Development
Series executive producer Ivan Tors conceived the idea for Sea Hunt while working on the 1958 film Underwater Warrior. Tors tried in vain to sell the series to all three major networks, but each network passed on the show because they felt a series set underwater could not be sustained. Tors then decided to sell the series into the first-run syndication market. Tors teamed up with Ziv Television Programs and was able to sell the show to over 100 syndicated markets before the series debuted in January 1958.
Lloyd Bridges was soon cast as lead character Mike Nelson. Sea Hunt was intended as a comeback vehicle for Bridges due to his brief blacklisting from acting. Bridges was blacklisted after admitting to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Actors' Lab, a group that was tied to the Communist party.
After winning the role, Bridges was given a crash course in scuba diving by Zale Parry and Courtney Brown. Brown served as his underwater stunt double. Over the course of the show's run, Bridges got more involved in the underwater stunt work, graduating from close-ups in the earliest episodes, to doing all but the most dangerous stunts by the end of the series' run.
Read more about this topic: Sea Hunt
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”
—Gail Sheehy (20th century)