O Sage Can You See

When the TV bunkhouse got so crowded last year, everybody reckoned somebody would have to go. Yet after the usual summer cleaning, none of last season's wagonload of "adult westerns" had moved on, leaving 21 oldtimers right where they were, and for two of them--Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel--that means a cushy rating spot on the top of the Nielsen Rating's top ten. TV producers recognize a mother lode when they see one, and they have moved with mule-skinner determination to pile it even higher: by last week a nerve-shattering total of eleven new westerns was slogging along the TV trail. And no one was slogging with more enthusiasm than a tall, balding journeyman writer-producer named Frank Gruber, 54, who has hacked out more words, he claims, than any other living writer. Nearly all of the words have been western.

Pluck & Prose. During his boyhood in Minnesota and Chicago, Author Gruber was influenced by the works of Horatio Alger, and his philosophy is still sturdily Horatian: he figures that if he works hard enough he can write and sell almost anything. With pluck, luck and plain prose about the plains he has published 41 novels, sold 20 to the movies, done an additional 54 screen plays, 90 TV scripts and written 350 short stories. The fact that he owns 15% of Wells Fargo does not keep him from writing scripts for other oaters (e.g., Desilu's The Texan) for the truth is, he thinks the market is still too small. "There really aren't enough TV westerns," says Gruber. "Now there are 35 hours of prime time a week on seven channels--that's 245 hours of prime time and westerns only take up 18 hours. Why, that's less than 10% of the time."

As businesslike as any Alger hero, Gruber still thinks of himself as primarily a book writer, but cheerfully admits: "I never write a book nowadays until after I've sold the idea for the story to a producer. That's why I stick to westerns. They're easier to sell to the movies and television."

Pitchfork & Ax. A well-read frontier buff, Gruber admits that "in television scripts we distort things. Like in Wells Fargo we have Dale Robertson inventing the swivel holster when it was really invented by John Wesley Hardin. Or we have Belle Starr as a beautiful woman, when she really was a terrible looking old bag."

But while he does not hesitate to shake up history himself, he hates to see amateur head shrinkers steal his act. "The psychological western is nonsense," he insists. "I think the western has to be honest. You kill the heavy in the end; you don't haul him off to the psychiatrist. Like I was watching Gunsmoke and there is this woman who is brutalized by a couple of heavies and she gets rescued and all she wants to do is go off to the city and become a prostitute and lead a good life. Can you imagine that? These young writers do anything."

Other minor errors also rile Gruber. "You don't shoot a man in the throat, and you don't kill him with a pitchfork or an ax," he argues. "We had a script here where the hero was killed with a pitchfork and I changed it to shooting. That very same week Jim [Gunsmoke] Arness killed two men with a pitchfork. That's not an honest western."

Such loyalty to the saddle-sore traditions of the old West is not the sort of thing Businessman Gruber intends to push past the end of a trend. For he still figures he can write anything that the public is willing to buy. Says he: "Science fiction has been gaining, and if it ever gains enough, I'll switch to it."

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