Canadian Press
Jan 14 2007
A.I. Bezzerides, screenwriter of film-noir classics, dies at 98
Published: Sunday, January 14, 2007
LOS ANGELES (AP) – A.I. Bezzerides, a screenwriter best known for
post-Second World War film-noir classics such as "Kiss Me Deadly,"
"On Dangerous Ground" and "Thieves’ Highway," has died at age 98.
Bezzerides died Jan. 1 at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital in
Woodland Hills after a brief illness, daughter Zoe Ohl said.
Bezzerides was working as a communications engineer for the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power when his 1938 novel "Long Haul"
was turned into "They Drive by Night," a 1940 melodrama starring
George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as struggling trucker brothers
hauling produce.
After Warner Bros. paid him $2,000 for the rights to his novel and
put him under contract as a $300-a-week screenwriter, Bezzerides
discovered that a script based on his book already had been written.
"I had no idea whether it was guilt or conscience, or greed to
swindle more stories out of me, for peanuts, that motivated Warner
Bros. to offer me a seven-year contract, with options to be exercised
every six months," Bezzerides wrote in the afterword to the 1997
University of California Press re-publication of his 1949 novel
"Thieves’ Market."
"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," he wrote.
Bezzerides’ first film credit was "Juke Girl," a 1942 story of
migrant farm workers starring Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan.
After leaving Warner Bros., Bezzerides, nicknamed Buzz, wrote or
co-wrote films such as "Beneath the 12-Mile Reef," "Desert Fury,"
"Sirocco" and "Track of the Cat."
He got into television in the 1950s, writing for such series as
"Bonanza," "DuPont Theater," "Rawhide," "77 Sunset Strip" and "The
Virginian."
Albert Isaac Bezzerides was born Aug. 9, 1908, in Samsun, Turkey. His
mother was Armenian and his father a Turkish-speaking Greek.
He moved to America with his parents by age two, and they settled in
Fresno, where his father worked in the fields before becoming a
produce-hauling trucker.
Bezzerides began writing short stories while studying at the
University of California at Berkeley.
A longtime Woodland Hills resident whose first marriage ended in
divorce, Bezzerides was married to film and television writer Silvia
Richards until her death in 1999.
In addition to his daughter Zoe, he is survived by another daughter,
a son, a granddaughter and four great-grandchildren.