BRANDED
Larry's brand..... Larry had a meeting with a man by the name of Harv Bennett. He had gone there to pitch him an idea for a TV series. He didn't have anything in mind when he went to the meeting. While waiting in Harv Bennett's office he picked up a brochure that listed old 16mm movies that were available for home viewing. In those days people would actually rent a movie projector and run a movie on a sheet or wall. On the brochure he came across a movies called "Four Feathers." This was a movie that Larry had seen as a kid. It was a story of how a man "Branded" a coward by his friends, which of each gave him a white feather, a symbol of cowardice. He had to journey to the Sudan where his friends were sent as part of an expeditionary force by the British government. He had to perform an act of heroism and return a feather to each of these men who branded him a coward. Larry felt cowardice was a very interesting idea and westerns were very popular in television at that time. So when he went into see Harve Bennett he winged it and made up a story of a captain in the cavalry who had been court-martialed had to spend the rest of his life proving to himself and to everybody else that he really wasn't a coward. Harve really liked the idea and to give him a couple of days to talk with the people from ABC about it. In the mean time, Larry's manager, Peter Sabiston, told Larry he thought he could sell this to Goodson and Toddman. They had previously produced a popular TV western called "The Rebel" and were in with Proctor and Gamble. So Larry wrote up four or five pages of "Branded," which took him about a half an hour and Sabiston took it over to Goodson and Toddman. Before he knew it they wanted to meet with them. They told them they thought it was great and that they had sent it to Proctor and Gamble who owned a time period 8:30 to 9:00 on Sunday nights on NBC. This time slot came between "The Wonderful World of Disney" and "Bonanza" and the competition was "The Ed Sullivan Show" on CBS and "The F.B.I." on ABC. Sunday night was one of the most important nights of the week for television. Proctor and Gamble went for it as long as they could deliver them Chuck Connors. Chuck Connors was available to do the series, but Proctor & Gamble was shocked when Chuck had asked for the unheard amount of $10,000 an episode. At that time $10,000 for a half an hour show was a lot of money. Everybody in town was talking about this. At this time there hadn't been any film shot, or test or promo film shot, nothing. All they had where these pages that Larry wrote up at the start and Chuck Connors agreement to do the show and Goodson and Toddman. The NBC told them they didn't want the show because they didn't own it. What they wanted was a percentage of the show. Larry didn't give in and Proctor and Gamble stuck by him with this decision. Proctor and Gamble told them they owned the time slot and that they were putting "Branded" in that time slot. They were told they would go on in mid season and the start date was January. They didn't have any shows or pilot wrote at this time. The had to come up with sixteen shows at that time, they needed to gear up, they needed a line producer, and a technical staff. They had to throw everything together and get it ready for production. In a 1965 article in TV Guide about the new Branded series, Larry Cohen talked about the show and Chuck Connors in the starring role of Jason McCord. "My intellectual concept of the show is that it's like a Shakespearean tragedy," said Cohen. "You must have a great man to experience true tragedy. That's why I like Chuck Connors so much in this part. He's so big — he's the tallest underdog in the west. I think the trend in television is the character in a situation week after week. The Fugitive broke the ice, but this isn't like The Fugitive — because Connors isn't chasing a one-armed man." Cohen also described the central; character of Jason McCord as " a man mistakenly, unfairly hated and persecuted — a man who must fight to destroy the image of dishonor that follows him." And on the subject of Jason McCord's new weapon, the broken sabre, Cohen said, "He'll take that half sword with him wherever he goes. A western hero needs a novel weapon, but this sword fits the character — it's not superimposed like Chuck's rifle in The Rifleman or Steve McQueen's sawed-off gun in Wanted Dead or Alive." *Some of this information, but not all is from David Fury's book Everything on this website is public domain and you are welcome to take whatever you want, as long as you don't claim it for your own. Enjoy! *If anybody has any information on any of the stars, and would like to share it,
posted 2/6/07 |
Microsoft IE. 6.0 or better―you can get it here:
