HOWARD, Sidney

Writer. Nationality: American. Born: Sidney Coe Howard in Oakland, California, 26 June 1891. Education: Attended the University of California, Berkeley, B.A. 1915; studied with George Pierce Baker at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1915–16. Family: Married 1) the actress Clare Jenness Eames, 1922 (divorced 1930); one daughter; 2) Leopoldine Blaine Damrosch, 1931; one daughter and one son. Career: Served in the American Ambulance Corps, and later in the Army Air Corps during World War I: Captain; 1919–22—member of the editorial staff, and literary editor, 1922, Life magazine; 1921—first play produced, Swords; 1929—first film as writer, Bulldog Drummond; 1938—founder, with S.N. Behrman and others, Playwrights Company. Awards: Pulitzer Prize for play They Knew What They Wanted, 1925; Academy Award for Gone with the Wind, 1939. Member: American Academy. Died: In a farm accident, in Tyringham, Massachusetts, 23 August 1939.

Films as Writer:

1929

Bulldog Drummond (Jones) (co); Condemned (Ruggles)

1930

Raffles (D'Arrast); One Heavenly Night (Fitzmaurice); ALady to Love (Sjöström) (co)

1931

Arrowsmith (Ford) (co)

1932

The Greeks Had a Word for Them (L. Sherman) (co)

1936

Dodsworth (Wyler)

1939

Gone with the Wind (Fleming)

1940

Raffles (Wood) (co)

Publications

By HOWARD: plays—

Swords, New York, 1921.

Casanova, New York, 1924.

They Knew What They Wanted, New York, 1925.

Lucky Sam McCarver, New York, 1926.

Ned McCobb's Daughter, New York, 1926.

The Silver Cord, New York, 1927.

Olympia, New York, 1928.

Half Gods, New York, 1930.

The Late Christopher Bean, New York, 1933.

Alien Corn, New York, 1933.

Dodsworth, New York, 1934.

Yellow Jack, New York, 1934.

Paths of Glory, New York, 1935.

The Ghost of Yankee Doodle, New York, 1938.

One, Two, Three, New York, 1952.

Madam, Will You Walk?, New York, 1955.

Lute Song, Chicago, 1955.

By HOWARD: other books—

The Labor Spy (nonfiction), New York, 1921.

With John Hearley, Professional Patriots (nonfiction), New York, 1927.

Gone with the Wind (screenplay), edited by Richard Harwell, New York, 1980.

By HOWARD: article—

"The Story Gets a Treatment," in We Make the Movies, edited by Nancy Naumburg, New York, 1937.

On HOWARD: book—

White, Sydney H., Sidney Howard, Manchester, 1977.

On HOWARD: articles—

Theatre Arts (New York), February 1957.

Sorelle, Cynthia M., in Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, edited by John MacNicholas, Detroit, Michigan, 1981.

Yeck, Joanne, in American Screenwriters, edited by Robert E. Morsberger, Stephen O. Lesser, and Randall Clark, Detroit, Michigan, 1984.

Finkle, D., "Tara! Tara! Tara!" in New York Times, 10 December 1989.

If Sidney Howard had written only the screenplay for Gone with the Wind, he would have earned his place in film history. But in addition to writing America's most popular movie, Howard's talents helped bring prestige and dignity to some of the best films of the 1930s.

Born in California in 1891, Sidney Howard began writing at the age of nineteen when he was confined in a Swiss sanatorium for tuberculosis. He graduated from Berkeley, studied English literature at Harvard, served as an ambulance driver and flyer during the World War I, then went to work as a journalist, contributing to such magazines as Colliers, The New Republic, and Hearst's International. His war experience had made a realist of Howard. This realism, combined with a strong social conscience, was reflected in his articles and eventually in his plays. In the mid-1920s, he gained national prominence as a dramatist with a series of Broadway successes, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning They Knew What They Wanted.

When the movies began to talk in 1927, Hollywood's producers combed New York for playwrights interested in writing for the screen. Lured by the promise of riches and the challenge of a new form, Howard was one of the first wave of notable New York writers to head west. He went to work for Samuel Goldwyn, Hollywood's most illustrious independent producer, who appreciated Howard's refined sensibilities.

