BEN HECHT A Biography <i> by William MacAdams (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $22.50) </i>

When the advent of sound-on-film and amplification technology forced the entire art of cinema to be reevaluated in 1916, Hollywood producers began issuing urgent calls to East Coast literati who could take film beyond the sketchy plots of the silent era. Ben Hecht’s call from Hermann Mankiewicz, co-author-to-be of “Citizen Kane,” was arguably the most fruitful, for by the 1930s, Hecht had become his era’s highest-paid, most prolific screenwriter.

Hecht seemed born to be the consummate entertainer for his culture, this diligently researched, affectionate history suggests, for from an early age, he shared its fascination with the tragic and the macabre, a spirit lingering from the fin-de-siecle era. When a runaway horse struck the streetcar in which 8-year-old Hecht and his family were riding, killing a man in the seat ahead, young Hecht began interviewing the passengers, the ambulance drivers and the police. Once home, Hecht’s puzzled brother Peter recalled, Hecht “locked himself in our bedroom and spent hours writing and rewriting his version of the bloody mess--the commotion, fainting, etceteras.”

By his late teens, Hecht had turned his obsession into a profession, becoming the most yellow of journalists. Having none of the police contacts necessary to rout out lurid stories, he simply made them up, convincing a police captain to pose, gun in hand, on his boat (his paper’s headline the next day: “Police Pursue River Pirates”) and his landlady to pose beside a small trench and some broken crockery (“The Great Chicago Earthquake”). Ironically, Hecht’s first film, “Underworld,” won the first “screen story” Academy Award in 1929 for its realism; Hecht gave the gangsters at the center of the film human quirks, such as a tick in the right hand, and dressed them not in turtleneck sweaters and cloth caps, a dime novel stereotype, but in sophisticated business suits.

While “Ben Hecht” is an absorbing chronicle of a compelling man, MacAdams’ focus on Hecht’s cinematic work overlooks some of the literary influences that shaped Hecht’s writing style, such as that of the French naturalist writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, and mentions Hecht’s early, darkly cynical novels, such as “Erik Dorn,” only in passing. MacAdams does, however, examine Hecht’s most significant literary attempt at optimism, “A Book of Miracles,” where one character, a solitary ant, manages to look beyond the “froth of hunger and ego” of human society and recognize that while “we have come forward only a small way, it is a noble inch we have moved.”