Editing Ben Hecht (section)

===Screenwriter===
[[File:Caricature of Ben Hecht by Gene Markey.jpg|thumb|Caricature of Ben Hecht in 1923, drawn by fellow Chicago reporter (and later screenwriter) [[Gene Markey]]]]
Film historian [[Richard Corliss]] writes, "Ben Hecht was ''the'' Hollywood screenwriter&nbsp;... [and] it can be said without too much exaggeration that Hecht personifies Hollywood itself." Movie columnist [[Pauline Kael]] says, "between them, Hecht and [[Jules Furthman]] wrote most of the best American talkies".<ref name=Corliss>Corliss, Richard, ''Talking Pictures'', (1974) Overlook Press</ref>{{rp|5}} His movie career can be defined by about twenty credited screenplays he wrote for Hawks, Hitchcock, Hathaway, Lubitsch, Wellman, Sternberg, and himself. He wrote many of those with his two regular collaborators, [[Charles MacArthur]] and [[Charles Lederer]].

While living in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from screenwriter friend [[Herman J. Mankiewicz]], who had recently moved to Los Angeles. "Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots", it read. "Don't let this get around." As a writer in need of money, he traveled to Hollywood as Mankiewicz suggested.<ref name=Siegel/>

;Working in Hollywood
He arrived in Los Angeles and began his career at the beginning of the sound era by writing the story for [[Josef von Sternberg]]'s gangster movie [[Underworld (1927 film)|''Underworld'']] in 1927. For that first screenplay and story, he won an [[Academy Award]] for [[Best Original Screenplay]] in Hollywood's first Academy award ceremony.<ref name=Siegel/><ref name="Chicago">"Eugenie Leontovich, 93; actress, writer, director", ''[[Chicago Tribune]]'', April 4, 1993, pg. 6.</ref> Soon afterward, he became the "most prolific and highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood".<ref name=McCarthy>McCarthy, Todd. ''Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood'', Grove Press (1997) p. 132</ref>

Hecht spent from two to twelve weeks in Hollywood each year, "during which he earned enough money (his record was $100,000 in one month, for two screenplays) to live on for the rest of the year in New York, where he did what he considered his serious writing", writes film historian Carol Easton.<ref name=Easton>Easton, Carol, ''The Search for Sam Goldwyn'', (1976) William Morrow and Company</ref>{{rp|173}} Nonetheless, later in his career, "he was a writer who liked to think that his genius had been stifled by Hollywood and by its dreadful habit of giving him so much money".<ref name=Thomson1/>{{rp|267}}

Yet his income was as much a result of his skill as a writer as well as his early jobs with newspapers. As film historians Mast and Kawin wrote, "The newspaper reporters often seemed like gangsters who had accidentally ended up behind a typewriter rather than a tommy gun; they talked and acted as rough as the crooks their assignments forced them to cover&nbsp;... It is no accident that Ben Hecht, the greatest screenwriter of rapid-fire, flavorful tough talk, as well as a major comic playwright, wrote gangster pictures, prison pictures, and newspaper pictures."<ref name=Mast>Mast, Gerald, and Kawin, Bruce, ''A Short History of the Movies'', (2006) Pearson Longman</ref>

Hecht became one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters, able to write a full screenplay in two to eight weeks. According to [[Samuel Goldwyn]] biographer, Carol Easton, in 1931, with his writing partner [[Charles MacArthur]], he "knocked out ''[[The Unholy Garden]]'' in twelve hours. Hecht subsequently received a fan letter from producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr.:

{{blockquote|After reading your magnificent script, Mr. Goldwyn and I both wish to go on record with the statement that if ''The Unholy Garden'' isn't the finest motion picture Samuel Goldwyn has ever produced, the fault will be entirely ours. You have done your part superbly.}}

It was produced exactly as written, and 'became one of the biggest, yet funniest, bombs ever made by a studio'."<ref name=Easton/>{{rp|174}}

;Censorship, profit, and art
Despite his monetary success, however, Hecht always kept Hollywood at arms' length. According to film historian Gregory Black, "he did not consider his work for the movies serious art; it was more a means of replenishing his bank account. When his work was finished, he retreated to New York."<ref name=Black/>

