After having "landed" in Hollywood, the newly established screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (he later wrote Citizen Kane) sent a cable from Hollywood to his friend and colleague, the playwright Ben Hecht in New York, which read: "There are millions to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Hecht went to Hollywood and created some of the greatest film scripts ever written.
Ben Hecht´s professional activities before becoming a successful playwright are quite interesting, especially for the german audience of this blog. Shortly after Word War I, being a journalist, he was sent to Germany in order to meet and write about the political and military class. He interviewed Friedrich Ebert, the famous president of the republic, but for this he had to pay 500 Dollars as bribe money.
ReplyDeletehttp://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hecht
We wouldn´t find this detail in the article about Friedrich Ebert, neither in the official history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, of which Ebert is recognized as an exemplary member.