Paddy Chayefsky

Sidney Aaron "Paddy" Chayefsky (January 29, 1923 – August 1, 1981), was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (the other three-time winners, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, have all shared their awards with co-writers).

He was considered one of the most renowned dramatists of the so-called Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, and he was regarded as the central figure in the "kitchen sink realism" movement of American television. Martin Gottfried wrote, "He was a successful writer, the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism."

Following his critically acclaimed teleplays, Chayefsky continued to succeed as a playwright and novelist. As a screenwriter, he received three Academy Awards for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976). The movie Marty was based on his own television drama about a relationship between two lonely people finding love. Network was his scathing satire of the television industry and The Hospital was also satiric. Film historian David Thomson termed The Hospital "daring, uninhibited, and prophetic. No one else would have dreamed of doing it."

Chayefsky's early stories were notable for their dialogue, their depiction of second-generation Americans and their sentiment and humor. They were frequently influenced by the author's childhood in the Bronx. The protagonists were generally middle-class tradesmen struggling with personal problems: loneliness, pressures to conform or their own emotions.

Early life
He was born in the Bronx, New York to Ukrainian Jewish parents, Harry and Gussie Stuchevsky Chayefsky. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, and then the City College of New York. While there, he played for the semi-professional football team Kingsbridge Trojans. He graduated with a degree in accounting in 1943, and then studied languages at Fordham University.

Military service
During World War II, he joined the U.S. Army, where he received both a Purple Heart and the nickname Paddy. The nickname was given spontaneously when Chayefsky was awakened at dawn for kitchen duty. He asked to be excused for Mass. "Okay, Paddy," said the officer, and the name became habitual.

Serving with the 104th Infantry Division in the European Theatre, he was near Aachen, Germany when he was wounded, reportedly by a land mine. While recovering from his injuries in the Army Hospital near Cirencester, England, he wrote the book and lyrics to a musical comedy, No T.O. for Love. First produced in 1945 by the Special Services Unit, the show toured European Army bases for two years. The London opening of No T.O. for Love at the Scala Theatre in the West End was the beginning of Chayefsky's theatrical career. During the London production of this musical, Chayefsky encountered Joshua Logan, a future collaborator, and Garson Kanin, who invited Chayefsky to collaborate with him on a documentary of the Allied invasion, The True Glory.

Post-war
Returning to the United States, Chayefsky worked in his uncle's print shop, Regal Press, an experience which provided a background for his later teleplay, Printer's Measure (1953). Kanin enabled Chayefsky to spend time working on his second play, Put Them All Together (later known as M is for Mother), but it was never produced. Producers Mike Gordon and Jerry Bressler gave him a junior writer's contract. He wrote a story, The Great American Hoax, which sold to Good Housekeeping but was never published.

He relocated to Hollywood, where he met his future wife Susan Sackler, and the couple married in February 1949. Failing to find work on the West Coast, Chayefsky returned to New York.

During the late 1940s, he began working full-time on short stories and radio scripts, and during that period, he was a gagwriter for radio host Robert Q. Lewis. Chayefsky later recalled, "I sold some plays to men who had an uncanny ability not to raise money." During 1951-52, Chayefsky wrote adaptations for radio's Theater Guild on the Air: The Meanest Man in the World (with James Stewart), Cavalcade of America, Tommy (with Van Heflin and Ruth Gordon) and Over 21 (with Wally Cox).

His play The Man Who Made the Mountain Shake was noticed by Elia Kazan, and his wife, Molly Kazan, helped Chayefsky with revisions. It was retitled Fifth From Garibaldi but was never produced. In 1951, the movie As Young as You Feel was adapted from a Chayefsky story.

Television
He moved into television with scripts for Danger, The Gulf Playhouse and Manhunt.

Philco Television Playhouse producer Fred Coe saw the Danger and Manhunt episodes and enlisted Chayefsky to adapt the story It Happened on the Brooklyn Subway about a photographer on a New York subway train who reunites a concentration camp survivor with his long-lost wife. Chayefsky's first script to be telecast was a 1949 adaptation of Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? for Philco.

Since he had always wanted to use a synagogue as backdrop, he wrote Holiday Song, telecast in 1952 and also in 1954. He submitted more work to Philco, including Printer's Measure, The Bachelor Party (1953) and The Big Deal (1953). One of these teleplays, Mother (April 4, 1954), received a new production October 24, 1994 on Great Performances with Anne Bancroft in the title role. Curiously, original teleplays from the 1950s are almost never revived for new TV productions, so the 1994 production of Mother was a conspicuous rarity.

