Lloyd Wolfe Bochner (July 29, 1924 – October 29, 2005) was a Canadian actor.
At the age of 11, Bochner began his acting career on Ontario radio programs. He went on to garner two Liberty Awards, the highest acting honour in Canada, for his work in Canadian film and theatre. He made his first debut in 1946 with The Mapleville Story and in 1951 he moved to New York City where he appeared in early television series such as One Man's Family and Kraft Television Theatre. In 1960, ABC called with a starring role in the series Hong Kong with co-star Rod Taylor. Faced against NBC's Wagon Train, then one of the most highly rated programs on the air, Hong Kong ended with the 26th episode. In 1961, he guest-starred in The Americans, an American Civil War drama about how the conflict divided families, starring Darryl Hickman.
A few years later, Bochner appeared in one of his most famous roles, that of a cryptographer attempting to decipher an alien text in the classic 1962 Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man", a part he spoofed years later in the comedy The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear. In 1962 and 1963, he appeared in two episodes of the CBS anthology series, GE True, hosted by Jack Webb; he portrayed the part of Stoughton in "Code Name: Christopher, Part I" and Captain Ian Stuart in "Commando".
From 1963 to 1964, Bochner was a member of the repertory cast of NBC's The Richard Boone Show. In 1964, he guest-starred in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea season-one episode "The Fear-Makers". Later that year, he appeared as murderer Eric Pollard in the Perry Mason episode, "The Case of the Latent Lover". In 1965, he guest-starred on ABC's Western series The Legend of Jesse James starring Christopher Jones in the title role. Two years later, he appeared on the ABC military-Western Custer starring Wayne Maunder in the title role. He appeared twice on the long-running television Western The Virginian in the 1960s. Bochner is also memorably smooth and malicious as the gangster Carter against Lee Marvin in John Boorman's seminal 1960s film noir Point Blank. In 1971 Bochner appeared as Abel Wilks in "The Men From Shiloh" (rebranded name for The Virginian) in the episode titled "The Town Killer."
Over the years, Bochner continued to portray a variety of roles in television and film, from a warlock on Bewitched to a homosexual doctor coming out at middle age in the 1977 television movie Terraces, to Pia Zadora's abusive screenwriter husband in the camp classic film The Lonely Lady. In 1960, he starred in an adaptation of A. J. Cronin's The Citadel along with Ann Blyth. His son Paul said he "almost always played a suave, handsome, wealthy villain."
A typical and famous Bochner role was that of the scheming Cecil Colby on Dynasty, in part due to his notorious death scene. The character suffered a heart attack while having sex with Alexis Carrington (Joan Collins), and later died in his hospital bed seconds after marrying her. A few years later, Bochner planned to star as C.C. Capwell on the daytime drama Santa Barbara, but a heart attack caused his departure from the series. Bochner continued to appear in television series for the next few decades, doing frequent voiceover work for the highly acclaimed animated TV shows Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures. In 1998, Bochner co-founded the Committee to End Violence, a panel designed to study the impact violent images had on culture. He was also active in Association of Canadian Radio and Television Artists and was a licensed amateur radio operator. He joined the Stratford Festival of Canada in its first season in 1953 and spent six years there, playing Horatio in Hamlet, Orsino in Twelfth Night, and Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure opposite James Mason.
