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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.- Writer
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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.- Writer
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I.A.L. Diamond was born on 27 June 1920 in Ungheni, Romania [now Moldova]. He was a writer and producer, known for The Apartment (1960), Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). He was married to Barbara Diamond. He died on 21 April 1988 in Beverly Hills, California, USA.- Writer
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Author, producer, and composer who earned a Bachelor of Science degree from CCNY, then a Purple Heart during World War II while serving in the US Army. Joining ASCAP in 1955, his chief musical collaborators included George Bassman and Harry Warren. His popular-song compositions include "Marty" and "Middle of the Night".- Writer
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One of the most critically and commercially successful screenwriters in Hollywood history, Lehman grew up on Long Island, graduated from NY's City College. One of his first jobs was as a copywriter for a Broadway publicist. This experience would later be reflected in his novel and screenplay, "Sweet Smell of Success." He also worked as a radio comedy writer, and as editor of a financial magazine. He freelanced short stories for the likes of Collier's magazine and one of these fiction piece 'The Comedian' led to his first job in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Paramount in the mid 1950s. Nick Roddick, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, praised Lehman as "a champion of the well-crafted, what-happens-next screenplay." Served as president of the Writers Guild of America from 1983-85.- Writer
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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.- Writer
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Graham Greene was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century and his influence on the cinema and theatre was enormous. He wrote five plays and almost all of his novels, including "Brighton Rock", "The Ministry of Fear" and "The End of the Affair", have been brought to the screen. A superb storyteller, he also wrote the screenplays for such classics as The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
A colorful and larger-than-life figure, Greene traveled widely throughout the world, from the jungles of Liberia to the Mexican desert to the Far East and the Soviet Union. In World War Two was a member of MI-6 (the British intelligence service) working with the double-agent Kim Philby, and he numbered among his friends such diverse personalities as Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward and Panamanian dictator Gen. Omar Torrijos. A notorious womanizer, he married only once but had a string of extra-marital affairs and confessed he was "a bad husband and a fickle lover." During the 1920s and 1930s he confessed that he had had relationships with over 50 prostitutes.
Born in Hertforshire, England, in 1904, the son of the headmaster of Berkhamstead School, Greene was educated at Berkhamstead and later Oxford. At Oxford he published more than 60 poems and stories and soon after graduation converted to Roman Catholicism. "I had to find a religion to measure my evil against" he said. His first novel, "The Man Within", came out in 1929, to public and critical acclaim. "Stamboul Train" (1934), a topical political thriller, was the first to reach the screen (as Orient Express (1934)) and a string of other taut suspense dramas followed: "This Gun For Hire" (1942), "The Ministry of Fear" (1943) and "The Confidential Agent" (1945). It was his novel "Brighton Rock", however, which depicted Pinkie, a teenage gangster with demonic spirituality, that eventually became a milestone in British cinema. Originally a successful stage play starring Richard Attenborough as Pinkie, Greene co-wrote the 1947 screenplay Brighton Rock (1948)) with Terence Rattigan.
Greene's collaboration with director _Carol Reed' produced three distinctive films: The Fallen Idol (1948), starring Ralph Richardson, The Third Man (1949) and Our Man in Havana (1959). One of the peaks in British filmmaking, "The Third Man", starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime, was a skillful tale of deception and drug trafficking. Greene developed the screenplay from a single sentence: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, amongst a host of strangers in the Strand". The character of Harry Lime later inspired an American radio series starring Orson Welles, short stories published by the News of the World and the TV series The Third Man (1959), starring Michael Rennie. In Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994). Kate Winslet fantasizes about Harry.
As well as writing novels, Greene reviewed films for "The Spectator", then for the short-lived "Night and Day", which folded after he was accused of a "gross outrage" on 'Shirley Temple (I)'--then nine years old--in his review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937). He wrote that "her admirers--middle-aged men and clergymen--respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality". In the view of the prosecuting counsel it was "one of the most horrible libels one could well imagine."
Greene was an intelligent and sophisticated playwright. His first play written directly for the stage was "The Living Room" (1953), a powerful drama of suicide and despair which starred Dorothy Tutin. It was followed by "The Potting Shed" (1957), a drama about an atheist's pact with God, and "The Complaisant Lover" (1959), a comedy of manners in which a husband and lover knowingly share a wife's favors, which starred Michael Redgrave. Many of his played were televised.
Greene's work continues to fascinate actors, filmmakers and cinema goers throughout the world. In 1973 Maggie Smith and Alec McCowen starred in "Travels With My Aunt" (Smith's role had originally been offered to Katharine Hepburn), Nicol Williamson and Ann Todd starred in The Human Factor (1979) and Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore starred in a remake of The End of the Affair (1999).
Greene said of his writing: "When I describe a scene . . . I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye--which leaves it frozen. In this precise domain I think the cinema has influenced me."
Towards the end of his life Greene lived in Vevey, Switzerland, with his companion Yvonne Cloetta. He died there peacefully on April 13, 1991.- Writer
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Woody Allen was born on November 30, 1935, as Allen Konigsberg, in The Bronx, NY, the son of Martin Konigsberg and Nettie Konigsberg. He has one younger sister, Letty Aronson. As a young boy, he became intrigued with magic tricks and playing the clarinet, two hobbies that he continues today.
