page_title: Andrew P. Solt
section_title: Career:  Broadway to Hollywood
hierarchical_section_title: Andrew P. Solt / Career:  Broadway to Hollywood
caption_attribution_description: English: During shooting break, Elizabeth Taylor in costume for her role as one of the March sisters in Little Women, 1949, with Andrew Solt, the film's screenwriter
context_page_description: Andrew Peter Solt was a Hungarian-born Hollywood screenwriter for film and television. He began his career as a playwright in Budapest. Solt is best known for writing the screenplay for In A Lonely Place, a critically acclaimed film noir directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. The film is on the Time Magazine "All-TIME 100 Movies" list of greatest films since 1923. In 2007, it was selected for preservation by the
  National Film Registry of the Library of Congress and cited for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
  Solt also co-wrote the screenplay for Joan of Arc, collaborating with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Maxwell Anderson. Adapted from Anderson's hit Broadway show Joan of Lorraine, the lavish production starred Ingrid Bergman and was nominated for seven Oscars and won two.
context_section_description: Solt soon took him up on his offer, and in 1939 was on a ship to New York City. It didn't take long for him to get caught up in the city's vibrant theater scene. One of his plays had been a smash hit throughout Europe in 1938. Translated into English as Accidents Don’t Happen, it was attracting keen interest from a number of Broadway producers.  The play wound up being optioned by famed songwriter Irving Berlin and Buddy DeSylva, the stage and screen producer. DeSylva wanted to do Accidents as a musical with Berlin, but the plans fell through. However, in 1944 the Shubert Organization bought the play, opening it on Broadway as a musical comedy in 1945.
  By then Solt was already a screenwriter in Hollywood, having gone there at the suggestion of Berlin who told him the motion picture studios were always on the lookout for new writers and new properties like his plays. Solt arrived on the West Coast in 1940. He started as a $250-a-week contract writer for Columbia Pictures, then quickly earned his first credit for a movie adaptation of another of his plays, The Orchestra Bride. The film version, They All Kissed the Bride, was released in 1942, and starred Joan Crawford and Melvin Douglas in the screwball comedy.
  Solt, universally known to friends and colleagues by his nickname Bundy, went on to  write a string of screenplays and adaptations for major films from the 1940s through the 1950s   They included Without Reservations (1946) starring John Wayne and Claudette Colbert;  The Jolson Story (1946) with Larry Parks; Joan of Arc (1946); a remake of the 1933 classic Little Women (1949) with the four March sisters played by Elizabeth Taylor, June Allyson, Margaret O’Brien and Janet Leigh; Whirlpool (1949), a film noir with Gene Tierney and Richard Conte, co-written with Ben Hecht; In a Lonely Place (1950); mystery Thunder on the Hill (1951) with Claudette Colbert and Ann Blyth; and a Mario Lanza musical set in Capri, For the First Time (1959); it  turned out to be the popular singer's final movie (he died two months after it opened).
  Over that span, Solt worked on films guided by some of Hollywood's leading directors including Victor Fleming, Mervin LeRoy, Otto Preminger, Rudolph Mate, Douglas Sirk, William Dieterle ,Tay Garnett and Nicholas Ray.
  Fleming—best known for helming two of the most popular movies in cinema history, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind, both released in 1939—directed Joan of Arc.  Fleming not only had Solt and Anderson's ambitious screenplay and Bergman's star power to work with, but also a budget of $5 million, an enormous sum in those days, provided by veteran independent producer Walter Wanger, who had a reputation as a socially conscious movie executive who produced provocative message movies and glittering romantic melodramas.
  Joan of Arc got a lukewarm reception from moviegoers—its box office slightly exceeded its budget—and critics gave it mixed reviews.  Wrote New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther: "Pictorially, it is one of the most magnificent films ever made, bespeaking the vast sum of money and the effort expended on it. Dramatically, it has moments of tremendous excitement and shock. And emotionally it has glimmers of the deep poignancy of the Maid. But, somehow, the huge combination of pageantry, legend and pathos—of spectacle, color, court intrigues and the historic ordeal of a girl—while honestly intended, fails to come fully to life or to give a profound comprehension of the torment and triumph of Joan." 
  The film, however, did get recognized by Academy Awards  voters. At the 1949 ceremonies, Joan of Arc won two Oscars—for best color photography and best costume design in a color film—out of a total of seven nominations. Bergman was nominated for best actress and co-star José Ferrer got the nod in the best supporting actor category. Other nominations were for best film editing, best art direction and set decoration, and best music. The film's producer, Walter Wanger, meanwhile received an honorary Academy Award for “distinguished service to the industry in adding to its moral
caption: Elizabeth Taylor in costume for Little Women with the film's screenwriter Andrew Solt
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