A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (Kindle Edition)

Ben Hecht was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. Called “the Shakespeare of Hollywood”, he received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some 70 films and as a prolific storyteller, authored 35 books and created some of the most entertaining screenplays or plays in America. According to film historian Richard Corliss, he was “the” Hollywood screenwriter, someone who “personified Hollywood itself.” The Dictionary of Literary Biography – American Screenwriters, calls him “one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures.”In 1921, Hecht inaugurated a Daily News column called One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago While it lasted, the column was enormously influential. His editor, Henry Justin Smith, later said it represented a new concept in journalism: “the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly unimaginatively tol (more…)