Starting out as a reporter in his native Georgia, Nunnally Johnson worked his way up the journalistic ladder to the New York Herald Tribune. A prolific writer, Johnson contributed fiction to such periodicals as The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post; one of his Post stories was adapted for the screen as the 1927 Clara Bow vehicle Rough House Rosie. Unlike other Manhattan-based writers, Johnson was attracted to film work. When his proposal to write movie criticism for The New Yorker was turned down by editor Harold Ross in 1933, Johnson decided to move to Hollywood, where he immediately found work as a screenwriter. Well known for his laconic, biting wit, Johnson became a close friend of several other well-known Tinseltown quipsters, notably Groucho Marx. His movie career was briefly jeopardized in the late 1930s when, under a pseudonym, he wrote a less than flattering Saturday Evening Post profile of powerful gossip columnist Louella Parsons. The crisis passed, and Johnson remained incredibly busy, particularly at 20th Century-Fox, where from 1935 onward he toiled as both screenwriter and associate producer.…  » Read more