55 Facts About Richard Brooks

Richard Brooks attended public schools Joseph Leidy Elementary, Mayer Sulzberger Junior High School and West Philadelphia High School, graduating from the latter in 1929.

Richard Brooks dropped out and left home when he discovered that his parents were going into debt to pay for his tuition.

Richard Brooks rode freight trains around the East and Midwest for a period of time, eventually returning to Philadelphia to seek work as a newspaper reporter.

Richard Brooks wrote sports for the Philadelphia Record and later joined the staff of the Atlantic City Press-Union.

Richard Brooks moved to New York to work for the World-Telegram; shortly afterward he took a job with radio station WNEW for a larger paycheck.

Richard Brooks began writing plays in 1938 and tried directing for Long Island's Mill Pond Theater in 1940.

Richard Brooks did not find film work but was hired by the NBC affiliate to write original stories and read them for a daily fifteen-minute broadcast called Sidestreet Vignettes.

Richard Brooks never served overseas during the war, instead working in the Marine Corps film unit at Quantico, Virginia, and at times at Camp Pendleton, California.

Richard Brooks found time to write a novel, The Brick Foxhole, a searing portrait of some stateside soldiers who were tainted by religious and racial bigotry, and opposed to homosexuals.

Richard Brooks's book was published in 1945 to favorable reviews.

Richard Brooks provided an uncredited screen story for The Killers, which introduced actor Burt Lancaster.

Richard Brooks wrote the scripts for two other Hellinger films, notably Brute Force, starring Lancaster.

Huston and Richard Brooks had both worked together previously in the uncredited rewrite for The Killers, and Huston would be the only co-writer Richard Brooks ever had.

Richard Brooks wrote two more novels shortly after the war, The Boiling Point and The Producer, a thinly disguised portrait of Mark Hellinger.

Richard Brooks wrote two screenplays for the studio before he was given the opportunity.

Richard Brooks recounted useful advice he received just before his directorial debut from cinematographer Karl Freund while speaking at the American Film Institute.

At its core was an issue Richard Brooks cared about: the consolidation of the newspaper industry and its effect on the diversity of voices in the press.

Richard Brooks directed four more films before achieving an unqualified hit with Blackboard Jungle starring Glenn Ford.

Richard Brooks chose to begin and end the film with the song "Rock Around the Clock", bringing rock 'n' roll to a major Hollywood production for the first time and sparking a No 1 hit for Bill Haley and the Comets.

In 1955, Richard Brooks was one of four American auteur filmmakers named as "rebels" by the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema.

Richard Brooks determined to avoid writing original screenplays and focused on adaptations of best-sellers or classic novels.

Richard Brooks later noted that adapting a novel gave him a head start on developing the story structure required for a screenplay.

Richard Brooks spent the last third of his film career working in relative independence.

Richard Brooks followed the success of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with an independent production for United Artists of Elmer Gantry, based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis.

Richard Brooks adapted and directed another Tennessee Williams play, Sweet Bird of Youth.

Richard Brooks had spent years writing the script and planning the most expensive project of his career.

Richard Brooks had assembled a stellar cast led by Peter O'Toole, Eli Wallach, Jack Hawkins, Paul Lukas, and James Mason.

Richard Brooks worked quickly and within a year released The Professionals, which became Columbia's biggest hit that year.

Richard Brooks landed the property of the decade when author Truman Capote selected him to adapt his best-selling book In Cold Blood.

Once again rejecting the methodical pace that had slowed him with other productions, Richard Brooks worked quickly to adapt the "nonfiction novel," as Capote called it.

Richard Brooks rejected Columbia's suggestion that he hire stars to play the killers and instead cast two relative unknowns, Scott Wilson and Robert Blake.

Richard Brooks resisted the studio on another point, shooting the film in black and white rather than color because he thought it was a more frightening medium.

Richard Brooks used locations where the events occurred, including the house where the family had been killed.

Richard Brooks received double Oscar nominations; cinematographer Conrad Hall and composer Quincy Jones were nominated.

Richard Brooks intended the film to be a commentary on the perceptions of veterans from both World War II and the Vietnam War.

Richard Brooks intended to make Teasle a more sympathetic character, who at the end of the film would have ordered his men to drop their guns to try to reason with John Rambo before Rambo was shot by unknown gunman.

Richard Brooks based his original screenplay on the endurance horse races popular at the turn of the century.

Richard Brooks ended his career with Wrong Is Right, a satire about the news media and world unrest starring Sean Connery, and a gambling addiction film with Ryan O'Neal and Catherine Hicks in Fever Pitch.

Richard Brooks himself had been a sportswriter when a young man.

Richard Brooks tried developing other projects in the last years of his life.

Richard Brooks suffered from heart ailments and a stroke before dying at his home in 1992 at the age of 79.

Previously, Richard Brooks had been married for 11 years to Harriette Levin, a relationship that ended in divorce.

Richard Brooks hated bigotry, which was a central theme of his novel The Brick Foxhole, his co-written screenplay for Storm Warning, and his first western, The Last Hunt.

Richard Brooks saw Blackboard Jungle as encouraging teachers to continue striving to help their students and as reassuring them that they can make a difference.

Richard Brooks chafed against the Production Code's limitations on subject matter and expression.

Richard Brooks responded by becoming a fast and efficient filmmaker, operating with a tight budget and often forgoing a high up-front salary in exchange for a guarantee of control.

Richard Brooks was developing a reputation as a hard-driving, difficult and perpetually angry man as early as his tenure with radio station WNEW in the late 1930s.

Debbie Reynolds recounts that, while as a young and relatively inexperienced actress filming The Catered Affair, Richard Brooks hit her in the face and had to be pulled away from further assault by the assistant director.

Richard Brooks readily acknowledged that he was a trying husband and that his work was the most important activity in his life.

Richard Brooks was not interested in Hollywood's social scene, preferring to entertain guests at his home with tennis and movies when he wasn't working on screenplays or other projects.

Richard Brooks was one of the relatively few filmmakers whose careers bridged the transition from the classic studio system to the independent productions that marked the 1960s and beyond.

Richard Brooks was among the postwar writer-directors who made some of their best films as they struggled to break free of industry censorship.

Richard Brooks's legacy is that of a filmmaker who sought independence in a collaborative art and tried to bring his own vision to the screen.

Richard Brooks was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California, a few steps away from the graves of his parents.

The quote was chosen by his step-daughter, film editor Tracy Granger, as Richard Brooks always identified most strongly as a writer.