50 Oscar winning screenwriters
Oscar winning screenwriters; before 1940 "Best Story", after that "Writing: Original story"
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Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood's and Broadway's greatest writers, won an Oscar for best original story for Underworld (1927) at the first Academy Awards in 1929 and had a hand in the writing of many classic films. He was nominated five more times for the best writing Oscar, winning (along with writing partner and friend Charles MacArthur, with whom he wrote the classic play "The Front Page") for The Scoundrel (1935) (the other nominations were for Viva Villa! (1934) in 1935, Wuthering Heights (1939) (shared with MacArthur), Angels Over Broadway (1940) and Notorious (1946), the latter two for best original screenplay). Hecht wrote fast and wrote well, and he was called upon by many producers as a highly paid script doctor. He was paid $10,000 by producer David O. Selznick for a fast doctoring of the Gone with the Wind (1939) script, for which he received no credit and for which Sidney Howard won an Oscar, beating out Hecht and MacArthur's Wuthering Heights (1939) script.
Born on February 28, 1894, Hecht made his name as a Chicago newspaperman during the heady days of cutthroat competition among newspapers and journalists. As a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, he wrote the column "1001 Afternoons in Chicago" and broke the "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story, which led to the conviction and execution of Army war hero Carl Wanderer for the murder of his pregnant wife in 1921. The newspaper business, which he and MacArthur famously parodied in "The Front Page", was a good training ground for a screenwriter, as he had to write vivid prose and had to write quickly.
While in New York in 1926 he received a telegram from friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The telegram read: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Hecht moved to Hollywood, winding up at Paramount, working uncredited on the script for Lewis Milestone's adaptation of Ring Lardner's story The New Klondike (1926), starring silent superstar Thomas Meighan. However, it was his script for Josef von Sternberg's seminal gangster picture Underworld (1927) that got him noticed. From then until the 1960s, he was arguably the most famous, if not the highest paid, screenwriter of his time.
As a playwright, novelist and short-story writer, Hecht always denigrated writing for the movies, but it is for such films as Scarface (1932) and Nothing Sacred (1937) as well The Front Page (1931), based on his play of the same name, for which he is best remembered.
He died on April 18, 1964, in New York City from thrombosis. He was 70 years old.Won two times, first 1927 with Underworld, then 1937 with The Scoundrel.
Also wrote the screenplays for Spellbound, Notorious, His Girl Friday and dozens of other movies- Writer
- Director
- Actor
John Monk Saunders was born on 22 November 1895 in Hinckley, Minnesota, USA. He was a writer and director, known for The Dawn Patrol (1930), Wings (1927) and Devil Dogs of the Air (1935). He was married to Fay Wray and Avis Bissell (Hughes). He died on 11 March 1940 in Ft. Myers, Florida, USA.A flier who loved writing. He won the Best Story 1931 for Dawn Patrol. He wrote the screenplay for Wings which was the first film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
He killed himself 1940.- Writer
- Director
- Actress
The most renowned female screenwriter of the 20th century, and one of the most respected scripters of any gender, Frances Marion was born in San Francisco. She modeled and acted and had some success as a commercial artist. She entered into journalism and served in Europe as a combat correspondent during World War I. She moved to Los Angeles and was employed by director Lois Weber as an assistant, in which position she received a thorough apprenticeship in the film industry. She began writing scripts and attracted the attention of Mary Pickford. The pair began a long relationship as both friends and artists, with Marion serving as Pickford's official screenwriter. She wrote many of Pickford's most famous and memorable silent films as well as many other of the great successful pictures of the 1920s and 1930s. She won Oscars for her writing on The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1931). Her influence resurrected the career of Marie Dressler and resulted in her greatest glory, and her scripts for Marion Davies are among the most memorable of that actress' oeuvre. At MGM, where she was long under contract, she enjoyed enormous creative freedom for a writer. With the death of Irving Thalberg, MGM's creative head, in 1936, Marion's power and influence waned. In 1946 she left Hollywood and thereafter concentrated on plays and novels. She was at one time married to 1920s cowboy star Fred Thomson and subsequently to director George W. Hill. She died in 1973, one of the most respected names in Hollywood history.She became the first female to win an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1930 for the film The Big House, she received the Academy Award for Best Story for The Champ in 1932. She wrote hundreds of screenplays.- Writer
- Producer
- Production Manager
Harvard graduate Robert Lord studied English literature and playwriting in George Pierce Baker's renowned Workshop 47. He subsequently put this training into practice as a story writer for the New Yorker. Before long, one of his contributions, The Lucky Horseshoe (1925), attracted the attention of Hollywood producers and motivated Lord to relocate to the West Coast. After work on Tom Mix westerns, he soon landed a prestige assignment in the shape of the disaster epic The Johnstown Flood (1926), a palpable box office success, for which Lord wrote the original story. His hard-edged style of prose impressed Warner Brothers, who signed him under contract in 1927.
A favorite of production manager Hal B. Wallis, Lord remained at the studio until 1941, by which time he had won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for One Way Passage (1932) and been nominated for another, the controversial social drama Black Legion (1937), a hard-hitting indictment of bigotry and mob rule. Lord again wrote the original story and also served as associate producer. A hit with both critics and audiences, the picture starred Humphrey Bogart, who, at the time was merely another contract player in danger of being typecast as heavies in run-of-the-mill potboilers. "Black Legion" reaffirmed Bogart's star qualities and he never forgot the role Robert Lord had played in rescuing his career.
Following the death of Mark Hellinger in 1947, Bogart went out of his way to procure Lord as vice-president of his independent Santana Productions. In his new role as Santana's main producer, Lord was given carte blanche to hire such experienced writers as Daniel Taradash and John Monks Jr. (for Knock on Any Door (1949)). He was also instrumental in acquiring the rights for suitable literary material, best of which was In a Lonely Place (1950), based on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. While Lord was never officially credited with writing any of Santana's screenplays, he was nonetheless significantly involved in their early development (as, for example, in defining the character of Dixon Steele). On the flip side, Lord's friendship with Bogart rather clouded his objectivity in that he frequently interfered in the creative process by insisting on editorial revisions (particularly, whenever he felt the star's character was not portrayed in a sufficiently sympathetic light).
After Bogart sold his interest in Santana to Columbia in 1955, Lord effectively retired from the film industry. He died in April 1976 in Los Angeles at the age of seventy-five.Won Best story 1933 for One Way Passage.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
Arthur Caesar was born on 9 March 1892 in Bucharest, Romania. He was a writer, known for Manhattan Melodrama (1934), Anne of the Indies (1951) and Transient Lady (1935). He was married to Dira (Dora?) Platts. He died on 20 June 1953 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.Best Story 1934; Manhattan Melodrama, which is most famous today for being the film that John Dillinger had just been to see before getting gunned down outside the cinema. Most of his screenplays were for B-movies.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
"Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers out there are starving!" When Patrick Dennis's fictional Auntie Mame uttered this pithy observation, she could have been speaking of Charles MacArthur. Charlie never shied away from the feast, and he certainly never went hungry. Arriving in November 1895 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Charlie was the second youngest of seven children born to stern evangelist William Telfer MacArthur and Georgiana Welsted MacArthur. His early life was dominated by his father's ministry, leading the family to travel cross country wherever the elder MacArthur's calling took them. Charlie spent much of his time during those years hiding in the bathroom -- the only place offering even a modicum of privacy for a member of such a large family -- reading virtually anything he could get his hands on. He developed a passion for the written word that would last him to his dying day. Resisting Reverend MacArthur's insistent urging that his son follow him into the ministry, young Charlie left the family's rural New York home soon after finishing high school. Heading off to the Midwest, he took a reporter's job at The Oak Leaves, a suburban Chicago newspaper owned by two of his older brothers and run by his older sister. His first professional taste of crafting something for others to read whetted his appetite for even more. Intently determined to pursue a calling which for him was as strong as the calling his father had heard, Charlie went to the City News Bureau of Chicago as the first step in his journey toward life as a journalist. Though only 19, the irreverent sense of humor and dislike for mindless authoritarianism for which he would later be so well known was already quite evident in the application he filled out for the job. In the space entitled "Tell us in exactly seventy-five words why you wish to become a reporter," Charlie wrote: "I want to become a reporter more because I like the work than for any other reason. I feel that even if I should branch off in another profession, the experience obtained in getting up on your toes after news would be valuable. These are my reasons. More words would be useless." The excitement of working in brash and brawling pre-1920s Chicago didn't quite satisfy Charlie's hunger for something more, however, and he soon hooked up with General "Black Jack" Pershing, galloping off to Mexico to join in the hunt for the infamous Pancho Villa. When World War I broke out, Charlie joined the Army's 149th Field Artillery, part of the Rainbow Division. During his time in France, he and his battery mate shot down a German plane with nothing more than a machine gun. Later in the war, Charlie sustained a mild shrapnel wound. In 1919 he penned his only book, A Bug's Eye View of the War (later republished in 1929 by Harper Collins as War Bugs) about his unit's adventures and misadventures during some of the most brutal and bloodiest fighting in history. Returning to Chicago just in time for Prohibition, the Roaring 20s, and Al Capone, Charlie became one of Chicago's most well-known and widely read reporters. He authored some of the most enduring pieces ever printed in the pages of the Chicago Tribune and Daily News. His style was inventive, charming, and witty. Readers couldn't get enough. Once, when writing about a dentist accused of sexually molesting his female patients, Charlie chose the headline "Dentist Fills Wrong Cavity". He also wrote several short stories, two of which, "Hang It All" (1921) and "Rope" (1923), were published in H.L. Mencken's The Smart Set magazine. His star continued to rise, and he eventually headed off to the greener pastures of New York City. Once settled in the Big Apple, he began to shift his efforts toward playwrighting. His first true Broadway success was in 1926 with the play "Lulu Belle", written in collaboration with Edward Sheldon. It would later be remade into a 1948 movie starring Dorothy Lamour and George Montgomery. His next play, "Salvation", written in collaboration with Sidney Howard, enjoyed a moderate Broadway run. During the summer of 1927, Charlie and long-time friend and collaborator, Ben Hecht, rented the premises of the Nyack Girl's Academy as a haven from which they could create their own special brand of playwrighting. Helen Hayes (the future Mrs. Charles MacArthur) would tell friends of times when she or Rose Hecht would visit to bring in food or other supplies for their men, and the building would be positively filled with shouts of laughter and merriment. The result of this seclusion was the 1928 Broadway debut of "The Front Page". The phenomenal stage success of "The Front Page" prompted Charlie to head to Hollywood and screenplay work. Having already developed such works as The Girl Said No (1930), Billy the Kid (1930) and The Unholy Garden (1931), he hit the jackpot in 1931, first with the movie version of The Front Page (1931) (again collaborating with Ben Hecht), which won Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Lewis Milestone), and Best Actor (Adolphe Menjou), and then, with the release of The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931), which