Gustave Field

Film and television writer Gustave Field was born Gustave Hirchfeld in New York City to immigrant parents. At 17 he became a newspaper photographer, and he was the only one allowed to take a photograph of Albert Einstein upon Einstein's arrival in the US to take his position at Princeton University in New Jersey (the bright flashes cameras at the time used hurt his eyes and he wouldn't allow photographers to use them; Field used a small 35mm Leica camera with no flash and Einstein chose him to take the pictures).

During World War II he was a navigator and bombardier on B-17 Flying Fortress bombers in the Pacific, and was the first to film the mushroom cloud that arose over Nagasaki, Japan, after the atomic bomb was dropped on it.

After the war ended he went to New York City to work in the theater, but soon decided to try his luck in Hollywood. He didn't work all that much, possibly because of his insistence on his scripts being shot as written and his habit of speaking his mind to the powers that be in the business. He once figured that he had taken his name off of approximately 25 films shot from his scripts, although some of his colleagues have said that he did use a pseudonym for several of his scripts that eventually were filmed. He had better luck writing for television. He wrote for such series as Gunsmoke (1955), Combat! (1962), 12 O'Clock High (1964) and Kung Fu (1972), and the made-for-TV film The Sunshine Patriot (1968).

In 1958 he was working for ABC Television, and they sent him to London as a story editor to develop and mentor new writers for television. Among the notable writers he helped develop were Alun Owen, Ray Rigby and Harold Pinter. He left England after a few years to return to Hollywood. He retired to the hills of Santa Barbara, California.

He died on August 5, 2012, aged 95.