John Lund Scripts Collection

Title: John Lund Scripts Collection

Dates: 1949-1963

Collection Number: WGF-MS-134

Creator/Collector:

Extent: 0.5 linear foot

Repository: Writers Guild Foundation Archive

Abstract: The collection contains scripts for film, television, radio and stage plays collected by actor John Lund during his Hollywood career.

Language of Material: English

Available by appointment only.

The responsibility to secure copyright and publication permission rests with the patron.

[Identification of item]. John Lund Scripts Collection. Collection Number: WGF-MS-134. Writers Guild Foundation Archive

Donated by Lydia Ringwald on 10/6/2022

John Lund (1911-1992) was film, stage, and radio actor who appeared in dozens of projects in the 1940s and 1950s. Born in Rochester, NY, he began his career on Broadway and moved to Hollywood with a contract at Paramount. He subsequently worked for Universal and Republic. Some of his best known films are A Foreign Affair and The Mating Season. He retired from acting in 1962 and was married to actress Marie Lund until her death in 1982.

The collection contains scripts John Lund collected which are for unproduced projects or projects in which he did not appear. Unproduced screenplays are My Wife the Celebrity by Charles Erskine and No Tax on Love by Hal Biller. Playscripts are Any Wednesday by Muriel Resnik, Las Vegas by Stephen Longstreet (book) and Sam Coslow (lyrics), The House by the Lake by Hugh Mills, Apennine Grape by Richard Maibaum, and The Best Man by Gore Vidal. Television scripts include the early pilot for Cain’s Hundred by Paul Monash and episodes of The Thin Man, Ford Television Theatre, and Twentieth Century Fox Hour. A pilot teleplay and pitch for Man With a Camera by Jack Laird and Wilton Schiller is included, and the famous photographer Weegee [Arthur Fellig] is described as a consultant. Also included is a teleplay Goodbye, Goodbye by Stirling Silliphant, based on the New Yorker story by Elizabeth Taylor. It is similar to what aired as part of the Loretta Young Show; Silliphant is not the credited writer. Unsold television pilot scripts include Grand Hotel by Leonard Freeman (1963), Oklahoma Run by William Froug (pitch included, 1963) and Leslie Stevens’ Formula for Adventure (pitch included, 1959). A treatment for a Western TV series, The Secret Gun, by Aubrey Wisberg is included. And finally, there is a pitch and multiple scripts for a proposed radio series titled Assignment U.S.A. presumably based on NBC’s Words at War 1944 program.