Allen broke into show business at 15 years when he started writing jokes for a local paper, receiving $200 a week. He later moved on to write jokes for talk shows but felt that his jokes were being wasted. His agents, Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins, convinced him to start doing stand-up and telling his own jokes. Reluctantly he agreed and, although he initially performed with such fear of the audience that he would cover his ears when they applauded his jokes, he eventually became very successful at stand-up. After performing on stage for a few years, he was approached to write a script for Warren Beatty to star in: What's New Pussycat (1965) and would also have a moderate role as a character in the film. During production, Woody gave himself more and better lines and left Beatty with less compelling dialogue. Beatty inevitably quit the project and was replaced by Peter Sellers, who demanded all the best lines and more screen-time.
It was from this experience that Woody realized that he could not work on a film without complete control over its production. Woody's theoretical directorial debut was in What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966); a Japanese spy flick that he dubbed over with his own comedic dialogue about spies searching for the secret recipe for egg salad. His real directorial debut came the next year in the mockumentary Take the Money and Run (1969). He has written, directed and, more often than not, starred in about a film a year ever since, while simultaneously writing more than a dozen plays and several books of comedy.
While best known for his romantic comedies Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Woody has made many transitions in his films throughout the years, transitioning from his "early, funny ones" of Bananas (1971), Love and Death (1975) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972); to his more storied and romantic comedies of Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); to the Bergmanesque films of Stardust Memories (1980) and Interiors (1978); and then on to the more recent, but varied works of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Husbands and Wives (1992), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Celebrity (1998) and Deconstructing Harry (1997); and finally to his films of the last decade, which vary from the light comedy of Scoop (2006), to the self-destructive darkness of Match Point (2005) and, most recently, to the cinematically beautiful tale of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Although his stories and style have changed over the years, he is regarded as one of the best filmmakers of our time because of his views on art and his mastery of filmmaking.- Writer
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Although his name is often linked to that of the "movie brat" generation (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different than theirs. His strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was 18. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries--Robert Bresson, Yasujirô Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, "Transcendental Style in Film") rather than Saturday-morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackpot when he and his brother, Leonard Schrader (a Japanese expert), were paid the then-record sum of $325,000, thus establishing his reputation as one of Hollywood's top screenwriters, which was consolidated when Martin Scorsese filmed Schrader's script Taxi Driver (1976), written in the early 1970s during a bout of drinking and depression. The success of the film allowed Schrader to start directing his own films, which have been notable for their willingness to take stylistic and thematic risks while still working squarely within the Hollywood system. The most original of his films (which he and many others regard as his best) was the Japanese co-production Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).- Writer
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Born in 1947 in Chicago, he was educated at Goddard College, in Vermont, and studied drama at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, before returning to Chicago and establishing the St Nicholas Theatre Company in 1972. He remained their resident writer for four years. The first of his plays to secure international recognition was 'Sexual Perversity in Chicago' (1974) and 'American Buffalo' (1975). The latter was eventually performed by Al Pacino on Broadway and London's West End earning him an 'Award Obie' when it transferred from Chicago to New York. His play 'Glengarry Glen Ross' won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. His other plays include 'A Life in the Theatre' (1977). 'Edmond' (1982). 'The Shawl' (1985) and 'Speed the Plow' (1988). The rejection of his screen adaption of 'Sexual Perversity in Chicago' was completely rewritten and released as 'About Last Night in 1986. He soon attracted wide acclaim as a screenwriter when his version of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' (1981) was made by Bob Rafelson and his original screenplay for 'The Verdict (1982) was nominated for an Oscar. Subsequent screenplays include 'The Untouchables' (1987), 'We're No Angels' (1990), 'Glengarry Glen Ross' (1992). He then wrote and directed 'House of Games' (1987), 'Things Change' (1988) and 'Homicide' (1991). He's also published two collections of essays 'Writing in Restaurants' (1986) and Some Freaks' (1989). In 1987, he conducted a series of classes at Columbia University Film School which were put into print as 'On Directing Film' (1992).- Writer
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Robert Douglas Benton is an American screenwriter and filmmaker from Waxahachie, Texas who is known for screenwriting Bonnie & Clyde, Kramer vs. Kramer and Superman. He won two Academy Awards for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer. He directed other feature films including Twilight, Bad Company and Nobody's Fool. He is married to Sallie Rendig since 1964.- Writer
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Screenwriter, novelist, playwright, non-fiction author. Born in Highland Park, Illinois, USA, began his career as a novelist in 1957. Started writing screenplays in 1965 with "Masquerade". A two-time Academy Award Winner, he is one of the most successful screenwriters and script doctors in Hollywood.- 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."- Writer
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Writer, director, producer, actor. Born in Los Angeles, California, USA, and raised in the seaport town of San Pedro. Got his start acting and writing for legendary exploitation director/producer Roger Corman. Came into his own during the 1970s when he was regarded as one of the finest screenwriters in Hollywood. Began directing with mixed success in 1982. One of the best script doctors in Hollywood, he contributed crucial scenes to such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972).- Writer
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Avid reader Charlie Kaufman wrote plays and made short films as a young student. He moved from Massapequa, New York to West Hartford, Connecticut in 1972 where he attended high school. As a comedic actor, he performed in school plays and, after graduation, he enrolled at Boston University but soon transferred NYU to study film. Charlie worked in the circulation department of the Star Tribune, in Minneapolis, in the late 1980s and moved to Los Angeles in 1991, where he was hired to write for the TV sitcom Get a Life (1990). He went on to write comedy sketches and a variety of TV show episodes. Between writing assignments, he wrote the inventive screenplay Being John Malkovich (1999), which created Hollywood interest and the attention of producer Steve Golin. Charlie works at home in Pasadena, California, where he lives with his wife Denise and children.- Writer
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Playwright and author of sophisticated screenplays, a graduate of Bard College and Columbia University Law School. Howard Koch started out as a practicing lawyer in Hartsdale, New Jersey, but soon found himself dissatisfied with his career choice and began to write plays on the side. His first two efforts flopped on Broadway (respectively in 1929 and 1933). Nonetheless, Koch continued, undaunted, and had his first critical success with "The Lonely Man", produced at the Blackstone Theater in Chicago in 1937. On the strength of this work he was engaged by John Houseman to write dramatic material for Orson Welles' "Mercury Theater on the Air" radio program (his starting salary was $75 for roughly sixty pages of script). Koch re-wrote H.G. Wells sci-fi story "War of the Worlds" as "Invasion from Mars" for the famous Halloween broadcast that "panicked America". It had such an effect on the public that the "New York Times" ran the headline "Many Flee Homes to Escape 'Gas Raid From Mars'".
