Dore Schary

Isadore Schary had a long and checkered history in motion pictures. He was first employed as a screenwriter at then-lowly Columbia after a story editor was struck by the crispness of a writing sample. The editor also happened to think that the writer was a woman, mistaking Dore for Dora. By 1933 he'd been lured away to the first of a number of writing stints at MGM at $200 per week working under producer Harry Rapf. Schary and Rapf (known as "the anteater," he'd prove to be his lifelong nemesis), then in charge of MGM's B-productions (although Louis B. Mayer frowned on the term), didn't see eye to eye on a number of issues and fought continually. Schary soon left for work as a hired gun with a typewriter but found himself back at MGM writing a Spencer Tracy vehicle, Big City (1937), when he became intrigued in the story of Father Flanagan's Nebraska Boy's Town, envisioning Tracy for the role. But Tracy was weary at playing a series of priests and the script was shelved. On top of that