NOTORIOUS SCREENWRITER BEN MOVIE
NOTORIOUS SCREENWRITER BEN SERIES

Hecht would eventually combine the two co-dependent worlds of crime and crime reporting in his breakthrough work of fiction, The Front Page, a stage play that told the story of how a newspaper editor and his star reporter would shamefully (and simultaneously shamelessly) rig the story of a murderer’s execution to generate extra sales. Ben himself would take flight at an early age, running away at the age of 16 to Chicago (the city, of course, that would become the personal fiefdom of the greatest gangster of all, Al Capone) to become a journalist, and particularly a crime reporter.

Hecht was born in New York in 1894 and like so many of the great geniuses of American letters and music (from Gershwin to Saul Bellow and beyond), he was the son of Jewish immigrants to America, who had fled Russia and in particular the vicious pogroms led by the Cossacks. Certainly, Hecht’s immortal exchanges of wisecracks and one-liners were as much the soundtrack to America between the two world wars as the sirens that announced the onset of yet another car chase in Chicago, New York or any other major US city. Don’t let this get around.' Of course, word did get around (it was probably spread by Hecht himself once he had made his fortune) and the story of “ the telegram” became one of the great founding myths of Hollywood, certainly for screenwriters.īen Hecht was his real name and it is almost onomatopoeic: his scripts would indeed become “hecked” and “helled” as his characters exchanged quips and curses with the lightning speed of the Tommy Guns that the Mafia and other gangsters used in the 20s and 30s to control much of Depression-era America, leading to the description of his trademark style of rapid-fire dialogue as “machine-gun dialogue”.

NOTORIOUS SCREENWRITER BEN MOVIE

Mankiewicz (the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, whose own writing I will look at later in the series) in 1926, which informed Hecht both of the desperate need for writers in the booming movie industry of California and the relative lack of competition, or as Mankiewicz famously put it: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. The extract in question was the legendary telegram sent to him by his friend and fellow writer, Herman J. In Part 2, Martin Keady examines the legacy of the man often regarded as the Greatest Hollywood Screenwriter of all, Ben Hecht.īen Hecht himself would have appreciated the irony that, for all his wonderful plays and screenplays (not to mention his journalism, memoirs and other writing, which reportedly included ghost-writing Marilyn Monroe’s biography), he is probably best remembered today for something that was written not by him but to him.

NOTORIOUS SCREENWRITER BEN SERIES

The Great Screenwriters is a new series for Scriptlab that examines the life and work of the finest writers for cinema, from Shakespeare to Diablo Cody.

Notorious screenwriter ben