Dore Schary

Dore Schary grew up in Newark, New Jersey, working in his family's catering business and trying his hand at acting and playwriting before heading to Hollywood as a screenwriter in the early 1930s. He had a knack for warm, humane, socially engaged stories, and in 1938 he won an Academy Award for the original story of "Boys Town," the tale of Father Flanagan's home for wayward boys that became his calling card.

Schary's ambitions were as much moral as commercial. He believed movies should grapple with prejudice, poverty, and democracy, and as a production executive he pushed "message pictures" that the older moguls found preachy and unprofitable. At RKO he ran production and championed hard-hitting fare like the anti-racism drama "Crossfire," until Howard Hughes bought the studio and Schary, unwilling to serve the eccentric new owner, walked out in 1948.

He landed at MGM, where the New York chief Nicholas Schenck installed him as head of production, deliberately positioning the socially minded Schary against the aging, sentimental Louis B. Mayer. The two men embodied a clash of eras, Mayer's escapist glamour against Schary's earnest realism, and in 1951 Schenck sided with Schary, forcing Mayer out of the studio he had built. Schary then ran MGM through the early 1950s, mixing his beloved message pictures with the musicals and spectacles the studio still needed.

But the same commercial pressures that toppled Mayer eventually claimed Schary. As MGM's fortunes sagged against television and the collapsing studio system, his prestige projects underperformed, and in 1956 he too was pushed out. He reinvented himself as a Broadway playwright, winning acclaim for "Sunrise at Campobello," his drama about Franklin Roosevelt's battle with polio, and devoted his later years to civic causes and leadership of the Anti-Defamation League. He died in 1980, a rare mogul who cared more for the sermon than the sale.