Film Noir Writers
Screenwriters / scriptwriters , story / original idea credits .
Some were noir fiction writers as well
Some were noir fiction writers as well
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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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James M. Cain was a 'Film Noir' author. His father was a professor, and president, of 'Washington College'. His mother was an opera singer in Maryland.
James graduated from the same college in 1910, and became a writer for 'Baltimore American', then 'Baltimore Sun' [still being published] by 1914. He was drafted in 1916, and spent 1918 in France as a writer for the 'Army Times'. When released, he did writing for various publications, and by 1934, his first novel,"The Postman Always Rings Twice", was published. Of Course, a very popular movie in 1946.
With adaptations of his novels[credit only as 'story contributor'],he was much in demand in the 40's in the 'Film Noir' category. But, in 1946, he formed a 'Cain Plan' ["American Authors' Authority"]whereby The writers would have authority of copyrights, and be the representative for them in negotiations with the movie producers and court disputes. Resembling 'S.A.G.', it was opposed by an org. called, "The American Writers' Assoc.". There was a debate carried on in the 'Saturday Review'.
He was married 4 times.- Martin Goldsmith was born on 6 November 1913 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for The Narrow Margin (1952), The Twilight Zone (1959) and Detour (1945). He died on 24 May 1994 in Sherman Oaks, California, USA.
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Steve Fisher was born on 29 August 1912 in Marine City, Michigan, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Destination Tokyo (1943), Hell's Half Acre (1954) and Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre (1955). He was married to Edithe Seimes. He died on 27 March 1980 in Canoga Park, California, USA.- Writer
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Daniel Mainwaring was born on 27 February 1902 in Oakland, California, USA. He was a writer, known for Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Out of the Past (1947) and Against All Odds (1984). He died on 31 January 1977 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Daniel Mainwaring's pseudonym- American writer of thrillers and film scripts, the son of a Chicago lawyer and a violinist. He was named 'Jonathan' after a famous ancestor who had served as a colonel on George Washington's staff during the American Revolutionary War. Latimer was a graduate of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Following travels in Europe, he began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Herald Examiner and the Chicago Tribune (1929-34), reporting on the activities of organized crime figures in his home town. That included meeting the likes of Al Capone and George Moran (aka 'Bugs') on their own turf!
From 1935, Latimer penned a series of hard-boiled crime novels published by 'The Crime Club' and usually featuring the dissolute private eye Bill Crane. These books were somewhat in the vein of Dashiell Hammett (by whom he was heavily influenced) and Raymond Chandler (whom he later befriended), with a suitably cynical but at times bawdily humorous, or self-mocking edge. He sometimes wrote under the pseudonym 'Peter Coffin' ("The Search for My Great Uncle's Head" (1937)). Latimer worked in Hollywood from the late 1930s, where he was at his best providing gritty dialogue for the film noir genre, notably Hammett's The Glass Key (1942), They Won't Believe Me (1947) and The Big Clock (1948). - Writer
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Horace McCoy was born on 14 April 1897 in Pegram, Tennessee, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Speed Wings (1934), The Lusty Men (1952) and Dangerous Mission (1954). He died on 16 December 1955 in Beverly Hills, California, USA.- Writer
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Robert Rossen was born on 16 March 1908 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and director, known for The Hustler (1961), All the King's Men (1949) and Alexander the Great (1956). He was married to Sarah (Sue) Siegel. He died on 18 February 1966 in New York City, New York, USA.- Vera Caspary was born on 13 November 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She was a writer, known for Laura (1944), A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Laura. She was married to Isadore Goldsmith. She died on 13 June 1987 in New York City, New York, USA.
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Writer-director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, one of the most prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklisting of communists and social progressives in the post-World War II period, was born on December 5, 1910, in New York, New York. An unreconstructed Marxist, Polonsky never hid his membership in the Communist Party. (Indeed, it was known by the federal government during World War II, when he was a member of the O.S.S. working in France with the Resistance, given credence to the charge that the House Un-American Activities Committee wasn't interested so much in "ferreting out" communists and fellow-travelers as in making progressives of the F.D.R. coalition publicly repudiate their beliefs in a form of public penance.) After being named by former fellow O.S.S. member Sterling Hayden, Polonsky himself was arraigned before HUAC in 1951. After defying the committee by refusing to name names, he was blacklisted for 17 years by the U.S. film industry.
As director and screenwriter, Polonsky was an "auteur" of three of the great film noirs made in the last century: Body and Soul (1947) (screenplay; directed by fellow CPUSA member Robert Rossen, who kept his career by "naming names"), Force of Evil (1948) (which he wrote and directed), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) (which he wrote using a front).
Polonsky studied English at City College of New York (CCNY) and, after briefly shipping out as a merchant seaman, went to Columbia Law School. Polonsky's father wanted him to have a profession, and he preferred the law over medicine. The young Polonsky had wanted to be a writer, and he taught English at CCNY while matriculating at Columbia Law, but the law was his first career. After graduation from Columbia Law, he became a practicing attorney, which ironically, led to his career in screenwriting.
Gertrude Berg, the creative force behind the popular radio show "The Goldbergs" (which later made the transition to TV), was a client of his firm. Needing background for an episode that would feature the machinations of the law, Polonsky was assigned to Berg as an expert. Berg was so impressed when Polonsky dictated a scene to his secretary, she hired him as one of her writers. Thus, in 1937, by a serendipitous route charted originally by his father, who wanted his son to be a professional, not a writer, Polonsky was on his way to becoming a hot, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and writer-director.
Polonsky eventually left Berg and became a labor organizer. In 1939, after organizing autoworkers at a General Motors plant near his home in Briarcliff, New York, he became the educational director of the Congress of Industrial Organization, the major labor federation for skilled workers, in upstate New York. While working as a labor organizer, Polonsky wrote his first novel, "The Discoverers", a novel dealing with New York City bohemians, radicals, and frustrated intellectuals. The book was optioned by a publisher that unfortunately went out of business; it remains unpublished to this day. However, he began to thrive as a novelist: Simon and Schuster published a novel he co-wrote, "The Goose Is Cooked," in 1942, and Little Brown published his sea-adventure story "The Enemy Sea," which originally had been serialized in "Colliers Magazine".
Paramount became interested in Polonsky and offered him a contract. However, as a dedicated anti-Nazi, Polonsky was determined to serve in the war despite being turned down for military service due to poor eyesight. Recruited by the O.S.S. (likely because of his communist background; it was said that during World War II, communists made the best secret agents due to their propensity for secrecy and their dedication to their ideology). He signed a contract with Paramount guaranteeing him a job after the war, and then was shipped off to London before serving in France as a liaison with the French underground.
Back from World War II, Polonsky alienated Paramount's head writer when he complained that his nominal boss had kept him waiting too long for their initial meeting. The peeved head writer gave him the Marlene Dietrich potboiler Golden Earrings (1947) as his first screenwriting assignment, and although he received a screen credit, he claimed that nothing he wrote made it to the screen. He quit Paramount to take a job with John Garfield's Enterprise Productions, which had a collectivist philosophy akin to the old Group Theater on Broadway, of which the former Julius Garfinkle (Garfield) had been a member. Garfield was a leftist, though not a member of the Communist Party, though he did employ director Robert Rossen, who was a member of CPUSA, as was Polonsky, who had joined during the Depression.
