Wissenswertes

Brother of Charles Furthman.

It was said that the reason he and Josef Von Sternberg worked together so often was that Furthman was the only person in Hollywood who was as arrogant as Von Sternberg was.

He wrote five films directed by Howard Hawks. Hawks had great admiration for his skills as a writer (once saying that "if there are five ways of doing a scene, Furthman will find a sixth") and also for his famously low tolerance for whatever he perceived as stupidity on the part of producers and studio heads - something he and Hawks had in common.

Although he wrote nine films directed by Josef Von Sternberg, including some long regarded as classics, he is never identified by name in Sternberg's autobiography. There is a brief and somewhat condescending reference to a young screenwriter whom Sternberg claimed to have trained in the art of writing motion pictures, but he is not named. Furthman was six years older than Sternberg, had begun working in movies much earlier and had written dozens of films before he and Sternberg met.