Word: hecht
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Most good playwrights get a break, but screenwriters are under a big bushel. Most screenwriters with big names made them elsewhere, like Ben Hecht, Robert Sherwood, Dorothy Parker. Some, like Grover Jones and Frances Marion, have big names in Hollywood that mean little to outsiders. Others, like Wesley Ruggles' Claude Binyon or Frank Capra's Robert Riskin, won fame as co-members of celebrated director-writer teams. Still others, like Darryl Zanuck and Alfred Hitchcock, got their glory in bigger jobs. As compensation for their comparative obscurity, screen authors work more steadily than playwrights and generally make more...
Towne & Baker need no longer worry about screen credit or having their stories mussed up by somebody else. They are now bosses of their own producing company, The Play's The Thing Productions. Unlike a similar producing venture attempted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur five years ago, T. P. T. P. will release four pictures through RKO* next year. The four, picked by Towne for their story value: The Swiss Family Robinson (published in 1813), James Fenimore Cooper's The Deer slayer (1841), Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and Alfred Batson's contemporary African...
...pillaged. It is crammed with neurotic, 19th-Century gloom, ridden with implications of incest, short on action, careless of conventional morality. As additional drawbacks, Mr. Olivier, entrusted with the crucial role of Heathcliff, boasts that he dislikes working for the movies and only does it for money; Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, preparing for their labors on Gunga Din, could barely be persuaded to leave their marathon backgammon game long enough to write a script. The script turned out brilliantly. Olivier's work as Heathcliff is a speaking tribute to the efficacy of the profit motive...
...story of Gunga Din, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and made into a screen play by Joel Sayre and Fred Guiol, appears to be a sort of Anglo-Indian Three Musketeers. What plot there is concerns the efforts of two sergeants to persuade the third to re-enlist when his period of service expires. This entails much hand-to-hand fighting against a band of Thugs, a few barrack-room practical jokes and frequent athletic tricks of the sort popularized by Master Fairbanks' father. Funny, spectacular, and exciting, Gunga Din reaches its climax when the liveliest sergeant...
...aided by red flares and sound trucks, red-capped newsboys hawked the first issue of the Herex as a tabloid. To give the tabloid zip, Connolly turned it over to onetime Herex Managing Editor Walter Howey, immortalized as the prototype of all man-eating managing editors by Playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in The Front Page. Lately on Hearst's executive staff, Howey had supervised the tabloid New York Mirror and the Boston Record. There are now 54 tabloids, of varying degrees of importance, on sale daily...