Career
Krasna was born in Queens, New York City. He attended Columbia University and St John's University Law School, working at Macy's Department Store during the day. He wanted to get into journalism and talked his way into a job as a copy boy for the Sunday feature department of the New York World in 1928. He quit law school, worked his way up to being a drama critic, at first for The World then the New York Evening Graphic and Exhibitors Herald World. He was offered a job with Hubert Voight in the publicity department of Warner Bros and moved to Hollywood.
He decided to become a playwright after seeing The Front Page. To learn the craft, he retyped the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur classic more than twenty times. Then while at Warners, at nights he wrote a play, Louder, Please!, based on his job and heavily inspired by The Front Page. He tried to sell it to Warners who were not interested but it was picked up by George Abbott who produced it on Broadway. The play had a short run, and Krasna was then offered a contract at Columbia Pictures as a junior staff writer.
He stayed at Columbia for five years, earning an Oscar nomination for The Richest Girl in the World. He also wrote a second play Small Miracle, which was very successful and really established him. He would continue to alternate between Broadway and Hollywood throughout his career.
By the mid-1930s he was working at other studios, such as MGM and Universal, and had turned producer. By the 1940s he also began to direct. During this decade he wrote two enormously popular plays, Dear Ruth and John Loves Mary.
In 1950 he and Jerry Wald formed Wald-Krasna Productions which worked out of RKO Studios for the next few years, announcing a $50 million slate of pictures. They made a number of films but both Wald and Krasna became frustrated at the influence of Howard Hughes, who ran RKO at the time, so Wald bought him out and he returned to writing.
At one stage Krasna had John Forsythe under contract.
He moved to Switzerland but returned to Los Angeles before his death of a heart attack.
Read more about this topic: Norman Krasna
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