Post World War 2 Career
After the war, Taradash attempted to find success on Broadway with an American version of Jean-Paul Sartre's Red Gloves, but the show folded quickly and he returned to Hollywood. He had more success as the co-writer (with John Monks Jr) of the Humphrey Bogart vehicle Knock on Any Door (1949). The Fritz Lang Western Rancho Notorious and the psychodrama Don't Bother to Knock (both 1952). Performers included Marlene Dietrich and Arthur Kennedy in the former, Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe in the latter. Taradash's adaptation of James Jones' massive novel From Here to Eternity (1953), was a big success and earned him an Oscar. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann. His subsequent film work was generally in adaptations, including Desiree (1954), about Napoleon and Josephine, Picnic (1955), from the William Inge play, and Bell, Book and Candle (1958), from John Van Druten's stage comedy.
In the mid-1950s, Taradash and Jules Blaustein formed Phoenix Corporation. He also tried his hand at directing with Storm Center (1956), about a librarian fighting censorship. Taradash and Zinnemann had planned to make two films from James Michener's massive novel Hawaii but were unable to raise the financing. (When George Roy Hill did make the film in 1965, he utilized Taradash's script with emendations by Dalton Trumbo.) By the 1970s, Taradash's efforts produced his final two scripts for the soap operas Doctors' Wives (1971) and The Other Side of Midnight (1977).
Taradash won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Drama for From Here to Eternity, and received a WGA nomination for Picnic.
Taradash died of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles.
Read more about this topic: Daniel Taradash
Famous quotes containing the words post, world, war and/or career:
“Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.”
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 16:15.
Jesus.
“... when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)