In 1962 Bochner played in The Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man." In 1965 he guest starred on Combat! in the fourth season episode "Evasion" as Major Thorne. In 1966 on The Wild Wild West he played Zachariah Skull, an ingenious murderer, in "The Night of the Puppeteer." In 1966, Bochner played the author Robert Louis Stevenson in the episode "Jolly Roger and Wells Fargo" of the syndicated television series, Death Valley Days, hosted by Robert Taylor and directed by Denver Pyle. That same year he appeared in 12 O'Clock High, playing the British officer, Major Mallory, episode "Fortress Weisbaden". In 1967 he appeared as a Royal Air Force officer and his German double on an episode of Hogan's Heroes in the episode "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To London". In 1967 he played an 'U.N.C.L.E.' agent in the last season of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.; a unique role in that while he was a 'good guy' in the final dialogue he was described as being "reassuringly unlikeable". In 1969, Bochner played a handsome warlock named Franklyn in a season-five episode of Bewitched, titled "Marriage Witches Style". In 1970, Bochner played Walter Gregson, a strangler on Hawaii Five-O in the season-three episode called "Beautiful Screamer". Later on Hawaii Five-O, he was the Navy captain in a 1975 episode called "Murder: Eyes Only". He also appeared in Hawaii Five-O season 12 in an episode called "Clash of the Shadows" as a Jewish diplomat. He appeared in the episode "Prosecutor" of the ABC crime drama The Silent Force in 1970. In 1973 he played a chess coach in Columbo: The Most Dangerous Match and was in the episode "The Pisces" of the short-lived TV show The Starlost. In 1977 he was in an episode of the ABC crime drama The Feather and Father Gang and an episode of the ABC situation comedy The San Pedro Beach Bums. Bochner also appeared in Barnaby Jones in an episode titled "The Loose Connection"(03/18/1973). He was Commandant Leiter in the Battlestar Galactica original-series episode "Greetings from Earth" (1978). In the 1980s, Bochner was in two episodes of The Golden Girls, he played a suave television-turned-stage actor (and womanizer) Patrick Vaughn, in 1987 and Eduardo the Barber in 1989.
Bochner was born in Toronto, Ontario, to a middle-class Jewish family. He was the son of Frieda (Kenen) and Charles Abraham Bochner, and the nephew of Isaiah L. Kenen, founder of the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs. He was married to Ruth Roher Bochner, a concert pianist, until his death from cancer on October 29, 2005, at the age of 81 at home in Santa Monica, California. Bochner and his wife had three children — Hart Bochner (actor, who also provided voices for Batman), Paul, and Johanna.
The Mapleville Story (1946)
Drums of Africa (1963) - David Moore
The Night Walker (1964) - The Dream
Sylvia (1965) - Bruce Stamford III
Harlow (1965) - Marc Peters
Sail to Glory (1967) - James Cox Stevens
Point Blank (1967) - Frederick Carter
Stranger on the Run (1967) - Mr. Gorman
Tony Rome (1967) - Vic Rood
The Detective (1968) - Dr. Roberts
The Young Runaways (1968) - Raymond Allen
The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit (1968) - Archer Madison
Tiger by the Tail (1970) - Del Ware
The Dunwich Horror (1970) - Dr. Cory
Ulzana's Raid (1972) - Captain Gates
Satan's School for Girls (TV - 1973) - Professor Delacroix
The Man in the Glass Booth (1975) - Dr. Churchill
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (1975) - Burton
The Immigrants (TV - 1978) - Chris Noel
A Fire in the Sky (1978) - Paul Gilliam
Mr. No Legs (1979) - D'Angelo
Riel (TV - 1979) - Dr. Schultz
The Hot Touch (1981) - Severo
Mazes and Monsters (TV - 1982) - Hall
The Lonely Lady (1983) - Walter Thornton
Crystal Heart (1986) - Frank Newley
Fine Gold (1989) - Don Pedro
Millennium (1989) - Walters
The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) - Terence Baggett
Lolita al desnudo (1991)
Landslide (1992) - Bull Matterson
Morning Glory (1993) - Bob Collins
Loyal Opposition (1998) (made-for-television movie) - President Mark Hayden
Bram Stoker's Legend of the Mummy (1998) - Abel Trelawny
The Commission (2003) - John J. McCloy (final film role)
Battlestar Galactica is an American science fiction television series created by Glen A. Larson that began the Battlestar Galactica franchise. Starring Lorne Greene, Richard Hatch, and Dirk Benedict, it follows the surviving humans as they flee in Battlestar Galactica and other ships in search for a new home while being pursued by the Cylons. The series ran for the 1978–1979 season before being canceled.
