Frank Partos

Frank Partos (7 February 1901, Budapest - 23 December 1956, Los Angeles) an American screenwriter, of Hungarian Jewish origin, and an early executive committee member of the Screen Actors Guild, which he helped found.^[1]

Career

In the 1930s, he was a staff writer at Paramount Pictures, during the early years to the talkie era. In 1939 he moved to RKO Radio Pictures, where he collaborated on the early noir film Stranger on the Third Floor (1941). He shared an Academy Award nomination for The Snake Pit (1948) with Millen Brand.

He arrived in California in the late 1920s with a letter of introduction to Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Partos was given a position as a reader and later given a book by Vicki Baum to write a synopsis. Thalberg decided to make Grand Hotel (1932) based on that synopsis and had Partos work as a screenwriter on the project. Partos did not get screen credit and, because of that slight, left MGM.