Edward Bartlett Cormack

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Edward Bartlett Cormack (March 19, 1898 - September 16, 1942) was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, and producer best known for his 1927 Broadway play The Racket, as well as his collaboration with Howard Hughes and Cecil B. DeMille on several films.

Early life

Cormack's uncle, Edward K. Cormack, and Alice E. Cormack, was born in Scotland. His family had migrated from Hammond, Indiana, to Chicago, Illinois, where his father worked in sales by 1900. He graduated from University High School and was accepted into the University of Chicago. Cormack wrote Anybody's Girl, one of the best Blackfriars scripts ever submitted (the student dramatic group). Cormack joined Maurice Browne's Little Theatre Company in Chicago, but his duties as a general handyman were so demanding that he be barred from the University due to poor class attendance.

He took up writing at the Chicago Evening Journal and stayed there for a year, covering "hangings, racial protests, street car strikes, and other local diversity typical of Mayor Thompson's turbulent city." He worked for the Chicago Evening Journal for five years before applying for reinstatement at the University of Chicago. He wrote two more college plays and became engaged, graduating two years later with a Phi Beta Kappa and two years later. He wrote articles and a few essays on The American, where he wrote a book review.

He married Adelaide Maurine Bledsoe (1901–1999), the niece of Samuel T. Bledsoe, a president and board chairman of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, in 1923. Thomas Bledsoe Cormack, the boy's brother, and Adelaide Kilbee Cormack, the daughter. He accepted a job as a press agent for a theater company right after the wedding and the couple then migrated to New York City.

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Stage career

Cormack's most influential work as a playwright was his 1927 Broadway play The Racket, which starred Edward G. Robinson in his first gangster role. The Racket was an expose of political graft in the 1920s and was considered one of the late 1920s and early 1930s Hollywood gangster cycles. The incidents took place over a period of about 18 hours in a Chicago police station, and the group features savvy crime reporters who dash to the phone and holler, "Get me the desk!" Bartlett Cormack was "the only playwright who has made the reporter real on stage," O. O. McIntyre wrote in The Miami News on December 24, 1927. The play was so inflammatory that it was refused a preview in Chicago, allegedly at Al Capone's orders; the prohibition has been in force for nearly two decades.

Joseph Hergesheimer, who wrote the novel of the same name in 1926, gave Cormack credit for the play Tampico. Ilka Chase and Gavin Gordon appeared in the play on Broadway in 1928. In 1930, MGM acquired the screen rights to the film.

Hey Diddle Diddle Diddle, a Hollywood comedy set in a duplex apartment, was later written by Cormack. Lucille Ball, "one of three roommates struggling with neurotic directors, disorganized executives, and grasping actors who hinder the girls' ability to advance" premiered in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 21, 1937. The play received rave reviews, but it was not without a doubt, particularly because its star, Conway Tearle, was in poor health. Cormack wanted to replace him, but Anne Nichols, the actor, said the part was flawed and rewritten and insisted that it be reformed and rewritten. The two were unable to find a solution. The play had been supposed to open on Broadway at the Vanderbilt Theatre in Washington, D.C., but after one week, Tearle suddenly became seriously ill, it was cancelled.

Film career

He moved to Beverly Hills in 1928, working on Howard Hughes' silent film version of The Racket, one of the first films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture (then called "Best Picture, Production) in 1929.

For the 1930 film version of The Spoilers, he gave Rex Beach a screenwriting credit. In Nome, Alaska, Beach based his 1906 book on the true story of corrupt government officials stealing gold mines from prospectors, which Beach had observed while prospecting. Five times have been adapted to film; 1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, and 1955.

Howard Hughes chose Cormack and Charles Lederer to write the script for the 1931 film The Front Page, although Ben Hecht was the author of The Front Page and himself a screenwriter. The film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor at the 4th Academy Awards.

He wrote the script for Cecil B. DeMille's This Day and Age, a film in which a group of High School students takes the law into their own hands in 1933. Robert S. Birchard's book Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood explains how DeMille wasn't positive Cormack's script had a sense of current slang, so he asked high school student Horace Hahn to read the script and comment (at the time, Hahn was senior class president at Los Angeles High School). The "Gee," a late 1930s movie talk, might be a laugh out loud today, but this (according to Hahn at least) was the way he and his classmates talked today. DeMille wrote to DeMille that the majority of Cormack's dialogue was "not typical of high school students." "It" should be interspersed with a few exclamations such as "gosh" — "gosh," the writer's address to the murdered tailor read: "Gosh, he was swell to us fellows." Despite seeking Hahn's advice, DeMille and Cormack did not accept his recommendations.

In 1935, he collaborated with screenwriter Fritz Lang and story author Norman Krasna on the anti-lynching film Fury, for which Krasna received an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Original Story.

Cormack, who relocating to England in 1938, helped script Sidewalks of London and the Charles Laughton film Vessel of Wrath (released in the United States as The Beachcomber). Cormack did some work on the script for the 1941 DeMille film Northwest Mounted Police but was not recognized for the work. Unholy Partners, which starred Edward G. Robinson, was one of Cormack's final screenwriting jobs. Robinson appeared in the first Broadway revival of The Racket, portraying an unidentified man.

John Cromwell produced the 1951 remake of The Racket. In the original Broadway production of The Racket, Cromwell appeared.

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