Winston Miller, screenwriter and television writer-producer, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 22, 1910. He was not to remain long in the Midwest, however. Miller attended high school in Hollywood, California, and then moved east to attend Princeton University. Graduating from Princeton in 1934, he returned to Hollywood and embarked upon a career as a writer for motion pictures.
It was appropriate that the young man began writing for Republic Pictures, because the small studio was founded in 1935 and was hungry for new talent. During 1936, Miller wrote scripts for the Dick Tracy serials. The assignment was good preparation for his later work in television because Miller had to learn to write within time limits, leaving his hero in danger at the end of each episode. In 1937, Miller sold his first original screenplay, One If by Land, to Republic.
In 1938, Miller began to write for the shorts department of MGM; the department was a training ground for young writers, directors, and actors. Here he wrote scripts for Crime Does Not Pay, a series of well-made, semi-documentary films. One of his crime shorts brought him to the attention of David O. Selznick, and Selznick hired Miller to work on the film that has since become a legend, Gone With the Wind (1939).
During the early forties, Miller wrote a number of westerns -- Carolina Moon (1940), Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride (1940), Prairie Stranger (1941), The Royal Mounted Patrol (1941), Man from Cheyenne (1942), The Heart of the Rio Grande (1942), Good Morning, Judge (1943), and Song of Texas (1943). Shortly before he went into the Marine Corps in 1944, he wrote the script for Home in Indiana, and on the basis of that successful screenplay he went to Twentieth-Century Fox when he was discharged from the service in 1945. His first screenplay after the war was for John Ford's picture, My Darling Clementine (1946).
From 1946 to 1960, Miller wrote the screenplays for more than twenty films, among which were Relentless (1948), Rocky Mountain (1950), The Last Outpost (1951), The Boy from Oklahoma (1954), The Bounty Hunter (1954), Run for Cover (1955), Lucy Gallant (1955), April Love (1957), Mardi Gras (1958), A Private's Affair (1959), and Hound-Dog Man (1959).
Like many other screenwriters, Miller found his talent in demand in the expanding television industry. He began sustained writing for the medium in 1956 with scripts for Gunsmoke. His television writing drew upon his earlier film writing, and he wrote for several western series: Wagon Train, Rawhide, Cimarron City, and The Virginian.
Miller became a writer-producer in 1960, when he went to Universal Studios to produce The Virginian. He produced more than fifty episodes of that long-running series. He also wrote the pilot script for 87th Precinct and then produced its season of thirty episodes. Subsequently, he produced segments of The Bold Ones, and produced Ironside, doing a considerable amount of writing on the shows he produced.
Winston Miller resides in Beverly Hills, California.
