Quinn Martin


Quinn Martin was an American television producer. He had at least one television series running in prime time every year for 21 straight years. Martin is a member of the Television Hall of Fame, having been inducted in 1997.

Early life

Born on May 22, 1922 in New York City, Martin was the second of two children. His father, Martin Goodman Cohn, was a film editor and producer at the studios of Metro Goldwyn Mayer; his mother was Anna Messing Cohn. He was of Jewish descent. From the age of 4, he was raised in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Fairfax High School. He later served five years in the United States Army during World War II, enlisting in the Signal Corps at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California, on September 10, 1940. He achieved the rank of sergeant. He changed his name to Quinn Martin.
While attending the University of California at Berkeley, Martin majored in English studies but did not graduate. Martin started his career in television as a film editor also at MGM, joining his father and also worked as manager of post-production for various organizations, including Universal Studios, but by the mid 1950s had become an executive producer for Desilu Studios, founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz of the famous 1950s TV series I Love Lucy. His first wife, Madelyn Pugh Davis, was one half of the writing team behind I Love Lucy. In 1959, he produced for Desilu a two-part special that appeared in season 1 of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse an anthology TV series and later became a weekly television show on the CBS television network , with The Untouchables, which would later win several Emmy Awards.

QM Productions

In 1960, Martin established his own production company, QM Productions. It produced a string of successful television series during the 1960s and 1970s, including The Fugitive, Twelve O'Clock High, The F.B.I., The Invaders, The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon, and Barnaby Jones. Besides producing sixteen one-hour television network series, he also produced twenty "made-for-TV" movies, including Attack on Terror, Brinks: The Great Robbery, Face of Fear, House on Greenapple Road, and Murder or Mercy. His only feature for the big screen was The Mephisto Waltz, released by Twentieth Century-Fox.
In 1979, a group of investors purchased his wholly self-owned QM Productions and subsequently sold it to Taft Broadcasting. Later in that year, the company was reincorporated into Taft Entertainment Television, though the QM name and logo continued to be used on-screen and for copyright purposes until the last official production was broadcast in 1983.

Typical format of a QM program

Shows produced by the company were usually introduced by announcer Dick Wesson or Hank Simms reading the title of the series and saying, "A Quinn Martin Production." Images of the stars of the show, followed by the guest stars for that week, were shown and their names announced, followed by the name of the episode and various to-black effects. In some series, such as The Fugitive and The Invaders, its backstory that led to the plot of the series, narrated by the announcer or the star, was told before the show's guest stars were announced. While episodes were structured into the usual four "acts" and an "epilogue," each was explicitly labelled at the start of each segment with the show title and the act number.

Later life

Martin worked as an adjunct professor at the University of California at San Diego's Earl Warren College, where he also endowed a professorial chair in drama. He also established a scholarship for theater arts and communications students at Santa Clara University Martin moved to Rancho Santa Fe, California, near San Diego where he became president of the La Jolla Playhouse and the Del Mar Fair board of directors. He was involved with developing motion pictures for Warner Bros. with a new company named QM Communications.

Death

Martin died of heart failure on September 5, 1987, in his home in Rancho Santa Fe, California.