At least part of the reason for this was due to the industry's system of censorship. Black writes, "as Mankiewicz, Selznick, and Hecht knew all too well, much of the blame for the failure of the movies to deal more frankly and honestly with life, lay with a rigid censorship imposed on the industry&nbsp;... [and] on the content of films during its golden era of studio production." Because the costs of production and distribution were so high, the primary "goal of the studios was profit, not art&nbsp;... [and] fearful of losing any segment of their audiences, the studios either carefully avoided controversial topics or presented them in a way that evaded larger issues", thereby creating only "harmless entertainment".<ref name=Black>Black, Gregory D. ''Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies'', Cambridge University Press (1996) pg. 5</ref>

According to historian David Thomson, "to their own minds, Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht both died morose and frustrated. Neither of them had written the great books they believed possible."<ref name=Thomson1>Thomson, David, ''The Whole Equation – A History of Hollywood'', (2005) Alfred A. Knopf</ref>{{rp|170}}

;with Howard Hawks
In an interview with director [[Howard Hawks]], with whom Hecht worked on many films, Scott Breivold elicited comments on the way they often worked:

{{blockquote|Breivold. Could you explain how the day-to-day writing goes on a script?

Hawks. Well, when Hecht and MacArthur and I used to work on a script, we'd sit in a room and work for two hours and then we'd play backgammon for an hour. Then we'd start again and one of us would be one character and one would be another character. We'd read our lines of dialogue and the whole idea was to try to stump the other people, to see if they could think of something crazier than you could.<ref name=Hawks>Hawks; Howard, Breivold, Scott. ''Howard Hawks – Interviews'', University Press of Mississippi (2006)</ref>}}

;with David O. Selznick
According to film historian Virginia Wexman,

{{blockquote|David Selznick had a flair for the dramatic, and no one knew that better than Ben Hecht. The two collaborated on some of Hollywood's biggest hits – movies like ''Gone With the Wind'' and ''Notorious'' and ''Duel in the Sun'' – and often enough, the making of those films was as rife with conflict as the films themselves<ref name=Wexman>Wexman, Virginia Wright. "Film and Authorship", Rutgers University Press (2003)</ref>{{rp|89}}}}

''[[Nothing Sacred (film)|Nothing Sacred]]'' is probably the "most famous of all the [[Carole Lombard]] films next to ''[[My Man Godfrey]]''", wrote movie historian James Harvey. And it impressed people at the time with its evident ambition "and Selznick determined to make the classiest of all screwball comedies, turned to Lombard as a necessity, but also to Ben Hecht, nearly the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood at the time, especially for comedy.&nbsp;... it was also the first screwball comedy to lay apparent claim to larger satiric meanings, to make scathing observations about American life and society."<ref name=Harvey>Harvey, James. ''Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges'', Da Capo Press (1998)</ref>{{rp|219}}

In an interview with [[Irene Selznick]], ex-wife of producer [[David O. Selznick]], she discussed the other leading screenwriters of that time:

{{blockquote|They all aspired to be Ben. The resourcefulness of his mind, his vitality were so enormous. His knowledge. His talent and ambition. He could tear through things, and he tore through life. They'd see this prodigious output of Ben's, and they'd think, "Oh, hell, I'm a bum." I think it must have been devastating. Ben did it to [[Charles MacArthur|MacArthur]], who died in time to save his reputation. And I'd hate to have been Herman [Mankiewicz], caught between [[George S. Kaufman|Kaufman]] and Hecht.<ref name=Meryman>[[Meryman, Richard]], ''Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz'' (1978), William Morrow</ref>{{rp|160}}}}

;with Ernst Lubitsch
According to James Harvey, [[Ernst Lubitsch]] felt uneasy in the world of playwright [[Noël Coward]].

{{blockquote|"If Coward could write his play for three particular actors, he reasoned to an interviewer, why couldn't it be rewritten for three others? It was at this point&nbsp;... that he turned to Ben Hecht&nbsp;... to work with him on the screenplay for ''[[Design for Living (film)|Design for Living]]''." It was the only Lubitsch-Hecht collaboration. Harvey adds, "Though Lubitsch must have been reassured by Hecht's taking the job. No writer in Hollywood had better credentials in the tough, slangy, specifically American style that Lubitsch wanted to impart to the Coward play. And together, they transformed it."<ref name=Harvey/>{{rp|57}}}}