Word: hechts
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...BOOK OF MIRACLES-Ben Hecht-Viking...
Whatever else Ben Hecht may be damned for-and blasphemy is likely to be included-he cannot be accused of writing A Book of Miracles for money. One of Hollywood's highest-paid writers (The Front Page, Let Freedom Ring, etc.), he forswore 15 months' salary to write it. (His movie salary is around $6,000 a week.) But for Hecht it was "fun writing what I want-without having Sam Goldwyn peering over my shoulder." Fun for Hecht has heretofore meant novels like Erik Dorn, Count Bruga, A Jew in Love-gaudy, swashbuckling, ranting books, splashed with...
Pegler left the American in 1915, worked three years on the Chicago Journal, where he broke in a couple of cubs named Lowell Thomas and Ben Hecht. In 1918 Pegler joined Terry Ramsaye in Manhattan to crash the moving picture business. Ramsaye stuck and became the historian of the industry, but after a few years Pegler was hired at $250 a week by a company which promptly folded. He went back to newspapering, first on the Tribune, then the Daily News, finally the Mirror. When he retired from the Mirror he was writing all the editorials and Editor Emile Gauvreau...
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...