Working from Polonsky's script, Rossen shot the classic boxing drama Body and Soul (1947). Polonsky actually was allowed on the set (not a common occurrence for the film industry) and actively gave Rossen advice. Some critics see Polonsky as a "co-director," a claim Polonsky rejected as "no one," he said, "co-directs a Robert Rossen Picture." However, in the collectivist atmosphere of the studio, he was able to prevail over Rossen's conception of a "happy ending," ensuring that his own ending was part of the picture. Polonsky won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the film that was hailed as a classic by cineastes not long after its release. Garfield encouraged Polonsky to become a director, a development the screenwriter relished as it would give him more control over his screenplay and enable him to bring his vision to the screen just as he saw it. Adapting a 1940 crime novel "Tucker's People," Polonsky wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948), which has been hailed as the greatest low-budget film noir ever.
By the time production had wrapped, Enterprise had gone bankrupt, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed enough to pick up the picture, though its hard-hitting indictment of big business, capitalism and political corruption was not Louis B. Mayer's cup of tea. MGM essentially dumped the picture as the bottom half of a double bill released for the Christmas season. This classic noir, with its indictment of capitalist society, was not exactly Christmas fare, and as Turner Classic Movies' Robert Osborne has said, it was quickly forgotten until rediscovered in the early 1960s. It has been considered a classic for at least a generation and had a big influence on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), whose equation of crime with business, and business with criminal behavior had been aired 24 years before in Polonsky's debut. In a huge loss to American cinema, Polonsky's debut was to be his last directorial effort for 20 years.
Both Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948) are about the deleterious effects of materialism on the soul, as both protagonists (both played by John Garfield operating at the peak of his talent) face the loss of their soul due to the temptation of big money. Indeed, it is easy to see why conservatives would be offended by Force of Evil (1948) as it arguably is the most radical film to have come out of mainstream Hollywood, and definitely is informed by Marxism.
Blacklisted after his uncooperative appearance before HUAC in April 1951, Polonsky did not get a chance to direct another film until 1968, when he helmed the production of the revisionist Western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), which he turned into an indictment of genocide. Although he wrote screenplays and marketed them through fronts (most famously, with the indictment of racism Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), directed by Robert Wise, it wasn't until 1968 that he was credited on a film, for the screenplay for Don Siegel's exegesis of police corruption, Madigan (1968). After the release of the well-reviewed "Willie Boy," Polonsky enter4ed into "Fiddler on the Roof" territory and helmed the more light-hearted Romance of a Horsethief (1971). After that, he was told by his physician that his heart could not take the strain of movie directing, so he retired from that part of his work, though he continued to write screenplays until the end of his life.
After the tide of public opinion turned against the HUAC informers after Victor Navasky's 1980 history "Naming Names," Polonsky was rediscovered by scholars of the cinema. However, he proved a frustrating subject to those that wanted to ferret out the films that had been produced from his fronted-work screenplays. Similarly to his stand 40 years earlier, when he had refused to "name names," Polonsky refused to cite the pictures he had ghostwritten or to name the fronts he had used for his fronted screenplays during the days of the blacklist. He said he had given the men his word that he would not betray their confidence, and indeed, he refused to cite his anonymous work as he felt it would have gone back on his pledge to the men who had helped him through a tough period, as it would have resulted in them being denied credit for the work. Polonsky had bargained with them in good faith, and a man of principle, he refused to go back on his pledge to them.
An unrepentant Marxist until his death, Polonsky publicly objected when director Irwin Winkler sanitized his script for Guilty by Suspicion (1991) to make the character played by Robert De Niro a liberal rather than a communist. He also was prominent in objecting to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarding an honorary Academy Award to director Elia Kazan, who was the most prominent of the people who "named names" before HUAC.
Abraham Polonsky died of a heart-attack in Beverly Hills, California, on October 26, 1999, convinced that he had been exonerated by history. As the auteur of three classic films that will live on in cinema history, he was right.- Writer
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A.I. Bezzerides was born on 9 August 1908 in Samsun, Ottoman Empire [now Turkey]. He was a writer and actor, known for Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) and They Drive by Night (1940). He was married to Von Gorne, Yvonne and Silvia Richards. He died on 1 January 2007 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- 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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Eric Ambler was born on 28 June 1909 in London, England, UK. He was a writer and producer, known for A Night to Remember (1958), The Purple Plain (1954) and The Cruel Sea (1953). He was married to Joan Harrison and Louise Smith Crombie. He died on 22 October 1998 in London, England, UK.- 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.- Writer
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Jay Dratler was born on 14 September 1911 in New York City, New York, USA. Jay was a writer and producer, known for Laura (1944), Call Northside 777 (1948) and Breaking Point (1963). Jay died on 21 September 1968 in Mexico City, Mexico.- Writer
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Roy Huggins was born on 18 July 1914 in Litelle, Washington, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Fugitive (1993), City of Angels (1976) and U.S. Marshals (1998). He was married to Adele Mara and Bonnie Marie Porter. He died on 3 April 2002 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Writer
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James Curtis was born on 4 July 1907 in Sturry, Kent, England, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for They Drive by Night (1938), Missing Ten Days (1940) and There Ain't No Justice (1939). He died in 1977 in Camden, London, England, UK.- Writer
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Joseph Damiani, a.k.a José Giovanni, was born on June 22th, 1923, to a Corsican family. He did many little jobs when he was a teenager. Washing dishes in a train-restaurant, lumberjack, coal miner, waiter in a hotel restaurant of Chamonix. He was arrested for fraud and condemned to one year in jail in 1932. During WWII, in 1943, he was a high mountain junior guide but contrary to the official version he was never in the Resistance (Joseph Damiani a.k.a José Giovanni lied all this life about this). In 1944 he came to Paris and got closer to his uncles Ange Santolini, a gangster and Paul Damiani, a Militiaman. He joined himself the Parti Populaire Français (PPF), a fascist party. Joseph Damiani was a collaborationist and a Militiaman and participate to the arrestation of many people who refuse the STO (forced work for the nazi in Occupied France). In August 1944, he pretended he was a german police officer with an accomplice and stole two jewish merchants in Lyon, France. He will later be charged during his trial with facts of kidnapping, torture, robbering and assassination (Roger and Jules Peugeot, May 1945).
He and his accomplice Georges Accad were arrested in June 1945. An other accomplice, Jacques Ménassole, commited suicide to avoid arrest. Paul Damiani was arrested too but escaped during a reconstruction of the Peugeot case. He will be fatally shot in Nice by mobsters in 1946. Joseph Damiani was judged a first time in Marseille in July 1946 for treason and sentenced to 20 years of prison. He tried to escape in 1947 but failed. He was judged a second time in July 1948 for the murder of the Peugeot brothers and was sentenced to death with Georges Accad. After months spent in the death row, they were pardoned by french president Vincent Auriol in 1949 and the death sentence was commuted to life sentence.
In 1956, Joseph was freed. He spend a long time in jail writing, and one of the first things he did after being back to free life was to send his book to editors. They were immediately impressed by "Le trou" ("The hole", slang for prison) and under his "nom de plume", the talented "José Giovanni" was soon published and appreciated. Director Jacques Becker bought the rights of the book and directed it in 1959.
