Walter de Leon

Occupation: Writer
Active: '30s-'40s
Major Genres: Comedy, Musical
Career Highlights: Broadway Melody of 1940, Ruggles of Red Gap, The Ghost Breakers
First Major Screen Credit: School Days (1921)

Biography

Longtime Hollywood screenwriter Walter DeLeon had a hand in three of the four film versions of the Paul Dickey-Charles Goddard theatrical chestnut The Ghost Breakers. DeLeon scripted the 1922 adaptation with Wallace Reid and the popular 1940 version with Bob Hope, and was credited as a collaborator on the 1953 version, reworked for Martin and Lewis as Scared Stiff. Essentially a comedy man, he also worked on Wheeler and Woolseys Girl Crazy and Hold 'Em Jail (1932) and Paramount's W.C. Fields and "Big Broadcast" features. He was also listed as one of the scriveners on Leo McCarey's Ruggles of Red Gap, and was given "original story" credit for the Oliver Hardy solo feature Zenobia (1939). After working on the Paramount musical-comedy product of the early 1940s, Walter DeLeon briefly joined Universal to co-script the offbeat Abbott and Costello vehicle Little Giant (1946), one of two films in which Bud and Lou were cast as separate characters rather than a unified team. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide