Writer-producer David W. Rintels has worked in a variety of dramatic television forms, including series, made-for-television movies, and miniseries. He began his television career in the early 1960s, writing episodes for the critically acclaimed CBS courtroom drama series The Defenders. He continued his series involvement writing episodes for Slattery’s People (1964–65), a CBS political drama, and became head writer for the ABC science fiction series The Invaders (1967–68) before concentrating his energies on writing and producing made-for-television movies and miniseries. His work has been honored with two Emmy Awards for outstanding writing (Clarence Darrow, 1973, and Fear on Trial, 1975); Writers Guild of America Awards for outstanding scripts (“A Continual Roar of Musketry,” parts 1 and 2 of the series The Senator, 1970; Fear on Trial, 1975; and Gideon’s Trumpet, 1980); and a cable ACE Award for writing (Sakharov, 1984). Rintels’s achievements also include the sole story and joint screenplay credits for the feature film Scorpio (1972).

Rintels’s television work in the genres of fictional history (using novelistic invention to portray real historical figures and events) and historical fiction (placing fictional characters and events in a more or less authentic historical setting) has been praised by Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg, who noted that Rintels’s “fine record for using TV to present history as serious entertainment is probably unmatched by any other present dramatist.” Some critics have argued, however, that while his faithfulness to historical detail and accuracy is commendable, Rintels’s use of lengthy expository sequences has, on occasion, diminished the stories’ dramatic power.

Following his involvement as an episode writer for The Defenders, the Emmy Award-winning drama series featuring a father and son legal team defending people’s constitutional rights, Rintels returned to the subject of the courts in Clarence Darrow (NBC, 1973) and Gideon’s Trumpet (CBS, 1980), the latter a Hallmark Hall of Fame production he both wrote and produced. Based on Anthony Lewis’s book, Gideon’s Trumpet was the real-life story of Clarence Earl Gideon (played by Henry Fonda), a drifter with little education, who was arrested in the early 1960s for “breaking and entering.” The U.S. Supreme Court held that Gideon was entitled to an attorney, although he could not afford to pay for one; this case established the constitutional right to legal representation, now guaranteed to all U.S. citizens.

Rintels has also frequently focused on the political sphere, and especially on idealistic individuals who become ensnared in the nefarious webs woven by those seeking power or influence. In “A Continual Roar of Musketry,” he developed the character of Hayes Stowe, an idealistic U.S. senator (played by Hal Holbrook).

In the 1975 CBS docudrama Fear on Trial, starring George C. Scott and William Devane, Rintels told the story of John Henry Faulk, a homespun radio personality who wrote a book about the blacklisting in television in the 1950s. Upon publication of this book, Faulk suddenly found his own name appearing in the AWARE bulletin, a blacklisting sheet created by two communist-hunting businessmen who proclaimed themselves protectors of the entertainment industry.

Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977), a 12- and-one-half-hour ABC miniseries co-written (with Eric Bercovici) and co-produced by Rintels, was a provocative examination of the Nixon administration, including a striking psychological portrait of Nixon, fictionalized as President Richard Monckton. Played to perfection by Jason Robards, Monckton is described by Michael Arlen as “nervous and disconnected . . . insecure, vengeful, riddled with envy, and sublimely humorless.” Although loosely based on The Company (the novel by Nixon administration insider John Erlichman) the Rintels and Bercovici script transcended Erlichman’s one-dimensional characterizations to bring to the small screen “an intelligent and well-paced scenario of texture and character.” Yet working in the genre of historical fiction was not without its pitfalls. In a foreshadowing of the heated debate surrounding Oliver Stone’s 1995 feature film Nixon, Arlen questioned the production’s mixing of fiction with fact:

There should be room in our historical narratives for such a marvelously evocative (though not precisely factual) interpretation as Robards’ depiction of Nixon-Monckton’s strange humorous humorouslessness, where an actor’s art gave pleasure, brought out character, and took us closer to truth. At the same time, for major television producers...to be so spaced out by the present Entertainment Era as to more or less deliberately fool around with the actual life of an actual man, even of a discredited President...seems irresponsible and downright shabby.

Rintels turned his attention to political repression abroad in Sakharov (HBO, 1984), the moving story of the courageous Soviet scientist Andrei Dmitrievich Sahkarov (played by Robards) and his second wife Yelena G. Bonner (Glenda Jackson). Sakharov chronicles the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s painful journey into dissent, and his outspoken advocacy of human rights. Because so much information about affairs in the Soviet Union was cloaked in secrecy, it would have been tempting to invent much of Sakharov’s tale. Rintels, however, was loath to do this. Rather, in order to present the personal side of Sakharov, Rintels compiled in formation from extensive interviews with Sakharov’s children and their spouses, who had emigrated to the United States, and with Yelena Bonner’s mother. Rintels also drew upon Sakharov’s own accounts and those of his friends, and on reports from journalists stationed in Moscow. As the story unfolded for Rintels, he decided to use, as a primary framing device, Sakharov’s “growing awareness—through his personal relationship with Yelena—of his moral duty.” Rintels was careful to avoid painting the Soviet bureaucrats and security police as “evil” in simplistic melodramatic terms in order to glorify Sakharov. The script attempted to explain why the Soviet officials perceived Sakharov as an internal threat and was circumspect regarding his motivations when the facts (or lack thereof) warranted.

