July 9

Charles Lane dies at the age of 102 in Santa Monica, California, 2007. When the Screen Actors Guild held its first public meeting on October 8, 1933, Lane was there as a founding member. “[The studios would] work you until midnight and get you back at seven in the morning,” the actor said about early conditions. “The actors were taking a terrible licking physically. Generally, as the case with any union, you form it because people are abused.” The lifelong character actor entered the movies in 1931 with Smart Money and made hundreds more, including Twentieth Century (1934), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Teacher’s Pet (1958) and The Music Man (1962). He almost always found himself typecast as the meanie in the room, playing rent collectors, bureaucrats, tax assessors and other killjoys. “You did something that was pretty good, and the picture was pretty good,” Lane said in a 2005 interview. “That pedigreed you in that type of part, which I thought was stupid, and unfair, too. It didn't give me a chance, but it made casting easier for the studio.”

April 18

Ben Hecht dies of thrombosis in New York City, 1964. He was a Chicago newspaper reporter-turned-screenwriter who moved to Hollywood after his friend Herman Mankiewicz sent him a telegram from California that read, “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” With Charles MacArthur, Hecht wrote some of the most famous films of the thirties and forties, including His Girl Friday (1940)—based on their play The Front Page—Wuthering Heights (1939), Twentieth Century (1934), Scarface (1932) and Gunga Din (1939). His love for the Hollywood Production Code and its influences on the motion pictures of the time is not well-documented, as he had none. Here are some of his more pithy observations about the state of the art:

Two generations of Americans have been informed nightly:

• that a woman who betrayed her husband (or a husband a wife) could never find happiness
• that sex was no fun without a mother-in-law and a rubber plant around
• that women who fornicated just for pleasure ended up as harlots or washerwomen
• that any man who was sexually active in his youth later lost the one girl he truly loved
• that a man who indulged in sharp practices to get ahead in the world ended in poverty and with even his own children turning on him
• that any man who broke the laws, man's or God's, must always die, or go to jail, or become a monk, or restore the money he stole before wandering off into the desert
• that anyone who didn't believe in God (and said so out loud) was set right by seeing either an angel or witnessing some feat of levitation by one of the characters
• than an honest heart must always recover from a train wreck or a score of bullets and win the girl it loved
• that the most potent and brilliant of villains are powerless before little children, parish priests or young virgins with large boobies
• that injustice could cause a heap of trouble but it must always slink out of town in Reel Nine
• that there are no problems of labor, politics, domestic life, or sexual abnormality but can be solved happily by a simple Christian phrase or a fine American motto