Quick as a Flash was a long-running radio series that Bill hosted, so it was logical to find him hosting this television pilot. Celebrities (Boris Karloff and Wendy Barrie in the pilot) were paired with contestants and together, they tried to come up with answers to questions based on skits, mostly on film but sometimes live in the studio. As the title might suggest, speed was a factor in answering the questions. Even though this pilot was made for NBC, the series did have two brief runs on ABC in 1953 and 1954. Bill did not host either one of them. This pilot is traded among collectors.
MORE INFORMATION at Mike Burger's Game Show Pilot Light and Adam Nedeff's Bill Cullen's World
The only non-game pilot on our PILOTS page, this one comes to us through a series of vintage newspaper articles and the intrepid sleuthing of Mike Burger. According to the articles, Paul Anka was scheduled to perform at New York's Copacabana nightclub following his appearance on the Eydie Gorme-Steve Lawrence show, and that performance was to be recorded as a pilot for a new CBS series hosted by Bill. That series would have traveled to various nightclubs to capture performers' acts on a live stage rather than a TV studio.
This program combined Bill's talents with those of another individual not known for musical entertainment programming. The show's producer/director was a young CBS News employee named Don Hewitt. Hewitt was already an up-and-coming star in the news business, and would later achieve his greatest success and fame as the creator and guiding force behind 60 Minutes.
UPDATE May, 2011
It turns out that a film of this obscurity does survive.
Unfortunately, we failed to win a 16mm print of this program on an Ebay
auction a few months back, but the listing offered more details than
the newspaper articles had provided. For one thing, the program's
title turned out to be A Very Special
Evening: Paul Anka at the Copa. The original newspaper articles
mentioned other possible titles, such as A Date
with Bill Cullen and Eyewitness to
Entertainment. According to the listing, such celebrities as
Dick Clark, Tommy Sands and Nancy Sinatra were on hand to witness the
performance.
Jack Clark hosted this Bob Stewart pilot, with Bill and Betsy Palmer serving as the celebrity panelists. When the show made it to the CBS prime time line-up, CBS sportscaster Jack Whitaker was the host and Jack Clark became the announcer. As in the series which aired, the object for the celebrities and their contestant partners was to unscramble strips of a photograph and recognize the famous subject.
Another Bob Stewart pilot hosted by Jack Clark, a copy of this program exists in the UCLA archives. Bill was a celebrity panelist for this show, teamed with Betsy Palmer against a team led by Florence Henderson and Darren McGavin. A team (two celebs and a contestant) saw a category ("Things said by a bride on her wedding night") and each gave a clue to the opposing team. The object, however, was to keep their opponents from guessing the category.
This is the earliest
reference to
the things-in-a-category theme that Stewart would perfect with Pyramid
and use in various permutations for the rest of his career. The ideas
that
would become Pyramid were all there, but this early format had
enormous
flaws in the game structure (the object was to give bad clues,
for
example) and was played mainly for laughs.
MORE
INFORMATION at
Mike Burger's Game
Show Pilot Light
We
believe Bill participated in the pilot which sold this 1967-69 Bob
Stewart
series. TV researcher Brendan McLaughlin has put together a
comprehensive
list of guest appearances during the regular run of the series, and
none
of them match the photo we have for the show. Given that Bill
participated
in so many Bob Stewart pilots and given that publicity photos for a new
series often come from the pilot episode, we're willing to bet that the
photo (which also includes host Larry Blyden and panelists Joan
Fontaine
and Milt Kamen) is from the pilot. 
This
was a Hatos-Hall production (the folks that gave us Let's Make A
Deal).
The studio audience and a celebrity panel (Melvin Belli, Meredith
MacRae
and Nipsey Russell) were presented with a series of hypothetical
questions
(some asked by Bill, some presented in badly acted skits) and given a
choice
of possible responses. In one skit, for example, a woman had the
chance to beat her husband's obnoxious boss at Scrabble with a big play
on the last turn. The husband didn't want her to show up his
boss.
Should she make the play or abide by her husband's wishes?Each celebrity offered
his or her
opinion and then the audience voted. If a celebrity's choice
matched
the audience vote, that celebrity earned points. The winning
celebrity
at the end of the show won a prize for a designated member of the
studio
audience. In the pilot, the celebrities did the best they could
to
wring entertainment out of a dull and rather pointless game (what's
with
the political motif?) but it's easy to see why this didn't get picked
up
by the network.
A copy of this pilot
exists in the
vast television collection at UCLA. The listing summarizes the
program
as a "game show that measures public opinions on current issues."
The show certainly was current; one question asked whether a father had
the right to forbid his teenage daughter to attend a peace rally.
The UCLA listing also provides the exact taping date.
