Daniel Mainwaring

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Daniel Mainwaring (22 July 1902 - 31 January 1977) was a successful novelist/screenwriter. The Oakland-born screenwriter began as a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle before becoming a film publicist and finally a screenwriter.

He often wrote under the name Geoffrey Homes, the pen name under which he wrote the novel Build My Gallows High, which was made into the film noir classic Out of the Past. That hard-boiled novel was a departure for Mainwaring, who had previously written more traditional fare, as he explained in an interview with Pat McGilligan:

With Build My Gallows High, I wanted to get away from straight mystery novels. Those detective stories are a bore to write. You've got to figure out "whodunit". I'd get to the end and have to say whodunit and be so mixed up I couldn't decide myself. [1]

Under his own name, Mainwaring penned the first film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Part of what made its vision of an alien invasion of a small California town was its convincing evocation of small-town life. As director Joseph Losey, whose The Lawless was adapted by Mainwaring from the writer's own novel, The Voice of Stephen Wilder, noted:

This is one of the things that makes me very close to Dan Mainwaring--his experience of Americana, the nostalgia of the good things about small towns. I remember the smell of burning leaves at night in the autumn too. And I remember the smell of Christmas, the sparkle in the air at football games, and the sound of distant trains. And Dan remembers them all. He's a much underrated writer and he's a really quite noble man. He damaged himself with drink and he was very badly hurt by the blacklist. [2]

As a result of the McCarthy-era blacklist, Mainwaring's work on Ida Lupino's film noir The Hitch-Hiker was uncredited.

Toward the end of his career, in the 1960s, he wrote for TV shows like The Wild Wild West and Mannix. He didn't live long enough to see Out of the Past remade as Against All Odds (1984).