Harold Hecht
Harold Adolphe Hecht was an American film producer, dance director and talent agent. He was also, though less noted for, a literary agent, a theatrical producer, a theatre director and a Broadway actor. He was a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the Screen Producers Guild.
During his first stay in Hollywood in the early to mid-1930s, Hecht was one of the leading dance directors in the movie industry, working with the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Bing Crosby, Cary Grant, W. C. Fields, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier and Marion Davies. In 1947, he co-founded Norma Productions, an independent film production company, with his business partner and managed actor Burt Lancaster. From 1954 to 1959, the Norma Productions subsidiaries Hecht-Lancaster Productions and later Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions, were the biggest and most important independent production units in Hollywood. Following the end of the Hecht-Hill-Lancaster partnership, Hecht continued as one of the top three independent producers in Hollywood, a position he shared with Stanley Kramer and the Mirisch brothers, for the next ten years.
At the 28th Academy Awards ceremony in 1956, Hecht received a Best Picture Oscar for the 1955 Hecht-Lancaster Productions film Marty. He was again nominated three years later at the 31st Academy Awards ceremony for the 1958 Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions film Separate Tables. The film did not win but Hecht did accept the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in place of Wendy Hiller who could not be present. The Broadway play version of Separate Tables, produced by Hecht-Lancaster Productions, was nominated for the Best Play Award at the 11th Tony Awards ceremony in April 1957 In November 1959 Hecht was chosen by United States President Dwight Eisenhower to accompany the cultural exchange program committee in a trip to Russia when Marty was selected by the USSR as the first American film to be screened in that country since World War II.
Fourteen of Hecht's film productions have won and been nominated for several awards and prizes at various ceremonies and film festivals, including; Academy Awards, Golden Globe Award, British Academy Film Awards, Bodil Awards, Directors Guild of America Award, Writers Guild of America Award, National Board of Review Awards, New York Film Critics Circle Award, Laurel Awards, David di Donatello Award, Bambi Award and the Online Film & Television Association Award; and at the Cannes Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival. Four of the films Harold Hecht was associated with have been deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States National Film Preservation Board and have been selected for preservation in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry; Duck Soup in 1990, Sweet Smell of Success in 1993, Marty in 1994 and She Done Him Wrong in 1996.
Early life
Harold Adolphe Hecht was born on June 1, 1907, in Yorkville, New York City, to Joseph Hecht and Rose Hecht. His father was born on November 17, 1882, in Austria. While employed as a sailor at the age of seventeen, he immigrated to New York City in January 1899. Once in New York he worked in construction and eventually made it up to the position of a building contractor. His mother was born on January 18, 1882, in Austria. Joseph and Rose were married in 1906 in New York City and had two children; Harold and Janet Hecht.He attended PS 169, graduating in spring 1923 at the age of sixteen. Hecht is reported to have frequented the Union Settlement house on East 104th Street in East Harlem.
Studies and Broadway career
Just as Hecht was looking for his vocation, the very field he wanted to be in was interviewing students for a new school. In November 1923, Richard Boleslavsky, a Russian immigrant and former student of Konstantin Stanislavsky, opened the American Laboratory Theatre, the first school in the United States to teach Stanislavski's system of acting. Hecht was among the first students accepted to attend the new school in late 1923. While there he studied and appeared in plays with Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, Anne Revere, Lenore Romney and Francis Fergusson.Hecht excelled at The Lab and was accepted into its Auxiliary Acting Group, granting him the privilege of appearing in the school's produced plays, while remaining under Boleslavsky's teachings beyond the two years required to graduate. While attending The Lab, Hecht appeared in The Straw Hat, Big Lake, Much Ado About Nothing, Dr. Knock, Grand Street Follies and The Wild Duck.
Many of The Lab's students worked on additional aspects of the plays that the school produced and Hecht was most drawn by choreography. He also worked under Boleslavsky, both in The Lab's productions and on other Broadway productions, as stage assistant. In 1929 Boleslavsky left for Hollywood and Hecht continued to attend The Lab headed by Maria Ouspenskaya and Maria Germanova.
After the American Laboratory Theatre closed in the spring of 1930, Hecht continued working on Broadway as either dancer or choreographer until late 1931. During this period he worked with Mikhail Mordkin, Martha Graham, George White and Albertina Rasch. He also worked on Les noces at the Metropolitan Opera.
