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b'Michael McGreevey\\xa0(born February 7, 1948) is an American actor and screenwriter. He starred in several\\xa0Walt Disney\\xa0films as a young actor and later became a writer for the\\xa0Fame\\xa0TV series. He is the son of\\xa0Emmy Award-winning television and film screenwriter\\xa0John McGreevey. Michael McGreevey\'s first major role was as young cabin boy Chip Kessler in the 1959-61 TV series\\xa0Riverboat.[1]\\xa0It starred\\xa0Darren McGavin\\xa0as the captain of a riverboat on the Mississippi River during the 1830s. In a 2015 interview, McGreevey confirmed the rumored friction between McGavin and his co-star\\xa0Burt Reynolds: "They were just two very different personalities. I think that Burt was insecure. It was his first job in Hollywood and Darren was a very polished actor. It was Darren\'s show really--he was Captain Holden. I think Burt was a little jealous of Darren and they clashed quite a bit. What finally happened was that Burt left the show. But I loved them both. Darren was very much a father figure for me and Burt was like a big brother. He had been a football player at Florida State and I was impressed with that because I was into football. The first football I ever got--in fact, I\'ve still got it--he got me. We used to play catch. I still see Burt every once in awhile. He still says: "Don\'t tell people you were only 11 years old when we were on\\xa0Riverboat.\'"[2]
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, McGreevey appeared in numerous episodes of Walt Disney\'s\\xa0Wonderful World of Color[3]\\xa0and in the Disney theatrical film trilogy:\\xa0The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes\\xa0(1969),\\xa0Now You See Him, Now You Don\'t\\xa0(1972), and\\xa0The Strongest Man in the World\\xa0(1975). Set at fictional\\xa0Medfield College, these three films featured\\xa0Kurt Russell\\xa0as college student Dexter Riley and McGreevey as his friend Richard Schulyer.[4]\\xa0McGreevey also appeared as a different character in the Disney films\\xa0Snowball Express\\xa0(1972) and\\xa0The Shaggy D.A.\\xa0(1976).
In addition to his Disney roles, McGreevey appeared as guest star in numerous television series, such as\\xa0The Virginian,\\xa0Bonanza, and\\xa0Route 66. He also starred opposite\\xa0Sally Field,\\xa0Kirk Douglas,\\xa0Robert Mitchum, and\\xa0Richard Widmark\\xa0in the 1967 western\\xa0The Way West, which was based on an\\xa0A. B. Guthrie, Jr.\\xa0novel. He played a young pioneer named Brownie Evans, who marries Sally Field\'s character.[5]
In 1978, after studying film at\\xa0UCLA, Michael McGreevey collaborated with his father, John McGreevey, on the script for the 1978 made-for-TV movie\\xa0Ruby and Oswald: "In reality, the movie, although it\'s called\\xa0Ruby and Oswald, is a three-way depiction of those four days in Dallas where we cut back and forth between the documentary footage of Kennedy and the recreated story with Ruby and Oswald. Dad and I both knew a man named\\xa0Alan Landsburg, who had done a lot of documentaries. We went to him with the project first and he knew\\xa0Mel Stuart, who had done an Academy Award-winning documentary called\\xa0Four Days in November\\xa0(1964). So, Mel was attached to direct it and we went into CBS and sold it right away as a three-hour special event movie. I was very proud of that movie; it was very well done."[2]
McGreevey subsequently wrote episodes of TV series such as\\xa0The Waltons,\\xa0Quincy, M.E., and\\xa0Fame. He eventually became a script editor and then creative consultant for\\xa0Fame.[6]\\xa0In 1984, he received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing in Children\'s Programming for co-writing the\\xa0ABC Afterschool Special"The Celebrity and the Arcade Kid."[7]\\xa0In 2015, he co-wrote the feature-length documentary\\xa0Earl Hamner Storyteller, which focused on the life and career of\\xa0The Waltons\\xa0creator\\xa0Earl Hamner, Jr.'