Charles Lederer
Birth : 1906-12-31, New York City, New York, USA
Death : 1976-03-05
History
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Charles Lederer (December 31, 1906 – March 5, 1976) was an American screenwriter and film director. He was born into a prominent theatrical family in New York, and after his parents divorced, was raised in California by his aunt, Marion Davies, mistress to newspaper publisher William Randolf Hearst. A child prodigy, he entered college at age 13, but dropped out after a few years to work as a journalist with Hearst's newspapers.
Lederer is recognized for his comic and acerbic adaptations and collaborative screenplays of the 1940s and early 1950s. His screenplays frequently delved into the corrosive influences of wealth and power. His comedy writing was considered among the best of the period, and he, along with writer friends Ben Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz, became major contributors to the film genre known as "screwball comedy".
Among his notable screenplays which he wrote or co-wrote, were The Front Page (1931), the critically acclaimed His Girl Friday (1940), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), Ocean's 11 (1960), and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).
With Ben Hecht, he co-wrote the original Kiss of Death which was to feature the actor Richard Widmark's chilling debut as the psychopathic killer with a giggle. In addition, he wrote and directed the 1959 film Never Steal Anything Small, an adaptation of a play by Maxwell Anderson and Rouben Mamoulian, starring James Cagney. The Spirit of St. Louis was Lederer's last significant film work. The films that followed that were primarily vehicles for established stars.
In 1954, he won three Tony Awards for the Broadway Musical Kismet, as Best Producer (Musical), as Best Author (Musical) with Luther Davis, and as co-author of the book which, with several collaborators, contributed to the Best Musical win.
Screenplay
Less than 24 hours into his parole, charismatic thief Danny Ocean is already rolling out his next plan: In one night, Danny's hand-picked crew of specialists will attempt to steal more than $150 million from three Las Vegas casinos. But to score the cash, Danny risks his chances of reconciling with ex-wife, Tess.
Original Film Writer
Jimmy Kilmartin is an ex-con trying to stay clean and raise a family. When his cousin Ronnie causes him to take a fall for driving an illegal transport of stolen cars, Detective Calvin Hart is injured and Jimmy lands back in prison. In exchange for an early release, he is asked to help bring down a local crime boss named 'Little Junior' Brown. However, he's also sent undercover by Detective Hart to work with Little Junior and infiltrate his operations. As soon as Little Junior kills an undercover Federal agent with Jimmy watching, the unscrupulous DA and the Feds further complicate his life.
Book
The story follows one fateful day as a beggar-poet and his daughter cross paths with a wicked wazir, a wily temptress, a handsome prince, a magical curse, opulent sets and exotic adventure. Adapted from the Broadway musical.
Screenplay
Bob Hope becomes surrogate father to a baby found abandoned at the United Nations. Director Jack Arnold's 1964 comedy also stars Yvonne De Carlo, Robert Sterling, John McGiver and Lilo Pulver.
Screenplay
The Bounty leaves Portsmouth in 1787. Its destination: to sail to Tahiti and load bread-fruit. Captain Bligh will do anything to get there as fast as possible, using any means to keep up a strict discipline. When they arrive at Tahiti, it is like a paradise for the crew, something completely different than the living hell aboard the ship. On the way back to England, officer Fletcher Christian becomes the leader of a mutiny.
Screenplay
When the Kwimper family car runs out of fuel on a new Florida highway and an officious state supervisor tries to run them off, Pop Kwimper digs in his heels and decides to do a little homesteading. He and his son Toby and their 'adopted' children—Holly, Ariadne, and the twins—start their own little community along a strip of the roadside.
Screenplay
Danny Ocean and his gang attempt to rob the five biggest casinos in Las Vegas in one night.
Screenplay
Parisian nightclub owner Simone Pistache is known for her performances of the can-can, which attracts the ire of the self-righteous Judge Philipe Forrestier. He hatches a plot to photograph her in the act but ends up falling for her — much to the chagrin of her boyfriend, lawyer François Durnais.
Screenplay
While on leave in New York, a serviceman both weds a chorus girl and wins a red convertible in a charity raffle. Both his wife and the car turn out to be problematic.
Writer
Director Charles Lederer's 1959 musical stars James Cagney as an unscrupulous longshoreman who'll resort to every dirty trick in the book to win his union's presidency.
Director
Director Charles Lederer's 1959 musical stars James Cagney as an unscrupulous longshoreman who'll resort to every dirty trick in the book to win his union's presidency.
Writer
Lawmen free a convict to hunt his ex-cellmate.
Screenplay
Broke and about to divorce his wife, a pilot joins a smuggling scheme in postwar Madrid.
Adaptation
Charles 'Slim' Lindbergh struggles to finance and design an airplane that will make his New York to Paris flight the first solo trans-Atlantic crossing.
Screenplay
A ballerina resorts to prostitution when her fiance is reported killed in World War II.
Screenplay
A roguish poet is given the run of the scheming Wazir's harem while pretending to help him usurp the young caliph.
Screenplay
Lorelei Lee is a beautiful showgirl engaged to be married to the wealthy Gus Esmond, much to the disapproval of Gus' rich father, Esmond Sr., who thinks that Lorelei is just after his money. When Lorelei goes on a cruise accompanied only by her best friend, Dorothy Shaw, Esmond Sr. hires Ernie Malone, a private detective, to follow her and report any questionable behavior that would disqualify her from the marriage.