Howard recognized that early sound films had suffered from too much talk. He acknowledged the power of silence and respected the impact of visual movement. Unlike many screenwriters, who are married to their words, Howard believed that a screenwriter should provide the director with "rhythms and ideas."

When Howard went to work for Goldwyn the producer's top star was Ronald Colman. Goldwyn was eager to maintain Colman's box office power and assigned Howard to the actor's first three talking pictures, Bulldog Drummond, Condemned, and Raffles. Colman's exquisite voice and Howard's sophisticated dialogue turned out to be a winning team, both at the box office and with the critics. Bulldog Drummond was so successful that Goldwyn produced a sequel, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, and Paramount eventually serialized it in the late 1930s featuring John Barrymore as the highly articulate adventurer. Raffles, the gentleman thief, proved durable as well; Goldwyn remade the film in 1940 with David Niven. Howard is credited along with fellow playwright John Van Druten. In these three distinctly different scripts, Howard proved his versatility. He could provide an abundance of witty, staccato dialogue when it was called for and could be equally economical when action was required.

Howard's comedic adaptations of Louis Bromfield's One Heavenly Night, which blended light satire with musical numbers, and Zoë Akins's racy The Greeks Had a Word for It, retitled The Greeks Had a Word for Them, were less successful. Although his dialogue was aptly sophisticated, his strength lay in more realistic material.

Of the Goldwyn films, Howard's adaptations of two Sinclair Lewis novels, Arrowsmith and Dodsworth, were his most notable works. Arrowsmith was hailed as one of the decade's first serious message pictures, named by the New York Times as one of the "Ten Best of 1931," and garnered four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Screen Adaptation. Dodsworth, which he had successfully dramatized for the New York theater two years before, also remains highly regarded. It received eight Academy nominations; again, the screenwriter was honored. The following year Howard attempted a third Lewis property, It Can't Happen Here (1935). The political content, however, was unacceptable to Hollywood's censors; it went unproduced.

Howard wrote only two scripts which were not produced by Goldwyn. In 1930, he adapted his own play They Knew What They Wanted for MGM. Called A Lady to Love, it was the second screen version of his play. The silent film, retitled Secret Hour, starred vamp Pola Negri and Jean Hersholt as the lovable Italian vintner. In 1940, RKO made a third attempt to recreate the impact of Howard's play, but was unable to retain its honest portrayal of adultery under the prevailing censorship.

Howard's last screenplay, Gone with the Wind, was an outstanding achievement. His reduction of Margaret Mitchell's 1,037 page epic of the old South to a manageable screenplay was a herculean task. His initial submission, though still over long, was faithful to the spirit of the book despite its extensive condensation of material. When Howard refused to leave New England to continue rewrites, producer David O. Selznick replaced him with a series of writers including Ben Hecht, John Van Druten, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oliver H.P. Garrett, and Charles MacArthur. Despite the multiplicity of contributors, the final script was remarkably close to Howard's 1936 draft, resulting in a single credit and a posthumously awarded Oscar for Best Screenplay. Howard had died tragically a few months before the awards at the age of forty-eight, crushed by a tractor on his farm in Tyringham, Massachusetts.

In the published preface to his play Lucky Sam McCarver Howard wrote, "The novelist prefers writing to anything; the dramatist prefers acting to anything. The drama does not spring from a literary impulse but from a love of the brave, ephemeral, beautiful art of acting." Howard's respect for talking pictures combined with his sincere love of acting unquestionably advanced the art of filmmaking in the 1930s.

—Joanne L. Yeck

Howard, Sidney Coe (1891–1939), American dramatist. His first play to be produced, a romantic verse drama entitled Swords (1922), was a failure; but success came with the Pulitzer Prize-winner They Knew What They Wanted (1924), a drama about a middle-aged Italian and his mail-order bride set in grape-growers' country in Howard's native state of California. It was followed by Lucky Sam McCarver (1925), the portrait of a night-club proprietor, Ned McCobb's Daughter and The Silver Cord (both 1926), the first a sympathetic tale of a New England woman at odds with rum-runners, the second a study of maternal possessiveness. The position of the artist in an unsympathetic community was the theme of Alien Corn (1933), a somewhat melodramatic piece starring Katharine Cornell; Yellow Jack (1934) was a factually accurate account of the fight against yellow fever; The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (1937), though only moderately successful in production, was perhaps the most satisfactory of Howard's plays, showing how in all classes of society economic considerations overcome the normal aversion to war. Howard had just finished the first draft of Madam, Will You Walk? when he was killed in an accident. It was produced in 1953 but, lacking the author's revisions, was not a success.