The following year Koch moved to Hollywood and was signed to a screenwriting contract by Warner Brothers (1939-1945). He achieved lasting fame through his felicitous collaboration with brothers Philip Epstein and Julius J. Epstein in adapting Murray Burnett's adaptation of the obscure play "Everybody Comes to Rick's" to the now classic Casablanca (1942). The Epsteins concentrated on the dialogue while Koch worked out the dramatic continuity. The three subsequently shared the 1943 Academy Award for Best Screenplay (Koch sold his Oscar at auction in 1994 for $184,000 in order to fund a granddaughter's school tuition). Before and after "Casablanca", Koch worked on a variety of other subjects, turning out polished screenplays for Errol Flynn's hugely entertaining swashbuckler The Sea Hawk (1940), an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's steamy melodrama The Letter (1940), the patriotic flag-waver Sergeant York (1941) and the George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945). His own personal favorite was his script for Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), a tender story of unrequited love set in Vienna.
Koch's reputation was sadly tarnished as a result of his work on Mission to Moscow (1943), the account of Joseph E. Davies, a former US ambassador to Russia. Although he was not particularly happy with this assignment, Koch was coerced into it by studio boss Jack L. Warner, who, in turn, was under pressure from the U.S. government to produce a picture that showcased the efforts of the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazi Germany. However, in 1947, at the height of the Red-baiting hysteria stirred up by senator Joseph McCarthy, Warner testified as a "friendly" witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), charged with "rooting out" Communist influence in the motion picture industry. Warner named Koch and other "liberals" as being Communist sympathizers, using the pro-Russian content of "Mission to Moscow" as "proof". This resulted in Koch becoming one of the so-called "Hollywood Nineteen" and finding himself being blacklisted by the industry in 1951. Unable to earn a living, he had little choice but to leave the country. Like other writers and directors in the same position, he moved to England where he continued to write screenplays under a pseudonym ("Peter Howard"). Returning to the US five years later, he bought a property near Woodstock, NY, and resumed writing plays for regional productions (as well as occasional film scripts).
In his memoirs, "As Time Goes By", Koch recalled how, early in the casting process, the stars of "Casablanca" were slated to be Dennis Morgan (!), Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan (in the Paul Henreid role of Victor Laszlo). Our appreciation of the classic film would have been rather different . . .- Writer
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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).- Writer
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Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on February 11, 1909, Joseph Leo Mankiewicz first worked for the movies as a translator of intertitles, employed by Paramount in Berlin, the UFA's American distributor at the time (1928). He became a dialoguist, then a screenwriter on numerous Paramount productions in Hollywood, most of them Jack Oakie vehicles. Still in his 20s, he produced first-class MGM films, including The Philadelphia Story (1940). Having left Metro after a dispute with studio chief Louis B. Mayer over Judy Garland, he then worked for Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, producing The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), when Ernst Lubitsch's illness first brought him to the director's chair for Dragonwyck (1946). Mankiewicz directed 20 films in a 26-year period, successfully attempted every kind of movie from Shakespeare adaptation to western, from urban sociological drama to musical, from epic film with thousands of extras to a two-character picture. A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950) brought him wide recognition along with two Academy Awards for each as a writer and a director, seven years after his elder brother Herman J. Mankiewicz won Best Screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941). His more intimate films like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Barefoot Contessa (1954)--his only original screenplay--and The Honey Pot (1967) are major artistic achievements as well, showing Mankiewicz as a witty dialoguist, a master in the use of flashback and a talented actors' director (he favored English actors and had in Rex Harrison a kind of alter-ego on the screen).- Writer
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Carl Foreman was born on 23 July 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Guns of Navarone (1961), High Noon (1952) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). He was married to Estelle Barr and Evelyn Smith. He died on 26 June 1984 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- 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.- Writer
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Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1902, Curt Siodmak worked as an engineer and a newspaper reporter before entering the literary and movie fields. It was as a reporter that he got his first break (of sorts) in films: in 1926 he and his reporter-wife hired on as extras on Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) in order to get a story on the director and his film. One of Siodmak's first film-writing assignments was the screenplay for the German sci-fi picture F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1932) (US title: "Floating Platform 1 Does Not Answer"), based on his own novel. Compelled to leave Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power, Siodmak went to work as a screenwriter in England and then moved to Hollywood in 1937. He got a job at Universal through his director-friend Joe May, helping write the script for May's The Invisible Man Returns (1940). Because the film went over well, Siodmak says, he fell into the horror/science-fiction "groove."- Writer
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Lawrence Kasdan is an American filmmaker, producer and screenwriter. He directed Body Heat, Grand Canyon, The Big Chill, Silverado and Dreamcatcher. He wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Bodyguard, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Force Awakens and Solo: A Star Wars Story. He is married to Meg Goldman since 1971 and has two sons.- Writer
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James Agee, Pulitzer Prize winning author, was born in Knoxville in 1909. The intense writer was to enjoy little real success in his lifetime, but after death won accolades. In 1958 he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his uncompleted biographical novel A Death in the Family. Agee also wrote the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with Walker Evans and the Oscar nominated screenplay for The African Queen with John Huston. Agee also appeared in a film and several TV shows while working in Hollywood. He died in 1955, only 45 years old, of a heart attack in NYC.- Actor
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An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, this Hollywood titan reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His ancestry was English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, distant German and very remote Portuguese. The age-old story goes that the small town of his birth was won by John's grandfather in a poker game. John's father was the equally magnanimous character actor Walter Huston, and his mother, Rhea Gore, was a newspaperwoman who traveled around the country looking for stories. The only child of the couple, John began performing on stage with his vaudevillian father at age 3. Upon his parents' divorce at age 7, the young boy would take turns traveling around the vaudeville circuit with his father and the country with his mother on reporting excursions. A frail and sickly child, he was once placed in a sanitarium due to both an enlarged heart and kidney ailment. Making a miraculous recovery, he quit school at age 14 to become a full-fledged boxer and eventually won the Amateur Lightweight Boxing Championship of California, winning 22 of 25 bouts. His trademark broken nose was the result of that robust activity.