First Hollywood career
Beginning at RKO
In October 1931 Richard Boleslavsky invited Hecht to join him in Hollywood to choreograph the dance numbers on an upcoming project he was set to direct at RKO Radio Pictures. Chi Chi and Her Papas, a 1924 German comedic play originally written by Armin Friedmann and Fritz Lunzer under the title Sie und ihr Zimmerherr, had been translated into English by Max Steiner in a single day. Steiner also composed three original songs and the score for the film adaptation, while the movie's producer, William LeBaron, wrote the lyrics. Humphrey Pearson was brought in for additional dialogue but eventually re-wrote the entire screenplay. Chi Chi and Her Papas was to be a starring vehicle for actress Lili Damita, her third film at RKO. Her leading man was scheduled to be John Warburton, loaned out from Fox Films, with Hugh Herbert as a singing supporting character. Other supporting roles were scheduled for George Frank, Tiny Sandford and Gertrude Astor.Hecht left by plane from New York City to Hollywood on Monday, November 2, his position on the film already confirmed. Once in California, he interviewed 200 girls and 150 men, in order to find the twelve girls and six men necessary for the dance numbers. Hecht hired Frances Grant, fresh from assisting Larry Ceballos at Fanchon and Marco, to help him with the new routines on Chi Chi and Her Papas. But a week after Hecht's arrival, the film was put on hold. Earlier that fall, RKO had acquired the Pathé Exchange film studio and a number of issues had come of it. New studio head, David O. Selznick clashed with equally positioned Charles Rogers and similar arguments went on between producer William LeBaron and former vice-president Joseph I. Schnitzer. Not only were crew positions scheduled to be cut, but some of the pictures too were cancelled. As part of the agreement, all 20 Pathé pictures in production at the time of the acquisition were to be made at RKO's studio. However, the 16 films on RKO's production schedule were not given the same security and for a variety of reasons, Chi Chi and Her Papas was one of the few to get shut down. LeBaron had already spent $100,000 within the four weeks of pre-production but neither Selznick nor Schnitzer liked the idea of the film and felt it was too racy and non-conducive to the American taste.
A few weeks later Hecht found work in the Los Angeles theater business. LeRoy Prinz was producing and directing the Edmunt Joseph and Nat Perrin story Lucky Day with financial backing from Rodney Pantages, Arthur Silber and Harold Morehouse. Prinz had clashed with the original choreographer, Billy Grant and Hecht came in to replace him. Other crew members included Earl Dancer staging the choir with music by Otis René and Leon René and lyrics by Ben Eilleon. Lucky Day opened at the Mayan Theater in L.A. on December 27 starring Alex Lovejoy, Eddie Anderson, Alma Travers, LeRoy Broomfield and Aurora Greeley. The play was relatively successful, gaining interest from RKO as a potential property.
Contract choreographer at Paramount
In mid-March 1932 Hecht signed a one-year agreement and became a contract choreographer and dance director for Paramount Pictures. Stories exist that it was his friend Busby Berkeley who helped him get in touch with the right people at Paramount, where the two are said to have worked on films together. Hecht's first assignment at Paramount was directing two dance ensembles in the Marx Brothers' college football comedy film Horse Feathers. One of the numbers Hecht directed was I'm Against It, a scene where Groucho Marx, playing Quincy Adams Wagstaff, is first installed as the new headmaster of Huxley College. Hecht trained Groucho alongside twenty elder actors, aged 61 to 77 years old, with naturally grown beards and dressed in academic gowns. Considering that his first known assignment at Paramount Pictures was a Marx Brothers film, it is quite possible that Hecht found his way to that studio through Nat Perrin, whom he had just worked with on Lucky Day and was Groucho's close friend and collaborator. Hecht was reported to have worked on additional Marx Brothers films, though no specific titles have surfaced to confirm this. If he did work on additional Marx Brothers films, the only plausible ones that were made during the remainder of his first venture in Hollywood were Duck Soup at Paramount in 1933 and A Night at the Opera at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1935. The exact shooting dates for Duck Soup have not been established, but it is known to have been filmed during the summer of 1933, after Hecht's contract at Paramount had expired. It is always possible that the studio reached out to Hecht, though no screen credits were provided for the dance numbers. As for A Night at the Opera, it was filmed at M-G-M Studio in the summer of 1935, during a time when Hecht was associated with the studio. However, the film gives screen credits to Chester Hale for the choreography. Whether Hale worked alone or if Hecht had any input in the film is unknown.Following Horse Feathers, Hecht worked on Lady and Gent, directed by Stephen Roberts and starring George Bancroft and Wynne Gibson, and Devil and the Deep, directed by Marion Gering and starring Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton and Cary Grant. In June and July 1932, Hecht was loaned out from Paramount to M-G-M for the Marion Davies film Blondie of the Follies. The film was produced by Davies who sought out Hecht herself and was directed by Edmund Goulding, who would later reunite with Hecht. The film also starred Robert Montgomery, Billie Dove and Jimmy Durante.
