Playwright/screenwriter Moss Hart not only didn’t go to college, but he didn’t even finish high school. He grew up in “relative poverty” in the Bronx and at 17 was working in a fur vault in New York City spending his lunch breaks looking at the want ads. After 2 ½ years of pushing furs around he landed a job as an office boy for Broadway producer and began a career in theatre.
He also spent six years working as a summer camp social director with amateur theatrical groups (including Camp Utopia in the Poconos) in his early 20s and by age 26 had his first Broadway hit (Once in a Lifetime.) He would go on to be known for writing, with George S. Kaufman, You Can’t Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. He also wrote the script for the Judy Garland version of A Star is Born (1954) and received an Oscar-nomination for his script for Gentleman’s Agreement.
This is part of the self-eduction of Moss Hart received in libraries:
“I do not believe that play-writing can be taught any more than acting can be taught, and I am quite certain that I did not consciously think of play-writing seriously in relation to myself, for all during that time it never occurred to me to read a book on how plays are written. I simply read the plays themselves, I read the published version of plays that I had seen and then plays that I had never seen, sitting there day after day like a bacteriologist trying to isolate a strange germ under the beam of a new more powerful microscope. . . . I began to perceive and place proper perspective the distinction between plot and character, the difference between tricks of the trade and honest craftsmanship, and though I was hardly aware of it, I began to discern the gradual steps by which a play is built and, in the really good plays, the wonderful economy with which each salient point is made and not a moment on the stage is wasted.”
Moss Hart
Act One, page 125
P.S. Apparently being the social director at summer camps meant coming up with nightly entertainment. Something that Hart learned to do quite well at various camps in Vermont, Pennsylvania, and in upstate New York. So while Hart didn’t have a formal education, staging and performing plays by George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, and George S. Kaufman nightly is arguably an education that colleges and universities can’t match. You’re learning what works and doesn’t work before a live audience. And as Hart pointed out, some of those theaters in the Catskills sat 1,500 people (attracting people from neighboring hotels).
Related post:
Can Screenwriting Be Taught?
The Secret to Being a Successful Screenwriter (Seriously)
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