netted a 1932 Best Actress Oscar for its star, Helen Hayes. The film also won awards at that year's Venice Film Festival for both its leading lady and its director, Edgar Selwyn. Charlie's screenplay for Rasputin and the Empress (1932), the only movie ever to feature siblings John Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore together in the same film, gained him his own first Academy Award nomination (in 1934, for Best Original Story). Even though their efforts had turned mostly to filmmaking by this point, it was also during this period that Hecht and MacArthur produced their second smash theatrical effort, "Twentieth Century", which debuted on Broadway in December 1932, and was later made into the well-received 1934 movie starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. Unhappy with the machinations of Hollywood's fledgling film industry, however, MacArthur and Hecht decided to set up their own shop in Astoria, New York, producing, writing, directing, and even making uncredited onscreen appearances in a series of films such as The Scoundrel (1935) (poking fun at themselves by playing downtrodden patrons of a charity flop house) and Crime Without Passion (1934) (in which they portrayed -- what else? -- newspaper reporters). Their work earned much critical acclaim, culminating in the 1936 Best Writing (Original Story) Academy Award for The Scoundrel (1935). Their 1939 collaboration to turn Rudyard Kipling's epic poem into the movie Gunga Din (1939), starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., was recognized in 1999 by the National Film Registry, and their adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1939) garnered the two yet another Academy Award Best Writing (Screenplay) nomination in 1940. That year also saw the remake of "The Front Page" into the popular movie, His Girl Friday (1940), starring Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. The advent of World War II prompted Charlie to interrupt his writing career and sign on in his country's service once again. He began his second stint of service years as a Major in the Chemical Warfare Service, returning home at the war's conclusion a Lt. Colonel. By now, the father of two children, Mary and James MacArthur, and husband to "The First Lady of the American Theatre", Charlie had amassed a considerable amount of fame in his own right, yet was still looking for something different. Resuming his theatrical and film work, he also took on the duties of editing and publishing the foundering Theatre World magazine, but left after little more than a year, dissatisfied with the politics and constraints of working in a corporate atmosphere. The tragic loss of his 19-year-old daughter to polio in 1949 was a blow from which Charlie would never quite recover. Though he continued to work on screenplays and movie scripts up until his death in 1956, some of which enjoyed a modicum of success, he would never again completely recapture the freewheeling enthusiasm of his earlier days. When his son grew old enough to begin considering a career of his own, his father advised, "Do anything you like, son, but never become a playwright. It's a death worse than fate!" Charles MacArthur left behind a lasting imprint upon both those who knew him personally and those who knew him only through his published works. Supremely disdainful of anything even remotely false or affected, Charlie nevertheless did follow the path his father wished him to take, albeit in his own inimical fashion. His words carried a truth and sincerity few writers have been able to achieve. His unique mix of subtle irony, gentle sarcasm, and poignant pathos reached as deeply into his audience at least as well as any fiery sermon from a pulpit ever could. As Ben Hecht said in the eulogy he delivered at his friend's memorial service (and later expanded upon in his 1957 book, "Charlie: The Improbable Life and Times of Charles MacArthur"), "Charlie was more than a man of talent. He was himself a great piece of writing. His gaiety, wildness and kindness, his love for his bride Helen, and his two children, and for his clan of brothers and sisters -- his wit and his adventures will live a long, long while".1935, cowriter of The Scoundrel, with Ben Hecht. He wrote several movie scripts together with Ben Hecht, for example His Girl Friday, and the 1939 Wuthering Heights.- Writer
- Cinematographer
- Script and Continuity Department
Pierre Collings was born on 22 September 1900 in Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was a writer and cinematographer, known for The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), A Woman of the World (1925) and Good and Naughty (1926). He was married to Natalie H. Collings. He died on 21 December 1937 in North Hollywood, California, USA.Won the Best Story 1936 for The Story of Louis Pasteur with Sheridan Gibney- Writer
- Producer
Sheridan Gibney was born on 11 June 1903 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) and The Locket (1946). He died on 12 April 1988 in Missoula, Montana, USA.Won the Best Story 1936 for The Story of Louis Pasteur with Pierre Collings- Robert Carson was born on 6 October 1909 in Washington, USA. He was a writer, known for A Star Is Born (1937), A Star Is Born (2018) and A Star Is Born (1954). He was married to Mary Jane Irving. He died on 19 January 1983 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Won 1937 for The Star Is Born, with William A. Wellman
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William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the original A Star Is Born (1937), was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his larger-than-life personality and lifestyle.
A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the 29th of February in Brookline, MA, Wellman was the great-great-great grandson of Francis Lewis, one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Wellman's father was a stockbroker and his mother, the former Cecilia McCarthy, was born in Ireland. Despite an upper-middle-class upbringing, the young Wellman was a hell-raiser. He excelled as an athlete and particularly enjoyed playing ice hockey, but he also enjoyed joyriding in stolen cars at nights.
Cecilia Wellman served as a probation officer for "wayward boys" (juvenile delinquents) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and was such a success in her field that she was asked to address Congress on the subject of delinquency. One of her charges was her own son, as the young Bill was kicked out of school at the age of 17 for hitting his high school principal on the head with a stink bomb. He tried making a living as a candy salesman and a cotton salesman, but failed. He worked for a lumber yard but was fired after losing control of a truck and driving it through the side of a barn. Eventually he wound up playing professional ice hockey in Massachusetts. While playing at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, an actor named Douglas Fairbanks took note of him. Impressed by Wellman's good looks and the figure he cut on ice, the soon-to-be silent-film superstar suggested to him that he had what it took to become a movie actor. Wellman's dream was to become an aviator, but since his father "didn't have enough money for me to become a flier in the regular way . . .I went into a war to become a flier."
When he was 19 years old, through the intercession of his uncle, Wellman joined the air wing of the French Foreign Legion, where he learned to fly. In France he served as a pilot with the famous Lafayette Flying Corps (better known as the Lafayette Escadrille), where he won his nickname "Wild Bill" due to his devil-may-care style in the air. He and fellow pilot Tom Hitchcock, the great polo player, were in the Black Cat group. Wellman was shot down by anti-aircraft fire and injured during the landing of his plane, which had lost its tail section. Out of 222 Escadrille pilots 87 were killed, but Wellman was fated to serve out the duration of the war. In the spring of 1918 he was recruited by the US Army Air Corps, joining "because I was broke, and they were trying to get us in." Commissioned an officer, he was sent back to the US and stationed at Rockwell Field, in San Diego, CA, to teach combat fighting tactics to the new AAC pilots.
Wellman would fly up to Hollywood and land on Fairbanks' polo fields to spend the weekend. Fairbanks told the returning hero that he would help him break into the movies when the war was over, and he was as good as his word. Fairbanks envisioned Wellman as an actor and cast him as the juvenile in The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919) and as a young officer in Evangeline (1919), but acting was something Wellman grew to hate, a hatred he later transferred to actors in his employ. He was fired by fellow macho director Raoul Walsh from "Evangeline" for slapping the lead actress, who Wellman didn't know was Walsh's wife. Disgusted with acting, Wellman told Fairbanks he wanted to be a director, and Fairbanks helped him into the production end of the business. It was a purely financial decision, he later recalled, as directors made more money than supporting actors at the time.
Goldwyn Pictures hired him as a messenger in 1920 and he soon worked his way up the ladder, first as an assistant cutter, then as an assistant property man, property man, assistant director and second-unit director before making his uncredited directorial debut later that year at Fox with Twins of Suffering Creek (1920) starring Dustin Farnum (the silent film B-Western star whom Dustin Hoffman's star-struck mother named the future double-Oscar winner after). Wellman later remembered the film as awful, along with such other B-Westerns as Cupid's Fireman (1923), starring Buck Jones, whose westerns he began directing in 1923 after serving his apprenticeship.
Fox Films gave Wellman his first directing credit in 1923 with the Buck Jones western Second Hand Love (1923) and, other than the Dustin Farnum picture The Man Who Won (1923), he turned out Jones pictures for the rest of his time at Fox. The studio fired him in 1924 after he asked for a raise after completing The Circus Cowboy (1924), another Buck Jones film. Moving to Columbia, he helmed When Husbands Flirt (1925), then went over to MGM for the slapstick comedy The Boob (1926) before landing at Famous Players-Lasky (now known as Paramount Pictures after its distribution unit), where he directed You Never Know Women (1926) and The Cat's Pajamas (1926). It was as a contract director at the now renamed Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky Corp. that he had his breakout hit, due to his flying background. Paramount entrusted its epic WW I flying epic Wings (1927) to Wellman, and the film went on to become the first Academy Award-winning best picture.
Paramount paid Wellman $250 a week to direct "Wings". He also gave himself a role as a German pilot, and flew one of the German planes that landed and rolled over. The massive production employed 3,500 soldiers, 65 pilots and 165 aircraft. It also went over budget and over schedule due to Wellman's perfectionism, and he came close to being fired more than once. The film took a year to complete, but when it was released it turned out to be one of the most financially successful silent pictures ever released and helped put Gary Cooper, whom Wellman personally cast in a small role, on the path to stardom. "Wings" and Wellman's next flying picture, The Legion of the Condemned (1928)--in which Cooper had a starring role--initiated the genre of the World War One aviation movie, which included such famous works as Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930) and Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930). Despite his success in bringing in the first Best Picture Oscar winner, Paramount did not keep Wellman under contract.
Wellman's disdain for actors already was in full bloom by the time he wrapped "Wings". Many actors appearing in his pictures intensely disliked his method of bullying them to elicit an performance. Wellman was a "man's man" who hated male actors due to their narcissism, yet he preferred to work with them because he despised the preparation that actresses had to go through with their make-up and hairdressing before each scene. Wellman shot his films fast. The hard-drinking director usually oversaw a riotous set, in line with his own lifestyle. He married five women, including a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, before settling down with Dorothy Coonan Wellman, a former Busby Berkeley dancer. Wellman believed that Dorothy saved him from becoming a caricature of himself. She appeared as a tomboy in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), a Depression-era social commentary picture made for the progressive Warner Bros. studio (and which is a favorite of Martin Scorsese). It came two years after Wellman's masterpiece, The Public Enemy (1931), one of the great early talkies, one of the great gangster pictures and the film that made James Cagney a superstar. Scorsese says that Wellman's use of music in the film influenced his own first gangster picture, Mean Streets (1973) .
Wellman was as adept at comedy as he was at macho material, helming the original A Star Is Born (1937) (for which he won his only Oscar, for best original story) and the biting satire Nothing Sacred (1937)--both of which starred Fredric March--for producer David O. Selznick. Both movies were dissections of the fame game, as was his satire Roxie Hart (1942), which reportedly was one of Stanley Kubrick's favorite films.
