David Dortort contributed to a number of feature films of the 1950s as a screenwriter, but it was as a producer on television that he made his lasting impact on popular culture. Although he couldn't have known it when he launched Bonanza in 1959, Dortort created one of the great iconic series on American television, and perhaps most popular "franchise" series this side of Star Trek. David Dortort had a strong interest in the American West as a boy during the 1920s, which he soon began indulging, in both his reading and his writing. Dortort attended City College in New York and, after earning a B.A., went to work for the city-owned radio station WNYC, and wrote stories for magazines in his spare time. He served four years in the military during World War II, and after returning to civilian life he decided to begin writing again. In 1947, he published a novel, Burial of the Fruit, dealing with juvenile delinquency and drugs, which went on to sell a reported two million copies. He wrote one more novel, The Post of Honor, which was published in 1949 but proved rather less successful.
Following the sale of Burial of the Fruit's film rights to Hecht-Lancaster, Dortort headed to Hollywood. He received his first two screenwriting credits in 1952, for the script of Fritz Lang's melodrama Clash by Night and for Nicholas Ray's rodeo drama The Lusty Men. By the mid-'50s, he'd demonstrated a talent for writing psychological thrillers as well, most notably the screenplay for A Cry in the Night (1956), a suspense film about a deranged man (Raymond Burr) whose obsession with a young woman (Natalie Wood) leads to her kidnapping and a city-wide manhunt. During the late '50s, he returned to writing Western scripts, including the screenplays for Reprisal and The Big Land. Dortort also began writing for television during the mid-'50s, earning Emmy nominations for his adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident to television, and transposing William Faulkner's fiction to the small screen in An Error in Chemistry. In 1957, Dortort started writing for the Western series The Restless Gun, starring John Payne, and quickly moved into the producer's spot on the show, which ran for two seasons. In 1958, he began devising the television series that would immortalize him, entitled Bonanza. An hour-long show shot in color -- the first of its kind on television -- the series told the story of the Cartwright family of Virginia City, NV, during the mid- to late 19th century.
Bonanza went on the air in September of 1959 and survived scathing early reviews and lackluster initial ratings to become one of the NBC network's top-rated programs. Within four years, Bonanza was one of the defining Western series on television. In tandem with Gunsmoke, it dominated the genre for most of its run over the decade that followed. One characteristic of the series that still elicits comment is the relatively disposable role that women played in the structure and content of the show through its run. The core of the series was the relationship between the father, Ben Cartwright, and his sons, and of the sons with each other; female characters were virtually an intrusion on the formula, regardless of how good or powerful an actress was cast in a particular guest role, or what kind of performance she gave -- it was always a guest role, and that character would never be around to join the Cartwrights in the final shot of the episode. One running joke, even among fans of the series, is that the fastest way for a woman character in a television Western to contract a fatal illness, get shot, or meet with a horrible accident was to fall in love with -- or, worse yet, get engaged to -- a Cartwright on Bonanza. The formula worked for 14 years, Dortort himself describing the series at one point as a family love story between four men. For the actors involved -- Lorne Greene, Michael Landon, Dan Blocker, and Pernell Roberts -- it meant getting the kind of good scenes and center-stage exposure that turned them into full-fledged stars and pop-culture icons; and in the relatively innocent sexual ethos of the 1960s, Bonanza itself became a kind of pop-culture touchstone, an allegory about male familial relations that resonated far beyond the series' high ratings. There were Bonanza action figures and comic books for the kids, and the series eventually took on epic seriousness and profound issues, which kept the adults fascinated from week to week. During the middle of Bonanza's run, Dortort was one of the busier writer/producers in Hollywood, serving as president of the Producers' Guild of America and as president of the Television-Radio branch of the Writers' Guild; he taught classes in screenwriting at UCLA as well, but he still found time to create and produce a new series set deeper in the American southwest, The High Chaparral, which ran for three seasons on NBC. Bonanza was canceled after 14 years on the air, during the 1972-1973 season, following the sudden death of Dan Blocker in the spring of 1972. In the following years, Dortort served as executive producer on a handful of television series and movies, including The Cowboys -- based on the John Wayne movie of that name -- and The Chisholms, and was the executive producer of the 1987 film Going Bananas. His career, however, always seemed to curve back toward Bonanza, and with good reason. Bonanza became one of the earliest hour-long Westerns to go into prime-time syndication on local television. The early ratings were good and got better, and the series proved almost as potent a cultural phenomenon after its cancellation as it did during its run. Part of that success had to do with fortuitous timing: Bonanza had ended its run in 1973, just before the political upheavals of Watergate, the resignation of President Nixon, and the social turmoil of the 1970s manifested themselves.
The series had a built-in nostalgia factor (especially the pre-1970 episodes, which were mostly what were shown for the first few years), coupled with good scripts, and seemed -- thanks to Dortort's vision of the program, the writers, and the work of the cast -- to stand for all of the cultural values that were being eclipsed by events in the '70s, the '80s, and beyond. By the '90s, the series was regarded with fondness by a huge portion of the viewing public, a major part of which hadn't even been born when the show had been canceled. Dortort then served as executive producer of Bonanza: The Return (1993), and as consultant on The Ponderosa, the "pre-quel" series, telling the history of the Cartwright family before most of the events depicted on the original series, which premiered on cable television during the 2001-2002 season. Bonanza thus became the second television series in history, after Star Trek, to spawn a generational spin-off of its original characters and setting. References to the original series also turn up regularly throughout American popular culture in the 21st century, perhaps most visibly in occasional snatches of dialogue on the sitcom Frasier, from the mouth of crusty would-be patriarch Martin Crane (John Mahoney), who often compares his relationship with his two sons unfavorably to that of Ben Cartwright and his sons on the series.
