Word: hecht
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hecht was lounging between careers -- he had written seven novels and two Broadway plays and was now dead broke -- when in 1926 he received a telegram from his pal Herman J. Mankiewicz, then a Hollywood scriptwriter. "Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures?" the wire read. "The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots." Then a mock-wily P.S.: "Don't let this get around...
...screenwriters, pre-eminently Preston Sturges, seized the means of production and became their own directors. The rest mostly complained about their six-figure serfdom, partly because they were so good at it. "It is as difficult to make a toilet seat as a castle window," Hecht wrote in 1962, "even if the view is different...
...Hecht was not just a cog in America's great art industry. He was a one-man cottage industry, occasionally directing his own scripts but more often writing and rewriting for hire. The filmography in William MacAdams' brisk biography of Hecht lists 143 movie projects, on 77 of which he got no screen credit. The list includes many of Hollywood's sassiest entertainments (Scarface, Twentieth Century, His Girl Friday), but neither MacAdams nor any other scholar can isolate Hecht's contribution to each of them. Only this can be said with assurance: Ben Hecht did not work on Citizen Kane...
MacAdams doesn't come close to making his case for Hecht as "the most influential writer in the history of American movies." The racy dialect and hard-eyed urban fables associated with Hecht were in Hollywood's vocabulary virtually from the onslaught of sound in 1927. But MacAdams brings gusto to tales of Hecht's early days as a ruthless reporter and to his later, angry crusade as a pioneer Zionist. MacAdams also has a great source: Hecht's brio- filled 1954 autobiography, A Child of the Century...
Sturges should have written Hecht's biography; he loved brash charlatans and made comic art of their deceptions. Hecht should have written Sturges'; he would have wrung high irony from the story of a gallivanting rich boy who grew up to be the top writer-director in pictures. And one of the blithest. "All I do is wave a little wand a little," purred the orchestra conductor in Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours, "and out comes the music." For five glorious years, 1940-44, Sturges waved his wand and out came words and pictures. Nothing but Hollywood's most distinctive satires...