During World War Two Wellman continued to make outstanding films, including The Ox-Bow Incident (1942) and Story of G.I. Joe (1945), and after the war he turned out another war classic, Battleground (1949). In the 1950s Wellman's best later films starred John Wayne, including the influential aviation picture The High and the Mighty (1954), for which he received his third and last best director Oscar nomination. His final film hearkened back to his World War One service, Lafayette Escadrille (1958), which featured the unit in which Wellman had flown. He retired as a director after making the film, reportedly enraged at Warner Bros.' post-production tampering with a film that meant so much to him.
Other than David O. Selznick, not many people in Hollywood particularly liked the hell-raising iconoclast Wellman. Louis B. Mayer's daughter Irene Mayer Selznick, the first wife of David O. Selznick, said that Wellman was "a terror, a shoot-up-the-town fellow, trying to be a great big masculine I-don't-know-what". The Directors Guild of America in 1973 honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
William Wellman died (from leukemia) in 1975.While he was primarily a director, he wrote the story for A Star Is Born and received a story credit for both remakes in 1954 and 1976- Eleanore Griffin, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who won her Academy Award along with co-writer Dore Schary for Boys Town (1938), was born on April 29, 1904, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Griffin began writing screenplays at Universal in 1937, being credited for the comedies When Love Is Young (1937) (directed by Hal Mohr) and Love in a Bungalow (1937) (directed by Ray McCarey, the younger brother of famed director Leo McCarey). Moving over to MGM, she penned the Mickey Rooney / Judy Garland musical Thoroughbreds Don't Cry (1937) for Maurice Rapf's production unit. It was there she hit paydirt with the script based on the true story of the priest who launched Boys Town in 1917, a reformatory for wayward boys. Directed by Norman Taurog, "Boys Town" was nominated for Five Academy Awards, bringing Oscars for Best Actor to 'Spencer Tracy (I)' (v) and for Best Original Story to Griffin and Dore Schary. It also made Edward Flanagan famous and spawned a sequel, Men of Boys Town (1941).
Griffin worked as a screenwriter for almost 30 years, but ironically, "Boys Town" - which came very early in her career - would remain the summit of her achievement. Part of this was due to the exigencies of studio production, in which even a highly paid screenwriter would win an Oscar one year and be penning B-picture potboilers the next. However, it was the vertical integration of the studios, which was complete by the time she established herself in Hollywood in the late 1930s, that likely limited her career, as it did all women from the mid-1930s to the turn of the century.
Women had been a major force in the film industry during the silent era, particularly in the area of screenwriting (since dialogue wasn't needed, and inter-titles were a separate discipline, screenplays were called "scenarios", with the concept of "play" devolving onto the movie itself, which commonly was called a "photoplay" in the first generations of cinema). June Mathis, who helped make Rudolph Valentino a superstar, wrote the scenarios and screenplays for over over 100 films, and also as an "editorial director" on others, from the mid-Teens until 1930.
Women directors were not uncommon during the silent era (in fact, the first "feature" film was directed by a woman, back in 1896), but with the vertical integration of the movie industry in the 1930s women were squeezed out after the advent of the Talkies. It is a truism of organizational theory that the more complex the structure, the more control is exerted over all aspects of the organization, and the more conformity is demanded from organizational players. The corporate hierarchies were dominated by men, and the pressure for conformity made the vertical, publicly traded studios inhospitable to women, who by their very gender, could not conform to the dominant corporate paradigm.
After the early Talkie period, it was unusual for there to be powerful women, i.e., directors or producers, and conformity was demanded even the writers (a craft with decidedly little power due to the industrial mode of production used by the vertically integrated studios, in which piece-work was the dominant paradigm). Only Frances Marion, a double Oscar winner able to write across genres, survived and it is significant that her two Oscars came during the early talkie period, in 1930 for Best Writing Achievement for the prison picture The Big House (1930) and in 1932 for the Best Original Story for The Champ (1931). Though she worked on such prestigious pictures as Camille (1936) at MGM, the most powerful of Hollywood studios, she only received one more Oscar nod, in 1934, for Best Writing, Original Story for The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933). By 1937, the year Griffin got her start at Univesal, the career of Hollywood's greatest woman screenwriter was virtually over.
After Griffin's Oscar victory at MGM, she moved over to Paramount for the musical-comedy St. Louis Blues (1939), directed by Raoul Walsh. At Columbia she contributed to the treatment of Howard Hawks' classic Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the screenplay of which was written by Jules Furthman. She also contributed the story for Mitchell Leisen's Army Air Crops melodrama I Wanted Wings (1941).
During World War II her career lost its momentum, despite the legions of male screenwriters who went to war. At Columbia she wrote the story for the B-movie series entry Blondie in Society (1941), as well as the stories for the comedy Hi, Beautiful (1944) starring 'Noah Beery' Jr.' and Hattie McDaniel at Universal and for Henry Hathaway's melodrama Nob Hill (1945) starring George Raft at Fox. Back at MGM she contributed the story for George Sidney's The Harvey Girls (1946)_ and wrote the screenplay for the 'Margaret O'Brien' vehicle Tenth Avenue Angel (1948).
Most writers in Hollywood during the sound era made their living rewriting, polishing or adding to scripts. Griffin's next major credited spurt of activity came in the mid-1950s, when she wrote two Henry Koster films, the religious drama A Man Called Peter (1955) and Good Morning, Miss Dove (1954)_ starring 'Jennifer Jones' in the title role.
Her contribution to Universal's 1959 remake Imitation of Life (1959), Fannie Hurst's novel, was largely forgotten due to the film being almost wholly attributed to Douglas Sirk, a main beneficiary of the auteur theory that elevated the director to the status of a film's sole author (which is rather ridiculous within the industrial paradigm of Hollywood film, particularly in a factory such as Universal, which ground out product for the Big and little screens like so much sausage). For "Life" producer Ross Hunter she adapted another of Hurst's novels into a film, Back Street (1961), which starred Susan Hayward and John Gavin.
Her last credited film was an adaptation of Norman Vincent Peale's autobiography "Minister To Millions", produced by Frank Ross as One Man's Way (1964).
Eleanore Griffin died on July 25, 1995, in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. She was 91 years old.won her Academy Award along with co-writer Dore Schary for Boys Town (1938). One of the most neglected screenwriters suffering much for the fact that she was a woman, the "vertical integration" and the "auteur theory". - Director
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Lewis R. Foster was born on 5 August 1898 in Brookfield, Missouri, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Captain China (1950) and Tropic Zone (1953). He was married to Dorothy Wilson and Helen Mae. He died on 10 June 1974 in Tehachapi, California, USA.Directed and wrote over one hundred films and television series between 1926 and 1960, but won only one Oscar for the "best story" for Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.- Writer
- Producer
- Script and Continuity Department
Benjamin Glazer was born on 7 May 1887 in Belfast, Ireland [now Northern Ireland], UK. He was a writer and producer, known for 7th Heaven (1927), Arise, My Love (1940) and Paris Calling (1941). He was married to Sharon Lynn. He died on 18 March 1956 in Hollywood, California, USA.He is best known for his Oscar-winning writing for Seventh Heaven (1927) and Arise, My Love (1941). Additional screenwriting credits include The Merry Widow, Flesh and the Devil, Mata Hari, A Farewell to Arms, We're Not Dressing, and Tortilla Flat.- Harry Segall was born on 10 April 1892 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer, known for Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Monkey Business (1952) and There Goes My Girl (1937). He was married to Dorothy Segall, Martha Salonen and Lenore Mittelman. He died on 25 November 1975 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.In 1941, Segall won an Academy Award for best original story for the film Here Comes Mr. Jordan, based on his play Heaven Can Wait.
A 1978 film version of Heaven Can Wait starred Warren Beatty which was subsequently remade several times under various titles, most recently in 2001 starring Chris Rock. - Writer
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Educated at the Universities of Prague and Stuttgart, Emeric Pressburger worked as a journalist in Hungary and Germany and an author and scriptwriter in Berlin and Paris. He was a Hungarian Jew, chased around Europe (he worked on films for UFA in Berlin and Paris) before World War II, finally finding sanctuary in London--but as a scriptwriter who didn't speak English. So he taught himself to understand not only the finer nuances of the language but also of the British people. A few lucky breaks and introductions via old friends led to his meeting with "renegade" director Michael Powell. They then went on to make some of the most interesting (IMHO) and complex films of the 1940s and 1950s under the banner of "The Archers". Pressburger often showed a deep understanding of the British only granted to those "outside, looking in". He always prided himself on being "more English than the English". After all, some of us were just BORN English, but he CHOSE to become English. He spent his last days at Shoemakers Cottage, Aspall, Stowmarket, Suffolk in the English countryside that he loved so well.Won the Best Story Oscar 1942 for 49th Parallel (The Invaders)
Known as "Michael Powell's Screenwriter", as he wrote the script for 40 of his films, but wrote a lot of other screenplays as well.- Writer
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Oscar winner and Pulitzer Prize recipient William Saroyan, who gained world fame with his classic book "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1934), was born in California to Armenak and Takoohi Saroyan.
With his unmistakably American literary works, deeply rooted in his Armenian heritage, William Saroyan soon established himself as one of the preeminent short story writers, playwrights and novelists in the United States.
In 1939 and 1940 William Saroyan's "My Heart's in the Highlands" and "The Time of Your Life" were staged for theater and "Love's Old Sweet Song" opened on Broadway, winning the New York Critics Circle Award.
In 1943 his MGM screenplay "The Human Comedy" was novelized and published and received great reviews, and he won the Academy Award for Best Writing Original Story for "The Human Comedy".
He wrote the lyrics of Ross Bagdasarian's famous # 1 hit song "Come On-a My House", performed by Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, and Rosemary Clooney, which was featured in Madonna's "Swept Away" (2002) and Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952).
William Saroyan is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century -- along with such masters as John Updike, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, who admired him. Saroyan is perhaps the only major and influential writer to receive both the Pulitzer Prize and the Academy Award, and his work continues to appear on the theater stage and the silver screen worldwide.Won 1943 for the Human Comedy, the only screenplay he ever wrote.- Director
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Leo McCarey was born on 3 October 1896 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a director and writer, known for An Affair to Remember (1957), Going My Way (1944) and Love Affair (1939). He was married to Virginia Stella Martin. He died on 5 July 1969 in Santa Monica, California, USA.Best known as the director, he wrote many of the screenplays for his movies. He won the Oscar for Going My Way 1945.- Charles G. Booth was born on 12 February 1896 in Lancashire, England, UK. He was a writer, known for The House on 92nd Street (1945), Fury at Furnace Creek (1948) and The Magnificent Fraud (1939). He died on 22 May 1949 in Beverly Hills, California, USA.Best Story 1945; The House on 92nd St.
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British novelist and playwright Clemence Dane was born Winifred Ashton in Kent, England, in 1888. A gifted student, she was educated in a variety of private schools and, at age 16, was hired to teach French in Geneva, Switzerland. A year later she returned to England and studied art for three years in London, and another year in Dresden, Germany, and showed promise as a portrait painter. However, she gave up her art career to accept a position as a teacher in Ireland. She left that position for a career as a stage actress, and did that for several years until World War I broke out. She plunged into war work and drove herself so relentlessly that her health broke down. While recuperating she wrote her first novel, "Regiment of Women", under the pseudonym Clemence Dane, a name she picked in honor of the famous London church of St. Clemence Dane (later destroyed in a German bombing raid in 1940).