In 1953, Chayefsky wrote Marty, which was premiered on The Philco Television Playhouse, with Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand. Marty is a poignant story of a decent, hard-working Bronx butcher, pining for the company of a woman in his life but despairing of ever finding true love in a relationship. Fate pairs him with a plain, shy schoolteacher named Clara whom he rescues from the embarrassment of being abandoned by her blind date in a local dance hall. The production, the actors and Chayefsky's naturalistic dialogue received much critical acclaim and influenced subsequent live television dramas. Chayefsky had a unique clause in his Marty contract that stated that only he could write the screenplay. Adapted into a 1955 film with Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair, it earned Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Delbert Mann) and Best Actor (Borgnine). Chayefsky won his first Best Screenplay Oscar for the movie.

Chayefsky's The Great American Hoax was broadcast May 15, 1957 during the second season of The 20th Century Fox Hour. This was actually a rewrite of his earlier Fox film, As Young as You Feel (1951) with Monty Woolley and Marilyn Monroe. The Great American Hoax was shown on the FX channel after Fox restored some The 20th Century Fox Hour episodes and telecast them under the new title Fox Hour of Stars beginning in 2002.

Writing style
Chayefsky gained the reputation as a realist for his television scripting. Chayefsky’s plays, broadcast live, adapted themselves well to the small screen format of early television through the utilization of physically restrained stage sets crafted so dialogue took precedence over action. His themes were often a testament to the struggles of the human condition, sagas of ordinary, hard- working people striving to maintain their hard-won middle-class status. His protagonists wrestled with personal problems, such as loneliness, pressure to conform to society’s expectations, and inability to understand or successfully manage their own emotional drives.

Broadway
The seventh season of Philco Television Playhouse began September 19, 1954 with E. G. Marshall and Eva Marie Saint in Chayefsky's Middle of the Night, a play which relocated to Broadway theaters 15 months later; In 1956, Middle of the Night opened on Broadway with Edward G. Robinson and Gena Rowlands, and its success led to a national tour. It was filmed by Columbia Pictures in 1959 with Kim Novak and Fredric March.

The Tenth Man (1959) marked Chayefsky's second Broadway theatrical success, garnering 1960 Tony nominations for Best Play, Best Director (Tyrone Guthrie) and Best Scenic Design. Guthrie received another nomination for Chayefsky's Gideon, as did actor Fredric March. Chayefsky's final Broadway theatrical production, a play based on the life of Joseph Stalin, The Passion of Josef D, received unfavorable reviews and ran for only 15 performances.

Films
After the success of Marty, he worked mainly on films. He received an Oscar nomination for The Goddess, loosely based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Directed by John Cromwell, it starred Kim Stanley as Emily Ann Faulkner, a small town blonde who achieves fame in films but becomes emotionally disturbed and a problem to her producer, her director, and her husband played by Lloyd Bridges.

Gore Vidal adapted Chayefsky's teleplay The Catered Affair into a film of the same name. In 2008, it was adapted to a Broadway musical by Harvey Fierstein with music and lyrics by John Bucchino. It had a four-month run, receiving 15 Tony and Drama Desk nominations.

He expanded his 1953 teleplay, The Bachelor Party, for the 1957 film adaptation. Directed by Mann, the drama has characters who are questioning the concept of marriage, of commitment to one person and going day after day to the same dull job to support a family.

During the 1960s his credits included The Americanization of Emily, which featured James Garner, Julie Andrews, Melvyn Douglas and James Coburn, an anti-war comedy that remains both Garner's and Andrews' favorite of their films. Garner plays a naval officer so comically frightened under fire on D-Day that he runs the other way. Paint Your Wagon, a screen vehicle for Lee Marvin, was a lavish Western musical comedy. Paint Your Wagon director Joshua Logan said he "found Chayefsky to be close to a genius, but too close to stubborn."
 * The Americanization of Emily

He won two more Oscars, the first for The Hospital (1971) which featured George C. Scott and Diana Rigg. David Thomson describes it as a "lethally funny account of American social benevolence collapsing in its own bureaucratic chaos. Another review terms it "a scathing indictment of the medical community." (In 1980, after he was diagnosed with cancer, he refused surgery, claiming that he "feared retribution by the doctors" for his caustic portrayal of them in the film. He died the next year. )
 * The Hospital

The film was followed by Network (1976), which featured Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch (who posthumously was awarded an Oscar for "Best Actor in a Leading Role") and Robert Duvall among other cast members. For both of these films Chayefsky received Golden Globe awards. The film annoyed many television executives and news anchors, but it won the acclaim of most critics. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning four, including Best Actress for Faye Dunaway. Peter Finch and Beatrice Straight also won for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, and it resulted in Chayefsky's third and final award for Best Screenplay.
 * Network

In a powerful scene from Network, set in a conference room of imperial décor and intimidating proportion, Chayefsky presents his prescient articulation of the evolutionary force of a forthcoming global economy and corporate prominence in the political sphere. Business mogul, Arthur Jensen, (actor Ned Beatty) lectures newscaster Howard Beale (actor Peter Finch):

Jensen: “...We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.”

