Best Writing, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
(Adaptation)
(Original Story) 
(Adaptation) 
(Original Story) 
(Adaptation)
Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason, Little Women. The collaboration of Heerman and Mason, husband and wife, goes back to 1920 when he directed a film called The Poor Simp from her scenario. They married the following year. Mason claimed to have been Hollywood's first "script girl," having suggested to Allan Dwan, writer of the screenplay for Arizona in 1918, that someone needed to keep track of how much of the script had been shot each day and to make sure that continuity -- the placement of the actors and props, details in their costumes and hairstyles, and so on -- remained consistent from day to day and shot to shot. Heerman and Mason worked together, often uncredited, on the screenplays for such films as Stella Dallas (1937), Pride and Prejudice (1940), and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).  

(Original Story) 
Robert Lord, One Way Passage. A former New Yorker writer, Lord came to Hollywood in 1925 when one of his stories, The Lucky Horseshoe, was filmed, and was hired by Warner Bros. in 1927. One Way Passage tells the story of a shipboard romance between a dying woman (Kay Francis) and a man (William Powell) who is headed for prison when the ship docks. It won him his only Oscar, but he was nominated for another for The Black Legion (1937), which starred Humphrey Bogart. When Bogart founded his independent production company, Santana, he hired Lord as a vice president in charge of production.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Adaptation) 
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
It may be one of the least subtle titles in movie history, but the title of the book in which Robert Elliott Burns told the story of his experiences was even less subtle: I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang! Warner Bros. decided not to offend the state further and edited the title a bit for the film version. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, with one of Paul Muni's best and least-mannered performances, it still has the power to shock and startle. It actually led to the abolition of the chain gang system in the South. Green and Holmes, contract writers at Warners, never received a nomination, and the rest of their work is generally unremarkable, leading me to suspect that then-production head at Warners, Darryl F. Zanuck, and perhaps producer Hal B. Wallis, had a good deal to do with the shaping of the film. 

(Original Story) 
Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar 
Groucho Marx, Louis Calhern, and Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup
 Kalmar and Ruby were a songwriting team who had done the songs for the Marx Brothers' Broadway hit Animal Crackers. Their friendship with the brothers, particularly with Groucho, led to their writing the screenplay for Duck Soup. There are those who will say that giving Oscars (even imaginary ones) to Kalmar and Ruby for Duck Soup's screenplay is a bit like crediting Hamlet to the pen Shakespeare wrote it with. Would it have been a classic if the roles had been played by, say, Robert Montgomery, Franchot Tone, Fredric March, and Lew Ayres instead of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo? Nevertheless, the brothers needed a place to jump off from into madness, and Kalmar and Ruby knew how to give it to them. It was the last and best of the five films the Marxes made at Paramount, and their relationship with the studio was never good. On the other hand, their relationship with MGM would be worse. Kalmar and Ruby were the subjects of a pleasant musical biopic, Three Little Words, which starred Fred Astaire as Kalmar and Red Skelton as Ruby, in 1950, so perhaps that's all the honor they really need.
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