That's how José Giovanni entered the cinema world. He became a well-known dialogue writer, scenarist too, working many times with Jacques Becker. Then he directed his first movie in 1966, "La loi des survivants", while he was still writing novels about gangsters, cops, prison and manly friendship... Some of his films (many are based from his own novels) include Le Rapace (1968), La Scoumoune (1972), Le Gitan (1975) and Le Ruffian (1983). One of his favourite actors was Alain Delon, whom he directed many times. He directed some great French actors as Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura or Jean-Paul Belmondo.
His death row experiment marked him very much. He was, of course, for the abolition of the death penalty and he showed it in many movies. "Deux hommes dans la ville" (1973) ends with an execution, Claude Brasseur's character in "Une robe noire pour un tueur" is supposed to be guillotined at the beginning of the movie... In 1995, he wrote "Il avait dans le coeur des jardins introuvables" (He had in his heart gardens which no one could find), which is the story of his life as a death condemned, and the struggle of his father against the son's doom. Later, in 2001, he directed Bruno Cremer in "Mon père", his own adaptation of his own novel. That was his last movie.
Living in Switzerland with his wife and children since 1969, Giovanni wrote 20 novels, 2 memories' books, 33 scripts, and directed 15 movies and 5 TV movies. After four days spent in the hospital of Lausanne, José Giovanni died at 2 p.m, on April 24th, 2004 from a brain hemorrhage.- Writer
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Mel Dinelli was born on 6 October 1912 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Mel was a writer and producer, known for The Window (1949), The Spiral Staircase (1946) and Beware, My Lovely (1952). Mel died on 28 November 1991 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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At age 17, Samuel Fuller was the youngest reporter ever to be in charge of the events section of the New York Journal. After having participated in the European battle theater in World War II, he directed some minor action productions for which he mostly wrote the scripts himself and which he also produced (e.g. The Baron of Arizona (1950)). His masterpiece was Pickup on South Street (1953) for 20th Century Fox, but at the end of the 1950s, he regained his independence from the production company and filmed many other movies of note, including the controversial White Dog (1982).- William Faulkner, one of the 20th century's most gifted novelists, wrote for the movies in part because he could not make enough money from his novels and short stories to support his growing number of dependants. The author of such acclaimed novels as "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom!", Faulkner received official screen credits for just six theatrical releases, five of which were with director Howard Hawks. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1949 and he received two Pulitzer Prizes, for "A Fable" in '1955 and "The Reivers", which was published shortly before he died in 1962.
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Leigh Douglass Brackett was born in 1915 in Los Angeles. She was the author of numerous short stories and books regarding science fiction and has been referred to as the Queen of Space Opera. Hollywood director Howard Hawks was so impressed by one of her novels that he had his secretary call in "this guy Brackett" to help William Faulkner write the script for The Big Sleep (1946). As a screenwriter, she is best known for her work in The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo (1959), and Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980). She died of cancer in 1978 in Lancaster, California.- David Goodis was born on 2 March 1917 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was a writer, known for The Edge (1989), Nightfall (1956) and Street of No Return (1989). He was married to Elaine Astor and Grayson Hall. He died on 7 January 1967.
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Frank Gruber, one of the "kings of pulp fiction", was born in Elmer, Minnesota. After serving a stint in the army, he took on various writing jobs, including trade journal editor and correspondence school teacher. During the early 1930s he got his break writing "quickie" detective stories for what were known as the "pulps", publications that specialized in short stories in a variety of genres, westerns, detective stories, etc., that were short on plot but long on action. He created many interesting characters, including the rascal Johnny Fletcher and his sidekick, strongman Sam Gragg. He also created the more well known Simon Lash series. Gruber will always be known, however, for his work in the western genre. He wrote dozens of western novels, many later adapted for the screen; he also wrote several original screenplays, mostly westerns. With the advent of television, Gruber turned his talents to teleplays and cranked out over 200, again mostly in the western genre. He was the creator of the series Tales of Wells Fargo (1957), The Texan (1958) and Shotgun Slade (1959). He also wrote a very good biography of legendary western writer Zane Grey. Gruber married Lois Mahood in 1931 and they had one son. One characteristic of much of Gruber's writing was that he often centered his piece around a specific subject, such as dog shows or antique furniture, and one could always pick up some interesting information from his works.- Writer
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Sydney Boehm was born on 4 April 1908 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Big Heat (1953), The Atomic City (1952) and When Worlds Collide (1951). He was married to Ellen Kaspertia. He died on 25 June 1990 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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Auguste Le Breton was born on 18 February 1913 in Lesneven, Finistère, France. He was a writer and actor, known for Rififi (1955), The Good Thief (2002) and Riff Raff Girls (1959). He died on 31 May 1999 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines, France.- Writer
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Jim Thompson was born on 27 September 1906 in Anadarko, Oklahoma, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Paths of Glory (1957), The Killing (1956) and The Getaway (1972). He died on 7 April 1977 in Hollywood, California, USA.- Writer
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Donald E. Westlake was born on 12 July 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Grifters (1990), Payback (1999) and The Stepfather (2009). He was married to Abigail Adams, Sandra Foley and Nedra Henderson. He died on 31 December 2008 in San Tancho, Mexico.- Born as Nathan Weinstein, the only son of a wealthy Manhattan real estate developer, West grew up as an overly spoiled child, largely burdened by the belief that he shouldn't be expected to work or show up on time or in any other way trouble himself to get by in the world. The Depression did a lot to revise this attitude. There is abundant evidence as to the domineering nature of his Russian Jewish mother in his novels along with sexual ambiguity (although he seems to have favored female prostitutes, given his numerous bouts with gonorrhea). As a child, West was enthralled by Russian novels and decided to pursue a career as an author. To West, a literary career presupposed a life in Paris, the 1920's intellectual Mecca, hanging out with the likes of Joyce and Fitzgerald, but the 4-month trip was largely spent engaging in sexual debauchery while attempting to pass himself off as a literary flaneur. Upon his return to New York, West failed miserably at writing, his short stories were continually rejected by magazines, his first novel had minuscule run of 500 copies (sales of his critically well-reviewed second novel, "Miss Lonelyhearts" suffered when the publisher went bankrupt), a play with his brother in law S.J. Perelman went unproduced and he sought out a career in Hollywood, where he became a pot boiler screenwriter and script doctor. Hollywood provided the financial stability his novels hadn't and a work structure that encouraged productivity. As a novelist, West was decades ahead of the public norm. His characters were the antithesis of anything drawn by Horatio Alger, filled with the grotesque themes. Indeed, West made it his conscious goal to be unlike anyone else and to be ahead of his time. He married 27-year old Eileen McKenney (the "Eileen" in "My Sister Eileen") in early 1940 and the couple were killed in a car accident--- West was a terrible driver, blowing through a red light at an intersection in El Centro, California, while returning from a hunting trip that had been overshadowed by the death of their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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Actor, screenwriter and director Crane Wilbur was born Erwin Crane Wilbur on November 17, 1886, in Athens, NY. The nephew of the great stage actor Tyrone Power Sr., Wilbur first took to the boards as an actor, making his Broadway debut billed as Erwin Crane Wilbur on June 3, 1903, in a trilogy of William Butler Yeats plays, "A Pot of Broth" / "Kathleen ni Houlihan" / "The Land of Heart's Desire", put on by the Irish Literary Society at the Carnegie Lyceum.
