Maverick: Legend of the West  takes you behind the scenes of the iconic Western series that turned the genre inside out, featuring interviews and commentary from series creator and producer Roy Huggins, writers Marion Hargrove and Howard Browne, directors Budd Boetticher and Leslie H. Martinson, producer Coles Trapnell, actors Roger Moore ("Beau Maverick") and Robert Colbert ("Brent Maverick"), and other key series personnel.

Bret Maverick (James Garner), and later his brother Bart (Jack Kelly), neither looked nor acted like a traditional cowboy hero. He dressed in black, played cards for a living, and wasn't above sneaking out the back door to avoid trouble. At a time when network TV was loaded with Westerns, Maverick (ABC, 1957-1962) stood out from the pack, putting series creator Roy Huggins on the map as a producer while making James Garner a star.

Maverick quickly became a bona fide TV legend, burning itself indelibly in the hearts and minds of Baby Boomers around the world. But like most legends, the show's history on television is a mixture of fact and fiction. Maverick: Legend of the West examines the myths and the realities, probing what made Maverick such a huge success in its first two seasons, while also revealing the backstage struggles with Warner Bros. that eventually drove away Huggins and Garner, the show's two key components. This revised second edition features additional interviews with actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. ("Dandy Jim Buckley") and guest stars Sherry Jackson, Julie Adams, and Linda Lawson, plus new information about the series, behind-the-scenes photographs, three appendices, and much, much more.

"A truly dandy history of the TV show, full of thrillingly memorable anecdotes, interviews and a lively (yet scholarly) look at the television industry of the late fifties and early sixties.... This is one of those books that transcends its own parochial interest to shed light on an entire medium: the players emerge as three-dimensional, idiosyncratic characters, and when the decline of the series is delineated, one feels it profoundly as the genuine tragedy and short-sided artistic waste that it was. Mr. Robertson performed the same honors in The Fugitive Recaptured, and, as notable works of television journalism, both deal a straight flush."

The Nassau Herald

"The definitive guide to Garner's definitive series."

Amazon.com

"A thorough documentation of the Emmy Award-winning series."

Ingram

"Everything you ever wanted to know about the TV show."

Jill Jackson's Hollywood

"Ed Robertson has studied and described this entertainment phenomenon from its beginning in 1956... [He] has made that history suspenseful and absorbing, and I am persuaded, after reading Maverick: Legend of the West, that Maverick is nowhere near the end of its illustrious history."

Roy Huggins
creator of Maverick
from his Foreword

 

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