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(1923–1984). American writer.
Wrote as
Michael Adams: "Dateline Moon" (story; script Robert Warnes Leach)
(1960), episode of Men into Space; "Vikor," "The
Watchers" (story with Earl
HAMNER, Jr; script Hamner
and Jerry SOHL) (1967), episodes of The Invaders; "Live
Bait" (story; script with James D. Buchanan and Ronald Austin) (1969),
episode of Mission Impossible.
We learn from an obituary of his younger
sister, Annette Dolinsky Baran, that his father was a Jewish house painter in
Chicago, and based on his date of birth, one can assume that the young Dolinsky
was drafted to fight for his country in World War II. However, he probably did
not enjoy the experience, since he never wrote any war stories, and pacifist
sentiments sometimes surface in his stories. After the war, we find this native
Chicagoan in the Los Angeles area, perhaps having moved there with his family
(since he and his sister both attended UCLA), though perhaps he relocated by
himself to pursue a career as a writer. Dogged investigation shows that
Dolinsky was writing scripts for the radio series The Whistler as early
as February, 1947; still, as if realizing that such work could not guarantee
him a steady income, this cautious young man also took advantage of the GI Bill
to obtain a college degree from UCLA in 1949 and a secondary teaching
credential from USC in 1950, so that he could always support himself as a high
school teacher if all else failed. Interestingly, a recent message from a
former student confirms that Dolinsky did work as a high school English teacher
in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, impressing her with his passion and sense of
humor and encouraging his students to listen to episodes of another radio
series he scripted, The Green Hornet. She also suggests that he may have
lost his teaching job after being identified as a Communist during the McCarthy
hearings: does a youthful flirtation with leftist politics explain why he had
trouble getting steady work until the late 1950s? In any event, his tenure as a
teacher may have been brief, but it surely informed his successful work for the
television series Mr. Novak (1963-1965), featuring an idealistic high
school English teacher that Dolinsky undoubtedly identified with.
One doubts, though, that Dolinsky ever missed
teaching as he began getting writing assignments in radio, film, and television,
including the scripts of two forgotten B-movies—Hot Rod Rumble (1957)
and As Young As We Are (1958); a cover image also shows that he wrote
the novelization of the former film under the title Hot Rod Gang Rumble
(1957). However, the bulk of his credits, then and for the rest of his career,
involved writing for television, including an unusually high proportion of
science fiction series—which might be regarded as evidence of a special
affinity for the genre, even if there is little about his scripts to suggest he
had any sort of scientific background or special interest in science. From a
more cynical perspective, one might argue that, since the science fiction
series of the day were not particularly prestigious or profitable, the top
writers tended to avoid them, so that unheralded journeymen like Dolinsky could
more readily market their wares in such venues.
What else do we know about Meyer Dolinsky? As
he settled into his screenwriting career, we know that he engaged in some
minimal networking with other writers, since he was twice a guest speaker for a
writer's organization called the Southwest Manuscripters, whose other speakers
included science fiction writers like Forrest J.
ACKERMAN, Charles BEAUMONT, Robert BLOCH, Ray
BRADBURY, Mark Clifton, Rod
SERLING,
and Leonard Wibberley; later, he had no trouble getting a science
fiction novel published, and he was interviewed by another writer, David J.
SCHOW, for the book The Outer Limits Companion. A Jewish organization
newsletter indicates that, at some point, a man named Meyer Dolinsky picked up
a wife named Ursel, though a genealogy chart elsewhere, with different birth
and death dates for the man married to Ursel, suggests that this was a
different Meyer Dolinsky; who can be sure about such things? Still, one can
more confidently discount reports that the man also worked as an "actor
and stunt coordinator," since these appear to be the result of confusing
Dolinsky with other people who shared his pseudonym Michael Adams.
Turning to his contributions to science
fiction film, Dolinsky's earliest scripts of genre interest include two of the
duller episodes of that dull series, Science Fiction Theatre, and his
contributions to the short-lived World of Giants were probably no better.
But his work for another short-lived series, Men into Space, showed more
promise: true, "Building a Space Station" and "Caves of the
Moon" were only competent but routine tales of male camaraderie and a
spaceman in peril, which is what the show specialized in, but his story for
"Dateline: Moon" broke away from the pattern to offer an intriguing
drama about a sleazy journalist who tries to con William
LUNDIGAN's
Colonel McCauley with a phony alien artifact, also introducing the
provocative theme that would increasingly dominate the series, McCauley's quest
for evidence of alien life. Yet since his script for the episode, now in the
UCLA archives, was rejected and rewritten, leaving him with only a story
credit, and since he never worked for the series again, one might detect
evidence of a pattern that would haunt his career: Dolinsky figures out what a
series wants and initially provides it, then somehow loses his touch, or
alienates somebody on the staff, forcing him to look for work elsewhere.