He began appearing in films in 1910, but he made his name as a cinema actor as the male lead in The Perils of Pauline (1914), the enormously popular serial starring Pearl White. A star during the 1910s, Wilbur's career as a movie actor began petering out after he appeared as the eponymous hero of Breezy Jim (1919). As the Roaring Twenties made their debut, Wilbur went back to the stage. Between 1920-34 he had seven plays presented on Broadway: "The Ouija Board" (1920); "The Monster" (1922; revived 1933); "Easy Terms" (1925); "The Song Wtiter" (1928); "Border-Land" (1932); "Halfway to Hell" (1933); and "Are You Decent" (1934). He also staged "Halfway to Hell" and directed Donald Kirkley and Howard Burman's "Happily Ever After" in 1945. Crane also performed in "The Ouija Board", "Easy Terms" and nine other Broadway shows from 1927-32, including "A Farewell to Arms" (1930) and "Mourning Becomes Electra" (1932).
Wilbur had directed several silent pictures, but he made his sound debut as a director with the controversial The Unborn (1935), touted as "The Most Daring, Sensational Drama Ever Filmed!" The movie is an expose of the "science" of eugenics, tied to a story about the attempted forced sterilization of a married couple by the Welfare Bureau. "Tomorrow's Children" exposed the fact that many people were sterilized against their will and even without recourse to due process of law. The movie was banned in New York state on the grounds that it was "immoral", that it would "tend to corrupt morals" and that it was an incitement to crime. The ban was challenged but was upheld in the courts and on appeal as it was found to disseminate information about birth control, which was illegal at the time.
After this controversy Wilbur went on to a long and productive career, particularly in the mystery-thriller genre, as both a director and a screenwriter. He had a hand in the production of such genre classics as House of Wax (1953), The Bat (1959) (which he also directed) and Mysterious Island (1961).
Wilbur died on October 18, 1973, in Toluca Lake, CA, of complications following a stroke.- Charles Williams was born in San Angelo, Texas, and grew up there and in New Mexico. He attended Brownsville High School in Texas through the tenth grade. In the United States Merchant Marine, from 1929 to 1939, he served as a radio operator. Williams joined the U.S. Navy during World War II, and between 1939 and 1950 worked as an electronics inspector, a wireless operator, a radar technician, and a radio service engineer. In the course of these careers he lived in Peru, Arizona, Florida, and Switzerland. Williams married Lasca Foster in 1939; they had one daughter, Alison. His first novel, Hill Girl, was rejected by several publishers before the Fawcett publishing company picked it up in 1950 for their line of Gold Medal paperback originals. Williams had beginner's luck; it sold, according to one source, 1,226,890 copies. He went on to publish 21 more novels, gaining enough attention as a member of the "Gold Medal" writers that he was hired to script a few films, including his own The Wrong Venus, filmed as Don't Just Stand There (1968), and Hell Hath No Fury, filmed as _Hot Spot, The (1990/I)_. Williams seems to have been familiar with the saying, "God made the country, man made the city, and the Devil made the small town." His hard-boiled thrillers are often set in the hot, humid, mosquito- and snake-infested hamlets of the Gulf Coast and South Florida in the 1950s and 1960s. His more famous later novels take place on boats or ships on the open sea. He also wrote some very funny comedies, including The Diamond Bikini (1956) and Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (1959), in which a boy chronicles the shenanigans of his scheming uncle. However, Williams's thrillers more usually featured guys who think they can get rich quick when they are seduced by the deceitful promises of beautiful and dangerous dames, or honest, likable types who find themselves in deadly circumstances but are determined to see justice done at last. Although fourteen of his novels were optioned or adapted for film -- the most successful being Dead Calm (1989) -- he received little critical attention in the U.S. However, his books were enormously popular in France, where nearly all were either translated or filmed. His wife Lasca died in the early 1970s of cancer, and Charles went to live alone in a trailer on the border between California and Oregon. The weather there depressed him; he was too in love with sun and sea. His personal finances declined as the popularity of hard-boiled thrillers began to wane. In 1975, he committed suicide. Williams's reputation lives on, stronger than ever, among aficionados of the hard-boiled crime novel, and even his battered paperbacks can sell for $100 or more.
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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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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.- Producer
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P.J. Wolfson was born on 22 May 1903 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a producer and writer, known for Boy Slaves (1939), The Devil Is Driving (1932) and Saigon (1947). He died on 16 April 1979 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
One of the most influential writers in screen history, W. R. Burnett has contributed countless classic moments in cinema.
Born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1899. By the time he left in 1927, he'd written over a hundred short stories and five novels, all unpublished. At 28, he left a civil service job he'd held for years and moved to Chicago where he found a job as a night-clerk in a seedy hotel. He found himself associating with a cornucopia of characters straight from the mean streets of Chicago -- prize-fighters, hoodlums, hustlers, and hobos. They inspired Little Caesar (novel 1929, film 1931) -- its overnight success landed him a job as a Hollywood screenwriter. Little Caesar (1931) became a classic movie, produced by First National Pictures (Warners) and starring then unknown Edward G. Robinson. The Al Capone theme was one he returned to in 1932 with Scarface (1932).
Burnett kept busy, producing a novel or more a year and turning most into screenplays (some as many as three times). Thematically Burnett was similar to Hammett and James M. Cain but his contrasting of the corruption and corrosion of the city with the better life his characters yearned for, represented by the paradise of the pastoral, was fresh and original. He portrayed characters who have, for one reason or another, fallen into a life of crime. Once sucked into this life they've been unable to climb out. They get one last shot at salvation but the oppressive system closes in and denies redemption.
Burnett's characters exist in world of twilight morality -- virtue can come from gangsters and criminals, malice from guardians and protectors. Above all, all of his characters were human -- this could be their undoing. In High Sierra (1940), Humphrey Bogart's Roy Earle plays a hard-bitten criminal who rejects his life of crime to help a crippled girl. In The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the most perfectly masterminded plot falls apart as each character reveals a weakness. Bruce Crowther wrote that Burnett's screenplays, "while still ostensibly in the cops versus gangsters mold, blur the conventional boundaries of the day." In The Beast of the City (1932), the police take the law into their own hands when the criminals walk free on a legal loophole presaging Dirty Harry (1971) by almost 40 years.
Burnett worked with many of the greats in acting and directing -- to name a few and certainly not all: John Huston, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Michael Cimino, Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Paul Muni, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Steve McQueen, and Clint Eastwood. He was Oscar nominated for his scripts for Wake Island (1942), and The Great Escape (1963), in addition to his film work he wrote scripts for television and radio. In later years with his vision declining, he stopped writing and turned to promoting his earlier work. In his career, he achieved huge popularity in Europe where his anti-hero ideology was enthusiastically embraced. He died in 1982 aged 82.- Gerald Butler was born on 31 July 1907. He was a writer, known for Third Time Lucky (1949), Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) and On Dangerous Ground (1951). He died in February 1988 in Eastbourne, East Sussex, England, UK.
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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.- Writer
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Hugo Butler, the screenwriter, was born on May 4, 1914 in Calgary, Alberta, the son of a silent movie actor and screenwriter. Butler worked as a journalist and playwright before moving to Hollywood in 1937, where he established himself as a screenwriter. In 1940, he married actress and screenwriter Jean Rouverol. The next year, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Edison, the Man (1940) along with future Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boss Dore Schary. (Schary, a well-known liberal, was one of the few top movie industry executives who objected to the imposition of the blacklist at the 1947 Waldorf Conference, which he attended as R.K.O.'s executive vice president in charge of production). His career was temporarily interrupted by military service in World War II, then permanently disrupted when he was blacklisted as a subversive after the war.
