In Remembrance: Abby Mann

     Abby Mann, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of 1961’s Judgment At Nuremberg, has passed away on March 25, 2008 in Beverly Hills, California. He was 80.

     Born in Philadelphia in 1927, the Jewish Mann grew up in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He would later incorporate his own feelings of being an outsider during his youth into several of his works. Mann attended Temple University and then New York University before serving in the Army during World War II.

     As live television began to rise in popularity in the early 1950s, Mann found work writing for such series as Cameo Theater, Lux Video Theater, Goodyear Television Playhouse and Studio One. It was for the prestigious Playhouse 90 series that he first penned his dramatization of the war crimes trials of four Nazi officers, “Judgment At Nuremberg.”

     Soon after the episode aired, Mann received an invitation to come to Hollywood and expand “Judgment At Nuremberg” to feature film length. The result was a gripping three-hour drama directed by Stanley Kramer that would win Mann an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Mann would also write a novel version of the story and adapt the screenplay for the stage.

     Mann would follow up the success of Judgment by scripting A Child Is Waiting (1963), a drama in which Judy Garland tries to reach out to an autistic boy, for director John Cassavetes. He then reteamed with Kramer to adapt Katherine Anne Porter’s novel Ship Of Fools, earning a second Oscar nomination in the process.

     After scripting the 1968 Frank Sinatra thriller The Detective, based on a novel by Roderick Thorpe, Mann returned to television. There he wrote several mini-series and made-for-tv movies. He received an Emmy and a Writers Guild of America Award for his Television movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which introduced to television audiences the character of Kojack, played by Telly Savalas. The tough, bald detective with an penchant for lollypops proved popular enough with the public to get his own long-running television series.