ART WALLACE LIED THROUGH HIS TEETH!
I respectfully submit that there is really no way to prove that Wallace lied or in any way distorted events as they actually took place. Granted, some of the other DS Files interviews were conducted before Wallace's had been done, but the subject of Barnabas' creation/introduction did come up and was discussed in almost all, if not all of them, with previous interviewees' remarks being quoted to current interviewees, who were asked for their comments. If Wallace had truly lied, one would suspect that at least one of the interviewees that followed might have mentioned that fact or at least disputed his claims. No one did.
Mr. Wallace was obviously jealous of what the latter writers (especially Hall & Russell) did, having turned his basic Gothic melodrama into something unique and fabulous.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not. But one thing that isn't up for dispute is the fact that prior to his interview with Gross, Wallace had successfully sued DC over Wallace's contributions to DS and his right to a share of DS merchandising profits. (I believe they settled on a lump sum). Wallace was quite proud of his contributions to DS and that they had been upheld in court. In what are frequently some of the frankest interviews ever to be conducted with the DS crew, nowhere is there a hint from anyone involved that Wallace might have been jealous of the success of his coworkers or anyone who succeeded him on the show. Perhaps he simply hid it well. Or perhaps it didn't exist.
After 13 weeks of writing scripts he walked away and didn't look back until he found out that the show had become a hit without his presence.
Actually, that isn't true. For example, Wallace's last credited script is for episode #85, which is within week #17 of the series. And there is no evidence to suggest that he even departed exactly thereafter.
I mean, read all the behind-the-scenes books and articles that have been written- aside from Mr. Wallace's pithy remarks, everything else published bolsters the above story about how Barnabas was created.
Well, it's no secret that many of the behind-the-scenes books (particularly those coming from PomPress) have a decided slant in which everything is framed in favor of DC. (In fact, I have it on good authority, that the original manuscript for the DS Companion, for instance, was different from the book we're all familiar with today - and that can be attributed to the way in which it was, er, "edited" before publication.) Wallace is either never mentioned or is merely a footnote in several of the books. But that doesn't necessarily mean that his contributions to DS were not substantial. Yes, much of what has been written about DS over the years is inaccurate - but that's especially true of some of the assumed "facts" presented in the PomPress books (we've lamented that fact many times here on the forum and have frequently provided our own corrections to, say, such things as the supposed idea that Lamar Trask was shot in episode #1198 (he was stabbed) or that Barnabas never actually gave Josette her music box (he did indeed in episode #404). What's worse is that many of the errors in the PomPress books were easily preventable had someone simply checked the readily available DS episodes in question. And, of course, there are also a great many inaccuracies in the Files interviews. But most, if not all of them, can be traced back to some faulty memories concerning events that had supposedly taken place in the early episodes that had not been seen in some twenty years - not necessarliy to the behind-the-scenes events surrounding the evolution of DS.