Butler and his wife moved to Mexico with Hollywood 10 member (and fellow blacklistee) Dalton Trumbo, with whom Butler pseudonymously collaborated on the screenplay for He Ran All the Way (1951), a film noir that was John Garfield' s last film. (Garfield died of a heart attack soon after being grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
In Mexico, Butler wrote for the directors Luis Buñuel and Carlos Velo. Butler and his wife did not return to the United States on a permanent basis until the 1960s.
Hugo Butler suffered from arteriosclerotic brain disease. He died from a heart attack on January 7, 1968 in Hollywood, California at the age of 53. The last film for which he was credited, Robert Aldrich's potboiler The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) was released later that year.
In 1997, the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America voted to posthumously give him official credit for scripts he had written.- 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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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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After the Liberation Michel Audiard started a career as a movie magazine writer. Under the pen name of Jacques Potier he worked for short-lived titles such as "L'Etoile du Soir" and "Cinévie". One day, André Hunebelle, the popular French filmmaker, asked him if he thought he could write an adventure story for him. And, well...he could! Mission à Tanger (1949) having been reasonably successful, Audiard accepted offers to write other scripts. He wrote many original screenplays, adaptations and dialogues over thirty-five years, these were of uneven quality but always contained at least several brilliantly put lines uttered with relish by consenting actors! Audiard's biting humor, lucid vision of society and human behavior combined with a taste for the cinema as a crowd-pleaser were soon noticed by the public who remained faithful to the end, simply ignoring the opinions of the Parisian film critics who had made Michel one of their favorite scapegoats. In 1968 Audiard directed his own films but dissatisfied with what he was doing, he returned to writing until his untimely death.- Writer
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Jacques Prévert was born on 4 February 1900 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He was a writer and actor, known for Children of Paradise (1945), The Score (2001) and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997). He was married to Janine Tricotet and Simone Dienne. He died on 11 April 1977 in Omonville-la-Petite, Manche, France.- Writer
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Albert Simonin was born on 18 April 1905 in Paris, France. He was a writer and actor, known for Any Number Can Win (1963), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). He was married to Marie-Hélène Bourquin and Marie Bondor. He died on 15 February 1980 in Paris, France.- 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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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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Author, playwright and composer Ira Levin decided on a career of a writer at the age of 15. Educated at the elite Horace Mann school, he went on to two years at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, before transferring to New York University, where he majored in philosophy and English. He earned his degree in 1950. In 1953 he was drafted into the army. Based in Queens, New York, he wrote and produced training films for Uncle Sam before moving into television, penning scripts for such anthology series as Lights Out (1946) and The United States Steel Hour (1953). He made a bright theatre debut at the age of 25 with an adaptation of Mac Hyman's "No Time for Sergeants" (1955). He went on to write several plays, including the longest-running Broadway mystery to date, "Deathtrap" (1978), and several popular novels, including "A Kiss Before Dying", and other plays including "Critics Choice" and "Interlock" and the Broadway stage score and libretto for "Drat the Cat!". Joining ASCAP in 1965, he wrote the popular gospel song "He Touched Me" with his chief musical collaborator Milton Schafer.- Writer
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John C. Higgins was born on 28 April 1908 in Winnipeg, Canada. He was a writer, known for Main Street After Dark (1945), Raw Deal (1948) and The File of the Golden Goose (1969). He was married to Gail Otto. He died on 2 July 1995 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.- Writer
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Maxwell Shane was born on 26 August 1905 in Paterson, New Jersey, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Glass Wall (1953), Nightmare (1956) and Fear in the Night (1946). He died on 25 October 1983 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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Earl Felton was born on 16 October 1909 in Sandusky, Ohio, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), The Happy Time (1952) and Bengal Tiger (1936). He died on 2 May 1972 in Studio City, California, USA.- A former business executive and literary agent who was educated at Oxford University in England, Gerald Drayson Adams began writing for the screen in the mid-1940s. He wrote mostly second features, specializing in action/adventure and western films, and ended his career with an Elvis Presley musical, Harum Scarum (1965).
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Producer and screenwriter who, among many in his craft labeled in the late 1940's and early 1950's as 'subversive' by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, was blacklisted, Jarrico in the prime of his career. His name was left out of the credits of most American films that he wrote during the 50's and 60's, and in others replaced by a pseudonym. He defied the ban, however, in producing the then little known film Salt of the Earth (1954), which would win awards in Europe - and eventually be listed by the U.S. Library of Congress in its catalogue of films to be preserved for all time! Ironically, Jarrico's death occurred as he was motoring home from a ceremony in observance of the 50th anniversary of the House Committee's first hearings.- Writer
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Beginning his film career as a screenwriter, Henri-Georges Clouzot switched over to directing and in 1943 had the distinction of having his film The Raven (1943) banned by both the German forces occupying France and the Free French forces fighting them, but for different reasons. He shot to international fame with The Wages of Fear (1953) and consolidated that success with Diabolique (1955), but continuous ill health caused large gaps in his output, and several projects had to be abandoned (though one, Hell (1994), was subsequently filmed by Claude Chabrol). His films are typically relentless suspense thrillers, similar to Alfred Hitchcock's but with far less light relief.- 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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Thea von Harbou was born on 27 December 1888 in Tauperlitz, Döhlau, Bavaria, Germany. She was a writer and director, known for Metropolis (1927), M (1931) and Woman in the Moon (1929). She was married to Fritz Lang and Rudolf Klein-Rogge. She died on 1 July 1954 in Berlin, Germany.- Writer
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Frank Partos was born on 2 July 1901 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary [now Hungary]. He was a writer, known for The Snake Pit (1948), Honolulu (1939) and College Scandal (1935). He was married to Maria Mariska Partos. He died on 23 December 1956 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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Born just before the century turned, Charles Bennett made his writing debut as a child in 1911, fought in France during World War I while still a teen and resumed his acting career after the war's end. In 1926 he dropped acting to concentrate on being a playwright, later turning one of his most famous plays, "Blackmail," into a screenplay for production under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. The affiliation with "Hitch" continued into the early 1940s, by which time both Bennett and the director were working in Hollywood. He wrote for producers ranging from Cecil B. DeMille to Irwin Allen to the penny-pinching folks at AIP. "If I couldn't write, I wouldn't want to live," commented Bennett, who had projects (including a remake of "Blackmail") going right up to the time of his death.- Writer
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Richard H. Landau was born on 21 February 1914 in New York City, New York, USA. Richard H. was a writer and producer, known for The Black Hole (1979), The Rat Patrol (1966) and The Six Million Dollar Man (1974). Richard H. died on 18 September 1993 in Century City, California, USA.- Director
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Harvard-educated Charles Haas entered films in 1935 as an extra at Universal. He was soon promoted to assistant director, then branched out into directing documentaries and industrial films. During WW II he made training films for the Army Signal Corps. After the war he went back to work for Universal, and was assigned to write and produce Moonrise (1948). He soon returned to making industrial films, then turned to television directing. He made his feature directorial debut in 1956, and turned out a string of low-budget westerns, gangster and juvenile-delinquent pictures - several with third-string Marilyn Monroe wannabe Mamie Van Doren - before returning to television.- Writer
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Richard Brooks was an Academy Award-winning film writer who also earned six Oscar nominations and achieved success as a film director and producer.
