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Screenwriter Edmund L. Hartmann was fresh out of Washington University when he began writing songs for the final editions of The Ziegfeld Follies. He moved to Hollywood in 1934, where for several years he specialized in melodrama (China Passage, The Last Warning) and mystery (Sherlock Holmes in Washington). While at Universal in the mid-1940s, Hartmann was assigned to the Abbott and Costello comedies; this led to his scripting of the Olsen and Johnson vehicles Ghost Catchers (1944) and See My Lawyer (1945), which he would always consider one of the more pleasurable chapters of his Hollywood career. He went on to co-write such Bob Hope films as The Paleface (1948), Sorrowful Jones (1949), Fancy Pants (1950), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951) and Here Come the Girls (1953). Temporarily leaving films in 1954, Hartmann spent several years in television, writing and producing such series as The Eve Arden Show (1957) and the Henry Fonda vehicle The Smith Family (1971). During the mid-1960s, Edmund Hartmann served as national chairman of the Writers Guild of America.