Advanced search
- TITLES
- NAMES
- COLLABORATIONS
Search filters
Enter full date
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
Only includes names with the selected topics
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
1-5 of 5
- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Actor
Erle Stanley Gardner, the prolific pulp fiction writer best known for creating the fictional lawyer Perry Mason; Della Street, Mason's secretary; private detective Paul Drake, Mason's favorite investigator; and Hamilton Burger, the district attorney with the worst won-lost record in the history of fictional jurisprudence, was born in in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1889, the son of a mining engineer. The family soon moved to Portland, Oregon, and later to the Klondike during the Gold Rush. Eventually, the Gardners settled in Oroville, California, a small mining town.
Young Erle graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1909, but his college education was cut short when he was expelled from Valparaiso University in Indiana early in his freshman year for fighting. The young Erle led a wild life, as befits a child of the Klondike and mining towns. He was to remain an ardent sportsman and traveler throughout his life. He also spoke fluent Chinese.
The wild young Mr. Gardner supported himself as a boxer and as a promoter of illegal wrestling matches. Eventually, fate was to intervene. While working as a typist in a California law office, he became intrigued by the subject and decided to make it his profession. In the first half of the 20th century, lawyers did not attend law school but gained their education via practical experience, i.e., working in a law office. Law school was for those who intended to teach the law or become judges. Without formal instruction, Garnder passed the bar examination and was admitted to the California Bar in 1911, opening his first law office in Merced, California, when he was 21 years old.
Initially, business was bad, but his Chinese fluency enabled him to make a living defending Chinese clients, who dubbed him "T'ai chong tze" ("The Big Lawyer"). Gardner moved south to Ventura, where he went into practice with another attorney in 1918. Gardner soon quit practicing law for three years, instead working as a salesman for the Consolidated Sales Co. He married Natalie Frances Talbert in 1921, the year he returned to Ventura and the practice of the law. He was a practicing attorney for the next 12 years.
In the early 1920s, Gardner began writing for the pulp fiction magazines under the pseudonym Charles M. Green, the first of many pen names he would use during his career. Gardner wrote strictly for the money, but he had a flair for it, and his mystery short stories were popular and proved highly salable. He soon became a quite successful writer. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Gardner "wrote nearly 100 detective and mystery novels that sold more than 1,000,000 copies each, making him easily the best-selling American writer of his time."
Gardner established himself as a major contributor to the Black Mask, the most famous of all the pulp magazines. He wrote stories about Gentleman Rogue Lester Leith, Sidney Zoom (The Master of Disguise and the King of Chinatown). After the Great Depression set in, Gardner began writing western stories for a penny a word. A 1931 trip to China gave birth to Major Copely Brane, International Adventurer. That same year, he began using a Dictaphone to dictate his stories. Gardner had averaged 66,000 typed words a week (10% longer than F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1949)). After dictating a story, Gardener's secretary would transcribe the recordings.
Perry Mason debuted in 1933 with two stories, The Case of the Velvet Claws and The Case of the Sulky Girl, and proved instantly popular. The first Perry Mason film, The Case of the Howling Dog (1934) was made the next year by Warner Bros.-First National, with Warren William as Perry Mason, ably supported by future Oscar-winner Mary Astor and character actor Allen Jenkins. Williams returned the following year in The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) and The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935), the former helmed by Michael Curtiz, one of Warner's top directors who won his first Oscar nomination for directing Alex Hakobian that same year. Curtiz eventually won his Oscar for directing Casablanca (1942).
The following year, at RKO, granite-chinned heart-throb Richard Dix played Gardner's detective Bill Fenwick in the B-movie Special Investigator (1936). Meanwhile, back at Warner Bros., William Warren reprised the role of Perry Mason in The Case of the Velvet Claws (1936) before handing the role over to former silent-film superstar Ricardo Cortez. Cortez had played Sam Spade in the original The Maltese Falcon (1931), and at whom the immortal line, "Who's the dame in my kimono?" was directed. In The Case of the Black Cat (1936), the series was foisted off on the B-unit. Donald Woods, who had made his film debut eight years earlier in the silent picture Motorboat Mamas (1928), took over the role for the final entry in the Warner Bros. series, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937). Despite Ann Dvorak being cast as Della Street, it proved the last appearance of Perry Mason on-screen for 20 years, with the exception of his veiled appearance under another name in Granny Get Your Gun (1940), which was based on the Perry Mason novel "The Case of the Dangerous Dowager."
After 1940, a Gardner work would never again appear on the big screen, though Perry Mason was to achieve immortality on TVs as they became ubiquitous in American homes. Perry Mason, which had some success as a radio show on CBS, moved to television in a one-hour format on 1957 and was a smash hit. The series ran until actor Raymond Burr, the definitive small-screen attorney, tired of the role in 1966. The TV series was revived in 1989 as made-for-TV movies, starting with "The Case of Too Many Murders" (1989), written by Thomas Chastain.
Due to his prodigious output, Garnder had to resort to pseudonyms so that his works wouldn't flood the market and depress their value. His most famous pen name was that of A.A. Fair. Gardner had a staff of secretaries to transcribe his dictation. He married one of his long-serving secretaries in 1968, after the death of his wife Natalie, from whom he had been estranged from since 1935.
Out of necessity, Gardner developed formulaic characters and plots, though each book was worked out extensively in his own longhand, including the final courtroom confrontation, before he sat down to dictate it. Graduating from Black Mask in the late 1930s, most of the Perry Mason novels were serialized by the Saturday Evening Post before they were published in book form. Gardner's connection with that magazine lasted 20 years.
