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Ed Spielman - Creator Kung Fu ABC-TV Series
Ed Spielman is a Writer, Executive Producer for Television and Motion Pictures, an Author and Journalist. He is the Creator of the groundbreaking and Emmy Award winning classic 'KUNG FU' ABC television series which initially aired on ABC from 1972 to 1975 and starred David Carradine as the Asian-American Shaolin monk from the Far East who journeyed through the Old West.
The show's original Pilot (co-written with Howard Friedlander), debuting February 22, 1972 on ABC's popular Movie of the Week was "the first American Martial Arts film". The Emmy award winning series that followed originated the modern martial arts genre for television and motion pictures and was honored by Entertainment Weekly magazine as "One of the 100 Best Television Shows of All Time."
Early Life Ed Spielman was born on Feb 3, 1944 to Harriet (Shapiro) and Al Spielman, into a working class Jewish family in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Hungary, White Russia and Poland. He has one brother Howard, eighteen months older; the Spielman brothers would have a close and lifelong association not only in age, but also in creativity. The family soon moved to the Midwood section of Flatbush, Brooklyn. Ed's parents divorced when he was twelve and his mother worked very hard to provide for her sons.
Ed began his career at a young age and in an unlikely fashion, when his fifth grade public school teacher assigned the class to "write a short story." "That was the first thing I ever wrote," Ed recalls. He was taken aback when he received the lowest mark in the class: a zero. The teacher demanded a note from his mother, railing, "You didn't write this. Your Mother wrote this!" "That was my first literary effort," he laughs today in recalling the incident. "My mother had not even seen it, let alone written it. I always wanted to find that teacher and show her my Life Membership Card in The Writers Guild...and thank her for a good review." Ed skipped the eighth grade and entered Brooklyn College at the age of sixteen. He attended at night while working as a Page on day-time quiz shows at ABC-TV in New York. With his friend and fellow Page, Howard Friedlander, he took to writing screenplays. Spielman discovered Kung Fu in the early 1960s and studied Mandarin Chinese, being one of only five students in the Chinese language dept. of Brooklyn college. He spent years doing research in New York's Chinatown and elsewhere, unearthing this heretofore secret knowledge. At that time, kung fu was little known in the Western world and was denied to non-Chinese. It was taught by master/student relationships and within families. It was never revealed to non-Chinese.
But Spielman pressed on. By the mid-1960s, Ed had acquired a depth of information and wrote a forty-four-page treatment for film, TV and publishing titled, Kung-Fu: The Way of the Tiger, The Sign of the Dragon. He spent the next few years trying to move it forward to film or television.
In 1969, he was introduced to young agent Peter Lampack at the William Morris Agency in New York. Lampack liked the material and made a deal with Fred Weintraub, Warner Bros. Executive Vice President in New York. In February of 1970, Lampack arranged a deal for Spielman and Friedlander to write a theatrical motion picture screenplay from Spielman's original story. All of this transpired in New York. (Peter Lampack would later establish the prestigious Peter Lampack Literary Agency which represents many renowned writers, among them Clive Cussler).
At the end of this development of Kung Fu, Warner Bros. chose not to make the theatrical film, but Fred Weintraub and studio executive Harvey Frand had faith in the project. They took it to ABC, which by that time had introduced a pioneering Movie of the Week format. The Spielman/Friedlander script was pared down for budget, produced and placed on the air, Television had never before seen anything like this 'eastern-western'... and it was an immediate hit. The iconic Kung Fu monthly-then-weekly series followed.
On the week ending May 6, 1973, Kung Fu became the No. 1 show on US television, drawing a regular audience of 28 million viewers.
