Abby Mann

Historian

• Abby Mann
• Born: December 1, 1927
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: March 25, 2008
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

Biography

Born Abraham Goodman, son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Abby Mann grew up during the 1930’s in a working-class neighborhood of Catholic families in Pittsburgh. In that setting, he was made to feel an outsider and was occasionally a target for abuse. These experiences rendered him sensitive to injustice. He was to become a writer for television and the movies. Not surprisingly, his scripts often deal with characters mistreated by law enforcement, the justice system, or other powerful institutions.

In the early days of television, Mann joined a number of other writers, such as Reginald Rose, Paddy Chayevsky, and Rod Serling, who emerged as major writers for various television anthology series, such as Playhouse 90, Studio One, or Robert Montgomery Presents. There was a great appetite then for new material in the form of one-hour or ninety-minute dramas. While still in his twenties, Mann set out to help satisfy that hunger. His scripts, from the beginning, were based on actual fact—situations in which abuse or injustice has occurred. They are provocative, controversial, and highly dramatic. Mann is well known for his keen abilities in creating vivid characters caught in gripping situations. Not only does he base the action on thorough research, he also shapes the situations and plots to present issues of consequence to society.

He began his career writing for various anthology series and struck his first major success with A Child Is Waiting, produced in 1957 as an episode of Studio One. The script dealt powerfully with abuses and mismanagement found in the care and treatment of retarded children. It was a moving drama that brought these issues into sharp focus through the interaction of the director of a school for retarded children and a new therapist. It led to a contract for a movie script released in 1963 in which Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland played the main roles and John Casavetes directed.

Mann wrote a script for Playhouse 90, a one-and-a-half hour dramatization of the postwar trials of Nazis held in Nuremberg. The play aired in 1959 under the title Judgment at Nuremberg. That, too, led to a feature length film directed by Stanley Kramer and released in 1961 with an outstanding cast that included Richard Widmark, Maximillian Schell, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster, and Montgomery Clift. Mann received an Academy Award and a New York Critics’ Award for his screenplay, and the picture itself was nominated for Best Picture in the Academy Awards.

From that time forward, Mann’s talents were in demand. He wrote the script for The Condemned of Altona, based on a stage play by Jean-Paul Sartre. Released in 1963, the film, under the direction of Vittorio de Sica and starring Frederic March and Maximilian Schell, did not quite meet with the success of the previous two movies. However, Ship of Fools, which came out in 1965, was a great success. Mann adapted the novel by Catherine Ann Porter with a keen sense for its dramatic and cinematic qualities.

The action transpires on board a ship bound from Veracruz, Mexico, to Germany, just prior to the outbreak of World War II. Its passengers represent a cross section of society in order to make vivid the ways that prejudice, self-centeredness, corruption, and ignorance had helped to bring about the horrors of Nazi Germany. Again an excellent cast included Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret, and Michael Dunn, under the direction of Stanley Kramer. Mann’s script earned him an Academy Award nomination.

Three years later, in 1968, The Detective appeared, an adaptation of the novel by Roderick Thorp. The drama turns on police corruption and incompetence in handling a murder/suicide case. Next, Mann returned to the television medium for two powerful dramas, The Marcus-Nelson Murders and Medical Story. The first of these dramatized the cases that led to the Miranda statement of rights. Mann received an Emmy Award for his script, which then became the basis for the Kojak weekly television series. The second teleplay deals with uncovering a surgeon’s unchecked and unnecessary operations.

In 1975, the film Report to the Commissioner appeared with a script by Mann in collaboration with Ernest Tidyman. Again, its drama hinges on exposing police corruption. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Mann produced other scripts for television, including the 1978 miniseries entitled King, which dramatized the events leading up to and following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Mann received Emmy nominations both for his direction and for his script.

Skag was a series that aired in 1979 dealing with the steel union’s mistreatment of a steel worker suffering health, money, and personal problems. The series started out with critical praise but it lasted only six weeks. He returned to the big screen in 1985 with the film War and Love, depicting the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of a young man in Poland. For television he wrote the script for The Atlanta Child Murders in 1989, based on the actual series of murders and on interviews with the man convicted of committing them, again casting doubt on the justice system.

In the 1990’s, Mann became involved as a producer of teleplays. He did, however, join his wife Myra in writing the screenplay for the television movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial, which aired in 1995 on Home Box Office (HBO). The story refers to a famous trial that took place in 1990. Members of the McMartin family operated a California preschool, and were accused of molestation of the children in their care. The judicial system bungled the case, and the teleplay commented on the ways in which the system had failed. The film won an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award.