As a lawyer, Gardner became the bane of the legal establishment when he helped co-founding The Case Review Committee (colloquially known as the Court of Last Resort), a professional association of concerned lawyers who sought to investigate and reopen cases wherein a person might have been wrongly convicted serious crime. Beside Gardner, other founders included LeMoyne Snyder, a physician and lawyer who wrote well-regarded text books concerning homicide investigations; Dr. Leonorde Keeler, a pioneer and authority in the use of the polygraph in criminal proceedings; former American Academy of Scientific Investigators President Alex Gregory (another polygraph expert who replaced Dr. Keeler after his death), renowned handwriting expert Clark Sellers, and former Walla Walla Penitentiary warden Tom Smith. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed its prestigious Fact Crime Edgar Award on Gardner in 1952, for his non-fiction book The Court of Last Resort (1957), which detailed one of the Court's first investigations.
The most prominent case the Court was involved with was the murder conviction of Dr. Samuel Sheppard, who staunchly proclaimed his innocence of the murder of his wife. (The Sheppard case provided the basis for the fictional The Fugitive (1963) TV show.) During the initial phases of the Sheppard appeal, Gardner polygraphed members of the Sheppard family. He had hoped if the results were favorable, he would then administer the lie detector test to Sam Sheppard himself. However, when Sheppard family members were tested, the polygraph results indicated guilty knowledge. Consequently Gardner declined to test Sam Sheppard, and the Court of Last Resort withdrew from the case, even though Gardner believed in Sheppard's innocence. Sheppard was later freed by a Supreme Court decision that held that Sheppard had not gotten a fair trial due to pre-trial publicity that tainted the juror pool. The Supreme Court case was won by F. Lee Bailey, who also won acquittal for Sheppard during the subsequent retrial. Polygraph tests have never been allowed into evidence in a U.S. court due to their unreliability. Gardner ended his active membership in the Court of Last Resort in 1960. The Court - which conducted preliminary investigations of at least 8,000 cases -- eventually disbanded.
Gardner died on March 11, 1970, at his home, Rancho del Paisano, in Temecula, California. His last Perry Mason mystery, "The Case of the Postponed Murder" was published in 1973.- Animation Department
Armin Shaffer was born on 22 February 1906 in Pennsylvania, USA. Armin is known for Albert in Blunderland (1950), Fresh Laid Plans (1951) and Inside Cackle Corners (1951). Armin died on 11 March 1970 in the USA.- Bill Leyden was born on 1 February 1917 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964), It Could Be You (1956) and Your First Impression (1961). He died on 11 March 1970 in Hollywood, California, USA.
- Writer
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Fenton William Earnshaw was born in Duluth, St. Louis County, MN on 2 August 1912 to Harry Alfred Earnshaw (1878-1953) and Vena Minnie, nee Radtke (1877-1959). Both of his parents are buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California. He attended UCLA, then known as "the Southern Campus", graduating in 1936 with a BA in Political Science. He was the president of the Blackstonians, a "pre-legal society" and a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity. He was also a colonel in the ROTC. He married Dorcas Abbott Brown on 7 June 1938 in Orange County, California. They had a son named Peter, born 12 March 1943. Dorcas died in September, 1994. When he registered for the draft on 16 October 1940, he and Mrs. Earnshaw resided at 1520 Surf Avenue in Balboa, California. Their phone number was NEwport-1895. He initially joined the Army in WWII, but, he told the Los Angeles Times in a 22 December 1952 article, he switched to the Navy, "and eventually found himself commanding a landing craft. He received a summons to report to Washington and before he knew what had happened was assigned to the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA]." "One of his first assignments was to land in Formosa and blow up a Japanese naval dock." He escaped by posing as member of a Chinese burial party. USN records from 1944 list Earnshaw as a Lt. JG as of July, 1943. As for writing for the early TV series Biff Baker, U.S.A. (1952), starring Alan Hale Jr., Earnshaw further told the Times that he took inspiration for the story lines from his own experiences in the OSS and his father's scripts from the radio series, "Chandu the Magician". Earnshaw's first script for 77 Sunset Strip (1958) was Iron Curtain Caper (1958), with Kurt Kreuger as a German agent named John Luder. The last script that Earnshaw is credited with was a 1961 two-part episode of 77 Sunset Strip (1958). He moved to Honolulu in 1963 and lived in the Ala Wai Boat Harbor aboard his 40' ketch, the "Vena M", named for his mother. He also spent several years in Tahiti, writing, and was fluent in French He worked variously for the Hawaii Department of Education, and radio stations KTRG and KGMB. In February of 1970, he flew to the Cleveland Clinic Hospital for cardiac surgery, and was accompanied by his brother, Harry. The surgery was deemed successful, but complications set in, including pneumonia. On 6 March, Earnshaw suffered cardiac arrest and remained unconscious until his death on the 11th. His son, Peter, was also at his side. He was cremated in Cleveland. Funeral services were held at the First Presbyterian Church in Honolulu, and in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were scattered in the ocean off Kona.- Actor
- Writer
Bryan Kendrick was born on 15 June 1929 in Lancaster, Lancashire, England, UK. He was an actor and writer, known for The Avengers (1961), The Spies (1966) and BBC Sunday-Night Theatre (1950). He died on 11 March 1970 in Hillingdon, London, England, UK.