Bonanza Classic Revived
Lawyer and Bonanza enthusiast Andrew Klyde shares the story behind the 50th anniversary DVD release.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 11/03/2009
Fenton Coe had a wonderful executive secretary named Joan Sherman (she was an interesting character, by the way; her father was the manager of Abbott and Costello). So David and Joan were working together in one of their late night sessions, and he would hand his legal pad to Joan, who was the fastest typist in the West, and she was sort of pausing. They weren’t happy with “Panamint.” She, being a bright gal, said, “Tell me a little bit about where the Cartwrights lived.” And he said, “It was nestled along the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains where these magnificent Ponderosa Pine trees dot the landscape.” She asked, “What kind of trees?” And he said, “Ponderosa Pines.” And she asked, “Why don’t you call it the Ponderosa?” And he said, “Eureka!”
Dan Blocker [Hoss], bless his heart, gave her an inscribed photograph, which said, “To Joannie, I hereby dub you the Madam of the Ponderosa, love Dan’l.”
Bonanza was the first hour-long color series. Whose idea was it to shoot the show in color?
That partly depends on who you ask. The instructions from New York were to make it a one-hour show and to make it a Western, but there were no instructions to shoot in color. That came later, and I believe that what probably happened was that David Dortort was enamored of the Lake Tahoe area; he had taken his family there on vacations. And he was always a student of American history, specifically Western history, even though he was born in New York and grew up in Brooklyn. But he had a great love for the West and visited a lot of the great national wonders, including Lake Tahoe. Again, he had an ally in Fred Hamilton, who had the ear of his boss Alan Livingstone. Fred Hamilton was very close friends with Robert Stack, of Untouchables fame, and Stack had a vacation home at Lake Tahoe. So between them all, they were all very familiar with, and in love with, the Tahoe area. It follows that they’d want to shoot in color. It just cries out to be preserved in living color. So I think what happened was, David, perhaps at his initial pitch or shortly thereafter, made a point of suggesting they shoot the show in color. The initial reaction was, that’s going to cost a lot of money, but, you know, the parent company, RCA, was in the business of making color TVs, after all.
Lorne Greene has said, that if it were not for the fact that the pilot was shot in color, it probably wouldn’t have gotten on the air. What he meant by that was, candidly, the pilot episode wasn’t really very good.
The reason it was not a great example of the series is because it was really rushed, and the [actors] were handed their scripts hours before filming started.
The NBC executives had seen two other color pilots and rejected them both, but they loved the way Bonanza looked. That’s because the director of photography was Bert Glennon, who was John Ford’s cinematographer and one of the all-time greats.
Comments (2)
Great article!
The DVDs are fantastic and I can't wait for more to come out. Thanks to Andy Klyde for keeping the Bonanza flame burning.
Prof. F. Sheets, LI NY
I loved Henry Beck’s article on Bonanza. He wrote: “In the same way that John Meston guided Gunsmoke, Herb Meadow and Sam Rolfe drove Have Gun Will Travel, and Gene Roddenberry fashioned Star Trek...”
I found it interesting that he put Have Gun Will Travel and Star Trek together in the same sentence. Others have observed that Trek was really a western in Spandex clothing. If you have watched any of the Have Gun DVDs recently, you will find an eerie similarity between the preachy, moral lessons of Have Gun and those of Trek.
Read the credits. Many, perhaps most, of the Have Gun, Will Travel episodes were directed by, yup, you guessed it, Gene Roddenberry. It seems Paladin was unknowingly going where no man had ever gone...yet.
John Taylor
Show Low, AZ
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