Ben Hecht

Hecht came up as a Chicago newspaperman in the raucous 1910s and 1920s, a self-described street reporter who could invent a story as easily as chase one. With his friend Charles MacArthur he wrote the immortal newspaper comedy The Front Page for Broadway, and its cynical, machine-gun dialogue became a permanent American idiom.

He was lured west by a famous telegram from Herman Mankiewicz promising that millions were there to be grabbed and the only competition was idiots. Hecht treated the town with open contempt and made a fortune from it. In 1927 he won the first Academy Award ever given for an original story, for the gangster film Underworld, and he essentially wrote the template for the sound-era crime picture with Scarface.

What set Hecht apart was speed and range. He claimed to have written some scripts in a week, and the claim was often true. He gave the screwball comedy its verbal machinery in Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred, and the peerless His Girl Friday, a remake of his own Front Page. He wrote romance and dread for Hitchcock in Spellbound and Notorious, adventure in Gunga Din, and the doomed grandeur of Wuthering Heights. When David Selznick's Gone With the Wind was foundering, it was Hecht who was hauled in to rescue the screenplay in a marathon week.

Off the page he was a fierce Zionist who used his celebrity and money to agitate for a Jewish state and to publicize the destruction of European Jewry, activities that got his films boycotted in Britain. He remained productive, prickly, and prolific to the end, contributing uncredited to dozens of pictures beyond his roughly seventy credits. He died in 1964, and though his name faded, he is fairly called the Shakespeare of Hollywood, the man who taught the movies how to talk.