys, you know. They don’t believe in unions. Or sticking up for yourself. Writers are intellectuals and socialists and drunks. [Laughter.] In any order. Without them, we had no clout. Right?

CATRON: Right.

HANEY: Because if we quit, they could have replaced us a lot easier than they could have replaced the artists. So we had — anyway, we went in and met Liebowitz one morning. You go to the top to the big man, you know. Donenfeld washed his hands of it. We knew dealing with him was ridiculous, you know? If Liebowitz wasn’t more fair, he was more intelligent and would realize that maybe you should give something just to keep production going. He gave us a pretty hard time, too. He put on a poor mouth. He’s the guy who one day when I went in to Duke Duchovny to get my check and Duke said to Gloria, the secretary, “Draw up a double check for Bob.” Double the amount.

And Liebowitz is standing there, the President of the company. Or chairman, or whatever he was. And he suddenly butts in and he says, “Why is that a double check?”

And Duke says, “Well, it was a double script, Jack.” And he says, “Yeah, but it’s only one idea, isn’t it?” [Catron laughs.]

And I thought to myself, “Here’s this millionaire, right?” Ah well, anyway. It gets my blood pressure up. Anyway, we tried to form the union. We dealt with Liebowitz. To make a long story short, we kind of fell apart after a month or two because we couldn’t get the artists. And we had a few weak vessels in there. I said to Arnold one day, “Look. I don’t want to keep pushing this.” I was maybe a little less angry or revolutionary than he was. I felt a little badly later. I just had to drop out. I said, “Look, I’m building my house. I’m getting a lot of work and if I keep pushing this, I’m going to — ” they did this twice before. They twice before, in previous years, had retaliated and fired everybody. In fact, at that point, Arnold did get kind of eased out. Around that point. You could ask him and I don’t pretend to know the true story and I don’t pretend to point any fingers except I think at that point, unfairly, Arnold was, like, eased out of the freelance assignments he had at DC. Which was, if it really happened that way, very unfair to him.

CATRON: But it actually did. That was the point where suddenly Denny O’Neil and Len Wein and Marv Wolfman and all those guys came in because suddenly Bill Finger and Gardner Fox and Arnold Drake and those people were gone.

HANEY: Yeah, they were eased out and part of the reason was that. Yeah, it’s coming back to me now, yeah. I stayed and I admit I did give in. But I gave in reluctantly and I was part of the group from the beginning. I stayed as long as I thought it made any sense. I could see that we were not going to get anything. And they didn’t get anything and they were eased out. That’s right. That’s the story.

I’ve always had some — I don’t know if you call it guilt, I’ve always had some bad feeling towards myself about it. But then I said “I would have just been eased out, too.” Nobody got anything. In other words, it was a lost cause from the beginning. Because if the bosses don’t want to give you something and they can replace you, which they did with all those guys — Yeah, because, you see, Carmine was very much a company man in some respects. The great story about Carmine —

“Carmine fucked himself up”

CATRON: Tell me again. [Laughs.]

A promotional still from the 1978 film Superman, featuring Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and Ned Beatty as Otis.

HANEY: Well, we’re talking the first Superman movie. ’78?

CATRON: It was released in ’78. It was first announced around ’75.

HANEY: Yeah. Well, this is important. Carmine was in his last months there. Because I think this had something to do with him being let out.

CATRON: Let me tell you something about the timeline. Some people have telescoped this in time. The first Superman movie was released in 1978, in December. So at the tail of ’78. The agreement that DC and Siegel and Shuster signed was actually three years earlier, in ’75. So they got their settlement with DC in ’75.

HANEY: You’re sure about this, ’75?

CATRON: Believe me, I know these dates.

HANEY: Yeah, OK.

CATRON: That’s when Shuster, in January of ’76 — not even a month later — that’s when he first moved out to San Diego. These negotiations that involved Jerry Robinson and Neal Adams, that was all going on during October and November and December of ’75.

HANEY: OK, that’s important, yeah. Because I had gotten the dates mixed.  In ’75, you’ve show me where that timeline is, Carmine, of course, is still editorial director. When did Jenette come in?

CATRON: Jenette comes in, I think, in ’76 or ’77.

HANEY: OK. Because I know it happened not long before Carmine fucked himself up. Well anyway, Jerry Siegel was threatening another lawsuit. He knew the Superman movie was in the works. Right?

CATRON: Right.

HANEY: And he chose that time wisely.

CATRON: He wasn’t just threatening. He had filed the suit.

HANEY: Yeah, right.

CATRON: The suit was filed in 1970, I think.

HANEY: Yeah, well, whatever. Carmine’s editorial head. He calls everybody into the production room. He gets up on a desk and stands there, big guy that he was, and he starts emotionally lecturing us about Siegel and this lawsuit and how Siegel is no good and he’s biting the hand that feeds him and don’t ever side with him  — he’s warning everybody. And I’m looking at him and I’m thinking, “This guy is more royal than the king.” You know that expression? And I think, “Well, wait a minute. This is bad timing from him. Why is he pushing it so hard?” The upstairs people, up on the 23rd floor, you know, Bill Sarnoff, who was president of the company at that point — of Warner publishing, head of everything — wasn’t that kind of a guy. And here Carmine is going beyond even what Liebowitz would do to Siegel and Shuster.

