Sam Rolfe | |
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| Born | Samuel Harris Rosenbaum (1924-02-18)February 18, 1924 New York City, United States |
| Died | July 10, 1993(1993-07-10) (aged 69) Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Occupations | |
Samuel Harris Rolfe (bornSamuel Harris Rosenbaum, February 18, 1924 – July 10, 1993) was an Americanscreenwriter best known for creating (withHerb Meadow) the 1950–60s highly ratedCBS television seriesHave Gun – Will Travel, as well as his work on the 1960sNBCtelevision seriesThe Man from U.N.C.L.E. andThe Eleventh Hour.[1]
A prolific radio, film and television writer for over 30 years, Rolfe described the craft as requiring "Stubbornness, masochism and perhaps some inherited insensitivity to pain. Writing is the most exasperating, most tormenting, loneliest occupation in the world".[2]
Rolfe was born Samuel Harris Rosenbaum on February 18, 1924 inNew York City.[3]He was the first of Max and Sylvia (née Kshonsky) Rosenbaum's two children.[4][5] Both of Rolfe's parents were Russian immigrants. His father worked at a bookbinding company,[6] while his mother worked as a seamstress.
Rolfe served in the US Army during World War II. After being discharged in 1945 he studied engineering, then advertising under theGI Bill. He worked as a railroad labourer and a dance instructor.[7]
In a 2005New York Times article, Rolfe's wife Hilda Newman-Rolfe related how Rolfe started his career: "I met my husband, Sam Rolfe, in 1952. He was a struggling writer, but right after we met he sold a screenplay calledThe Naked Spur for $25,000 (equivalent to $296,021 in 2024). That was his big break... After we were married, he began to write and produce television shows. He created 13 in all, includingHave Gun - Will Travel,The Man From U.N.C.L.E. andThe Manhunter".[8]
In 1952 Rolfe shared a two-office bungalow owned byUniversal Studios in West Los Angeles with authorRay Bradbury. Rolfe was writingThe Naked Spur while Bradbury was working onIt Came From Outer Space.[9]
Rolfe's early career included writing 30 minute radio plays for various broadcast anthology shows. Among them were:
In 1950 Rolfe was writing for the radio anthology showSuspense.Richard Widmark starred in Rolfe'sToo Hot To Live, playing a drifter who finds himself accused of murdering a young cafe waitress. Rolfe's script was later adapted as a television show.[10]
In 1951 Rolfe's scriptTime To Kill was broadcast onHollywood Star Playhouse. The drama starredWendell Corey as a would-be bus rider who discovers townspeople have violent plans for him as he waits four hours for the next bus.[11]
In 1953 Rolfe was 27 years old when he wrote his first screenplayThe Naked Spur. The film earned him a 1954Oscar nomination.[12] Co-written withHarold Jack Bloom (who was 27 years old as well), theWestern film was a "five-character chamber play"[13] directed byAnthony Mann and starredJames Stewart.
In his 1971 essayThe Evolution of the Western, film criticAndré Bazin named the filmThe Naked Spur "the finest of all Westerns".[14] In 1997, the film was inducted into theNational Film Registry as a Western film "with tense psychological complexity through strong, clear story-telling by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom".[15]
Rolfe's screenplay was set during the Korean War, where a unit of American soldiers, along with a three-man British tank crew are trapped behind enemy lines.[16]
Rolfe's script portrayed the career and accidental death of aKorean War jet ace who was killed on August 25, 1954, while serving as atest pilot atEdwards Air Force Base in theMojave Desert,California.
Rolfe's script, co-written withIrving Wallace, centered on the crew performing a key test run of the new 200-tonBoeing B-52 Stratofortress.[17]
In 1956 Rolfe wrote the script forUniversal Pictures'Western,Pillars of the Sky from a novel by Will Henry. Rolfe's script was sympathetic to Native Americans, who were often portrayed as one-dimensional villains. A New York Times review said "It's a pleasure to watch a modest, soldier vs. Indian picture shape into something respectable...Pillars of the Sky, with a nice, surprising mixture of compassion and cynicism, keeps insisting that (the characters) all matter, red and white... Thanks to scenarist Sam Rolfe (or author Will Henry), the actors sound like real people".[18]
Most of Rolfe's career was spent in television. Rolfe flourished as a freelance writer, producer and showrunner over a career that lasted four decades.
