The Greatest Westerns Ever Made and the People Who Made Them by Henry C. Parke & TRUE WEST MAGAZINE

Author:Henry C. Parke & TRUE WEST MAGAZINE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Published: 2024-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

JIM BYRNES

With 635 television episodes, 480 radio shows, and 5 movies, no other series in any genre has equaled the longevity of Gunsmoke. And to fans who read the credits, Jim Byrnes is a familiar name, having penned 34 of the very best episodes, and 1 of the movies.

The Iowa-born writer always knew what his specialty would be. “I loved Rawhide, Wanted: Dead or Alive, and of course I loved Gunsmoke, never dreaming I’d ever write for Gunsmoke. I was in high school when I sold my first script.” His older brother Joseph was taking a writing course at Los Angeles Valley College from prolific Western telewriter Richard Carr. “My brother said, ‘They want us to write something, and you watch all the Westerns. Any ideas?’ We wrote a story called Desert Flight. Carr read it and said, ‘You guys should submit it: this is pretty good.’” It became an episode of Zane Grey Theater, “and James Coburn and Dick Powell starred. Then I didn’t sell anything for six years.”

Byrnes wrote scripts on speculation, and drove taxis and trucks until his script, Gaucho, landed him an agent. Gunsmoke producer John Mantley read Gaucho, and called Byrnes in. “They said, we want you to write a Gunsmoke. Come up with a story.” The problem was, they’d already been on for thirteen years. “I started pitching stories. ‘We did that ten years ago.’ I think, this is my great chance; I can’t blow this. I finally found this story about a wolf.” The episode became “Lobo,” and the late Morgan Woodward, who was Gunsmoke’s most frequent guest star, named it his favorite. He recalled with a laugh, “Watching it, I got so involved, I forgot I’m watching me!”

Before Byrnes had finished writing “Lobo,” Mantley offered him a six-week job as story consultant. “I said yes. Then they said, ‘We want you to stay,’ so six weeks turned into two years.”

The late 1960s was a tough transitional time for TV, especially Westerns. The back-to-back assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy led to demands for less violence on-screen. “They had to change the opening of the show: Matt in a shoot-out [became] Matt riding a horse. We were warned constantly about violence—the network called me Mr. Blood-and-Guts because I kill a lot of people.”

While Dillon was making mostly cameo appearances, Arness preferring to spend his time surfing, Byrnes’s skills often earned him plum assignments with Dillon in the center. “The Badge” is one of the few shows to deal with the Matt Dillon/Miss Kitty romance. Byrnes also tackled history that was uglier than TV generally dealt with, as in one of his several two-parters. ‘“The Valley of Tears’ was a real place. Indians would raid ranches and farms, kidnap the women, then meet in the Valley of Tears with the Comancheros, who’d trade for them, to sell them into prostitution in Mexico. I got really pissed off when they changed the title to ‘Women for Sale.’”

Another element common in Byrnes’s stories, but rare in the black hat/white hat world of Westerns, is moral ambiguity.

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