Celebrity Biographies
Irving Brecher
Irving Brecher was a veteran screenwriter from the golden age of Hollywood. He wrote hilarious gags—including some for the Marx Brothers—and musicals. Those who worked with him were amazed because he was a very witty guy, capable of improvising funny jokes with admirable speed. On Monday, November 17, 2008, Brecher passed away in Los Angeles. He had reached the respectable age of 94 years. A friend of his confirmed the sad news and explained that the writer had suffered a series of heart attacks in the last days of his life.
Born in the Bronx – the popular New York neighborhood – on January 17, 1914, when Irving Brecher turned 19, he decided that he had to earn a living by writing. He started out as a sports writer for a local newspaper. His relationship with the cinema began as a ticket salesman in a modest locale, but there he met a critic from Variety magazine, who was amazed at his capacity for humorous improvisation and explained that he could earn money writing gags for comedians. Said and done, Brecher tried his luck in this field and managed to be hired by the humorist Milton Berle , who became very popular on stage and on television.
In 1937 he decided to embark on the adventure of cinema and moved to Hollywood, where he began writing scripts for Mervyn LeRoy , then head of production at MGM. Although he does not appear in the credits, Brecher was one of the ‘doctors’ who fixed some problems that the Wizard of Oz script apparently had at the time . This commission was very amusing to the incomparable Groucho Marx , who nicknamed him ‘the joker of the west’, making a play on words that changed Witch (witch) to Wit (funny). The Marxes appreciated his talent and he created many gags for them, although he only appeared credited as a screenwriter on two of his films, The Marx Brothers in the West and An Afternoon at the Circus .. In the latter, Brecher joked about the Hays code, which ensured the decency of movies, in a few sentences that Groucho said: “There must be some way to make money without getting into trouble with the Hays code office.”
Brecher also wrote the musicals Ziegfeld Follies (with Fred Astaire ), Yolanda and the Thief (also with Astaire), A Kiss for Birdie (with Janet Leigh and Dick Van Dyke ), Summer Holiday (with Mickey Rooney ) and the unforgettable film Rendezvous in St. Louis (with Judy Garland ) for which he was nominated for an Oscar. He made his directorial debut with The Life of Riley , a comedy based on an idea by Groucho Marx.
Brecher retired in the 1960s. His first wife, Eve, died in 1981, though he remarried, to Norma, who survives him.