The Freak Accident That Killed The Wild Wild West’s Creator
The Freak Accident That Killed The Wild Wild West’s Creator
Hollywood has always kept its darkness well-dressed. Careers ended with a meeting in a boardroom. Visions are not killed by failure, but by accidents and death. Brandon Lee was shot on a film set. Vic Marorrow was killed by a helicopter on a night shoot. The industry collects these stories the way it collects everything else, quietly and at a profit.
But Wild Wild West creator Michael Garrison’s death always felt different. The details are bizarre and the more you look at them, the stranger they get. It all started with a drink that someone spilled. You watch the Wild Wild West. You love the train, the gadgets, the two agents who made it all feel effortless, but you probably never knew the name of the man who put it all together, or how little time he had left when the cameras first started rolling.
This is his story. Hit that subscribe button and the notification bell because you do not want to miss a single moment. When Michael Garrison, the creator of the Wild, Wild West, pitched the idea to CBS in the mid 1960s, his idea was to create James Bond on horseback. The show would follow two United States Secret Service agents who handled special missions for President Ulysius Srant after the Civil War.
Now, Garrison was obsessed with spy films. He had already tried to make a James Bond film, but it went even deeper than that. In 1954, Garrison and his partner Gregory Ratoff bought the movie rights to Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, for $600. They spent years trying to get the film made. They couldn’t find financing.
When Rolof died in 1960, Garrison sold the rights to Charles K. Feldman for $75,000. Feldman then produced the 1967 film Casino Royale. He got all the glory and Garrison got the regrets. After selling the Casino Royale rights, a different man would have walked away from the whole idea of James Bond and probably never looked back.
But Garrison, he did the opposite. He took the spy, the gadget, and the egoomaniacal villains and he merged it with the western genre. >> My boy, you become rich. You mean we’ve become rich, old man? No, it’s all for you. I think you deserve it. >> By then, the western was dying on American television. Gunsmoke was still on the air, but the genre had started to feel like furniture and had been completely taken for granted.
Meanwhile, Goldfinger had just came out. The man from Uncle was already a hit. But when many people saw the spy genre being on the rise and the western was fading, Garrison saw something else. he saw a gap that could be filled. So when others were choosing between westerns and spy films, he didn’t and decided to combine them.
His combination of the spy genre and the western was definitely a unique idea, but maybe a bit too unique, and you’ll see what I mean soon. At this time in Garrison’s career, nothing on his resume suggested that he was about to create one of the most distinctive shows in CBS history. There was nothing to show that he could even be trusted to create a show at all.
He was 41 years old and had come up through the industry the long way. He was a stage actor in London in the 1940s. He had bit parts at 20th Century Fox and that was it. Then came the slow pivot towards producing at studios that gave him credits without control. He was an associate producer on An affair to Remember and Payton Place.
Both were solid work. They gave Garrison a reputation, but there was nothing to show that he was a legend in the making yet. But his vision was unique in a way that his resumes couldn’t capture. He believed that television audiences were tired of sincerity and dramas rooted in reality.
He was certain that the audience wanted spectacle. So, if a show could be funny and exciting and not quite real, this is why he set the show in a version of the American West that had never quite existed, and why he powered his fictional world with fancy gadgets and science that wouldn’t be invented for another century, even if at all.
The show then cast two men who understood the assignment completely. Robert Conrad with all his heightened physical precision and Ross Martin, a character actor of extraordinary range who could become anyone in the space of a wardrobe change and in a different accent. The Wild Wild West premiered on September 17th, 1965. It wasn’t an immediate ratings giant, but it did find its audience.
And then it found something else. Chaos. Nine producers in one season. That is what CBS did to the Wild Wild West in its first year on air. Garrison conceived the show, sold the show, and then watched a parade of other producers rotate through the production while the network tried to reshape what he had built into something it found easier to understand.
At one point, CBS fired him outright. But Garrison was as stubborn as the fictional characters he created. He went to his lawyers, fought his way back in, and by the end of the first season, he had been reinstated as executive producer. He literally sued his way back onto his own show. And if you know how Hollywood politics work, you’ll see how immense what Garrison achieved actually was.
The version of the Wild Wild West that you saw on air was Garrison’s version, not a committee’s. In television, the committee almost always wins. The fact that it didn’t win here tells you everything about how hard he was willing to push and what kind of man he was underneath the polish of the suits and the Hollywood parties.
He had come too far through too many dead ends to let this one be taken from him. The show was expensive and the network knew it. But was it worth it? Conrad performed most of his own stunts, which was both genuinely thrilling on screen and a constant source of anxiety off of it. The period costumes, the elaborate villain sets, and the gadgets built for scenes cost more than a straightforward western would have.
But Garrison understood something that the accountants at CBS didn’t. The expense was necessary. The show could not be cheap and still be itself. By the second season, he had been proven right. The audience had fully arrived and was rewarded with villains who had grown wilder with continental ambitions and grander schemes.
The partnership between West and Gordon had become something the audience genuinely loved and craved. CBS had stopped asking whether the concept worked and started asking how long they could sustain it. Garrison had found his golden goose. The success of the show rubbed off on him and while season 2 was in production, he moved into the new house in Bair.