John married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Harvey, and also took his first professional stage bow with a leading role off-Broadway entitled "The Triumph of the Egg." He made his Broadway debut that same year with "Ruint" on April 7, 1925, and followed that with another Broadway show "Adam Solitaire" the following November. John soon grew restless with the confines of both his marriage and acting and abandoned both, taking a sojourn to Mexico where he became an officer in the cavalry and expert horseman while writing plays on the sly. Trying to control his wanderlust urges, he subsequently returned to America and attempted newspaper and magazine reporting work in New York by submitting short stories. He was even hired at one point by mogul Samuel Goldwyn Jr. as a screenwriter, but again he grew restless. During this time he also appeared unbilled in a few obligatory films. By 1932 John was on the move again and left for London and Paris where he studied painting and sketching. The promising artist became a homeless beggar during one harrowing point.
Returning again to America in 1933, he played the title role in a production of "Abraham Lincoln," only a few years after father Walter portrayed the part on film for D.W. Griffith. John made a new resolve to hone in on his obvious writing skills and began collaborating on a few scripts for Warner Brothers. He also married again. Warners was so impressed with his talents that he was signed on as both screenwriter and director for the Dashiell Hammett mystery yarn The Maltese Falcon (1941). The movie classic made a superstar out of Humphrey Bogart and is considered by critics and audiences alike--- 65 years after the fact--- to be the greatest detective film ever made. In the meantime John wrote/staged a couple of Broadway plays, and in the aftermath of his mammoth screen success directed bad-girl 'Bette Davis (I)' and good girl Olivia de Havilland in the film melodrama In This Our Life (1942), and three of his "Falcon" stars (Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet) in the romantic war picture Across the Pacific (1942). During WWII John served as a Signal Corps lieutenant and went on to helm a number of film documentaries for the U.S. government including the controversial Let There Be Light (1980), which father Walter narrated. The end of WWII also saw the end of his second marriage. He married third wife Evelyn Keyes, of "Gone With the Wind" fame, in 1946 but it too lasted a relatively short time. That same year the impulsive and always unpredictable Huston directed Jean-Paul Sartre's experimental play "No Exit" on Broadway. The show was a box-office bust (running less than a month) but nevertheless earned the New York Drama Critics Award as "best foreign play."
Hollywood glory came to him again in association with Bogart and Warner Brothers'. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a classic tale of gold, greed and man's inhumanity to man set in Mexico, won John Oscars for both director and screenplay and his father nabbed the "Best Supporting Actor" trophy. John can be glimpsed at the beginning of the movie in a cameo playing a tourist, but he wouldn't act again on film for a decade and a half. With the momentum in his favor, John hung around in Hollywood this time to write and/or direct some of the finest American cinema made including Key Largo (1948) and The African Queen (1951) (both with Bogart), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951) and Moulin Rouge (1952). Later films, including Moby Dick (1956), The Unforgiven (1960), The Misfits (1961), Freud (1962), The Night of the Iguana (1964) and The Bible in the Beginning... (1966) were, for the most part, well-regarded but certainly not close to the level of his earlier revered work. He also experimented behind-the-camera with color effects and approached topics that most others would not even broach, including homosexuality and psychoanalysis.
An ardent supporter of human rights, he, along with director William Wyler and others, dared to form the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947, which strove to undermine the House Un-American Activities Committee. Disgusted by the Hollywood blacklisting that was killing the careers of many talented folk, he moved to St. Clerans in Ireland and became a citizen there along with his fourth wife, ballet dancer Enrica (Ricki) Soma. The couple had two children, including daughter Anjelica Huston who went on to have an enviable Hollywood career of her own. Huston and wife Ricki split after a son (director Danny Huston) was born to another actress in 1962. They did not divorce, however, and remained estranged until her sudden death in 1969 in a car accident. John subsequently adopted his late wife's child from another union. The ever-impulsive Huston would move yet again to Mexico where he married (1972) and divorced (1977) his fifth and final wife, Celeste Shane.
Huston returned to acting auspiciously with a major role in Otto Preminger's epic film The Cardinal (1963) for which Huston received an Oscar nomination at age 57. From that time forward, he would be glimpsed here and there in a number of colorful, baggy-eyed character roles in both good and bad (some positively abysmal) films that, at the very least, helped finance his passion projects. The former list included outstanding roles in Chinatown (1974) and The Wind and the Lion (1975), while the latter comprised of hammy parts in such awful drek as Candy (1968) and Myra Breckinridge (1970).