"Regiment of Women" was an almost instant success. Her next novel, "Legend", was also successful, and several reviewers suggested that it should be turned into a play. She followed their advice, and the play, now called "A Bill of Divorcement", had a successful run on Broadway and the London stage with Katharine Cornell, and was made into a film several times, most notably with Katharine Hepburn and John Barrymore (A Bill of Divorcement (1932)). She alternated writing novels, plays and essays, and even wrote a personal and professional study of actor/writer Hugh Walpole.
She died in London, England, in 1965 at age 77.This British screenwriter was born Winifred Ashton. She won the Oscar for Vacation from Marriage in 1946.- Writer
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Valentine Davies was born on 25 August 1905 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Miracle on 34th Street (1947), The Glenn Miller Story (1954) and It Happens Every Spring (1949). He was married to Elizabeth Strauss. He died on 23 July 1961 in Malibu, California, USA.Wrote the original story "Miracle on 34th Street", which was then adapted for screen by George Seaton- Writer
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Richard Schweizer was born on 23 December 1899 in Zurich, Switzerland. He was a writer and director, known for The Search (1948), Marie-Louise (1944) and Kleine Scheidegg (1937). He was married to Ruth Margaret Langnese. He died on 30 March 1965 in Zurich, Switzerland.A Swiss playwriter, won Oscars 1944 (Best Writing: Original Screenplay - Marie-Louise) and 1948 (Best Story; The Search) together with another Swiss, David Wechsler- Writer
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Douglas Morrow was born on 13 September 1913 in Oswego, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Stratton Story (1949), Men of Annapolis (1957) and Target (1958). He died on 9 September 1994 in Kingston, New York, USA.Wrote mostly for television, but won the "Best Story" Oscar 1949 for Stratton Story.- Writer
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A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, Edward Anhalt started his career in early television before turning to writing and producing films, often in collaboration with his wife Edna Anhalt. A prolific screenwriter, Anhalt and his wife won an Academy Award for Panic in the Streets (1950). He got his second Oscar for Becket (1964).Won Best Story 1951 together with his wife Edna, for Panic in the Streets. Edna didn't write much anything after she divorced him 1957.
Won Best Adapted Story 1965 for Becket.- Writer
- Music Department
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Paul Dehn's show-business career began in 1936 as a movie reviewer for several London newspapers. He later wrote plays, operettas and musicals for the stage. Dehn's first screenplay, for Seven Days to Noon (1950), garnered him an Oscar. He later wrote everything from James Bond films to entries in the "Planet of the Apes" series, and also was a lyricist for several film musicals.British screenwriter, who won the Oscar for Best Story together with his life partner at that time, composer James Bernard, 1952.- Writer
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Frank Cavett was born on 27 December 1905 in Jackson, Ohio, USA. He was a writer and assistant director, known for Going My Way (1944), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947). He was married to Mary Oakes. He died on 25 March 1973 in Santa Monica, California, USA.Won two Oscars, the first together with Frank Butler, 1945, Going My Way, and the second together with Fredric M. Frank and Theodore St. John, for the Greatest Show on Earth, 1953.- Writer
- Actor
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Frank Butler was born on 28 December 1890 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for Going My Way (1944), Wake Island (1942) and Whispering Smith (1948). He was married to Ethel Virginia Chapman. He died on 10 June 1967 in Oceanside, Long Island, New York, USA.A writer and an actor, who won Oscar for "Best Screenplay" for Going My Way, 1944, together with Frank Cavett.- Writer
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Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, arguably the most talented, most famous of the blacklisted film professionals known to history as the Hollywood 10, was born in Montrose, Colorado to Orus Trumbo and his wife, the former Maud Tillery.
Dalton Trumbo was raised at 1124 Gunnison Ave. in Grand Junction, Colorado, where his parents moved in 1908. His father, Orus, worked in a shoe store. Dalton, the first child and only son, was later joined by sisters Catharine and Elizabeth. The young Dalton peddled the produce from his father's vegetable garden around town and had a paper route. While attending Grand Junction High School (Class of 1924), he worked at The Daily Sentinel as a cub reporter. Of his early politics, a much older Dalton Trumbo told how he asked his father for five dollars so he could join the Ku Klux Klan, a mass organization after the First World War. He didn't get the five dollars.
While at university, he realized that his calling was as a writer. He worked on the school's newspaper, humor magazine and yearbook, while also toiling for the Boulder Daily Camera. He left school his first year to follow his family to Los Angeles. The family moved due to financial difficulties after his father had been terminated by the shoe company. In L.A., Dalton enrolled at the University of Southern California but was unable to complete enough credits for a degree. Orus Trumbo died of pernicious anemia in 1926, and Dalton had to take a job to become the breadwinner for his widowed mother and two younger sisters. Dalton Trumbo took on whatever jobs were available, including repossessing motorcycles and bootlegging, which he quit because it was too dangerous. Eventually, Trumbo took a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery on the night shift and remained for nearly a decade. Trumbo continued to write, mostly short stories, becoming more and more anxious and eventually desperate to leave the bakery, fearing that he would never achieve his destiny of becoming an important writer. During this time, he sold several short stories, written his first novel and worked for the "Hollywood Spectator" as a writer, critic and editor. His work also appeared in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines. Trumbo's first novel, "Eclipse" (1934), was set in fictional Shale City, Colorado (a thinly veiled Grand Junction) during the 1920s and 1930s, with characters who resembled notable community members. One of its main characters, John Abbott, is modeled after Trumbo's father. Dalton had tried, perhaps unfairly he admitted later, to avenge his father on the town where he had failed.
In 1934, Warner Bros. hired Trumbo as a reader, a job that entailed reading and summarizing plays and novels and advising whether they might be adapted into movies. It lead to a contract as a junior screenwriter at its B-pictures unit. In 1936, the same year he of his first screen credit for the B-move Road Gang (1936), Trumbo met his future soulmate Cleo Fincher and they married two years later. Daughter Nikola was born in 1939 and son Christopher in 1940. A daughter was added, Mitzi, the baby of the family.
He wrote the story for Columbia's Canadian-made Tugboat Princess (1936), clearly influenced by Captain January (1936), which had been made into a silent in 1924 before being remade with superstar Shirley Temple, substituting a tugboat in the original with a lighthouse. His screenplays for such films as Devil's Playground (1937) showed some concern for the plight of the disenfranchised, but the Great Depression still existed, and social commentary was inevitable in all but fantasies and musicals.
After leaving Warners, he worked for Columbia, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and beginning in 1937, M.G.M., the studio for which he would do some of his best work in the 1940s. By the late 1930s, he had worked himself up to better assignments, primarily for RKO (though he returned to Warners for The Kid from Kokomo (1939)), and was working on A-list pictures by the turn of the decade. He won his first Oscar nod for RKO's Kitty Foyle (1940), for which Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for best actress as a girl from a poor family who claws her way into the upper middle class via a failed marriage to a Main Line Philadelphia swell.
By the time of America's entry into World War II, Trumbo was one of the most respected, highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. He had also established a name for himself as a left-wing political activist whose sympathies coincided with those of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), which hewed to the line set by Moscow.
Trumbo was part of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition of communists and liberals in the late 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War. The Popular Front against Nazism and Fascism was been torn asunder in August 1939 when the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Many party members quit the CPUSA in disgust, but the true believers parroted the party line, which was now pro-peace and against US involvement in WWII.
Trumbo reportedly did not join the Party until 1943 and harbored personal reservations about its policies as regards enforcing ideological conformity. However, the publication of his anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun" in 1939 coincided with the shift of the CPUSA's stance from anti-Hitler to pro-peace, and his novel was embraced by the Party as the type of literature needed to keep the US out of the war. Trumbo agreed with the Party's pro-peace platform. The book, about a wounded World War One vet who has lost his limbs, won the American Book Sellers Award (the precursor to the National Book Award) in 1939. In a speech made in February 1940, four months before the Nazi blitzkrieg knocked France out of the war, Trumbo said, "If they say to us, 'We must fight this war to preserve democracy,' let us say to them, 'There is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship.'"
His speech was a rebuke to New Deal liberals. The Party began demonizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hated Hitler and was pro-British, as a war-monger. The Party ordered its members to henceforth be pro-peace and anti-FDR in their work and statements. In June 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, the CPUSA shifted gears to become pro-war, supportive of FDR's aggressive behavior towards Nazi Germany.
Shortly after the German invasion, Trumbo instructed his publisher to recall all copies of "Johnny Got His Gun" and to cease publication of the book. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war against the U.S. catapulted the U.S. into both the Asian and European theaters of World War II, the book - always popular with peace-lovers and isolationists who opposed America's involvement in foreign wars - suddenly became popular among native fascists, too. However, it proved hard to get a copy of the book during the war years.
Trumbo joined the CPUSA in 1943, the same year Victor Fleming's great patriotic war movie A Guy Named Joe (1943), with a Trumbo screenplay, appeared on screens. In 1944, Original Story was a separate Oscar category and David Boehm and Chandler Sprague were nominated in that category for an Academy Award. Trumbo's screenplay was overlooked. Like other communist screenwriters, he proved to be an enthusiastic writer of pro-war propaganda, though except for the notorious pro-Stalin Mission to Moscow (1943), few films displayed any overt communist ideas or propaganda. One that did was Tender Comrade (1943) , which Trumbo wrote as a Ginger Rogers vehicle for RKO. Directed by his future Hollywood 10 comrade Edward Dmytryk, it depicted a mild form of socialism and collectivization among women working in the defense industry. He also wrote the patriotic classic Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) for M.G.M., which was based on the Doolittle Raid of 1942.
Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his house in 1944 and showed them letters he had received from what he perceived were pro-fascist peaceniks who had requested copies of "Johnny Got His Gun", then out-of-print due to Trumbo's orders to his publisher. He turned those letters over to the FBI and later kept in contact with the Bureau, a fact that would later haunt blacklisted leftists, urging that the F.B.I. deal with them. His actions conformed to the CPUSA policy of denouncing anyone who opposed the war.
In 1945, the last year of the war, MGM released the Margaret O'Brien / Edward G. Robinson vehicle, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), penned by Trumbo. Robinson was a future member of the Hollywood "gray-list" with those, like Henry Fonda who were suspected of leftist sympathies or for being Fellow Travelers, but who could not be officially blacklisted. Drawing on his own rural childhood, it was a picture of a young girl's life on a farm in rural Wisconsin. The year 1945 was crucial for Trumbo and other Hollywood party members in terms of the CPUSA's desire to have their work reflect the party's ideological agenda.
