Home

John Meston (1914-1979)

Gallery Unavailable

Birthplace:
Pueblo, Colorado, USA

Born:
July 30, 1914

Died:
March 24, 1979

Biography from TheMovieDB

John Meston was one of radio and television's most important storytellers, and yet oddly enough his contributions are often overlooked today. He is the writer credited with creating "Gunsmoke," along with producer Norman MacDonnell, essentially starting the adult western on radio and television and setting the tone and style which would make both the radio and television versions of the series so memorable. Meston began in the program practices department at CBS in the 1940s before becoming a writer and editor. Overall, he wrote 183 of the "Gunsmoke" radio episodes (413 were produced in all between 1952 and 1961), and 196 of the 635 episodes produced for television between 1955 and 1975. While he never won any major award for his work, Meston was a master writer, serving up memorable characters in authentic western settings.

Click the heading above to show or hide the text.

Additional information:

The Search Form


Film Production

In Memory Of:
1992  Gunsmoke: To the Last Man

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

TV Production

Creator:
1955  Gunsmoke

Screenplay:
1955  Gunsmoke

Story:
1955  Gunsmoke

Writer:
1955  Gunsmoke
1974  Little House on the Prairie

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.