William Conselman

American screenwriter William Conselman came up from the newspaper comic-strip mills. In 1925, Conselman and artist Charles Plumb created the popular funny-pages attraction Ella Cinders. The following year, Conselman came to Hollywood to help write the screen version of his comic-strip creation. Though he would remain with Ella Cinders until his death in the early 1950s, Conselman spent the lion's share of his time working on such films as Eddie Cantor's Whoopee (1930), Shirley Temple's The Little Colonel (1935), and the exuberant football music Pigskin Parade (1936). Though he seldom injected anything of a personal-statement nature in his screenplays, William Conselman was certainly speaking from the heart when he scripted Kay Kyser's feature-film debut That's Right You're Wrong (1939); stuck with the dilemma of fashioning a film vehicle for a radio orchestra leader, Conselman came up with the notion of writing a story about that dilemma--which, in true Pirandellian fashion, ended up as the plot of the picture.