In 1980, a write-in campaign revived the show as Galactica 1980 with 10 episodes. Books have also been written continuing the stories. Battlestar Galactica was remade in the early 2000s with a reimagined miniseries and a weekly series.
In a distant star system, the Twelve Colonies of Mankind were reaching the end of a thousand-year war with the Cylons, warrior robots created by a reptilian race which expired long ago, presumably destroyed by their own creations. Humanity was ultimately defeated in a sneak attack on their homeworlds by the Cylons, carried out with the help of a human traitor, Count Baltar (John Colicos). Protected by the last surviving capital warship, a "battlestar" (from "battle starship"), named Galactica, the survivors fled in available ships. The Commander of the Galactica, Adama (Lorne Greene), led this "rag-tag fugitive fleet" of 220 ships in search of a new home. They began a quest to find the long lost thirteenth tribe of humanity that had settled on a legendary planet called Earth. However, the Cylons continued to pursue them relentlessly across the galaxy.
The era in which this exodus took place is never clearly stated in the series itself. At the start of the series, it is mentioned as being "the seventh millennium of time", although it is unknown when this is in relation to Earth's history. The implication of the final aired episode, "The Hand of God", was that the original series took place after the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969 (as the Galactica receives a television transmission from Earth showing the landing). The later Galactica 1980 series is expressly set in the year 1980 after a 30-year voyage to Earth.
Larson, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, incorporated many themes from Mormon theology into the shows.
Main article: Saga of a Star World
The pilot to this series, budgeted at $8 million (one of the most expensive at that time), was released theatrically (in Sensurround) in various countries including Canada on July 8, 1978, Japan and some in Western Europe in an edited 125-minute version.
On September 17, 1978, the full 148 minute pilot premiered on ABC to high Nielsen ratings. Two thirds of the way through the broadcast, ABC interrupted with a special report of the signing of the Camp David Accords at the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, witnessed by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. After the ceremony, ABC resumed the broadcast at the point where it was interrupted. This interruption did not occur on the West Coast. After the pilot aired, the 125-minute theatrical version was given a nationwide U.S cinema release in May 1979.
The pilot had originally been announced as the first of three made for TV movies. After broadcast of the second episode, "Lost Planet of the Gods", Glen Larson announced the format change to a weekly series, catching his writing and production staff off guard, resulting in several substandard 'crash of the week' episodes until quality scripts could resume. "Lost Planet of the Gods" also introduced a costume change from the original, in that the warriors' dress uniform featured a gold-trimmed cape falling to upper thigh. Because of the costume change, a portion of the pilot was reshot; this refilmed version was released in cinemas in 1979. The original version of the warriors' dress uniform, a plain, mid-thigh-length cape, is documented in The Official Battlestar Galactica Scrapbook by James Neyland, 1978.
Battlestar Galactica was criticized by Melor Sturua in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. He saw an analogy between the fictional Colonial/Cylon negotiations and the US/Soviet SALT talks and accused the series of being inspired by anti-Soviet hysteria:
The galactic negotiations between the people and the Cylons really resembled the U.S./Soviet SALT talks - not in their actual form but in the perverted interpretation of the enemies of the treaty from the family of Washington hawks... Their inspiration is the pumping-up of military, anti-Soviet hysteria, which in this case is disguised in the modern costume of socio-scientific fantasy... Anti-Soviet symbolism dressed in a transparent tunic of science fiction.
Isaac Asimov commented: "Star Wars was fun and I enjoyed it. But Battlestar Galactica was Star Wars all over again and I couldn't enjoy it without amnesia."
In 1978, 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios (producers of Battlestar Galactica) for plagiarism, copyright infringement, unfair competition, and Lanham Act claims, claiming it had stolen 34 distinct ideas from Star Wars. Universal promptly countersued, claiming Star Wars had stolen ideas from their 1972 film Silent Running, notably the robot "drones", and the Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s.[citation needed] 20th Century Fox's copyright claims were initially dismissed by the trial court in 1980, then the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit remanded the case for trial in 1983. It was later "resolved without trial".