Directing daughter Angelica in her inauspicious movie debut, the thoroughly mediocre A Walk with Love and Death (1969), John made up for it 15 years later by directing her to Oscar glory in the mob tale Prizzi's Honor (1985). In the 1970s Huston resurged as a director of quality films with Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Wise Blood (1979). He ended his career on a high note with Under the Volcano (1984), the afore-mentioned Prizzi's Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987). His only certifiable misfire during that era was the elephantine musical version of Annie (1982), though it later became somewhat of a cult favorite among children.
Huston lived the macho, outdoors life, unencumbered by convention or restrictions, and is often compared in style or flamboyancy to an Ernest Hemingway or Orson Welles. He was, in fact, the source of inspiration for Clint Eastwood in the helming of the film White Hunter Black Heart (1990) which chronicled the making of "The African Queen." Illness robbed Huston of a good portion of his twilight years with chronic emphysema the main culprit. As always, however, he continued to work tirelessly while hooked up to an oxygen machine if need be. At the end, the living legend was shooting an acting cameo in the film Mr. North (1988) for his son Danny, making his directorial bow at the time. John became seriously ill with pneumonia and died while on location at the age of 81. This maverick of a man's man who was once called "the eccentric's eccentric" by Paul Newman, left an incredibly rich legacy of work to be enjoyed by film lovers for centuries to come.- Actor
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Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky on June 28, 1926 in Brooklyn, New York. He served in WWII, and afterwards got a job playing the drums at nightclubs in the Catskills. Brooks eventually started a comedy act and also worked in radio and as Master Entertainer at Grossinger's Resort before going to television.
He was a writer for, Your Show of Shows (1950) Caesar's Hour (1954) and wrote the Broadway show Shinbone Alley. He also worked in the creation of The 2000 Year Old Man (1975) and Get Smart (1965) before embarking on a highly successful film career in writing, acting, producing and directing.
Brooks is famous for the spoofs of different film genres that he made such as Blazing Saddles (1974), History of the World: Part I (1981), Silent Movie (1976), Young Frankenstein (1974), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), High Anxiety (1977), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), and Spaceballs (1987).- Frank S. Nugent was an American screenwriter known for his collaborations with director John Ford. For a writer with only 21 feature films credited to his name, his influence is surprisingly ubiquitous and far-reaching. During his lifetime Nugent won two WGA Awards for Best Written Comedy for The Quiet Man (1952) and Mister Roberts (1955) respectively. He also wrote two films in Ford's famous "Cavalry Trilogy" and his script for The Searchers (1956) has been named by the WGA as one of the 101 greatest screenplays of all time. It's no exaggeration to say that every subsequent western movie bore the influence of Nugent's writing.
Nugent began his career as a film critic for The New York Times. He was very prolific and became known for his vicious reviews of popular movies. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck noticed his writings and decided to hire him as a script doctor. After working on a number of scripts, Nugent met John Ford (a director he liked) and the two decided to work together, thus beginning one of Hollywood's most fruitful writer-director collaborations. Nugent wrote for Ford for several decades, writing some of his best-known and most successful films. - Writer
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Son of a small shopkeeper, he attended Manchester Grammar School. He later said that he made poor uses of his opportunities there. He went to work in an insurance office, but later entered Manchester University, taking a degree in History. A post-graduate year at Exeter University led to a schoolmaster's position, first at a village school in Devon, then for seven years at Millfield. During this time he wrote a dozen radio plays, which were broadcast. Encouraged by the London success of his stage play "Flowering Cherry" he left teaching for full-time writing. 1960 saw two of his plays ("The Tiger And The Horse" and "A Man For All Seasons") running concurrently in the West End.- Writer
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David Webb Peoples was born on 9 February 1940 in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. He is a writer and editor, known for Unforgiven (1992), Blade Runner (1982) and 12 Monkeys (1995). He is married to Janet Peoples.- Writer
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The son of a Russian émigré clothing merchant, Sidney Buchman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on March 27 1902. He initially attended the University of Minnesota. After his family moved to New York, he continued his studies at Columbia University, graduating in 1923. The following year, he travelled to England and worked as an assistant stage manager at the Old Vic. Upon his return to New York, he tried his hand writing for the theatre and had two plays produced, "This One Man" (Broadway, 1930) and "Storm Song", both of which flopped.
In 1931, Buchman went to Hollywood, having secured a screenwriting contract with Paramount. He remained for two years, then moved on to Columbia, where he was given the opportunity to work on several sophisticated and witty comedy scripts which often juxtaposed simple, honest country folk, with slick, corrupt urbanites. Along with Frank Capra, he helped raise the studio's prestige and shake off the stigma of having once been a 'poverty row' outfit. His biggest hits were She Married Her Boss (1935), Theodora Goes Wild (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). In view of the massive box office success of these pictures, Buchman was promoted up the ladder to producer in 1937. Five years later, he was made vice-president of production (with his own production company within the studio), effectively functioning as Harry Cohn's right-hand man.
