Adam West…sigh. Real nice man. I was tapped to interview him at a couple of comic book conventions and at one of them, we wound up having a dinner during which neither one of us mentioned Batman at all. From the way we didn't talk about it, I got the feeling he considered it a mixed blessing. It made him very famous. I don't think it made him very wealthy, at least at the time. Decades later, it was the autograph circuit that did that.
When he signed on for the role, he was a working actor who probably wasn't working enough. He had some good roles but he hadn't really distinguished himself; hadn't cut himself away from a herd of other handsome leading men types in his age bracket. Batman finally set him off from the others but for that, he paid a high, immediate price. It only lasted three seasons, getting very hot and then very cold in a very short span of time. Once it was off, it was Adam West's career that got very cold. He was a fine, versatile talent but he was too associated with that character and with a style of deliberately bad acting which no one wanted in their show or movie.
The first time I met Adam was at the Comic-Con in San Diego in 1986, I think. The Batman movie which would star Michael Keaton had been announced but Keaton had not been cast. No one had, nor had the film been green-lit for production. Adam was not a guest of the con. He had driven down to San Diego and maybe even paid admission, just to walk around the hall and try to drum up support for him to be cast in the role.
He had assumed — wrongly — that anyone who loved Batman considered him the definitive actor to play the part and that we'd all rally behind him. The presence of Adam West at the con drew very little interest and zero groundswell.
Back then, I don't think too many fans remembered that show fondly. It was, after all, a show that ridiculed the property — it was nominated for an Emmy for Best Comedy Series, remember — produced in large part by people who thought the comic books were stupid and those of us who bought them were stupider. We didn't know much about the then-pending Batman feature but we did know that it was supposed to be the antithesis of the TV show. The Casting Call, if there was one, probably said they were seeking anyone who wasn't Adam West.
He didn't get the part…or very many others around then but time changes how we view some things. Maybe it was just inertia. Maybe it was because as mainstream media began taking comic book characters more seriously, we who loved comics felt less threatened by one spoof. Maybe some people even felt that the move towards a darker, grittier Batman took the character too far to that side and the show Adam had done represented when Batman was more fun and less psychotic.
Pick one or come up with your own reason that the show became beloved and that folks lined up to pay for his signature, as well as that of his co-stars. At the first con where I interviewed him, West and Frank Gorshin were there on a guarantee of a very impressive number of dollars…and they way exceeded their guarantees. At about the same time, producers and directors who'd been tots when Batman was on began trying to hire Adam West for non-Batman roles, just because they loved him and wanted to work with him. (I should mention here that his career was also helped a lot by an agent named Fred Wostbrock, whose obit — sadly — was posted here last November.)
Adam West lived and survived long enough to become a genuine, in-demand superstar…and he deserved it. Like I said, he was a real nice man and a much more able actor than any line of that TV show required. Aside from the parts about him and his agent dying, this is a pretty happy ending.