Roy Huggins

Roy Huggins
Born	July 18, 1914 Litelle, WA
Died	April 3, 2002 (aged 87) Santa Monica, CA
Other name(s)	Thomas Fitzroy John Thomas James John Francis O'Hara
Occupation	film and television producer screenwriter novelist
Years active	1950s-1990s

Roy Huggins (July 18, 1914 – April 3, 2002) was a novelist and an influential writer/creator and producer of character-driven US television series, including Maverick, The Fugitive, and The Rockford Files.

Education and pre-Hollywood employment

Huggins was educated at the University of California, 1935-41. After graduation, he worked as a special representative of the U.S. Civil Service, 1941-43, and later as an industrial engineer, 1943-46.

Novels and TV series

Huggins' novels include The Double Take (1946), Too Late For Tears (1947) and Lovely Lady, Pity Me (1949).

When Columbia Pictures purchased the rights to Huggins' novel The Double Take in 1948, Huggins signed a contract with the studio to adapt the script into the movie I Love Trouble. From here he entered the movie industry, working as a contract writer at Columbia and RKO Pictures. In 1952, he wrote and directed the film Hangman's Knot, a Randolph Scott western. Afterwards, he worked as a staff writer at Columbia until 1955.

Huggins moved to television in April 1955, when Warner Brothers hired him as a producer. He is best known as the creator of long-running shows such as Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip and The Fugitive, all on ABC.

Huggins left Warner Brothers and in October 1960 became the vice-president in charge of television production at 20th Century-Fox. In the 1961-1962 season, he created Bus Stop, an ABC drama based loosely on William Inge's play of the same name, with Marilyn Maxwell in the role of Grace Sherwood, owner of the bus station and diner in fictitious Sunrise, Colorado.

In 1963, Huggins took a job as a vice president in the television division at Universal, where he spent the next 18 years. At Universal, he created The Rockford Files and produced The Virginian (TV series), Alias Smith and Jones and Baretta, among other series.

Later, after being lured out of retirement by protege Stephen J. Cannell, he served for three years as the executive producer of Hunter. Cannell said of Huggins' time on Hunter: "Roy was in the driver's seat where he belonged. Nobody does it better or with more style...Roy Huggins is my Godfather, my Hero and my Friend. They don't come any better."^[1]

Huggins often wrote under the pseudonym John Thomas James, a composite of the names of his three sons from his second marriage.

A member of the Communist Party USA until the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, Huggins appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, where he named 19 former comrades who had already been named before the Committee.

Huggins was married to artist Bonnie Porter and later to actress Adele Mara.

The "Huggins Contract"

At Warner Brothers television, Huggins was repeatedly denied credit and compensation as the creator of several television programs. Perhaps most famously, Jack Warner deliberately had the pilot to 77 Sunset Strip screened briefly at movie theatres in the Caribbean in order to legally establish that the television series derived from a film, rather than, as was actually the case, several books and novellas Huggins had written in the 1940s. Since this was not the only occasion on which Warner had found a way to circumvent Huggins' creative rights, he left the studio soon thereafter.

Following this experience, he increasingly demanded ownership of all television concepts he authored. By the mid-1960s, he had distilled this demand into a standard part of all contracts into which he entered.

I was getting paid my royalty and my fee whether I did the show or not. If I conceived the show, and got it on the air, anyone could produce it and I would still get paid just as if I was doing it . . . That became known as "the Huggins Contract". Every producer in television would say 'I want the Huggins contract', and some of them got it.^[2]

—Roy Huggins, interview with the Archive of American Television, July 21, 1998

A notable early example of a show created under "the Huggins Contract" was The Fugitive. Not only was the production carried out by Quinn Martin Productions, but he only gave limited television rights to Universal Studios. He reserved other rights, such as those he would later exercise to allow for a 1993 film.^[2]

References

External links

• Stephen J. Cannell's Archive of American Television explanation of Huggins' approach
• Roy Huggins Biography at The Museum of Broadcast Commications
• Thrilling Detective
• The Caucus for Television Producers, Writers & Directors
• Roy Huggins at the Internet Movie Database
• Roy Huggins' Interview in the Archive of American Television