One of the greatest newspaper films ever made was born by accident. Director Howard Hawks was trying to prove that Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play, The Front Page, still had some of the best modern dialogue ever written, but he didn't have two men to read a scene between editor Walter Burns and ace reporter Hildy Johnson. He gave Hildy's lines to his secretary, then announced, "It's even better this way." He got Hecht's blessing on the altered version, and the two started working on the script in 1939. But their work was going nowhere until Hecht's protégé, Charles Lederer, suggested the story would be more focused if Walter and Hildy had been married and divorced previously. Eventually, Hecht had to leave for another project, so Lederer finished the script and took sole credit with Hecht's blessing. Initially, he called the film The Bigger They Are before settling on the more romantic title His Girl Friday (1940). Although the final screenplay for His Girl Fridaywas a hefty 191 pages, the film clocks in at only 92 minutes (screenplays tend to run between one and one-and-a-half pages per minute). The reason was Hawks' insistence on using overlapping dialogue and rapid delivery throughout the film. His Girl Friday is one of three films often hailed as the ultimate screwball comedy. The other two are Bringing Up Baby (1938), which also paired director Howard Hawks with Cary Grant, and The Awful Truth (1937), starring Grant.