Though his reputation rests primarily on having written the novels that served as the inspiration for Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954) and Elliot Silverstein's Cat Ballou (1965), Roy Chanslor enjoyed a long career as a Hollywood scribe, penning screenplays in a variety of genres, chief among them westerns and mysteries. His original story "Hi, Nellie" - a pulpy riff on Nathaniel West's "Miss Lonelyhearts" (adapted for films in 1933 as Advice to the Lovelorn), in which a big city news reporter is demoted to the advice desk - was first adapted for the movies by Warner Brothers in 1934, with Paul Muni playing the lead. The material was reworked for Ronald Reagan in Love Is on the Air (1937), where the setting was a radio station, and gender-reversed for Brenda Marshall in You Can't Escape Forever (1942). Remounted again in 1949 as The House Across the Street, the plot finds racket-busting journalist Wayne Morris shifted for fear of a libel suit by editor Alan Hale to the newspaper's advice column. Glumly resigned to his fate, Morris changes his tune when a pretty blonde with boyfriend troubles offers him a backdoor to exposing racketeer Bruce Bennett. Chanslor's story was trotted out again for radio on Lux Video Theatre, in a November 1956 adaptation starring Don DeFore and Virginia Grey.

By Richard Harland Smith