He wrote biographies of Barrymore, Durante

Gene Fowler

It is the birthday of legendary newspaperman Gene Fowler (1890), who worked for The Denver Post and famously interviewed Buffalo Bill Cody, asking impertinent questions about his numerous love affairs. As city editor at the Rocky Mountain News, he allegedly kept a pistol loaded with blanks to help sleepy reporters stay alert. Later, he was a colleague in New York of iconic sports writer Damon Runyon at Hearst newspapers. During his Hollywood years, he wrote 17 screenplays, most of them in the 1930s, including The Mighty Barnum (1934), The Call of the Wild (1934), A Message to Garcia (1936), White Fang (1936) and Nancy Steele is Missing! (1937). He was a close friend of W.C. Fields and John Barrymore, about whom he wrote a biography, Good Night, Sweet Prince: The Life and Times of John Barrymore (1944). He wrote other biographies and memoirs, including The Great Magoo (1933) (with Ben Hecht), Father Goose: The Story of Mac Sennett (1934), Beau James: The Life and Times of Jimmy Walker (1949), and Schnozzola: The Story of Jimmy Durante (1951).

Ben Hecht wrote screenplays in two weeks

Ben Hecht

It is the birthday of writer Ben Hecht (1894), whose masterful screenplays like Scarface (1932), The Front Page (1934), Barbary Coast (1935), Gunga Din, Gone With the Wind, Some Like it Hot, Wuthering Heights (all 1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), A Farewell to Arms, Monkey Business (1957), Muntiny on the Bounty (1962) and Casino Royale (1967) entertained America for decades. He was fast and prolific. He could write a screenplay in two weeks, never spent more than eight weeks on a script and may have produced as many as 90 of them (some under pseudonyms because his work was banned in Britain because of his political stance over Palestine.) Hecht was a war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in Berlin during World War I. With fellow reporter Charles MacArthur, he wrote a stage play The Front Page (1928), which ran successfully on Broadway, and was produced as a film, then remade three times. The comedy film Gaily, Gaily (1969) is based on Hecht's autobiography, A Jew in Love (1931).