Lorenzo Semple Jr.

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Lorenzo Semple Jr. (born 1922) is an American screenwriter and film producer, possibly best known for his work on the campy television series Batman.

Semple's writing career started in 1951, as a short story contributor to magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Argosy, and Ladies Home Journal. He tried his hand at writing for Broadway and local New York TV programs, before relocating to Hollywood and establishing himself as a writer for several television shows, including Kraft Suspense Theatre, Burke's Law, and The Rat Patrol.

In 1966, he began working as head script writer on the ABC-TV Batman series for producer William Dozier. He wrote most of the early episodes, and his wisecrack-filled, outlandishly plotted scripts set the tone for the entire series' run. In all, he wrote nearly forty of the series's shows. He also provided the screenplay for the Batman theatrical feature film version, also released in 1966.

While his work on Batman was noted for its entertaining silliness, not all of Semple's subsequent screenplays were comedies. His script for the critically acclaimed cult film Pretty Poison (1968) was a career high point, and he later wrote screenplays for such straight dramas as Papillon (1973) (co-written with Dalton Trumbo), The Parallax View (1974), The Drowning Pool (1975), and Three Days of the Condor (1975). But he also wrote the scripts for the popular but critically assailed King Kong-remake (1976) and the deliberately campy Flash Gordon (1980). After Never Say Never Again (1983), an "unofficial" James Bond series entry, Semple's only notable credit was for Sheena (1984), based on the comic book Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.