In two other efforts, Day One (AT&T Presents/CBS, 1989) and Andersonville (TNT, 1996), Rintels examined the United States at war. Day One was a three-hour drama special detailing the history of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb during World War II. Based on Peter Wyden’s book Day One: Before Hiroshima and After, the program was written and produced by Rintels and won an Emmy Award for outstanding drama special. The story began with the flight of top European scientists, who feared Nazi Germany was progressing toward developing an atomic bomb, to the United States. Near the program’s conclusion, a lengthy, balanced, and soul-searching debate transpires among scientists, military leaders, and top civilian government officials, including President Truman, regarding whether to drop the bomb on Japan without prior notice or to invite Japanese officials to a demonstration of the bomb in hopes that they would surrender upon seeing its destructive power. Through-out the piece, Rintels explores the symbiotic relationship that developed between the two key players in the Manhattan Project: the intellectual scientist and project leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the military leader charged with overall coordination of the effort, General Leslie R. Groves.

Andersonville, a four-hour, two-part drama written and produced by Rintels, recounts the nightmare of the Civil War Confederate prison camp in southwest Georgia—a 26-acre open-air stockade designed for 8,000 men, which at peak operation contained 32,000 Union Army prisoners of war. Of the 45,000 Union soldiers imprisoned there between 1864 and 1865, nearly 13,000 died, mostly from malnutrition, disease, and exposure. Not only were the Confederate captors cruel; there also existed in the camp a ruthless gang of prisoners, the Raiders, who intimidated, beat, and even killed fellow prisoners for their scraps of food. The other prisoners eventually revolted against the Raiders, placing their six ring leaders on trial and hanging them with the Confederates’ blessing. Rintels places the blame for the squalid conditions in the camp both on the camp’s authoritarian German-Swiss commandant, Henry Wirz, the only person tried and executed for war crimes following the Civil War, and on larger forces that were the products of a devastating four-year war: shortages of food, medicine, and supplies that plagued the entire Confederacy and forced it to choose between supplying its own armies or the Union prisoners. To Rintels, the Andersonville camp, unlike the Nazi concentration camps, seemed less the result of a conscious evil policy than the tragic result of a brutal war.

The Holocaust and the people responsible for it were the subject of Rintels’s miniseries Nuremberg (TNT, 2000), which earned the highest ratings to date for any miniseries aired on U.S. basic cable. Starring Alec Baldwin (who also coproduced the four-hour miniseries) as the lead U.S. prosecutor, Nuremberg chronicles the International Military Tribunal proceedings against Nazi officers after World War II, focusing not only on the horrible crimes committed but also on the challenges faced in this first effort to establish standards for the international prosecution of war crimes.

Rintels tackled a somewhat less weighty subject in his next for-cable project, a biography of Indiana University’s volatile head basketball coach, Bobby Knight. A Season on the Brink (2002) is notable for two reasons: it represents the first effort by the sports cable channel ESPN to air an original drama, and it was aired simultaneously on ESPN, with dialogue heavily peppered with profanity, and ESPN2, where the offending words were covered by “bleeps.”

In addition to his creative work, Rintels has also been active in the politics of television. As president of the Writers Guild of America (1975–77), he coordinated the successful campaign, led by the Guild and producer Norman Lear, to have the courts overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s 1975 “family-viewing” policy, which designated the first two hours of prime time (7:00–9:00 P.M.) for programs that would be suitable for viewing by all age groups. Rintels and Lear argued that the policy violated the First Amendment, forcing major script revisions of more adult-oriented programs appearing before 9:00 P.M. and the rescheduling of series such as All in the Family.

Since the early 1970s, Rintels has been a vocal critic of television networks’ timidity in their prime-time programming. In 1972, he condemned commercial television executives for rejecting scripts dealing with Vietnam draft evaders, the U.S. Army’s storing of deadly nerve gas near large cities, antitrust issues, and drug companies’ manufacture of drugs intended for the illegal drug market. In a 1977 interview, Rintels criticized the bulk of prime-time entertainment television: “That’s the television most of the people watch most of the time—75 to 80 million people a night. And it is for many people a source of information about the real world. But the message they are getting is, I think, not an honest message.”