He held this post until 1951, when he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee and forced to admit that he had been a member of the Communist Party between 1938 and 1945. However, he steadfastly refused to 'name names'. In March 1953, he was found guilty of contempt by Congress, fined $150 and blacklisted. While based in the south of France, Buchman was given a reprieve by 20th Century Fox, who defied the blacklist, by hiring him in 1960 to work in their European department. He eventually did most of the work on the screenplay of The Mark (1961), a British/German co-production starring Maria Schell and Stuart Whitman. He was also one of the many contributors to Fox's epic Cleopatra (1963). Buchman died in his adopted home in Cannes in August 1975 at the age of 73.- Writer
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An American novelist, writer of crime fiction featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe, Raymond (Thornton) Chandler was born in Chicago of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother. He moved to England when his parents divorced. He attended Dulwich College and studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in 1907 and becoming a naturalized British subject. He took a civil service job in the Admiralty, which he left in 1912 to return to America, settling in California. After the US entered World War I he enlisted in the Canadian Army, then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. After the armistice he returned to California and got a series of bookkeeping jobs, finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil syndicate.
All along, however, he had been submitting stories, poems, sketches and essays to a number of periodicals, but when the Depression hit and the bottom fell out of the oil business, he lost his job and turned to writing full-time. He found a niche with stories of the "hard-boiled" school popularized by Dashiell Hammett, and had many of his early stories accepted by Black Mask, the same mystery magazine that had first published Hammett. His first four novels--"The Big Sleep" (1939, filmed 1946 [The Big Sleep (1946)] and 1978 [The Big Sleep (1978)]); "Farewell My Lovely" (1940, filmed 1944 [Murder, My Sweet (1944)] and 1975 [Farewell, My Lovely (1975)]); "The High Window" (1942, filmed 1947 [The Brasher Doubloon (1947)]); and "The Lady in the Lake (1943, filmed 1946 [Lady in the Lake (1946)])--which reworked plots from some of his short stories, were his most successful.
He spent some time in Hollywood as a screenwriter, contributing to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), the film noir classic The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). He wrote realistically, in stark contrast to the English style of drawing-room puzzle mysteries where an amateur detective always knows more than the police and clues turn up at just the right moment. Chandler dismissed these plots as "having God sit in your lap."- Writer
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Neil Simon was born on 4 July 1927 in The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Odd Couple (1968), Murder by Death (1976) and The Goodbye Girl (1977). He was married to Elaine Joyce, Diane Lander, Marsha Mason and Joan Baim. He died on 26 August 2018 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
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Tennessee Williams met long-term partner Frank Merlo in the summer of 1948 (Merlo died of lung cancer in the fall of 1963). Though separated briefly in 1961 and again in 1962, the two were partners for 15 years. Merlo acted as his personal manager/secretary.
Williams spent much of his most prolific years in Rome, Italy, and his enduring friendship with Italian stage and screen legend Anna Magnani lasted 24 years and inspired both "The Rose Tattoo" and "Orpheus Descending". Magnani realized the lead parts of these two plays, which were written for her, in their film versions. The turbulent and inspirational friendship shared between Williams and Magnani is the subject of the internationally acclaimed play "Roman Nights" by Franco D'Alessandro.
Aside from his published "Memoirs", the only authorized biographical book on Williams is by Bruce Smith, entitled "Costly Performances - Tennessee Williams; The Last Stage." This book deals with the last four years of Williams' life (1979-1983).- Writer
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Attended Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Illinois, graduating in 1994.
Graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Majored in English.
Shortly after graduating from Georgetown University, Jonathan Nolan served as a production assistant on Memento (2000).
Wrote the short story, "Memento Mori", on which the film Memento (2000) is based.
Was co-writer, with his brother Christopher Nolan, on The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Also co-wrote the Terminator Salvation (2009).- Writer
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Best known for his cerebral, often nonlinear, storytelling, acclaimed Academy Award winner writer/director/producer Sir Christopher Nolan CBE was born in London, England. Over the course of more than 25 years of filmmaking, Nolan has gone from low-budget independent films to working on some of the biggest blockbusters ever made and became one of the most celebrated filmmakers of modern cinema.
At 7 years old, Nolan began making short films with his father's Super-8 camera. While studying English Literature at University College London, he shot 16-millimeter films at U.C.L.'s film society, where he learned the guerrilla techniques he would later use to make his first feature, Following (1998), on a budget of around $6,000. The noir thriller was recognized at a number of international film festivals prior to its theatrical release and gained Nolan enough credibility that he was able to gather substantial financing for his next film.
Nolan's second film was Memento (2000), which he directed from his own screenplay based on a short story by his brother Jonathan Nolan. Starring Guy Pearce, the film brought Nolan numerous honors, including Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay. Nolan went on to direct the critically acclaimed psychological thriller, Insomnia (2002), starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank.
The turning point in Nolan's career occurred when he was awarded the chance to revive the Batman franchise in 2005. In Batman Begins (2005), Nolan brought a level of gravitas back to the iconic hero, and his gritty, modern interpretation was greeted with praise from fans and critics alike. Before moving on to a Batman sequel, Nolan directed, co-wrote, and produced the mystery thriller The Prestige (2006), starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as magicians whose obsessive rivalry leads to tragedy and murder.
In 2008, Nolan directed, co-wrote, and produced The Dark Knight (2008). Co-written with by his brother Jonathan, the film went on to gross more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. Nolan was nominated for a Directors Guild of America (D.G.A.) Award, Writers Guild of America (W.G.A.) Award and Producers Guild of America (P.G.A.) Award, and the film also received eight Academy Award nominations. The film is widely considered one of the best comic book adaptations of all times, with Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker receiving an extremely high acclaim. Ledger posthumously became the first Academy Award winning performance in a Nolan film.
In 2010, Nolan captivated audiences with the Sci-Fi thriller Inception (2010), starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, which he directed and produced from his own original screenplay that he worked on for almost a decade. The thought-provoking drama was a worldwide blockbuster, earning more than $800,000,000 and becoming one of the most discussed and debated films of the year, and of all times. Among its many honors, Inception received four Academy Awards and eight nominations, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Nolan was recognized by his peers with a W.G.A. Award accolade, as well as D.G.A. and P.G.A. Awards nominations for his work on the film.
