Biography
Overview (2)
| Date of Birth | 28 February 1894 , New York City, New York, USA |
| Date of Death | 18 April 1964 , New York City, New York, USA (thrombosis) |
Mini Bio (1)
Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood & Broadway's greatest writers, won an Oscar for best original story for Underworld
(1927) at the first Academy Awards in 1929 and had a hand in the
writing of many classic films. He was nominated five more times for the
best writing Oscar, winning (along with writing partner and friend Charles MacArthur, with whom he wrote the classic play The Front Page) for The Scoundrel (1935) (the other nominations were for Viva Villa! (1934) in 1935, Wuthering Heights (1939) (shared with MacArthur), Angels Over Broadway (1940), and Notorious
(1946). The latter two for best original screenplay. Hecht wrote fast
and he wrote well, and was called upon by many producers as a highly
paid script doctor. He was paid $10,000 by producer David O. Selznick for a fast doctoring of the Gone with the Wind (1939) script, for which he received no credit and for which Sidney Howard won an Oscar, beating out Hecht and MacArthur's "Wuthering Heights" script.
Born on February 28, 1894, Hecht made his name as a Chicago newspaperman during the heady days of cutthroat competition among newspapers and journalists. As a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, he wrote the column 1001 Afternoons in Chicago and broke the Ragged Stranger Murder Case story, which lead to the conviction and execution of Army war hero Carl Wanderer for the murder of his pregnant wife in 1921. The newspaper business, which he and MacArthur famously parodied in The Front Page, was a good training ground for a screenwriter, as he had to write vivid prose and had to write quickly.
While in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The telegram read: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Hecht moved to Hollywood, winding up at Paramount, working uncredited on the script for Lewis Milestone's adaptation of Ring Lardner's story The New Klondike (1926), starring silent superstar Thomas Meighan. But it was his script for Josef von Sternberg's seminal gangster picture Underworld (1927) that got him noticed. From then until the 1960s, he was arguably the most famous, if not the highest paid, screenwriter of his time.
As a playwright, novelist and short-story writer, Hecht always denigrated writing for the movies, but it is for such movies as Scarface (1932) and Nothing Sacred (1937) as well The Front Page (1931), based on his play of the same name for which, he is best remembered. He died on April 18, 1964 in New York City from thrombosis. He was 70 years old.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood
Born on February 28, 1894, Hecht made his name as a Chicago newspaperman during the heady days of cutthroat competition among newspapers and journalists. As a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, he wrote the column 1001 Afternoons in Chicago and broke the Ragged Stranger Murder Case story, which lead to the conviction and execution of Army war hero Carl Wanderer for the murder of his pregnant wife in 1921. The newspaper business, which he and MacArthur famously parodied in The Front Page, was a good training ground for a screenwriter, as he had to write vivid prose and had to write quickly.
While in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The telegram read: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Hecht moved to Hollywood, winding up at Paramount, working uncredited on the script for Lewis Milestone's adaptation of Ring Lardner's story The New Klondike (1926), starring silent superstar Thomas Meighan. But it was his script for Josef von Sternberg's seminal gangster picture Underworld (1927) that got him noticed. From then until the 1960s, he was arguably the most famous, if not the highest paid, screenwriter of his time.
As a playwright, novelist and short-story writer, Hecht always denigrated writing for the movies, but it is for such movies as Scarface (1932) and Nothing Sacred (1937) as well The Front Page (1931), based on his play of the same name for which, he is best remembered. He died on April 18, 1964 in New York City from thrombosis. He was 70 years old.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood
Spouse (2)
| Rose Caylor | (1925 - 18 April 1964) (his death) (1 child) |
| Mary Armstrong | (November 1916 - 27 February 1926) (divorced) (1 child) |
Trivia (9)
Father of actresses Jenny Hecht and Edwina Armstrong.
Had his own TV talk show in the New York City area in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Brian De Palma dedicated Scarface (1983), his remake of the 1932 film, to Hecht.
Hecht was portrayed by Mark Kiely in an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues (1993).
Wrote the complete script for Scarface (1932) in 11 days.
Before working as a script writer, he was a crime reporter and columnist in Chicago.
If uncredited work is included, he is the best represented
screenwriter in the 5th edition of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You
Die (edited by Steven Jay Schneider). The films credited to Hecht on the
list are Scarface (1932), Gunga Din (1939), Wuthering Heights (1939), His Girl Friday (1940) (his credit is for writing the original "The Front Page"), Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946). Additionally, Hecht worked without credit on Queen Christina (1933), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Stagecoach (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Angel Face (1952), Guys and Dolls (1955) and the remake of his script, Scarface (1983).
Hecht wrote Scarface (1932), a thinly disguised biography of Chicago gangster Al Capone.
After the script had been finished, but before shooting had begun,
Hecht was in his Hollywood hotel room when he was "visited" by two of
Capone's gunmen, who had somehow managed to obtain a copy of the script
and wanted to "discuss" its portrayal of their boss. A nervous Hecht
told them that the only thing it had in common with Capone was the title
"Scarface", which was Capone's nickname. That was because they were
using it to lure in audiences who would think that the film was about
Capone which, Hecht told them, it really wasn't (although it really
was). His story convinced them and they left him in one piece.
Wrote a number of radio plays during the 1940's. For the series
Suspense, he wrote "The Marvelous Barastro," "Beyond Good and Evil,"
"Crime Without Passion," and "Actor's Blood," which he also starred in
(as himself). This seems to be something he enjoyed doing, since he also
appeared as himself in a radio adaptation of his film "Specter of the
Rose" on Inner Sanctum Mysteries. The Peter Lorre series Mystery in the
Air recycled his Suspense scripts for "Barastro" and "Good and Evil"
during its short run as the summer replacement for Abbot and Costello.