HCUA was originally created in 1934 as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to look into the activities of fascist and pro-Nazi organizations. Then popularly known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities exposed fascist organizations, including a planned coup d'etat against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the so-called Business Plot. Later on, it became known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Dies Committee after the new chairman, Martin Dies. HCUA originally was tasked with investigating the involvement of German Americans with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
HCUA became a standing committee in 1946, still tasked with investigating suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution." The focus was solely on the communists and their allies, so-called Fellow Travelers who made common cause with communists during the War Years. Fellow Travelers was a loose term that seemed to embrace many liberal FDR New Deal Democrats.
HCUA subpoenaed suspected communists in the entertainment industry. Trumbo's screenplay for Tender Comrade (1943), which concerned three Army wives who pool their resources while their husbands are away fighting was denounced as communist propaganda. However, writer-producer James Kevin McGuinness, a conservative who was a friendly witness before HCUA, testified that left-wing screenwriters did not inject propaganda into their movie scripts during World War II. McGuiness testified "[The movie industry] profited from reverse lend-lease because during the [war] the Communist and Communist-inclined writers in the motion picture industry were given leave of absence to be patriotic. During that time...under my general supervision Dalton Trumbo wrote two magnificent patriotic scripts, A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)."
Appearing before HCUA in October 1947 with Alvah Bessie, Herbert J. Biberman, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, 'Ring Lardner Jr' , Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, and Samuel Ornitz, Trumbo - like the others - refused to answer any questions. In a defense strategy crafted by CPUSA lawyers, the soon-to-be-known-as "Hollywood 10" claimed that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse to answer inquiries into their political beliefs as well as their professional associations. One line of questioning of HCUA was to ask if the subpoenaed witnesses were members of the Screen Writers Guild in order to smear the SWG. It was a gambit played by the Committee as it knew that which of the 10 were in the unions, and it knew which were communist. As Arthur Miller has pointed out, HCUA left the Broadway theater alone, despite the fact that there were communists working in it, because no one outside of the Northeastern U.S. really cared about theater or knew who theatrical professionals were, and thus, it could not generate the publicity that HCUA members craved and courted through their hearings.
HCUA cited them for contempt of Congress, and the Hollywood 10 were tried and convicted on the charge. All were fined and jailed, with Trumbo being sentenced to a year in federal prison and a fine of $1,000. He served 10 months of the sentence. The Hollywood 10 were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, a blacklist enforced by the very guilds they helped create. Trumbo and the other Hollywood 10 screenwriters were kicked out of the Screen Writers Guild (John Howard Lawson had been one of the founders of the SWG and its first president), which meant, even if they weren't blacklisted, they could not obtain work in Hollywood. Those who continued to write for the American cinema had to do so under assumed names or by using a "front", a screenwriter who would take credit for their work and pass on all or some of the fee to the blacklisted writer. Later, as one of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo claimed for himself the mantle of "Martyr for Freedom of Speech" and attacked, as rats, those who became informers for HCUA by naming names. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote in The Saturday Review of Books, that Trumbo was in fact NOT a free speech martyr since he would not fight for freedom of speech for ALL the people, such as right-wing conservatives, but only for the freedom of speech of CPUSA members. The anti-communist Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian, thought Trumbo and others like him were doctrinaire communists and hypocrites. In response, Trumbo wrote a scathing letter to The Saturday Review to defend himself, characterizing himself as a paladin championing free speech for all Americans under the aegis of the First Amendment, which the Hollywood 10 claimed gave them the right to refuse to cooperate with HCUA.
After his blacklisting and failure of the Hollywood 10's appeals, the Trumbo family exiled themselves to Mexico. In Mexico, chain-smoking in the bathtub in which he always wrote, usually with a parrot given to him by 'Kirk Douglas' perched on his shoulder, Trumbo wrote approximately thirty scripts under pseudonyms and using fronts who relayed the money to him. His works included the film noir classic Gun Crazy (1950) (AKA Gun Crazy), co-written under the pseudonym Millard Kaufman, Oscar-winning Roman Holiday (1953) (with screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter as a front), and The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955) for director Otto Preminger and upon which blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Wilson also worked).
At the 1957 Academy Awards, Robert Rich won the Oscar for best original story of 1956 for The Brave One (1956). Rich was not present to accept the award, which was accepted on his behalf by Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Screen Writers Guild. When journalists began digging in to the background of the phantom Mr. Rich, they found out he was the nephew of a producer. Suspicion then arose that Rich was a pseudonym for the blacklisted Trumbo.
Though Hollywood has always been inundated with writers, Trumbo, even while blacklisted, was prized as a good writer who was fast, reliable and could write in many genres. Despite being a communist, Trumbo's favorite themes were more in the vein of populism than Marxism. Trumbo celebrated the individual rebelling against the powers that be.
With rumors circulating that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning The Brave One (1956), it triggered a discussion in the industry about the propriety of the blacklist, since so many screenplays were being written by blacklisted individuals who were being denied screen credit. The blacklist only worked to suppress the prices of screenplays by these talented writers. In 1958, Pierre Boulle won the Oscar for the screenplay adapted from his novel The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which was unusual since Boulle could not speak nor write in English, which may have been the reason he did not attend the awards ceremony to pick up the Oscar in person. It was immediately realized that the screenplay had likely been written by a blacklisted screenwriter. It was - Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman.
Kirk Douglas hired Trumbo to write the script for Spartacus in 1958. In the summer of 1959 Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write the script for Exodus. On January 20, 1960, the New York Times carried the story that Otto Preminger had hired Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Exodus, and that he would start shooting in April. On August 8, of the same year Kirk Douglas announced in Variety that Trumbo had written the script for Spartacus. Both pictures opened in the winter of 1960.
Trumbo wrote many more screenplays for A-list films, including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Sandpiper (1965), Hawaii (1966) , and _Fixer, The (1968). In 1970, he was awarded the Laurel Award for lifetime achievement by the Screen Writers Guild. He made a famous speech that many saw as a reconciliation of the two sides of fight. In 1971, he wrote and directed the movie adaptation of his famous anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1971). His last screenwriting credit on a feature film was for Papillon (1973), in which he also had a cameo role.
A six-pack-a-day smoker, he developed lung cancer in 1973. Two years later, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (which had supported the black list), Walter Mirisch, personally delivered a belated Oscar to Trumbo for his The Brave One (1956) script, now officially recognized by AMPAS as his creation. Eighteen years later, AMPAS would award him a posthumous Oscar for Roman Holiday (1953).
Dalton Trumbo died from a heart attack in California on September 10, 1976. At his memorial service, Ring Lardner Jr., his close friend and fellow Hollywood 10 member, delivered an amusing eulogy. "At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."One of the Hollywood Ten, who was blacklisted because he refused to testify for MacCarthy.
Won Oscars during his blacklisting 1954 as Ian McLellan Hunter, for Roman Holiday and 1957 as Robert Rich, for The Brave One. He also wrote the script for Spartacus, Exodus and Papillon, to mention a couple.- Writer
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Philip Yordan was born on 1 April 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Detective Story (1951), Broken Lance (1954) and Dillinger (1945). He was married to Faith Clift and Marilyn Nash. He died on 24 March 2003 in La Jolla, California, USA.Won the Oscar 1954 for Broken Lance.- Daniel Fuchs was born on 25 June 1909 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Love Me or Leave Me (1955), Criss Cross (1949) and Between Two Worlds (1944). He died on 26 July 1993 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Won the Oscar "Best Story" 1955 for Love Me or Leave Me. The Screenplay was written together with Isobel Lennart, but it didn't win.
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Preston Sturges' own life is as unlikely as some of the plots of his best work. He was born into a wealthy family. As a boy he helped out on stage productions for his mother's friend, Isadora Duncan (the scarf that strangled her was made by his mother's company, Maison Desti). He served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during WWI. Upon his return to Maison Desti, he invented a kissproof lipstick, Red-Red Rouge, in 1920. Shortly after his first marriage, his mother demanded that he return control of the company to her. Kicked out of Maison Desti, he turned to inventing. A tickertape machine, an intaglio photo-etching process, an automobile and an airplane were among his some of his commercially unsuccessful inventions. He began writing stories and, while recovering from an appendectomy in 1929, wrote his first play, "The Guinea Pig". In financial trouble over producing his plays, he moved to Hollywood in 1932 to make money. It wasn't long before he became frustrated by the lack of control he had over his work and wanted to direct the scripts he wrote. Paramount gave him this chance as part of a deal for selling his script for The Great McGinty (1940), at a cheap price. The film's success launched his career as writer/director and he had several hits over the next four years. That success emboldened him to become an independent filmmaker, but that did not last long--he had a string of commercial failures and acquired a reputation as an expensive perfectionist. He moved to France to make what turned out to be his last movie, The French, They Are a Funny Race (1955). He died at the Algonquin Hotel, New York City, in 1959.Won the "original screenplay" 1940 for the Great McGinty.
He has a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame- Writer
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Herman J. Mankiewicz, now known primarily as the man who co-wrote Citizen Kane (1941) with Hollywood's greatest wunderkind, Orson Welles, was one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood and the head of Paramount's screen-writing department in the late 1920s and early '30s. He reached the pinnacle of his craft soon after arriving in Hollywood, then started to make a quickening descent as alcoholism and cynicism adversely affected his career by the end of that decade. His collaboration with Welles, which brought both men the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1942, gave his career a boost in the early 1940s, and he garnered another Oscar nod the following year for writing The Pride of the Yankees (1942) about the recently deceased New York Yankees great Lou Gehrig.
Herman was born on November 7, 1897 in New York City, the son of Johanna (Blumenau) and Franz Mankiewicz. His parents were Jewish emigrants from Germany, and after living in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the family, along with Herman's kid brother Joe, moved back to the Big Apple in 1913. Mankiewicz took a degree in philosophy at Columbia and became an editor of the "American Jewish Chronicle" before going to fight the Great War with the Marine Corps.
The hard-drinking Mankiewicz, like so many of the screenwriters of the Talkie period, started out as a newspaperman. After World War One was over, he was hired by the Paris-based American Red Cross News Service, eventually moving on to the "Chicago Tribune" where he covered German politics in Berlin. He served as dancer Isadora Duncan's publicist while in Europe.
A married man who ultimately sired three children with his long-suffering wife, the former Sara Aaronson, Mankiewicz returned to the city of his birth to write for the "New York World". He established himself as a prime wit rivaled only by George S. Kaufman, and pieces he wrote appeared in the top magazines of the time, including "Vanity Fair." He eventually worked at the "New York Times" with Kaufman as a drama critic before moving on to the "New Yorker" magazine, where he served in the same capacity. He also tried his hand as a Broadway dramatist. His comedy "The Good Fellow" was a flop in 1926, closing after seven performances, though his next effort, "The Wild Man of Borneo (1941)" that he co-wrote with Marc Connelly, lasted all of 15 performances before closing in 1927.