As one of the best-reviewed and highest-grossing movies of 2012, The Dark Knight Rises (2012) concluded Nolan's Batman trilogy. Due to his success rebooting the Batman character, Warner Bros. enlisted Nolan to produce their revamped Superman movie Man of Steel (2013), which opened in the summer of 2013. In 2014, Nolan directed, wrote, and produced the Science-Fiction epic Interstellar (2014), starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. released the film on November 5, 2014, to positive reviews and strong box-office results, grossing over $670 million dollars worldwide.
In July 2017, Nolan released his acclaimed War epic Dunkirk (2017), that earned him his first Best Director nomination at the Academy Awards, as well as winning an additional 3 Oscars. In 2020 he released his mind-bending Sci-Fi espionage thriller Tenet (2020) starring John David Washington in the lead role. Released during the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie grossed relatively less than Nolan's previous blockbusters, though it did do good numbers compared to other movies in that period of time. Hailed as Nolan's most complex film yet, the film was one of Nolan's less-acclaimed films at the time, yet slowly built a fan-base following in later years.
In July 2023, Nolan released his highly acclaimed biographic drama Oppenheimer (2023) starring Nolan's frequent collaborator Cillian Murphy- in the lead role for the first time in a Nolan film. The movie was a cultural phenomenon that on top of grossing almost 1 billion dollars at the Worldwide Box office, also swept the 2023/2024 award-season and gave Nolan his first Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, D.G.A. and P.G.A. Awards, as well as a handful of regional critics-circles awards and a W.G.A. nomination. Cillian's performance as quantum physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was highly acclaimed as well, and became the first lead performance in a Nolan film to win the Academy Award.
During 2023, Nolan also received a fellowship from the British Film Institute (BFI). In March 2024, it was announced that Nolan is to be knighted by King Charles III and from now on will go by the title 'Sir Christopher Nolan'.
Nolan resides in Los Angeles, California with his wife, Academy Award winner producer Dame Emma Thomas, and their children. Sir Nolan and Dame Thomas also have their own production company, Syncopy.- Producer
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Joel Daniel Coen is an American filmmaker who regularly collaborates with his younger brother Ethan. They made Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis, Hail Caesar and other projects. Joel married actress Frances McDormand in 1984 and had an adopted son.- Producer
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The younger brother of Joel, Ethan Coen is an Academy Award and Golden Globe winning writer, producer and director coming from small independent films to big profile Hollywood films. He was born on September 21, 1957 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In some films of the brothers- Ethan & Joel wrote, Joel directed and Ethan produced - with both editing under the name of Roderick Jaynes; but in 2004 they started to share the three main duties plus editing. Each film bring its own quality, creativity, art and with one project more daring the other.
His film debut was in 1984 dark humored thriller Blood Simple (1984) starring Frances McDormand (Joel's wife) and M. Emmet Walsh in a deep story revolving a couple of romantic lovers followed by an insisting private eye. The film received critical acclaim, some award nominations to Ethan (best writing at the Film Independent Spirit Awards) and became a cult following over the years. Their second work was the comedy Raising Arizona (1987) starring Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter as a unusual couple trying to create their family by kidnapping babies from a rich family.
Miller's Crossing (1990) was the third film of the brothers, a mob drama with heavy influences from several criminal dramas and with a stellar cast that included Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Albert Finney, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro and Jon Polito (the latter three would become regular actors in the Coen's films).
Their views on the Hollywood era of the 1930's was the central theme is the great Barton Fink (1991), created from a writers block both brothers suffered during the making of their previous film. John Turturro stars as a writer who suffers from a breakdown when he's commissioned to a big budget Hollywood project. The film was a breakthrough for the Coens marking their first win at the Cannes Film Festival (Joel got the Palme d'Or) and the first time a film of their received Oscar nominations. The underrated comedy The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) was what followed; but no one could predict their next big and boldest move that would definitely put Ethan and Joel on the spotlight once and for all.
The comedy of errors Fargo (1996) was a huge critical and commercial success. With its crazed story of a man who hires two loonies to kidnap his own wife and a pregnant policewoman tracking the leads to the crime, Ethan and Joel came at their greatest moment that couldn't be missed. The film received several awards during award season and the Coen's got their first Oscar in the Best Original Screenplay category. What came next was the underrated yet hilariously good The Big Lebowski (1998) starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, John Turturro and Steve Buscemi. Those masterpieces made their career in the late 1990's cementing the duo as one of the greatest writers and directors of their generation, if not, from all time.
The Odyssey retold for the 1930's in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000); the intelligent noir The Man Who Wasn't There (2001); the comedy Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and a remake The Ladykillers (2004) marked their way into the early 2000's. Certaintly of period of minor hits and some downer moments.
The big return was with the highly acclaimed No Country for Old Men (2007), where the brothers swooped at the Oscars with three wins: Best Picture, Screenplay and Writing, an adaptation from the Cormac McCarthy's novel.
A Serious Man (2009), Burn After Reading (2008), True Grit (2010), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Hail, Caesar! (2016) and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) were the subsequent films, all well received by audiences or got awards recognition, mostly nominations.
A shift from tone and career move was writing with other writers and for another directors: for Angelina Jolie's Unbroken (2014), for Spielberg in Bridge of Spies (2015) and George Clooney in Suburbicon (2017).
