John Mantley Part III

"Gunsmoke" producer John Mantley said of  the show's star, "I can tell you it was great fun to work with James Arness and the entire cast. They were a sheer delight and some of the best professions I've ever had the pleasure to work with. I wrote "Gunsmoke" scripts but I was far too busy producing the show to write many of them. And to be honest, I have never really liked to write. 

"Most of what I have today was earned with words, but I never actually enjoyed the process of writing. I've found it the hardest work I've ever done."

Mantley received five consecutive Western Heritage awards,  and shared honors with Calvin Clements and Earl Wallace for the 1978 Spur Award for "How the West was Won." He was also a recipient of the William F. Cody Award. 

He felt that the  networks should stay out of the creative process. During the golden age of television, "the only people who looked at your rough cuts or your manuscripts were advertising agencies to protect their clients. They came to rough cut screening to make sure you didn't ford a river if you were sponsored by Chevrolet--as in "Bonanza." As a result of that, in their 13-year history, characters in "Bonanza" never forded a river, they crossed it. On the other hand, we at "Gunsmoke" forded a lot of rivers, but I was fond of saying that 'we never chevroleted one.'"

Mantley operated his own production company for a number of years and was loaned out to produce "Wild, Wild West," "Dirty Sally" and "How the West Was Won," among others. 

Heavily involved in show business politics, he served on the board of directors of the Producer's Guild, and hosted the earliest meetings of the caucus of the Producers,Writers and Directors in his own backyard. He also co-chaired the organization in his later years, which was comprised of some 175 members "who between them are responsible for the majority of all prime-time television entertainment."

Mantley advised fledgling script writers to "Write, write, write. The more you write, the more you learn. " But that doesn't offer much encouragement in the declining freelance market. "Yes, you do have to be thick-skinned to survive as a script writer, because having your work rewritten by producers is bad enough, but you also have to expect to have it rejected for the most inane reasons."

Having apprenticed in two of the most highly skilled but lowest paying jobs as actor and  writer, Mantley said, "I did all kinds of things to support my acting career--liquor store clerk, dishwater, parking attendant, bus boy--and as far as acting is concerned, I really never had much problem. But after I sold those two novels, I sort of wrote steadily until I got to producing and then I was able to get away from writing, which was a consummation devotedly to be wished."

Mantley was back in Dodge City as executive producer of "Gunsmoke" during the fall of 1987. Filmed in Calgary, Canada, the two-hour CBS television movie, featured an aging Marshall Matt Dillon back in the saddle again.

(This interview was excerpted from my book, Maverick Writers.) 

Remembering John Mantley, Part II

John Mantley played the lead on “Buckingham Theatre,” which was the most prestigious program on Canadian radio’s coast-to-coast network. “It was necessary to do half a dozen shows a week to earn a halfway decent living,” he said. “Therefore, we learned to do old voices and young voices and all kinds of accents that would come in handy later on.” Mantley won several provincial and national awards for acting and directing with the New Play Society, Canada’s equivalent of the American ANTA.

Returning to California, he performed as an actor at the LaJolla Playhouse.  “After that I went to New York City, where I starved.  But eventually, I got to play three leads in several shows that were produced by Harvey Marlow, and I got to be friends with him.” Manley assumed Marlow’s job as producer of the television station WOR, when his friend was named general manager. Among three half-hour shows, he produced “Mr. & Mrs. Mystery,” written by John Gay, who later won an Oscar for “Separate Tables.”  Mantley then wrote the half-hour series scripts and played Mr. Mystery, while his wife played Mrs. Mystery. For the original script and their combined performances, they received a grand total of fifty dollars in cash so they could collect unemployment insurance "in order to stay alive.”

The Canadian actor also produced the first foreign language television show in this country, starring an all-Italian cast, and had to change his name for the show to Giovanni Mantelli. It was during his years at WOR that he began to write for television, “because we didn’t have a budget, and I was doing all the things I had to do for a weekly salary of $103, barely enough to live in New York. We had no professional writers. We got our scripts from university students, and anybody who had an idea, and I had to fix them to make them work.”

Mantley spent four years in Rome, where he produced and directed a series of thirty-nine, half-hour  dramatic anthologies for American television, a pioneering effort which played in some two hundred markets and earned investors a good return on their money. “I learned a tremendous amount in shooting the shows in Italy because when we got there, the Italians had never shot live sound. They had no way to do special effects, or even fades and dissolves. All they could do was print film. So it was a great learning experience.”

The Mantley’s first child was born in Italy, “and we survived there because part of the time my wife did the voices—post synchronization of the voices of Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren and many others.” Mantley said he translated Italian films into English by the lip syncing process because American audiences would not accept subtitles.  “And because at that time the American motion picture industry would not sell their films to television because they were trying to destroy the media.”

Mantley borrowed the fare from his cousin Mary Pickford to return to this country, where he found that the entertainment industry had a short memory; no one remembered him or his work. It was then he began to write full time, turning out a number of short stories and articles. His first novel, The 27^th Day, became a Book of the Month Club selection here and in England, as well as adapted to film for Columbia Pictures. “The book was somewhat of a minor classic in the science fiction field, I have to believe, because I just bought a first edition which cost me fifty-five dollars.” He subsequently wrote The Snow Birch, at the urging of his cousin, which was produced as the motion picture, “Woman Obsessed” by Twentieth Century Fox, starring Susan Hayward. Mantley recalls that “those books kept my nose above water financially until I began to write for television.”

His first freelance television script was for Desilu Westinghouse Theatre, for which he wrote five. He also wrote for “Harrigan and Sons,” “The Untouchables,” “Outer Limits,” “Kraft Theatre,” “Rawhide,” and nearly a hundred other shows. He freelanced scripts for “Gunsmoke” before he became executive story consultant, and held the same position with “Great Adventure.”

He produced “Gunsmoke,” the longest running dramatic show in television history, for the next ten years. The series had previously been produced on radio before it made the transition to television, and ran five more years.

(The conclusion of this interview will appear next weekend. John Mantley talks about what it was like to work with James Arness and much more.)