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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No to the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and today I'm very pleased to have, as my guest, Adina Hoffman.

Adina has written a life of the great, almost mind-boggling screenwriter Ben

Hect. The book has the subtitle, Fighting Words, Moving Pictures. Ben Hect had his, oh, would you say

finger in so many pies?

I'd say that, yes.

He starts out having moved with his family to the Midwest.

As soon as he graduates from high school, he realizes that college is not for him, and he

hightails it to Chicago, where he becomes a very well-known newspaper man, so well-known

that his adventures in the newspaper business become perhaps the most famous play ever to be

written about newspapers that he wrote with Charles MacArthur, yes, called The Front Page.

The Front Page becomes his girl Friday with Carrie Grant and Rosalyn Russell, and thereby hangs a tail.

Every time Ben Heck turns around, there's a revision of something he's done, a new version of it by someone else that he in turn revises.

Right. Even his own memoirs, he has multiple versions of what happened to him in his own life.

He's kind of astonishing. This came from the days when, face it, a writer wrote.

...