As for personal life, Ethan has been married to Tricia Cooke since 1990. Tricia works as an assistant editor in several of the Coen brothers films.- Calder Willingham was born on 23 December 1922 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He was a writer, known for The Graduate (1967), Paths of Glory (1957) and Little Big Man (1970). He died on 21 February 1995 in Laconia, New Hampshire, USA.
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Waldo Salt was one of the many people blacklisted in Hollywood during the Red Scare, but unlike others, Salt recovered triumphantly. He wrote his first scripts in the late 1930s (MGM contract writer, 1936-42) and also served as a civilian consultant to the Office of War Information from 1942- 1945 before being blacklisted in 1951 after refusing to testify before HUAC. Salt spent several years writing under assumed names for various television series (low-budget series such as "Colonel March of Scotland Yard," for example) and undistinguished films before slowly turning his career around, working in more widely seen television and eventually winning two Oscars for his later work in film.- Writer
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Alvin Sargent was an American screenwriter who wrote Ordinary People and the Marvel screenplays for Sony: Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man. His writing for Spider-Man 2 got widespread acclaim. He also wrote a few episodes of Paper Moon. He was married to film producer Laura Ziskin, who produced the Spider-Man films he had written.- Producer
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Frank Pierson was born on 12 May 1925 in Chappaqua, New York, USA. He was a producer and writer, known for Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Presumed Innocent (1990) and Cool Hand Luke (1967). He was married to Helene Szamet, Dori Pierson and Polly Stokes. He died on 22 July 2012 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Terry Southern began writing satirical, outrageous fiction at the age of 12, when he took it upon himself to rewrite various Edgar Allan Poe stories "because they didn't go far enough". After serving as a lieutenant in the army in World War II, he began writing short stories in earnest while studying at the Sorbonne. "The Accident", published in the premier issue of The Paris Review, was the first short story to appear in that magazine. According to Peter Matthiessen, "The Sun and the Stillborn Stars", also by Terry, determined the course of The Paris Review as a venue for short fiction. He admired and befriended influential British novelist Henry Green, who convinced Andre Deutsch to publish his first novel, "Flash and Filigree" (1958). Residing with his first wife Carol in Geneva, he spent days conjuring surrealistic exploits for billionaire trickster Guy Grand in "The Magic Christian" (1958) while at the same time writing Candy (1958) for Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press. He and Gregory Corso presented William Burroughs' beat masterwork "Naked Lunch" to Girodias, convincing him to publish it. Terry published numerous short stories in England, France and America, (anthologized in "Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes"), and co-edited "Writers in Revolt; an Anthology of the Most Controversial Writing in the World Today" (1962) with Alex Trocchi and Richard Seaver.
After settling in an old farmhouse in Connecticut, Terry began contributing regularly to Esquire Magazine. One of his assignments was to interview director Stanley Kubrick, who subsequently invited him to employ his satirical skills on the "Dr. Strangelove" screenplay (1964). A rewarding period in Hollywood followed, including screenplays for the films The Loved One (1965), The Collector (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Casino Royale (1967) and Barbarella (1968). Terry helped inaugurate the independent film movement by co-authoring Easy Rider (1969) and writing and co-producing The End of the Road (1976) with his old Paris/Greenwich Village hipster soulmate Aram Avakian - filmed entirely on-location in the Berkshires with Actors Studio cast and a non-union crew (including James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach and Gordon Willis). After the publication of the novel "Blue Movie" (1970), he turned to screenwriting full-time, working on original scripts, adaptations and speculative assignments throughout the 70s and 80s.
During this difficult period, when films and "quality-lit" (a phrase he coined) moved from character-driven stories to action-packed blockbuster, the IRS repeatedly attempted to reclaim over $150,000 in unpaid taxes owed from the mid-sixties. He was hired in the early-eighties by Michael O'Donoghue to write for Saturday Night Live (1975), and wrote "The Telephone" (1986) with singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. With legitimate film work increasingly elusive, Terry taught Screenwriting at both NYU and Columbia University from the late 80s until his death in 1995. His last novel, "Texas Summer", was released by Arcade Books in 1992. His novels "The Magic Christian", "Flash and Filigree", "Blue Movie" and "Candy" are available through Grove Atlantic. A new collection, "Now Dig This; The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern 1950-1995" was released by Grove in 2001, as was Terry's biography by Lee Hill, "A Grand Guy, the Art and Life of Terry Southern" (Harper Collins). - Writer
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James L. Brooks was born on 9 May 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Broadcast News (1987), As Good as It Gets (1997) and Terms of Endearment (1983). He was previously married to Holly Holmberg Brooks and Marianne Catherine Morrissey.- Writer
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Robert E. Sherwood, a brilliant multifaceted writer, was born to Arthur Murray and Rosina Emmet Sherwood, educated at the Milton Academy (Massachusetts) and Harvard, and was wounded while serving with the Canadian Black Watch in WWI. His literary career started with jobs as movie critic at Vanity Fair and Life magazines, but he became a full-time writer with the success of his play "The Road to Rome" in 1927. His first movie writing job came in 1924, rewriting the subtitles for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Over the years he worked with most of the major talents in the film business, including Alexander Korda, George S. Kaufman and Samuel Goldwyn, often working without credit. During WWII Sherwood served in a number of posts, most notably as director of the overseas branch of the Office of War Information (OWI). He resigned in 1944 and returned to film writing, winning an Oscar for his script for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Sherwood received numerous literary awards throughout his career, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1936, '39, '41, and '49, and the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history in 1949.- Writer
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Robert Riskin was born on 30 March 1897 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for It Happened One Night (1934), You Can't Take It with You (1938) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). He was married to Fay Wray. He died on 20 September 1955 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.