Ben Hecht
American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century was shaped by a wave of writers who moved fluidly between newspapers, novels, the stage, and Hollywood. Ben Hecht was one of those figures, born on February 28, 1894, in New York City, and educated at Washington Park High School before making his way into the professional world.
Hecht built a career that crossed nearly every form of English-language storytelling available to him. He worked as a journalist, a novelist, a playwright, a screenwriter, a film director, and a film producer — a range that was unusual even for an era when writers often wore more than one hat. That breadth meant he was contributing to the press, to fiction, to the stage, and to cinema, sometimes in overlapping periods of his life. Few writers of his generation moved between so many distinct crafts and continued producing work in each of them over such an extended stretch.
His work in film earned him particular recognition from the industry and from critics. He received the Academy Award for Best Story, one of the more specific distinctions the film industry offered to writers who originated a narrative. Beyond Hollywood's own recognition, he also received New York Film Critics Circle Awards and Locarno International Film Festival Awards, which placed his work in front of audiences and juries outside the studio system. The Writers Guild of America honored him with the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement, a peer recognition from within the craft itself rather than from producers or box-office figures.
Hecht died on April 18, 1964, in New York City, the same city where he'd been born seventy years earlier. The Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement stands as a pointed piece of evidence about how his fellow screenwriters assessed his contribution to the craft — it's a recognition that comes from practitioners who understood what the work actually involved, which makes it a fitting note on which to close a career as varied and long-running as his.
Quotes by Ben Hecht
A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling 'Thief.' If he is wise he has not been impoverished. Nor has the fool been enriched. The thief flatters us by stealing. We flatter him by complaining.
I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like when life's hidden. Gives you a chance to imagine nice things. Nicer than they are.
There’s a thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die—their silence. For a while an echo stays in your ear. You hear a laugh, a knowing phrase or two, a certain quality of enunciation. Then, nothing. Another death takes place—voices.
There is hardly one in three of us who live in the cities who is not sick with unused self.
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
In pre-movie days, the business of peddling lies about life was spotty and unorganized. It was carried on by the cheaper magazines, dime novels, the hinterland preachers and whooping politicians.
Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of cliche.