Curt Siodmak(1902-2000)
- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1902, Curt Siodmak worked as an engineer
and a newspaper reporter before entering the literary and movie fields.
It was as a reporter that he got his first break (of sorts) in films:
in 1926 he and his reporter-wife hired on as extras on Fritz Lang's
Metropolis (1927) in order to get a story on the director and his film. One of
Siodmak's first film-writing assignments was the screenplay for the
German sci-fi picture F.P.1 antwortet nicht (1932) (US title: "Floating Platform 1 Does Not
Answer"), based on his own novel. Compelled to leave Germany after
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power, Siodmak went to work as a
screenwriter in England and then moved to Hollywood in 1937. He got a
job at Universal through his director-friend Joe May, helping write the
script for May's Le retour de l'homme invisible (1940). Because the film went over well, Siodmak
says, he fell into the horror/science-fiction "groove."
