Hollywood’s invisible man

What do the following filmmakers have in common: Victor Fleming, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Lewis Milestone, Otto Preminger, Josef von Sternberg, George Stevens, Charles Vidor, King Vidor, Orson Welles and William Wyler? I know, it’s a toughie — and it isn’t much less tough if you consult IMDb. But the answer is that all of them made pictures from scripts that had been worked on by the same man. His name was Ben Hecht and, even today, 125 years after his birth, he’s regarded as the greatest screenwriter the movies ever had.

If you want some idea of how great that is, consider that between 1937 and 1940 Hecht wrote, co-wrote or rewrote more than 20 pictures — among them Gone With the Wind, His Girl Friday, It’s a Wonderful Life, Wuthering Heights, Nothing Sacred, The Goldwyn Follies and Gunga Din. I doubt whether there’s a film buff alive who doesn’t count at least one of those titles in their top ten.

Yet though Hecht believed that ‘90 per cent of the success of a movie lay in the writing of the script’, he wasn’t impressed with what he called ‘stirring up the bilge with my fountain pen… and rescuing, as they call it, the produce’. A hacked-off hack, Hecht kept a low profile. ‘Half my aversion to writing movies is removed,’ he told David Selznick, ‘if I don’t have to see my name on them.’

Hecht was born on the Lower East Side, although he always said that his life didn’t start until 1910 when, at 17, he fetched up in Chicago looking for work. The way he got his first gig, on the Daily Journal, will have today’s young media hopefuls weeping. A ‘red-nosed’ editor shook his hand, said he was going out to lunch and suggested that Hecht write him a dirty poem.