Roy Huggins

Education and pre-Hollywood employment

Huggins was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1935-41. After graduation, he worked as a special representative of the U.S. Civil Service, 1941–43, and later as an industrial engineer, 1943-46.

Writing career

Huggins' novels include The Double Take (1946), Too Late for Tears (1947), and Lovely Lady, Pity Me (1949).

When Columbia Pictures purchased the rights to Huggins' novel The Double Take in 1948, Huggins signed a contract with the studio to adapt the script into the movie I Love Trouble. From here he entered the movie industry, working as a contract writer at Columbia and RKO Pictures. In 1952, he wrote and directed the film Hangman's Knot, a Randolph Scott Western.

A member of the Communist Party USA until the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, Huggins appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, where he named 19 former comrades who had already been named before the committee.

A staff writer at Columbia until 1955, Huggins moved to television in April 1955, when Warner Bros. hired him as a producer. He is best known as the creator of long-running shows such as Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, and The Fugitive, all on ABC.

Huggins left Warner Bros. and in October 1960 became the vice president in charge of television production at 20th Century-Fox. Once Huggins moved into an executive role, he generally used pseudonyms on stories or teleplays he created for episodic television, usually only taking credit under his real name for producing and/or creating a show.

In the early 1960s, when writing for TV, Huggins alternated between the pseudonyms Thomas Fitzroy and John Francis O'Mara, generally maintaining a policy of using one pseudonym and then the other, in strict rotation from one script to the next. These pen names were partly derived from the names of the eldest two sons from his second marriage (to Adele Mara).

In the 1961-62 season, Huggins created Bus Stop, an ABC drama based loosely on William Inge's play of the same name, with Marilyn Maxwell in the role of Grace Sherwood, owner of the bus station and diner in the fictional town of Sunrise, Colorado.

In 1963, Huggins took a job as a vice president in the television division at Universal, where he spent the next 18 years. At Universal, he co-created The Rockford Files and produced The Virginian, Alias Smith and Jones, and Baretta, among other series. Beginning in the late 1960s, Huggins phased out his other pen names and began using the pseudonym John Thomas James for virtually all of his television scriptwriting, usually on the shows he was producing. The name was a composite of the names of all three of his sons from his second marriage.

Huggins worked in TV through the 1980s, and served for three years as the executive producer of Hunter. Stephen J. Cannell said of Huggins' time on Hunter: "Roy was in the driver's seat where he belonged. Nobody does it better or with more style...Roy Huggins is my Godfather, my Hero and my Friend. They don't come any better."

The Huggins contract

At Warner Bros. Television, Huggins was repeatedly denied credit and compensation as the creator of several television programs. A Warner-owned property was used as the basis of the script for the first broadcast episode of Maverick, substituted for the actual pilot, which was run second to cheat Huggins out of his creator residuals. Perhaps most famously, Jack L. Warner deliberately had the pilot to 77 Sunset Strip screened briefly at movie theatres in the Caribbean to legally establish that the television series derived from a film, rather than, as was actually the case, several books and novellas Huggins had written in the 1940s. Since these were not the only occasions on which Warner had found a way to circumvent Huggins' creative rights, he left the studio soon thereafter.

These experiences led him to demand increasing rights and ownership of all television concepts he authored. By the mid-1960s, he had distilled this demand into a boiler plate for all his contracts.

"I was getting paid my royalty and my fee whether I did the show or not. If I conceived the show, and got it on the air, anyone could produce it and I would still get paid just as if I was doing it . . . That became known as 'the Huggins contract'. Every producer in television would say, 'I want the Huggins contract', and some of them got it."

He used the contract for his television series The Fugitive. It limited the rights of United Artists Television to his material. This permitted his participation in the 1993 film version of his creation decades later.

Personal life

Huggins was married to artist Bonnie Porter and later to actress Adele Mara.