In Remembrance: Devery Freeman

     Devery Freeman, a writer who was instrumental in both the founding of the Screen Writers Guild and its eventual reorganization into the Writers Guild of America, has passed away on October 7, 2005 in Los Angeles, CA. He was 92.

     Born on February 18, 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, Freeman, a graduate of Brooklyn College, began his writing career penning short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker and the English humor magazine Punch. While serving in the Navy during World War II, he helped to Navy’s unit of Armed Forces Radio. Following the war he got a job writing the radio series The Baby Snooks Show for comedian Fanny Brice.

     Freeman sold his first screenplay, Main Street Lawyer, to Republic Pictures before World War II. In 1946, Freeman returned to Hollywood, helping to write segments for MGM Studio’s Ziegfeld Follies. He soon landed a contract at Columbia Pictures and wrote such films as the musical The Thrill Of Brazil (1946) and the comedies The Fuller Brush Man (1948) and Tell It To The Judge (1949). After his contract expired, Freeman spent a majority of the 1950s penning comedies for a variety of studios, most notably two entries in the Francis, The Talking Mule series- Francis Joins The WACS (1954) and Francis In The Navy (1955). His final film was 1957’s The Girl Most Likely.

     Freeman also worked in television on such diverse series as Playhouse 90, The Thin Man, The Ann Southern Show and The Loretta Young Show. He also created the western series Sugarfoot which starred Will Hutchins.

     Freeman was one of the early activists in the Screen Writers Guild and was a participant in the guild’s first negotiations with the studios during which the guild won the right to determine a film’s writing credits. He was also instrumental in the Guild’s 1954 reorganization into the Writers Guild of America.

     In the early 1970s, he wrote a novel about military school, Father Sky. It was subsequently adapted into the 1981 film Taps, which starred George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton and Tom Cruise.