The Jules Furthman Screenplay Archive

Jules Furthman

This archive comprises a group of twenty-three screenplays, dating from 1923 to 1958, and related material by Jules Furthman (1888-1966).

Jules Furthman was born in Chicago (Julius Grinnell Furthman), educated at Northwestern, and began his career as journalist and magazine writer.

Scripts of Mutiny on the Bounty   and Rio Bravo.

He first submitted stories for silent films in 1915, and for forty years from 1918 wrote screenplays for Paramount, Fox, MGM, Warner Brothers, and other studios. He worked with the directors Josef von Sternberg and Howard Hawks.

Cary Grant, star of Only Angels Have Wings, on the cover of Screen Romances.

Furthman's best-known films include Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (with William Faulkner, 1944), The Big Sleep (1946), and Rio Bravo (1959). In addition to screenplays, the donation includes typescripts for several stories and story-treatments, as well as additional items documenting Furthman's interest in rare books, coins, and orchids.

The earliest screenplay in the archive is Furthman's The Acquittal (1923). The archive was generously donated by Furthman's nephew, Mr. Frank D. Balzer. In fall 2001, while going through the papers of Furthman's widow, he came across an unanswered inquiry from Prof. Matthew J. Bruccoli, of USC's English Department, asking about the location of Furthman's professional archives, and offered these papers to Thomas Cooper Library. 

P.G.S.

References:
Dennis Aig, "Jules Furthman and the Popular Aesthetics of
   Screenwriting," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State
   University, 1983 (University Microfilms, 1984).
Richard Corliss, "Jules Furthman (1888-1960)," in his Talking
   Pictures: Screenwriters of Hollywood (Newton Abbot: David and
   Charles, 1975), 265-274.
Richard Koszarski, "The Golden Years: Jules Furthman," in The
   Hollywood Screenwriters, ed. Richard Corliss (New York:
   Avon/Discus Books, 1972).
Renee D. Pennington, "Jules Furthman," in American Screenwriters
   (Dictionary of Literary Biography, 26), ed. Robert D. Mossberger,
   Stephen O. Lesser, and Randall Clark (Detroit: Gale Research,
   1978), 119-129.
Tom Stempel, "Jules G. Furthman," in American National Biography,
   ed. John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford
   University Press, 1999), 8: 589-591.