Reprinted below are a number of those news blurbs from 1959, for programming decisions that never happened. Information in Italics is from me, clarifying what did happen during the course of events.
June 13, 1959
Have Gun – Will Travel will film four shows in Mexico this summer, another four or five in Hawaii. If the location jaunts are successful, the show next year will travel to Japan, Asia and Europe.
June 6, 1959
Richard Carlson goes into production in June with another 39 episodes of Mackenzie’s Raiders. (A second season never went into production.)
May 30, 1959
Ed Sullivan trying to line up Marlene Dietrich and Orson Welles to do their magic act for the show he’s taking to Moscow next August. The Russians, in return, offered Ed choice of six acts for the special he’s to tape in Moscow for televising here in September.
March 28, 1959
Bat Masterson will be stretched to a full hour on Monday nights.
February 14, 1959
Jack Oakie is now weighing offers for two different series. The Fat Man and Uncle Sidney. No decision yet.
May 9, 1959
Constance Bennett now goes into the projected Mother is the Governor of Texas series, originally planned for Helen Traubel.
May 23, 1959
Polly Bergen preparing “The Enchanted Cottage” as a 90-minute TV special.
May 16, 1959
Rock Hudson and Joan Crawford may star in a 90-minute special based on Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock.
April 4, 1959
With nine shopping months until Christmas, there’s a Christmas special in the works. Burl Ives in “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” The producers see it as a yearly affair.
October 17, 1959
Kathy (THE REAL McCOYS) Nolan and Hugh (WYATT EARP) O’Brian are working up an act that they’d do for TV guest shots. Idea for the act was born when, by coincidence, they appeared at state fairs together last summer.
October 3, 1959
Richard Boone will finish filming this season’s batch of HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL episodes in January, will then turn director for two episodes of DEATH VALLEY DAYS, may also direct both a GUNSMOKE and a LINEUP for CBS.
October 3, 1959
Neville Brand, who played Al Capone in the original THE UNTOUCHABLES, and just appeared in DuPont’s BODY AND SOUL, will star in THE SEARCHERS, new series dealing with the Treasury Department’s narcotics division. Test film will be shot in Tokyo this month.
May 23, 1959
Nancy Gates, who plays a man in the first Riverboat episode, may do the role in three more segments of the NBC series.
June 6, 1959
If Joan Crawford goes through with plans to do an anthology dramatic series for Pepsi-Cola, it will mark the first time in history a member of the sponsor’s board of directors stars in the sponsor’s show.
August 29, 1959
Broderick Crawford has come to the end of the HIGHWAY PATROL road after four years. He’ll do at least 39 episodes of a new series, a Western, which will probably go into production before the snow flies.
