WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

I was watching an episode of 'Cheyenne' called "The Argonauts", with Rod Taylor and Edward Andrews as the guest stars. Cheyenne teamed up with two guys named Clancy (Taylor) and Duncan (Andrews) to mine for gold. In the end, Duncan went mad with gold fever and stole all of their shares after Cheyenne was called away to help a local Indian tribe. Dunc shot Clancy and left him for dead but was later killed himself by renegades who scattered the gold dust to the winds.

As I watched it I kept thinking this was a pretty close copy of the 1948 movie, "The Treasure of Sierra Madre", with Duncan the Bogart character, Taylor as Tim Holt, and Clint Walker - Cheyenne Bodie - as Walter Huston. And then by that ending, I was thinking it was a blatant rip-off.

But then I saw the end credits:
B. Traven wrote the original novel both the movie and the 'Cheyenne' episode were based on. And it stood to reason, since Jack Warner didn't like to pay for original material when they had an extensive library of material owned by Warner Brothers to choose from. (Roy Huggins had that difficulty when trying to get 'Maverick' launched. He couldn't use his original choice of episode for the pilot or Warner would have had to pay him more. So Huggins dug around in the library and found a non-fiction book called "The War Of The Copper Kings" and built a 'Maverick' plot on that.

BCnU!
Toby O'B