David Dortort has been engaged in many kinds of writing throughout his career. During his college career at the City College of New York he majored in history and English, and he has continually drawn from those interests in his writing. From 1938 to 1941, while living in New York, he wrote short stories and for radio, but the advent of World War II brought him a temporary end to that work.
Dortort was based in California during the war. Released from the army in 1916, in 1917 he and his family moved to the west coast. In the late forties he wrote two novels, Burial of the Fruit (1947) and The Post of Honor (1949). During this time he also began to write screenplays. In 1952 he worked on both the script and the production of the film, The Lusty Men, the first realistic treatment of the rodeo cowboy.
During the early fifties Dortort gravitated to television writing. The Cavalcade of America television series, together with his work on The Lusty Men, manifested his desire to write fiction in historical terms. This was also true of “The Dutch Schultz Story,” a script he wrote for the Suspense series when he returned to New York for eight months in 1953.
Returning to California, Dortort immersed himself in television. In 1951 he won an Emmy for his adaptation of a Faulkner short story for Climax, and in 1955 he received the same award for his adaptation of “The Oxbow Incident” on the Twentieth Century-Fox Hour. A pilot he wrote for The Restless Gun during this period became a series in 1957. The series marked an important turning point in Dortort's career and, indeed, in television history, for he was the first television writer to also become a producer.
The late fifties were exceptionally busy and productive years for Dortort. Not completely leaving motion pictures, he wrote the screenplays for Reprisal! (1956), A Cry in the Night (1956), and The Big Land (1957). From 1957 to 1959 he worked as writer-producer for The Restless Gun. And in early 1959 he developed the format for the highly successful Bonanza television series.
The essential research for Bonanza was done by Dortort for a show on Fireside Theatre; as with his other productions, he wanted to present what happened in the American West in entertaining but historically accurate terms. He took his cue from his reading of Bernard DeVoto, who emphasized the importance of mining camps in the West. Hence, Bonanza--the biggest strike of them all. In 1959 the series began its long run, with Dortort as its producer. Its worldwide popularity was insured by its gradual shift from a purely western theme to a kind of morality play, with universal human situations within a western setting. In 1968 Dortort became Bonanza's executive producer.
Bonanza's cast changed considerably over the years. Originally Lorne Greene played the father, and the sons were played by Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker, and Michael Landon. Roberts quit the series in 1965, and Blocker died in 1972. To enlarge the Ponderosa family, David Canary was hired in 1967, Mitch Vogel in 1970, and Tim Matheson in 1972.
In 1965 Dortort created another western television series, The High Chaparral, and became its executive producer. He is also intimately involved with the future of the television industry and has served as president of both the Writers Guild (Television Branch) and the Producers Guild.
David Dortort currently (1972) resides in Bel Air, California.
