Harriet Frank Jr., 1923-2020

This being Thursday, it's usually time for another installment of the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon. This week being the last week of the month, it's time for a TV-themed edition, and the theme is "2019 Freshman TV series". Now, I've mentioned on quite a few occasions that I watch very little episodic TV any more; most of my viewing is sports and movies, with a smattering of local news and game shows thrown in for good measure. So I dont' think I watched an episode of any TV show that made its debut in 2019.

So instead, I'll mention the death of Harriet Frank Jr., a screenwriter who with her husband Irving Ravetch wrote screenplays to several promient movies, and was nominated twice. The two nominations were for Hud (which of course won Star of the Month Patricia Neal her Oscar) and Norma Rae.

They worked quite a bit with director Martin Ritt, starting with The Long Hot Summer and including the aforementioned Hud, as well as Conrack, based on the Pat Conroy novel about his year teaching black students on an island off the South Carolina coast.

One movie that doesn't get enough mention is The Carey Treatment, which Frank and Ravetch wrote but used a pseudonym.