WHEN WHAT YOU GOT IS NOT WHAT YOU THOUGHT YOU’D GET: Reading Classic Hollywood Screenwriter Ben Hecht’s Autobiography Child of the Century by Craig Hammill

I love reading. I have almost never read something and then thought “Well that was a waste of three days, three weeks, three months. . .”

I have thought that about other mediums but almost never about the printed word.

And lest you think this preamble is setting you up for something, it’s not. I am just finishing classic Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht’s autobiography Child of the Century and I feel only pleasure and gratitude at having Mr. Hecht as a raconteur and storyteller in my ear for the past month.

What did surprise me though was how what turned out to be important and meaningful in the read had nothing to do with why I picked up the book.

Let’s back up a moment for a bit of background and set-up:

Ben Hecht was one of Hollywood’s top go-to screenwriters in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Whether his name was on the screenplay like it was for Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and Spellbound or Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday or whether he was brought in to save a drowning screenplay as an uncredited script doctor (as he was for Gone with the Wind in a whirlwind sleepless eight day writing jag with producer David O Selznick and director Victor Fleming), Hecht was your pinch hitter.

And he delivered time and time again.

So it follows that reading the autobiography of such a Titan of cinema would yield countless stories of Hollywood, screenwriting craft, and the business at that time.

Except that Hecht spends a total of sixty pages (out of six hundred plus)  on his screenwriting career. And he makes it very clear that he only ever saw Hollywood as a paycheck and a place to get away from once those checks cleared.

I wasn’t prepared for this. Nor was I prepared for a hundred initial pages of his philosophical musings on the current state of the world (at the time of writing the 1950’s), his in-depth portraits of his family, his hilarious and much longer passages about his time as a newspaper journalist (a profession he clearly preferred to movies), his irreverent and sometimes shocking takes on historical personages (specifically his disdain for Franklin Delano Roosevelt whom he feels let down the European Jewish community during HItler’s reign of terror) or Hecht’s final 150 or so pages on his commitment to the Jewish cause of creating a country in Palestine by any means necessary. 

Once I realized that this book was not going to be what I wanted but rather what Hecht wanted it to be, I let go and tried to receive the book on its own terms. And when I did that, I realized that Mr. Hecht was actually speaking in a kind of out there in plain daylight code.

And this is what I deciphered:

The book was not going to be the “How To” on great moviemaking I wanted it to be. However, it was a tremendous resource in seeing and understanding the world from the early 1900’s through the 1950’s as it actually might have been.  Not as we see and understand that time now with the edges sanded off, the details effaced, so we have an easy to digest sanitized block of bullet points we can carry in our head. But as any time or epoch actually is lived  and experienced: vital, messy, contradictory, complex, pugilistic, lusty, confusing, disorienting, invigorating.

Hecht’s anecdotes and stories about the  people he came up with in the creative world are more “warts and all” than what would pass as an autobiography today. But his stories always  hum with humanity. I was particularly moved by an anecdote he told about a near to death John Barrymore and a party that Hecht through in Barrymore’s honor. 

Also, I was completely unprepared for how in-depth Hecht would go with his own Jewishness and observations about what it was like to be American and Jewish during that time.  His insights into his own, his family’s, and other’s psychology about their Judaism is often bracing. His later passages on how many in the Hollywood Jewish community only wanted others to see them as Americans and were furious with Hecht for reminding them that they were Jewish and should do something to help their European brethren and the creation of Israel adds a layer of  complexity not often discussed.

Another fascinating takeaway  was to see how so many of Hecht’s ideas and viewpoints have not dated well. Time more often than not disproved or has called into question Hecht’s sometimes catty, sometimes muddled, sometimes surface philosophizing about moments, movements, and personages of his time.

But ultimately that humbled me as a reader to  realize that most of us only bat about .150 (if  we’re lucky) when it comes to understanding the bigger oceanic currents at play in our time. Cleverness (which Hecht has in abundance) isn’t the same as sagacity (which he has but in stops and starts, like most of us). 

Finally, Hecht does come off as a man of the early part of  the twentieth century. He talks about women, wives, and affairs in a way that probably would have seemed near enlightened in the 1950’s (he has great love and empathy for the women in his life from his lovers to his children to his mother and aunts) but comes off as at least 50% Mad Men wrong now.

So what I’m getting at is that I learned precious little about movies. But a whole helluva lot about life and the crispy details of Hecht’s time that would make any story told in that era snap, crackle, and pop. That’s what we miss a lot in our period pieces (even our contemporary stories) is the snap, crackle, and pop of contradictory life as it is actually lived.

So don’t read A Child of the Century if you want bon mots on screencraft. But do read A Child of the Century if you want to realize how first person texts can offer a treasure trove of details impossible to glean in any other way.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.