Monday, March 23, 2015

A00079 - Harve Bennett, Quiz Kid and "Star Trek" Producer



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Harve Bennett, left, and Leonard Nimoy on the set of “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.”CreditParamount Pictures, via Photofest

Harve Bennett, who navigated a rocky path from childhood stardom to youthful disaffection to adult success as a producer of four “Star Trek” films and an Emmy-winning TV movie, died on Feb. 25 in Medford, Ore. He was 84.
A friend, Terry Lee Rioux, said the cause was complications of a recent fall.
From shortly before his 11th birthday to the age of 16, Harve Fischman, as he was then known, was a regular on “The Quiz Kids,” the wildly popular 1940s radio show that taxed a panel of pint-size intellectuals with questions sent in by listeners. (“Would a bathtub drain quicker if you continue to sit in the tub after pulling the plug?”; “If you dug a hole from Denver to sea level and jumped in, how long would it take you to hit bottom?”)
Scores of young panelists served on “The Quiz Kids” over the years, but Harve was among the most renowned, appearing nearly 200 times. A “jack of all knowledge,” as he was described in the press, he was an authority on American history in general and presidential history in particular.

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Clockwise from top, Mr. Bennett (then known as Harve Fischman), Ruthie Duskin, Gerard Darrow and Joan Leslie.CreditNBC, via Photofest

In adulthood, Mr. Bennett was best known for producing four of the original six “Star Trek” movies, starting with “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” in 1982 and ending with “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” in 1989. His death came two days before that of Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in all six films and the original TV series, but was announced only this week.
Mr. Bennett also produced several noted mini-series, among them “Rich Man, Poor Man” (1976), starring Peter Strauss and Nick Nolte, and “From Here to Eternity” (1979), starring Natalie Wood and William Devane. He received an Emmy Award as the executive producer of “A Woman Called Golda” (1982), a TV dramatization of the life of Golda Meir, starring Ingrid Bergman.
The son of a father who was a lawyer and a mother who was a newspaper reporter — a rare calling for a woman of the period — Mr. Bennett was born in Chicago on Aug. 17, 1930. His parents’ aspirations for him were inscribed in his very name: Harvard Bennett Fischman.
At 10, on his own initiative, Harve (the name rhymes with “carve”) auditioned for “The Quiz Kids” and soon became a household commodity.
Broadcast nationwide from Chicago on NBC, the show made celebrities of its panelists, who were held up by American parents as shining exemplars of precocity and diligence and resented by American children on precisely the same grounds. They made frequent public appearances, traveled the country to raise money for war bonds and were the subjects of a thicket of coverage in newspapers and magazines.
At 16, the show’s mandatory “retirement” age, its young stars faded off the air and, in some cases, into obscurity. (One panelist, however, James D. Watson, would go on to map the molecular structure of DNA with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, work that earned them a Nobel Prize in 1962.)
After Harve aged out of the show, he found himself at loose ends.
“There was a time when my time on the show troubled me greatly,” Mr. Bennett told The New York Times in 1982. “ ‘The Quiz Kids’ was part of the reason I dropped my last name, and partly it was my Jewishness, part of being a bright Jewish kid, having expectations heaped upon me.”
As a young man, he earned a bachelor’s degree in theater arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and served stateside in the Army during the Korean War. But he nonetheless felt directionless, he later said, for quite some time.
Though Mr. Bennett was too old to appear on the television incarnation of “The Quiz Kids,” which began in 1949 and never rivaled the success of the radio version, he did eventually build a career in TV. He was the producer or executive producer of a string of shows in the 1970s and afterward, including “The Mod Squad,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Woman.”
His other credits as an executive producer include a short-lived television revival of “The Quiz Kids” in 1981; “The Jesse Owens Story,” a 1984 TV movie starring Dorian Harewood; and, with Steven Spielberg, “Invasion America,” a 1998 animated science-fiction series.
Mr. Bennett, who moved to Oregon after retiring from Hollywood, was divorced three times. Survivors include his fourth wife, Jani, and four children from previous marriages: a son, Christopher, and three daughters, Susan Bennett, Callie Bennett and Samantha Bennett-Stephenson.
In an interview with The Times in 1980, Mr. Bennett was philosophical about his formative years as a Quiz Kid.
“Over the long run,” he said, “the fame and success, I believe, had a totally positive effect on me. But I went through a period of several years after leaving the show when I suppose I was experiencing a classic letdown, like a lot of child actors, who have achieved too much, too soon.”

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