Off the Deep End

Producer Ivan Tors hovered weightlessly just out of camera range; fluttering near by were a director, a movie cameraman and a lighting expert. Tors's pretty secretary, Zale Parry, glided about the group, taking notes on a slate. The movie camera, encased in a weightless "blimp," focused on the desperate struggle of Actor Lloyd Bridges as he grappled with a villain who might have come from Mars.

But this was no imaginary corner of outer space. For a typical underwater interlude in the shooting of Sea Hunt, one of the world's most widely syndicated TV dramas, Tors & Co. were in the depths of a huge kelp bed off Santa Catalina Island. The film they were making is being seen over 167 U.S. TV stations, and broadcasted in 20 other countries in eight languages. Though distributed on film (by Ziv Television Programs, Inc.) rather than on a network. Sea Hunt is among the ten top-rated U.S. syndicated shows.

Photogenic Scuttling. Roughly half of each 30-minute installment of Sea Hunt happens underwater. Skindiving Hero Mike Nelson (Bridges) has battled the odds in the form of sharks, octopuses, moray eels, manta rays, alligators, giant sea turtles, Aqua-Lunged badmen--and "rapture of the deep" (nitrogen narcosis). The whole production crew is equally at home at sea; Ziv Producer Tors, 42, is a zealous sea hunter, and Secretary Parry holds the world's depth record for women: 209 ft. down, off Catalina in 1954.

The special appeal of Sea Hunt lies in its power to float its fans right through their TV screens into the unearthly realm where its churning action chiefly occurs. Hungarian-born, Hollywood-based Producer Tors has roved from the Marshall Islands to the Caribbean in his own hunt for sunny weather, clear water, exotic fauna and flora. Last year he tied himself under a canoe, inspected coral reefs off the Colombian coast of South America while an Indian paddled. This week he is filming near Mexico's Coronado Islands. Soon he will scout the waters off Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti--as well as Samoa, where some World War I German cruisers are rumored to lie photogenically scuttled.

But much of the show is shot in the huge tanks of the world's biggest aquarium. California's Marineland of the Pacific at Palos Verdes. Even in the tanks, filming Sea Hunt is risky. Bubbles, Marineland's 1,800-lb. pilot whale cow, once pinned astonished Chief Cameraman Lamar (The Old Man and the Sea) Boren against a tank window out of crushing affection. Actor Bridges, a muscular, sandy-haired man of 45, yearns to ride Bubbles, but Tors vetoes the idea: "All Bubbles has to do is to flip her tail and I lose my leading man!"

Gurgled Defiance. No diver till he took the job. Bridges has quickly become the world's best-known underwater actor, picks up tidy extra income on his merchandising tie-in with a rubber company that makes "Mike Nelson" flippers, masks, snorkels and rubber boats. His 52 sponsors across the U.S. are elated with Sea Hunt's showing, will doubtless keep Bridges going off the deep end next year. He will continue to expose marine-insurance frauds, nab below-surface smugglers of aliens, rescue other hapless souls trapped in the deep, cut short careers of skindiving robbers who prey on fishermen.

Any doubts about Sea Hunt's wide appeal are now being dispelled by the Soviet Union. Ziv, biggest U.S. film syndicator, last April turned over 13 installments to the U.S.S.R. in the first swap of TV films under the new U.S.-Soviet cultural exchange program. At the moment. Sea Hunt is being dubbed in Russian. Soon Mike Nelson will be captivating the U.S.S.R.'s adventure lovers as he peers fearlessly through his mask, gurgles defiance, draws his knife and . . .

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