New York-born Harry Essex planned on a writing career throughout his
young life. Among his first jobs were stints on the New York newspapers
"The Daily Mirror" and "The Brooklyn Eagle", short stories for
"Collier's" and "The Saturday Evening Post" and even a Broadway play
titled "Something for Nothing" (which Essex later called "a resounding
failure"). Writing for the movies was uppermost in Essex's mind
throughout the period (and he DID co-write the original story for
Universal's
Monstermann verbreitet Schrecken (1941)), but
"the big break" never came, and World War II intervened. Five or six
days after Essex's discharge, he ran into an old acquaintance whose new
job was finding playwrights to turn into screenwriters for Columbia
Pictures. Essex wrote or co-wrote dozens of movies and numerous TV
shows during his lengthy Hollywood career.
