Edwin Justus Mayer (1896-1960) was a journalist and occasional playwright who, quite enterprisingly, wrote an autobiography when he was 25 and had achieved very little. From 1927 to 1945 he worked on a number of Hollywood films; in his own words, “I never gave up the stage, the stage gave me up. The pictures gave me a living and the theatre wouldn’t. I see no shame in using your professional weapons to make a living.” His crowning achievement was his final screenplay, for Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be (1945).
Mayer had earlier been one of the three writers credited with the script for In Gay Madrid.
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