In 1963 David Susskind and Dan Melnick hired Rolfe as a vice-president at theirTalent Associates-Paramount, Ltd. production company. Three weeks later, Rolfe quit saying he felt better working alone and that he should resign "before I involved myself too deeply".[1]
Rolfe wrote the screenplay for the 1953 episode "Let the Cards Decide", based on a story by Louis L’Amour.[19]
Rolfe wrote the 1958 "The Last Comanchero" episode starringEdd Byrnes.
Co-written by Rolfe, Lou Morheim and Barney Slater in 1959, thisAlcoa-Goodyear Theatre episode was an unsold pilot for a proposed series about the exploits of Johnny Nighthawk, the adventurous owner and pilot of a one-plane airline.[20]
Using a script outline created by Rolfe in 1961,Rod Serling wroteA Quality of Mercy, the 80th episode of the American television anthology seriesThe Twilight Zone.[21]
Rolfe was a contract writer for CBS but left in 1962 to produceThe Eleventh Hour, aMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer star vehicle forWendell Corey.[1] The NBC network series was a medical drama about how psychiatric treatment could aid law-enforcement.[22]
Rolfe co-wrote the lyrics to the show's second season theme song "Theme from The Eleventh Hour" withHarry Sukman. The score was written byIrving Elman.[23]
Rolfe co-created the highly regarded television western seriesHave Gun – Will Travel for CBS from 1957 through 1963 withHerb Meadow.[24] Rolfe had approached CBS with a show idea featuring a contemporary New York City private eye who perused out of town newspapers for leads for work. The network said they were more interested in a Western, so Rolfe changed both the era and the locale of the proposed show.[25]
Rolfe's primary character was "Paladin", a professional gunfighter named after one of Charlemagne's knights and played byRichard Boone. Not a typical television western cowboy, Paladin was almost an anti-hero. Set in the 1870s, Paladin lived in San Francisco's Hotel Carlton and charged a $1,000 (or higher) fee for his services. If he chose to help someone who couldn't afford his fee, he would work for free.[26]
Have Gun - Will Travel was the third most watched television program in America during the show's first three years.[26] Rolfe co-wrote the show's theme song "The Ballad of Paladin" withJohnny Western and show starRichard Boone.[27] The song was chosen one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time by theWestern Writers of America.[28]
Rolfe and Meadow hired a number of new writers during the show's 6 year run, many of whom would later create outstanding television, film and books. Among them:Gene Roddenberry, creator and writer of the originalStar Trek series, wrote 23 episodes ofHave Gun - Will Travel and won aWriter’s Guild award for one of them,Bruce Geller, creator of the TV seriesMission: Impossible andMannix,Sam Peckinpah who would later direct the filmThe Wild Bunch andIrving Wallace, author of the booksThe Agony and the Ecstasy andThe Man also wrote for the show.[29]
ProducerNorman Felton had been developing a television spy series namedSolo withIan Fleming, the creator ofJames Bond. Fleming named the proposed series' lead character "Napoleon Solo" but hadn't told Felton the character name had already been used in the script of the upcomingGoldfinger film.Cubby Broccoli, producer of the Bond films, forbade Fleming to continue working on Felton's project. Felton then approached Rolfe, who was at that time working onThe Eleventh Hour.[30]
Felton asked Rolfe to create a framework for the series. Rolfe's 80 page prospectus for the show included the show nameThe Man from U.N.C.L.E., the pilot episode "The Vulcan Affair", created the backstory for theU.N.C.L.E. organization including the acronym and 30 story ideas.[30] Rolfe's work so impressed Fleming that he tried to buy some of them to use in his Bond books. Rolfe produced the first season ofThe Man from U.N.C.L.E. and did much of the writing.
Robert Vaughn, who playedNapoleon Solo in the series, called Rolfe "the real man from U.N.C.L.E.".[31]
Rolfe made a cameo appearance in the first season, seventhU.N.C.L.E. episode,The Giuoco Piano Affair which aired on November 10, 1964, where he appeared as "Texan" in the party-scene at Gervaise Ravel's (portrayed byAnne Francis) apartment.[32]
Rolfe's attention to detail included specifying special props necessary to create the show's illusion of world spycraft, including the famous "Man From U.N.C.L.E. gun". Rolfe said "I wanted one gun capable of shooting single shots or rapid-fire automatic shots, with sound or silently. I also wanted sleep inducing darts, explosive bullets and just bullets, and a gun that could convert to a long-range rifle. I wanted everything in the U.N.C.L.E. gun, and the one thing I had forgot, I had put in the Thrush gun - an infra-red light, so the Thrush people could shoot at night". The guns themselves actually received 500 fan letters a week, many simply addressed to "The Gun".[33]
Rolfe left the show at the end of its first season.[34] After his departure the show changed direction and exchanged its subtle, tongue-in-cheek humour for more overt gags, culminating in the high-camp third season.[31] Rolfe did not approve of the change in direction and felt the show lost its way after the first season. In an interview given shortly before his death he commented:
I've always feltU.N.C.L.E. was a show that needed a particular kind of a mind to direct it. You needed somebody that could do drama and then also lay humor into it but could sense when the humor had to be stopped and when you had to make the drama take over. And you could talk forever about it, but unless you walk in with that instinct, you're not going to get it. And I think that some of the people that followed me didn't have an instinct for it. So they got silly with it... They never sat down, they didn't really grasp the drama - that you had to have the dramatic spine.[31]
Rolfe created and producedDundee and the Culhane, an AmericanWestern television drama series starringJohn Mills andSean Garrison that aired onCBS from September 6 to December 13,1967.
