Word: gruber
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...they have moved with mule-skinner determination to pile it even higher: by last week a nerve-shattering total of eleven new westerns was slogging along the TV trail. And no one was slogging with more enthusiasm than a tall, balding journeyman writer-producer named Frank Gruber, 54, who has hacked out more words, he claims, than any other living writer. Nearly all of the words have been western...
Pluck & Prose. During his boyhood in Minnesota and Chicago, Author Gruber was influenced by the works of Horatio Alger, and his philosophy is still sturdily Horatian: he figures that if he works hard enough he can write and sell almost anything. With pluck, luck and plain prose about the plains he has published 41 novels, sold 20 to the movies, done an additional 54 screen plays, 90 TV scripts and written 350 short stories. The fact that he owns 15% of Wells Fargo does not keep him from writing scripts for other oaters (e.g., Desilu's The Texan...
...businesslike as any Alger hero, Gruber still thinks of himself as primarily a book writer, but cheerfully admits: "I never write a book nowadays until after I've sold the idea for the story to a producer. That's why I stick to westerns. They're easier to sell to the movies and television...
Pitchfork & Ax. A well-read frontier buff, Gruber admits that "in television scripts we distort things. Like in Wells Fargo we have Dale Robertson inventing the swivel holster when it was really invented by John Wesley Hardin. Or we have Belle Starr as a beautiful woman, when she really was a terrible looking...
Other minor errors also rile Gruber. "You don't shoot a man in the throat, and you don't kill him with a pitchfork or an ax," he argues. "We had a script here where the hero was killed with a pitchfork and I changed it to shooting. That very same week Jim [Gunsmoke] Arness killed two men with a pitchfork. That's not an honest western...