51 Facts About Ben Hecht

Ben Hecht was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist.

Ben Hecht received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films.

Ben Hecht received the first Academy Award for Best Story for Underworld.

Ben Hecht provided story ideas for such films as Stagecoach.

Ben Hecht became an active Zionist after meeting Peter Bergson, who came to the United States near the start of World War II.

In 1954, Ben Hecht published his highly regarded autobiography, A Child of the Century.

In 1983,19 years after his death, Ben Hecht was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Ben Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Belarusian-Jewish immigrants.

The family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where Ben Hecht attended high school.

When Ben Hecht was in his early teens, he would spend the summers with an uncle in Chicago.

Ben Hecht lived with relatives, and started a career in journalism.

Ben Hecht won a job with the Chicago Daily Journal after writing a profane poem for publisher John C Eastman to entertain guests at a party.

Ben Hecht was an excellent reporter who worked on several Chicago papers.

From 1918 to 1919, Ben Hecht served as war correspondent in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News.

In 1921, Ben Hecht inaugurated a Daily News column, One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago.

Ben Hecht's was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors, his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death.

Ben Hecht knew Margaret Anderson, and contributed to her Little Review, the magazine of the Chicago "literary renaissance", and to Smart Set.

Ben Hecht explained, 'When I say lying, I mean she isn't telling the truth.

Ben Hecht wrote many of those with his two regular collaborators, Charles MacArthur and Charles Lederer.

Ben Hecht 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 in 1927.

Ben Hecht spent from two to twelve weeks in Hollywood each year, "during which he earned enough money 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.

Ben Hecht became one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters, able to write a full screenplay in two to eight weeks.

Ben Hecht subsequently received a fan letter from producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr.

Ben Hecht did it to MacArthur, who died in time to save his reputation.

Ben Hecht had a lively sense of humor and an uncanny ability to ground even the most outrageous stories successfully with credible, fast-paced plots.

Ben Hecht was best known for two specific and contrasting types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies.

Ben Hecht married Marie Armstrong, a gentile, in 1915, when he was 21, and they had a daughter, Edwina, who would grow up to be an actress.

Ben Hecht later met Rose Caylor, a writer, and together they left Chicago in 1924, moving to New York.

Ben Hecht married Caylor that same year, and they remained married until Hecht's death in 1964.

On July 30,1943, Ben and Rose had a daughter, Jenny Hecht, who became an actress at the age of 8.

Ben Hecht died of a drug overdose on March 25,1971, at the age of 27, shortly after completing her third movie appearance.

Ben Hecht was among a number of signers of a formal statement, issued in July 1941, calling for the "utmost material assistance by our government to England, the Soviet Union, and China".

Ben Hecht claimed that he had never experienced anti-Semitism in his life, and claimed to have had little to do with Judaism, but "was drawn back to the Lower East Side late in life and lived for a while on Henry Street, where he could absorb the energy and social consciousness of the ghetto", wrote author Sanford Sternlicht.

Ben Hecht wrote in his book, Perfidy, that he used to be a scriptwriter until his meeting with Bergson, when he accidentally bumped into history: that is, the burning need to do anything possible to save the doomed Jews of Europe.

Ben Hecht "took on a ten-year commitment to publicize the atrocities befalling his own religious minority, the Jews of Europe, and the quest for survivors to find a permanent home in the Middle East".

Ben Hecht was a member of the Bergson Group, an Irgun front group in the United States run by Peter Bergson, which was active in raising money for the Irgun's activities and disseminating Irgun propaganda.

Ben Hecht wrote the script for the Bergson Group's production of A Flag is Born, which opened on September 5,1946, at the Alvin Playhouse in New York City.

The proceeds from the play were used to purchase a ship that was renamed the MS Ben Hecht, which carried 900 Holocaust survivors to Palestine in March 1947.

The SS Ben Hecht later became the flagship of the Israeli Navy.

In October 1948, the Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association, a trade union representing about 4,700 British film theaters, announced a ban on all films in which Ben Hecht had a role.

Ben Hecht cut his fee in half and wrote screenplays under pseudonyms or completely anonymously to evade the boycott, which was lifted in 1952.

Ben Hecht was noted for confronting producers and directors when he wasn't satisfied with the way they used his scripts.

The story of how Scarface came to be written represents Ben Hecht's writing style in those days.

Ben Hecht worked without credit on Hitchcock's next two films, The Paradine Case and Rope.

Spellbound, the first time Hitchcock worked with Ben Hecht, is notable for being one of the first Hollywood movies to deal seriously with the subject of psychoanalysis.

Ben Hecht sought out director Victor Fleming, who, at the time, was directing The Wizard of Oz.

Ben Hecht was not credited for his contribution, and Sidney Howard received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

Dear Ben Hecht: There are only seven titles needed for Gone With the Wind and I am certain you could bat them out in a few minutes, especially since a few of them can be based on titles you wrote while you were here.

Ben Hecht wrote the first screenplay for Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale.

All the pages in Ben Hecht's papers are gripping, but the material from April 1964 is phenomenal, and it's easy to imagine it as the basis for a classic Bond adventure.

Ben Hecht's treatment of the romance element is powerful and convincing, even with the throwaway ending, but there is a distinctly adult feel to the story.