Nelson Gidding(1919-2004)
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Born in New York and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard,
Nelson Gidding said that he had been interested in writing ever since
he was a child and had a poem published in the Boy Scouts magazine
("That was as recently as the mid-'20s!" he laughed). A POW during
World War II, Gidding began writing his first (and only) book "End Over
End" while in prison camp; after the war's end, he segued into TV work
("Suspense, " "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, " many others) and
ultimately into movies. His list of film credits includes such
well-respected titles as "Odds Against Tomorrow, " "The Haunting, "
"The Andromeda Strain" and (with co-writer Don Mankiewicz) the
Oscar-nominated screenplay for "I Want to Live!", the story of the last
years of real-life prostitute Barbara Graham (Susan Hayward) and her
gas chamber execution on murder charges. "I Want to Live!" was
Gidding's first film for director Robert Wise, with whom he has worked
on several subsequent occasions. In his later years he taught a class
in screenwriting at the University of Southern
California.
