Case of the Missing Scripter

The only notable change of expression that flickered over the bored faces of Hollywood's stars and officials at the recent Oscar-awarding ceremonies came when the name of Robert Rich was announced as the writer of the year's best original motion picture story, The Brave One. After a startled pause, eyebrows raised curiously. Who was Robert Rich?

Who, Indeed? Up to the stage trotted Jesse Lasky Jr., an officer of the Screen Writers' Guild. The academy had asked Lasky to pick up Rich's Oscar after someone claiming he was Rich phoned to say that he had to sit up with his sick wife. But neither Lasky nor anyone else had ever heard of Rich--except Frank King, producer of the award-winning story of a boy whose pet bull is spared in the bull ring because of its gallant fight. King says he knows Rich all right, met him in Europe in 1952 and bought a "five-or six-page treatment" of the story. Where is Rich now? "In Europe," retorts King. "I'm looking for him now. He's around 34, and he wears a goatee."

King's story left Hollywood profoundly unconvinced. Last week nearly everyone in the colony was gleefully playing a slapstick guessing game about King's goateed friend. Oddly enough, King has a nephew named Robert Rich who has occasionally worked around the studio. But this Rich, now an accountant, has truculently denied that he wrote the story.

Before the guessing game started, Producer King and his two brothers were tagged with a $750,000 piracy suit by the Nassour brothers, independent film producers, who charged that The Brave One was lifted from a story they have been animating for the last four years. Nassour's screenplay was done by Paul Rader, 33, now a Boston television producer, who adapted a script written by Willis O'Brien, the Hollywood special-effects man who put the chill into oldtime movies, e.g., King Kong. After the Oscar-awarding show, Rader got a wooden Oscar from his co-workers bearing the inscription: "To Paul Rader, for the best story borrowed in 1956." Said Rader: "I'm convinced that it [The Brave Owe] came from my script." (The Nassour brothers claim their suit was recently settled out of court.)

Hurrah for Them! Other movie folk also thought they detected a familiar ring in The Brave One. Director Fred Zinnemann recalled that the late documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) had told him in 1931 of a similar story he wanted to shoot. Flaherty later sold the idea to Orson Welles, who produced an unfinished version of the story for RKO called My Friend Bonito. In her Vermont home, Mrs. Frances Flaherty has no thought of suing anyone. "I wouldn't think about protesting that award," she says, "but I'm highly amused by the whole situation." Welles is even more delighted with the flap. "If they [the King brothers] used a lot of our stuff and it worked," he chuckles, "hurrah for them!"

At week's end Rich's Oscar was back in stock at the academy. "We don't know a darn thing here," said Margaret Herrick, executive director of the academy. "The only thing we can do is wait until someone comes forward with proof that he wrote the story." Meanwhile, Hollywood wiseacres theorized that Robert Rich may be the pen name of a writer blacklisted by the industry for taking the Fifth Amendment about his politics. "The King brothers have to pretend that Rich exists abroad," said one insider. "The more publicity they can get out of the Nassour suit, the better it will be for them as long as no one ever finds out who Rich is."

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