Friday, February 26, 2021

The King of Hollywood (Screenwriters) - February 26, 2010

He was born to poor Russian immigrants on the Lower East Side of New York City. He grew up to become a hard-boiled reporter in the Chicago of the 1910s and '20s, in the years when corruption, graft, gangsters, and politicians all went hand-in-hand. He co-wrote one of the most important plays in American history, and by the time he died, he'd written the screenplays for more than 70 films (including the highest-grossing film ever), won two Oscars (including the first one ever awarded for screenwriting), and became known as the man "who personified Hollywood." His name was Ben Hecht, and we note his 116th birthday on February 28.

Hecht's writing reflected the unlikely mixture of his various careers as reporter and scriptwriter. He was a voracious reader of French philosophers, and was friends with such literary giants as
Theodore Dreiser, Maxwell Anderson, and Carl Sandburg. His years as a newspaperman introduced him to characters from all strata of society, from murderers to senators. "I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls, and bookshops." he wrote. "I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me."

Spurred by a telegram from screenwriter
Herman Mankiewicz, ("Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around."), Hecht found himself in Hollywood, turning out such screenplays as Underworld (for which he won the Oscar) and Scarface, which set the template for virtually every gangster film that has followed. Like most serious writers of the period, though, he saw screenwriting as slumming.

The big prize for Hecht was Broadway, where such heavyweight playwrights as
Eugene O'Neill and Bernard Shaw tackled big ideas. In 1928, he and fellow reporter Charles MacArthur hit the big time with their play The Front Page. Although the play was widely condemned as crude and vulgar, even those who criticized it acknowledged its realism. It marked the first time that Americans were shown on stage as they were in life -- swearing, sweating, spitting -- even using the bathroom. Audiences couldn't get enough of it, and its authors soon found themselves the toast of the town.

Hecht migrated between New York and Hollywood -- where he would stay only long enough to collect the outrageous salaries that would finance his more serious writing the rest of the year. In 1939, he embarked on his most legendary escapade, writing the script for
Gone With the Wind. Producer David O. Selznick, frustrated over his inability to get a coherent script out of seventeen writers, locked himself in an office with Hecht and director Victor Fleming -- neither of whom had read the original book. Over the next five days, fueled by only bananas and peanuts, Selznick and Fleming acted out the novel while Hecht batted out the script on a typewriter.

Hecht spent the next 25 years turning out scripts, both credited and uncredited, on such classic films as
Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, A Farewell to Arms, Cleopatra, and Casino Royale. But despite his own preferences for the 35 books he wrote, it's his screenwriting, brash, bold, and original, for which he's remembered.

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