Jump to content

User:Cybersea/Hecht: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
Cybersea (talk | contribs)
242 edits
No edit summary
Cybersea (talk | contribs)
242 edits
Line 20: Line 20:


==Early years==
==Early years==
Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. "He was considered a child prodigy at age 10, seemingly on his way to a career as a concert violinist, but two years later he was performing as a circus acrobat." <ref name=Siegel>Siegel, Scott, and Siegel, Barbara. ''The Encyclopedia of Hollywood'', 2nd ed. (2004) Checkmark Books</ref>. The family later moved to Racine, Wisconsin, and when Hecht was in his early teens he would spend his summers with an uncle in Chicago. At sixteen, he ran away to live permanently in Chicago, and found work as a reporter, first for the ''Chicago Journal'', and later with the ''Chicago Daily News''.
Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. "He was considered a child prodigy at age 10, seemingly on his way to a career as a concert violinist, but two years later he was performing as a circus acrobat." <ref name=Siegel>Siegel, Scott, and Siegel, Barbara. ''The Encyclopedia of Hollywood'', 2nd ed. (2004) Checkmark Books</ref>. The family later moved to Racine, Wisconsin, and when Hecht was in his early teens he would spend his summers with an uncle in Chicago. At sixteen, he ran away to live permanently in Chicago, and found work as a reporter, first for the ''Chicago Journal'', and later with the ''Chicago Daily News''. <ref name=Clark>Clark, Randall. ''Dictionary of Literary Biography - American Screenwriters'' (1984) Gale Research </ref>


A 1969 movie, directed by [[Norman Jewison]], ''Gaily, Gaily'', was based on the life of his early years working as a reporter in Chicago, and was nominated for three Oscars. The story was taken from a portion of his autobiograhy, ''A Child of the Century''.
A 1969 movie, directed by [[Norman Jewison]], ''Gaily, Gaily'', was based on the life of his early years working as a reporter in Chicago, and was nominated for three Oscars. The story was taken from a portion of his autobiograhy, ''A Child of the Century''.

Revision as of 02:19, 28 July 2008

Ben Hecht
SpouseMary Armstrong (1916-1926)
Rose Caylor (1926-1964)

Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964), was an American playwright, novelist and prolific Hollywood screenwriter. He was considered "the" Hollywood screenwriter, someone who "personified Hollywood itself." The Dictionary of Literary Biography refers to him as "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures."

During his 40-year career he wrote screenplays or stories for more than 70 films (20 of which he received no credit for, such as Gone with the Wind and Monkey Business). His best work was done in collaboration with other writers, including Charles MacArthur and Charles Lederer, although the one film which he produced, directed, and wrote himself, Angels Over Broadway (1940), was Oscar nominated for Best Screenplay. Today, many of his movie screenplays are considered "classics", such as The Front Page (1931) and Scarface (1932), and his movies have been nominated six times for the Academy Award, winning twice.

He could produce a screenplay in two weeks and, according to his autobiography, never spent more than eight weeks on a script, yet was still able to produce mostly rich, well-plotted, and witty screenplays. His scripts included virtually every movie genre: adventures, musicals, or impassioned romances such as Wuthering Heights (1939). But ultimately, he was best known for two specific types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies.

Although he was more interested in writing plays and novels, he wrote screenplays for part of the year to "replenish his bank account." He lived mostly in New York, and traveled to Hollywood only to work on films. Despite his success, however, he scorned most of the films on which he worked, and disliked the effect that movies were having on the theater, American cultural standards, and on his own creativity.

Early years

Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. "He was considered a child prodigy at age 10, seemingly on his way to a career as a concert violinist, but two years later he was performing as a circus acrobat." [1]. The family later moved to Racine, Wisconsin, and when Hecht was in his early teens he would spend his summers with an uncle in Chicago. At sixteen, he ran away to live permanently in Chicago, and found work as a reporter, first for the Chicago Journal, and later with the Chicago Daily News. [2]

A 1969 movie, directed by Norman Jewison, Gaily, Gaily, was based on the life of his early years working as a reporter in Chicago, and was nominated for three Oscars. The story was taken from a portion of his autobiograhy, A Child of the Century.

Married life

He married Marie Armstrong in 1915, when he was 21 years of age; they had a daughter, Edwina. He got divorced ten years later, in 1925, and married Rose Caylor that same year. They had a daughter, Jenny.

Journalist

From 1918 to 1919 Hecht served as foreign war correspondent in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News. Besides being a war reporter, he was noted for being "a tough crime reporter while also becoming known in Chicago literary circles."[1] He published the sensational column 1001 Afternoons in Chicago during his work as reporter.

