Word: hecht
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...echo chambers, creaking doors and the indelible clack of skeletons rising from granite tombs. Dashiell Hammett's detectives, Sam Spade, The Thin Man and The Fat Man, gave audiences a private eye and earful; other ops-Philip Marlowe, Philo Vance and Martin Kane-were even more hardboiled. Ben Hecht himself could not glamorize the press as well as oldtime radio. Britt Reid (the true identity of the Green Hornet) was a newspaperman; so, for that matter, was Clark Kent, Superman in mufti. Front Page Farrell had an adventure a day. Big Town recounted the trials of Steve Wilson...
Presiding over this six-night-a-week hound happening is Isadore Hecht, 60, West Flagler's owner. The former tomato grower and banana importer bought the track 20 years ago when it handled just $14 million in bets during a 13-week season. Hecht modernized the plant and produced a greyhound gold mine. In 1972 the track handled $63 million in bets (8% went to management) in a 16-week meeting. Every night Hecht can be found in a posh suite of offices perched at one end of the track. There he can monitor the betting windows...
...subject. He concentrates upon Selznick, an obsessive perfectionist who brought off the film in spite of the collective industry opinion that regarded it as "Selznick's Folly." Sometimes his conferences would last 48 hours, nonstop. He went through four directors and scriptwriters like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ben Hecht. When the Screen Extras Guild produced only 1,500 bodies to represent the Confederate wounded at the Atlanta Railroad Station, Selznick violated union rules by ordering up 1,000 dummies to swell the crowd...
...passes for humor on the screen these days. It is true that we lack clowns of legendary status, but that is not really the problem; given something to do, actors like Bologna and Gorman would do it very nicely. The trouble is a lack of literate lunatics like, say, Hecht and MacArthur among the screenwriters; a lack of directors like, say, Howard Hawks, who can get to the point and then stick to it until the last laugh has been squeezed out. Sometimes such people tried to cram too much into too small a space. But it is far easier...
...only person thus far to sign the petition is poet Anthony Hecht, visiting professor of English. He was not available for comment yesterday...