Fay Kanin Won Writing Awards in Film and TV

We met Ruth Gordon and her co-writing partner and husband Garson Kanin in the fifth column in this series. This month we turn our attention to her sister-in-law Fay Kanin, married to Garson’s brother Michael. As another married writing partnership Fay and Michael earned an Academy Award nomination for a Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay for their Teacher’s Pet (1957).

Born Fay Mitchell in 1917, Fay won a state spelling bee and met then governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt in her childhood. In 1937 she earned a B.A. at the University of Southern California and joined the RKO story department as a reader after graduation. While at RKO she, “stayed on at night to do my own writing. I walked on sets, invaded editing rooms, snooped, made friends. Hollywood was like all your childhood fantasies come true, full of beautiful people having a simply marvelous time.” One of the friends she made was Michael Kanin whom she married in 1940.

Determined to work together they spent their honeymoon in a rented house in Malibu adapting a New Yorker short story about a woman running a boarding house for fighters (written by A. J. Leibling) into a film. Produced in 1942, Sunday Punch became their first joint sale, though they each continued to work on solo projects as they searched for an idea for their next original screenplay. Fay wrote Blondie for Victory, a story involving the comic strip character inspiring local housewives to work for the war effort, who were left at home to handle the domestic chores. Fay earned the assignment based on a series of radio shows she produced with the same theme. An activist like her mother, Fay used her art to support her politics.

[Edna Anhalt, Hidden in Her Husband’s Shadow Despite Her Academy Award]

Even after the war, she and Michael created a female congresswoman heroine for their Broadway play, Goodbye, My Fancy, modeled on Eleanor Roosevelt. Michael’s solo work included producing the first screenplay written by Garson and Gordon. The story of an actor overwhelmed by his role as Othello, A Double Life earned Academy Award nominations for the screenplay, Ronald Coleman won Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Miklos Rozsa for Best Musical Scoring in 1948.

Michael and Fay’s next original screenplay, My Pal Gus (1952) concerns a businessman who falls in love with the teacher he trusts to corral his misbehaving son. An ex-wife enters the picture to cause trouble but all ends happily when she accepts higher alimony to stay out of their lives. There followed a short fallow period as the couple discovered they had not been blacklisted but graylisted. Neither Michael nor Fay had formally joined the Communist party during the war, but they were friends with many suspected members, so studios chose not to hire them to avoid any potential issues. Two years later, director Charles King Vidor wanted them to write a film for Elizabeth Taylor, but MGM studio refused to hire the couple. Vidor threatened to expose the existence of the graylist unless they were hired. Vidor won and Fay and Michael wrote Rhapsody which premiered in 1954.

[Most Hitchcock Films are Harrison Films]

Fay’s first Academy Award nomination came for Teacher’s Pet. The script involves a famous male journalist who does not believe reporting can be taught. Forced to take a class with a female journalism professor, the journalist comes to respect the professor and they eventually fall in love. Teacher’s Pet was their last film success. Together Fay and Michael wrote a theatrical version of Rashomon and then a musical, The Gay Life, neither of which succeeded nearly as much as previous films.

Similar to the Gordon/Kanin collaboration, this pair of Kanins ended their working partnership as well. According to Fay, “We decided we would have to keep the working collaboration or the marriage. We decided on the marriage.” Each former partner took on separate assignments beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fay worked in the new form of the television movie, writing four in a ten-year period from 1974 to 1984. She earned an Emmy for adapting the true story of parents determined to discover how their soldier son died in Vietnam into Friendly Fire (1979). During that period she also served as president of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences followed by a twenty-year run as chair of the National Film Preservation Board. Michael died in 1993 and Fay in 2013.

Research for this column comes from the book When Women Wrote Hollywood, edited by Rosanne Welch. If you’d like to learn more about the women highlighted in this column, and about the art of screenwriting while earning your MFA, our low residency Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is currently accepting applications.