KnightRiderLegacy Read online

  2

  • Knight Rider Legacy

  should be; I simply did what I always do. My M.O. is not to write a treatment or even a story. I wrote a script.” When Larson finished the still untitled script, he handed separate copies to both his wife and McCluggage. They both came up with the title, Knight Rider, independently and then compared notes. “I immediately thought that was exactly what we wanted,” says Larson. “Michael Knight, in a way, is prototyped by The Lone Ranger. If you think about him riding across the plains and going from one town to another to help law and order, then K.I.T.T. becomes Tonto.”

  His inspiration for K.I.T.T. was actually HAL the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I was looking for an artificial intelligence that really became a full character in the show so that we could eliminate all the expository dialogue by having someone onboard to tell him what’s going on as opposed to having Devon stand there and bore us to death with too much exposition. There was a method to my madness to choosing those elements and choosing them the way I did.”

  Although Larson was quite busy writing

  the pilot script while in Honolulu, he still

  managed to go out with his wife and

  McCluggage in the evenings. “The sun is

  down, and we are Knight Riders—we’re

  going out to some of my favorite restaurants. The same places I took Tom Selleck when we were interested in him doing

  Magnum, PI.” By the end of his Hawaiian

  vacation, Larson managed to have a complete

  pilot script in hand. “I left Honolulu paler

  than when I arrived, and they had a beautiful

  tan.”

  His initial script varied quite a bit from what actually made it on screen. K.I.T.T. was originally named T.A.T.T., the Trans Am Two

  A Shadowy Flight… •

  3

  Thousand. It was later changed to the

  Knight 2100, followed finally by the

  Knight 2000. The Knight 2100 was said to

  have been made from Michael’s personal

  Trans Am. “The car is Knight 2000,”

  Larson explains. “K.I.T.T. is the onboard

  computer. The car is one, and K.I.T.T. is

  "K.I.T.T." arrives on the location. the nickname for the computer. I never

  [Photos Courtesy of Linda Borchers] considered the car was named K.I.T.T., just the character inside.” F.L.A.G. headquarters was initially called the Foundation for Law and Justice instead of the familiar Foundation for Law and Government. Also of significance, it is Michael, not Wilton, who first utters the words “One man can make a difference.” When Wilton asks if Michael really believes that, he replies, “Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I couldn’t believe it.” A scene was also written for Wilton Knight’s funeral, as well as a completely different ending to the movie where Michael and K.I.T.T. arrest Tanya and her gang at a presentation of the $5,000 prize that Michael won in the demolition derby. Early drafts of the pilot script also had Lonnie as Michael Long’s partner. Incidentally, Larson’s completed script did not list “Knight of the Phoenix” as the title. In fact, he had never even heard it called that before.

  “‘Knight of the Phoenix’ came out of the syndication department, not the creative team. They must’ve felt they needed a way to distinguish it from the series as a whole.”

  With the script completed, Larson focused his energy on choosing an automobile for K.I.T.T.’s body and designing the futuristic look it needed. For him, choosing the redesigned 1982 Pontiac Trans Am for K.I.T.T.’s body was a simple choice. “No other car was being considered for K.I.T.T.’s body. I simply liked the look of that car. I thought that it was so extraordinarily clean that it wouldn’t leave us a lot of need to do what other people had done previously when it came to motion picture cars. A lot of people went to an organization called Barris. I didn’t do that. I liked 4

  • Knight Rider Legacy

  the Pontiac, it was a neat looking machine and it was not even really out yet.” Larson went to the Vista Group, who represented GM, and they were immediately excited about it. They actually took the first couple of cars right off the assembly line and donated them to the show. “They were cars that were bought and on their way to dealers, and they had to sort of fib a bit because they were not ours,” recalls Larson. Shortly after giving the cars to Knight Rider, a trainload of brand new Trans Ams, 32 to be exact, derailed en route to the dealerships. The majority of the cars were in pristine condition with only a few having been bent or nicked up in the accident. However, there was a law that if a car had been in an accident, it could not be sold as new or put on the road because no one knew what really might be wrong with them. Larson adds, “GM said that the cars were in too good of shape to just crush and they donated them to us. They called me at Fox and told me we could have them under the condition that they would never be licensed for use on the road and that when we were done with them, they would be crushed. I gave half to Knight Rider, and kept the other half for The Fall Guy to use as stunt cars and cars I could bash in. As you probably know, we were very hard on automobiles.”

  Once the car was in their possession, Larson enlisted the help of a very young and cutting edge Mattel toy maker named Michael Scheffe. “I told him what I wanted in the cockpit and that we wanted to customize the car and sleek it up a bit. He did all the mockups himself. The whole interior of the cockpit was designed by him and his associates out of Styrofoam. Things like LEDs that had never been used in cars before, really came out of his drawings. He submitted his drawings and I told him I wanted the monitors and various things and that I wanted the scanner.”

