One December day in 1939, Frank Nugent, a film critic for the New York Times, took his seat at the premiere of Gone with the Wind and waited for the carnage to unfold. So long and overblown had the movie’s ad campaign been that Nugent was sure it was going to be a turkey. When that proved not to be the case, he was stunned. “We cannot get over the shock of not being disappointed,” he wrote in his review the next day.
In truth, Gone with the Wind had come perilously close to being just the kind of disaster Nugent had foreseen. Three weeks into shooting, the producers shut down production, fired the director, and hired Ben Hecht to rewrite the script. Hecht was known as the “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” for his ability to knock out clever, crowd-pleasing work in the time it takes most writers to sharpen their pencils. But this was a tall order even for him: he’d never read Margaret Mitchell’s novel and had just seven days to dismantle and rebuild an epic blockbuster. The fact that he did it—fueled, so he claimed, by nothing but bananas and salted peanuts—might seem evidence of his remarkable talent. Hecht himself cited it as proof of the rank absurdity of Hollywood. Despite authoring dozens of successful films and earning six Oscar nominations, he dismissed Hollywood as a “marzipan kingdom” populated by idiots, responsible for an “eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.”
Hecht gave that lacerating verdict in his autobiography, A Child of the Century (1953), listed by Time in 2011 as one of the hundred best works of nonfiction published since the magazine’s founding in 1923. Written in the rambunctiously opinionated style of Hecht’s hero, H. L. Mencken, the book deals with Hecht’s eclectic life as a literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He was intimidatingly prolific, and always provocative. His second novel, Fantazius Mallare (1922) landed him in court on an obscenity charge; a later novel, A Jew in Love (1931) had him labeled as a self-hating Jew. Hecht shrugged off the controversies; bigger strife lay ahead.
As his career in Manhattan and Hollywood climbed to new heights of critical and commercial success, he suddenly swerved onto an entirely unexpected path: revisionist Zionism. During World War II, Hecht sabotaged his Hollywood career by castigating the U.S. and its citizens for failing to stop the Holocaust.