Charles Lederer - Screenwriting Career

Screenwriting Career

When he was 19, Lederer became friends with Ben Hecht, who introduced him to the New York literati. His friendship with Hecht led to his being hired to write additional dialogue for the film The Front Page. He later moved back to Hollywood to become a full-time screenwriter.

Lederer is recognized for his acerbic wit, with adaptations and collaborative screenplays written mostly during the 1940s and early 1950s. His screenplays frequently delved into the corrosive influences of wealth and power. Yet his comedy writing was also among the best of the period, and he, along with Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz became major contributors to the film genre known as "screwball comedy".

He was friends with screenwriters Joseph and Herman Mankiewicz. Herman would later become co-screenwriter of Citizen Kane. After becoming friends with Lederer, "Herman told Joe to come to the office of their mutual friend Charlie Lederer ... " Herman, who met Hearst as a result of his friendship with Lederer, later "saw Hearst as ‘a finagling, calculating, Machiavellian figure.’ But also, with Charlie Lederer, … wrote and had printed parodies of Hearst newspapers ..."

As explained by Hollywood columnist Pauline Kael, "Mankiewicz found himself on story-swapping terms with the power behind it all, Hearst himself. When he had been in Hollywood only a short time, he met Marion Davies and Hearst through his friendship with Charles Lederer, a writer, then in his early twenties, whom Ben Hecht had met and greatly admired in New York when Lederer was still in his teens. Lederer, a child prodigy, who had entered college at thirteen, got to know Mankiewicz ... Lederer was Marion Davies’s nephew – the son of her sister Reine ... Marion was childless, and Lederer was very close to her; he spent a great deal of his time at her various dwelling places, and took his friends to meet both her and Hearst.”

After finishing the script for Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz gave a copy to Lederer, which Kael explains was foolish:

He was so proud of his script that he lent a copy to Charles Lederer. In some crazily naive way, Mankiewicz seems to have imagined that Lederer would be pleased by how good it was. But Lederer, apparently, was deeply upset and took the script to his aunt and Hearst. It went from them to Hearst's lawyers. . . . It was probably as a result of Mankiewicz's idiotic indiscretion that the various forces were set in motion that resulted in the cancellation of the premiere at the Radio City Music Hall the commercial failure of Citizen Kane.

Lederer, however, told director Peter Bogdanovich that Kael was totally incorrect in this matter, and "she never bothered to check with him." He did not, in fact, ever give the script to Davies. Lederer explains:

I gave it back to him. He asked me if I thought Marion would be offended and I said I didn't think so. The script I read didn't have any flavor of Marion and Hearst—Robert McCormick was the man it was about.

According to Hecht biographer, William MacAdams, "When Hecht began looking around for a new collaborator ... he thought of Charlie Lederer, whom he had met on one of his first trips to Los Angeles....In a letter to screenwriter Gene Fowler, Hecht called Lederer "a very tender soul.... captivated the New York literati just as the other Charlie (MacArthur) had a few years earlier."