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Considered a fearless writer of the highest caliber during television’s “Golden Age,” Reginald Rose’s ability to tackle pressing – and often controversial – social issues head-on brought him success and acclaim. Rose was born on December 10, 1920, and he was educated at City College (now City University of New York). He served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1946, and became a television writer for CBS in 1951 when he was hired to work on Out There, a live anthology series which bridged the gap between juvenile science fiction shows and adult drama. Using filmed special effects, its episodes were all adapted from stories by prominent science fiction writers. Rose’s first original television script was The Bus to Nowhere, which appeared on another CBS anthology, Studio One, in 1951. Rose gained a reputation for writing about “touchy” subjects, and his teleplay Thunder on Sycamore Street, in which an ex-convict tries to begin a new life in an upper-class neighborhood but is hounded by a mob of protesters, raised some eyebrows at the network. The central character was originally written to be an African-American, but sponsors were afraid of losing audiences in the South, so Rose was forced to change him into an ex-convict instead. A few years later, Rose would become the head writer for Studio One and create the work that would become his masterpiece. The 1954-55 season gave Rose his credentials as a top writer; that year has been referred to as “The Reginald Rose Season” at Studio One. Scripts such as 12:32 a.m., An Almanac of Liberty, and Crime in the Streets were highly regarded, but were eclipsed by the now-classic TWELVE ANGRY MEN. The teleplay won Emmy Awards for Rose, its director Franklin Schaffner, and its star Robert Cummings. Rose would continue to write for Studio One in the following years in addition to penning scripts for The Twilight Zone and such features as Dino (1956) and Man of the West (1958). One of his Studio One scripts, The Incredible World of Horace Ford (1955), starred Art Carney as a nostalgic toy designer who returns to the street of his childhood and finds it exactly as it was when he was a child, including the same children. It was later bought by the producers of The Twilight Zone and shown in 1963, with Pat Hingle as the hero, but it had a different ending written by Rose at the producers’ request. “I wanted to point out that the funny, tender childhood memories we cling to are often distorted and unreal,” said Rose. “Horace turns into a kid again and finds it not to be glorious but terrible. They wanted a more upbeat ending for Twilight Zone. The work had already been done the way I saw it, and therefore it didn’t bother me to change the ending.” One of the teleplays that Rose wrote for Studio One was The Defender (1957), which starred Ralph Bellamy and William Shatner as father-son lawyers and Steve McQueen as a young defendant accused of murder. He expanded his original idea into the 1961-1965 series The Defenders, which starred Edward G. Marshall as the seasoned attorney and Robert Reed as his partner-son, just out of law school. At a time when television series tended to shun controversy, The Defenders became notable for addressing such issues as abortion, mercy-killing, and blacklisting. His writing for the series won Rose two more Emmy Awards. Rose won further Emmy nominations for The Sacco-Vanzetti Story (1960), and Dear Friends (1967). In 1975 he both created and wrote scripts for the series The Zoo Gang. Rose also wrote several screenplays, including Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (1958) which, although a western, had much of the same claustrophobic tension as that of TWELVE ANGRY MEN. Later his writing included the action movie The Wild Geese (1978), The Sea Wolves (1980), Whose Life is it Anyway? (1981), The Final Option (1983), and Wild Geese II (1985). In 1987 he wrote the award-winning miniseries Escape from Sobibor. In 1997, the repercussions of Rose’s most famous work were reinforced when TWELVE ANGRY MEN once again went before the cameras, nearly 50 years after it was written. In response to questions about “reasonable doubt” raised during the O.J. Simpson trial, William Freidkin directed the new movie version with a racially diverse cast. On April 19, 2002, Rose died from complications of heart failure in a Norwalk, CT hospital, leaving behind his second wife and six children. He was 81.
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