[Deathwatch] Ernest Lehman, screenwriter, 89

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

"North by Northwest" Writer Dies

By Joal Ryan 58 minutes ago

Troublemakers didn't have anything on Ernest Lehman. He put Cary Grant
into harm's way on Mount Rushmore, helped Audrey Hepburn bewitch
Humphrey Bogart and gave the Sharks and the Jets something to fight
about in their big-screen face off.

But Lehman was no ordinary troublemaker; he was a screenwriter.

The celebrated scribe, whose résumé included Oscar nominations for
endangering Grant in North by Northwest, matching up Hepburn and Bogart
in Sabrina, engaging street gangs in West Side Story and heaping on the
domestic turmoil in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, died Saturday at
UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles following a lengthy illness, the
Writers Guild of America announced Tuesday. He was 89.

In a statement, writer-director Daniel Petrie Jr., president of the
Writers Guild of America, West, praised Lehman as a "creative giant
among writers and within the industry.

A three-time cowriter of the Academy Awards telecast, Lehman never won
a competitive Oscar as either a writer or a producer, a title he held
on two Best Picture hopefuls, Hello, Dolly! and Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?.

The Academy made it up to Lehman in 2001, presenting him with an
honorary Oscar in appreciation of "a body of varied and enduring work."


"I accept this rarest of honors on behalf of screenwriters everywhere,"
Lehman told the black-tie audience. "We have suffered anonymity far too
often."

If Lehman wasn't a household name like Grant and Hepburn, then he was a
familiar name to the right people--the people who got pictures made.

In little more than 20 years, Lehman earned screenplay credits on 15
films, three of which (North by Northwest, West Side Story, The Sound
of Music) would go on to be named by the American Film Institute as
among the 20th century's 100 greatest U.S. movies.

True to the spiel that went along with the honorary Oscar, Lehman was
versatile. He wrote big, showy prestige pictures, specializing in the
stage-to-screen transformations of The King and I, West Side Story, The
Sound of Music and Hello, Dolly!. He wrote stark black-and-white
dramas, chiefly, Sweet Smell of Success, the arguable signature work,
cowritten with Clifford Odets, that exposed the very dark underbelly of
the publicity trade, Somebody Up There Likes Me, the biopic about boxer
Rocky Graziano, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, yet another play
adaptation. And he wrote North by Northwest, the classic Alfred
Hitchcock thriller.

As a writer-director hyphenate, Lehman brought Philip Roth's comic
novel Portnoy's Complaint to the screen in 1972.

Born Dec. 8, 1915 in New York City, Lehman wrote for radio, a theater
publicist and the literary world before breaking into Hollywood in 1948
with the story for the comedy, The Inside Story. His past work provided
him and Hollywood with a wealth of material--his novella, The Comedian,
begat a celebrated 1957 TV production; his former life as a lackey for
a publicist provided the inspiration for J.J. Hunsecker and Sidney
Falco, the slicksters of Sweet Smell of Success.

"Sweet Smell of Success is one of those rare films where you remember
the names of the characters because you remember them," critic Roger
Ebert wrote in 1997, "as people, as types, as benchmarks."

Lehman, who became a father for the third time in his late 80s, is
survived by his children and wife Laurie. A private memorial service is
scheduled for Friday in Los Angeles, the WGA said. 

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary