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« on: July 02, 2020, 08:54:39 PM »
I think the official credits are to some extent misleading--Violet Welles said in the one interview with her I found that she wrote, apparently, all the PT 1841 episodes credited to Gordon Russell--and implied that she wrote some that went out under his name earlier on, as well (which reportedly is how she got the gig to write for the show under her own byline). I have no idea why she wasn't simply credited for writing that final group of episodes--it may have been that she, like several others who worked on the show, had some kind of argument or dispute with DC. It seems to have happened a lot. So Gordon simply paid her under the table and took the credit. According to another writer who so far as I know never worked on DS, playwright Robert Patrick (author of the fascinating novel Temple Slave, a fascinating roman-a-clef about avant-garde off-off B'way theatre culture in 1960s Greenwich Village), a lot of name writers had ghost writers churning out their scripts if they were busy developing other projects and were given assignments on deadline.
Joel Crothers also stated in an interview that he wrote, if I remember correctly, at least a couple of scripts for DS. I have no idea who got credit for writing those shows.
I doubt we will ever know more about who was actually writing for the show since most of the people involved are dead now. And even when they were living, they would have been reluctant to discuss this subject, since among other things there were potential violations of writers' guild rules involved.
G.
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