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Ed Spielman – Creator of the Kung Fu ABC-TV Series
Ed Spielman is a writer, executive producer for television and film, author, and journalist. He created the groundbreaking, Emmy Award-winning ABC television series "KUNG FU," which aired from 1972 to 1975 and starred David Carradine as an Asian-American Shaolin monk traveling through the Old West.
The original pilot episode, co-written with Howard Friedlander and broadcast on February 22, 1972, as part of ABC's Movie of the Week, is considered "the first American martial arts film." The Emmy-winning series that followed pioneered the modern martial arts genre in television and film and was named by Entertainment Weekly magazine as "One of the 100 Best Television Shows of All Time."
Early Life
Born on February 3, 1944, to Harriet (Shapiro) and Al Spielman, Ed grew up in a working-class Jewish family in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Hungary, White Russia, and Poland. He has an older brother, Howard, with whom he shared a lifelong close bond both personally and creatively. The family later moved to the Midwood section of Flatbush, Brooklyn. Following his parents' divorce when he was twelve, his mother worked tirelessly to support her sons.
Ed's writing career began unexpectedly when his fifth-grade teacher assigned a short story. Although he received the lowest grade—a zero—because the teacher believed his mother had written it, Ed recalls this as his first literary effort. He later skipped the eighth grade and enrolled at Brooklyn College at sixteen, attending night classes while working as a page on daytime ABC-TV quiz shows in New York. Together with fellow page Howard Friedlander, he began writing screenplays.
Spielman discovered kung fu in the early 1960s and studied Mandarin Chinese as one of only five students in Brooklyn College’s Chinese language department. He conducted extensive research in New York’s Chinatown and beyond, uncovering knowledge that was traditionally secret and restricted to Chinese practitioners. Kung fu was taught through master-student relationships and within families, rarely shared with outsiders.
By the mid-1960s, Spielman had compiled a comprehensive 44-page treatment titled "Kung-Fu: The Way of the Tiger, The Sign of the Dragon" for film, TV, and publishing, and spent the following years trying to develop it for production.
In 1969, he met agent Peter Lampack at the William Morris Agency in New York. Lampack liked the concept and secured a deal with Fred Weintraub, Warner Bros. Executive Vice President. In February 1970, Lampack arranged for Spielman and Friedlander to write a theatrical screenplay based on the story. Though Warner Bros. ultimately decided not to produce the film, Weintraub and executive Harvey Frand believed in the project and pitched it to ABC, which had recently introduced the Movie of the Week format.
The Spielman/Friedlander script was adapted for budget and produced as a TV movie, introducing an “eastern-western” like nothing seen before on television. It was an immediate success, leading to the iconic monthly-then-weekly Kung Fu series.
By the week ending May 6, 1973, Kung Fu had become the number one show on U.S. television, attracting a regular audience of 28 million viewers.
