Edward Anhalt

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After working as a journalist and documentary filmmaker for Pathe and CBS-TV, Edward Anhalt (March 28, 1914 - September 3, 2000) teamed with his second wife Edna Anhalt, during World War II to write pulp fiction. (Edna was the second of his five wives.) The first wife was a "socialist" activist and during the courtship, the inventive Anhalt (who was very right wing, but also in love,) came up with the whiskbroom horse-rectum maneuver which was guaranteed to throw any mounted policeman backwards onto concrete. He used it effectively during anti government demonstrations or pickets and won the fair lady. But she was a real pinko and went off to marry another in Oxford. Then came Edna, the mother of his only child, a daughter. Then came Jackie George, his longest marriage, then actress/writer Camilla Carr, and the last was Huguette Patanaude.

During World War II, Anhalt served with the Army and rose to the rank of Captain he was stationed with theFirst Motion Picture Unit known by insiders as 'Fort Wacky" at Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, California as a scenarist for training films. He was actually in the OSS by then, a job attained by breakfasting at a posh diner near the OSS' and bumping into Wild Bill Donovan over his favorite corned beef hash. Donovan was impressed by Anhalt's having mastered the art of propaganda films under Columbia's top documentary filmmaker, an immortal. Anhalt frequently wrote his own orders to get out of being in Merril's Mauraders a doomed unit that would die in the Pacific, he assigned himself what he thought would be more interesting, Moscow. He watched Stalin pace the Kremlin from the inside in his great coat, no heat. Just vodka to drink. And the Germans stumped by the big impassable ditches Russiand had dug all around the city. Anhalt would return with Lawrence Schiller thirty years later to write & film Peter the Great.

After the war, the Anhalts graduated to writing screenplays for thrillers, initially using the joint pseudonym Andrew Holt. Put under contract by Columbia, the Anhalts scripted Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1947). After a stint at Twentieth Century Fox during which they earned an Oscar for the screen story to the urban plague thriller Panic in the Streets (1950), the husband and wife team returned to Columbia as writer-producers, scoring another Academy Award nomination for their story to the gritty thriller The Sniper in 1952.. A dozen mothers in Canada sued Paramount alleging that a serial killer had watched the film many times and that Paramount should be liable for its perversity. The judge ruled in favor of the studio after Anhalt quipped, "nothing perverse about that. He killed women. Now, if he'd killed men..."

Perhaps Anhalt's most notable effort was the 1952 screen version of Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding which preserved the stage performances of Julie Harris, Brandon De Wilde and Ethel Waters.

After the couple divorced, Anhalt proved a versatile, consistently effective (and reputedly speedy) scenarist. He penned the superb adaptation of Irwin Shaw's WWII novel The Young Lions (1958) and the slick Wives and Lovers (1963) and a Robert Shaw play, "The Man in the Glass Booth" (Shaw, the star of 'The STING" and Jaws,) In college, he'd for his own amusement, rewritten one of George Bernard Shaw's tediously wordy plays turning it into a trim three actor. He loved to preen, "I've rewritten three Shaws." (Irwin, George and Robert.) He sent the rewrite off to GBS and received a letter back from the great British playwright saying 'this rewrite is all very well but you should be doing your own work." Soon enough Edward would be adapting or rewriting all kinds of media, novels, other people's earlier work, either an early version of a screenplay (in Hollywood one writer after another tackles rewrites, or stage plays as in Becket and another Jean Anouilh play, Madwoman of Chaillot").

The screenwriter earned a second Academy Award for his excellent adaptation of Jean Anouilh's play Becket (1964). Burton O Toole starrer.

Subsequent solo outings included The Boston Strangler (1968), The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969) and two for Ely A. Landau's American Film Theater, Luther (1973) and The Man in the Glass Booth (1975). He scored some solid box office successes with The Satan Bug (1965) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972). In the early 1970s Anhalt scripted the book for the stage musical Thomas and The King^[1] and then returned to the small screen, earning a well-deserved Emmy nomination for the acclaimed ABC miniseries QB VII (1974). Three years later, he scripted the Frank Sinatra vehicle Contract on Cherry Street (NBC) and contributed to the small screen remake of Madame X (NBC, 1981) and the biblically inspired The Day Christ Died (CBS, 1982). Anhalt was also the guiding force behind the lavish 1985 NBC miniseries Peter the Great. [[Anhalt became known as the creative and conciliatory bridge between the mob and Hollywood that included 'friendships' with the late Joe Bonanno and others with whom he dined while accommodating Hollywood executives. Meanwhile, he nurtured friendships with the churches, specifically the Jesuits for whom he had personal respect. Anhalt was a student of scriptures from all religious texts, which resulted in rich exchanges with his pragmatic endnotes.]]

His feature film output towards the end of his life was much more erratic, with films like Escape to Athena (1979), Green Ice (1981) and The Holcroft Covenant (1985) being lambasted by critics and failing to find an audience. He was hired by Barbra Streisand to write the biopic. Begin & Arafat. He was half way through the script when he was told to show up at the premiere of the Glenn Close Lesbian TV movie to meet Streisand. Streisand came down the handshake line, Cissy introduced him. "Mr. Anhalt," she said in queenly tones, 'what do your friends say when they hear you're working for me." "They ask which one of the two you're playing," he quipped. She was stony faced. All these stories are fairly apocryphal as he told them to his friends afterwards. We always suspected that he could rewrite reality as well as he rewrote novels, plays and scripts.

External links

• Edward Anhalt at the Internet Movie Database

Notes

1. ^ Thomas And The King, TER, CD, (insert notes) by Jeffrey Dunn, London, 1981.