In 1957, Have Gun -- Will Travel was beginning a long run on CBS. Star Richard Boone, a big name in television at the time, ensured good ratings from the outset. Show-runner Rolfe welcomed Roddenberry with five script assignments for the series’ freshman season, beginning a long professional relationship between the two.
This rapid rise in Roddenberry’s stature soon brought him an assignment writing his first hour-long script, “So Short a Season,” for the NBC anthology, Kaiser Aluminum Hour. At year’s end, he was paid to write two more pilot scripts: “Threshold,” for an independent production company, was set at the United States Air Force Academy; and, for Screen Gems, the newly-formed television arm of Columbia Pictures, a western called “The Man from Texas.” While neither made it to series, the assignments exemplified Roddenberry’s newfound prestige. He had sold more than two dozen scripts in a single year.
In 1958, as Roddenberry continued to write for Have Gun -- Will Travel, he did a favor for Don Ingalls, his friend from the LAPD. Ingalls left the force to become a newspaper columnist, but also had his eyes on television. Roddenberry passed a “spec script” written by Ingalls to the producer of Harbor Command, which led to a few assignments. Now Ingalls had a spec ready for Have Gun. Roddenberry connected him with Sam Rolfe, who was so impressed by both Ingalls’ personality and abilities that the near-novice writer was given a job as the series’ new associate producer. The ambitious Roddenberry took notice.
In November 1958, one of Roddenberry’s Have Gun -- Will Travel scripts, “Helen of Abajinian,” won a Writers Guild Award in the Best Western category. This improved the odds for him to achieve what Sam Rolfe had – create and run a series of his own. He tried with another pilot script for Screen Gems’ “Sam Houston,” about the 19th century statesman, politician and soldier. This also failed to find a sponsor. Undaunted, he wrote a pilot script based on his own idea: “The Man from Lloyds," dramatizing the cases of an insurance investigator. Screen Gems was not interested and Roddenberry didn’t get paid for the effort. Next, he pitched a series idea to CBS. “Foot Beat” was about a cop walking a beat in Manhattan. The network passed.
More work came with a new Screen Gems series, Jefferson Drum, about a newspaper editor in a lawless frontier town. Roddenberry was given three assignments. In all, he sold 11 scripts in 1958. But Roddenberry was suddenly feeling “written-out.” Looking for help, he sent a letter to his mentor, Erle Stanley Gardner:
Dear Earl [sic]: Help! As you once advised (and the wisdom becomes more apparent every day), writers have a way of going stale. The battery runs down. You said you had a system of recharging which you were holding until I said I needed it. I need it.
Gardner advised Roddenberry to pursue other interests outside of writing, explaining that those activities would create experiences that could enrich his work. In time, the interests and activities Roddenberry chose to pursue would end his marriage.
1959 brought another half-dozen Have Gun -- Will Travel assignments, courtesy of Sam Rolfe and Don Ingalls. And there was a new customer: Four Star and its latest series for ABC, The Detectives, starring Robert Taylor. Roddenberry picked up two assignments there. But his sights were now focused more than ever on getting a series of his own going. To this end, he returned to Screen Gems, on assignment to turn “Foot Beat” into a pilot called “The Big Walk.” In March 1959, ABC announced that the series was on its fall schedule for Tuesdays 10:30 - 11 p.m. It seemed that Roddenberry was about to have his first series as creator. Five weeks later, Jack Hellman reported for Daily Variety:
[Advertisers] are generally agreed that never in their experience has there been such an aggravating season of changes in the lineup of network shows. Overnight programs are moved around and what was scheduled yesterday doesn’t hold good for tomorrow.... We have before us a list of 30 such shows, mostly half-hour, and any network exec who can tell at this time where they’ll end up deserves a special Emmy.... Let the ad men try to figure out just where such shows as “The Big Walk” will land in the schedule.
“The Big Walk” was shuffled around, penciled in and then erased, and then penciled in again. One upside from all the shuffling: Roddenberry was getting noticed. On June 2, 1959, Daily Variety reported:
Writer Gene Roddenberry, whose “The Big Walk” telefilm package at Screen Gems found a sponsor but no time slot, is one of the unusual breed of scripter who lived his stuff. “Big Walk” is about a cop on the beat, which Roddenberry was.
