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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