Seton I. Miller

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seton I. Miller (1902 - 1974) was a Hollywood screenwriter and producer. During his career, he worked with many notable American film directors, such as Howard Hawks and Michael Curtiz.

[edit] Career

Miller began writing stories for silent films in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, he tended toward the crime genre, collaborating with Hawks and others on one of the most groundbreaking of such pictures, Scarface (1932). At the time of the Production Code's enforcement in 1934, Warner Bros. called in Miller to supply the dialogue and storylines they needed to adapt their pre-Code bad-guys to the new system. His scripts for G-Men (1935) and Bullets or Ballots (1936) successfully transformed big screen gangsters James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, respectively, into crime-fighters. Often he adapted popular plays or novels, as with Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear for Fritz Lang's 1944 film. He worked regularly in Hollywood until 1959, when he helped write the thriller The Last Mile, but then left the industry for more than a decade. In his seventies, he made a brief return, providing screenplays for a horror film, A Knife for the Ladies, and for Disney's Pete's Dragon.

[edit] Awards

He received an Oscar with Fred Niblo, Jr. for their 1930 screen adaptation of Martin Flavin's play The Criminal Code.
He received a second Academy Award in 1941 for the screenplay of Here Comes Mr. Jordan.