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Michael Wilson (writer)
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Michael Wilson (writer)
Michael Wilson (July 1, 1914 – April 9, 1978) was an American screenwriter known for his work on Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Planet of the Apes (1968), Friendly Persuasion (1956), A Place in the Sun (1951), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The latter two screenplays won him Academy Awards. His career was interrupted by the Hollywood blacklist, during which time he wrote numerous uncredited screenplays.
Franklin Michael Wilson Jr. was born on 1 July 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma. When he was nine, his family relocated, first to a Los Angeles suburb and then to the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1936, he graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Philosophy and a minor in English. He stayed at Berkeley for three years of postgraduate study: one as a teaching assistant in English, one on a Theban Fellowship in Creative Literature, and one on a Gayley Fellowship in American History.
Wilson had been a self-described "dilettante" as an undergraduate; it was only during his first year in graduate school that he became politically active and joined the communist movement. With aspirations to be a novelist, he initially experimented with proletarian short stories. He was soon able to sell five of his stories to Esquire and other magazines.
Wilson met architecture student Zelma Gussin at Berkeley; they married in 1941. Zelma's older sister Sylvia was married to Paul Jarrico, who at the time was a fledgling Hollywood screenwriter, as well as being a leftist like Wilson. Zelma encouraged Michael to talk to Jarrico about pursuing screenwriting. Jarrico later recalled, "I preached [to Wilson] the gospel of film as the art form that combines all the other arts, with the greatest possible potential for political influence." Jarrico also told Wilson that if he found he didn't love screenwriting, he could view it merely as a remunerative craft to support his literary career. Wilson took Jarrico's advice and moved to Hollywood in 1940.
To educate himself about movie scripts, Wilson attended as many movies as he could. He meanwhile continued to write and publish short stories. One of them caught the attention of an agent, who helped Wilson land a job at Columbia Pictures. He was paid $100 a week for five weeks' labor on a troubled script that had already passed through 15 other writers. The movie, The Men in Her Life with Loretta Young, was released in 1941 and Wilson received a co-credit. He then got hired at $200 a week by independent producer Harry Sherman to write Hopalong Cassidy westerns featuring actor William Boyd. Wilson's scripts, completed in the first half of 1942, became the films Border Patrol (1943), Colt Comrades (1943), Bar 20 (1943), and Forty Thieves (1944).
Wilson's burgeoning screenwriting career was interrupted by America's entrance into World War II. In August 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He trained as a radio analyst and attained the rank of first lieutenant before leaving the Marines in December 1945.
Upon returning to civilian life, Wilson worked as a contract screenwriter with Liberty Films. His first notable effort was on It's a Wonderful Life (1946). He was hired as a "polisher" of the script, which was based on the fantasy short story "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern. After an arbitration by the Screen Writers Guild, the script was credited to Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and director Frank Capra, with "additional scenes" by Jo Swerling. Although Wilson was uncredited, he was acknowledged in the Academy Bulletin as "contributor to screenplay." His wife Zelma recalled that Wilson thought It's a Wonderful Life was a good film, not great: "[Mike] was a disenchanted Catholic, and he was not wild about pictures with angels. I remember him groaning about having to write dialogue with an angel, but he was a professional writer and he did his job."
As his next assignment from Capra, Wilson was tasked with adapting Jessamyn West's The Friendly Persuasion, a short story collection about an Indiana Quaker family forced to examine its pacifist convictions during the American Civil War. While praising Wilson for doing "a swell job" adapting West's book, Capra decided that given the Cold War atmosphere in the late 1940s, "it would be a bad time to produce a picture that might be construed as being antiwar. But we let Wilson work on until he had finished with it." In his subsequent testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Wilson would accuse the committee of "beating the drums of war" before adding bitterly, "I feel that this committee might take the credit, or part of it at least, for the fact that The Friendly Persuasion was not produced, in view of the fact that it dealt warmly, in my opinion, with a peace-loving people."
