Ben Hecht

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Ben Hecht (around 1919)

Ben Hecht (born February 28, 1894 in New York , † April 18, 1964 there ) was an American journalist , writer , screenwriter and film director . He was one of Hollywood's most sought-after screenwriters and worked with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock , Howard Hawks , Otto Preminger , John Ford and Ernst Lubitsch on some of the most iconic works in film history, including writing dramas, thrillers and comedies. Hecht has been nominated six times for an Oscar and won it twice.

Life

Journalist and writer

Ben Hecht was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Raised in Racine , Wisconsin , he moved to Chicago at the age of sixteen , where he joined the editorial team of the Chicago Daily Journal in July 1910 . For fifteen years he roamed the city as a reporter. A daily column in the newspaper ( 101 Afternoons in Chicago, also the title of his first band with short stories) made him known. His most famous screenplay for Extrablatt ( The Front Page ) also draws on these experiences. His memories of the time in Chicago were processed by Norman Jewison in the 1969 film Gaily, Gaily . “He was a tough guy who spent 15 years in the urban jungle of Chicago - in madhouses, death row, slums. That was the fund from which the author drew his whole life, which paved the way for him to become the most sought-after and fastest screenwriter in Hollywood, ”describes the film critic Marli Feldvoss in a radio feature on the occasion of his 125th birthday.

Although Hecht was hardly in control of Germany and initially had little interest in politics, his newspaper sent him to Berlin in 1918 to report on the German Reich after the lost First World War . Hecht was there when Karl Liebknecht occupied the Berlin Palace with a division of sailors. He interviewed important figures of the old regime such as the Chief of Staff of the Eastern Army Max Hoffmann , Admiral von Tirpitz and Commander-in-Chief Ludendorff . The new Prime Minister Philipp Scheidemann granted him his first interview after the war, and even Reich President Friedrich Ebert , who otherwise did not allow himself to be interviewed, could be spoken in exchange for a bribe of 500 US dollars. Hecht was only impressed by two Germans, USPD leader Hugo Haase and George Grosz , with whom he roamed the Dadaist scene and exhibited at the First International Dada Fair in 1920 . When Grosz later had to go into exile in the USA, Hecht supported him.

The journalist bought a plane with which he could fly through the country. In this way he was able to report from the Spartacist-ruled Düsseldorf and from Katowice while the revolution broke out there. In Stettin he interviewed War Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg . In Berlin he witnessed the Spartacus uprising , in Weimar the opening of the National Assembly . He was to be expelled from the country because of a report about the mass shooting of unarmed insurgents in Moabit prison. Hecht hid until the Weimar Republic was proclaimed , after which the expulsion was lifted.

Hecht quickly came to the conclusion that the revolution and the democratic government were only a staging of the still intact German military. For fear of Bolshevism , the victorious powers should be persuaded to help Germany back on its feet militarily as well. In April 1919 he even managed to travel to Munich during the Soviet Republic . On his flight he picked up a Bolshevik agent named Dr. Bezsmertnij and the leader of the Anti-Bolshevik League , Dr. von Berg, a representative of the military and the government, who seemed to get along very well. Bezsmertnij had a suitcase with one million gold marks with which he intended to buy the Munich garrison. This episode confirmed to Hecht that the “revolution” was just a game that was agreed upon.

After some time with the Chicago Literary Times , Hecht went to New York in 1925, where he made friends with Charles MacArthur , husband of Broadway star Helen Hayes , and Dorothy Parker . Hecht worked with MacArthur for life, together they wrote a number of successful Broadway plays, including The Front Page, which was filmed four times in 1928 , and The Twentieth Century, which was filmed in 1934 with Carole Lombard and John Barrymore . He also wrote over a hundred short stories and numerous novels. Apart from a play and a novel, none of his works have ever been translated into German.

Screenwriter

In 1926, director Herman J. Mankiewicz , who had just arrived in Hollywood , sent a telegram to his friend Hecht:

“There are millions to be made here and your only competitors are idiots. Do not miss out."

- Biography in the IMDb

Hecht actually went to Hollywood, where he wrote the script for Josef von Sternberg's gangster film Underworld under contract with Paramount in 1927 , for which he won his first Oscar . He got a second one in 1935 for The Scoundrel of 1935. Hecht worked as an official screenwriter, but also often as a script doctor, so reworking already finished scripts, an activity that was not mentioned in the credits of the films.

Within a few years, Ben Hecht rose to become one of the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood thanks to his success with films such as Back Street , the adaptation of a Fannie Hurst novel, Topaze, Queen Christina and The Hurricane . In his biography, A Child of the Century , Hecht claimed to have received between $ 50,000 and $ 125,000 per script. For his revision of the script of Gone With The Wind he received a daily fee of US $ 10,000 from David O. Selznick . Other well-known films of the period that he worked on include Stagecoach and Lady of the Tropics , one of the films that aimed to make Hedy Lamarr a star. Hecht also worked as a director himself in part, but most of his films were not very successful at the box office. In the 1950s and 1960s, Hecht was one of the first talk show presenters on American television.