Personal Quotes (21)
A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
[on movie moguls, studio heads and New York senior executives who
care about profits and nothing else] Most of them were nitwits on a par
with the lowest run of politicians I had known as a reporter.
Hollywood is to sex what the major leagues are to baseball. The
glamorous Hollywood figures perform in a sort of World Series sex math.
There are millions of Americans who belong by nature in movie
theaters as they belong at political rallies or in fortuneteller parlors
and on the shoot-the-chutes. To these millions the movies are a sort of
boon--a gaudier version of religion. All the parables of right living
are paraded before them tricked out in gang feuds, earthquakes and a
thousand and one near rapes. The move from cheap books to cheap movie
seats has not affected them for the worse.
Not only was the plot the same, but the characters in it never
varied. The characters must always be good or bad (and never human) in
order not to confuse the plot of Virtue Triumphing. This denouement
could be best achieved by stereotypes a fraction removed from those in
the comic strips.
Two generations of Americans have been informed nightly that a
woman who betrayed her husband (or a husband a wife) could never find
happiness; that sex was no fun without a mother-in-law and a rubber
plant around; that women who fornicated just for pleasure ended up as
harlots or washerwomen; that any man who was sexually active in his
youth, later lost the one girl he truly loved; that a man who indulged
in sharp practices to get ahead in the world ended in poverty and with
even his own children turning on him; that any man who broke the laws,
man's or God's, must always die, or go to jail, or become a monk, or
restore the money he stole before wandering off into the desert; that
anyone who didn't believe in God (and said so out loud) was set right by
seeing either an angel or witnessing some feat of levitation by one of
the characters; than an honest heart must always recover from a train
wreck or a score of bullets and win the girl it loved; that the most
potent and brilliant of villains are powerless before little children,
parish priests or young virgins with large boobies; that injustice could
cause a heap of trouble but it must always slink out of town in Reel
Nine; that there are no problems of labor, politics, domestic life, or
sexual abnormality but can be solved happily by a simple Christian
phrase or a fine American motto.
The American of 1953 is a cliché-strangled citizen whose like was
never before in the Republic. Compared to the pre-movieized American of
1910-1920, he is an enfeebled intellect. I concede the movies alone did
not undo the American mind. A number of forces worked away at that
project. But always, well up in front and never faltering at their
frowzy task, were the movies. In pre-movie days, the business of
peddling lies about life was spotty and unorganized. It was carried on
by the cheaper magazines, dime novels, the hinterland preachers and
whooping politicians. These combined to unload a rash of infantile
parables on the land. A goodly part of the population was infected, but
there remained large healthy areas in the Republic's thought. There
remained, in fact, an intellectual class of sorts -- a tribe of citizens
who never read dime novels, cheap magazines or submitted themselves to
political and religious howlers. It was this tribe that the movies
scalped. Cultured people who would have blushed with shame to be found
with a dime novel in their hands took to flocking shamelessly to watch
the picturization of such tripe on the screen. For forty years the
movies have drummed away on the American character, They have fed it
naïveté and buncombe in doses never before administered to any people.
They have slapped into the American mind more human misinformation in
one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade. One basic plot
only has appeared daily in their fifteen thousand theaters -- the
triumph of virtue and the overthrow of wickedness.
The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.
Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the
intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I
write of them -- as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American
mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous
sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of
pinochle. Of the 60 movies I wrote, more than half were written in two
weeks or less. I received from each script, whether written in two weeks
or [never more than] eight weeks, from $50,000 to $150,000. I worked
also by the week. My salary ran from $5000 a week up.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1949 paid me $10,000 a week. David O. Selznick once paid me $3500 a day."
For many years I looked on movie writing as an amiable chore. It
was a source of easy money and pleasant friendships. There was small
responsibility.
Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence
of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its
subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are
the trusted loyalists of cliché.
The job of turning good writers into movie hacks is the producer's chief task.
[on Herman J. Mankiewicz]
I knew that no one as witty and spontaneous as Herman would ever put
himself on paper. A man whose genius is on tap like free beer seldom
makes literature out of it.
[on John Gilbert]
In the time of Hollywood's most glittering days, he glittered the most.
There were no enemies in his life. He was as unsnobbish as a happy
child. He went everywhere he was invited. He needed no greatness around
him to make him feel distinguished. He drank with carpenters, danced
with waitresses and made love to whores and movie queens alike. He
swaggered and posed but it was never to impress anyone. He was being
John Gilbert, prince, butterfly, Japanese lantern, and the spirit of
romance.
[on Clark Gable]
He was America's dream of itself, a symbol of courage, indomitable
against the greatest of odds. But he was also a human being, kind,
likable, a guy right out of the life all around the fans who worshiped
him. Gable was the boy-man, without arrogance, but plenty of fire and
spunk, a gay, daring, dashing blade.
[on Fanny Brice] So many things she said stopped you cold. She was about people the way those carnival fellows are about your weight.
Would that our writing had been as good as our lunches.
[to David O. Selznick] The trouble with you, David, is that you did all your reading before you were twelve.
(on politicians) They bore me. The best of them are dummies and the worst are pickpockets.
Salary (3)
| Underworld (1927) | $10,000 |
| Scarface (1932) | $1,000/day |
| Gone with the Wind (1939) | $5,000 |
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