Screenplay
Research chemist Barnaby Fulton works on a fountain of youth pill for a chemical company. One of the labs chimps gets loose in the laboratory and mixes chemicals, but then pours the mix into the water cooler. When trying one of his own samples, washed down with water from the cooler, Fulton begins to act just like a twenty-year-old and believes his potion is working. Soon his wife and boss are also behaving like children.
Screenplay
A young man brings his pet lion with him when he's drafted into the army. Comedy.
Director
After years of living in her selfish parents' (Melvyn Douglas and Lynn Bari) egotistical shadows, desperate teenager Jill Bradley (Joan Evans) makes a last-ditch play for attention by attempting suicide. Jill's guilt-ridden father tries at last to help her and to cheer her up but new problems
Screenplay
Scientists and US Air Force officials fend off a blood-thirsty alien organism while investigating at a remote arctic outpost.
Story
Andy Clark discovers he was cheated out of a half interest in partner Mike's business, now a thriving dance hall in 1892 Chicago. Unable to win it back, Andy schemes to make Mike's position untenable. He also hopes to turn Ruby Summers, Mike's motor-mouthed burlesque queen, into a classier entertainer, and incidentally to make her his own. But at the last minute, Andy's revenge comes unravelled.
Screenplay
Andy Clark discovers he was cheated out of a half interest in partner Mike's business, now a thriving dance hall in 1892 Chicago. Unable to win it back, Andy schemes to make Mike's position untenable. He also hopes to turn Ruby Summers, Mike's motor-mouthed burlesque queen, into a classier entertainer, and incidentally to make her his own. But at the last minute, Andy's revenge comes unravelled.
Story
A Broadway director rescues a starlet from mobsters who blame her for a shooting.
Screenplay
After marrying an American lieutenant with whom he was assigned to work in post-war Germany, a French captain attempts to find a way to accompany her back to the States under the terms of the War Bride Act.
Co-Writer
A romantic drifter gets caught between a corrupt tycoon and his voluptuous wife.
Writer
Bill Weldon is an Ad man who craves his wife Margaret's approval of his work, instead he gets constructive (and on-target) feedback, which he hates. Things get really strange when Bill creates advertising for a wacky inventor's embalming fluid.
Screenplay
A con man tries to blackmail a Mexican gangster.
Screenplay
An ex-con trying to go straight must face a crazed criminal out for revenge.
Screenplay
Small-town soda-jerk Peggy Evans quits her dead-end job and moves to New York where she invents a new identity.
Screenplay
Joan Lyons and her friend Patricia Drew are autograph hounds spending most of their day bumping into, and having tea, with the likes of Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. Based on misinformation from a meddling old-maid governess, Miss Featherstone, Joan also devotes some time to working on the no-problem marriage of her parents to the extent of hiring Dr. Hercules, the strong man from a side show to pay attention to her mother in order to make her father jealous, despite the good advice received from Walter Pidgeon.
Director
In Chicago, an unemployed actor aims to solve the mystery concerning a string of ax murders, apparently committed by a lunatic.
Screenplay
Circumstance, an old flame and a mother-in-law drive a happily married couple to the verge of divorce and insanity.
Screenplay
An American reporter smuggling news out of Soviet Moscow is blackmailed into helping a beautiful Communist leave the country.
Screenplay
Boring businessman Larry Wilson recovers from amnesia and discovers he's really a con man...and loves his soon-to-be-ex wife.
Screenplay
Hildy, the journalist former wife of newspaper editor Walter Burns, visits his office to inform him that she's engaged and will be getting remarried the next day. Walter can't let that happen and frames the fiancé, Bruce Baldwin, for one thing after another, to keep him temporarily held in prison, while trying to steer Hildy into returning to her old job as his employee.
Screenplay
A married singer, pianist/composer team are struggling to hit it big in New York. Finally, they audition before a Broadway producer, but the producer only wants the singer, leaving the husband without a job and feeling a failure.
Screenplay
A wrongly convicted woman studies law and seeks her revenge.
Screenplay
A philanthropist's will dictates that four people receive $5,000 apiece, with the stipulation that the first one who can double the amount -- without dishonesty-- will win a cool million. Hindering the four are the avaricious relatives of the late millionaire.
Screenplay
Mary Beamish, a folksy Ozark girl, yearns for the glitter of show business and for a man. She knows she is anything but gorgeous, but figures her enthusiasm offsets that small deficit.
Additional Dialogue
Thanks to a series of comic mishaps, a timid, small-town office clerk finds himself wanted by the police and labeled by the media as "Public Enemy No. 2." Comedy.
Sequence Supervisor
An honest and naive schoolteacher gets a lesson in how the world works outside the classroom, when a rich Baron and his mistress use the teacher's name and outstanding reputation in a crooked business scheme.
Dialogue
An opera diva sets her sights on a womanizing army officer.
Writer
An opera diva sets her sights on a womanizing army officer.
Additional Dialogue
Hildy Johnson is an investigative reporter is looking for a bigger paycheck. When an accused murderer escapes from custody, Hildy sees an opportunity for the story of a lifetime. But when he finds the criminal, he learns that the man may not be guilty. With the help of his editor, Hildy attempts to hide the convict, uncover the conspiracy and write the scoop of his career.
