Although best known for his novels and essays, Gore Vidal, who died in 2012, also co-wrote the screenplay for which extremely successful film of the 1950's?
Gore Vidal script-doctor explanation, Charlton Heston said that Gore Vidal had contributed little to the script of Ben Hur. Despite Vidal's script-doctor resolution of the character's motivations, the Screen Writers Guild assigned formal screenwriter-credit to Karl Tunberg, in accordance with the WGA screenwriting credit system, which favored the "original author" of a screenplay, rather than the writer of the filmed screenplay. Two plays, "The Best Man: A Play about Politics" (1960, made into a film in 1964) and "Visit to a Small Planet" (1955) were theatre and movie successes; Vidal occasionally returned to the movie business, and wrote historically accurate teleplays and
Gore Vidal and Liz Smith. Gore Vidal Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing. Vidal was born to a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907–1921 and 1931–1937). He was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982). As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal