Wilford Lloyd Baumes, the TV writer and producer who created The Love Boat and worked on Wonder Woman and the critically acclaimed Holocaust miniseries QB VII, all in collaboration with famed producer-executive Douglas S. Cramer, has died. He was 86.
A resident of Cincinnati, Baumes died Sunday, his family announced.
Also with Cramer, Baumes wrote and produced the 1974 ABC telefilm Sorority Kill, directed by Gloria Monty and featuring Anthony Geary (in his first prominent TV role) as a psychotic killer who holds people captive in a sorority house, and produced the prison-set Nightmare in Badham County, which starred Deborah Raffin and became an unexpected sensation in China.
Cramer entered a business relationship with producer Aaron Spelling with the rights to The Love Boat after reading a newspaper review of a “tacky three-dollar paperback” written by Jeraldine Saunders about “how easy it was to get laid aboard a cruise ship,” he said in a 2009 conversation for the Television Academy Foundation website The Interviews.
Following two failed Love Boat pilots that were burned off as telefilms, Spelling wooed Gavin MacLeod to play Captain Merrill Stubing for a third pilot, and ABC ordered the series. It ran for nine seasons, from 1977-87 (all the pilots were developed by Baumes).
