Charles William Brackett | |
|---|---|
 Brackett in 1942 | |
| Born | November 26, 1892 |
| Died | March 9, 1969 (aged 76) |
| Alma mater | Williams College |
| Occupation(s) | Screenwriter, producer |
| Years active | 1925–1962 |
| Spouses | Elizabeth Fletcher (m. 1919;died 1948)Lillian Fletcher (m. 1953) |
| Children | 2 |
Charles William Brackett (November 26, 1892 – March 9, 1969) was an American screenwriter and film producer. He collaborated with Billy Wilder on sixteen films.
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Brackett was born in Saratoga Springs, New York, the son of Mary Emma Corliss and New York State Senator, lawyer, and banker Edgar Truman Brackett. The family's roots traced back to the arrival of Richard Brackett in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629. His mother's uncle, George Henry Corliss, built the Centennial Engine that powered the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. A 1915 graduate of Williams College, he earned his law degree from Harvard University. He joined the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War I, and was awarded the French Medal of Honor.
He was a frequent contributor to the Saturday Evening Post , Collier's , and Vanity Fair , and a drama critic for The New Yorker . He wrote five novels: The Counsel of the Ungodly (1920), Week-End (1925), That Last Infirmity (1926), American Colony (1929), [1] and Entirely Surrounded (1934).
Brackett was a president of the Screen Writers Guild (1938–1939) and for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1949–1955). He either wrote and/or produced over forty films, including To Each His Own , Ninotchka , The Major and the Minor , The Mating Season (1951), Niagara , The King and I , Ten North Frederick , The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker and Blue Denim .
Beginning in August 1936, Brackett worked with Billy Wilder, writing the film classics The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard , both of which won Academy Awards for their respective screenplays. Brackett described their collaboration process as follows: "The thing to do was suggest an idea, have it torn apart and despised. In a few days it would be apt to turn up, slightly changed, as Wilder's idea. Once I got adjusted to that way of working, our lives were simpler." [2]
His partnership with Wilder ended in 1950 and Brackett went to work at 20th Century-Fox as a screenwriter and producer. His script for Titanic (1953) won him another Academy Award.
He received an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1958.
Brackett died on March 9, 1969. [3] His diaries covering his screenwriting and social life from 1932 to 1949 were edited by Anthony Slide into Slide's book It's the Pictures That Got Small: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood's Golden Age.
Brackett married Elizabeth Barrows Fletcher in 1919. They had two daughters, Alexandra Corliss Brackett and Elizabeth Fletcher Brackett. His wife died in 1948, and in 1953, Charles married Lillian Fletcher, her sister. They had no children. [4]
Brackett was a Republican who voted for Alf Landon in 1936 and supported Barry Goldwater in the 1964 United States presidential election. [5]
("*" indicates collaboration with Wilder)
| Year | Category | Film | Result | Shared with |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1939 | Best Adapted Screenplay | Ninotchka | Nominated | Billy Wilder & Walter Reisch |
| 1941 | Best Adapted Screenplay | Hold Back the Dawn | Nominated | Billy Wilder |
| 1945 | Best Picture | The Lost Weekend | Won | — |
| 1945 | Best Adapted Screenplay | The Lost Weekend | Won | Billy Wilder |
| 1946 | Best Story | To Each His Own | Nominated | |
| 1948 | Best Adapted Screenplay | A Foreign Affair | Nominated | Billy Wilder & Richard L. Breen |
| 1950 | Best Picture | Sunset Boulevard | Nominated | — |
| 1950 | Best Original Screenplay | Sunset Boulevard | Won | Billy Wilder & D. M. Marshman Jr. |
| 1953 | Best Original Screenplay | Titanic | Won | Richard L. Breen & Walter Reisch |
| 1956 | Best Picture | The King and I | Nominated | — |
| 1957 | Honorary Award | — | Won | — |
Billy Wilder was an American filmmaker and screenwriter. He was born in Sucha Beskidzka, Poland, a town in Austria-Hungary at the time of his birth. His career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema. He received seven Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and two Golden Globe Awards.
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Ninotchka is a 1939 American romantic comedy film made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by producer and director Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. It was written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch, based on a story by Melchior Lengyel. Ninotchka marked the first comedy role for Garbo, and her penultimate film; she received her third and final Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. In 1990, Ninotchka was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2011, Time also included the film on the magazine's list of "All-Time 100 Movies".
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Charles Reginald Jackson was an American writer. He wrote the 1944 novel The Lost Weekend.
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The Lost Weekend is Charles R. Jackson's first novel, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1944. The story of a talented but alcoholic writer was praised for its powerful realism, closely reflecting the author’s own experience of alcoholism, from which he was temporarily cured. It served as the basis for the classic 1945 Oscar winning film adaptation.
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Doane Harrison was an American film editor whose career spanned four decades. For nearly twenty years, from 1935–54, he was a prolific editor of films for Paramount Pictures, including eleven films with director Mitchell Leisen. For twenty-five years, from 1941–1966, Harrison was editor, editorial supervisor or associate producer on all the films directed by Billy Wilder, who is now considered one of the great 20th-century filmmakers.
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