Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God Read Online Free PDF Page A

Disneyland, agreed to let kids into their Kansas-City-based training center to learn what it took to become a pilot (Duncan Richardson) or flight attendant (Pat Morrow). The series, for which Silliphant was writer and production supervisor, was called “What I Want to Be” and ran for ten weeks beginning October 3, 1955, in the third quarter-hour of The Mickey Mouse Club.
    For all his genius as an innovator and story editor, Disney the man was a ganglia of contradictions. As a result of having been cheated out of the first cartoon character he created, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, he was paranoid to a fault about everything else his studio turned out. He would roam the office after his workers had left, leaving notes for them in blue ink and rifling through their trash cans in case they had discarded an idea that his genius would know how to save. But he also wanted to discover if any of them was working for anybody else on his time. When Silliphant realized this was going on, he started leaving cryptic and misleading material in his trash can to see what Walt would do. Perhaps as a result, when Silliphant pitched Disney on future episodes, discord developed between the men and both the series and Silliphant’s employ were canceled.  [31] “What I Want to Be” was replaced by “Adventure in Dairyland,” in which Mouseketeers Annette Funicello and Kevin “Moochie” Corcoran appeared. As for Silliphant, he never worked for Disney again.
    Meanwhile, Maracaibo was published to reviews that were good enough to warrant a call from Collier’s magazine “about my interest in submitting a short story for consideration,” Silliphant said. “Having no short story conveniently in stock, I sat down that very night and wrote 3,500 words and called it ‘Under Capricorn.’ The title comes from one of the lines in the human palm, which, in the case of murderers, is to be found under the mound of Capricorn.  [32] The Collier’s editor, upon receiving and reading the short story, rejected it with a vehemence, which I found quite disturbing [calling it] ‘the most horrible story she’d ever received.’” Undaunted, he took off the rejection slip and mentioned the story to agent Ned Brown. “He promptly sold it for $750 (more than I would have received from the niggardly Collier’s crowd) to a new TV show called Screen Director’s Playhouse. “I said, ‘How long has this been going on?’ and I was in television.”  [33]
    The story was never produced, but that hardly mattered; Silliphant had cracked TV. The first four titles in his imposing Writers Guild of America credit roster are for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which filmed at Revue — the TV arm of MCA — in 1956. Peggy Robertson and Norman Lloyd handled the day-to-day chores as associate producers. Silliphant’s first script for them was “Never Again” (airdate: April 22, 1956), which had a twisted history: it was based on a story by movie columnist Adela Rogers St. John, with earlier attempts by Gwen Bagni and Irwin Gielgud. Silliphant applied the final polish.
    Apparently it shone like a beacon because he was hired ten more times over the course of three years but seldom got to work with the Master of Suspense himself.
    “Except for one meeting with Hitch to discuss my scripting a one-hour Suspicion, ” Silliphant said, “I never, over the two or three seasons I wrote for the show, met the man.  [34] My meetings were always with Joan Harrison — with nobody else — not even with Norman Lloyd, although I did see him a few times around the office at Revue. Joan would simply call me up and tell me she was sending me a story to read and if I liked it to come in and we’d talk about it. I don’t recall ever having written an original for the show — only adaptations — and all based on stories given to me by Joan. This lady had a prodigious talent and… one of the keenest story minds of any producer with whom I ever worked — I have always