Former journalist and occasional novelist Cyril Joseph Hume (1900-1966) had a fairly workaday career as a Hollywood screenwriter. The high point of the 1930s was adapting Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and contributing to several of its sequels, and co-writing Flying Down to Rio (1933).
Then, in 1956, came Hume’s annus mirabilis. He wrote the screenplay for the science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet, and followed it up by co-writing the estimable Nicholas Ray picture Bigger Than Life.
Early in his career, Hume contributed dialogue to New Moon.
Arthur Reichman (1886-1944) was a successful playwright who dabbled in screenwriting during the 1930s.
Richman wrote a string of successful plays performed on Broadway in the 1920, including The Awful Truth (1922), which was filmed several times, most successfully with Cary Grant and Irene Dunn in 1937. In 1924, he was elected President of the Dramatists Guild of America.
Richman’s screen work was generally uninspiring, though he did work without credit on Imitation of Life (1934). For MGM, he contributed dialogue to A Lady’s Morals.
John Meehan (1890-1954) was a Canadian actor and dramatist with some limited success on Broadway who made his greatest mark as a screenwriter for MGM. His play Bless You, Sister (1927) was the source for Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931).
Meehan signed a contract with the studio in 1929, along with many other Broadway alumni. Over the next twenty years, he worked on many pictures, including A Free Soul (1931), Dinner at Eight (1933, uncredited) and Boy’s Town (1938).
Meehan worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals, Stage Mother, Babes in Arms and Three Daring Daughters.
Ivy Claudine Godber (1890-1943) was a British novelist and playwright (to little lasting effect, it would seem), who journeyed to Hollywood in 1929 to write for the talking pictures, where she found considerable success.
Signed up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West contributed to the scripts of some of the studio’s most successful films of the 30s and early 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933, uncredited), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Good Earth (1937), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest (both 1942). She shared Oscars for the last three pictures.
West worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals and, without credit, Maytime, The Firefly and The Chocolate Soldier.
Claudine West worked as a codebreaker during the First World War, and it is noticeable that Mrs Miniver and her screenplay for Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940) were as fervently anti-Nazi as might be expected from somone with brothers serving in the RAF at the time.
Gilbert Emery Bensley Pottle (1875-1945) was a successful author and playwright (sometimes under the name Emery Pottle) both before and during his career as a screen character actor. At least one of his plays, The Hero (1921), has been revived in the 21st century.
Following some stage acting, Emery made his first film, for Vitagraph, in 1921, but only appeared in one other silent film. From 1929 onwards, however, he accumulated around 80 credits.
Emery only appeared in one MGM musical, A Lady’s Morals, but he also contributed to the screenplays of a number of pictures, one of which was The Cuban Love Song.
John Howard Lawson (1894-1977) is usually discussed today as one of the Hollywood Ten, the group of Hollywood professionals, mostly writers, who were imprisoned for contempt of congress. Newsreel footage of Lawson’s appearance before HUAC, with J Parnell Thomas pounding the gavel and shouting “That is not the question, that is not the question” is the one most frequently played when the McCarthy Era is under discussion. And, unlike his nine colleagues, Lawson’s career never recovered from the blacklist; as he said, “I’m much more notorious, and extremely proud of that”.
Before HUAC, however, Lawson was a celebrated playwright and screenwriter, and one of the original organizers of the Screen Writers Guild. It was shortly after signing a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that Lawson worked, without credit, on the screenplay for Madam Satan.
It is difficult to attach a label to Elsie Jane Bierbower (1889-1956). She was, amongst other things, a stage and screen actor, a singer, a screenwriter, a lyricist, NBC’s first female announcer, an author, and one of the first people to entertain troops on the frontline, when she became known as ‘the sweetheart of the American Expeditionary Force’.
As ‘Baby Elsie’, Janis started singing at church aged two and a half. She made her stage debut aged six, in a professional production of East Lynne. Next came vaudeville, where she demonstrated her skill at impersonating celebrities. In 1906, she appeared on Broadway for the first time. By 1914, Janis was writing songs for herself and for other performers, including Vernon and Irene Castle.
After the United States joined in the First World War, Janis and a small troupe toured the battle zones; she even learned some French so she could entertain French troops.
She wrote a memoir in 1925, and by 1930 was writing for the cinema. She worked on the screenplay for Madam Satan, as well as contributing songs written in collaboration with Jack King.
During the Second World War, Janis toured for the troops again, even performing with Bob Hope, who was following where she had led.
Show business glamour was maintained to the very end. When Janis died in 1956, her friend Mary Pickford was at her bedside.
Abbie Jean MacPherson (1886-1946) acted in over 140 silent films and directed a couple, but is remembered for her work as a screenwriter, and in particular for writing 30 of Cecil B DeMille’s pictures.
MacPherson made her debut in 1908 in D W Griffith’s The Fatal Hour, and amassed all-but-one of her acting credits between then and 1917. In 1913, at the age of only 27, she wrote, directed and starred in The Tarantula, playing a Mexican young woman with a psychopathic bent.
After joining the Lasky Studio and acting in a couple of films for DeMille, he persuaded her to concentrate on writing. This led to, amongst other titles, Old Wives for New (1918), Male and Female (1919), The Ten Commandments (1923), The Plainsman (1936) and Union Pacific (1939).
One of the DeMille pictures worked on by MacPherson was Madam Satan. Not her finest hour, but possibly her craziest.
Harry A Grinde (1893-1979) was a vaudeville performer who found work as a director at MGM in the late twenties. From then until 1945 he directed around sixty generally low budget features for a variety of studios.
Early on, Metro occasionally used Grinde to work in partnership with tyro directors who had joined the studio directly from theatre work. For example, he co-directed The Bishop Murder Case (1930) with Broadway director David Burton.
Another such was Good News, which Grinde co-directed with Edgar J MacGregor, director of the original broadway production.
Grinde did not direct any additional musicals at Metro, being far more at home with westerns and thrillers, though he did, out of left field, write the screenplay for Babes in Toyland.
Dorothy Farnum (1897-1970) acted in a couple of films as a teenager, but realized that her real strength was writing. In 1919 she sold an original scenario to producer Harry Rapf, who would later be a colleague at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After a few years of journeyman work in which she learned her trade, Rapf hired Farnum to write Beau Brummel (1924). Star John Barrymore told a newspaper it was the best part he had ever been given, and the film launched Farnum’s reputation as an expert adapter of literary works.
Farnum became one of MGM’s top-earning writers, In 1926 her adaptation of the potboiler The Torrent was the first of several collaborations with Greta Garbo. It was described at the time as “the first picture with an unhappy ending to win a box-office success”.
Dorothy Farnum wrote two MGM musicals, providing the stories for Call of the Flesh and A Lady’s Morals. Shortly afterwards she relocated to Europe, writing a screenplay in French (she was fluent in a number of languages, and had previously written the French version of A Lady’s Morals), and then working for Gaumont-British. In 1934 she retired to the south of France.
