Zero to Sixty

Milwaukee-born Don Weis began as a director of light-hearted, often youth-oriented entertainments. After graduating in film studies from the University of Southern California in 1942, he got his first job as an errand boy at Warner Brothers. He saw wartime service as a film technician with the U.S. Army Air Corps, based at Culver City. After the war, he resumed his apprenticeship with Enterprise Productions as a dialogue director and assistant on several pictures produced by Stanley Kramer. In 1951, he was signed by Dore Schary to a two-year contract at MGM, making his directorial feature debut with the newspaper expose Bannerline (1951). This was followed by a string of light comedies and musicals of widely varying quality.

Among the best of the bunch was the cheerful George Wells scripted and produced musical I Love Melvin (1953), (starring Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor), highlighted by several exuberant dance routines and an engaging dream sequence in which Debbie sings “A Lady Loves”. There was also a youthful college comedy, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953), and an enjoyable minor sword and sandal outing, made for Allied Artists, entitled The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954). Of considerably less interest, either artistically or as entertainment, were two inane entries into the ‘beach party’ genre: the sleep-inducing Pajama Party (1964) and the ludicrously titled and conceived The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), which sadly wasted the talents of the two wonderful screen veterans Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone.

In 1954, Weis began to direct episodes for television, a medium to which he found himself eminently suited. In the course of the next thirty years, he became one of TV’s busiest directors and one of the most accomplished – winning six annual awards from the Directors Guild of America. Ranging across every known genre, he was equally at ease helming the iconic “Batman” (1966) , as he was behind the camera of some 58 episodes of crime-busting wheelchair-bound “Ironside” (1967); or filming four of the best instalments of the cult series “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (1974). Weis achieved his greatest success directing a brace of the most enduring episodes of the much-loved wartime comedy series “M*A*S*H” (1972). Following his retirement, he presided over the Motion Pictures Permanent Charities Committee (PCC) and served on the board of the New Mexico Film Council. —IMDb