Howard Koch (screenwriter)
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Howard E. Koch (December 12, 1901 – August 17, 1995)[1][2][3] was an American playwright and screenwriter who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses in the 1950s.
Born in New York City, New York, he was a graduate of Bard College and Columbia Law School. While practicing law in Hartsdale, New York, he began to write plays. Great Scott (1929), Give Us This Day (1933), and In Time to Come (1941) were produced on Broadway.[4]
His radio work includes the Orson Welles radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938), which caused panic among some listeners for its documentary-like portrayal of an invasion of spaceships from Mars. The incident was dramatized into a 1975 TV movie, The Night That Panicked America.
Koch began writing for Hollywood studios. His first accepted screenplay was made into a 1940 film. Koch contributed dialogue to the popular film Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart, which he coscripted with writers Julius and Philip Epstein in 1942, and for which he received an Academy Award in 1944. He also wrote Shining Victory (1941), and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), his favorite screenplay.
In 1943, at the request of Jack Warner of Warner Bros., Koch wrote the screenplay for Mission to Moscow (1943). The movie subsequently spawned controversy because of its positive portrayal of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. After the war, Koch was fired by Jack Warner after Koch was identified as a Communist. He was then criticized by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for his political views. Koch was blacklisted by Hollywood in 1951.
After being blacklisted, Koch moved to the United Kingdom with other blacklisted writers where he wrote for five years under the pseudonyms "Peter Howard" and "Howard Rodney".
Howard Koch died in 1995 in Kingston, New York.[5] He lived in nearby Woodstock, New York.[6]
[edit] Bibliography
Play:
- "Invasion from Mars", (pl) CBS, October 30, 1938.
Book:
- "Invasion from Mars", ed. Orson Welles, Dell 1949.
- "The Panic Broadcast", Little, Brown and Company 1970, Avon Books 1971.
Short story:
- "Invasion from Inner Space", (nv) in Star Science Fiction Stories #6, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine 1959.
Anthologies:
- Invaders of Earth, ed. Groff Conklin, Vanguard 1952, Pocket 1955, Tempo 1962.
- The Treasury of Science Fiction Classics, ed. Harold W. Kuebler, Hanover House 1954.
- The Armchair Science Reader, ed. Isabel S. Gordon & Sophie Sorkin, Simon & Schuster 1959.
- Enemies in Space, ed. Groff Conklin, Digit 1962.
- Contact, ed. Noel Keyes, Paperback Library 1963.
- Speculations, ed. Thomas E. Sanders, Glencoe Press 1973.
- Bug-Eyed Monsters, ed. Anthony Cheetham, Panther 1974.
It is likely that all of the above publications were for the same story or play in one form or another.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Ancestry.com. New York City Births, 1891-1902 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2000.
- ^ Social Security Death Index.
- ^ U.S. Census, January 1, 1920. State of New York, County of Ulster, enumeration district 174, p. 8A, family 218.
- ^ Internet Broadway Database.
- ^ Mel Gussow, "Howard Koch, a Screenwriter For 'Casablanca,' Dies at 93", The New York Times, August 18, 1995, p. D17.
- ^ Ancestry.com. U.S.: Selected Jewish Obituaries, 1948-2002 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2008.
[edit] External links
- Howard E. Koch at the Internet Movie Database
- Howard E. Koch at the Internet Broadway Database
- Howard Koch (screenwriter) at Find a Grave
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