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Walter Reisch

Basinger, Jeanine; Wasson, Sam. Hollywood: The Oral History (p. 223-5). HarperCollins

A few remarks I’ve lifted from this fascinating book put Walter Reisch at the head of my list of insightful bringers, and this book brings a bunch of them.

WALTER REISCH:
“Talkies inspired all the studios to hire lots of writers, especially big-name writers. At MGM, on the second floor, which was the writers’ floor, there were doors carrying names like Anita Loos, Michael Arlen, Donald Ogden Stewart, Charlie MacArthur, Ludwig Bemelmans, and I was proud to be one of them. There were the Spewacks, the Hacketts, and anybody who had a name. Paul Osborn, Claudine West, Alice Duer Miller, who wrote The White Cliffs of Dover. It was an endless procession of great names, and really and truly, with the exception of James Hilton, who at that time also had an office there, they did not know how to write an original story for a motion picture. Either it was beneath their dignity or they didn’t have the knack to do it.” (“James Hilton (born September 9, 1900, Leigh, Lancashire, England—died December 20, 1954, Long Beach, California, U.S.) was an English novelist whose popular works include Lost Horizon (1933), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934), and Random Harvest (1941), all of which were made into highly successful motion pictures.” — Wikipedia)
“The men who at that time dominated and ruled Hollywood did the right thing in not leaving it all up to one man, as they do today. The results today are very sad—the so-called auteur directors who write everything, direct everything, cut and edit everything themselves—the end results turn out to be lopsided, cockeyed. The results are not always 100 percent happy when one of these “great” directors does everything himself. There is no control, no supervision. The pictures we made at MGM in the studio system conquered the earth for one reason: whether right or wrong, the attitude of those dialogue writers towards the original stories was unmolested by their own vanity, had an open mind towards them, a critical distance. It wasn’t their own stories the writers had to defend, to improve upon, or to polish. So they had detachment. Thus all the departments together under the producer and director, with the objective control by the studio . . . it just worked like a beautiful Swiss clock, the whole MGM machinery. I laughed—and so did everyone—at New York reviews that referred to us as a “factory” because two or three writers’ names always appeared on a script. That’s why it worked. It took collaboration. I made myself an integral part of the whole machinery.
The story of my Hollywood career as a writer is simple. Whenever they needed construction—a beginning, a new middle, and, more than anything else, a new ending or a finale (which they never had, you know)—I was called in. Fortunately, I was always teamed with a very important dialogue writer. This was their great forte in Hollywood: these people could write magnificent words, beautiful lines, but somehow they always lacked a sense of story construction. I was always called in to write a story, to invent characters, to give the outline scene by scene as in a shooting script. And I could write exactly within the budget they were going to shell out for a picture. If they’d allocated, say, $1.2 million, which at that time was a lot of money, I could write exactly 150 pages that would cost exactly that.”

Basinger, Jeanine; Wasson, Sam. Hollywood: The Oral History (p. 223-5). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Wikipedia — Walter Reisch (May 23, 1903 – March 28, 1983) was an Austrian-born director and screenwriter. He also wrote lyrics to several songs featured in his films, one popular title is “Flieger, grüß mir die Sonne”.[1] He was married to the dancer and actress Poldi Dur and was the cousin of Georg Kreisler.
Selected filmography

References

1. Walter Reisch discography at Discogs
   External links
   • Walter Reisch at IMDb
   • Walter Reisch discography at Discogs
   • Walter Reisch (in German) from the online-archive of the Österreichischen Mediathek

@ IMDb
Overview Born: May 23, 1903 · Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]
• Died: March 28, 1983 · Los Angeles, California, USA (cancer)
Biography
• After completing studies in literature at the University of Vienna, Walter Reisch began his screen career as an extra and title writer in 1918. He eventually made the acquaintance of Stephan Lorant, a refuge from the Horty regime in Hungary, who, within a single year, had made a name for himself in Austrian films as a film maker and cinematographer. Lorant gave Reisch a break by promoting him as his assistant director on Die Narrenkappe der Liebe (1921). Reisch followed Lorant to Berlin — then the artistic hub of Europe — to work as his assistant cameraman. He subsequently continued on in the same capacity, working on documentary newsreeels in Switzerland.