While at the Chicago Daily News, Hecht famously broke the "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story. Army war hero Carl Wanderer and his wife had been assaulted by a "ragged stranger". His wife and the stranger were killed in the struggle. Hecht's investigation revealed that the stranger was actually a drifter named Al Watson whom Wanderer had hired to stage a holdup. Wanderer admitted he was a homosexual and had planned the murder of his pregnant wife. He was sentenced to death by hanging and was executed on March 19, 1921.

During this time period in Chicago, he met and befriended Maxwell Bodenheim, an American poet and novelist who was known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians and who became a lifelong friend.

Playwright

He began writing plays beginning with a series of one-acts in 1914. His first full-length play was The Egotist, and was produced in New York in 1922. While living in Chicago, he met fellow reporter Charles MacArthur and they together moved to New York permanently in order to collaborate on a play. The Front Page was widely acclaimed and had a successful run on Broadway of 281 performances, which began in August, 1928. In 1931 it was turned into a successful film which was nominated for three Oscars.

Screenwriter

While in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from screenwriter friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently arrived in Los Angeles. "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots", it read. "Don't let this get around." In need of money, he decided to travel to Hollywood as Mankiewicz suggested. [1]

He arrived in Los Angeles and began his remarkable career at the very beginning of the sound eral by providing the story for Josef von Sternberg's early gangster movie, Underworld, in 1927. For that first screenplay and story he won Hollywood's first Academy Award for Best Original Story.[1]

"The talkie era put writers like Hecht at a premium because they could write dialogue in the quirky, idiosyncratic style of the common man. Hecht, in particular, was wonderful with slang, and he peppered his films with the argot of the streets. He also had a lively sense of humor and an uncanny ability to ground even the most outrageious stories sucessfully with credible, fast-paced plots." [1]

He was best known for two specific types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies.[1] Among crime thrillers, Hecht was responsible for such films as The Unholy Night (1929), the classic Scarface (1932), and Hitchcock's Notorious. Among his comedies, there were The Front Page, with led to many remakes, Noel Coward's Design for Living (1933), Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred, and the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business (1952).

Personal life

Jewish activism

Part of a series of articles on
the Holocaust
Blood for goods
Key figures
Issues
Writers
Kastner train passengers
Related

Hecht's activism began when he met Peter Bergson (né Hillel Kook) - an ETZEL emissary to America. Hecht wrote in his book Perfidy that he used to be a scriptwriter until his meeting with Bergson, when he accidentally bumped into history - i.e. the burning need to do anything possible to save the doomed Jews of Europe (paraphrase from Perfidy). After meeting Kook, Hecht dedicated himself to working with Kook's rescue group and after the war ended he continued to work with Kook on establishment of the State of Israel.

Kook's rescue group purchased ad space in major US newspapers and Hecht wrote most of the ads, which were designed to call for immediate rescue action. In Perfidy and other writings, Hecht wrote that he was saddened by the negative reaction of mainstream American Jewish leaders toward rescue. He perceived them as pompous and more involved with petty aspects of Jewish politics and post-war Zionist issues than investing their talents, time and connections into rescue of their doomed brethren across the Atlantic.

Together with Kurt Weill and other top-level Broadway and Hollywood contacts, Hecht produced the pageant We Shall Never Die, which was shown in Madison Square Garden and in numerous cities across America. In Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt and many government leaders saw it. The pageant was strongly opposed by major Jewish leaders such as Stephen Wise, and they tried to ensure that it was not shown.[3][4] Despite considerable obstruction the Bergson Group's activism bore fruit, although much less and much later than Kook, Hecht and their colleagues expected[5]. The Bergson Group had generated considerable support in Washington, and after long delay their activism resulted in President Roosevelt's establishment of the War Refugee Board (WRB), which ultimately supported the Wallenberg mission to Budapest. According to history books by David Wyman and Rafael Medoff, over 200,000 people were rescued as a result of the Bergson Group - probably mostly in Hungary.

After the war ended Hecht and Weill produced another major pageant, this time about establishment of the State of Israel, called A Flag is Born. It raised more than $400,000[6] for the revisionist-supporting American League For a Free Palestine, and was bitterly opposed by Haganah supporters.[7]

Hecht became a great supporter of Zeev Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Zionism movement led by Menachem Begin. He opposed the social-democratic policies of Israel's first two prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, and of the Jewish Agency for what he regarded as their complicit silence and co-operation with the British during World War II in not doing more to rescue Jews and open the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. He spoke out against the lack of interest in saving the Jews trapped in Europe during the Holocaust. He purchased newspaper advertising in New York's newspapers to publicize the fate of Hitler's victims. In one such "advertisement" with the headline: "FOR SALE: 70,000 JEWS AT $50 APIECE GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS" explaining that three and a half million dollars would rescue the then-trapped Romanian Jews (quoted in his work Perfidy, pp. 191-192). However, Stephen Wise made a public statement in the name of the American Jewish Congress denying the "confirmation" of the offer from the Romanian government.

