George Froeschel

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George Froeschel (born March 8, 1891 in Vienna as Georg Fröschel , † November 22, 1979 in Los Angeles ) was an Austrian - American writer , screenwriter and Oscar winner .

Live and act

Career and writing in Europe

George Froeschel, son of a Jewish Viennese banker, wrote the novella Ein Protest while still at high school . He completed a doctorate in law and was the author of official kuk war reports during the First World War . In 1918 he wrote his first novel, The Whimsical Impostor , an upscale entertainment novel, like most of his other works. Some of his stories were filmed in the silent film era, around 1921 in Vienna's The Key to Power and Roswolsky's Beloved in Berlin .

Between 1922 and 1924 he was chief dramaturge at UFA in Berlin , then editor at Ullstein Verlag . In 1931 Paramount bought his book A Completely Different Woman to make a film with Marlene Dietrich as the leading actress. However, this did not materialize.

Emigration and career in Hollywood

In 1936 Froeschel emigrated to the United States . He first worked in the picture editor of the digest magazine Coronet in Chicago . From 1937 he tried to get a job at one of Hollywood's film companies , which was only successful in April 1939 when Sidney Franklin took him under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Soon there was a conversation with the head of the MGM, Louis B. Mayer , who commissioned him to supervise "three Jewish writers who have fled Germany" and to familiarize them with the local conditions. These were Walter Mehring , Alfred Polgar and Alfred Döblin , who were employed at MGM for a year on a probationary basis for a hundred dollars a week.

From 1939, but especially after the USA entered World War II , the production of anti-Nazi propaganda films flourished. For six such films, Froeschel was commissioned to write the scripts because of his knowledge of the conditions in the “enemy territory” from which he emigrated. As early as 1940 he achieved a great success with The Mortal Storm , which was very beneficial for his further career. When writing scripts together with other writers, Froeschel's strength was the drafting of the plot and the development of coherent plots. The "narrative film" that was predominant at the time corresponded exactly to his talents, which were recognized with numerous awards, including the Writer's Guild Award .

When adapting Mrs. Miniver (1942) to a screenplay for which he was commissioned in 1940, he asked Döblin, who was still under Froeschel's supervision, to write down his ideas about a scene. He did this very well, so the scene was used in the script - it was the "Dunkerque Episode". The quartet of authors - but without Döblin - received the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for the film, which tells the story of the first year of the war from the perspective of a London housewife . The great success led MGM to continue their secret ( The Miniver Story ) in 1950 . Froeschel received an Oscar nomination in 1942 for Found Years ( Random Harvest ), one of the "25 moneymaking films of the year". At Froeschel's request, Döblin also contributed a few pages to this.

Froeschel was also in private contact with other emigrants from German-speaking countries in Hollywood. Especially Vicki Baum , whom he knew from Ullstein-Verlag, Fritz Kohner , Billy Wilder , Gina Kaus , Ernst Deutsch and Leopold Jessner were among his close friends. Through his work at MGM he was also in contact with Alfred Polgar and Alfred Döblin. After 1940 the Werfels , Feuchtwangers and Fritzi Massary were friends of his house. George Froeschel lived with his Berlin-born wife Else in a canyon in Beverly Hills .

George Froeschel's estate is at Brandeis University in Waltham , Massachusetts .

Literary works

  • The key to power , Vienna [u. a.] 1919
  • The strange impostor , Vienna [a. a.] 1919
  • Roswolsky's mistress , Berlin 1921
  • The coral throne , Frankfurt a. M. 1921
  • Admiral Bobby , Berlin 1923
  • The priest and the woman , Berlin 1923
  • Woman in Flames , Berlin 1925
  • The most terrible experience and other stories , Berlin-Charlottenburg 1926
  • Honeymoon like never before , Berlin 1928
  • The judge without mercy , Berlin 1930
  • A completely different woman , Berlin 1931
  • Heaven, my shoes! , Leipzig 1932
  • Farewell to the stars , Vienna [a. a.] 1937
  • A woman was in the city , Berlin 1951
  • George Froeschel tells from his life , in: Filmkritik, Volume 27, March 1983, No. 315

Filmography

Literary template

script

Awards

literature

  • Rudolf Ulrich: Austrians in Hollywood. Verlag Filmarchiv Austria, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-901932-29-1 , p. 148 u. 149 (used as source)
  • Kay Less : 'In life, more is taken from you than given ...'. Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. ACABUS-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 175 f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut G. Asper: Something Better Than Death - Film Exile in Hollywood. Schüren Verlag, Marburg 2002, p. 430

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Froeschel, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Froeschel, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1979
Place of death los Angeles