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A. I. Bezzerides

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A.I. "Buzz" Bezzerides
BornAlbert Isaac Bezzerides
(1908-08-09)August 9, 1908
Samsun, Ottoman Empire
DiedJanuary 1, 2007(2007-01-01) (aged 98)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
OccupationNovelist, screenwriter

Albert Isaac "Buzz" Bezzerides (buh ZER uh deez[1] August 9, 1908 – January 1, 2007) was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for writing films noir and action motion pictures, especially several of Warners' "social conscience" films of the 1940s.

Personal life

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Bezzerides was born in Samsun, Ottoman Turkey, to a Greek father and an Armenian mother, who emigrated to America before he was two years old.[2][3][4][5][6][7] His father worked in farm fields before becoming a trucker hauling produce.[8]

Bezzerides resided in Rudolph Schindler's Van Dekker House, Woodland Hills, California.[9][10][11][12]

From the late 1940s on, Bezzerides' companion was Silvia Richards, a screenwriter.[13]

Bezzerides died at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital in Woodland Hills.[14]

Career

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Bezzerides began writing short stories as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied electrical engineering. He was first published in a 1935 issue of Story Magazine, which printed his story, "Passage Into Eternity." He wrote the 1938 novel The Long Haul, about the trucking business. In 1940, Warner Bros. offered him $2,000 for movie rights to the story. He learned later that the script based on the book had already been written by others. The resulting film, They Drive By Night, starring Humphrey Bogart and George Raft, was a critical and commercial hit.

The studio also offered Bezzerides a contract to be a screenwriter at a salary of $300 a week. At the time, he was working as a communications engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. He later commented, "I had no idea whether it was guilt or conscience, or greed to swindle more stories out of me, that motivated Warner Bros. to offer me a seven-year contract ... Whatever their reason, I grabbed their offer so I could quit my putrid career as a communications engineer by becoming a writer, writing scripts in an entirely new world.. His first screenplay was for 1942's Juke Girl, which starred Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan.[15]

Films based on his novels or screenplays included Desert Fury (1947), Thieves' Highway (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), Beneath the 12 Mile Reef (1953) and Track of the Cat (1954). He wrote the screenplay for the 1962 espionage thriller The Angry Hills, which was set in Nazi-occupied Greece during World War II and based on a novel by Leon Uris. He wrote prolifically for television in the 1950s and '60s and was a co-creator of the Western television series The Big Valley.[16]

Bezzerides' script for Kiss Me Deadly (1955) transformed the novel by Mickey Spillane into an apocalyptic, atomic-age paranoia film noir. When asked about his script, and his decision to make "the great whatsit" the Pandora's Box objective of a ruthless cast of characters, Bezzerides commented: "People ask me about the hidden meanings in the script, about the A-bomb, about McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only say that I didn't think about it when I wrote it . . . I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting. A girl comes up to Ralph Meeker, I make her a nympho. She grabs him and kisses him the first time she sees him. She says, "You don't taste like anybody I know." I'm a big car nut, so I put in all that stuff with the cars and the mechanic. I was an engineer, and I gave the detective the first phone answering machine in that picture. I was having fun."[17]

Novels

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  • 1938 : The Long Haul
  • 1942 : There Is a Happy Land
  • 1949 : Thieves' Market. University of California Press. 1 January 1997. ISBN 978-0-520-20746-2.

Legacy

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  • The Long Haul of A.I. Bezzerides, 2005[18]
  • Buzz 2006[18]

Further reading

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References

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  1. ^ "The Long Haul" (2005) film documentary
  2. ^ Bergan, Ronald (6 February 2007). "AI Bezzerides". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2014-10-02. Retrieved 2021-08-15. On camera, AI (Albert Isaac) Bezzerides, who has died aged 98, recalled his Armenian mother and Greek father ...
  3. ^ Martin, Douglas (14 January 2007). "Obituary: A.I. Bezzerides, writer of world-weary heroes - Americas - International Herald Tribune". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  4. ^ Martin, Douglas (14 January 2007). "A. I. Bezzerides, 98, Creator of World-Weary Characters, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  5. ^ "Screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides dies at 98 - UPI.com". UPI. 2007-01-09. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  6. ^ "Novelist/screenwriter Bezzerides dies". East Bay Times. AP. 15 January 2007. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  7. ^ Bergan, Ronald (6 February 2007). "AI Bezzerides". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  8. ^ "A.I. Bezzerides, 98: Film screenwriter". Toronto Star. 15 January 2007. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  9. ^ "Home". Van Dekker House. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  10. ^ "Van Dekker House". Los Angeles Conservancy. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  11. ^ "'Hidden gem' house by R.M. Schindler in Woodland Hills restored". Daily News. 24 November 2015. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  12. ^ "the-story". vandekkerhouse. Archived from the original on 5 July 2023. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  13. ^ Smith, Imogen Sara. "People and Places of Scoundrels & Spitballers". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  14. ^ McLellan, Dennis (9 January 2007). "A.I. Bezzerides, 98; novelist became a screenwriter known for film noir classics". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  15. ^ "A.I. Bezzerides". inquirer.com. 15 January 2007. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  16. ^ ""Big Valley" en route to big screen". Reuters. 14 July 2009. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  17. ^ The Independent, A.I. Bezzerides, No-nonsense novelist/screenwriter, "A. I. Bezzerides - Independent Online Edition > Obituaries". Archived from the original on 2007-10-01. Retrieved 2007-04-09.
  18. ^ a b "A.I. Bezzerides". Variety. 10 January 2007. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
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