Niven Busch

American novelist and screenwriter Niven Busch was born in New York City in 1903. In the early '20s he began writing for "Time" magazine. He had risen to editor of the publication, and was also at the same time working for "The New Yorker" magazine, when he decided to use the Hollywood connections he had--his agent was Myron Selznick, the son of producer Lewis Selznick and the brother of producer David O. Selznick--to try to break into the movie business. His agent got him some work at Warner Bros. Pictures, and his first film was The Crowd Roars (1932), directed by the legendary Howard Hawks and starring the equally legendary James Cagney--not a bad start for a freshman screenwriter (although his name was misspelled in the credits). Busch's talent for screenwriting secured him steady work in the '30s, at the major studios. He wrote his share of "B" pictures, but in 1938 he was nominated for an Oscar for his work on 20th Century-Fox's big-budget In Old Chicago (1937), which was based on his story "We, the O'Leary's". He worked for producer Samuel Goldwyn on The Westerner (1940), and soon became Goldwyn's story editor. In that capacity he recommended that Goldwyn produce Pride of the Yankees (1942), co-starring Gary Cooper (I) and Busch's future wife, Theresa Wright (I). Secure in his career as a major screenwriter, Busch began to write novels. One of them was "Duel in the Sun" (1944), which was a best-seller and was later made into the infamous Duel in the Sun (1946). Another successful novel, "The Furies", was turned into a successful western with Barbara Stanwyck, The Furies (1950). He wrote the screenplay for what is regarded a classic of the "film noir" genre, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) as well as Pursued (1947) with Robert Mitchum (I), often considered to be one of the first "noir" westerns. Wright and Busch divorced in 1952 after ten years of marriage--he was married five times altogether--and HE left the movie business and moved to northern California, where he bought a cattle ranch and concentrated on writing novels. He married two more times. He became a Regent Professor at the University of California. In 1988 he had a small part in the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), which was shot in the San Francisco area, as "The Old Man". He wrote his final novel, "The Titan Game", in 1989. He died of congestive heart failure in San Francisco in 1991, at age 88.