He was born Reuben Sax on May 18, 1912, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants. He graduated from West Philadelphia HS, attended Philadelphia's Temple University for two years, before dropping out and later working as a sports reporter and radio journalist in the 1930s. After a stint as a writer for the NBC network, he worked for one season as director of New York's Mill Pond Theatre, and then headed to Los Angeles. There he broke into films as a script writer of "B" movies, Maria Montez epics, serials, and did some radio writing. During the Second World War, he served with the US Marines for two years.
Richard Brooks made his directorial debut with MGM's Crisis (1950) starring Cary Grant. He scripted and directed The Brothers Karamazov (1958) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and two years later won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Elmer Gantry (1960). He had six Oscar nominations and 25 other nominations during his film career. Brooks was a writer and director of Chekhovian depth, who mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax and implied emotion. His films enjoyed lasting appeal and tended to be more serious than the usual mainstream productions. Brooks was regarded as "independent" even before he officially broke away from the studio system in 1965. In the 1980s, he had his own production company.
Richard Brooks died of a heart failure on March 11, 1992, in Beverly Hills, California, and was laid to rest in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6422 Hollywood Blvd., for his contribution to the art of motion picture.- Director
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Edward Dein was born on 24 May 1907 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Seven Guns to Mesa (1958), Sword of Granada (1953) and Shack Out on 101 (1955). He died on 14 February 1984 in Encino, California, USA.- Gordon Gordon was born on 12 March 1906 in Anderson, Indiana, USA. He was a writer, known for That Darn Cat! (1965), Men of Annapolis (1957) and Experiment in Terror (1962). He was married to Mildred Gordon and Mary Dorr DOB: 1918-2004. He died on 14 March 2002 in Tucson, Arizona, USA.
- Mildred Gordon was born on 24 July 1905 in Eureka, Kansas, USA. She was a writer, known for That Darn Cat! (1965), Men of Annapolis (1957) and Experiment in Terror (1962). She was married to Gordon Gordon. She died on 3 February 1979 in Tucson, Arizona, USA.
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Brian Clemens left school at the age of 14. After national service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, he worked his way up from messenger boy to copywriter at an advertising agency, writing in his spare time. One of his scripts was accepted by the BBC in 1955. He joined a production company, literally writing scripts to order. With tight deadlines and plots often based on the availability of sets, props or location, he churned out scripts for B-films and TV series.
Clemens is best remembered for his work on British television in the 1960s and 1970s, especially on Danger Man (1960), The Avengers (1961) (for which he wrote many episodes, including the pilot in 1961), The Baron (1966), The Persuaders! (1971) and creating The Professionals (1977). He also wrote for the stage; his play "Strictly Murder" was performed by a cast including Brian Capron in 2017.
Clemens was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to Broadcasting and to Drama. According to his son Samuel, the last thing he did before he died was to watch an episode of The Avengers (1961) and his last words were: "I did quite a good job".- Writer
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One of the driving, creative forces behind the legendary Hammer Studios, Jimmy Sangster was born on December 2, 1927, in Kinmel Bay, North Wales. He began in the film industry as a production assistant at age 16 during WWII. After this gig, he worked as a gofer and assistant projectionist for Norman's Film Services at London's Wardour Street. Subsequently, he became a film magazine loader and clapper boy at a small studio located on Abbey Road.
At this point, he was drafted by the R.A.F. and was posted to India. After his tour of duty came to an end, he was able to get himself a job as a 3rd assistant director for a low-budget film, that happened to be shooting near his parents' cottage. That film's producer was offered a job with Exclusive Studios, which was to become Hammer Studios. He brought Sangster along with him as an assistant producer.
Hammer Studios producer Anthony Hinds offered Sangster the assistant director job, which he performed for a while before Hinds and 'Michael Carreras' urged him to give screen-writing a go. His script for the science-fiction film X the Unknown (1956) proved to be the turning point in his career. His next project was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), which he wanted to make his own instead of patterning it after the 1930's Universal picture; he was more interested in the role of the creator than that of the creature. Horror of Dracula (1958) (aka The Horror of Dracula)followed, which proved to be an even bigger hit for the studio. He then turned out subsequent scripts such as The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and The Mummy (1959) and would even write scripts for competing studios such as Blood of the Vampire (1958) and The Crawling Eye (1958) (aka The Trollenberg Terror).
By now, Sangster had tired of writing Gothic horrors and entered into a phase of his career where he concentrated on psychological thrillers which would be filmed in black & white. These included Scream of Fear (1961) and Paranoiac (1963).
Another short-lived phase of his career came when he was approached to re-write a script titled The Horror of Frankenstein (1970). Feeling that it was too much of a carbon copy of his own The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and wanting to put a fresh spin on it, he injected his re-write with much sex and humor. His proviso for the re-write was that he get to direct for once, which Hammer allowed him to do. After "Horror of Frankenstein", he directed Lust for a Vampire (1971), filling in for frequent Hammer director Terence Fisher, after the latter had broken his leg. His final directorial effort was "Fear in the Night"; unfortunately, these three films would prove to be disappointments commercially and critically.
Around this time, Sangster moved to Hollywood where his screen-writing credits would include Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972), The Legacy (1978) and Phobia (1980), as well as episodes of such television series as Banacek (1972), Cannon (1971) and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) and some detective novels.
Sangster retired some time back, maintaining homes in both California and England. In 1997, his autobiography "Do You Want It Good or Tuesday?" was published. Sadly, the legendary writer passed away on August 19, 2011.
His many years in the business are indicative of the talent of a prolific and much-respected screenwriter, whose films continue to be enjoyed to this day.- Writer
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Sidney Gilliat, the English director, screenwriter, and producer, was born on February 15, 1908 in Edgely, Cheshire, England. He began his screen-writing career in the silent movie era, writing inter-titles, going uncredited for his contributions to Honeymoon Abroad (1928), Champagne (1928), and Week-End Wives (1929). He first entered into a working relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock on The Manxman (1929), for which he did uncredited research. Ten years later, he would help write the dialog for the director's Jamaica Inn (1939). He eventually became a credited screenwriter in the 1930s, with A Gentleman of Paris (1931).
He partnered with Frank Launder, whom he first worked with uncredited on The Greenwood Tree (1929), and together they wrote, directed and produced almost 40 movies between their first credited collaboration Facing the Music (1933) through The Great St. Trinian's Train Robbery (1966), which they also co-directed. For Hitchcock, they co-wrote the classic The Lady Vanishes (1938). They also wrote Night Train to Munich (1940) for Carol Reed. Their collaboration is most famous for generating the St. Trinian's films, most notably The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954), which was directed by Launder and featured a tour de force performance by Alastair Sim. Sim was also the star of their The Green Man (1956), for which they received second straight Best British Screenplay nomination from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Sidney Gilliat died on May 31, 1994 in Wiltshire, England. He was 86 years old.- Writer
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Frank Launder, initially a civil servant and repertory actor, started as a scriptwriter in the late 1920s on such classics as The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Night Train to Munich (1940). He joined forces with Sidney Gilliat and together they wrote, directed and produced over 40 films. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat are well-known for their St. Trinian's films, among many others.- Writer
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Ben Barzman was an Anglo-Canadian best known as a screenwriter who was blacklisted during the post-World War II "Red scare" in Hollywood. Born on October 12, 1910, in Toronto, he moved to the United States, where he established himself as a screenwriter during the war. He is probably best known for The Boy with Green Hair (1948), his adaptation of Betzi Beaton's novel that was an allegory against intolerance that bears witness to post-war American attitude that demanded conformity. The movie was directed by Joseph Losey, who also would be blacklisted and with whom Barzman would work in the future.