Star Wars director George Lucas also threatened legal action against Apogee, Inc., the visual effects studio formed by John Dykstra and several other former artists from Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic who decided to remain in Van Nuys rather than relocate to San Rafael with the rest of the company. Lucas claimed that Apogee's work on Galactica was being done with equipment that he had left behind, for a project that would be in direct competition against Star Wars. Eventually, Apogee agreed to surrender the equipment to ILM, and several members of Dykstra's team returned to ILM. Afterwards, Universal's newly-formed visual effects division, Universal Hartland Visual Effects, took over the show's visual effects for the remainder of its run. Lucas also went after Galactica merchandise, claiming that the Cylon Raider and Colonial Viper toys could be confused with his own Star Wars toys. His major contention was that the Galactica toys featured plastic pellets that could be fired to simulate lasers, and these constituted a choking hazard for children, and he did not want to be blamed for any such accidents, despite none of the Star Wars toys offered by Kenner having anything similar. The Galactica toys were subsequently redesigned so that the pellets would not leave the toy when fired.[citation needed]
Battlestar Galactica initially was a ratings success. CBS counter programmed by moving its Sunday block of All in the Family and Alice an hour earlier, to compete with Galactica in the 8:00 timeslot. From October 1978 to March 1979, All in the Family averaged more than 40 percent of the 8:00 audience, against Galactica's 28 percent.
In mid-April 1979, ABC executives canceled the show. An AP article reported "The decision to bump the expensive Battlestar Galactica was not surprising. The series ... had been broadcast irregularly in recent weeks, attracting slightly over a quarter of the audience in its Sunday night time slot." Larson claimed that it was a failed attempt by ABC to reposition its number one program Mork & Mindy into a more lucrative timeslot.[verification needed] The cancellation led to viewer outrage and protests outside ABC studios, and it even contributed to the suicide of Edward Seidel, a 15-year-old boy in Saint Paul, Minnesota who was obsessed with the program.
While primarily English, the Colonial language was written to include several fictional words that differentiated its culture from those of Earth, most notably time units and expletives. The words were roughly equivalent to their English counterparts, and the minor technical differences in meaning were suggestive to the viewer. Colonial distance and time units were incompletely explained, but appear to have been primarily in a decimal format.
The show's original music was composed and conducted by Stu Phillips, with the pilot score performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. It was recorded at 20th Century Fox, which later sued Universal over the series. MCA Records released a soundtrack album on LP and cassette with Phillips as the music producer; the album was later reissued on compact disc by Edel in 1993, and Geffen Records in 2003. For the series, Phillips used a studio orchestra at Universal, although the theme and end credits music as recorded by the LAPO were retained.
In 2011-2012 Intrada Records released four albums featuring Phillips's music for the series, representing the first commercial release of music other than that of the pilot. (Phillips previously produced a four CD promotional set.) Except the first, all are two disc sets.
2011: Battlestar Galactica Volume 1: "Saga of a Star World".
2011: Battlestar Galactica Volume 2: "Lost Planet of the Gods" parts 1 and 2, and "Gun on Ice Planet Zero" parts 1 and 2.
2012: Battlestar Galactica Volume 3: "The Long Patrol", "The Lost Warrior", "The Magnificent Warriors", "The Young Lords", "Murder on the Rising Star", "Take the Celestra", "The Hand of God", and Galactica 1980's "The Return of Starbuck".
2012: Battlestar Galactica Volume 4: "The Living Legend" parts 1 and 2, and "War of the Gods" parts 1 and 2, plus music recorded for Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack and Galactica 1980.
"Fire in Space", "The Man with Nine Lives", "Greetings from Earth", "Baltar's Escape", and "Experiment in Terra" were entirely tracked with preexisting material.