Howard E. Koch

Howard Koch ( born December 12, 1901 in New York City; † August 17, 1995 in Woodstock, Ulster County, New York; pseudonym Peter Howard ) was an American screenwriter.

Life

Koch was famous with the adaptation of HG Wells' science fiction novel War of the Worlds, which was founded in 1938 on the eve of Halloween directed by Orson Welles as a radio play for CBS. Since then, cooking was considered one of the most prolific writers of the American theater and film history.

Koch's specialty was the machining difficult literary substances lost through conversion to optical film none of their intensity. For the screenplay for Casablanca chef got together with his co- authors, the brothers Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, an Oscar.

1951 Koch was heavily loaded before the Senate Committee on Un-American Activities of the film producer Harry M. and Jack L. Warner and was shifted to the infamous blacklist of the American film industry, which was tantamount to a prohibition. Main complaint was Koch's screenplay for the film Mission to Moscow ( 1943). Contracting for this work was Jack Warner.

In the following ten years, cooking was in the U.S., only a single writer ( The Intimate Stranger, 1956) under the pseudonym Peter Howard sell, even though he had previously come under precisely this pseudonym in 1953 in difficulties, as American investors a British film company his true identity got out. The McCarthy era, which was the trigger for the prohibition, for seven years was the story before it was in the early sixties for cooking professionally up again.

1967 drew cooking with his wife Anne in the artists' colony Bird Cliffe in the small town of Woodstock has to offer. There he worked alongside his orders for film and television with the local Bird Cliffe Theatre.

Published in 1970 Howard Koch a book about the origins, mission and partly panicky impact of radio play Invaders from Mars on October 30, 1938, which he had witnessed as a radio play author of the radio station up close. In 1975, Koch the screenplay for the documentary feature film The Night That Panicked America ( German version: The night when the Panicked America ) about the subject.

In 2006, the Writers Guild of America ( WGA), the Casablanca screenplay No. 1 on the best 101 screenplays of all time.

Screenplays (selection)

Works

• The War of the Worlds. Radio play of HG Wells. Editing: Howard Koch. Directed by: Orson Welles. Production: CBS, 1938, ISBN 3-89940-617-6.
• Howard Koch: The Panic Broadcast - The Whole Story of the Night the Martians Landed - Orson Welles ' Legendary Radio Show Invasion From Mars, Avon Books, New York, 1970, ISBN 0380005018