Of course, we all, as freelancers or creative people, were sympathetic to [Siegel]. We were sympathetic to him as a creator. They’d fucked him over for 30 years. Sure enough, very shortly thereafter, Sarnoff, who was a smart man — hell, they’ve got this multi-million dollar movie coming out, or they’re developing and starting to work on it. And here the publicity of these two poor old guys — one of them blind, right? That would be the worst thing they could do! So of course he made a deal. And Carmine’s caught out on a limb, sawing it off. Right? [Catron laughs.] Looking like an asshole. I tried to tell him that, after this meeting. I went into his office. He and I were chummy. I said, “Yeah, Carmine, I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen here. I think the company is going to get smart and give them something for the PR. Not because they’re generous or nice, but strictly for the PR. They have this huge movie thing coming out. And more movies to come, right? Superman, blah, blah, blah.”

Anyway, later on — and that isn’t exactly the same package in a way but it seems to me related, his arrogance — Carmine’s arrogance towards the upstairs people who were his bosses. He would sit there in meetings with me and brag about how he told Sarnoff off about this or that. And I thought, “That doesn’t ring right to me.” Because Sarnoff was not some guy you told off. [Laughs.] You know?

Sure enough, within a brief time, maybe you know the date, Carmine overreached himself. Sales were not so great. They called him up in some meeting and he got — whatever he did, I don’t know exactly what he did — but they fired him.

They fired him like “Wham!” I’m a little hazy on the exact tactics here. But I think they were leaning on him about sales and he said, “If you don’t like it, I’ll quit.” And they said, “Good-bye.” It was like being fired and firing yourself all at the same time. You may have data that I don’t have on that. But that was what I remember. I came in the next morning because I was staying a couple days over. And Murray looked stricken. I said, “What’s the matter?” And he says, “Carmine just got fired.” He couldn’t believe it.

I went into Carmine’s office. He looked like somebody’d shot him through the heart. He didn’t think they’d call his bluff. Well, they’d had enough of him at that point. He just wasn’t smart, you know? You don’t go up to the big people and do that kind of shit. Pretend you’re their boss or something. You might push hard, aggressively for a certain point, or justice, or whatever. But you don’t do all this kind of shit. These guys were much bigger people. At that point, of course, sales were still dropping. Not all Carmine’s fault by any means. But we’re in a much tougher, competitive era in the mid-’70’s. So Jenette comes in, you have a new type of management.

Jenette Kahn arrives

HANEY: I think you’re right about the time. The ’75 thing was Jerry Siegel and the lawsuit, if that’s the year. Then she would be within the next year or so. I don’t know exactly when, either. I remember vividly when she came in. I can’t place the year any more. Some of these years float around. But I know the day she came in and was introduced to us all.

CATRON: Were you there that day?

HANEY: Yeah.

CATRON: What was your initial impression?

HANEY: Well here’s this tall, young woman who I had heard — the grapevine was already buzzing that she had had a personal relationship with somebody important upstairs — I don’t know who that was — and that’s how she got the job. But she had some minor background in comics. They showed us this little comic book she’d worked on. Which I think was — what do you call them when it’s a public-service thing? A public-service publication. I may be wrong about that.

CATRON: Something called Dynamite.

HANEY: It was a cute little thing. She’d somehow been the producer or publisher of it. But she had no real background in the rough-and-tumble world of major comic-book publishing. Much better to have taken somebody from the business. She was introduced to us all; she seemed terribly nervous and unsure of herself.

Immediately she surrounded herself — or they surrounded themselves around her — with Neal Adams — and she had a personal relationship with him. Also Paul and people like that. All flocked around her. She needed them. Because she didn’t know how to run that crazy shop and how to deal with all the problems it was facing. To give her credit, of course, she brought in a different attitude, she was a different generation and she and Paul and all these other people, they began to realize that unless you started bringing DC Comics into the 18th century, let alone the 19th or 20th, right? Just bring it up to the 18th century, in terms of how you treated writers, artists, whoever. That’s when things began to change. In terms of rates, credit, blah, blah, blah. You know. It didn’t change overnight, but they began to change. I was there for a few years while that happened.

CATRON: Now what were you writing at that point? You were doing Unknown Soldier by then.

HANEY: Yeah, I was doing Unknown Soldier again. Brave and the Bold I’m still doing. World’s Finest? No, not World’s Finest any more. Now we’re talking 10 years after the ’60s; we’re talking mid- and late-’70s, so I had less books. But there was a whole new wave, then, of very creative people. New writers, new editors — you had Len Wein, you had Paul, you had Denny, you have new writers, freelancers, new artists. There was a big, big changeover. Murray was still there.

CATRON: Well, I was there in ’78. Murray was still there, then.

HANEY: Yeah, he was still there. Weisinger was dead, of course.

CATRON: He died while I was there.

HANEY: That year?

CATRON: I remember the day they came in and announced Weisinger had died that day. So he died in ’78.

HANEY: Yeah, OK. That sounds right. Well, let’s see. Kanigher had retired, or was he still editing?

CATRON: I don’t remember seeing Kanigher in the office. So if he was doing anything, he was doing it freelance.

HANEY: Yeah, I guess he had retired by then. Well, maybe not. Maybe he had retired a little later. Anyway. But he retired when I was still there. That I remember, I’m pretty sure. I didn’t leave until ’82. Schiff had retired, of course and as I said, these new editors. There was Orlando and Dick —

CATRON: Giordano.

HANEY: Giordano. I worked for them briefly. I had the Teen Titans back again for a brief while — but I had less total work. Then by ’82, of course, I was forced out. Pretty much.