New York City and the Movies: Three Screenwriters Born in NYC

New York City is an eternal favorite with Hollywood. With its multitude of iconic buildings and structures, as well as its inexhaustible wealth of talent, the history of Hollywood's partnership is too much for any one article to even attempt to sum up. Thus, I decided to focus on its screenwriters- three in particular.

Lester Cole was born on June 19, 1904 in New York City. His career as a writer and screenwriter for the movies spanned four decades. His first movie seems to have been If I Had A Million in 1932. Over the years, he was prolific. According to the list on IMDb.com, it appears that he favored stories involving crime and mysteries. It is also clear that his work included other genres as well. Some of the movies he wrote on were The Jury's Secret (1938), The Invisible Man Returns (1940), and Born Free (1966). He helped to establish the Screen Writers Guild (SWG) in 1933 and later spent a year in prison during the 1950s for his political beliefs as one of the "Hollywood Ten". He emigrated to London in 1961, but returned later and continued to write under a psuedonym. On August 15, 1985, Cole died of a heart attack. He was 81 years old.

Harry Essex was born in New York City on November 29, 1910. He always wanted to write for the movies from childhood, but did not get the opportunity for some time. He wrote for several New York newspapers and had short stories published in journals such as the Saturday Evening Post. Then along came World War II. Just as it did for most everyone of that generation, the War interrupted his career for a while. When he was discharged from the army, a friend finally gave him the big break he'd been looking for. Eventually, his career as a screenwriter spanned from Man Made Monster in 1941 to It Came From Outer Space II which was released on television in 1996. Other movies Essex wrote include Boston Blackie and the Law (1946), Kansas City Confidential (1952), and Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). He died on February 6, 1997.

Among New York's most famous screenwriters, Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928. He performed badly at school until his father introduced him to chess circa 1941. Chess would become an important motif in his movies. For his thirteenth birthday, his father bought him a camera. He did photographic assignments for Look magazine for a while. In 1951, his first film became a reality. It was a documentary called Day of the Fight. He wrote the next film, Flying Padre, in 1951. Thus began the screenwriting aspect of his career. His movies include Dr. Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Full Metal Jacket (1987)- which U2 fans will recognise as the working title for the earliest versions of what became the song Vertigo, although a connection has never been stated- and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Kubrick was working on Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001) when he died and it was finished by Steven Spielberg. He died in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, UK on March 7, 1999 of a heart attack. His style of writing, shooting, and special effects was so distinct it gave rise to a new discriptive term. He was known to have suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

For more information on these and other screenwriters who were born in New York City see the Internet Movie Database at http://www.IMDb.com.