In the last years of silent pictures, Mankiewicz heeded the admonition of Horace Greeley to "Go West, young man" and moved to Hollywood. He wrote intertitles, most notably for Josef von Sternberg's classic The Last Command (1928). Paramount made him the chief of their scenario department, where he hired talented writers in his own mold, men like Ben Hecht, another hard-drinking, ink-stained wretch from the newspaper industry. "Mank" was a talented wordsmith and he soon became the highest paid writer in Hollywood, as his position was solidified with the advent of sound and the need for real dialogue that could be spoken onscreen by actors, not read by audiences, many of whom moved their lips while following along, eyes agog. The new Talkies demanded fast, crisp dialogue, and Mank was the man to provide it. His biting wit and taste for satire went down well with the audiences for the new Talkies. He eventually brought his kid brother Joseph L. Mankiewicz to Hollywood. (With four Oscars out of 10 nominations, Joe -- a triple threat as writer-director-producer -- eventually surpassed his elder brother, creating some classics of his own such as All About Eve (1950).)
Herman Mankiewicz produced the The Marx Brothers pictures Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932) and Duck Soup (1933). His penultimate gig as a producer at Paramount was on W.C. Fields's 1932 Olympics comedy Million Dollar Legs (1932), on which brother Joe worked as a writer. Surprisingly, Herman wold not produce another movie until 1949, but his bad-boy behavior, which included gambling as well as hard partying, apparently was taking its toll. Mankiewicz's career was hampered not just by his alcoholism, but also by his cynicism. He despised Hollywood.
Mankiewicz went back to New York in early 1932 to make his Broadway debut as an actor, playing a waiter, in the play "Blessed Event", which was a modest hit. Eventually, Paramount let him go. By 1934, he was a contact writer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and by the end of the decade, his reputation was suffering, as he had lost the lofty perch he once occupied.
Orson Welles claimed that he had to assign producer John Houseman to keep Mankiewicz sober during the drafting of the "Citizen Kane" screenplay. After that film gave his career a boost, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that he became even more erratic and unreliable due to his drinking. Mankiewicz apparently found it hard to fit into the increasingly hierarchical structure of the movie industry, which was far removed from the far more relaxed days of the early talkies.
He died in Hollywood, a place he despised, at the age of 55 on March 5, 1953.Wrote the original story that was to become Citizen Kane.
He too has a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame- Actor
- Writer
- Director
His father, Richard Head Welles, was a well-to-do inventor, his mother, Beatrice (Ives) Welles, a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died in 1924 (when he was nine) he traveled the world with his father. He was orphaned at 15 after his father's death in 1930 and became the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein of Chicago. In 1931, he graduated from the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. He turned down college offers for a sketching tour of Ireland. He tried unsuccessfully to enter the London and Broadway stages, traveling some more in Morocco and Spain, where he fought in the bullring.
Recommendations by Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott got him into Katharine Cornell's road company, with which he made his New York debut as Tybalt in 1934. The same year, he married, directed his first short, and appeared on radio for the first time. He began working with John Houseman and formed the Mercury Theatre with him in 1937. In 1938, they produced "The Mercury Theatre on the Air", famous for its broadcast version of "The War of the Worlds" (intended as a Halloween prank). His first film to be seen by the public was Citizen Kane (1941), a commercial failure losing RKO $150,000, but regarded by many as the best film ever made. Many of his subsequent films were commercial failures and he exiled himself to Europe in 1948.
In 1956, he directed Touch of Evil (1958); it failed in the United States but won a prize at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. In 1975, in spite of all his box-office failures, he received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1984, the Directors Guild of America awarded him its highest honor, the D.W. Griffith Award. His reputation as a filmmaker steadily climbed thereafter.Won Oscar together with Herman Mankiewicz for Citizen Kane. Another director who wrote a lot of his own material.- Writer
- Producer
- Director
The older brother of writer/producer/director Garson Kanin, Michael Kanin was a fine talent in his own right. After serving a creative apprenticeship writing and acting in Catskill resort shows with his brother, Kanin worked as a commercial artist and musician. In 1939 he was signed to a screenwriting contract at RKO, where he met his future wife and frequent collaborator 'Fay Mitchell'. With another collaborator, Ring Lardner Jr., he won an Academy Award for his work on MGM's Woman of the Year (1942), and later received a best screenplay Oscar nomination (along with his wife) for the 1958 Clark Gable-Doris Day comedy Teacher's Pet (1958). Kanin went on to produce the popular Ronald Colman melodrama A Double Life (1947), written by his brother Garson and Ruth Gordon, and made a once-only stab at directing with the 1951 seriocomedy When I Grow Up (1951). After 1960, his work showed signs that he was a bit out of touch with contemporary audiences; he retired shortly after working on the anachronistic Bob Hope vehicle How to Commit Marriage (1969).1942, best original screenplay, Woman of the Year, together with Ring Lardner Jr. Later he married Kay Mitchell, who is a screenwriter of her own right.- The Oscar-winning screenwriter, Ring Lardner, Jr., will always be known for one of two things: that he was the son of one of the greatest humorists American literature has produced, and he was one of the Hollywood 10, the ten film-makers who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigating subversion in Hollywood and were fined and jailed for the defiance.
The son of newspaper sports columnist and best-selling writer Ring Lardner, the future double Oscar winner was born on August 19, 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. Ring, Sr. (who was born Ringgold Wilmer Lardner) became famous for his "Saturday Evening Post" series, "You Know Me Al", fictional letters being sent from one baseball player to another. Mawell Perkins, editor-extraordinaire at the publishing house, Charles Scribners & Son, collected Lardner's columns and stories into publishable form (Ernest Hemingway, another Scribers writer, was a great fan) and they were a great success. Such was Lardner's renown, that 30 years after his death (while his son and namesake was still officially blacklisted), he was the first sportswriter inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, in 1963.
On his part, Ring, Jr. became a reporter for the "New York Daily Mirror" after dropping out of Princeton. He moved West and became a publicist for producer David O. Selznick, where he met his future wife, who also worked for the producer. He also worked as a script doctor for Selznik, then went on to become a screenwriter, often working in collaboration.
During the Spanish Civil War, Lardner moved steadily left in his political thinking, and helped raise funds for the Republican cause. He joined the Communist Party and became involved in organizing anti-fascist demonstrations. Although his leftist politics were known to the studios, in the 1930s and early '40s, Hollywood did not shy away from hiring talented writers no matter what their political proclivities, and employed many known (as well as secret) communists.
In 1943, he and Michael Kanin won the Oscar in 1942 for their Woman of the Year (1942) screenplay. He wrote such great pictures as Laura (1944) for Otto Preminger and, in 1947, 20th Century Fox gave him a contract at $2,000 a week, making him one of the highest paid scribes in La-La Land. Ironically, at the time of this seeming triumph, his career and life were about to unravel.
When it was Lardner turn to be hauled before HUAC and asked, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?", he came up with a witty riposte.
"I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning". After the appeals process against HUAC's citations for contempt of Congress played out, Lardner was sentenced to a year in prison and fined. More importantly, he was blacklisted and could not find work in Hollywood except under pseudonyms for work "fronted" by others. After the blacklist was officially broken when Preminger hired Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's novel "Exodus" for his 1960 production (Kirk Douglas then immediately hired Trumbo to write a screenplay for his upcoming Spartacus (1960)), the blacklisted writers slowly returned to work under their own names. Lardner was hired by producer Martin Ransohoff, who respected writers more than did the average Hollywood producer, to write the screenplay for The Cincinnati Kid (1965) under his own name. His comeback was complete when, in 1971, he won his second Oscar for adapting Robert Hooker's comic novel, "M*A*S*H" (1970) (ironically, due to director Robert Altman's improvisational style, little of Lardner's dialogue remained in the movie). His career, though, had been effectively aborted by the blacklist, and he only was credited with two more screenplays during his lifetime.
Ring Lardner, Jr. was the last of the Hollywood 10 to die, passing away on Halloween, October 31, 2000, in New York City from cancer. He was 85 years old and had long outlived most of the witch-hunters who had tormented him. He was survived by his wife, Frances Chaney, and five children.Another blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter and a member of the Hollywood Ten.
Won Oscar 1942 for Woman of the Year, and 1970 for M*A*S*H, best adapted script. - Writer
- Producer
- Director
Humorist, playwright and screenwriter Norman Krasna went to great lengths planning for a career in law. He attended New York University, Columbia University and St. John's University law school but then abruptly changed his plans and started work as a copy boy at a New York newspaper. He had a brief stint as a drama critic for the Evening Graphic and wrote a column for the Exhibitor's Herald World and this likely awakened his interest in the film business. He was soon off to L.A. and finagled a job in the Warner Brothers publicity department. Upon seeing his first filmed play, The Front Page (1931), he decided there and then to become a playwright. Having obtained a copy of the original script, he re-typed it over and over to get the hang of style and methodology. This approach seems to have worked since Krasna soon published his first play (the comedy "Louder,Please") which opened on Broadway by November 1931.
While not a huge hit, the play led first to a screenwriting contract with Columbia, then in 1935 with MGM. At MGM, Krasna met Groucho Marx and the two became lifelong friends (in 1948, they wrote a play together, "Time for Elizabeth", which had a brief run on Broadway). Within a relatively short period of time Krasna acquired a reputation for writing intelligent, witty scripts quickly. This ability naturally endeared him to thrifty-minded producers. He also had a penchant for clever one-liners (it would have been fun to sit in on conversational banter between Krasna and Groucho). Krasna did not only confine himself to screwball comedy but also occasionally turned out good original dramatic material such as Fritz Lang's indictment of mob justice, Fury (1936). He penned Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) for Alfred Hitchcock, wrote the perennial family favourite White Christmas (1954), and the glossy romantic comedy Indiscreet (1958) based on his own 1953 play "Kind Sir". For the most part, the accolades kept coming for his sophisticated comedies - often featuring mistaken identity (The Ambassador's Daughter (1956)), irascible, or curmudgeonly characters (Charles Coburn in The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) and Princess O'Rourke (1943)), or men-of-the-world cured of their cynicism through love (Cary Grant in 'Indiscreet'). Krasna won an Oscar for 'Princess O'Rourke', one of four films he also directed. While most of his plots are now somewhat dated, his dialogue rarely fails to entertain.
