Charles Lederer

Charles Lederer wrote some of the sharpest screwball comedy of Hollywood's golden age, co-writing His Girl Friday and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and adapting The Front Page for the screen, alongside collaborators Ben Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz. His scripts had a recurring interest in what money and power corrode, dressed up in dialogue fast enough that audiences rarely noticed the argument underneath the jokes. He later wrote Ocean's 11 and Mutiny on the Bounty, a career spanning three decades of studio filmmaking.