During the same month as this near miss, Roddenberry was presented with an unlikely second award -- at the American Baptists Convention. For his work on Have Gun - Will Travel, he was acknowledged as one of a handful of writers who were “consistently identifying themselves with the Christian way of life on radio and television.” He later said, “I used religion several times in Have Gun -- Will Travel. Once in a penitentiary where a pastor was trying to keep a fellow from being hung, I wrote that the pastor grabbed a hacksaw blade, was cut by it, and was bleeding. I had him make some comment about blood and salvation. It’s not that I actually believed in blood and salvation being connected, but that was the way the audience believed and I can remember going out of my way not to deal directly with what my thoughts were for several reasons.... I had learned early in school that the world was a cruel and difficult place, so I learned to cover myself. Perhaps I was consciously dishonest. Yes, I was, but I knew that a certain amount of dishonesty about such things covered you.” (145-23)
As a result of the award from the American Baptists Convention, John M. Gunn, producer of the Christian television program Frontiers of Faith, contacted Roddenberry in regard to a series he wanted to launch dealing with “the modern application of the Christian ethic.” Preoccupied with “The Big Walk” at the time, Roddenberry wrote back:
Waited a week before answering you in the expectation that some [of the other series] might cancel out or fold, but the situation just got more grim.... “The Beat Cop” thing became “The Big Walk” which sold to L & M, was set to go ABC Sunday night following Maverick, then was cancelled out last moment on a policy decision to go all-western. Ah well... at least it may come alive again this winter but, frankly, I’ve become disenchanted with it now. (145-7)
The “grim” situation was about to get back on an upward trajectory.
In December 1959, the Hollywood trades reported that Gene Roddenberry and Don Ingalls had come together to produce a new western anthology series called The Weapon, in association with Zane Grey Theatre producer Hal Hudson. A pilot was made and aired as an episode of Zane Grey, but the series never materialized. A short time later, Roddenberry received a better offer. Daily Variety broke the news, reporting that he had been “inked to an exclusive writer-producer pact by Screen Gems,” with him serving to “develop new properties for the company, as well as function as producer on ‘Nightstick’ [the new title for ‘The Big Walk’], should it be sold for the following season.”
Roddenberry, Kelley and Jake Ehrlich, “333 Montgomery Street”
At Screen Gems, a new pilot called “333 Montgomery Street” was moving forward. William Dozier, West Coast Vice President of Screen Gems, made the announcement on December 16, 1959 that, besides pursuing an effort to get a series out of “The Big Walk,” the studio was planning to have a script written based on San Francisco criminal attorney Jake Ehrlich’s book Never Plead Guilty. Roddenberry was assigned the job and finished the script quickly before the writers’ strike started in mid-January. He then spent the remainder of the month working not as a writer but as a producer, preparing production under the watchful eye of studio executive Robert Sparks. Dozier and Sparks recommended he hire DeForest Kelley for the lead role based on attorney Ehrlich. Familiar with the actor, and having liked him in the Boots and Saddles episode he had written two years earlier, Roddenberry happily obliged.
In late January 1960, as the production of “333 Montgomery Street” shifted from the streets of San Francisco to the sound stages of Los Angeles, Ro
ddenberry responded to another correspondence from Christian TV producer John Gunn, writing:
I’m still involved in winding up the show I produced in San Francisco last week, and it looks like another ten days or two weeks before we get it into the can. Which means it would be at least that long before I could prepare any sort of story line for your approval.
Roddenberry didn’t really want the job. In another letter to Gunn, from March, he continued to procrastinate, writing:
Unfortunately, despite the continuing strike [January 16 to June 10], Screen Gems has elected to put my agreement with them into immediate effect, a marriage which includes a clause similar to the one my wife insisted upon some nineteen years ago. So, for better or worse, I’m bound-up exclusively theirs. For a year, anyway.