“What Hecht took with him from his restless journalistic years shaped his temperament, and this temperament in turn shaped the American films of the thirties. Their sophistication, their brusque harshness, the volleys of insults and sharp-tongued wit, the fascination with violence and illegality, the division of the world into those who know how it's done (typically urban and male), and into rude backwoodsmen (often rural) - these qualities made the comedies and melodramas of the Depression a hard-nosed new American art, an art that moved faster and had more shoals than life. "

- David Denby : New Yorker . 2019

One of the most famous and influential screenwriters in film history, Ben Hecht, ironically, always looked down on the film business and preferred writing dramas, novels and short stories.

“Writing a good film earns a writer about as much praise as riding a bicycle. At most, it brings him more offers. If his film is bad, the critics will only say 'but, but'. The producer, the director and the stars are the geniuses, which we Hosanna cries out when the movie is a hit. And it's their heads that you plant on spears in case the film flops. "

- Ben Hecht

Zionist engagement

Ben Hecht was a supporter of Zionism . He repeatedly publicly criticized what he believed to be the undecided efforts of the Allies to save European Jews from the Holocaust and had advertisements run in New York daily newspapers in an attempt to rouse the public. One of these ads had the headline:

“For sale: 70,000 Jews at $ 50 each. Guaranteed human beings. "

This happened at a time when the American press was still reluctant to report in the editorial section about the mass murder of the Jews. He also tried to mobilize the audience through his plays. In We will never die, for which Kurt Weill wrote the music, the European Jews appear as accusers of the world. In its reviews, the US press was forced to comment on what was going on in Germany for the first time.

Hecht supported the actions of the Jewish Agency in Palestine and an illegal immigrant ship was named Ben Hecht in his honor . Britain responded to its criticism of British policy on Palestine by boycotting the Hollywood films in which Hecht was involved. Later, Hecht was disappointed with Zionism and justified this in his controversial book Perfidy with the person of Rudolf Kasztner . Hecht accused Kasztner of working with Adolf Eichmann and leaving the Hungarian Jews to the National Socialists because their rescue stood in the way of the establishment of the State of Israel .

Awards

Filmography (selection)

Ben Hecht worked a lot as a script doctor , revising original stories and scripts that had already been completed, so that he was not named in the credits of a number of films that he wrote.

Director and screenwriter

Hecht directed and wrote all of these films with Charles MacArthur, except for Angels Over Broadway , on which he worked with co-director Lee Garmes .

Screenwriter

Author of literary templates

Publications (selection)

  • 1922: 1001 afternoons in Chicago
  • 1922: Fantazius Mallare, a Mysterious Oath
  • 1923: The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives
  • 1924: Kingdom of Evil
  • 1926: Broken Necks
  • 1939: The Book of Miracles
  • 1941: 1001 afternoons in New York
  • 1945: The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht
  • 1954: A Child of the Century (autobiography; German in excerpts: A Child of the Century, 1985)
  • Revolution in the water glass. Stories from Germany 1919. Berenberg, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-937834-16-8 .
  • From Chicago to Hollywood. Memories of the american dream. Selected, from the English and with an afterword by Helga Herborth. Berenberg, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-937834-35-1 .

literature

  • Doug Fetherling: The five lives of Ben Hecht. Toronto 1977, ISBN 0-919630-85-5 .
  • Jeffrey Brown Martin: Ben Hecht, Hollywood screenwriter (= Studies in Cinema. 27). UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor (Michigan) 1985, ISBN 0-8357-1571-X (university publication ).
  • William MacAdams: Ben Hecht. The Man Behind the Legend. Scribner, New York 1990, ISBN 0-684-18980-1 .
  • Adina Hoffman: Ben Hecht. Fighting words, moving pictures. Yale University Press, New Haven 2019, ISBN 978-0-300-18042-8 ( preview in Google Book Search).
  • Julien Gorbach: The notorious Ben Hecht. Iconoclastic writer and militant Zionist. Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana 2019, ISBN 978-1-55753-865-9 ( preview in Google Book Search; dissertation, University of Missouri, 2013).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ben Hecht: From Chicago to Hollywood. Memories of the american dream. Berenberg Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-937834-35-1 , p. 11.
  2. ↑ Marli Feldvoss: Ben Hecht was born 125 years ago - Hollywood's most sought-after screenwriter. In: Deutschlandfunk - calendar sheet. February 28, 2019, accessed February 28, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b Ben Hecht in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  4. ↑ David Denby: The Great Hollywood Screenwriter Who Hated Hollywood . In: The New Yorker . February 4, 2019 ( newyorker.com [accessed February 28, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Let's Make the Hero a MacArthur. In: Christopher Silvester (Ed.): The Penguin Book of Hollywood. Penguin Books, London 1998, ISBN 0-14-027527-4 .
  6. ↑ Ben Hecht ( Memento from February 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: kirjasto.sci.fi, accessed on March 1, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Pike, ben
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist, writer, screenwriter, and film director
DATE OF BIRTH February 28, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH April 18, 1964
Place of death New York City