Belated obit: Jerome Coopersmith

Jerome Coopersmith’s title card for the Hawaii Five-O episode “Nine Dragons.”

Jerome Coopersmith, a writer for television and the stage, died in July at age 97, according to an obituary published at Legacy.com.

His many credits included 32 episodes of the original Hawaii Five-O series, some under the pen name of Jay Roberts.

In 2019, Coopersmith was interviewed by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about his work for the show. The writer lived in New York. He’d take his scripts to the CBS mail room and they would be flown overnight to Los Angeles.

In the 2019 interview, Coopersmith said he got many of his ideas from reading newspapers.

“A fabulous variety of crimes are committed every day,” he told the Honolulu paper. “All I had to do was figure out how to transplant them to Hawaii, and how to make the criminals smarter than they are in real life so that it would take ‘Five-O’ an hour to catch up with them and not just five minutes. In real life most criminals are stupid.”

One of Coopersmith’s best, and most ambitious, Five-O tales was the two-hour episode Nine Dragons that led off the 1976-77 season.

Steve McGarrett’s arch-foe, Wo Fat, intends to lead a coup of China, then launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the United States. Wo Fat tortures and brainwashes McGarrett as part of the plot. Much of the episode was filmed on location in Hong Kong.

According to Coopersmith’s Wikipedia entry, the scribe’s first television writing job was in 1947. Starting in the 1960s, Coopersmith began writing plays, including Baker Street, a musical based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.

2023’s spy entertainment ‘In Memoriam’

As 2023 draws to a close, here’s a look at those who contributed to spy entertainment (or at least spy-related). These are not listed in any particular order. It’s also not a complete list.

David McCallum (1933-2023): Played Illya Kuryakin in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. The Kuryakin character originally was envisioned as a sidekick to Robert Vaughn’s Napoleon Solo. By the end of the first season, Illya was a full-fledged partner for Solo. For some U.N.C.L.E. fans, especially young women, Illya’s popularity rivaled Solo’s.

Robert Janes (1940-2023): Television writer who penned many episodes for the later seasons of Hawaii Five-O.

Stephen Kandel (1927-2023): Wrote episodes of Star Trek (those that featured Harry Mudd), Hawaii Five-O, Mannix, Mission: Impossible, The Wild Wild West and many other American television shows.

John Romita Sr. (1930-2023): The second artist to draw Spider-Man who helped make the web-slinger even more popular.

Chaim Topol (1935-2023): Actor best known for Fiddler on the Roof, who played an ally of Bond in For Your Eyes Only (1981).

Tina Turner (1939-2023): Veteran singer who performed the title song for 1995’s Goldeneye.

Jim Brown (1936-2023): Pro football player who switched to acting, including an episode of I Spy and the movie Ice Station Zebra.

Ray Austin (1932-2023): Stunt performer and television director whose credits included The Avengers, The New Avengers and The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Paul Playdon (1943-2023): One-time child actor who became a writer for television shows such as Mission: Impossible.

Sharon Farrell (1940-2023): Actress whose credits included The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Wild Wild West.

Edward Hume (1936-2023): Television writer who scripted the pilots for Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco, and Barnaby Jones.

Gayle Hunnicut (1943-2013): Actress who was considered to play Solitaire in Live And Let Die who played the female lead in the 1983 TV movie The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Robert Butler (1927-2013): Television director who helmed the pilots for Remington Steele (starring Pierce Brosnan), Batman, Hogan’s Heroes and Hill Street Blues. Butler was also credited as co-creator of Remington Steele. He also directed episodes of Mission: Impossible, I Spy, and Blue Light (a World War II spy show starring Robert Goulet)