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Saluting the Shadowy Screenwriter Who Helped Create the Capra Mystique: A Tribute to Robert Riskin, Who Wrote `It Happened One Night,' `Mr. Deeds Goes to Town' and `Lost Horizon'
When Jack Warner, the movie studio production head, coined his legendary definition of Hollywood screenwriters as "schmucks with typewriters," it was perhaps just another episode in American Jewish culture of a mutual resentment between those who work with money and those who work with words. The writers, in turn, made fun of the moguls' malapropisms, but the bosses got the historical last laugh. When we speak of "how the Jews invented Hollywood," it's the magnates and not the wordsmiths we refer to.
There's an opportunity, however, to begin reassessing the cultural significance of the Hollywood Jewish screenwriter with today's opening of "Written by Robert Riskin," a week-long tribute to a largely forgotten writer, at Film Forum in lower Manhattan. Some 12 of Riskin's clever comedy-dramas from the Great Depression era will be screened through Thursday, January 13. But who, you ask, was Robert Riskin, and why pay homage to him? Born in New York City in 1897 to immigrants from Russia, he was one of many bright young Jewish men who sought their chance in popular entertainment, producing and writing Broadway plays in...