| This dissertation explores the lives and major films of several married screenwriters in American film history, concentrating on Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, and Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell. An examination of the films these married writing teams created finds that they wrote at least one classic film revolving around a marriage -- The Thin Man, Father of the Bride, Adam's Rib, and The Marrying Kind and A Star is Born -- giving rise to the question of whether their personal, marital experience influenced the cultural constructions of the marriages they created on film.;Relating the marriage of each couple to the marriage or marriages they created in films uncovered some new theories on the genesis of most of these films. Film studies have long held that the characters of Nick and Nora Charles were patterned after Dashiell Hammett, author of the original novel, and his companion, playwright Lillian Hellman. When the Hacketts turned Nick and Nora into characters for the film, they patterned the couple after themselves and their urbane, sophisticated relationship. The continued popularity of Hellman's memoirs make it a hard legend to counter and has kept the Hacketts from the critical attention their work on this film deserves. The study of the Gordon and Kanin scripts finds that Gordon's feminism influenced the on and off screen persona of Katherine Hepburn and that Garson Kanin's previous experience as a director helped create the visual style of Adam's Rib. Finally, an assessment of Campbell's contribution to A Star is Born, along with a study of all the other writers who claimed a part in Star's success, leads to the theory that the writing credit belongs to Parker alone.;Therefore, this dissertation contributes to the scholarship on women in film, working marriages, collaboration in the entertainment business and authorship studies. It also contributes to the history of the creation of each of these classic films. |
