Gilbert Ralston
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Gilbert Alexander Ralston (born 1912, Newcastle, County Down Ireland - died 1999, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina) was an American screenwriter, journalist and author. He often wrote under pseudonym Stephen Gilbert. He worked as a reporter for The Northern Whig newspaper, and then later joined his father's seed sale business before emigrating to the United States.
He wrote for many scientific journals, particularly dealing with the anatomyce of animals. Ratman's Notebooks was his only fiction novel, published in 1969, which later was the basis for the cult film Willard and its sequels. In the 1950s and 1960s he worked as a television writer.[citation needed]
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[edit] Bibliography
- The Landslide
- Bombardier
- Monkeyface
- The Burnaby Experiments
[edit] Wild Wild West
Ralston helped create the television series The Wild Wild West and scripted the pilot episode, "The Night of the Inferno". In 1997, aged 85, Ralston sued Warner Brothers over the upcoming motion picture based on the series. (Wild Wild West was released in 1999.) In a deposition, Ralston explained that in 1964 he was approached by producer Michael Garrison who '"said he had an idea for a series, good commercial idea, and wanted to know if I could glue the idea of a western hero and a James Bond type together in the same show."[1]
Ralston said he then created the Civil War characters, the format, the story outline and nine drafts of the script that was the basis for the television series. It was his idea, for example, to have a secret agent named Jim West who would perform secret missions for President Ulysses S. Grant.
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Ralston's experience brought to light a common Hollywood practice of the 1950s and 60s when television writers who helped create popular series allowed producers or studios to take credit for a show, thus cheating the writers out of millions of dollars in royalties.
[edit] Outcome of court case
Ralston died in 1999, before his suit was settled. Warner Brothers ended up paying Ralston's family between $600,000 and $1.5 million.[2]