“333 Montgomery Street” aired in June 1960 as an episode of the anthology series Alcoa Goodyear Theatre. The critic for Daily Variety, finding the half-hour to have “polish and gleam,” wrote:
Best aspect of Gene Roddenberry’s script was the establishment of the central character -- and the lines given him to speak in court, unless they were verbatim out of Ehrlich’s memoirs.
Despite the praise, the series did not sell.
Throughout the spring of 1960, as the writers’ strike continued, so did Roddenberry’s hefty $100,000 salary from Screen Gems, which allowed him plenty of time to tinker with new projects, writing them now and turning them in later when the strike was over. “Kapu” was an action-adventure set in the Hawaiian islands, circa 1800; “Freelance” featured a mystery-writer playing detective (think Murder She Wrote); “The Centurion” was a Roman Empire saga with an Army commander as the lead; and “Caravan” was described by Roddenberry as a “Sea Hunt type action-adventure utilizing the mysterious desert instead of the mysterious sea.” None of the properties found a sponsor.
As the strike -- and the abundant free time -- dragged on, Roddenberry gained notoriety within the television industry by serving as a panelist on what the Writers Guild called “a unique and provocative inquiry.” The June meeting presented by the Guild followed its Annual Television-Radio Writers Awards show. The “Television on Trial” panel consisted of TV producers Roddenberry and Peter Kortner (Studio One and Playhouse 90), LA Times entertainment writer Cecil Smith, Federal Communications Commissioner Ted Meyers, ABC exec Selig Seligman and, representing the advertising agency of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, ad man Bud Stefan. Larry Tubelle for Daily Variety observed:
In response to Roddenberry’s contention that the FCC, since it was set up to protect the public interest in this area, has every right to discipline a network for permitting “an obvious falsehood that harms the nation,” [FCC man] Meyers expressed “doubt that the Commission would take a step to interfere with the internal content of a program that did not violate the law.” … Roddenberry’s plea capped a sustained barrage of examples of sponsor interference in program content, and several sharp exchanges in which [ABC’s] Seligman -- whose views brought audience hissing on a few occasions -- and [ad man] Stefan more or less lined up against [producers] Roddenberry, Kortner and [Times writer] Smith on a number of ticklish, inflammatory issues. Roddenberry’s basic beef was with “the tremendous number of taboos” a writer must contend with. He cited, at the outset, a 22-point sponsor’s edict to which he, as a writer, had to conform, and questioned their origin and basis. Such taboos, he noted [included] a major edict in which it was decided that “no Negroes were ever to be seen” on the Riverboat series, thus inaccurately depicting 1860 life on the Mississippi to the American public. This condition, Roddenberry heatedly maintained, was “ridiculous and damned near criminal.”
Tubelle further quoted Roddenberry as saying:
Is our nation, this priceless commodity, best served by [prestige] programs being exclusively tailored to sell soap and toothpaste? Even lesser shows should not be warped and changed to sell product.... For sponsors to twist facts to sell a product is wrong -- it should be prohibited by the FCC.
Gene Roddenberry’s name was now familiar to all the studio heads and network chiefs. Notoriety can jumpstart a career in entertainment. In time, it can also end one. But Roddenberry’s stature now seemed strong enough to survive his controversial opinions.
After working together on “333 Montgomery Street,” Robert Sparks felt Roddenberry needed more experience in production. The moment the strike ended, Sparks arranged for him to get a crash course in producing with a project started under Screen Gems show-runner Paul Harrison. Wrangler, a new western set to fill in as a summer replacement for the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show on NBC, would be a co-venture with Paramount Pictures, a novice in television, and Hollis Productions, a new company set-up by Charles Irving, who had produced live soap operas in New York. With an order for 13 episodes, Wrangler was to be shot outdoors on video tape, and the industry was watching this experiment closely to see just how inexpensively and fast a primetime action-oriented series could be made. On June 29, Bob Chandler of Variety reported:
Thus far, the all-tape series, such as they are, have been restricted to interiors, and consequently have had the same limitations, insofar as action is concerned, as live programs.... Wrangler involves action by its very nature -- it’s a western.... The implications could be enormous, provided the shows work out.