In Hollywood Ben and his wife Norma Barzman became members of the Communist Party and remained so in exile. After Barzman traveled to England in 1949 to work on a movie, he decided to stay in Europe, and he and Norma moved to Paris, where they had the freedom to associate with Communists, left-wingers and anyone else they wanted to. However, Ben grew to dislike the milieu, and moved the family to the south of France in the 1950s. They broke with the Party after the student riots of 1968 due to the French Communist Party's failure to support a general strike called by labor unions in solidarity with the students.
Norma Barzman claims that Ben rewrote the screenplay of the Oscar-winning Z (1969) for director Costa-Gavras, but did not receive credit. He also helped arrange for the filming of the movie in Algeria. In addition to his screen work, Barzman wrote the science-fiction novel "Out of This World" in 1960.
He died on December 15, 1989, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 79.- Writer
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Robert E. Kent was born on 31 August 1911 in Canal Zone, Panama. He was a writer and producer, known for Twice-Told Tales (1963), Pier 5, Havana (1959) and Inside Detroit (1956). He died on 11 December 1984 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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- Cinematographer
Orville H. Hampton was born on 21 May 1917 in Rockford, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and cinematographer, known for One Potato, Two Potato (1964), The Atomic Submarine (1959) and Red Snow (1952). He was married to Rosemary Ann Sheridan and Ruth Villemin. He died on 8 August 1997 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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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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Bernard Gordon was born on 29 October 1918 in New Britain, Connecticut, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Horror Express (1972), Zombies of Mora Tau (1957) and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). He was married to Jeannette Lewin. He died on 11 May 2007 in Hollywood Hills, California, USA.- Director
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Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1920, Wolf Rilla was the son of German actor Walter Rilla. When Nazi leader Adolf Hitler came to power, the elder Rilla--who was Jewish--moved his family to London, England.
After completing his education, Wolf went to work for the BBC World Review in 1942, and in the late 1940s transferred to the network's newly created television service. He stayed there for a few years, but his passion was for films, and in 1952 he struck out on his own, making his debut as a writer/director with Glad Tidings! (1953). After making several more independent low-budget features, he hooked up with Group 3, a production company formed by Michael Balcon, John Baxter and John Grierson. His first film for them was The End of the Road (1954), with Finlay Currie. His next film for the company, Navy Heroes (1955), about a shell-shocked war veteran, garnered positive critical reviews, and his later comedy Bachelor of Hearts (1958) was a box-office success.
In 1960 Rilla, who by this time was working for MGM's British operation, directed what would become his best-known film, the tense and chilling Village of the Damned (1960), based on John Wyndham's novel "The Midwich Cuckoos", a tale of a sinister group of alien children taking over a small British town. Rilla not only directed the film but, with Ronald Kinnoch (writing as "George Barclay") and Stirling Silliphant, also wrote it. The film was a tremendous success, making more than $1.5 million in the US alone--on an $82,000 budget--and spawned a less-successful sequel, Children of the Damned (1964). Rilla directed his father Walter, along with George Sanders, in Cairo (1963), a somewhat anemic remake of John Huston's classic The Asphalt Jungle (1961), with the plot changed to a heist of King Tut's jewels in a Cairo museum.
Rilla occasionally crossed over to television in the 1950s, and by the mid-'60s most of his work occurred in that medium. He was also a lecturer at the International Film School in London, and wrote a very well-received guide to screenwriting, "A-Z of Movie Making", in 1970. He was an officer in the British Directors Guild as well as the film technicians' trade association ACTT. He retired from the film industry and, with his wife, bought and operated a hotel/restaurant, Le Moulin de la Camandoule, in Fayence in Provence, France.- Writer
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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.- Producer
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- Production Manager
Sydney Box was born on 29 April 1907 in Beckenham, Kent, England, UK. He was a producer and writer, known for The Seventh Veil (1945), Holiday Camp (1947) and Forbidden Cargo (1954). He was married to Muriel Box. He died on 25 May 1983 in Perth, Western Australia, Australia.- Writer
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John Paxton was born on 21 May 1911 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Murder, My Sweet (1944), Crossfire (1947) and Kotch (1971). He died on 5 January 1985 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Writer
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- Script and Continuity Department
Charles Lederer was born on 31 December 1911 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and director, known for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), The Thing from Another World (1951) and His Girl Friday (1940). He was married to Anne Shirley and Virginia Nicolson. He died on 5 March 1976 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
John Gilling was born on 29 May 1912 in London, England, UK. He was a director and writer, known for The Pirates of Blood River (1962), The Gamma People (1956) and Murder Will Out (1952). He died on 22 November 1984 in Madrid, Spain.- Writer
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- Actor
Jean Aurenche was born on 11 September 1904 in Pierrelatte, Drôme, France. He was a writer and director, known for The Judge and the Assassin (1976), L'étoile du Nord (1982) and Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975). He died on 29 September 1992 in Bandol, Var, France.- Writer
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Henri Jeanson was born on 6 March 1900 in Paris, France. He was a writer and actor, known for The Loves of Colette (1948), Lady Paname (1950) and Nana (1955). He was married to Claude Marcy and Marion Delbo. He died on 6 November 1970 in Équemauville, Calvados, France.- Director
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Vernon Sewell was educated at Malborough College. He was one of the crew of "castaways" with Michael Powell on the Shetland island of Foula to make The Edge of the World (1937). He later became one of the mainstays in the "B" movie niche of the British film industry, and in his almost 40-year career he turned out everything from spy thrillers to horror films to "sexploitation" fare.- Writer
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Janet Green was born on 4 July 1908 in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England, UK. She was a writer, known for Sapphire (1959), Victim (1961) and The Clouded Yellow (1950). She died on 30 March 1993 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, UK.- Writer
- Actor
Victor Canning was born on 16 June 1911 in Plymouth, Devon, England, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for Family Plot (1976), Spy Hunt (1950) and Shark (1969). He died on 21 February 1986 in Cirencester, England, UK.- Writer
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Daniel B. Ullman was born on 18 October 1918 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Dial Red O (1955), The Invaders (1967) and Badlands of Montana (1957). He was married to Gloria. He died on 23 October 1979 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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Ken Hughes was an award-winning writer and director who flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, though he continued directing into the early 1980s. Born in Liverpool, England, on January 19, 1922, Hughes decided early in his life that he wanted to be a filmmaker. When he was 14 years old he won an amateur movie-making contest.
In 1952 his first feature, the crime drama Wide Boy (1952), was released. By 1955 he was working with imported American character actor Paul Douglas in the quirky Joe MacBeth (1955), a retelling of William Shakespeare's tragedy recast as a modern film noir. Hughes directed the movie and wrote the screenplay. That film led to his directing more English pictures with imported Hollywood B-list stars, including Arlene Dahl and Victor Mature. In a reverse of the Atlantic trade, he exported a script to the US, which was picked up by "Alcoa Theater" and aired as Eddie (1958), starring Mickey Rooney and directed by Jack Smight. It brought Hughes an Emmy Award for his teleplay.
