Ben Hecht

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1894 age 0

   Born

2. 1932 age 38

   CreditScarfacescreenwriter

3. 1933 age 39

   CreditQueen Christinascreenwriter

4. 1938 age 44

   CreditAngels with Dirty Facesscreenwriter

5. 1939 age 45

   CreditGone with the Windscreenwriter

   CreditStagecoachscreenwriter

   CreditWuthering Heightsscreenwriter

6. 1940 age 46

   CreditForeign Correspondentscreenwriter

   CreditHis Girl Fridayscreenwriter

   CreditThe Shop Around the Cornerscreenwriter

7. 1944 age 50

   CreditLifeboatscreenwriter

8. 1945 age 51

   CreditSpellboundscreenwriter

9. 1946 age 52

   CreditGildascreenwriter

   CreditNotoriousscreenwriter

10. 1947 age 53

    CreditThe Paradine Casescreenwriter

11. 1948 age 54

    CreditRopescreenwriter

12. 1951 age 57

    CreditStrangers on a Trainscreenwriter

13. 1952 age 58

    CreditMonkey Businessscreenwriter

14. 1962 age 68

    CreditMutiny on the Bountyscreenwriter

15. 1963 age 69

    CreditCleopatrascreenwriter

16. 1964 age 70

    Died

17. 1974 age 70

    CreditThe Front Pagescreenwriter

• AHAlfred Hitchcock7 titles
• LCLeo G. Carroll4 titles
• WWWalter Wanger4 titles
• DSDorothy Spencer4 titles
• CMCharles MacArthur4 titles
• IBIrving Bacon3 titles
• DSDavid O. Selznick3 titles
• LGLee Garmes3 titles
• EMEdwin Maxwell3 titles
• WZWilliam H. Ziegler3 titles

• The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: ‘Who shall be in charge of telling the story.’

  Ben Hecht, CC BY-SA 4.0

• The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and, later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status.

  Ben Hecht, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

  Ben Hecht, CC BY-SA 4.0

• The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.

  Ben Hecht, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Most of my script-writing friends – I never had more than a handful—took eagerly to the bottle or the analyst’s couch, filled their extravagant ménages with threats of suicide, hurled themselves into hysterical amours. And some of them actually died in their forties and fifties. Among these were the witty Herman Mankiewicz and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the fine novelist.

  Ben Hecht, CC BY-SA 4.0

• I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of nonwriting writer hatched by the movies—as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers.

  Ben Hecht, CC BY-SA 4.0

Nationalities

United States

Cause of death

coronary thrombosis

Languages

English

Education

Washington Park High School