Jerome Coopersmith's title card for the Hawaii Five-O episode "Nine Dragons."
Jerome Coopersmith, a writer for television and the stage, died in July at age 97, according to an obituary published at Legacy.com.
His many credits included 32 episodes of the original Hawaii Five-O series, some under the pen name of Jay Roberts.
In 2019, Coopersmith was interviewed by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about his work for the show. The writer lived in New York. He'd take his scripts to the CBS mail room and they would be flown overnight to Los Angeles.
In the 2019 interview, Coopersmith said he got many of his ideas from reading newspapers.
"A fabulous variety of crimes are committed every day," he told the Honolulu paper. "All I had to do was figure out how to transplant them to Hawaii, and how to make the criminals smarter than they are in real life so that it would take 'Five-O' an hour to catch up with them and not just five minutes. In real life most criminals are stupid."
One of Coopersmith's best, and most ambitious, Five-O tales was the two-hour episode Nine Dragons that led off the 1976-77 season.
Steve McGarrett's arch-foe, Wo Fat, intends to lead a coup of China, then launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the United States. Wo Fat tortures and brainwashes McGarrett as part of the plot. Much of the episode was filmed on location in Hong Kong.
According to Coopersmith's Wikipedia entry, the scribe's first television writing job was in 1947. Starting in the 1960s, Coopersmith began writing plays, including Baker Street, a musical based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.
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