The Academy was still trying to clarify the distinctions between story and screenplay and between something written for the screen and something adapted from another source. So for a while it worked with a tripartite division of the writing awards, still separating story and screenplay, but also giving out two awards for screenplays, one original to the screen and the other adapted.
The nominees were ...
(Original Screenplay)
- Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison, Foreign Correspondent
- Charles Chaplin, The Great Dictator
- Ben Hecht, Angels Over Broadway
- John Huston, Heinz Herald, Norman Burnside, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet
- Preston Sturges, The Great McGinty
(Original Story)
(Screenplay)
- Nunnally Johnson, The Grapes of Wrath
- Dudley Nichols, The Long Voyage Home
- Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison, Rebecca
- Donald Ogden Stewart, The Philadelphia Story
- Dalton Trumbo, Kitty Foyle
... when they should have been ...
(Original Screenplay)
(Original Story)
(Screenplay)
- Aldous Huxley, Jane Murfin, Pride and Prejudice
- Charles Lederer, His Girl Friday
- Samson Raphaelson, The Shop Around the Corner
- Donald Ogden Stewart, The Philadelphia Story
- Preston Sturges, Christmas in July
And the Oscar went to ...
(Original Screenplay)
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| Preston Sturges with his Oscar for The Great McGinty |
In a typical Sturges twist, a crooked politician is undone by one mistake: He turns honest. Sturges had been writing for the movies for a decade before making his debut as a director with two films in 1940: this one and Christmas in July. Both of them are terrific, though not quite up to the level of the five brilliant movies that followed: The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. Like Christmas in July, The Great McGinty suffers from less-than-stellar casting -- Dick Powell and Ellen Drew in the former, and Brian Donlevy and Muriel Angelus in the latter. But every Sturges movie is an ensemble affair, because he created wonderful parts for his favorite character actors, chief among them William Demarest, who made eight films under Sturges's direction.
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| Brian Donlevy in The Great McGinty |
(Original Story)
Though the Oscar went to Glazer and Toldy for their story, their success probably came because they were riding on the backs of a screenplay written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder -- another example of the problematic division of the writing awards into separate story and screenplay categories. Claudette Colbert plays a war reporter modeled on Martha Gellhorn, and Ray Milland is a pilot whom she helps escape from the Fascists at the end of the Spanish Civil War. There is a clumsy blend of romantic comedy and the tragedy resulting from the oncoming World War throughout. Glazer had previously won for 7th Heaven. Toldy was the pseudonym of János Székely, who became known as Hans Székely after he moved from to Germany after World War I. He became a screenwriter in Berlin, where he met Ernst Lubitsch, who brought him to the United States in 1934. During the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s he moved to East Germany, and worked for the state-owned film studio DEFA before his death in 1958.
(Screenplay)
Stewart was a natural choice to adapt playwright Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story to the screen. He had been classmates with Barry at Yale, and Barry wrote the part of Nick Potter in Holiday with him in mind. Stewart played the role on Broadway, and adapted the play for the 1938 screen version in which the role was played by Edward Everett Horton (who had also played it in the 1930 version). Stewart had been part of the Algonquin Round Table circle and had gained some success as a playwright and humorist before coming to Hollywood in 1930. He quickly became known for his witty, sophisticated dialogue, and contributed to the screenplays of such films as Dinner at Eight, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Love Affair. In the 1950s he was blacklisted because of his earlier affiliation with leftist organizations, and he chose exile in London.
... when it should have gone to ...
(Original Story)
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| Samuel and Bella Spewack |
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| Leo McCarey |
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| Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott in My Favorite Wife |
(Screenplay)
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| Charles Lederer |
Lederer grew up in Hollywood, where he was raised by his aunt, Marion Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. A precocious child, he entered the University of California at Berkeley at the age of thirteen, but dropped out to become a reporter for the Hearst newspapers. His friendship with screenwriter and former journalist Ben Hecht got him his first screenwriting job: providing additional dialogue for the 1931 film version of The Front Page, the source of His Girl Friday. He would go on to work with director Howard Hawks on I Was a Male War Bride, The Thing From Another World, Monkey Business, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He was much in demand for acerbic dialogue, and wrote the screenplays for such films as the thriller Kiss of Death and the Rat Pack caper Ocean's Eleven. In 1940, Lederer married Orson Welles's ex-wife Virginia Nicholson, and after some initial (and understandable) friction became close to Welles. He had also been friends with fellow screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who was collaborating with Welles on Citizen Kane. The connection between Lederer and the creators of Kane has given rise to the story, promulgated by Gore Vidal, that "Rosebud," the mysterious final word of Charles Foster Kane, was actually Hearst's nickname for Marion Davies's genitalia, and that Lederer had told this to Mankiewicz and Welles. (Though it does seem like an exceptionally intimate detail for an aunt to share with her nephew.)
