page_title: Winchell Smith
section_title: Broadway
hierarchical_section_title: Winchell Smith / Broadway
caption_attribution_description: Photo from the stage production of Brewster's Millions. This is the yacht scene and Edward Abeles stars as Monty Brewster as he also did in the later film.
context_page_description: Winchell Smith was an American playwright, known for big hit works such as Brewster's Millions and Lightnin'. Many of his plays were made into movies. He spent freely but left a large fortune at his death.
context_section_description: After twelve years as an actor, in 1906 Smith began a career as a dramatist with a play based on the novel Brewster's Millions.
  Smith was an assistant to Frederic Thompson, owner of the New York Hippodrome, who had a stage version of Brewster's Millions in rehearsal.
  Thompson was advised by the successful dramatists George Howells Broadhurst, Augustus Thomas and William Gillette that the play would fail, and the novel could not be dramatized. Smith disagreed, saying it "would make a swell play". He was given the job of rewriting the play, which he did with the help of Byron Ongley. The experts disliked the new version too, but Thompson was persuaded to stage it anyway, and it proved highly successful. Smith often collaborated with other playwrights.
  In his career of over twenty years he wrote one original play, but adapted or "doctored" numerous hits.
  In 1913 Smith and Victor Mapes staged a revised version of  The Henrietta, Bronson Howard's 1887 success.
  The New Henrietta starred William H. Crane and Douglas Fairbanks.
  Smith wrote or co-wrote The Fortune Hunter (1909–10), The Boomerang (1915–16), Turn to the Right (1916–17) and Lightnin' (1918-20), all of which were great successes on Broadway.
  Smith became associated with the producer John Golden.
  Smith's Turn to the Right, produced by Golden and first staged in August 1916, launched Golden's career.
  Lightnin' was co-written by Smith and Frank Bacon and produced by Golden.
  Frank Bacon was fifty-five when he met Smith, and had always played minor roles. Bacon had written Lightnin'  long before but had never been able to interest a producer. 
  It was a comic play about a rustic character who ran a hotel straddling the Nevada-California border.
  He is lazy, often drunk and a spinner of entertaining yarns.
  Winchell Smith saw the potential of the play. He agreed to rewrite it and stage it at the Gaiety Theatre in partnership with Bacon and Golden. Bacon played the lead role.
  It was first staged in August 1918. A critic said that Lightnin' Bill was as delightful a character as Rip Van Winkle.
  President Woodrow Wilson attended a show with his wife, and called Golden to his box, where he told him the play was the most entertaining they had ever seen.
  Lightnin' played for 1,291 performances on Broadway, a record at the time.
  After Lightnin' closed the cast paraded down Broadway to Pennsylvania Station, where they boarded a train for a tour of the nation. The parade was headed by Mayor John Francis Hylan and Commissioner Grover Whalen.Lightnin' played in Australia and South Africa, but was not staged in London until 1925. 
  Smith had agreed that Frank Bacon, co-author and player of the principal role, should appear in the London production. However, Bacon died in 1922.
  The play was put on at the Shaftesbury Theatre in January 1925 in a production supervised by Smith. In 1919 John Golden arranged a meeting with his fellow producers Fred Zimmerman, Archibald Selwyn, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., Winchell Smith and L. Lawrence Weber with the goal of cooperating on common issues such as censorship and ticket speculation.
  He wanted to set up a forum so the producers could share ideas, and wanted stop the rival organizations poaching each other's stars. This led to formation of the Producing Managers' Association, which may have inadvertently shown actors the value of organizing into the Actors' Equity Association. Winchell Smith continued to work with John Golden Smith decided that The Wisdom Tooth, a comedy by Marc Connelly, should be staged at the Little Theatre in February 1926. When it was tried out in Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut, it flopped in both cities. However, Golden sent Smith a cable, "We have had plenty of successes. Let's have a failure for a change. The Little Theatre needs a tenant. Try it out for a week or two there". In the event, The Wisdom Tooth was a hit, and played for 160 performances. Later that year Smith's Two Girls Wanted was a greater success.
caption: Brewsters Millions on stage, 1907
exif: {}