John O'Toole (producer) in the United States Army from 1954 to 1956. O’Toole was the CEO of the Washington, D.C. -based production company, Eli Productions, for over 20 years. He wrote and produced documentaries, TV shows, and radio series on topics that included the arts and the aging process, many of which aired on NBC, CBS, and public television and radio. His work earned him a Writers Fellowship by The National Endowment for the Arts. In 1979, he wrote a TV miniseries adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales", which aired on PBS and earned an Outstanding Writer Emmy nod. He also did
Leatherstocking Tales the series, which discrepancies Cooper likely introduced for the sake of convenience. For instance, Cooper manipulated time to avoid making Leatherstocking 100 years old when he traveled to the Kansas plains in "The Prairie". The Natty Bumppo character is generally believed to have been inspired, at least in part, by the historic explorer Daniel Boone or the lesser known David Shipman. Critic Georg Lukacs likened Bumppo to Sir Walter Scott's "middling characters; because they do not represent the extremes of society, these figures can serve as tools for the social and cultural exploration of historical events, without directly portraying the