Queer Places:
Williams College, 880 Main St, Williamstown, MA 01267
Harvard University (Ivy League), 2 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
George Seligman Oppenheimer (February 7, 1900 in New York City; † August 14, 1977) was an American screenwriter, playwright, and journalist.[1]
From an affluent family, he had studied at Harvard with George Pierce Baker and founded Viking Press in New York with Harold Gunsberg in 1925. With such impeccable credentials, he was immediately embraced by Hollywood society, but his memoirs, carefully worded, suggest he was never quite "in."
Oppenheimer began a career as a screenwriter in Hollywood in 1933, hired to complete the screenplay of Samuel Goldwyn's comedy Roman Scandals (1933). For the rest of the decade he worked at MGM, often as a script doctor rewriting or polishing existing scripts. Oppenheimer was a proper, preise fellow who wrote Roman Scandals (1933), Libeled Lady (1936), A Day at the Races (1937) with the Marx Brothers, and A Yank at Oxford (1938), among others.
In the late 1930s, the bar of "circumspection" was relative: in the property department, Elliot Morgan recalled sometimes paging Henry Grace with a campy "Calling Grace Moore", but every Friday night, gay screenwriter George Oppenheimer dutifully attended the prizefights at the American Legion with his heterosexual coworkers. Oppenheimer, who was a gay man, never married. Oppenheimer was the occasional sexual partner of the young Harry Hay; the pair met while cruising on Hollywood Boulevard.[5][6]
Although he enjoyed the film colony at first, he found it "inbred and insular, small town and small-minded." He attended practically every party to which he was invited, but never felt at home among Hollywood types, preferring to spend time with fellow writer Charlie Lederer and his aunt Marion Davies, who was regularly surrounded by gay men.
Harry Hay recalled being picked up by Oppenheimer on the corner of Hollywood and Vine around 1935; they saw each other on and off after that. Hay claimed he helped Oppenheimer revise movie scripts: "For these ghostwriting tussles he would give me 15 to 20 dollars a hit." But when Hay begged to be taken to an industry gala, Oppenheimer refused, telling him he was "too obvious."
Oppenheimer was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his work on The War Against Mrs. Hadley at the 15th Academy Awards of 1942.[2]
His contributions to theater criticism are recognized by the Newsday George Oppenheimer Award, which was awarded annually from 1979 to 2007 to the best New York debut production by an American playwright for a non-musical play.[3]
Oppenheimer graduated from Williams College and studied at Harvard University with George Pierce Baker. He joined Newsday in 1955 to write the weekly "On Stage" column, became a daily critic in 1963, and was named Sunday drama critic in 1972.[4]
My published books:
