The Wild Wild West - Creation, Writing and Production

Creation, Writing and Production

Michael Garrison and his partner at the time, Gregory Ratoff, purchased the film rights to Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1954 for $600. CBS bought the TV rights for $1000, and on October 21, 1954 broadcast an hour-long adaptation on its Climax! series, with Barry Nelson playing American agent ‘Jimmy Bond’ and Peter Lorre playing the villain, Le Chiffre. CBS also approached Fleming about developing a Bond TV series. In 1955 Ratoff and Garrison bought the rights to the novel in perpetuity for an additional $6000, and pitched the idea to 20th Century Fox. The studio turned them down. After Ratoff died in 1960, his widow and Garrison sold the film rights to Charles K. Feldman for $75,000. Feldman eventually produced the spoof Casino Royale in 1967. By then, Garrison and CBS had brought James Bond to television in a unique way.

The pilot episode, "The Night of the Inferno", was produced by Garrison and, according to Robert Conrad, cost $685,000. The episode was scripted by Gilbert Ralston, who had written for numerous episodic TV series in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1997, Ralston sued Warner Bros. over the upcoming motion picture based on the series. (Wild Wild West was released in 1999.) In a deposition, Ralston explained that he was approached by 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 denying the writers millions of dollars in royalties). Ralston died in 1999, before his suit was settled. Warner Brothers ended up paying his family between $600,000 and $1.5 million.

As indicated by Robert Conrad on his DVD commentary, the show went through several changes in producers in its first season. This was apparently due to conflicts between the network and Garrison. At first, Ben Brady was named as producer, but he was then shifted to Rawhide. The network then hired Collier Young. In an interview, Young said he saw the series as The Rogues set in 1870. (The Rogues, which he had produced, was about con men who swindled swindlers, much like the 1970s series Switch.) Young also claimed to have added the wry second "Wild" to the series title, which had been simply "The Wild West" in its early stages of production. Young lasted three episodes (2–4). His shows featured a butler named Tennyson who traveled with West and Gordon, but since the episodes were not broadcast in production order, the character popped up at different times during the first season.

Young's replacement, Fred Freiberger, returned the series to its original concept, and it was on his watch that the arch-villain Dr. Loveless was created. Loveless became an immediate hit, and actor Michael Dunn was contracted to appear in four episodes per season.

After ten episodes (5–14), Freiberger was replaced by John Mantley, reputedly due to a behind-the-scenes power struggle. Mantley, who had been associate producer on Gunsmoke, produced seven (15–21) episodes before he, too, was replaced. While Mantley returned to his former position on Gunsmoke, Gene L. Coon took over the production reins of The Wild Wild West. Coon, however, left after six episodes (22–27) to take a screen-writing assignment at Warner Bros.

By then, Garrison's conflict with CBS was resolved, and he returned to produce the last episode of season one and the initial episodes of season two. The producer's return was much to the relief of Ross Martin, who once revealed that he was so disenchanted during the first season that he tried to quit three times. He explained that Garrison "saw the show as a Bond spoof laid in 1870, and we all knew where we stood. Each new producer tried to put his stamp on the show and I had a terrible struggle. I fought them line by line in every script. They knew they couldn't change the James West role very much, but it was open season on Artemus Gordon because they had never seen anything like him before."

On August 17, 1966, however, during production of the new season's ninth episode, The Night of the Ready-Made Corpse, Garrison fell down a flight of stairs in his home, fractured his skull, and died. CBS brought in Bruce Lansbury, head of programming in New York, to produce the show for the remainder of its run.

The Wild Wild West was filmed at CBS Studio Center on Radford Avenue in the San Fernando Valley. The 70-acre lot was formerly the home of Republic Studios, which specialized in low-budget films including Westerns starring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and Saturday morning serials (which The Wild Wild West appropriately echoed). CBS had a wall-to-wall lease on the lot starting in May 1963, and produced Gunsmoke, The Virginian and Rawhide there, as well as Gilligan's Island. The network bought the lot from Republic in February, 1967, for $9.5 million. Later, MTM Enterprises (headed by actress Mary Tyler Moore and her then-husband, Grant Tinker) became the Studio Center's primary tenant, beginning in 1971. Seinfeld was filmed there in the 1990s.