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Michael Wilson (writer)
Michael Wilson (July 1, 1914 – April 9, 1978) was an American screenwriter known for his work on Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Planet of the Apes (1968), Friendly Persuasion (1956), A Place in the Sun (1951), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The latter two screenplays won him Academy Awards. His career was interrupted by the Hollywood blacklist, during which time he wrote numerous uncredited screenplays.
Franklin Michael Wilson Jr. was born on 1 July 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma. When he was nine, his family relocated, first to a Los Angeles suburb and then to the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1936, he graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Philosophy and a minor in English. He stayed at Berkeley for three years of postgraduate study: one as a teaching assistant in English, one on a Theban Fellowship in Creative Literature, and one on a Gayley Fellowship in American History.
Wilson had been a self-described "dilettante" as an undergraduate; it was only during his first year in graduate school that he became politically active and joined the communist movement. With aspirations to be a novelist, he initially experimented with proletarian short stories. He was soon able to sell five of his stories to Esquire and other magazines.
Wilson met architecture student Zelma Gussin at Berkeley; they married in 1941. Zelma's older sister Sylvia was married to Paul Jarrico, who at the time was a fledgling Hollywood screenwriter, as well as being a leftist like Wilson. Zelma encouraged Michael to talk to Jarrico about pursuing screenwriting. Jarrico later recalled, "I preached [to Wilson] the gospel of film as the art form that combines all the other arts, with the greatest possible potential for political influence." Jarrico also told Wilson that if he found he didn't love screenwriting, he could view it merely as a remunerative craft to support his literary career. Wilson took Jarrico's advice and moved to Hollywood in 1940.
To educate himself about movie scripts, Wilson attended as many movies as he could. He meanwhile continued to write and publish short stories. One of them caught the attention of an agent, who helped Wilson land a job at Columbia Pictures. He was paid $100 a week for five weeks' labor on a troubled script that had already passed through 15 other writers. The movie, The Men in Her Life with Loretta Young, was released in 1941 and Wilson received a co-credit. He then got hired at $200 a week by independent producer Harry Sherman to write Hopalong Cassidy westerns featuring actor William Boyd. Wilson's scripts, completed in the first half of 1942, became the films Border Patrol (1943), Colt Comrades (1943), Bar 20 (1943), and Forty Thieves (1944).
Wilson's burgeoning screenwriting career was interrupted by America's entrance into World War II. In August 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He trained as a radio analyst and attained the rank of first lieutenant before leaving the Marines in December 1945.
Upon returning to civilian life, Wilson worked as a contract screenwriter with Liberty Films. His first notable effort was on It's a Wonderful Life (1946). He was hired as a "polisher" of the script, which was based on the fantasy short story "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern. After an arbitration by the Screen Writers Guild, the script was credited to Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and director Frank Capra, with "additional scenes" by Jo Swerling. Although Wilson was uncredited, he was acknowledged in the Academy Bulletin as "contributor to screenplay." His wife Zelma recalled that Wilson thought It's a Wonderful Life was a good film, not great: "[Mike] was a disenchanted Catholic, and he was not wild about pictures with angels. I remember him groaning about having to write dialogue with an angel, but he was a professional writer and he did his job."
As his next assignment from Capra, Wilson was tasked with adapting Jessamyn West's The Friendly Persuasion, a short story collection about an Indiana Quaker family forced to examine its pacifist convictions during the American Civil War. While praising Wilson for doing "a swell job" adapting West's book, Capra decided that given the Cold War atmosphere in the late 1940s, "it would be a bad time to produce a picture that might be construed as being antiwar. But we let Wilson work on until he had finished with it." In his subsequent testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Wilson would accuse the committee of "beating the drums of war" before adding bitterly, "I feel that this committee might take the credit, or part of it at least, for the fact that The Friendly Persuasion was not produced, in view of the fact that it dealt warmly, in my opinion, with a peace-loving people."