Ben Hecht

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Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was a prolific Hollywood screenwriter, even though he professed disdain for the motion picture industry. He was nominated six times for the Academy Award, winning twice, in 1929 and in 1936.

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[edit] Life and career in Hollywood

Hecht was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and as a young man moved to Chicago, where he became a reporter and, eventually, a short-story writer and novelist. He eventually landed in New York, where he met movie mogul David O. Selznick. The two were to be lifelong friends and frequent collaborators.

Early in his career, he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News. There he published the sensational column 1001 Afternoons in Chicago. While working at the newspaper, he met and befriended Maxwell Bodenheim. They would remain lifelong friends.

While at the Chicago Daily News, Hecht famously broke the Ragged Stranger Murder Case story. Army war hero Carl Wanderer and his wife had been assaulted by a ragged stranger. His wife and the stranger were killed in the struggle. Hecht’s investigation revealed that the stranger was actually a drifter named Al Watson whom Wanderer had hired to stage a holdup. Wanderer admitted he was a homosexual and had planned the murder of his pregnant wife. He was sentenced to death by hanging and was executed on March 19, 1921.

While in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently arrived in Los Angeles. "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots," it read. "Don't let this get around."

Hecht eventually moved to Hollywood, where he scripted Josef von Sternberg's gangster story Underworld in 1927, and won an Oscar for his work at the first Academy Awards presentation. His plays include Twentieth Century and The Front Page, both of which he wrote with frequent collaborator Charles MacArthur. The latter was filmed four times, most notably as Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday in 1940. Much of Hecht's later work was uncredited, as he worked as a "script doctor".

Hecht had an early talk show on television in the New York metropolitan area in the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote the book for the 1953 Broadway musical Hazel Flagg.

[edit] Jewish and anti-Holocaust activism

"Blood for goods"
proposal

Background
Auschwitz · The Holocaust
Hungary:WWII · Jews in Hungary

People and events
Aid and Rescue Committee
Kurt Becher
Joel Brand
Adolf Eichmann
Malchiel Gruenwald
Heinrich Himmler
Rudolf Kastner · Kastner train
Joel Teitelbaum
Rudolf Vrba
Vrba-Wetzler report
Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl
Alfréd Wetzler

Sources
Yehuda Bauer
John Conway
Ben Hecht
Raul Hilberg
Miroslav Karny
Ruth Linn

Categories
Category:The Holocaust

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Ben Hecht was a great supporter of Zeev Jabotinsky and the right-wing Revisionist Zionism movement of Menachem Begin. He subsequently wrote the book Perfidy, dramatizing the failure to rescue Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, and the roles of the Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner and others in leadership positions in the Hungarian Jewish community. This issue was the subject of a famous libel trial, when the Israeli government sued a writer who accused Kastner, at the time a government minister, of having collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Although the court initially held that these accusations were correct, on appeal the verdict of collaboration was reversed by a split 3-2 decision in the Supreme Court. However the Supreme court upheld the decision of the lower court that Kastner saved Kurt Becher, a major German war criminal, from the punishment awaiting him at Nurenberg. The case remains controversial.[1] [2] [3] [4] and it is not universally accepted that Hecht's account can be accepted as fair.

Hecht also opposed the social-democratic policies of Israel's first two prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, and of the Jewish Agency for what he regarded as their complicit silence and co-operation with the British during World War II in not doing more to rescue Jews and open the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. He spoke out against the lack of interest in saving the Jews trapped in Europe during the Holocaust. He purchased newspaper advertising in New York's newspapers to publicize the fate of Hitler's victims. In one such "advertisement" with the headline: "FOR SALE: 70,000 JEWS AT $50 APIECE GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS" explaining that three and a half million dollars would rescue the then trapped Romanian Jews (quoted in his work Perfidy, pp. 191-192). However, Stephen Wise made a public statement in the name of the American Jewish Congress denying the "confirmation" of the offer from the Romanian government.

