The announcement by Columbia Pictures that it has added to its staff of permanent (if such a thing is possible in the movie industry) writers and adaptors; Herbert Asbury, Monecure March, Becky Gardiner and Joel Sayre should convey some idea of how to become a writer for pictures. With the exception of Becky Cardiner who has since 1926 been writing steadily for the films all the others mentioned came from the ranks of journalism.
Asbury was a star reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and is also the author of such books as “Gangs of New York,” and “Barbary Coast” Joel Sayre also a Herald-Tribune ex-reporter wrote Rackety Rax and Hizzoner the Mayor” and March another New York newspaperman wrote many plays before he found a steady birth in Hollywood.
THE STAR TRIO
With very few exceptions most of the successful writers in Hollywood today graduated from reportorial ranks. The three highest paid scenarists on the Coast today are Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur and Gene Fowler and although this trio has, each in his own right, written plays, short stories and novels, each got his start on a newspaper. Fowler began his impudent but colorful career on the Denver Post while Hecht’s and MacArthur’s prose first felt ink in the pages of the Chicago Daily News.
OTHER EX-LEG MEN
A quick glance at the roster of Hollywood plot and dialogue men uncovers many ex-leg men who once chased news for their paper. Louis Weitzenkorn, Sam Ornitz, Arthur Kober, Aben Kandel, Edward Doherty, Evelyn Seeley, Nunnally Johnson, David Karsner and a host of others are among the select company that {SPAN}##{/SPAN} sizeable weekly pay checks from some studio.
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