After leaving MGM in 1938, Krasna worked for the next twelve years as a free-lance writer dividing his time between Hollywood and Broadway. In 1950, he formed an independent production company with charismatic producer Jerry Wald at RKO. The enterprise was sadly short-lived. Just four films were produced out of a total of sixty originally stipulated. Krasna then went on to produce several films for various studios, including Clash by Night (1952), which featured a young Marilyn Monroe. He also wrote Marilyn's penultimate film Let's Make Love (1960). That same year, he was honoured with the Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Screen Writer's Guild. Krasna retired in 1964 and died twenty years later in Los Angeles, aged 74.He garnered four Academy Award screenwriting nominations, winning once for 1943's Princess O'Rourke, a film he also directed.- Writer
- Producer
- Music Department
Author and screenwriter, often preoccupied with American history as viewed from a Southern perspective. Born in Atlanta, Trotti studied writing at Columbia University and was also the first person to graduate from the University of Georgia's Henry Grady School of Journalism. In 1923, he became the youngest editor employed by a newspaper owned by the Hearst Press, The Georgian. From 1925, Trotti worked in New York for the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, moving on to Hollywood in 1932. He spent virtually his entire career at 20th Century Fox as writer/producer: from 1933 until his untimely death in 1952. He wrote screenplays for a wide range of genres, including war films, westerns, comedies and biopics. The majority of these were critical and box office hits.
Recurring motifs in Trotti's work are life in a romanticised Deep South (Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), Can This Be Dixie? (1936)), the Civil War (Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Belle Starr (1941), The Ox-Bow Incident (1942)), pioneering history (Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Brigham Young (1940), Hudson's Bay (1940)) and rustic, small town Americana (Cheaper by the Dozen (1950)). Invariably, his screenplays have benefited from a profound knowledge of American history and politics and his keen eye for characterisation.
His peers in the industry regarded Trotti as a man of considerable integrity. He was generally described as of quiet, self-effacing nature, possessed of strong moral convictions. His contributions were recognised thirty-one years after his death with a prestigious Screen Laurel Award from the Writer's Guild of America.Won the Oscar for Original screenplay 1944 for Wilson- Writer
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Muriel Box was born on 22 September 1905 in New Malden, Surrey [now in Kingston upon Thames, London], England, UK. She was a writer and director, known for The Seventh Veil (1945), Mr. Lord Says No (1952) and A Novel Affair (1957). She was married to Gerald Gardiner and Sydney Box. She died on 18 May 1991 in London, England, UK.Won Oscar for best original screenplay 1946 for Seventh Veil with her husband Sydney.
Muriel was a screenwriter and director, a feminist and she made movies of controversial subjects, which got her movies often banned.- Writer
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Sheldon was born in Chicago on February 17, 1917. He began writing as a youngster and at the age of ten he made his first sale of a poem for $10. During the Depression, he worked at a variety of jobs and while attending Northwestern University he contributed short plays to drama groups.
At seventeen, he decided to try his luck in Hollywood. The only job he could find was as a reader of prospective film material at Universal Pictures for $22 a week. At night he wrote his own screenplays and was able to sell one called "South of Panama," to the studio for $250 in 1941.
During World War II, he served as a pilot in the Army Air Corps. After the war he established a reputation as being a prolific writer in the New York theater community. At one point during this career he had three musicals on Broadway including a rewritten version of "The Merry Widow," "Jackpot" and "Dream with Music." Eventually he received a Tony award as part of the writing team for the Gwen Verdon hit "Redhead" which brought to the attention of Hollywood.
His first assignment after his return to Hollywood was The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947) starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and Shirley Temple, which won him an Academy Award for best original screenplay of 1947.
In his 1982 interview he described his years under contract with MGM as, "I never stopped working. One day Dore Schary (who was then production head) looked at a list of MGM projects then under production and noted that I had written eight of them, more than three other writers put together. That afternoon, he made me a producer."
In the early 1960s when the movie industry was hurting because of television's popularity, Sheldon decided to make a switch. "I suppose I needed money," he remembered. "I met Patty Duke one day at lunch and stated producing "The Patty Duke Show," (that starred Duke playing two identical cousins). I did something nobody else in TV ever did at that time. For seven years, I wrote almost every single episode of the series."
His next series was "I Dream of Jeannie," which he also created as well as produced, lasted five seasons, 1965-1970. The show concerned an astronaut, Larry Hagman, who lands on a desert island and discovers a bottle containing a beautiful, 2,000-year-old genie, played by Barbara Eden, who accompanies him back to Florida and eventually marries her.
According to Sheldon it was "During the last year of "I Dream of Jeannie," I decided to try a novel. Each morning from 9 until noon, I had a secretary at the studio take all calls. I mean every single call. I wrote each morning or rather, dictated and then I faced the TV business." The result was "The Naked Face," which was scorned by book reviewers but sold 21,000 copies in hardcover. The novel scored even bigger in paperback, where it reportedly sold 3.1 million copies. Thereafter Sheldon name would continually be on the best-seller lists, often reigning on top for months at a time.
Sheldon's books including titles like "Rage of Angels," "The Other Side of Midnight," "Master of the Game" and "If Tomorrow Comes," provided him with his greatest fame. They featured cleverly plots with sensuality and a high degree of suspense, a device that kept fans from being able to putting his books down.
In a 1982 interview Sheldon told of how he created his novels; "I try to write my books so the reader can't put them down. I try to construct them so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she has to read just one more chapter. It's the technique of the old Saturday afternoon serial: leave the guy hanging on the edge of the cliff at the end of the chapter."
Explaining why so many women bought his books, he once commented that: "I like to write about women, who are talented and capable, but most important, retain their femininity. Women have tremendous power, their femininity, because men can't do without it."
Sheldon had few fans among highbrow critics, whose reviews of his books were generally reproachful of both Sheldon and his readers. Sheldon however remained undeterred, promoting the novels and himself with warm enthusiasm.
A big, cheerful man, he bragged about his work habits. Unlike other novelists who toil over typewriters or computers, Sheldon would dictate fifty pages a day to a secretary or a tape machine. He would correct the pages the following day and dictate another fifty pages continuing the routine until he had between 1,200 to 1,500 pages. "Then I would do a complete rewrite 12 to 15 times," he said. "Sometimes I would spend a whole year rewriting."
Sheldon prided himself on the authenticity of his novels. During a 1987 interview he remarked that: "If I write about a place, I have been there. If I write about a meal in Indonesia, I have eaten there in that restaurant. I don't think you can fool the reader."
For his novel "Windmills of the Gods," that dealt with the CIA, he interviewed former CIA chief Richard Helms, traveled to Argentina and Romania, and spent a week in Junction City, Kansas where the book's heroine had lived.
After a career that had earned him a Tony, an Oscar and an Emmy (for "I Dream of Jeannie"), Sheldon declared that his work as a novelist was his best work. "I love writing books," he once commented. "Movies are a collaborative medium, and everyone is second-guessing you. When you do a novel you're on your own. It's a freedom that doesn't exist in any other medium."
Several of his novels became television miniseries, often with the Sheldon serving as producer.
He was married for more than 30 years to Jorja Curtright Sheldon, a stage and film actress who later became a prominent interior decorator. After her death in 1985 he married Alexandra Sheldon, a former child actress and advertising executive, in 1989.
Sheldon died January 30, 2007 of complications from pneumonia at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California according with his wife, Alexandra, was by his side.
Along with his wife, Sheldon was survived by his daughter, author Mary Sheldon; his brother Richard and two grandchildren.Won Oscar for Original Screenplay 1947 for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, but is more known for his television scripts (I dream of Jeannie, Hart to Hart) and later best selling novels.- Additional Crew
- Writer
- Director
Robert Pirosh enjoyed a lengthy Hollywood career, which began when he was signed by MGM, along with fellow newcomer George Seaton , as a contributing writer in 1934. His most notable success was garnering the Academy Award for his screenplay of Battleground (1949), a film based on the Second World War Battle of the Bulge in which he had himself fought as a Master Sergeant with the 35th Infantry Division. A versatile writer, Pirosh alternated among dramatic subjects, such as the Oscar-nominated war picture Go for Broke! (1951) and the adventure Valley of the Kings (1954)--both of which he also directed--and madcap comedy, most notably his contribution to the classic The Marx Brothers farce A Day at the Races (1937). Some of Groucho Marx's funniest lines are attributed to Pirosh, who also became the comedian's lifelong friend. From the late 1950s,Pirosh became involved in writing television scripts, including the pilot episodes for Laramie (1959) and Combat! (1962). Towards the end of his career he taught writing at the University of Southern California.He earned an Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay in 1949 for his script for the World War II drama Battleground.
He wrote the script for A Day At The Races for Marx Brothers.- Writer
- Producer
Charles Brackett, born in Saratoga Springs, New York, of Scottish ancestry, followed in his attorney-father's footsteps and graduated with a law degree from Harvard University in 1920. He practised law for several years, before commencing work as drama critic for The New Yorker (1925-29), in addition to submitting short stories to The Saturday Evening Post. In 1932, Brackett left for Hollywood as a screenwriter. He was signed by Paramount primarily on the strength of his novel "Week-End". Brackett remained at the studio until 1950, doubling up as producer from 1945.
During his tenure at Paramount, Brackett became part of one of the most celebrated screenwriting partnerships in the motion picture business, alongside Billy Wilder. They were eventually dubbed by Life Magazine as "the happiest couple in Hollywood". Despite having very different personalities and arguing incessantly -- Wilder being the more extroverted and cynical, while Bracket was, to quote Gloria Swanson, 'quieter, more refined' -- their collaboration endured until 1951, spanning fourteen motion pictures. Many of their most popular hits, such as Ninotchka (1939), Ball of Fire (1941) and The Lost Weekend (1945), were noted for their intricate scripting and witty, sardonic dialogue. The culmination of their efforts was Sunset Blvd. (1950), which won an Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay. Following this, the team split up at the peak of their success, each going their separate ways.
Brackett moved on to work under contract at 20th Century Fox for the next eight years. With Walter Reisch, he co-wrote the screenplays for Niagara (1953) and Titanic (1953), winning his third Oscar for the latter. He also produced the superior western Garden of Evil (1954), the historical drama The Virgin Queen (1955) and the lavish musical The King and I (1956). Brackett retired due to illness after producing State Fair (1962).Won Oscars 1951, best story and screenplay together with Billy Wilder and D.M.Marshman Jr. for Sunset Bulevard and 1954 together with Walter Reisch and Richard L. Breen for Titanic.
These three wrote also the screenplays to among others Ninotchka and Niagara.
1946; Best adapted screenplay; The Lost Weekend with Billy Wilder.
1958 he was awarded a honorary Oscar for "outstanding service to the Academy".- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Originally planning to become a lawyer, Billy Wilder abandoned that career in favor of working as a reporter for a Viennese newspaper, using this experience to move to Berlin, where he worked for the city's largest tabloid. He broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929 and wrote scripts for many German films until Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Wilder immediately realized his Jewish ancestry would cause problems, so he emigrated to Paris, then the US. Although he spoke no English when he arrived in Hollywood, Wilder was a fast learner and thanks to contacts such as Peter Lorre (with whom he shared an apartment), he was able to break into American films. His partnership with Charles Brackett started in 1938 and the team was responsible for writing some of Hollywood's classic comedies, including Ninotchka (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941). The partnership expanded into a producer-director one in 1942, with Brackett producing and the two turned out such classics as Five Graves to Cairo (1943), The Lost Weekend (1945) (Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay) and Sunset Blvd. (1950) (Oscars for Best Screenplay), after which the partnership dissolved. (Wilder had already made one film, Double Indemnity (1944) without Brackett, as the latter had refused to work on a film he felt dealt with such disreputable characters.) Wilder's subsequent self-produced films would become more caustic and cynical, notably Ace in the Hole (1951), though he also produced such sublime comedies as Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960) (which won him Best Picture and Director Oscars). He retired in 1981.Won 3 Oscars for writing:
1946; Best adapted screenplay; The Lost Weekend with Charles Brackett
1951; Best original screenplay; Sunset Blvd, with Charles Brackett and D.M.Marshman Jr.
