Richard Brooks is one of my filmmaker heroes and role models. Whenever I’m writing a film script I always imagine to myself, “How would Richard Brooks approach this.” Brooks was a writer-producer-director, one of the “hyphenate” filmmakers who I admire. But first and foremost, Richard Brooks was a writer. He was an MGM contract writer-director in the 1950s, sometimes churning out as many as three movies a year, which he both wrote the screenplay for and directed. He was also one of the first studio directors who insisted on sitting in on the editing. At that time, most directors...
