Writer/producer David Dortort passed away September 5.
Among his many other credits, he was one of the writers of the excellent Guy Madison picture Reprisal! (1956). This would be a tremendous addition to Sony’s new DVD-R thing.
Here’s bits and pieces of the Associated Press piece I came across —
LOS ANGELES — David Dortort, who produced Bonanza and other TV Westerns, has died. He was 93.
Dortort also was executive producer of The High Chaparral, which ran from 1967 to 1971, and the 1979 miniseries The Chisolms, along with several later Bonanza TV movies.
And of course, one of the other three REPRISAL! screenwriters (Raphael Hayes) died just last month, in your neck of the woods.
Michael Pate gets pretty good billing on that poster….
I’d love to get an idea how these long lists of writers came to be on these middle-budget pictures. (These days, with each cast member getting a rewrite, it makes more sense.)
Unfortunately, for Reprisal!, we don’t have anybody to ask anymore.
I dunno … I looked up Dortort’s history on THE LUSTY MEN, a truly brilliant movie, in Bernard Eisenschitz’s terrific Nicholas Ray bio. Apparently Dortort was the original writer on the project, adapting a published story by a real rodeo guy, Claude Stanush, after he (Dortort) had submitted a treatment on the same subject to RKO. But the producer, Jerry Wald, also had a second writer working on the script at the same time.
Then once Nick Ray and Robert Mitchum came on board, they threw out everything that had been written so far, got Horace McCoy to come up with some new material, and improvised the rest based on Stanush’s original story.
But, oddly, Dortort hung around the set to watch them (not) film his script, because he was new in the biz and wanted to learn.
Lusty Men is a great great film, one of Ray’s best, I always thought.