| During the Depression a writer for The New Republic
suggested a cooperative production to which unemployed theater people
could contibute on a profit-sharing basis. Heywood Broun produced a
revue, Shoot the Works, in 1931, whose writers included Broun,
Dorothy Parker, E. B. White, Peter Arno, Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin, and
George S. Kaufman, and Nunnally Johnson.
As Nunnally explained: "Heywood asked everybody who volunteered to help produce Shoot the Works how much dramatic experience they had had, and I said I hadn't had any, so they made me the play doctor on the spot, and now you can see how to become a famous producer practically overnight. I'm going to get out a book of memoirs pretty soon under the title: My Years on Broadway Since Last Thursday." -- New York Herald Tribune, 19 July 1931 |
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| Nunnally said that opening night for Shoot the Works was "the beginning of my exit from the American theater," though he did other plays over time. His other Broadway works included Dark Eyes (1943), The World's Full of Girls (1943), Park Avenue (1946), and Darling of the Day (1968), which was a rewrite of his earlier film, Holy Matrimony. | |
| In 1964 he and his daughter Nora had written a screenplay of her novel, The World of Henry Orient, for a film by the same name, starring Peter Sellers, Paula Prentiss, Angela Lansbury, and Tom Bosley. In 1967, they adapted the novel as a Broadway musical, Henry, Sweet Henry. |
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