Meet Michael Landon: "Generation X's Great Storyteller"

One of my Artistic Heroes

You may not know Eugene Orowitz, but he knew what happens inside the human heart and, therefore, he knew you. Eugene created important stories for broadcast television that became Sunday School for Generation X. No church was necessary to model moral behavior.

Eugene wrote, directed, and produced the most important moral lessons for an entire American generation of young people growing up to struggle with living in a world of hard luck chances and malevolent strangers.

Like his contemporary Fred Rogers, Eugene Orowitz would approach the medium of broadcast television like a humble preacher of common decency, spreading the gospel of love as far as radio waves travel. They are still out there in space, those waves.

Suppose an alien civilization intercepts the signals we’ve been broadcasting through these radio waves for nearly a hundred years now. In that case, I hope the stories of Eugene Orowitz (who became Michael Landon) get there before the reality TV that became the news arrives.

Orowitz was born in Queens, New York, on Halloween 1936, just as America was pulling itself out of The Great Depression and readying for the inevitable greatest war to come. Eugene’s parents were Eli and Peggy. Eli was a theater manager and actor. Peggy was a dancer and comedian. It was almost predestined that young Eugene would become a star. Almost.

His mother had issues with being a mother, wife, and human trying to function in a world gone wrong. This tenuous relationship between a son and a mentally disturbed parent evoked a deep empathy in young Eugene. He saw the world from a more patient and forgiving perspective. And he listened to the stories being acted out and told around him. He learned how to tell a compelling story that keeps the audience’s attention and fills their heart with the components of life constructed of wealth beyond money. Wealth of the heart.

While still young, the Orowitzs moved from Queens to Jersey, where young Eugene would grow up to face and manage racist bullying by his classmates because he was Jewish. The young man came to detest the bully. He learned that the bully is a lot of talk but that when you stare into their eyes and dare them to say it or do it one more time, and when they do…which they always do…you hit them so god damned hard in a sensitive place, that when they fall to the ground, it’s like the hammer of god fell on their shoulders. And Eugene also learned the greater power of offering the bully a hand to help them up and help them right themselves. The power of forgiveness to shape the world is the great lesson that Eugene Orowitz would grow up to show the world a thousand times.

Eugene grew into a fine young man, a good person, and a good citizen. He was also a world-class athlete, competing nationally as a ranked javelin thrower. He earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Southern California, and we see that he was destined to meet the city of Los Angeles and the magic factory of Hollywood in the 1950s. There was no place on Earth better for a storyteller to be than Hollywood in the 1950s. Everything that mattered happened there first.¹

As if a dramatist wrote, Eugene suffered an injury that ended his days of competing athletically. Life thus required him to re-evaluate what he wanted to do with the thirty-five years he had left of living, though he did not know how short it would be at the time.

Eugene wanted to create art. He tried to develop storytelling through performance when acting. And he was terrible at first. He was rejected many times. But he took acting lessons. He approached the craft with a beginner’s mind, the non-negotiable key to mastering any skill.

He got his break in 1957 when he was cast in the film ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf. It was a hit at a time when a hit meant your life was changed forever. Orowtiz cast his lot by going with his heart, and he changed his name to something “More Hollywood” by picking new first and last names from his local phonebook. Michael Landon was his most incredible creation from which all the future stories would unfold.

In 1959, Michael Landon secured a role on a television show as the youngest son from a third marriage in a family managing a large Nevada ranch beyond the edge of the Frontier during the time leading to and after the United States Civil War. Bonanza ran for 14 years. Michael Landon portrayed a character who grew up on screen from a boy to a man. He acted out those stories, and it wasn’t long before he started writing them, directing them, and learning how to produce them.

Michael Landon wasn’t just an actor. He wasn’t just a writer. Like Clint Eastwood, he wanted to own the entire process (or as much as possible) of creating and producing moral stories for consumption by an audience staring at the screen and listening to speakers with a synced-up soundtrack aligned to the projected images.

And when Michael Landon wrote screenplays for his little films, he didn’t glorify violence as the solution to human problems. Instead, empathy was almost always the superpower of anyone with the wisdom to choose, seeking to understand the other person, to be brave enough to kneel at the foot of pride, and to ask for help from loved ones and neighbors. The whole time he was on Bonanza, it was the producer’s role that Michael Landon learned most from watching.

After Bonanza ended its long and successful run in 1973, Michael Landon was ready for his next opportunity, one that would make him an artistic legend. Ed Friendly was an NBC executive, and he had recently secured the rights to adapt Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books for a scripted television drama film and series. He approached Michael Landon to direct the Pilot episode, which told the story of how the Ingalls made the difficult decision to leave their kin behind in Kansas to start a new life in the wilderness of Minnesota.