  Perhaps the most recognizable feature on K.I.T.T. was the sequence of red lights that oscillated in the front bumper. The scanner, as it was called, acted as K.I.T.T.’s “eyes.” With it, he could monitor any activity within a certain radius and alert Michael if there was a problem. The idea for K.I.T.T.’s scanner actually dated back to the late 1970’s. Larson based the scanner light bar configuration on the evil Cylons from another one of his A Shadowy Flight… •

  5

  series, Battlestar Galactica. “I thought it was neat and it gave the car not only a personality and a mystique, but also a certain power. We took a shot at it, and it looked great. It was too good a device not to use since Galactica did not last long. Remember, out of a dark warehouse, you see that thing come to life. It’s a great introduction. Scheffe designed both the interior and the exterior of the car within a week. I was very impressed.”

  With the car model chosen and the necessary modifications completed, the stage was set to film a prototype presentation to be shown in New York. Larson recalls, “We didn’t have time to finish a pilot, so we made a 40 minute presentation, and I chose the scenes that best showed the people in New York what we were trying to sell.” Many fans noticed that K.I.T.T.’s front nose changed dramatically throughout the pilot episode.

  “I think it’s when we came back to finish the picture that the changes were made, like the front nose. What they mocked up for the presentation was 7-10 days worth of shooting, but once we came back to finish the picture, we had to make it more sturdy so it wouldn’t fall apart and make it more how we wanted it.”

  Glen Larson was in New York driving when he got the call on his cell phone (one of the very early ones) one morning. “They said congrats, you’re on the air. I thought that was fantastic because we had a lot of confidence in it. Knight Rider was the last show to get to New York therefore the last show picked up for the network.”

  When Larson discovered that Knight Rider was picked up, he assumed that the network loved everything about it. NBC told him that they were not sure if the car should talk, and they were not sure if David Hasselhoff should be the lead in it. “I said, ‘what the hell did they buy?’ But they never came back and insisted on any changes. We simply prevailed in our vision and they went with us.” The reason behind NBC’s hesitation stemmed fr
om the failure of another talking car series in the 1960’s. “In my youth, there had been a show called My Mother the Car. It was one of the major bombs of all times, and this car talked. The fact that I decided that I wanted this car to talk scared the hell out of everybody. What I was trying to do was create 6

  • Knight Rider Legacy

  something that would appeal to the eight o’clock audience which, at that time, I thought would be largely kids. Because of the highly intelligent computer on board, I thought it would also give it an adult kick. I think that completely obscured the problem if it had come off as My Mother the Car. We were able to sell the relationship between Michael and the car. Its onboard computer helped to raise the intellectual level of the show.”

  With that, Larson returned to the set to finish filming the pilot episode. By this time, the main casting was complete and the car was built to his specifications. Larson commented, “Dan Haller directed it; he did a beautiful job with the presentation and executing the jokes, such as crashing through the wall of the jail. He’s very inspired. He used to be the art director for all of Roger Corman’s movies, so you not only get a director, but a guy with a good eye. He shot the car so it had a personality and the funny scenes are funny. He had a nice touch. Jean Dorleac was the costumer, and we knew what kind of look we wanted for Michael; we wanted a continuation of the car, really.”

  Larson felt it was very important to interject humor into the pilot. “In a way, we created a comic team, and there’s an irony to that. The first time we catch this is when they are driving along and he is falling asleep at the wheel as a highway patrol car passes it with a couple of my stock company actor/comedians in it, who had actually been in Alias Smith and Jones as part of the bad guy gang. ‘Did you see that he looked plum asleep’, you know? And they turn around, and K.I.T.T. says ‘Oh no. Michael…Michael…’” That scene, incidentally, was the first to be filmed for the series. “So really, we started off with some jokes between them, and

  [David Hasselhoff and William Daniels] had never met. They were on the air, they were a success, they were virtually a comedy team, and they met for the first time later that year at a Christmas party at Universal.”

  Larson chose his guest cast very carefully, utilizing many people he had worked with in the past. Besides the two actors that portrayed the policemen, Richard Anderson had worked for him previously in The Six Million Dollar Man. Like Edward Mulhare, Richard Basehart was considered to be a higher class of actor which helped raise the intellectual level of the pilot. A Shadowy Flight… •

  7

  Both Anderson and Basehart were Larson’s first choice and, as such, there were no casting calls for them.

  Pamela Susan Shoop guest starred in the pilot episode and still holds many fond memories of her time on the set. “I really enjoyed the scene where Maggie’s bumper falls off. It was all a lot of fun. It was also amazing to watch the stunt drivers put the car on two wheels. I sat in the stands during the entire scene, so I got to see some amazing feats. To this day, seeing K.I.T.T. on two wheels was the most breathtaking site I have ever seen!

  I also watched them jump the car, which was very impressive.”

  Once filming was completed, Larson realized the pilot ran about seven minutes shorter than what they needed. He quickly wrote three standalone vignettes of the two car thieves trying to steal the car. “We did those running gags with the two car thieves, again two wonderful actors I went on to work with again. The picture was already in the can and ready to go on the air when I shot those. It turned out to be one of the more fun things in the pilot. It gave it some good flavor and a touch tongue-incheek so we wouldn’t take it too seriously. Sometimes good things happen after you start it, and that became a good thing because K.I.T.T. became the star of those scenes and the hero.”

