Keene Thompson (November 15, 1885, in Minneapolis, Minnesota – July 11, 1937, in Hollywood, California) was a story, scenario and screenwriter who worked in the film industry from 1920 to 1937.^[1][2]

Career

Thompson had a small acting role in the 1917 Douglas Fairbanks Sr. film Reaching for the Moon,^[3][4] but his first writing work was a screenplay for Fairbanks.^[5] His last was scripting the Jack Benny musical Artists and Models.^[6]

Some of his early silent film work was for the Christie Film Company,^[7] but his later screenwriting was associated primarily with Paramount Pictures where he became a general story advisor.^[5] At Paramount he was known for his work with Adolphe Menjou,^[8][9] and had written scripts and special materials for such stars as Raymond Griffith, Gary Cooper and Clara Bow,^[10] such as Clarence G. Badger's Paths to Paradise, Victor Fleming's The Virginian, and Frank Tuttle's True to the Navy.^[10]

Fighting Caravans (1931), a story of the caravans of wagon trains that supplied freight to the pre-Civil War Old West before the completion of the transcontinental railways, was his adaption of a Zane Grey novel of the same name.^[11] His work Man Against Woman for Irving Cummings was called a "forceful drama" and an "entertaining film".^[12] During the later part of his career Thompson specialized in comedies. The more notable of these included Leo McCarey's Six of a Kind (1934) which used the top Paramount actors of the time, including Charlie Ruggles, Mary Boland, George Burns, W.C. Fields, Gracie Allen, Alison Skipworth.^[10] The 1945 Frank R. Strayer comedy film Mama Loves Papa was based upon his screenplay for the 1933 Norman Z. McLeod film of the same name.^[13][14]

Keene became ill in June 1937, just after completing the script for the Jack Benny musical comedy Artists and Models.^[6] On July 11, 1937, he died of lobar pneumonia.^[5] His body is interred in the Great Mausoleum, Columbarium of the Graces at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, CA.

Filmography