1961 Pilot - Loretta Young in "The Spark"

THE SPARK - (1961 pilot)
By the summer of 1961, after eight seasons on NBC and over 250 episodes produced, the Loretta Young Show was cancelled. Looking toward the future, and with a production crew still in place, Miss Young decided to produce a pilot for a new series of hour-long television specials dealing with pressing family issues of the day.
“The Spark” is the result.
No production notes survive and no credits appear in this pilot episode, but one can assume that the same basic crew that worked on the series worked on this pilot.
The writer and director was most likely Richard Morris, and the producer John London, who both had collaborated on many episodes of the original series.
This is the story of Lucy Masters, a psychiatrist in training at Clearview Farms, an institution for emotionally disturbed boys. Of particular interest to her are two especially difficult young patients, Frankie and Paul. Both boys are severely autistic, but she believes she can help them, only to discover that they ultimately help one another.
The part of Paul is played by twelve-year-old Roger Mobley, a popular child actor of the time who had also appeared in the final episode of the Loretta Young NBC series entitled “Not In Our Stars”, apparently filmed only weeks earlier than this pilot.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Mobley made more than one hundred television appearances and co-starred in nine feature films in a nine-year career. Once he outgrew his child actor status, he joined the Green Berets during the Vietnam War and was subsequently a police officer in Beaumont, Texas.
Most of the other cast members were familiar to the original series as well.
This pilot never sold, so this program was never broadcast. We present it for the first time as we believe it was originally viewed in private screening rooms in New York and Los Angeles.