In 1925, Reisch returned to Austria to specialise as a scenarist. Before long, his growing reputation led the producer Erich Pommer to sign him to a contract with Germany’s leading film company Ufa, where he had the opportunity to work alongside another gifted Viennese writer named Billy Wilder. Much of Reisch’s work at this time was adapted from literary classics, but he also used some of his own original stories as material. From 1930, he managed to fulfill his long-standing ambition to write lyrics for operatic films. For the next three years, he contributed to many melodies which became popular across the European continent, featured in films like Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel-Takt (1930), The Theft of the Mona Lisa (1931) and A Blonde Dream (1932).

With the rise of Nazism, Reisch, like most creative talent of Jewish background, was forced to join the mass exodus from Germany. He had a brief resurgence in Vienna, where he worked under Willi Forst on the comedy Masquerade in Vienna (1934) and the Franz Schubert biopic Unfinished Symphony (1934). Both turned out to be solid international hits. By 1936, the political situation in Austria had made it untenable for Reisch to continue his work. Almost penniless, he moved on to join his previous mentor Alexander Korda (for whom he had worked as assistant in his student days) in London. After writing and directing the comedy Men Are Not Gods (1936), starring Miriam Hopkins, Reisch unexpectedly received an offer from Louis B. Mayer, who was on a tour of European cities scouting for talent. Soon bound for MGM, Reisch crossed the Atlantic aboard the cruise liner Normandie, with ice-skating star Sonja Henie and actors Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Gertrude Lawrence as fellow passengers.

At MGM (1938-48), his chief contribution was in story construction, solving continuity problems, providing narrative, inventing characters and making relationships between characters plausible and compelling. It remained for other writers, like Charles Brackett or Wilder, to sort out the dialogue. Reisch also had a knack for tailoring scripts to suit a specific star, which he achieved to great effect for Greta Garbo (with Ninotchka (1939)), Clark Gable (with Comrade X (1940)) and Ingrid Bergman (with Gaslight (1944)). Reisch had another crack at directing with Song of Scheherazade (1947). It ended up being made at Universal, because MGM, having an over-abundance of directors under contract, wanted to keep their writers doing what they did best. Though made relatively cheaply, “Song of Scheherazade” turned out to be an ill-advised piece of kitsch, centred around a purely fictitous romance between composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and a dancer. The film was roundly slammed by critics and Reisch was never again approached to direct another picture.

Despite this setback, he returned to best writing form after joining 20th Century Fox in 1949, though he had to adapt himself to a new working methodology: budgets and schedules were tighter and just about everything had to be run past Darryl F. Zanuck; the studio also tended to lean towards action subjects, rather than musical comedy, romantic melodrama or wry satire, which had hitherto been Reisch’s forte. Nonetheless, his lengthy tenure at Fox encompassed two massive back-to-back hits. In collaboration with his former writing partner Charles Brackett, he first worked on location at Niagara Falls, devising the entire original story for Niagara (1953), Brackett handling the dialogue and production. Reisch next worked on Titanic (1953), for which he developed many of the characters by researching contemporary newspaper articles. For this, he was made co-recipient of the Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay in 1954. His last worthy effort was a powerful, underrated drama based on a sensational 1906 scandal: The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955). Zanuck wanted a star vehicle for his latest acquisition, Joan Collins, and Reisch obliged by selling him on the Thaw-White murder case, with Collins in the role of actress Evelyn Nesbit. He had the script ready within ten weeks, painstakingly researched from the original transcripts, and, as he later proudly claimed, ’70 % fact and only 30% fictionalised’!

In 1959, a strike of the Screen Writer’s Guild prevented Reisch from working for six months. When he was finally able to return, a regime change at Fox had taken place, and, as part of a general purge, his contract was not renewed.

• IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

Family Spouse Liesl Handl(1937 – March 28, 1983) (his death)

Trivia

• To his last movies belong “Teenage Rebel” (1956) with Ginger Rogers and “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1959) with James Mason.
• In 1936 he went to England where he wrote and directed the movie “Men Are Not Gods” (1937), finally he migrated to Hollywood in 1937 with a contract for M-G-M. There he was able to write again multitude well-known movies, among others for Billy Wilder, and was very successful.
• He worked in Germany at the beginning of the 30’s and committed some milestones of the German film history to paper, especially in the musical field. In this time he often worked together with director Geza von Bolvary and actor Willi Forst.
• He also wrote lyrics to several songs featured in his films, one popular title is “Flieger, grüß mir die Sonne”.
• Walter Reisch came back to Germany in the 50’s for a short time and wrote the movies “Die Mücke” (1954) and “Der Cornet – Die Weise von Liebe und Tod” (1955), after that he returned to the USA where he was active as a screen writer till 1959.
• Walter Reisch was awarded with an Oscar for his movie “Titanic” in 1953, moreover he also was nominated for three more Oscars.
• The screenwriter Walter Reisch made first experiences in the film business as an assistant of Alexander Korda and he wrote his first scripts for the Austrian film in the silent movie era.
• He was was the cousin of Austrian-American Viennese-language cabarettist, satirist, composer, and author Georg Kreisler.
• When the National Socialists came into power in Germany the Jew Walter Reisch returned to Austria and continued his career in his home country. Especially his cooperation with the actor and director Willi Forst turned out to be very fruitful.
• In 1955 he became presiding judge of the Academy committee for the category “Best Foreign Language Film”.

Quotes

• [on Hedy Lamarr]: I don’t think I exaggerate when I say she was the most beautiful girl God ever sent down to Earth.
• At Fox, it was like being in a big newspaper office. Everything went according to Zanuck’s taste, Zanuck’s speed, Zanuck’s way of making pictures – that is, fast, topical, very little conversation, very few arguments. I personally just loved it.

A quick post. Let’s see whether this miserable block/post nonsense permits anything legible and intelligible to squeak through this ungainly process.

14 JULY 2025 — Conversely, Frank Capra expressed precisely the opposite view in the middle of the same book, thusly: “We directors can’t all make the same kind of films. You make the films that come out of you. If you have complete control of your films, every film that you make will be a chapter in your own autobiography, because your self will escape into it, and it should. If self doesn’t escape into it, you’ll have a conglomeration of stuff — you’ll have too many minds in that one film and you’ll get a committee-made thing, and it’s pretty hard to make art with a committee. You’ve got a chance of making a film that means something if one person guides it, one person makes it from beginning to end. One man, one film.”

The Capra View of filmmaking is clearly oldschool sexist, for starters, but it flies in the face of the great success of the studio system that permitted his existence in spite of his contempt for the influence of consummate professional collaborating storytellers in all of the diverse fields required to make good movies.

“The men who at that time (30s – 40s) dominated and ruled Hollywood did the right thing in not leaving it all up to one man, as they do today (50s – 60s). The results today are very sad—the so-called auteur directors who write everything, direct everything, cut and edit everything themselves—the end results turn out to be lopsided, cockeyed. The results are not always 100 percent happy when one of these “great” directors does everything himself.” — Walter Reisch (above)

The lack of supervision and outside expertise/objectivity is replaced by vanity and a quality of proprietary desperation that never improves anything, least of all THE most mediate of artforms ever invented.

Ferrari style fabrication versus Ford assembly line participation seems like polar opposite description of agendas in creative and fiduciary conflict … and that’s exactly what became of the studios when investment bankers and other outliers took over for the moguls who made the studio system successful with the primary objective of making good films AND some money. I suspect 1947 wrote the prologue to the studio system’s epitaph that now reads:

SPACEY! the final confrontier! These are the voyages of the studio system enterprise, the 105-year mission of which is to tell great stories in brand new ways in spite of traditions that prevent film from going where ain’t nobody been, taking one timid, tiny step at a time for women and one quantum leap for artifice and intelligence simultaneously. And you got some ‘splainin’ to do when toxic workplace environments produce greater art than politically castrated cancel culture content, Lucyfer!

28 Dec 24 Posted by Scott Ellington | Uncategorized | 1930s, film, history, hollywood, movies | Leave a comment