| Gilbert Ralston | |
| Birth Name: | Gilbert Alexander Ralston |
| Birth Date: | 5 January 1912 |
| Birth Place: | Newcastle, Ireland |
| Death Place: | Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, United States |
| Occupation: | Screenwriter |
Gilbert Alexander Ralston (January 5, 1912 – March 18, 1999) was a British-American screenwriter,[1] journalist and author. He was a television producer in the 1950s and a screenwriter in the 1960s. He created the television series The Wild Wild West and wrote scripts for Star Trek, Gunsmoke, Ben Casey, I Spy,[1] Hawaii Five-O and Naked City. He wrote the screenplay for the 1971 movie Willard,[2] which was based on the 1968 novel Ratman's Notebooks written by Stephen Gilbert.[2]
Ralston was born in 1912 in Newcastle, Ireland.
In the 1950s he worked as a television producer in the United States. In the 1960s, he worked as a television screenwriter, according to the IMDb website. Willard was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1972 for Best Motion Picture.
He died on March 18, 1999, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, of congestive heart failure.
Ralston was a screenwriter for many of the top television shows in the United States in the 1960s. He wrote the script for the 1967 Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?", which is a line from Adonais (1821), the elegiac poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. He also wrote scripts for Ben Casey, Laredo, I Spy, The Big Valley, Gunsmoke, The Naked City, Combat, Hawaii Five-O and The Wild Wild West
Ralston helped create the television series The Wild Wild West and wrote the pilot episode, "The Night of the Inferno". In 1997, at the age of 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."[3]
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 U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.
Ralston's experience brought to light a common Hollywood practice of the 1950s and 1960s, where television writers who helped create popular series allowed producers or studios to take credit for said series, thus depriving the writers of any royalties.
Ralston died in 1999 before his lawsuit was settled. Warner Brothers ended up paying Ralston's family between $600,000 and $1.5 million.[4]
| Year | Film | Credit | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1968 | Kona Coast | Written by | |
| 1971 | The Hunting Party | Written by | |
| Willard | Screenplay by | based on the novel Ratman's Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert | |
| 1972 | Ben | Written by | based on characters created by Stephen Gilbert |
| 1976 | Special Delivery | Written by | |
| Year | TV series | Credit | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1952-53 | Your Jeweler's Showcase | Producer | 28 episodes |
| 1952-54 | Cavalcade of America | Producer | 14 episodes |
| 1953 | General Electric Theater | Producer | 12 episodes |
| 1955-57 | Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion | Producer, Executive Producer | 37 episodes |
| 1957 | High Adventure with Lowell Thomas | Producer | |
| 1961 | Bus Stop | Writer | 1 episode |
| 1961-62 | Naked City | Writer | 7 episodes |
| 1961-64 | Ben Casey | Writer | 16 episodes |
| 1962 | Route 66 | Writer | 1 episode |
| Writer | 1 episode | ||
| 1962-63 | The Untouchables | Writer | 2 episodes |
| 1963 | Alcoa Premiere | Writer | 1 episode |
| Wide Country | Writer | 1 episode | |
| 1964 | The Richard Boone Show | Writer | 1 episode |
| Suspense | Producer | 1 episode | |
| 1965 | Alfred Hitchcock Presents | Writer | 1 episode |
| Burke's Law | Writer | 1 episode | |
| Gunsmoke | Writer | 1 episode | |
| I Spy | Writer | 2 episodes | |
| Mr. Novak | Writer | 1 episode | |
| Slattery's People | Writer | 1 episode | |
| The Wild Wild West | Writer | 1 episode | |
| 12 O'Clock High | Writer | 1 episode | |
| 1966 | Combat! | Writer | 1 episode |
| Laredo | Writer | 1 episode | |
| 1966-67 | The Big Valley | Writer | 3 episodes |
| 1967 | Insight | Writer | 1 episode |
| Iron Horse | Writer | 2 episodes | |
| Star Trek | Writer | 1 episode | |
| 1967-68 | Gentle Ben | Writer | 5 episodes |
| 1968 | Land of the Giants | Writer | 1 episode |
| 1969 | Hawaii Five-O | Writer | 1 episode |
| The Name of the Game | Writer | 1 episode | |
| 1971 | O'Hara, U.S. Treasury | Writer | 2 episodes |
| 1972 | Nichols | Writer | 1 episode |