  While the pilot was being filmed, a separate crew worked on filming the opening credits. Wayne Fitzgerald, a specialist when it came to main themes, discussed with Larson the idea of giving the theme a mystical feeling. “Wayne really put together the structure of it. He went out to the desert on a weekend and shot at a couple of different speeds and one of the problems was it affected the scanner on the front. If you go slow motion or fast, it’s going to screw up the whole speed of the scanner. Its look and all of that was done completely apart from shooting the show. We were fighting a real time crunch because Universal came to me very late with this order, so we didn’t even have time to make a full pilot. We were shooting the main title at the same time.”

  Thus began a shadowy flight into a dangerous world of a man who does not exist…..

  CHAPTER TWO

  I AM THE KNIGHT RIDER

  Like almost any television show on the air at the time, the casting of Knight Rider’s most exuberant star, David Hasselhoff, was a chance meeting. In March 1982 at a Soap World Convention of TV syndicates in Las Vegas, Hasselhoff tried to enjoy the weekend, but was swarmed by females calling him “Snapper” and asking for his autograph. Many of them did not even know his real name until he signed the autograph. By believing in himself and his abilities, Hasselhoff managed to snag the role of the lone crusader. [Courtesy of Linda Borchers] 8

  I am the Knight Rider •

  9

  After a weekend’s worth of gambling, Hasselhoff boarded a flight back to Los Angeles. He noticed a man a few rows back who kept looking at him and he eventually asked his seatmate who the man was. His seatmate, an entertainment lawyer, told Hasselhoff that the man was Brandon Tartikoff, the Entertainment President of NBC. Just as he got up to talk to Tartikoff, the seatbelt sign went on. Hasselhoff never got a chance to meet Tartikoff that day. He was unsuccessful in catching up with Tartikoff after the plane landed at Burbank Airport. Hasselhoff had thought he had blown it and missed his opportunity.

  A day later, Hasselhoff got a call to come down and test for the lead in NBC’s new pilot called Knight Rider. Tartikoff had seen the women at the slot machines swarm around Hasselhoff and asked his seatmate (who had known him from the game show Fantasy) for his name. Hasselhoff was tired of playing the same character, tired of learning so much dialogue, and tired of being turned down for primetime roles. His immediate reaction to being hired was, “This is IT! This is the one! I didn’t say ‘I’ve got to get this part’—I said ‘I will get it!’ I became obsessed with it, I called people up, ‘Hi, this is the Knight Rider.’ Knight Rider… Knight Rider. I was going crazy. I made everyone call me ‘Michael’ for two weeks. No one could not call me ‘Michael’. If you called me and asked for David, I’d say,

  ‘No, this is Michael. Michael Knight’.”

  The Knight Rider screen test was a near disaster for Hasselhoff. Provided with a Pontiac Trans Am, he could not get his lines together. He asked producers for five minutes. “I went back stage and shouted ‘I am the Knight Rider’ and walked back in, did the scene dead on and won the part. I believed it, I saw it, I drank it, and I got it. And it was the biggest thing that ever happened to me.”

  Glen Larson, the executive producer with his new vision, commented on David’s screen test and hiring. “I didn’t pay much attention to David when Tartikoff’s people sent him over to me. I had been testing one kid after another and, except for his height, he didn’t seem much different in person. I sent a tape of all the tests to NBC and they turned everyone 10

  • Knight Rider Legacy

  down. Then I looked at the tape myself. David’s scene was one in which the electronic car was being explained to him. The look on his face and his tone of voice was perfect: ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ It was just what I wanted. I sent the tape back to NBC, saying, ‘What about this last kid on the tape?’ They finally agreed with me, even though they had another, more serious guy in the running.” That man was Don Johnson, who would later go on to star in Miami Vice, another NBC hit during the 1980’s. Larson adds when Hasselhoff walked in for the role he was totally irreverent. “The first time the car talked to him, he burst out laughing. He kept adding litt
le shtick of his own, like calling the car ‘Buddy,’ and patting it like it was a horse. He’s the main reason the show works. He has that mischievous look in his eye that tells you, ‘Of course you are not going to believe this, but lean back and enjoy it anyway’.”

  Larson remembers the screen test and Hasselhoff almost not getting the role. “After I read a number of people, we wound up doing a screen test on five actors, including Steve Bauer, Don Johnson, and David Hasselhoff. We did the screen test at Fox. When we were done and I looked at the screen tests, I got a phone call from Dick Lindheim saying that NBC didn’t like any of them. ‘What the hell was wrong with Hasselhoff?’ I said. They said they would get back to me. Two hours later, Lindheim calls back and says you got Hasselhoff!” Larson points out that, “Don Johnson could have done it, but David was ideal for the role. His size and everything worked well.” Larson also found out that Universal was not fully behind the concept. “The suggestion that we probably would not have time to make a whole pilot was a resourceful thing on the part of Universal to salvage the fact that they did not have that much conviction and belief in the thing, and they would have rather just put enough money into a presentation rather than a two hour movie.”

  Hasselhoff won the role, but it was the critics who apparently decided to squash his excitement. Tom Shakes of the Washington Post said,