Biografía

Had co-written an early screenplay of Mi nombre es violencia (1968) with Herman Miller.

In his book "Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed", writer Harlan Ellison referred to Laird as a thug.

He wrote freelance television scripts under many pseudonyms for several television shows, such as, Ben Casey (1961), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962), El fugitivo (1963), Espías con espuelas (1965), and Doctor Simon Locke (1971), among others.

He was considered by producer Robert H. Justman to hire as a staff writer and producer for Viaje a las estrellas: La nueva generación (1987).

He had written scripts that were never produced for television shows such as The Veil (1958), Chicos computarizados (1983), El hombre sin nombre (1965), and Have Gun - Will Travel (1957).

The British are masters in this form, Victorian mansions, ghostly footsteps, foggy streets. But there's also such an enormous body of American fiction that there's a publishing house, Arkham, in Sauk City, Iowa, devoted to nothing else but these kinds of stories, and it's catalog of titles is a thick book in itself. Aside from an occasional original story by Rod Serling, we plan to do only adaptions from this massive body of work.

I knew the stories were solid and would hold up because they did in their short story form, they had to be meaty or they would not have stood the test of time, I merely had to make certain the visuals, and not visuals in the ordinary sense, could be created by our special effects department.

I like to borrow from the classics for two reasons, first, many of the stories I like personally, and second, you're almost sure they will work, if a script writer fails with a story idea, you just pass it on to another writer, someone will do it right and come up with the spirit of the original source material.

Material is always the problem in television, and in this genre it is virtually inexhaustible, not only do you have tens of thousands of stories from specialists in this field, but almost every great writer of fiction tried tales of the supernatural and the mysterious at one time or another in their career.

You can have all the organizational ability in the world, but, if you don't have visual judgment, the battle can be lost right at the beginning.