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Thread: Ben Hecht

  1. #1
    radiojane Guest

    Ben Hecht



    Did you love Notorious, Monkey Business, the orginal Scarface? How about His Girl Friday, or Gunga Din? Well, thank this guy. He had a hand in all of them.


    BEN HECHT
    1894-1964


    It is estimated that of the seventy to ninety screenplays he wrote, many were written anonymously due to the British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of the Zionist movement in Palestine, during which time a supply ship to Palestine was named the S.S. Ben Hecht.

    He could produce a screenplay in two weeks and, according to his autobiography, never spent more than eight weeks on a script. Yet he was still able to produce mostly rich, well-plotted, and witty screenplays. His scripts included virtually every movie genre: adventures, musicals, and impassioned romances. But ultimately, he was best known for two specific types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies. Despite his success, however, he disliked the effect that movies were having on the theater, American cultural standards, and on his own creativity.


    Ben was born in New York, the son of Jewish immigrants. He was raised in Racine Wisconsin. After graduating from high school in 1910, Hecht moved to Chicago, lived with relatives, and started a career in journalism. At sixteen, he ran away to live permanently in Chicago, and found work as a reporter, first for the Chicago Journal, and later with the Chicago Daily News. He was an excellent reporter who worked on several Chicago papers. After World War I, Hecht was sent to cover Berlin for the Chicago Daily News. There he wrote his first and most successful novel, Erik Dorn (1921). It was a sensational debut for Hecht as a serious writer.


    From 1918 to 1919 Hecht served as war correspondent in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News. According to Siegel, "Besides being a war reporter, he was noted for being a tough crime reporter while also becoming known in Chicago literary circles.


    He arrived in Los Angeles and began his career at the very beginning of the sound era by writing the story for Josef von Sternberg's gangster movie, Underworld, in 1927. For that first screenplay and story he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in Hollywood's first Academy award ceremony Soon afterward, he became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood..." Hecht spent from two to twelve weeks in Hollywood each year, "during which he earned enough money (his record was $100,000 in one month, for two screenplays) to live on for the rest of the year in New York, where he did what he considered his serious writing." Nonetheless, later in his career, "he was a writer who liked to think that his genius had been stifled by Hollywood and by its dreadful habit of giving him so much money."


    Yet his income was as much a result of his skill as a writer as well as his early jobs with newspapers. As film historians Mast and Kawin wrote, "The newspaper reporters often seemed like gangsters who had accidentally ended up behind a typewriter rather than a tommy gun; they talked and acted as rough as the crooks their assignments forced them to cover...It is no accident that Ben Hecht, the greatest screenwriter of rapid-fire, flavorful tough talk as well as a major comic playwright, wrote gangster pictures, prison pictures, and newspaper pictures.


    Hecht became one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters, able to write a full screenplay in two to eight weeks. According to Samuel Goldwyn biographer Carol Easton, in 1931, with his writing partner Charles MacArthur, he "knocked out The Unholy Garden in twelve hours. Hecht subsequently received a fan letter from producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. He also ghostwrote MARILYN MONROE'S biography, and graciously kept his mouth shut. It wasn't until years after he and Monroe had passed that he was credited openly.


    He married Marie Armstrong in 1915, when he was 21 years of age, and had a daughter, Edwina, who became actress Edwina Armstrong. He was divorced ten years later, in 1925, and married Rose Caylor that same year. They had a daughter, Jenny Hecht, who also became an actress. He remained married to Rose Caylor until his death in 1964.


    Hecht was a vocal supporter of Civil rights, and fought against both Jewish and African American discrimination.
    He died in 1964. He remained close friends with the Macarthur's (Mrs. Macarthur was Helen Hayes), and is buried close to them.



    Last edited by radiojane; 03-02-2009 at 10:07 PM.

  2. #2
    Guest Guest
    Also being death hags we must know that he died from a thrombosis.

  3. #3
    GoldwynGal Guest
    I've read the book he ghostwrote for Monroe... not bad.

    Apparently he and Macarthur were some pair when they socialized.

  4. #4
    Join Date
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    I love reading his stuff he wrote with
    Charles MacArthur.
    Last edited by theotherlondon; 11-06-2009 at 04:47 AM.
    Carolyn(1958-2009) always in my heart.

  5. #5
    Join Date
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    RIP Ben
    GOD IS NOT DEAD





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