Samuel A. Peeples

Biography: With hundreds of television episodes to his credit, Samuel A. Peeples was one of television's more prolific screenwriters. He began his career in Westerns, but over the next several years, he built up a considerable body of science fiction work, beginning with the original Star Trek. Born in Utah in 1917, Peeples started riding horses at a young age and took naturally to Westerns as a writing subject. He wrote stories for pulp magazines and, by the early '50s, was authoring full-length novels under the pseudonyms Brad Ward and Frank Bass; these ran the gamut from seemingly generic titles, such as Johnny Sundance, Trouble at Tall Pine, and Terror at Tres Alamos to stories evocative of specific eras and incidents, such as The Man From Andersonville. His 1958 novel Hoffman Burney, was honored by one professional panel as the best Western novel of the year. He started writing teleplays for a Western television series during the mid-'50s and, by 1960, had 110 such scripts to hisWith hundreds of television episodes to his credit, Samuel A. Peeples was one of television's more prolific screenwriters. He began his career in Westerns, but over the next several years, he built up a considerable body of science fiction work, beginning with the original Star Trek. Born in Utah in 1917, Peeples started riding horses at a young age and took naturally to Westerns as a writing subject. He wrote stories for pulp magazines and, by the early '50s, was authoring full-length novels under the pseudonyms Brad Ward and Frank Bass; these ran the gamut from seemingly generic titles, such as Johnny Sundance, Trouble at Tall Pine, and Terror at Tres Alamos to stories evocative of specific eras and incidents, such as The Man From Andersonville. His 1958 novel Hoffman Burney, was honored by one professional panel as the best Western novel of the year. He started writing teleplays for a Western television series during the mid-'50s and, by 1960, had 110 such scripts to his credit, mostly consisting of half-hour episodes for such series as Wanted: Dead or Alive, Overland Trail, and The Tall Men. By then, he was also one of the higher-paid writers in the field, collecting up to 5,000 dollars for a half-hour script. He was also an impassioned defender of the genre from charges that it was excessively violent, speaking up on behalf of unbridled story development in the face of calls for censorship. His outlook was that if a story's dramatic development called for it and could support its presence, then a violent script was perfectly acceptable. As late as the mid-'60s, he was still involved with TV oaters, most notably A Man Called Shenandoah, a fascinating series about an amnesiac traveling the post-Civil War West trying to find a clue to his identity. In 1965, however, he became involved in a science fiction project with a fellow writer-turned-producer named Gene Roddenberry. Peeples wrote the second pilot episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," which sold the series to NBC. That script, one of the most suspenseful in the show's run, also established the beginning of the Kirk/Spock relationship, as well as many of the parameters of the subsequent series and the motion pictures derived from it. Peeples and Roddenberry later worked together on Spectre, an eerie occult-thriller that was a pilot for a proposed series mixing classic detective fiction and the supernatural. They also became partners in a company that developed new programs for Warner Bros. and NBC during the 1970s. In the late '70s, Peeples was a writer on the series Space Academy and the story editor on Jason of Star Command, both done by Filmation. In feature films, he wrote the screenplay for Final Chapter: Walking Tall (1977) and made uncredited script contributions to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Peeples died of cancer in 1997.… Expand