Biography
While Paul Monash is accurately remembered as a writer and producer of terrific entertainment, he also strived to bring social issues to light, and to push the artistic boundaries of film and television. His early career included work on anthologies such as "Studio One in Hollywood," which made the jump from radio to television in the late '40s. During the mid-to-late '50s, he received critical acclaim for his writing on these shows, and subsequently scripted and produced the pilot for "The Untouchables," which became an influential crime show, followed by the wildly successful drama "Peyton Place" in the '60s. Both "Peyton Place" and Monash's legal series "Judd for the Defense" touched on controversial topics such as teen pregnancy and blacklisting, although the latter was never very popular. By decade's end, he was turning his attention to producing feature films, and throughout the late '60s and '70s worked with George Roy Hill and others to get classics such as "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Slaughterhouse-Five," and "The Front Page" up on the big screen. He closed the '70s with a critically lauded television adaptation of the novel "All Quiet on the Western Front," which he wrote, and his output slowed afterward (although he was a consultant on the sci-fi series "V" from 1984 to 1985). However, during the '90s he won praise for screenplays about political figures Joseph Stalin and George Wallace, winning the Humanitas Prize for the latter, which presented its title character in a more complex light.