Initially, Michael Landon was going to serve the film behind the camera. Eventually, it became apparent that Charles Ingalls would be the most essential creative vessel of Michael Landon’s life. The character of Charles Ingalls still serves as a model of the ideal American father, friend, citizen, and simple moral human being committed to the Common Good and willing to whip someone’s goddamned ass when they stepped over the moral and ethical line between good and bad people.

Charles was stubborn, prideful, and often myopic. But his heart was as big as the universe, filled with compassion, and Charles always sought deeper wisdom while protecting his family and friends from the green jungle of harsh but beautiful nature surrounding them and the grey jungle always threatening to grow inside the human heart and eat all the color from the world.

Michael Landon was deeply involved in all aspects of the production of Little House on the Prairie. He crafted the moral and aesthetic universe in which these essential guides to ethical behavior were projected into the living rooms of millions of American families. I was one of those children watching these stories weekly, mimetically taking in a model of the good father, the good friend, and the good man. But it wasn’t just men. It was women and children taking on these moral challenges. They addressed racism, public health, natural disasters, and the terrible and boundless greed of white men acting as if the world was their possession.

Regarding moral teaching through compelling stories and characters, Little House on the Prairie was one of the most influential television shows ever made, and it ended its nine-season run with a story about an evil 1% wealthy maniac who acquires ownership of the entire town of Walnut Grove. He evicts residents and has designs to wreck the town and turn it into a big mineral mine. The community comes together and decides to take collective action of self-destruction on behalf of the town. The good citizens of Walnut Grove burn that fucker to the ground, every home, every store, the mill, all of it. They did it because fuck that millionaire trying to become a billionaire; what a shameful thing to be. The town showed that asshole precisely what he was worth, and America needs this Walnut Grove attitude now more than ever.²

After the enormous success of Little House on the Prairie, Michael Landon doubled down. He would not only produce, write, direct, and star in another show. He was going to create it from concept to script. Highway to Heaven is still a brilliant idea for a 42-minute dramatic series that accommodated 18 minutes of nested advertising. The consumer goods and services advertised during Highway to Heaven’s time slot could almost guarantee that they reached high-value viewers with morals focused on their families and communities.

Those people tuned in weekly for five years to watch Michael Landon play an angel in reform, undergoing penance to become enlightened by the face of God. His penance is to travel to America without money and do good deeds for these sometimes hopeless but never helpless Americans just trying to be good people in a world gone wrong. But Jonathan Smith wasn’t alone. This was a buddy show, and Victor French (Mr. Edwards on Little House) was an ex-cop who drove Jonathan around and watched out for his worldly affairs while doing a little penance for his own sins.

Highway to Heaven was the culmination of a lifetime of moral lessons. It was a perfect concept for a show and the ideal time to broadcast it across American airwaves when we all believed that either AIDS or a nuclear bomb would kill us at any moment.

But by 1989, television was changing. The stories were becoming more challenging, more demanding, and more cynical. As the greed of America became more of a means to an end, the higher self was no longer situated as an idealized goal of maturity. Highway to Heaven declined in ratings around the time the Twin Peaks Pilot film was in its earliest stages of conception. Television would never be the same after Twin Peaks. Michael Landon never crossed that bridge from his television of the 1980s to Frost & Lynch’s television of the 1990s.

In April 1991, Michael Landon collapsed from severe abdominal pain while skiing in Utah. He was diagnosed with an ultra-aggressive form of pancreatic cancer: a death sentence and a torture verdict. The adenocarcinoma rapidly spread from his pancreas to his liver and lymph nodes. He spoke openly about his brief illness and even joked about his limited time in our world.

Michael Landon died on July 1, 1991, at 54. The Soviet Union was well into the process of collapse that would see a new freedom rise in a dark part of Europe. But in America, a light went out that day. Luckily, that light left a legacy that remains as powerful as ever.

Michael Landon did not accomplish these great moral stories on his own. He had caring, intelligent, and skilled people working with him. But I am comfortable saying that none of these great shows would have been made possible without Michael Landon’s artistry. For this, he is one of my artistic heroes, and may his work live forever.

THE JB MINTON NEWSLETTER

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1. I think we take this magic for granted. The human eye has a flaw that has allowed the most influential art form for telling stories to be built by creative artists over 140 years now. We capture and manipulate light and shape it to tell our stories. And then we bend sound and poke it through that light. And we sit in dark places together and become something more than we were when the lights were on. And when the lights come back on, we are united as an audience in a way so unique that it has become a psychic trash dump for us to collectively grieve and grapple with the more complex issues in our lives, the ones beyond our opinions about the latest outrage.

2. This is very similar in situation to the ending of Deadwood’s Season 3. The Deadwood film picks up years later from that moment, where they town backed off its own self-destruction.