Biography

Wendell Mayes was born on July 22, 1918 in Hayti, Missouri, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Death Wish (1974) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972). He died on March 28, 1992 in Santa Monica, California, USA.

Wendell Mayes started out as an actor. He began writing to provide a part for himself as an actor. An episode he wrote for the Kraft Television Theatre (1953) got such a good review in a Los Angeles newspaper, that Billy Wilder hired him to work on the script of The Spirit of St. Louis (1957). He went on to have a very successful writing career.

Under contract at 20th Century Fox, 1956-58.

In the mid-1960s, he spent a long time working with director Fred Zinnemann on a large-scale western called "The Day Custer Fell", concerning the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. Twentieth Century Fox spent a great deal of money on this project before finally deciding it would be just too expensive and abandoning it. He ruefully noted to interviewers that another film on the same subject, "Custer Of The West" (1967), was put together as a sort of cheap rip-off immediately afterwards and took only a few months to get into cinemas.