MORE
INFORMATION at
Mike Burger's Game
Show Pilot Light and Adam Nedeff's Bill
Cullen's World
This unsold Bob Stewart pilot surfaced on a Game Show Network marathon. Geoff Edwards hosted, and teams consisted of one contestant and two celebrities (Bill, Peter Lawford, Betsy Palmer and Anne Meara in the pilot). A celebrity gives a response to a revealing question, and the object for the other two teammates was to guess whether he responded as himself or as he thought one of the other celebs would. Numbingly mindless, especially since only Bill and Betsy knew each other well, and celebrities virtually always just answered as themselves anyway.
MORE INFORMATION at Mike Burger's Game Show Pilot Light
This
was yet another attempt by Bob Stewart to expand upon the
items-in-a-list
formula that had worked for him so well with The
$25,000 Pyramid. In this game, two contestants faced a
panel
of five celebrities (Bill, Anne Meara, Anita Gillette, Clifton Davis
and
Stephanie Braxton). The celebrities received a category ("Things
That Bite") and, in turn, gave a clue that fit the category.
Contestants
tried to figure out the category from the clues.It was an effort to merge two popular formats of the day: the Pyramid guessing game with the celebrity interaction of Match Game. The five celebrities even sat Match Game-style on a two tiered panel. (The photo shown here is from the bonus round.) However, aside from Bill, these celebrities were not exactly known for their witty wordplay, and the Pyramid game without a clock proved unexciting. Jim Peck was at the helm, a deservedly well respected host of the seventies who was out of his element hosting a celebrity driven game.
A few years later, Jack
Clark hosted
another Stewart pilot called Caught In The Act that bore no
resemblance
to this one.
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This was one of at least two pilots Bob Stewart shot for the series that would become Shoot for the Stars. This pilot aired as pard of a Game Show Network marathon. Geoff Edwards was host (he would eventually host the series), Stewart favorites Bill and Anita Gillette were the celebrity players. Anne Meara and Rick Hurst were featured in another pilot also hosted by Edwards. Bill made several visits to Shoot for the Stars as a celeb player. Those are listed on our Guest Appearances page.
In the Meara-Hurst pilot,
traded
among collectors, one of the contestants is a young actor named David
Michaels.
Bob Stewart was so impressed with Michaels that he hired the young man,
and Michaels became Geoff Edwards' personal assistant for this brief
series.
After that, he went on to produce various incarnations of Pyramid
for Bob Stewart throughout the eighties.
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All
we know for sure is the date of this show's taping and the fact that it
was a Ralph Andrews production. It's obviously some sort of
battle-of-the-sexes
game being played by married couples. Note Bill getting down with
those open collars! 
Here's
another pilot for which we have very little information. A ticket
for the show gives us the date, as well as the facts that it was from
Stu
Billett Productions (Billett would go on to do The People's Court),
it
taped
at
the
NBC
studios in Burbank, and it featured a celebrity panel.
This
Bob Stewart production, an updated version of Eye Guess, was
pitched
to local stations by syndicator Metromedia in 1980 but failed to
sell.
In the game, eight comic performers (including a then-unknown Edie
McClurg) held "punch lines" which would complete statements
Bill
would read to the two celebrity-contestant teams. As with Eye
Guess, the object was to remember where the correct punch line was
located. The humor came out of the comically mismatched answers, as
well
as the over-the-top line readings given by the performers.
Celebrities
Joyce Bullifant and Fred Grandy, along with their playing partners, are
not pictured.While the game failed to sell in America, it turned up a few years later in the UK, where game shows are much more common and have an easier time finding an audience. See the listing at the UK Game Show Page for more information about how the game was played.
Bill hosted this unsold guessing game pilot from Barry-Enright. The celebrity players in one pilot were David Letterman and Joyce Bullifant. Arte Johnson and Liz Torres handled the celeb chores in another pilot. The game was a tepid variation on Family Feud. For each round, six items were revealed, along with a question requiring them to be ordered in a list. For example, one question involved animals to be put in order by the lengths of their gestation periods. One member of a celebrity-contestant team would choose two of the items, and the other member had to determine which one ranked higher on the list than the other. As confusing as it was dull. The Letterman-Bullifant pilot is available among game show traders, in pretty ragged shape.
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Another Bob Stewart pilot featuring Bill as a panelist. Dick Clark hosted this all-star variation on To Tell The Truth. Two teams of four competed, each with three celebrities and a contestant. Bill's celebrity teammates on the pilot were Robert Mandan and Elaine Joyce. The other celebrity team consisted of Soupy Sales, Betty White and ventriloquist Jay Johnson.
Clark read a question
about a famous
personality, and the celebrities of one team each offered their
responses.
(For example, "When Sylvester Stallone and his wife discussed having a
child, they made very specific arrangements for conceiving a
child.
What were they?") Only one story was true, of course, and it was up to
the other team to figure out which one it was. A bonus round
featured
the celebrities answering general knowledge questions to reveal
portions
of a celebrity photo the contestant had to identify.
MORE INFORMATION at Mike Burger's Game Show Pilot Light