Word: hechts
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...Girl Friday (Columbia). One day last spring, sporty Director Howard Hawks had an idea. It was a rather weird idea; he kept it to himself until he had bought (for $35,000) the rights to The Front Page, the Hecht-MacArthur stage hit, from which Lewis Milestone had already made a picture (1931). Hawks remade the picture, changed its title to His Girl Friday. The result is not just another remake, for Director Hawks's weird idea was also to remake the sex of his leading character. Hildy Johnson, ace newshawk, played by tough-talking Lee Tracy...
...forcing his actors to speak 240 words a minute (average conversational speed - 90 words a minute). Rough est spots in the original versions have been sandpapered or excised, the pressroom's whiskey cynicism toned down to half of one per cent, but the comedy still has enough Hecht-MacArthur kick to make later interpolations smell synthetic. Synthetic sample: "What does he [Ralph Bellamy] look like?" Editor Burns: "Oh, he looks like that movie actor-Ralph Bellamy...
Maney's stunts are those of a born tongue-in-cheeker. When he did the publicity for The Great Magoo, which the critics drubbed, he had a hand in the decision of its playwrights, Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler, to lie in state in separate coffins at a funeral parlor. For Billy Rose, Maney concocted an advertisement for "100 bona fide noblemen" to serve as dancing partners at Rose's Fort Worth Frontier Centennial. "In answering," read the ad, "submit photographs in uniform, with orders, ribbons and decorations evident. . . . Bogus counts, masqueraders and descend ants of the Dauphin...
...Script No. i. When finished, it contained 30,000 words, would have required five and a half hours to run if it ever had been shot. It never was. They made another. Then Selznick made another. In the next year Jo Swerling, Oliver H. P. Garrett, Ben Hecht, John Van Druten, Michael Foster, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winston Miller, John Balderston, Edwin Justus Mayer all had at least a little finger in the scenario. But next to Sidney Howard's work, the bulk of the scripting, as David Selznick admits, was done by David Selznick. He is still very touchy...
When the literary history of his time comes to be written, Carl Sandburg may well be esteemed the luckiest of his Midwestern generation. Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters had as great if not greater native talent; even Ben Hecht, whose desk was next to Sandburg's on the Chicago Daily News in the early '20s, seemed a more brilliant, sophisticated writer. Of them all, Sandburg, the immigrant's son, got the surest roothold in authentic U. S. tradition, and got it perhaps by the near accident of digging for the truth about Abraham Lincoln. "That...