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2 unusual facts about Ben Hecht


Anthony Buckeridge

The deftly worded farce and delightful understatement of his narratives has been compared to the work of P. G. Wodehouse, Ben Hecht and Ben Travers.

Carl Wanderer

The case was cracked in part by famed Chicago-based reporter and future screenwriter Ben Hecht, of the Chicago Daily News and reporter and future playwright Charles MacArthur of the Chicago Examiner.


Hubbard Street

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's hit play "The Front Page" was set in the Chicago Criminal Courts Building on 54 West Hubbard Street.

International Fortean Organization

The original society included many of New York's literati including Booth Tarkington, Ben Hecht, Clarence Darrow, Alexander Woollcott and Dorothy Parker.

Ken Ludwig

Other Broadway credits include Moon Over Buffalo (1995) with Carol Burnett and Lynn Redgrave (on Broadway) and Frank Langella and Joan Collins at the Old Vic in London, the book for a musical adaptation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (2001), and a new adaptation of the classic Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play, Twentieth Century (2004) starring Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche.

Leo Brady

Directed by Mark Robson and with a screenplay by Philip Yordan, with post-primary scenes added by writers Ben Hecht and Charles Brackett and directed by Charles Vidor, the film was a rather notorious failure, due in no small part to the creative team’s inability to realize the story’s thematic critique of organized religion and the way society fails to respond to the less-fortunate poor.

Nikita Balieff

He appeared in the Ben Hecht - Charles MacArthur film Once in a Blue Moon (1935) with Jimmy Savo.

Stanisław Szukalski

Ben Hecht, who knew Szukalski in the 1920s, described him in his 1954 autobiography A Child of the Century as starving, muscular, aristocratic and disdainful of lesser beings than himself—traits Szukalski retained for the rest of his life.

Tammany Young

Born in New York City, Young appeared on Broadway, in The Front Page (1928) by Ben Hecht and The New Yorkers (1930) (Herbert Fields and Cole Porter), and was considered a “good luck actor” by Broadway producers.

Union Pier, Michigan

During the summer of 1914 a colony of Chicago bohemians, including the writers Sherwood Anderson and Ben Hecht, vacationed at the "Camp's Cottages" (for the owner Eli Camp) on the Union Pier beach.

Walter Howey

Howey was the prototype for Walter Burns, the scheming, ruthless managing editor, in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play The Front Page (1928).

We Will Never Die

It is unlikely that Weill and Ben Hecht had met during Hecht's reporting stint for the Chicago Daily News in Berlin in the early 1920s, but Weill had identified Hecht as early as 1934 as a potential American collaborator.


see also

Horace Liveright

Ben Hecht wrote and directed the film The Scoundrel (1935), inspired by Liveright and his friend Tommy Smith.