John Bright (screenwriter)

John Milton Bright (born January 1, 1908 in Baltimore , Maryland , † September 14, 1989 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American screenwriter .

biography

Bright dropped out of high school before graduation and worked as a clerk in Ben Hecht's office for the Chicago Daily News when he was 13 . He later worked at Kubec Glasmon , in whose pharmacy the most dangerous gangsters in Chicago met at the time and where he also met Al Capone . At the time he was also attending a banquet at the Chicago Commonwealth Hotel and witnessed Al Capone commissioning two renegade mafiosi to be killed with baseball bats . This incident was adopted as a scene in the film The Untouchables, made by Brian De Palma in 1987 .

Bright himself began as a screenwriter in 1931 and was nominated together with Kubec Glasmon for his debut , the template for the film The Public Enemy at the Academy Awards in 1931 for the Oscar for best original story.

Other well-known films based on his and Glasmon's templates were Leichtes Geld (1931), Der Schrei der Menge (1932) and Taxi! (1932). In 1933 he was one of the ten co-founders of the Screen Writers Guild and wrote the screenplay for You did him wrong (1933) in addition to twenty other templates . Among the film directors with whom he worked, were William A. Wellman , Alfred E. Green , Roy Del Ruth and Lowell Sherman .

In 1951 Bright was summoned by the Un-American Activities Committee , but went to Mexico before his hearing , from where he did not return for seven years. He then worked as a journalist and novelist.

In 2002 he published his memoirs with Worms in the Winecup .

Web links

• John Bright in the Internet Movie Database (English)