In Remembrance: David Shaw

     David Shaw, the prolific television writer who penned the screenplay for the comedy If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium, has passed away on July 27, 2007 in Beverly Hills, CA. He was 90.

     Born Samuel David Shanforoff on August 27, 1916 in Brooklyn, NY, Shaw graduated from the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn in 1936. He served in the Army Air Forces as a Morse Code operator stationed in Africa during World War II. Following his discharge, he worked as a writer for episodic radio series originating in New York City. In the late 1940s he relocated to Los Angeles with his brother, novelist and playwright Irwin Shaw.

     One of Shaw’s earliest writing assignments, and his first motion picture work, was working on the script for director Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948). The following year his novel Night Call was turned into the thriller Take One False Step starring William Powell, though he did not work on the film itself.

     Shaw spent a majority of the 1950s working in television on such series as Actor’s Studio, Studio One, Playhouse 90 and The Philco Television Playhouse. He served as a story editor for the legal drama The Defenders, where he and series producer Reginald Rose often hired writers who had been blacklisted during the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings.

     In addition to his voluminous television work, Shaw found time to script the crime drama The Man Inside (1958), which starred Jack Palance and Anita Ekberg. In addition to scripting If It’s Tuesday…, he also adapted the Vladimir Nabokov novel King, Queen, Knave for director Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1972 film version.