David Wise (writer)

David Wise is a television and animation writer, tutored by writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon whilst attending the Clarion Workshop.

Wise began experimenting with animation and live-action film at the age of seven, under the tutelage of several artists and experimental filmmakers, including Len Lye, Francis Lee, and Stan VanDerBeek. Wise created dozens of brief animations using cut-outs, scratch-on-film techniques, as well as conventional cel animation. In 1963, at the age of eight, Wise released a compilation of his experiments, entitled "Short Circuit." Distributed by the Filmmakers' Cooperative, "Short Circuit" was shown throughout the world, won several awards, and was the U.S. entry in the "Child & the World" festival in Czechoslovakia. Writing in the Village Voice, filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas called Wise "the Mozart of Cinema."

By the time he was nine, he was lecturing on filmmaking at universities and film societies (including Washington & Lee and the University of Maryland at Baltimore), and appeared on numerous television shows, including I've Got a Secret with Steve Allen as host.

At the age of sixteen, Wise abandoned film-making for writing, determined to become a professional science fiction writer. The following year Wise sold several SF short stories to various anthologies. This led directly to his first television writing job, an episode of Filmation's animated Star Trek series entitled "How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth," written in collaboration with Russell L Bates. The episode won Wise the Emmy for best children's series—the only Emmy the original version of Star Trek ever won.

After a successful stint of live action work, writing for Glen A. Larson's Buck Rogers (the "Space Vampire" episode) and the Lynda Carter series Wonder Woman, Wise returned to animation in the 1980s, collaborating on many of the animated endeavours of that period such as He-Man and Mighty Orbots.

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