1961; Best original screenplay; The Apartment with I.A.L.Diamond
and Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award 1988.- Writer
- Music Department
- Producer
Playwright/lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was born into a wealthy New York City retailing family. His professional association with Frederick Loewe started in 1942 when they teamed up to write "Life of the Party". Their first Broadway success was the 1947 musical fantasy "Brigadoon." Lerner adapted work for the screen (Brigadoon (1954)) and earned two Oscars as the screenplay writer for An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958), and a Grammy for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). Lerner and Loewe parted company in 1962 following the success of Camelot (1967). Lerner's last musical, "Dance a Little Closer", was written with Charles Strouse in 1983. It closed after one performance.A composer who wrote two Oscar winning screenplays; 1951 An American In Paris (Best Original), and 1958; Gigi (Best Adapted).- Writer
- Music Department
- Script and Continuity Department
T.E.B. 'Tibby' Clarke graduated with a law degree from Cambridge University, but decided that writing was more his forte. He started on that career path first as writer for a magazine in Australia, than back in London freelancing as a journalist. He also had jobs on Fleet Street, worked in advertising, as a door-to-door salesman, briefly served in the police force and contributed a series of articles as a foreign correspondent based in Argentina during a military coup. In addition, he found the time to author five novels, the first of fifteen major publications to appear under his name.
An interview with a scenario editor at Ealing Studios led to a contract and, from 1943 to 1957, he was employed as a screenwriter, at first in collaboration with others. From Hue and Cry (1947), he received solo writing credits and became noted for a series of imperishable comedies about English eccentricities that have remained uniquely popular to this day. Clarke was known to be a meticulous researcher and only needed a hook on which to hang his underlying fantasy premise. Already fascinated by archaic laws, he painstakingly looked for historical precedents for his comedy Passport to Pimlico (1949), finding them in the independent medieval duchy of Burgundy and posed the question : what if Charles the Bold had survived the 1447 Battle of Nancy and sought political asylum in England, say Pimlico, which might then, by default, be considered a principality of Burgundy ?
For his caper comedy The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), he confronted a teller at the Bank of England with a note saying 'Information required on means of stealing gold bullion'. Within a short time, Clarke had three bank executives, including the managers of the bullion and the transport department, sorting out any plot-related problems as to where, when and how such a heist might conceivably succeed. 'The Lavender Hill Mob' won Clarke the 1952 Academy Award for Best Story and Screenplay. 'Tibby' used similar means of coaxing information out of British Railways officials for The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) and the registrars at Lloyd's Shipping for All at Sea (1957).
After leaving Ealing, Clarke worked only sporadically in the movies. He drew upon his own experience in the police force to write the police drama Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958) for John Ford (having had a previous hit with The Blue Lamp (1950)), and the following year collaborated on a screen adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1960) with Gavin Lambert, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. In 1974, he published a revealing autobiography detailing his work at Ealing, entitled 'This Is Where I Came In'.won 1952 Original Screenplay Oscar for Lavender Hill Mob.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Director
Richard L. Breen was born on 26 June 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and director, known for Titanic (1953), A Foreign Affair (1948) and State Fair (1962). He died on 1 February 1967 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.Won Oscar for Original Screenplay together with Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch 1954 for Titanic.
These three wrote also the screenplays to among others Ninotchka and Niagara.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
After completing studies in literature at the University of Vienna, Walter Reisch began his screen career as an extra and title writer in 1918. He eventually made the acquaintance of Stephan Lorant, a refuge from the Horty regime in Hungary, who, within a single year, had made a name for himself in Austrian films as a film maker and cinematographer. Lorant gave Reisch a break by promoting him as his assistant director on Die Narrenkappe der Liebe (1921). Reisch followed Lorant to Berlin -- then the artistic hub of Europe -- to work as his assistant cameraman. He subsequently continued on in the same capacity, working on documentary newsreeels in Switzerland.
In 1925, Reisch returned to Austria to specialise as a scenarist. Before long, his growing reputation led the producer Erich Pommer to sign him to a contract with Germany's leading film company Ufa, where he had the opportunity to work alongside another gifted Viennese writer named Billy Wilder. Much of Reisch's work at this time was adapted from literary classics, but he also used some of his own original stories as material. From 1930, he managed to fulfill his long-standing ambition to write lyrics for operatic films. For the next three years, he contributed to many melodies which became popular across the European continent, featured in films like Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel-Takt (1930), The Theft of the Mona Lisa (1931) and A Blonde Dream (1932).
With the rise of Nazism, Reisch, like most creative talent of Jewish background, was forced to join the mass exodus from Germany. He had a brief resurgence in Vienna, where he worked under Willi Forst on the comedy Masquerade in Vienna (1934) and the Franz Schubert biopic Unfinished Symphony (1934). Both turned out to be solid international hits. By 1936, the political situation in Austria had made it untenable for Reisch to continue his work. Almost penniless, he moved on to join his previous mentor Alexander Korda (for whom he had worked as assistant in his student days) in London. After writing and directing the comedy Men Are Not Gods (1936), starring Miriam Hopkins, Reisch unexpectedly received an offer from Louis B. Mayer, who was on a tour of European cities scouting for talent. Soon bound for MGM, Reisch crossed the Atlantic aboard the cruise liner Normandie, with ice-skating star Sonja Henie and actors Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Gertrude Lawrence as fellow passengers.
At MGM (1938-48), his chief contribution was in story construction, solving continuity problems, providing narrative, inventing characters and making relationships between characters plausible and compelling. It remained for other writers, like Charles Brackett or Wilder, to sort out the dialogue. Reisch also had a knack for tailoring scripts to suit a specific star, which he achieved to great effect for Greta Garbo (with Ninotchka (1939)), Clark Gable (with Comrade X (1940)) and Ingrid Bergman (with Gaslight (1944)). Reisch had another crack at directing with Song of Scheherazade (1947). It ended up being made at Universal, because MGM, having an over-abundance of directors under contract, wanted to keep their writers doing what they did best. Though made relatively cheaply, "Song of Scheherazade" turned out to be an ill-advised piece of kitsch, centred around a purely fictitous romance between composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and a dancer. The film was roundly slammed by critics and Reisch was never again approached to direct another picture.
Despite this setback, he returned to best writing form after joining 20th Century Fox in 1949, though he had to adapt himself to a new working methodology: budgets and schedules were tighter and just about everything had to be run past Darryl F. Zanuck; the studio also tended to lean towards action subjects, rather than musical comedy, romantic melodrama or wry satire, which had hitherto been Reisch's forte. Nonetheless, his lengthy tenure at Fox encompassed two massive back-to-back hits. In collaboration with his former writing partner Charles Brackett, he first worked on location at Niagara Falls, devising the entire original story for Niagara (1953), Brackett handling the dialogue and production. Reisch next worked on Titanic (1953), for which he developed many of the characters by researching contemporary newspaper articles. For this, he was made co-recipient of the Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay in 1954. His last worthy effort was a powerful, underrated drama based on a sensational 1906 scandal: The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955). Zanuck wanted a star vehicle for his latest acquisition, Joan Collins, and Reisch obliged by selling him on the Thaw-White murder case, with Collins in the role of actress Evelyn Nesbit. He had the script ready within ten weeks, painstakingly researched from the original transcripts, and, as he later proudly claimed, '70 % fact and only 30% fictionalised'!
In 1959, a strike of the Screen Writer's Guild prevented Reisch from working for six months. When he was finally able to return, a regime change at Fox had taken place, and, as part of a general purge, his contract was not renewed.Won Oscar for Original Screenplay together with Charles Brackett and Richard L. Breen 1954 for Titanic.
These three wrote also the screenplays to among others Ninotchka and Niagara.- Writer
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Budd Schulberg was born on 27 March 1914 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for On the Waterfront (1954), Everglades! (1961) and A Face in the Crowd (1957). He was married to Betsy Ann Langman, Geraldine Brooks, Agnes Victoria Anderson and Virginia Ray. He died on 5 August 2009 in Westhampton Beach, Long Island, New York, USA.Best Writing, Story and Screenplay for: On the Waterfront (1954).- Writer
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Sonya, a graduate with a law degree from New York University, briefly practiced law before becoming a magazine editor and fiction writer. After several of her stories were adapted to the screen, she became a screenwriter. Levien wrote several screenplays for Will Rogers films and for Fox studios during the 1930s. She wrote for a number of studios including RKO and Warner Bros., but most of her work was with MGM.Won Oscar for best original screenplay 1955 for Interrupted Melody, together with William Ludvig- William Ludwig was born on 26 May 1912 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Interrupted Melody (1955), Oklahoma! (1955) and The Great Caruso (1951). He was married to Susan Riesenfeld. He died on 7 February 1999 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.Won Oscar for best original screenplay 1955 for Interrupted Melody, together with Sonya Levien.
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A former photographer, he turned to directing short subjects in the late 40s, soon acquiring an international reputation for the poetic quality of his short and medium-length films involving the fantasy world of children. Both his White Mane (1953) and The Red Balloon (1956) received a grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the latter also winning an American Academy Award. In the early 60s he turned to feature length films with considerably less success, then retreated to documentary shorts. He was killed in a helicopter crash while shooting a documentary near Teheran. That film, The Lovers' Wind (1978), a visually stunning helicopter tour of Iran, was later edited from his notes and was nominated for an Oscar as best feature documentary for the Academy Award ceremonies of 1979.Best Writing, Best Screenplay - Original for: Le ballon rouge (1956).- Writer
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The son of vaudevillian Billy K. Wells graduated from New York University and began as a writer for radio ('The Jack Pearl Show','Lux Radio Theater'). In 1943, he joined MGM under contract as a screenwriter, rapidly acquiring a reputation for lending a deft touch and inventiveness to light comedies and musicals. Wells won the Academy Award for Best Original Story and Screenplay for Designing Woman (1957), a sophisticated marital comedy starring Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck. He also co-wrote Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949) with Harry Tugend, an MGM musical with Gene Kelly, nominated by the Writer's Guild of America for an award as Best Written American Musical. He produced several of Esther Williams's films, including Jupiter's Darling (1955). George Wells left MGM in 1970, penned a few more TV scripts and in 1982 wrote 'Taurus', described as a "'novel of erotic horror".Won Oscar for best original screenplay 1957 for Designing Woman