Ben Hecht's was a close associate of Hillel Kook (also known as Peter Bergson) - an ETZEL emissary to America. Hecht wrote in Perfidy that he used to be a scriptwriter until his meeting with Bergson, when he accidentally bumped into history - i.e. the burning need to do anything possible to save the doomed Jews of Europe (paraphrase from Perfidy). After meeting Hillel Kook Ben Hecht dedicated himself to working with Kook's rescue group and after the war ended he continued to work with Kook on establishment of the State of Israel. Kook's rescue group purchased ad space in major US newspapers and Ben Hecht wrote most of the ads, which were designed to call for immediate rescue action. In Perfidy and in other writings Ben Hecht was saddened by the negative reaction of mainstream American Jewish leaders toward rescue, and perceived them as pompous and more involved with petty aspects of Jewish politics and post-war Zionist issues than investing their talents, time and connections into rescue of their doomed brethren across the Atlantic. Together with Kurt Weil and other top level Broadway and Hollywood contacts he produced the pageant We Shall Never Die, which was shown in Madison Square Garden and in numerous cities across America, including Washington, where Eleanor Roosevelt and many government leaders saw it. The pageant was intensely opposed by major Jewish leaders like Stephen Wise, and they tried to assure it is not shown[1]. In spite of considerable obstruction the Bergson Group's activism bore fruit, although much less and much later than what Kook, Hecht and their colleagues expected[2]. The Bergson Group had considerable support in Washington and after long delay the activism resulted in President Roosevelt establishing the War Refugee Board (WRB), which ultimately supported the Wallenberg mission to Budapest. According to history books, such as those by David Wyman and Rafael Medoff, over 200,000 people were rescued as a result of the Bergson Group - probably mostly in Hungary. In contrast to historians like Wyman and Medoff, noted Israeli historian Professor Yehuda Bauer, whom many consider to be the authority on the Holocaust, categorically stated that Hillel Kook (and by implication members of his team, such as Ben Hecht) didn't save anyone[3].

After the war ended Ben Hecht produced another major pageant, this time about establishment of the State of Israel, called A Flag is Born.

[edit] Quotes

How My Egoism Died, From: A Child in the Century

A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God's incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands.

Other famous quotes

  • In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
  • The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
  • People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
  • When asked by his new wife's discomfited parents "Why didn't you tell us you were a Jew?", Hecht responded "I was afraid you would think I was bragging."
  • One of the finest things ever done by the mob was the crucifixion of Christ. Intellectually, it was a splendid gesture. But trust the mob to bungle. If I'd had charge of executing Christ, I'd have handled it differently. You see, what I'd have done was had him shipped to Rome and fed to the lions. They never could make a Savior out of mincemeat! - A Jew in Love
  • Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
  • There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age. (A Guide for the Bedevilled)
  • The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them. (Perfidy)

[edit] Academy Award nominations

[edit] Writing filmography

[edit] Books (partial list)

  • 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, McGee/Covici, (1922)
  • Fantazius Mallare, a Mysterious Oath, 174 pp., Pascal Covici (1922)
  • The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives w/ illustrations by Wallace Smith, 256 pp. Boni & Liveright (1923)
  • Kingdom of Evil, 211pp., Pascal Covici (1924)
  • Broken Necks { Containing More 1001 Afternoons }, 344pp., Pascal Covici (1926)
  • The Book of Miracles, 465 pp., Viking Press (1939)
  • 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, 370 pp., Viking Press (1941) ASIN B0007E7X9K
  • The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht, 524 pp., Crown (1945)
  • Gaily, Gaily, Signet (November 1, 1969) ISBN
  • A Child of the Century 672 pp. Plume (May 30, 1985) ISBN
  • Perfidy 288 pp. Milah Press, Inc. (April 1, 1997) ISBN
  • The Front Page, Samuel French Inc Plays (January 1, 1998) ISBN
  • A Guide for the Bedevilled 216 pp. Milah Press, Incorporated (September 1, 1999) ISBN-X
  • Erik Dorn
  • Count Bruga
  • A Jew in Love

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Books on Hillel Kook by Prof. David Wyman and Dr. Rafael Medoff
  2. ^ Larry Jarvik circa mid 1970-s video interview with Hillel Kook: Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die
  3. ^ conversation with Professor Bauer at Yad Vashem, circa 2005

[edit] References

  • Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers, 146. 

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reading

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