Word: boyd
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This full, rich life ended with a bang in 1931. It was a time when many a silent star suddenly became a has-been. Boyd has another reason for his decline: another actor named William Boyd (who had played Sergeant Quirt in the Broadway version of What Price Glory?) was raided by the police during a noisy party and thrown into jail for possession of illegal whisky and gambling equipment. Hopalong-to-be suffered; when newspapers ran his picture by mistake, Radio Pictures tore up a $3,000-a-week contract, pushed him adrift...
...four years before he got a steady job, playing the part of Hopalong Cassidy in a series of B westerns produced by an oldtime horse-opera manufacturer named Harry Sherman. Boyd and Sherman made 54 Hopalong pictures. Then in 1943, because of rising costs, Sherman stopped producing them. Boyd made twelve more on his own hook, finally was forced to quit too. In 1947, at the age of 52, he was on the beach again, this time apparently for good. But he refused to believe he was through...
...Author Clarence Mulford's original pulp-paper stories, Hoppy had been a ragged, tobacco-chewing, whiskery cowpoke who walked with a bad limp. But Boyd made him a veritable Galahad of the range-a soft-spoken paragon who did not smoke, drink, or kiss girls, who tried to capture the rustlers instead of shooting them, and who always let the villain draw first if gunplay was inevitable...
Dreamer with a Penny. Boyd gambled everything on getting the television rights to the Hopalong Cassidy pictures, although television was only a vague dream when he began and some of his critics thought he might just as well have been buying up freight space on the first rocket to the moon. He sold his ranch, mortgaged his automobile, moved into a little four-room bungalow in the Hollywood hills (where he still lives), sank every nickel he could beg, borrow or earn into his vast and complicated project. It took almost $350,000 in all, involved years of haggling...
...Hoppy movies had never sent any motion-picture audiences home with stars in their eyes, but they electrified the junior television slave. Because children like their stories repeated, the films have increased steadily in popularity, even though some are now being televised for the third time. Almost overnight, Boyd found himself a hero-and a hero with the Midas touch...