Robert Lord

Biography

Harvard graduate Robert Lord studied English literature and playwriting in George Pierce Baker's renowned Workshop 47. He subsequently put this training into practice as a story writer for the New Yorker. Before long, one of his contributions, The Lucky Horseshoe (1925), attracted the attention of Hollywood producers and motivated Lord to relocate to the West Coast. After work on Tom Mix westerns, he soon landed a prestige assignment in the shape of the disaster epic The Johnstown Flood (1926), a palpable box office success, for which Lord wrote the original story. His hard-edged style of prose impressed Warner Brothers, who signed him under contract in 1927. A favorite of production manager Hal B. Wallis, Lord remained at the studio until 1941, by which time he had won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for One Way Passage (1932) and been nominated for another, the controversial social drama Black Legion (1937), a hard-hitting indictment of bigotry and mob rule. Lord again wrote the original story and also served as associate producer. A hit with both critics and audiences, the picture starred Humphrey Bogart, who, at the time was merely another contract player in danger of being typecast as heavies in run-of-the-mill potboilers. "Black Legion" reaffirmed Bogart's star qualities and he never forgot the role Robert Lord had played in rescuing his career. Following the death of Mark Hellinger in 1947, Bogart went out of his way to procure Lord as vice-president of his independent Santana Productions. In his new role as Santana's main producer, Lord was given carte blanche to hire such experienced writers as Daniel Taradash and John Monks Jr. (for Knock on Any Door (1949)). He was also instrumental in acquiring the rights for suitable literary material, best of which was In a Lonely Place (1950), based on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. While Lord was never officially credited with writing any of Santana's screenplays, he was nonetheless significantly involved in their early development (as, for example, in defining the character of Dixon Steele). On the flip side, Lord's friendship with Bogart rather clouded his objectivity in that he frequently interfered in the creative process by insisting on editorial revisions (particularly, whenever he felt the star's character was not portrayed in a sufficiently sympathetic light). After Bogart sold his interest in Santana to Columbia in 1955, Lord effectively retired from the film industry. He died in April 1976 in Los Angeles at the age of seventy-five.