Albert Isaac Bezzerides (buh ZER uh deez August 9, 1908 – January 1, 2007) was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for writing films noir and action motion pictures, especially several of Warners' "social conscience" films of the 1940s.

Personal life

Bezzerides was born in Samsun, Ottoman Turkey, to a Greek-Armenian family who emigrated to America before he was two years old.

Career

Bezzerides had begun writing short stories as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied electrical engineering. He was first published in a 1935 issue of Story Magazine, which printed his story, "Passage Into Eternity."

Bezzerides wrote the novel The Long Haul (1938), which got him into the screenwriting business. He wrote such action feature movies as They Drive by Night (1940; based on The Long Haul), Desert Fury (1947), Thieves' Highway (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), Beneath the 12 Mile Reef (1953) and Track of the Cat (1954). He was one of the co-creators of the Western television series The Big Valley.

In 1940, Warner Bros. offered Bezzerides $2,000 for movie rights to The Long Haul. He learned later that the script based on his book had already been written. The resulting film, They Drive By Night, starred Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. Bezzerides' third novel, Thieves' Market (1949), was adapted as a film titled Thieves' Highway, directed by Jules Dassin.

The studio also offered Bezzerides a contract to be a screenwriter at a salary of $300 a week. At the time, he was working as a communications engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. He later commented, "I had no idea whether it was guilt or conscience, or greed to swindle more stories out of me, that motivated Warner Bros. to offer me a seven-year contract ... Whatever their reason, I grabbed their offer so I could quit my putrid career as a communications engineer by becoming a writer, writing scripts in an entirely new world."

His first film credit was 1942's Juke Girl, which starred Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan.

Bezzerides' script for Kiss Me Deadly (1955) transformed the novel by Mickey Spillane into an apocalyptic, atomic-age paranoia film noir. When asked about his script, and his decision to make "the great whatsit" the Pandora's Box objective of a ruthless cast of characters, Bezzerides commented: "People ask me about the hidden meanings in the script, about the A-bomb, about McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only say that I didn't think about it when I wrote it . . . I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting. A girl comes up to Ralph Meeker, I make her a nympho. She grabs him and kisses him the first time she sees him. She says, "You don't taste like anybody I know." I'm a big car nut, so I put in all that stuff with the cars and the mechanic. I was an engineer, and I gave the detective the first phone answering machine in that picture. I was having fun."

Novels

• 1938 : The Long Haul
• 1942 : There Is a Happy Land
• 1949 : Thieves' Market