Howard was a prolific translator and adaptor, being responsible for the American versions of Vildrac's Le Paquebot Tenacity in 1922 and René Fauchois's Prenez garde à la peinture in 1932, among others. As The Late Christopher Bean, the latter had a great success, and was further adapted for British audiences by Emlyn Williams. Howard also dramatized Sinclair Lewis's novel Dodsworth in 1934 and was the joint adaptor of a 14th-century Chinese play as Lute Song, eventually staged as a musical, with Mary Martin, in 1946.

Howard, Sidney [Coe] (1891–1939), California‐born playwright, graduated from the state university (1915), studied at Harvard in the 47 Workshop of G.P. Baker, served in World War I, and returned to become a magazine editor. His first major play, Swords (1921), a romantic blank‐verse tragedy set in medieval times, was followed by adaptations from foreign dramas, including S.S. Tenacity (1922), Casanova (1923), and Sancho Panza (1923), and an original play, Bewitched (1924), written with Edward Sheldon. Although he continued to make adaptations, his reputation as an original dramatist was established with They Knew What They Wanted (1924, Pulitzer Prize), which was followed by Lucky Sam McCarver (1925), Ned McCobb's Daughter (1926), and The Silver Cord (1926). With Charles MacArthur, he wrote Salvation (1928), a play about a woman revivalist. A further series of adaptations included Olympia (1928); Marseilles (1930); and The Late Christopher Bean (1932), which transfers a French play to a New England setting and shows the triumph of a hired girl in recognizing the greatness of a struggling artist, who marries her when he becomes successful. Howard's next play was Alien Corn (1933), the story of a music teacher in a small college, who forsakes her dream of becoming a concert pianist because of her love for the married college president, and, when their affair ends, stifles her feelings and continues her teaching. Later plays include Dodsworth (1934), in collaboration with Sinclair Lewis; Yellow Jack (1934); Paths of Glory (1935), a dramatization of a war novel by Humphrey Cobb; and The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (1937), the story of a liberal's fight against war propaganda.

Howard, Sidney [Coe] (1891–1939), playwright. Born to pioneer stock in Oakland, California, he studied at the University of California and with Professor George Pierce Baker in his 47 Workshop at Harvard. Howard then worked on magazines and newspapers before his first play, the romantic verse drama Swords (1921), reached New York. His first success was They Knew What They Wanted (1924), followed by Lucky Sam McCarver (1925), Ned McCobb's Daughter (1926), and The Silver Cord (1926). Howard endured a series of failures before finding success again with The Late Christopher Bean (1932), Alien Corn (1933), and his 1934 dramatization of Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth. In 1938 he joined in founding the Playwrights' Company. For the rest of his career Howard's new plays met with divided notices and poor box office response. Ironically, after he died in an accident on his farm, two of his works found better receptions: the adaptation of an old Chinese classic, Lute Song (1946), written with Will Irwin; and the fantasy Madam, Will You Walk (1953), a play that had closed on the road in 1939 but was superbly revived by the Phoenix Theatre. Theatre historian Glenn Hughes observed, “Howard's work was always vigorous and biting, but frequently repellent. At times, too, it lacked form and compactness. He was a headstrong writer, and his enthusiasms were apt to carry him beyond the bounds of dramatic propriety.” But his best work also showed a compassionate, tolerant understanding of human foibles and a zest for life.

Sidney Coe Howard 1891–1939, American dramatist, b. Oakland, Calif., grad. Univ. of California, 1915, and studied under George Pierce Baker at Harvard. His first successful play was They Knew What They Wanted (1924; Pulitzer Prize), a compassionate drama set in the wine-producing region of California. It was followed by such plays as Ned McCobb's Daughter (1926), about a courageous New England resort owner; The Silver Cord (1926), concerning possessive maternalism; and Yellow Jack (1934), a dramatization of man's struggle against yellow fever. Howard's other works include the adaptation The Late Christopher Bean (1932) and the Academy Award winning screenplay for the movie Gone With the Wind (1939).