Robert Hardy Andrews

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Charles Robert Douglas Hardy Andrews (October 19, 1903 – November 11, 1976) was a novelist, screenwriter and radio drama scriptwriter.

Career

Andrews began his career as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, and edited the newspaper's magazine Midweek.[1] He began writing radio soap operas when the noted producer team of Frank and Anne Hummert were impressed by Three Girls Lost, a work of serial fiction he had written for the Chicago Daily News.[1] Andrews wrote the story in seven days, on a bet, writing 15,000 words per day. Three Girls Lost was later published as a novel, and was the basis for a 1931 movie of the same title, directed by Sidney Lanfield and starring Loretta Young and John Wayne. His novel Windfall: A Novel about Ten Million Dollars was the basis for the 1932 movie If I Had a Million, starring Gary Cooper and Charles Laughton, and Andrews was credited for the story and/or screenplay of 46 other movies over the next 30 years, including Bataan, The Cross of Lorraine, Girls of the Road and Salute to the Marines.[2]

Andrews wrote many of the Hummerts' early radio soap operas, beginning with The Stolen Husband, and including

Skippy, sponsored by General Mills, which helped make Wheaties cereal a household word. He was a prolific writer, for years averaging over 100,000 words of material per week.[1] In one 20-hour period, he wrote 32,000 words. At his peak, he was writing seven daily radio dramas at the same time. He wrote from noon to midnight, seven days a week, smoking as many as five packs of cigarettes a day and drinking 40 cups of coffee.[1] For Just Plain Bill alone, he wrote 2,600 scripts over a ten-year period.[3] One time a week of air-mailed scripts for Just Plain Bill were lost in a plane crash and he had no copies, so he dictated a new script for a show over the telephone and a stenographer typed it out while the show was on the air, delivering it to the actors page by page.[4]

Television

He was a consultant on the

Thriller and Death Valley Days
.

Bibliography

Books

  • Windfall: A Novel about Ten Million Dollars (1930)
  • Three Girls Lost (1930)
  • One Girl Found (1930)
  • Burning Gold (1945)
  • Legend of a Lady: The Story of Rita Martin (1949)
  • Great Day in the Morning (1950)
  • A Corner of Chicago (1963)

Radio

References

  1. ^ a b c d Thurber, James (15 May 1948). "Soapland I - O Pioneers!". The New Yorker. pp. 34–47. Retrieved 10 July 2012.
  2. ^ "Robert Hardy Andrews". IMDB. Retrieved 2012-07-10.
  3. ^ Thurber, James (12 June 1948). "Soapland III - Sculptors in Ivory". The New Yorker. pp. 48–58. Retrieved 11 July 2012.
  4. ^ Thurber, James (3 July 1948). "Soapland IV - The Invisible People". The New Yorker. pp. 40–48. Retrieved 13 July 2012.
  5. ^ "Full cast and crew for "The Millionaire"". IMDB. Retrieved 2012-07-12.

Further reading

External links
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