TV Pilots That Never Got Off the Ground : Television: From the adventures of a samurai D.A. to the creation of a half-man, half-satellite secret agent, Lee Goldberg details the industry’s wacky, hilarious and ambitious flops over the last 35 years.

Claudette Colbert, Groucho Marx, Richard Dreyfuss, Orson Welles, Sidney Pollock, Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, Stephen J. Cannell, Steven Bochco. . . . For Lee Goldberg’s purposes, they were all failures.

Goldberg is the author of “Unsold Television Pilots, 1955-1988” (McFarland & Co. Inc.: $45), the definitive reference book on television shows that never got past the one-shot pilot stage. And yes, all the aforementioned successful actors, directors and producers have unsold pilots lurking in their histories.

“The fascinating thing about pilots is that no other industry trots out its prototypes and tells the world what it is they’re doing, in the way that television does,” said 28-year-old Goldberg, executive story editor on “Baywatch” and a writer for the defunct “Spenser: For Hire” and “Murphy’s Law.”

“My book is equivalent to looking at all the car designs Ford Motor Co. discarded, or all the dresses that Halston decided not to make.”

Which is not to imply that all unsold TV shows were would-be Edsels. Altman and Pollock directed some ambitious projects in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Marx played billionaire J. Paul Greedy in a half-hour comedy in 1967, and Colbert played a Congresswoman juggling career and family way back in 1958.

Indeed, of the 2,269 finished pilots catalogued and described in the book (often with quotes from reviews, producers and directors), there were, Goldberg said, some potential hits and “wonderful pieces of work”--among them Spielberg’s “Savage,” with Martin Landau as an investigative reporter; Richard Dreyfuss in a version of “Catch-22”; a 1974 all-Asian program; “Judge Dee” (written by Nicholas Meyer), about solving crimes in 17th-Century China, and, perhaps most intriguingly, “The Orson Welles Show,” a 1958 Desilu production in which Welles was to direct adaptations of classic literature--or devote programs to magic, interviews, readings or anything he wished. The pilot featured Welles directing, narrating and starring in an adaptation of John Collier’s “Fountain of Youth.”

“It was doomed before the pilot was completed,” said Goldberg, a former journalist and confessed television fanatic. “Welles went over budget, took four weeks instead of the allotted 10 days to shoot it, and threw an expensive wrap-party that he billed to Desilu.”

Although given the Peabody Award of excellence, the Welles pilot was rejected by the networks, Goldberg wrote, for being “too sophisticated.” The same could not be said, probably, for “Where’s Everett?”, a 1966 half-hour sitcom featuring Alan Alda as the guardian of an invisible alien baby, or the 1976 production of “Twin Detectives,” in which Jim and John Hager of “Hee-Haw” fame solved crimes by pretending to be one detective (“It was,” Goldberg said flatly, “as good as it sounds.”).

The book is rife with such flops. A few of the author’s favorites:

* “Samurai,” a 1979 Danny Thomas Productions pilot in which Joe Penny (Jake on “Jake and the Fat Man”) played an Amerasian “district attorney by day and sword-wielding Samurai warrior by night.” “He drives a big Mack truck to the offices of those people he couldn’t prosecute as D.A.,” Goldberg explained, “and takes care of them as a Samurai.”

* “Dr. Franken,” a 1980 NBC co-production updating the Frankenstein myth, in which Robert Vaughn built his monster from parts removed from a hospital medical bank. The result? “Once this guy is built, he gets vibes from all these different organs,” chortled Goldberg. “You know, ‘Oh, my pancreas!’ and then he hunts down the families that these organs came from and helps them through their troubles.”

* “The Infiltrator,” a 1987 TriStar co-production featuring Scott Bakula (“Quantum Leap”) as “a wacky Bruce Willis-type scientist who is creating a transporter beam.” In an adjoining lab, however, is Deborah Mullowney, “this cool sexy Cybill Shepherd-type who is building a satellite.” As a lark, Bakula beams himself into her lab, but accidentally lands in the satellite. “He looks fine,” said Goldberg, “unless he gets mad, and then he becomes . . . half-man, half-satellite! Sort of a Go-bot.” And, the author added, like most other “guys who gain an uncontrollable and unpredictable power in a freak accident,” he becomes a secret agent.

* “Crash Island,” a 1981 Universal attempt to do “Gilligan’s Island” straight, in which Greg Mulavey and Meadowlark Lemon were charter airline pilots flying a 15-member YMCA co-ed swim team to Hawaii. Crashing on an uncharted island, aided by a Japanese soldier who had been a castaway there for 30 years and thought the war was still on, they formed their own society and tried to cope. Lemon played a character called “Meadowlark.” Said Goldberg: “Just one of the worst pilots ever. I think people realized it even then.”

The son of a television news anchor and a gossip columnist, Goldberg grew up in San Francisco, was a reporter for the Contra Costa Times, and spent his 20s as a free-lance writer and author of the “.357 Vigilante” series of pulp thrillers under the name “Ian Ludlow” (“I wanted people to confuse me with Ian Fleming, and to file the books near Robert Ludlum.”). When New World Pictures bought, but did not use, a “Vigilante” script he wrote with partner Bill Rabkin, Goldberg broke into television by writing (with Rabkin) a “Spenser: For Hire” episode. But research for the unsold pilots project, he claims, began at age 9.

“When I was a kid,” he said, reclining in the study of his Encino home, “I remember seeing something in a TV Guide that said ‘unsold pilot.’ The idea that there were all these programs made that aired once and disappeared into oblivion never to be seen again--or never even aired-- well, something about it fascinated me.”

Goldberg’s research consisted of clipping every pilot listing and every review of a pilot he found in trade publications. When VCRs arrived, Goldberg taped every pilot that came along. While doing free-lance interviews with actors and producers, he would casually ask if they remembered any pilots they had made (Cannell and Bochco spent hours reminiscing “proudly,” Goldberg said, about such failed ventures as Bochco’s “Doctors and Nurses” in 1981, an early attempt at a “St. Elsewhere,” and Cannell’s “Nightside” in 1980, a cop and ambulance-chasing black comedy.).

Advertising agencies, he discovered, keep reviews of all pilots. The Leo Burnett Agency, which has reviewed pilots since 1955, opened its files to him. Serious organization of the esoteric reference book (which is available by mail order through the publisher and locally at Larry Edmunds Cinema and Theater Bookshop and Samuel French Theater and Film Bookshop) began three years ago.

While a lot of the book consists of such hilarities as 1979’s “Dracula,” which found the count teaching a night course in history in San Francisco (“so he can meet chicks,” writes Goldberg), the author cautions against excessive sneering.

“It’s all in the execution. I mean, look at ‘Beauty and the Beast’--big hairy monster who lives in the sewer and fights crime with the D.A. he loves. It’s asinine!” he says, adding “but look how it turned out--an acclaimed series that was very romantic and well-written. And don’t forget that a show about a guy who fights crime with the help of his talking car (‘Knight Rider’) ran for five years!”