Wild Wild West
Ralston helped create the television series The Wild Wild West and scripted the pilot episode, "The Night of the Inferno". In 1997, aged 85, Ralston sued Warner Brothers over the upcoming motion picture based on the series. (Wild Wild West was released in 1999.) In a deposition, Ralston explained that in 1964 he was approached by producer Michael Garrison who '"said he had an idea for a series, good commercial idea, and wanted to know if I could glue the idea of a western hero and a James Bond type together in the same show."
Ralston said he then created the Civil War characters, the format, the story outline and nine drafts of the script that was the basis for the television series. It was his idea, for example, to have a secret agent named Jim West who would perform secret missions for President Ulysses S. Grant.
Ralston's experience brought to light a common Hollywood practice of the 1950s and 60s when television writers who helped create popular series allowed producers or studios to take credit for a show, thus cheating the writers out of millions of dollars in royalties.
Read more about this topic: Gilbert Ralston
Famous quotes containing the words wild and/or west:
“And Change with hurried hand has swept these scenes:
The woods have fallen, across the meadow-lot
The hunter’s trail and trap-path is forgot,
And fire has drunk the swamps of evergreens;
Yet for a moment let my fancy plant
These autumn hills again: the wild dove’s haunt,
The wild deer’s walk: in golden umbrage shut,”
—Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873)
“Wild Bill was indulging in his favorite pastime of a friendly game of cards in the old No. 10 saloon. For the second time in his career, he was sitting with his back to an open door. Jack McCall walked in, shot him through the back of the head, and rushed from the place, only to be captured shortly afterward. Wild Bill’s dead hand held aces and eights, and from that time on this has been known in the West as “the dead man’s hand.””
—State of South Dakota, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)