On July 6, one day before Wrangler was scheduled to premiere on NBC, Variety reported that things were going badly and the network had cut the order back from 13 episodes to 11. According to the trade:
Four tapes of the cowpoke skein are in the can, and apparently the network and JWT [the ad agency] have seen them all [and this] reportedly doesn’t please the agency.... First of the four segments was taped in “film technique,” but the director didn’t tape enough covering footage, so that it’s almost impossible to edit. Second segment was taped okay, in live sequence, but NBC continuity & acceptance insisted on deletion of a couple of scenes. Hollis [Productions] said this was impossible, that in shooting it “live style,” such deletions would require complete re-doing of the entire scenes involved, at prohibitive cost. It claimed NBC should have posted a continuity man [network rep] on set instead of after-the-fact editing.
The finger-pointing had already begun and NBC postponed the premiere of Wrangler by two weeks. The order for episodes, in turn, was reduced again, from eleven to nine. On July 27, Variety reported that NBC, ad agency J. Walter Thompson and sponsor Ford Motors were united in their disappointment over the series, but would reluctantly go forward since there was not enough time to find a substitution for the time slot.
Wrangler made it on the air, but with its order slashed to six episodes. Daily Variety reviewed the first of these on August 8, saying it was “just another western that plods over the same old trails” and the “script of Gene Roddenberry played it safe without any attempts at striking a new note.” Two days later, the weekly edition of Variety chimed in, saying:
Wrangler doesn’t answer many questions as to the future of tape, unfortunately. Overall, the opening show was so poor as to obviate some of the plus aspects of the cost comparison between tape and film.... The trouble with the show lay primarily in the creative end. A sometimes confusing script by Gene Roddenberry and a completely confusing job of direction by David Lowell Rich were mainly responsible.
KTLA unit manager Stretch Adler, involved in the project with the station’s video tape mobile production unit, later said, “Wrangler was a debacle from beginning to end. It was done by amateurs who had no knowledge of what they were doing.” (1a)
Because Roddenberry, one of those amateurs, was working under Paul Harrison, he escaped blame. It had, however, been an eye-opening education as to what can and often will go wrong in television.
On December 20, 1960, with his Screen Gems contract in its final months and concerned it wouldn’t be renewed, Roddenberry wrote to Bill Dozier:
At a party the other evening, someone asked why nothing has ever been done with Michener’s book Tales of the
South Pacific. I was about to reply, mentioning the stage play, the motion picture, and Twentieth-Century’s television series. Then it struck me that this was a hell of a good question. One single short story from the book has been used. Over and over again. And it was the weakest and most undramatic story of the entire book.... The bulk of this great book, one of the all-time best sellers, is a collection of unusually well-written, small and varied tales of Pacific war camp life. As you know, it is not a collection of war stories. Rather, it tells of the old Tonkinese woman who sold souvenir shrunken human heads, of the savage whose dream was to parachute from an airplane, of heat itch, of bootlegging, of the admiral who caught his zipper in his underwear, of the weird escapades planned to relieve their endless waiting, of gigantic poker and crap games and their humorous aftermaths.... In short, I am suggesting a half-hour, network-quality television series unlike anything which has been done. The title: “The Wild Blue.” Not Tales of the South Pacific; no deal [needed] with Michener, but involving the same area of story, emphasizing quiet, ordinary and identifiable men caught up in the extraordinary background furnished by this most romantic, bizarre, and flavor-filled backwash of World War II. (145-7)
Just as “Hawaii Passage” could have been The Love Boat some 21 years before that ship sailed, this new concept contained the same framework to later be choppered in to M*A*S*H. Dozier, knowing a potential hit when he read one, extended Roddenberry’s contract by six months, with a new provision: He could now also write for outside shows.
With his income from Screen Gems secured, Roddenberry took his time delivering pages on the series’ proposal, instead grabbing several fast-paying script jobs around town. He accepted more writing assignments from Have Gun -- Will Travel, including an episode directed by Robert Butler, who would later direct for Star Trek. He also wrote three scripts for old friend Don Ingalls, who was now serving as story consultant on Whiplash, a new western filmed in Australia. One of Roddenberry’s scripts was chosen to be the network premiere episode.
These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One Page 4