Immediately after Lucky Day, Hecht started working on the play Hullabaloo, which took several months of preparation. Hecht co-directed it with Paul Gerard Smith and choreographed the Gilmor Brown production. The production featured music by Ralph Rainger and lyrics by Don Hartman. Hullabaloo opened on May 26 at the Pasadena Community Playhouse and ran until June 19, with a cast featuring Sterling Holloway, Frank Atkinson, Leonard Sillman and his sister June Carroll.
In the fall of 1932, Hecht worked on another theater play, a revised and modernized version of Franz Lehár's operetta, The Merry Widow. The play was brought up to date by J. Keirn Brennan with dance numbers by Hecht and vocal numbers by H. L. Heidecker. Karl Hajos composed and conducted the 30-piece orchestra and the cast included Herbert Evans, Ruth Gillette, Alex Callam, Florinne McKinney, Franklin Record, Roland Woodruff, Diane Warfield, Paul Sauter, Rolloe Dix, William Jeffries, Harold Reeves and Evelyn Cunningham. The play opened on Monday November 14 at the Columbia Theater in California.
In late November 1932 Hecht became involved in a series of Mae West projects, which all eventually culminated into a single picture. Earlier that year Paramount had signed Mae West to a contract and the actress was eager to step up from the lower-billed role she received in her first picture, Night After Night. She was billed fourth, after George Raft, Constance Cummings and Wynne Gibson. West was working to adapt her notoriously banned play, Diamond Lil, into a film, initially titled Honky Tonk. But the censors objected and Paramount worked quickly to change a few scenes, re-title the film to Diamond Lil and tried again to get it into production. The censors objected again, Paramount went back to work and, hoping to fool the censors into thinking they were submitting an all-new film, re-titled the project Ruby Red. But the censors found far too many similarities between Ruby Red and Diamond Lil and blocked the production completely. West and Paramount decided to merge Ruby Red into another West film in the writing stages, She Done Him Wrong, using the cast and crew already hired for Ruby Red. This final version of the script made it into production. Producer LeBaron, who had left RKO to work for Paramount, hired Hecht to work on She Done Him Wrong back when it was still a separate entity from Ruby Red. Hecht was also hired for dance routines on Ruby Red. Ultimately, all of Hecht's material was merged into a single film and used on She Done Him Wrong. The film was directed by Lowell Sherman and starred West, Cary Grant, Owen Moore and Noah Beery. Hecht was interviewed by Motion Picture Magazine in 1933, in response to Mae West's media comments regarding "curvy women being the new trend", to which he answered in her favor; "Dangerous curves are not only ahead, but actually with us. Present-day chorus girls must be slightly more round and more curved than those of a few years ago. Girls with thin, boyish figures definitely are out."
Following the Mae West projects, Hecht became one of the more prominent choreographers in Hollywood and was well-in-demand at Paramount and other studios. In January 1933, Paramount scheduled Hecht for three of their upcoming features: A Bedtime Story, directed by Norman Taurog and starring Maurice Chevalier and Helen Twelvetrees, International House, directed by A. Edward Sutherland starring W. C. Fields, Bela Lugosi and George Burns and the highly anticipated blockbuster College Humor. College Humor, another William LeBaron production, was proclaimed by Paramount's publicity department as "the most lavish musical picture since the advent of talking pictures". The film was directed by Wesley Ruggles and starred Bing Crosby, Richard Arlen, Mary Carlisle, Jack Oakie, George Burns and Gracie Allen. In addition to working with the main stars, Hecht trained The Ox-Road Co-Eds, a group of sixty chorus line dancers, for several original music sequences. He teamed up with Jack Oakie and Boris Petroff to create a new dance, the Fraternity Stomp, which Oakie and Lorna Andre performed in the film. The new dance was well advertised in newspapers and magazines with a depiction of steps and moves for people to learn it at home.
Hecht later stated that he worked with director Frank Tuttle during his days at Paramount. Though no evidence has been found, it is likely that the film he was referring to was The Big Broadcast, starring Bing Crosby, Stuart Erwin, Leila Hyams and George Burns. The Big Broadcast was produced by Benjamin Glazer, who had written A Bedtime Story, and featured music by Ralph Rainger, who had also worked on A Bedtime Story and International House, as well as Hecht's play, Hullaballoo.