"Dateline: Moon" was also the first occasion when Dolinsky asserted
his Writer's Guild-protected right to use a pseudonym, Michael Adams, and one
can infer from its occasional deployments that, like Harlan
ELLISON, he used this name to indicate his extreme displeasure with the way a
certain assignment turned out. (Does the name mean that Michael, the first name
he later used for his novel, damns this project?) Pardon me for projecting,
then, but to me it all suggests a writer who lacked certain social skills.
But Dolinsky soldiered on with the
indefatigable energy that would define his career, selling scripts to a number of
major and minor series in the 1960s, and he temporarily seemed to find a home
with the anthology series The Outer Limits, to which he contributed
three scripts that represent his best argument for inclusion in this
encyclopedia. Therein, a characteristic theme also suggestive of a socially
challenged person emerged: paranoia. "The Architects of Fear"
involves some scientists' scheme to stage a phony alien invasion to bring about
world peace, "O.B.I.T." posits an implausible effort by aliens to
conquer the Earth by introducing a pervasive surveillance device, and
"Z-Z-Z-Z-Z" looks suspiciously at some beehives to suggest that their
inhabitants, too, may be secretly plotting to take over the Earth. The first
two episodes have been critically praised, but to me they were sabotaged by
factors Dolinsky had no control over: the ludicrous appearance of the purported
monster in "The Architects of Fear," and the obligatory appearance of
an alien menace in "O.B.I.T.," dictated by the series' format, that
distorted an otherwise straightforward look at the dangers of Big Brother-style
totalitarianism. Only "Z-Z-Z-Z-Z" seems an unqualified success,
driven by the remarkable performance of Joanna
FRANK,
although its tale of a bee-turned-woman who kills a man's wife in dogged
pursuit of her sinister goals is more than mildly misogynistic, another
recurring undercurrent in Dolinsky's work. But Joseph STEFANO disliked certain
aspects of his script and heavily revised it, and Dolinsky never worked for the
series again.
Dolinsky kept dabbling in science fiction in
the later 1960s, though with increasingly unhappy results: certainly,
"Plato's Stepchildren" should be near the top of anyone's list of the
worst Star Trek episodes, and the second script he wrote for the series,
the rejected "The Joy Machine," was undoubtedly much worse. And his
brief associations with The Invaders and Mission: Impossible were
probably not fulfilling experiences, since he had all of his work credited to
Adams. By the early 1970s, Dolinsky was mostly writing for crime dramas, with
several scripts for Cannon (1971-1976) and Hawaii Five-0
(1968-1980), although his tenure with the later series again ended, as was the
case with Men into Space, with a rewritten script and another story
credit for Adams. A collection of his scripts, donated to the library of his
alma mater UCLA, shows that he also tried to sell scripts to several other
series in the 1960s and 1970s, including the forgettable science fiction series
My Favorite Martian, Amos Burke, Secret Agent, The Time Tunnel,
and The Man from Atlantis, and he also worked on a proposed adaptation
of Eleanor Cameron's 1954 juvenile The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom
Planet —a project that, despite its science fictional story line, seems far
removed from Dolinsky's strengths, such as they were, as a writer.
But the 1970s was also the time when the
risk-adverse Dolinsky, now entering his fifties, finally decided to pursue some
bigger dreams: he published a science fiction novel, as Mike Dolinsky, called Mind
One (1972), and he began writing film scripts again: two routine
made-for-television movies, the crime drama The Manhunter (1972) and
technothriller SST—Death Flight, and a mildly horrific insane-asylum
drama, The Fifth Floor (1978), that earned a theatrical release. But
none of these projects brought him any acclaim, and this is also the time when
Meyer Dolinsky begins to fade from the public record, with only one more credit
for an episode of the ephemeral series Big Shamus, Little Shamus (1979)
before his seemingly premature death in 1984 at the age of sixty. Noting that
his years of birth and death roughly coincide with those of Rock
HUDSON,
one might theorize that Dolinsky was also a deeply closeted gay man
who died of AIDS, explaining the near-complete absence of biographical data and
certain recurring themes in his work. But there are many other things that can
drive a hard-working writer to an early grave, including alcoholism, drug
abuse, and the sheer anger and frustration of working in an industry that so
dauntingly fails to value its writers. Based on the information that I have
been able to turn up, one suspects that there is an interesting and instructive
story to tell about the life of Meyer Dolinsky, and somebody, somewhere, for
some reason, should endeavor to tell it. But having done what I can, this
hard-working writer must now leave this unfinished task for others to address
and move on to another assignment.
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