Chayefsky provided actor Peter Finch with one of the most iconic movie lines in film history. Finch as the unhinged news anchor, Howard Beale, implores his TV audience to rise in unanimous protest against universal injustice. Waving his arms in vehement appeal, he instructs the public to take up the call, go to their windows and with him in unison yell out to the world:

“I’m as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'

Although Chayefsky was an early writer for the television medium, he eventually abandoned it, "decrying the lack of interest the networks demonstrated toward quality programming." As a result, during the course of his career, he constantly toyed with the idea of lampooning the television industry, which he succeeded in doing with Network. The film is said to have "presaged the advent of reality television by twenty years" and was a "sardonic satire" of the television industry, dealing with the "dehumanization of modern life."

Novels
Inspired by the work of John C. Lilly, Chayefsky spent two years in Boston doing research to write his science fiction novel Altered States (HarperCollins, 1978) about a man's search for his primal self through psychotropic drugs and an isolation tank. Chayefsky suffered greatly from stress while working on the novel, resulting in his heart attack in 1977. Subsequent to that misfortune, he was sued by one of the numerous scientific advisors he hired to help him with research. He wrote the screenplay for the 1980 film, but he is credited by his real first and middle name, Sidney Aaron, because of disputes with director Ken Russell.

Personal life
Drama critic Martin Gottfried gives a general description of Chayefsky's personal traits as they may have affected his writings:
 * Chayefsky was a sturdy man of 42, compact and burly in the bulky way of a schoolyard athlete, with thick dark hair and a bent nose that could pass for a streetfighter's. He was a grown-up with one foot in the boys' clubs of his city youth, a street snob who would not allow the loss of his nostalgia. He was an intellectual competitor, always spoiling for a political argument or a philosophical argument, or any exchange over any issue, changing sides for the fun of the fray. A liberal, he was annoyed by liberals; a proud Jew, he wouldn't let anyone call him a "Jewish writer." In short, the life of the mind was a participant sport for Paddy Chayefsky.

Paddy and Susan Sackler Chayefsky's son Dan was born six years after their 1949 marriage. Despite an alleged affair with Kim Novak, Paddy and Susan Chayefsky remained married until his death.

Chayefsky died in New York City of cancer in August 1981 at the age of 58, and was interred in the Sharon Gardens Division of Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, Westchester County, New York. His personal papers are at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Filmography

 * The True Glory (1945), uncredited, with Garson Kanin
 * As Young as You Feel (1955), with Lamar Trotti
 * Marty (1955)
 * The Catered Affair (1956)
 * The Bachelor Party (1957)
 * The Goddess (1958)
 * Middle of the Night (1959)
 * The Americanization of Emily (1964)
 * Paint Your Wagon (with Alan Jay Lerner) (1969)
 * The Hospital (1971)
 * Network (1976)
 * Altered States (1980)
 * The Habakkuk Conspiracy (1983)

Television and stage plays

 * Television (selection)
 * 1950-55 Danger
 * 1951-52 Manhunt
 * 1951-60 Goodyear Playhouse
 * 1952-54 Philco Television Playhouse
 * 1952 Holiday Song 
 * 1952 The Reluctant Citizen 
 * 1953 Printer's Measure 
 * 1953 Marty
 * 1953 The Big Deal 
 * 1953 The Bachelor Party
 * 1953 The Sixth Year
 * 1953 Catch My Boy On Sunday
 * 1954 The Mother
 * 1954 Middle of the Night
 * 1955 The Catered Affair
 * 1956 The Great American Hoax 


 * Stage
 * No T.O. for Love (1945)
 * Middle of the Night (1956)
 * The Tenth Man (1959)
 * Gideon (1961)
 * The Passion of Josef D. (1964)
 * The Latent Heterosexual (originally titled The Accountant's Tale or The Case of the Latent Heterosexual) (1968)