It was during this time that Hecht wrote his book A Guide For The Bedeviled, which explains the thoughts and forces that drove him to this radical change of life and work.

He subsequently wrote Perfidy, dramatizing the failure to rescue Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, and the roles of the Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner and others in leadership positions in the Hungarian Jewish community. This issue was the subject of a famous libel trial, in which the Israeli government sued an amateur pamphleteer who accused Kastner, at the time a spokesman of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, of having collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Although the court initially held that these accusations were not libelous, on appeal the verdict was reversed by a split 3-2 decision in the Supreme Court. By then, however, Kastner had been assassinated.

Legacy

His writing has influenced many of Hollywood's most loved movies, including, Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina (1933), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939), and several Hitchcock films, including Lifeboat (1944), The Paradine Case (1948), and Rope (1948). He received no screen credits for his work on those films.[1]

Quotes

How My Egoism Died from: A Child in the Century:


Remember us from: The Reader's Digest, February 1943:


Other quotes:

  • In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
  • The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
  • People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
  • When asked by his new wife's discomfited parents "Why didn't you tell us you were a Jew?", Hecht responded "I was afraid you would think I was bragging."
  • Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
  • There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age. (A Guide for the Bedevilled)
  • The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them. (Perfidy)

Academy Award nominations

Writing filmography

Books (partial list)

  • 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, McGee/Covici, (1922)
  • Fantazius Mallare, a Mysterious Oath, 174 pp., Pascal Covici (1922)
  • The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives w/ illustrations by Wallace Smith, 256 pp. Boni & Liveright (1923)
  • Kingdom of Evil, 211pp., Pascal Covici (1924)
  • Broken Necks { Containing More 1001 Afternoons }, 344pp., Pascal Covici (1926)
  • Count Bruga, 319 pp., Boni & Liveright (1926)
  • The Book of Miracles, 465 pp., Viking Press (1939)
  • 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, 370 pp., Viking Press (1941) ASIN B0007E7X9K
  • A Guide for the Bedevilled, 276 pages, Charles Scribner's Sons (1944), 216 pp. Milah Press Incorporated (September 1, 1999) ISBN 096468862X
  • The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht, 524 pp., Crown (1945)
  • Perfidy (with critical supplements), 281 pp. (plus 29 pp.), Julian Messner (1962)
    • Perfidy 288 pp. Milah Press (1961), Inc. (April 1, 1997) ISBN 0964688638
  • Concerning a Woman of Sin, 222 pp., Mayflower (1964)
  • Gaily, Gaily, Signet (1963) (November 1, 1969) ISBN
  • A Child of the Century 672 pp. Plume (1954) (May 30, 1985) ISBN
  • The Front Page, Samuel French Inc Plays (January 1, 1998) ISBN
  • The Champion From Far Away (1931)
  • Actor's Blood (1936)
  • A Treasury Of Ben Hecht: Collected Stories And Other Writings (1959, anthology)
  • Erik Dorn
  • A Jew in Love
  • I Hate Actors!
  • 1001 Afternoons in New York
  • The Sensualists
  • Winkelberg
  • Miracle in the Rain
  • Letters From Bohemia
  • Gargoyles
  • The Egoist

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Siegel, Scott, and Siegel, Barbara. The Encyclopedia of Hollywood, 2nd ed. (2004) Checkmark Books
  2. ^ Clark, Randall. Dictionary of Literary Biography - American Screenwriters (1984) Gale Research
  3. ^ Wyman, David (1984). The Abandonment Of The Jews. New York: Pantheon. ISBN 0394740777.
  4. ^ Medoff, Rafael (2002). A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust. New York: Mew Press. ISBN 156584761X.
  5. ^ Larry Jarvik circa mid 1970-s video interview with Hillel Kook: Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die
  6. ^ "A Flag Is Born". American Jewish Historical Society. 2005. Retrieved 2008-01-11.
  7. ^ "Traitors, Inc.", Time, July 14, 1947 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)

References

  • Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. p. 146.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=User:Cybersea/Hecht&oldid=228305480"