Leo Brady

Leo Brady (January 23, 1917 – November 18, 1984) was a multidimensional American writer and theater artist who also achieved great success as a teacher of young playwrights.

After writing some well-received plays as an undergrad at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., Brady published a play version of Richard Connell’s short story Brother Orchid, which became a staple of the Samuel French catalog and inspired Hollywood to adapt the story for a film starring Edward G. Robinson. (Brady received no credit.) In collaboration with Walter Kerr, he wrote Yankee Doodle Boy, a musical about the life of Broadway showman George M. Cohan, which debuted to great success in Washington and received national media exposure along with the endorsement of Cohan himself. Again, Hollywood lifted this idea whole cloth without giving the authors credit, and subsequently released the film version, Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring James Cagney. Brady received his first major New York credit as the coauthor (again with Kerr) of a 1942 Broadway musical revue called Count Me In. After serving in World War II, where he continued creating as a writer and radio producer for the Army Recruitment Service, Brady returned to civilian life as a drama teacher at his alma mater. For a brief time he wrote film criticism for the Washington Post, while teaching, doing some acting and also beginning his career as a stage director.

In 1949, Brady published his first novel, Edge of Doom, which Samuel Goldwyn produced as a feature film in 1950. Directed by Mark Robson and with a screenplay by Philip Yordan, with post-primary scenes added by writers Ben Hecht and Charles Brackett and directed by Charles Vidor, the film was a rather notorious failure, due in no small part to the creative team’s inability to realize the story’s thematic critique of organized religion and the way society fails to respond to the less-fortunate poor. The Hecht-Brackett rewrites, spurred on after the initial screening by the producer's fear that the movie was too bleak, attempted to turn a dark tale of a pathetic murder into some kind of hopeful Hollywood preach-fest. These changes—including a sappy narration and hackneyed prologue and epilogue—were designed to gain the film wider audience appeal but only helped to doom the project completely. The film still turns up now and then as an acknowledged curiosity piece in the film noir genre.

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