The Oscar Winners: Ben Hecht

Ben Hecht, the great Hollywood screenwriter, 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 countless classic films. He was nominated five more times for a 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) in 1936 (the other nominations were for Viva Villa! (1934) in 1935, Wuthering Heights (1939) in 1940 (shared with MacArthur), Angels Over Broadway (1940) in 1941, and Notorious (1946) in 1947 (the latter two for 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

Born on February 28, 1894, Ben 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, Hecht 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, where he wound 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 that got him noticed in 1927. From then until the 1960s, he was arguably the most famous, if nor the highest paid, screenwriter of his time.

Thirty years after arriving in Hollywood, B en Hecht told Mike Wallace in a 1958 TV interview that Hollywood was "sad compared to the gay, charming, wondrous town it once was."

Hecht went on to say, "When you got off the train in the old days [your] pockets filled with gold before you got to the hotel. Everybody was young, everybody had the world by the tail, everybody was going to be a wizard, a success, and oddly enough, everybody turned out to be that. We had nothing but geniuses in this town. If you weren't a genius, you hardly could eat out. Geniuses dominated the whole city from stem to stern."

He went on to sum up that the Golden Age of Hollywood, of the Hollywood full og geniuses, was gone. "We have nothing but people running out of a burning building today in Hollywood."

A playwright, a novelist, and the writer of over 300 short stories and several books of memoirs, Ben Hecht always denigrated writing for the movies, which he equated to piecework, assignments similar to the assignments doled out when he was a newspaperman. Hecht said the writer was merely a craftsman akin to a plumber, who excercised so little control over the final product that he had little interest in the final product. He told Wallace he did not see the movies he wrote, unless someone said that one of them had turned out very well.

Despite denigrating the craft of screenwriting, it is for the screenplays on such movies as Scarface (1932) and Nothing Sacred (1937) that Hecht will be remembered, along with his play The Front Page, which was committed to film four times, including the original 1931 version and Howard Hawk's update His Girl Friday (1940).

Ben Hecht died on April 18, 1964 in New York City from thrombosis. He was 70 years old.