Douglas Heyes

1919 - 1993

The word artist applies to few of us, but it does apply to the late Douglas Heyes. He was an artist of amazing versatility; a painter, in oil, water colors, pen and ink; a sculptor; a writer, director, producer of motion pictures and television. He was a novelist. He wrote non-fiction articles. He was superb at drama and comedy, period pieces and contemporary stories, and he proved himself in documentary writing, direction, and production.

He was just about the most restless man I ever knew. Ideas flowed out of him in casual conversation--about a new television series, a period piece for television or motion pictures, ideas for books. At one time he put his energy into creating an image of the old West in his own home--an expansive train layout that included mountains and shrubbery, deserts and streams, dozens of stores whose rooftops were removable in order to display the stores' contents, and scores of individual cowboys, Indians, marshals, bystanders, storekeepers, outlaws fighting it out with the local sheriff and his deputies, cattle drives--all of them, hundreds of individual pieces each of which he hand carved.

One of his last efforts was to construct a handsome portfolio designed to hold dozens of faded news clipping and rare photographs featuring the work of his father, Herbert Harrison Heyes, an actor distinguished for his success in the theater, in silent movies, and in the new talkies, the end product destined for each of his own two sons, Mark, a music executive, and Doug Jr., a writer and story editor himself.

I first became aware of Doug Heyes when I was a network executive. I needed a writer to convert an idea of mine into a television series.

Frank Telford introduced me to Doug Heyes on the telephone. Doug talked for an hour, and the fire and the passion that I felt in Doug Heyes' voice three thousand miles away were enormously persuasive. I immediately gave him the green light to proceed to script.

Doug Heyes wrote and directed 21 pilots all of which took to the air. On rare occasion, usually to help a fellow creative force--a Rod Serling, a Roy Huggins, a Glen Larson among others--he would lend his talent to an episodic project, but it would have to be a major challenge and he would have to direct it.

Doug Heyes, when he was at his work, sat in his handsome study, the room filled with leather bound volumes of his own work and the work of the world's greatest writers, all precisely set in place, their leather bindings broken here and there with some beloved piece of statuary that depicted a Shakespearean character or the bust of an heroic figure such as Lincoln. He plunged into his work never knowing whether it was night or day, so absorbed was he in the act of creation, his wife, J. P. keeping fresh coffee on his desk, day and night.

Doug wrote and directed, not only pilots for series, but some of television's greatest mini-series-- The Captains and the Kings, episodes of the North and the South for which he also prepared the story bible of over 600 pages for the entire project--and others.

He could have done more in television, but his reach extended to the motion picture world where he turned out script after script, all designed to propel the Heyes Company into production. Toward the end of his life, cut short so abruptly as a devastating byproduct of the recent rains that fell on California when he overextended himself in fighting the ravages of the storms as they struck his home, Doug had turned away from television. He simply could not abide a system that would mandate that a network executive would be assigned to convey to another network executive the gist of what he, Doug, wanted to propose. No one could ever duplicate the intensity and the passion of his own convictions of how an idea could be developed into a mini-series or a movie-of-the-week. And no one could direct his own ideas with Doug's own vision. Television lost a great talent because as Doug often said, television decision makers didn't take the time or have the wisdom to listen directly to proven creators. Their loss. Ours.

Doug had created a handsome meeting room in his home, a special kind of tribute to Shakespeare, with a dozen busts of the Bard, and his own inimitable hand carved and painted statues of Lear, Hamlet, and Ophelia. Of Doug Heyes, it surely can be said that he lived and worked by his own high standard, faithful to Shakespeare's challenge, "This above all: to thine own self be true."

-- D. L. 1993