His favorite of his many movies was The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), starring Peter Finch as the doomed writer. He was nominated for three BAFTA Awards and Finch took home the BAFTA as Best Actor. It also won the Samuel Goldwyn Award for Best English-Language Foreign Film at the Golden Globes.
During the 1960s Hughes worked on A-List pictures, including Of Human Bondage (1964), an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's book, but it did not make anyone forget the Bette Davis-Leslie Howard classic of 30 years earlier (Of Human Bondage (1934)). He also toiled as one of the five directors on the cinematic mishmash Casino Royale (1967), which was a box-office smash but a critical bomb.
His greatest hit was the adaptation of another Ian Fleming work, his children's book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). The movie was a huge hit, but Hughes was dissatisfied with it. His next picture, the historical epic Cromwell (1970) (1970), got good reviews, but did not burn up the turnstiles at theaters.
His career slowed down in the 1970s, the low point of which was undoubtedly his directing 83-year-old Mae West, vamping eternally as the 30-something sexpot she imagined herself in her mind, in the Golden Turkey Sextette (1977), a critical and box-office dud. He ended his career directing the exploitation film Night School (1981), a slasher pic starring a then-unknown Rachel Ward.
After a period of declining health, Ken Hughes died on April 28, 2001, in Los Angeles. He was 79 years old.- Writer
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Dwight Taylor was born on 1 January 1903 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Top Hat (1935), Pickup on South Street (1953) and The Amazing Mr. Williams (1939). He was married to Marigold Lockhart Langworthy and Natalie Visart. He died on 31 December 1986 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Leo Townsend was born on 11 May 1908 in Faribault, Minnesota, USA. He was a writer, known for Fireball 500 (1966), I'd Rather Be Rich (1964) and Dangerous Crossing (1953). He was married to Pauline Townsend. He died on 2 November 1987 in Riverside County, California, USA.
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Robert Presnell Jr. was born on 21 July 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and director, known for McCloud (1970), The Twilight Zone (1959) and Norman Corwin Presents (1971). He was married to Marsha Hunt and Kathryn (Kay) Elaine Brown. He died on 14 June 1986 in Sherman Oaks, California, USA.- Writer
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Don Martin was born on 3 April 1911 in Pennsylvania, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Shakedown (1950), Triple Threat (1948) and Search for Danger (1949). He died on 24 December 1985 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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New York-born Harry Essex planned on a writing career throughout his young life. Among his first jobs were stints on the New York newspapers "The Daily Mirror" and "The Brooklyn Eagle", short stories for "Collier's" and "The Saturday Evening Post" and even a Broadway play titled "Something for Nothing" (which Essex later called "a resounding failure"). Writing for the movies was uppermost in Essex's mind throughout the period (and he DID co-write the original story for Universal's Man Made Monster (1941)), but "the big break" never came, and World War II intervened. Five or six days after Essex's discharge, he ran into an old acquaintance whose new job was finding playwrights to turn into screenwriters for Columbia Pictures. Essex wrote or co-wrote dozens of movies and numerous TV shows during his lengthy Hollywood career.- Writer
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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.- Producer
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Irving Allen started his film career in 1929 as an editor. He turned to directing in the 1940s, and two shorts he directed, Forty Boys and a Song (1941) and Climbing the Matterhorn (1947), won Academy Awards. His feature film output, however, was not particularly successful, and in the 1950s he and producer Albert R. Broccoli formed Warwick Films in Great Britain to produce films there.- Writer
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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.- Fred Niblo Jr. was born on 23 January 1903 in New York City, New York, USA. Fred was a writer, known for The Criminal Code (1930), You May Be Next! (1936) and Motor Madness (1937). Fred was married to Patricia Henry. Fred died on 18 February 1973 in Encino, California, USA.
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Born in New York and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, Nelson Gidding said that he had been interested in writing ever since he was a child and had a poem published in the Boy Scouts magazine ("That was as recently as the mid-'20s!" he laughed). A POW during World War II, Gidding began writing his first (and only) book "End Over End" while in prison camp; after the war's end, he segued into TV work ("Suspense, " "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, " many others) and ultimately into movies. His list of film credits includes such well-respected titles as "Odds Against Tomorrow, " "The Haunting, " "The Andromeda Strain" and (with co-writer Don Mankiewicz) the Oscar-nominated screenplay for "I Want to Live!", the story of the last years of real-life prostitute Barbara Graham (Susan Hayward) and her gas chamber execution on murder charges. "I Want to Live!" was Gidding's first film for director Robert Wise, with whom he has worked on several subsequent occasions. In his later years he taught a class in screenwriting at the University of Southern California.- 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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Donald Mankiewicz was born in Berlin into an illustrious creative family, his father being the screen-writer Herman Mankiewicz and his uncle film director Joseph Mankiewicz, whilst his brother Frank would also distinguish himself as a journalist. Brought up in Beverly Hills - where his parents' dinner guests numbered the biggest screen stars of the 1930s - he graduated from Columbia University in 1942 and served in Army Intelligence before becoming a staff writer for the 'New Yorker'. In the early 1950s, he began writing for television, one of his early jobs being an adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Last Tycoon'. At the time, he commented that, of his writing contemporaries, he was possibly the only one to have known the author, who was a friend of his father. In 1958 he was Oscar-nominated for writing 'I Want To Live', which gained Susan Hayward her Academy Award as convicted murderess Barbara Graham, though much of his work was in television, on such series as 'Marcus Welby,MD', 'Ironside', and 'Star Trek', and, as a key member of the writers' union, he helped to gain union recognition for quiz show writers. Don Mankiewicz died of heart failure at his home in Monrovia, California on 25 April 2015, leaving behind a widow Carol, to whom he had been married for 43 years and four children, son John being a screen-writer and daughter Jane an authoress.- Writer
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Blake Edwards' stepfather's father J. Gordon Edwards was a silent screen director, and his stepfather Jack McEdward was a stage director and movie production manager. Blake acted in a number films, beginning with Ten Gentlemen from West Point (1942) and wrote a number of others, beginning with Panhandle (1948) and including six for director Richard Quine. He created the popular TV series Peter Gunn (1958), Mr. Lucky (1959) and Dante (1960). He directed a diverse body of films, from comedies to dramas to war films to westerns, including such pictures as Operation Petticoat (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Experiment in Terror (1962), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964). After The Great Race (1965) he began fighting with studios. In England he surfaced again with The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), then went back to Hollywood and a real hit, 10 (1979). Victor/Victoria (1982) won him French and Italian awards for Best Foreign Film.- Writer
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Ranald MacDougall was born on 10 March 1915 in Schenectady, New York, USA. He was a writer and director, known for Mildred Pierce (1945), The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) and Cleopatra (1963). He was married to Nanette Fabray and Lucille Margaret Brophy. He died on 12 December 1973 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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Robert Smith is known for Invasion, U.S.A. (1952), The Second Woman (1950) and Science Fiction Theatre (1955).- Writer
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George Bricker was born on 18 July 1898 in St. Mary's, Ohio, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Blonde Alibi (1946), Tangier Incident (1953) and A Man's World (1942). He died on 22 January 1955 in Los Angeles, California, USA.