A. I. Bezzerides

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A.I. Bezzerides
Born:	August 9, 1908 Samsun, Ottoman Empire
Died:	January 1, 2007 Los Angeles
Occupation:	Novelist & Screenwriter

A.I. Bezzerides, (August 9, 1908—January 1, 2007), was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for writing action motion pictures.

He was born Albert Isaac Bezzerides in Samsun, Ottoman Empire (now in Turkey), to a Greek-Armenian family[1][2][3] who immigrated to America before he was two. He wrote the novel The Long Haul (ca. 1938), which got him into the screenwriting business. He wrote such action feature movies as They Drive by Night (1940), Desert Fury (1947), Thieves' Highway (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), Track of the Cat (1954), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). He was one of the co-creators of the western television series The Big Valley.

In 1940, Warner Bros. offered Bezzerides $2,000 for movie rights to his 1938 novel The Long Haul. He learned later that the script based on his book had already been written. The film, They Drive By Night, starred Humphrey Bogart and George Raft.

The studio also offered Bezzerides a contract to be a screenwriter at a salary of $300 a week. Bezzerides, who at the time was working as a communications engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, later wrote: "I had no idea whether it was guilt or conscience, or greed to swindle more stories out of me, that motivated Warner Bros. to offer me a seven-year contract ... Whatever their reason, I grabbed their offer so I could quit my putrid career as a communications engineer by becoming a writer, writing scripts in an entirely new world."

His first film credit was 1942's Juke Girl, which starred Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan.

Bezzerides had begun writing short stories as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. He was first published in a 1935 issue of Story Magazine, which printed his story titled Passage Into Eternity.