The Chris Moeller Archives

The last of the great Golden Age screenwriters

I'm reading a delightful book from my local library entitled "The Wicked Wit of the West." It's the autobiography of Irving Brecher (as told to Hank Rosenfeld), a Hollywood screenwriter from its so-called Golden Age and one of its all-time masters in the arena of the comic one-liners. Milton Berle gave Brecher his first job writing jokes in Vaudeville in 1931, and once said of his penman, "He's a very rare person. As a writer, he really has no equals. Superiors, yes..."

Brecher was the sole writer of two Marx Brothers films "Go West" and "At the Circus," and he wrote the screenplays for both "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Bye Bye Birdie." He created "The Life of Riley" radio serial (which evolved into television's first sitcom), and perhaps most infamously, he was responsible at one point for "punching up" the script of "The Wizard of Oz" while on the MGM lot in the late '30s, transforming the cowardly lion, tin man, and scarecrow into comedic characters. Brecher died in 2008 at the age of 94, and the book was published posthumously in January of the following year.

The book is one hilarious anecdote after another, regarding the likes of Jack Benny, Judy Garland, Henny Youngman, Billy Wilder, Louis B. Mayer, and of course, the Marx Brothers, who were the heroes of Brecher's adolescence in New York City before he became their screen collaborator.

Sample dialogue, Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont:
"We were young, gay, reckless! That night I drank champagne from your slipper. Two quarts. It would have been more, but they were open-toed. Ah, Hildegard!"
"My name is Susannah."

When asked of the power of the quick retort by his interviewer, Brecher opines that "Apparently there's a hunger on the part of most of us to be the messenger of something funny," and in that spirit, I'm reprinting my favorite anecdote from the book. Brecher doesn't take author's credit for the story, and it begs to be apocryphal...

I respect a husband who is supportive of his wife and her career. Like the husband of Pia Zadora, who happens to be well fixed. And she's a cute little thing. She's got talent. But the movies she made were flops. And the critics didn't appreciate her acting. So finally she said to her husband, "Darling, I'm not for the movies, but I am for the stage. With a live audience, I'm a great actress."
Her husband said, "Honey, so do a play. I'll finance it."
And she did. She chose "The Diary of Anne Frank." She played Anne Frank. They tried to play out in Miami with a sympathetic Jewish audience. In the third act, when the Nazis ran in and said, "Where is she?" four hundred Jews stood up and said: "She's in the attic!"

posted by CM @ 8:41 PM