…here’s one of the best books you’re ever going to find: Unsold TV Pilots – The Almost Complete Guide To Everything You Never Saw On TV, by Lee Goldberg.
If you laughed really hard at the “Fox Force Five” discussion in “Pulp Fiction,” you won’t be able to stop reading this book…and re-reading it, and re-reading it.
Here are just a few entries to whet your appetite:
Wurlitzer: Scott Maldovan inherits a run-down diner, and in it, an antique, mahogany Wurlitzer jukebox which not only plays timeless hits, but hurls our hapless hero into the past, to the time when each particular song was popular. In the unproduced pilot, Scott is sent to 1968 San Francisco to help a woman in her battle against drug addiction.
Ethel Is An Elephant: Todd Susman is a New York photographer who shares his apartment with a baby elephant abandoned by a circus. The proposed series would chronicle this awkward living arrangement and his constant battles with the city and his landlord to keep the animal.
Poor Devil: Sammy Davis, Jr., stars as the earnest but inept disciple of the Devil (played by Christopher Lee, no less) who constantly fails to win over souls.
Ebony, Ivory, and Jade: On the surface, Ebony Bryant (Debbie Allen) and Ivory David (Martha Smith) are a Las Vegas song-and-dance team, managed by slick guy Nick Jade (Bert Convy)…but they are actually three crack secret agents.
There are also a lot of failed pilots which included actors and actresses who would LATER become famous. After the flop of “Basic Instinct 2,” one wonders if Sharon Stone now wishes that ABC had picked up “Badlands 2005,” the story of a U.S. marshall (Lewis Smith) and his cyborg partner (Miguel Ferrer) who patrol the now barren American West in a high-tech car for a tough female boss…played by Stone, naturally.
SUCH an awesome book.
