Robert Riskin by Ian Scott
Robert Riskin earned an Oscar with his screenplay for It Happened One Night (1934). It wasn’t his first collaboration with director Frank Capra nor would it be his last. Riskin also wrote Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe and became an esteemed figure in Hollywood. According to biographer Ian Scott, Riskin was the writer Billy Wilder went to for ideas.
Out now in paperback, Robert Riskin: The Life and Times of a Hollywood Screenwriter is a sustained argument for Riskin’s importance. One of Scott’s tasks—and he’s not the first to undertake it—is to lift Riskin out of Capra’s shadow. The emphasis of film critics and the first generation of film historians on directors worked in Capra’s favor, aiding Capra’s own legend making. As Scott sees it, Capra was uncharitable to his old friend and colleague. They had drifted apart after Meet John Doe and in his last years, his career behind him, the director was accused of burnishing his own reputation at the expense of others.
After the U.S. entered World War II, Riskin produced or codirected 26 features for the Office of War Information, America’s propaganda bureau. Scott concedes that Riskin never regained his stride after the war. Tastes were changing and his once unfailing sense for “the spirit of the vernacular, the everyday asides that were part of ordinary people’s conversation.”
Robert Riskin: The Life and Times of a Hollywood Screenwriter is published by University Press of Kentucky.
