- Born
- Died
- One of television's must prolific freelance script writers, Carey Wilber was described by everyone as full of contradictions, funny as hell, passionate, irresponsible, sympathetic, crazy, and eloquent, a writer with the soul of a drifter.
Upon completing his education, Wilber went to work as a copy boy for the old Buffalo Times in 1936, he would then turn to journalism, where he made his mark at multiple newspapers, including the Birmingham Age-Herald, Toronto Globe, Providence Journal-Bulletin, Tacoma Times, Boston Globe, New York Times, Milwaukee Journal, Anchorage Times, Memphis Commercial Appeal, spending anywhere from six weeks to four years in each connection, he also covered the Legislature for the Ketchikan Chronicle and the Anchorage Times.
By the early 1950s, while on a week's leave from the Toronto Globe and Mail, Wilber gazed at the emerging medium of television, and decided a writer of his ilk could make a living there.
He bought a book on television writing, went back to Toronto and began grinding out scripts for commercial television programs like Armstrong's Circle Theatre, Lux Video Theatre, Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theatre, The Doctor, and Studio One, he then spent the next three decades writing hundreds of scripts produced for a host of westerns, dramas, science fiction, detective, and daytime shows like Captain Video, Lost in Space, The Outlaws, Time Tunnel, Bonanza, Big Valley, Maverick, Twilight Zone, Lancer, The Rogues, Emergency!, To Catch a Thief, Days of our Lives, and General Hospital, for which he wrote the wildly popular "Ice Princess" story, a bizarre science fiction story line that made the show one of the most talked-about shows in the history of television.
Wilber also had written an original Star Trek episode titled "Space Seed". The episode's story would later serve as the basis for the second Star Trek movie, "The Wrath of Khan".
Wilber died on May 2nd, 1998, at the age of 81.
- IMDb mini biography by: F.J. Trescothik
- He wrote the "Star Trek" episode "Space Seed", which inspired the movie "The Wrath of Khan".
- Worked as a copy boy for the old Buffalo Times in 1936.
- Prior to becoming a television writer, he worked as a reporter, feature writer, and copy-reader for multiple newspapers.
- He was paid $750 for his first script sell.
- Got tossed out of Catholic school at the age of 14 for reading Voltaire (while pretending to read his prayer missal).
- The characters I write about are prototypes of people I have known, and the situations are those I either have experienced or heard about.
- [on not working by a set schedule]: I just pick a good idea and round it out.
- One night I got an idea at 11 o'clock and by 8 the next morning the half-hour script was finished. The first time I did a full-hour script, didn't take long-three days. But, the second one took me a week. The more I know about script writing, the more I care I put into it.
- Writing for television is like writing captions, the only difference is that for TV the picture is in your mind instead of laid out in front of you.
- One kind of play I don't turn out is a situation comedy about family life, the average family just isn't funny. you have to distort characters too much.
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