The show combined the Western and legal show genres, following the exploits of two frontier lawyers who provided legal defense to their accused clients. The show was not a success. CBS had bought it on the strength of Rolfe's pilot, but after seeing a few additional episodes and scripts, network officials were convinced that the show would fail before it caught on. CBS decided in September to replaceDundee and the Culhane in December with aJonathan Winters variety hour.[35][36]
In 1981 Rolfe wroteKilljoy forLorimar Productions. TheCBS television mystery centered around a love triangle that perhaps included a missing person who didn't exist. The "finely dovetailed" script earned Rolfe aMystery Writers of AmericaEdgar Award.[37]
In 1972 Rolfe createdThe Delphi Bureau starringLaurence Luckinbill. The drama series which ran for one season related the adventures of government agent Glenn Garth Gregory who relied on his photographic memory to solve crimes. The show was broadcast onABC as one of three elements ofThe Men, awheel series shown as part of its1972-73 schedule.[38]
After the cancellation ofDundee and the Culhane, Rolfe returned to the spy genre, creating and producing anABC network television series adaptation ofDonald Hamilton’sMatt Helm. The title character was played byAnthony Franciosa. The show aired from September 20, 1975 to January 3, 1976.[39]
In 1974, Rolfe wrote the pilot episode script forManhunter, aQuinn Martin Productions film directed byWalter Grauman starringRick Dalton,Stefanie Powers,Gary Lockwood andJames Olson.Ken Howard replaced Dalton when theCBS network picked up the series, renaming itThe Manhunter which ran for 22 episodes until March 5, 1975.[40]
In the 1960's Cincinnati'sTaft Broadcasting Company began buying broadcast production companies such asHanna-Barbera,Quinn Martin Productions andSunn Classics and renamed itself the Taft Entertainment Company. In 1980, Sy Fischer, president and CEO hired a number of noted television writers and producers, including Rolfe, Sam Denoff, producer-writer ofThe Dick Van Dyke Show, Leigh Vance, writer-producer ofHart to Hart, and Fred Silverman, former chief of CBS.
The Key to Rebecca, based onKen Follett's best-selling suspense novel is credited to Rolfe's pseudonym "Sam Harris" for Taft Entertainment in association with Castle Combe Productions. The four-hour mini-series was filmed and was directed byDavid Hemmings and was scheduled for broadcast in May 1985. It was later shown in the United Kingdom,Scandinavia and other countries where the novel had been popular.[41]
Rolfe then developed other crime drama tv shows, creating, writing and producingRosetti And Ryan,[42]Delvecchio andKaz.[43]
Rolfe continued to work as a producer and screenwriter right up until his death. He wrote scripts forStar Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Vengeance Factor" and theStar Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Vortex".
His last major project was based on Ken Follett’sOn Wings of Eagles. The five-hour television mini-series portrayed former presidential candidate Ross Perot’s experiences in Iran.[24] The mini-series was watched by an estimated 25 million viewers.[44]
In 1975 Rolfe purchased theZimmerman House, a landmark home located in theBrentwood neighborhood inLos Angeles for $205,000 (equivalent to $1,197,925 in 2024) from actorRichard Kelton. Designed in 1949 by modernist architectCraig Ellwood, the house was built in 1950 on a 0.83-acre lot, featuring extensive landscaping by landscape architectGarrett Eckbo. After Rolfe's death, his widow Hilda Newman-Rolfe continued to own and reside at the property until her death in 2022.[45] The home and lot was purchased in 2023 for $ 12.5 million byChris Pratt andKatherine Schwarzenegger who then demolished the house and flattened the lot.[46]
Rolfe died of aheart attack in 1993, aged 69, after collapsing while playing tennis.[47]