Now, that house was marvelous. It had marble floors and a staircase that made a statement about Garrison’s new station in life. The staircase had carpeting, but Garrison felt it limited their grandeur. So, he decided the carpeting should come off and removed it himself. Bare marble, he thought, would look way more impressive. And it made sense.
Garrison didn’t spend all this time fighting to keep the flashiness of his show, but now has this bland looking staircase. He was hosting a housewarming party in August of 1966, and his guests would be greeted by his impressive staircase. By the way, if this story is bringing back the good old days, hit that like button and help it reach every other fan who loves the show like you do.
The production crew was filming the episode titled The Night of the Ready-made Corpse in August. That should have been the highlight for Michael Garrison for the month. That and his housewarming party. But there was something else. During the party, a drink was spilled on the stairs. Michael Garrison slipped on that drink and fell down the flight of stairs.
The fall caused him to suffer a fatal skull fracture. And on August 17th of 1966, he died. He was 43 years old, 5 months short of 44, with a birthday that he would never reach. The news reached the Wild, Wild West set while a funeral parlor scene was still being shot. It looked like even his own show mourned his death.
But wait, a man fired by his own network, fought his way back legally, and had spent two years in open conflict with the institution funding his work, just slipped on wet marble, fell, and died. Just like that, could there have been something more at play? On the surface, there was no evidence of anything other than the accident. The accounts of that night were consistent.
It was a freak combination of circumstances, bad luck, and a wet floor. But what if we go deeper than the surface? After all, Garrison was not a man without enemies inside the system that employed him. He had been fired and legally reinstated. He had three other TV shows in active development at the time of his death.
Those projects were ones that powerful people at major studios wanted to control. Now, none of that is evidence of anything. All of it is the nature of the world he was navigating. But one thing could be certain. The script Garrison had on his desk for episode 9 may not have been shot that way had he written it. Michael Garrison was gone.
But the show didn’t stop. CBS moved quickly. Bruce Lansbury, a producer already embedded in the production structure, was brought in to take command within days. Conrad kept doing his own stunts. Ross Martin kept disappearing into disguises and reappearing as different men. The gadgets kept arriving in impossibly small spaces.
The villains kept losing on schedule. To the audience at home on Friday nights, very little appeared to have changed. But what is a show without the person who understood what it was? This was a question the Wild Wild West spent three seasons trying to answer. But it wasn’t just the Wild Wild West that faced this problem.
And this part rarely gets mentioned. Garrison had three television projects in active development at the time of his death. The Pickle Brothers, a comedy series built around Don Rickles, Happy Valley in association with Warner Brothers, and Kelly’s Country, a country themed series. These three shows were visions that existed inside one man’s head and nowhere else.
Not one of them ever aired. Not one of them ever went before a camera. They died on August 17th, 1966 along with everything else he was carrying, and the industry moved on without ever knowing what it had lost. The Wild Wild West ran until April 1969 with 104 episodes in total. The ratings held, the fan base remained, but then the show was cancelled.
Why cancel what the audience loved? The Wild Wild West ran on pure fictional science and was meant to be an escape from the real world, but the real world caught up with him. The United States Congress had arrived and they had a problem with the show. On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Two months later, on January 5th, Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated. Violence on television was blamed for the increased violence in real life. And afterwards, there was a political push to reduce violence on American television. The Wild Wild West was directly in the crosshairs since the show had always trafficked in stylized theatrical violence.
The show’s violence was choreographed almost beautiful and it was the kind of show that didn’t shy away from it, even if the show itself didn’t feel real. But all of this didn’t matter to the political climate of 1969, which had stopped making that distinction. Also, Ross Martin suffered a near fatal heart attack in 1968, exactly 2 years after Garrison’s death, and missed a stretch of episodes that the writers had to work around.
But the show barely broke stride. By that time, it had become a machine that had learned to run without the person who built it and to keep running through damage without slowing down. The show had faced problems along the way and survived them, but the political pressure was too much for it to bear. Even after cancellation, Wild Wild West wouldn’t die.
The cult built slowly after cancellation the way it does when the shows that were too unique to be fully understood and their own movement usually do. Reunion TV movies arrived in 1979 and 1980. Plans for more were halted by a heartbreaking incident involving Ross Martin’s death in 1981. A 1999 feature film with Will Smith and Kevin Klene brought Wild Wild West to a generation that had not grown up with the original, but not many people liked it.
Critics gave the film a 16% rating and the audience a 28%. People said it was unfunny and it didn’t capture the show’s soul. It looks like not many can replicate Michael Garrison’s personal vision. You can find actors to wear the costume, spend a ton of money on special effects and gadgets, but you can’t capture the chaotic creative soul that Michael had.
That show is not only Michael’s vision, but also his legacy. The only reason it survived after his death was that he had laid down the formula and that there were people directly close to him who could carry out his vision. But even so, fans who paid close attention felt that there was a difference. A person outside the circles of those who made the 60s show work may seem to understand what worked.
But as the feature film had shown, a formula understood from the outside is a very different thing from a vision understood from inside the mind that made it.