Frank Nugent facts for kids

Frank Stanley Nugent (May 27, 1908 – December 29, 1965) was an American screenwriter, journalist, and film reviewer. He wrote 21 film scripts, 11 for director John Ford. He wrote almost a thousand reviews for The New York Times before leaving journalism for Hollywood. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953 and twice won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Comedy. The Writers Guild of America, West ranks his screenplay for The Searchers (1956) among the top 101 screenplays of all time.

Career in films

Nugent continued to write for the Times on a freelance basis during his first several years in Hollywood. For Zanuck he worked on scripts, reviewing others' screenplays and providing criticism. He said later that "Zanuck told me he didn't want me to write, that he just thought the studio would save money if I criticized the pictures before they were made." Fox terminated him in 1944 and Nugent turned to work as a freelance writer. His sharp critiques served Zanuck, but won him no screenwriting work, while his criticism of his colleagues' work, just as clever as when he was a journalist, was not designed to win collaborators. He returned one script to Zanuck with a note saying: "My opinion of this script is unchanged. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with it that a waste basket can't cure."

Nugent was working on a magazine article about The Fugitive (1947), while the film was being shot, when he met the film director John Ford on the set in Mexico. Their meeting led to Nugent's long and fruitful association with the John Ford Stock Company. Ford hired him to work on his next film, Fort Apache (1948), and Nugent wrote screenplays for several more of Ford's westerns, including 3 Godfathers (also 1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Wagon Master (1950) and The Searchers. Of the 21 film scripts Nugent worked on, 11 were for Ford. They had a difficult working relationship, as did everyone who worked with Ford, but Nugent later said "it was a small price to pay for working with the best director in Hollywood." In assessing their work together, Glenn Frankel credits Nugent with providing Ford with more sophisticated male-female relationships than his other scripts and tempering the racism so endemic to the western genre's portrayal of Native Americans. Nugent's screenplay for Fort Apache, for example, altered his source material's "visceral loathing" for the Indigenous characters, transforming them into "victims of government-sanctioned criminal exploitation". In the place of like-minded Native leaders, he introduced contrast between the young, hot-blooded warrior and the wiser veteran, which became a standard feature of the Hollywood western.

His screenplay for The Searchers (1956), has been ranked among the top 101 screenplays of all time by the Writers Guild of America, West. It was named the Greatest Western of all time by the American Film Institute in 2008. It placed 12th on the American Film Institute's 2007 list of the 100 Greatest American Films.

He wrote other westerns for Stuart Heisler (Tulsa), for Robert Wise (Two Flags West), for Raoul Walsh (The Tall Men), and for Phil Karlson (They Rode West and Gunman's Walk). Nugent also worked on Mister Roberts.

His screenplays in other genres include The Red Beret, North West Frontier, Trouble in the Glen, The Quiet Man, The Rising of the Moon and Donovan's Reef.

For his work on for The Quiet Man, he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay. The Quiet Man won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Comedy in 1953 and he won the same award in 1956 for Mister Roberts (1955).

Of his long association with Ford, Nugent once wrote:

I have often wondered why Ford chose me to write his cavalry films. I had been on a horse but once—and to our mutual humiliation. I had never seen an Indian. My knowledge of the Civil War extended only slightly beyond the fact that there was a North and a South, with West vulnerable and East dealing. I did know a Remington from a Winchester—Remington was the painter. In view of all this, I can only surmise that Ford picked me for Fort Apache as a challenge.

Nugent served as the President of the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) from 1957 to 1958 and as its representative on the Motion Picture Industry Council from 1954 to 1959. He also served a three-year stint (1956–59) as chairman of the building fund committee that oversaw the construction of its headquarters in Beverly Hills.

Personal life

On January 3, 1939, he married Dorothy J. Rivers. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia performed the ceremony in his City Hall chambers. They divorced in 1952. He married his second wife, Jean Lavell, in 1953.

Nugent suffered from heart problems for several years before dying of a heart attack on December 29, 1965, in Los Angeles.

Feature film screenwriting credits

Credited as Frank S. Nugent or Frank Nugent for screenplay or the story that provides the basis for the screenplay.

Table key

Indicates films directed by John Ford

Additional sources

• Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema, 1927-1973 (Overlook Press, 1974)
• Arleen Keylin and Christine Bent., eds, The New York Times at the Movies (Arno Press, 1979), ISBN: 0-405-12415-5
• Peter Lehman, Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism (University Press of Florida, 1990), ISBN: 0-8130-0967-7
• Joseph McBride, "The Pathological Hero's Conscience: Screenwriter Frank S. Nugent Was the Quiet Man Behind John Ford", Written By, May 2001