Edward Bartlett Cormack (March 19, 1898 – September 16, 1942) was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, and producer best known for his 1927 Broadway play The Racket, and for working with Howard Hughes and Cecil B. DeMille on several films.

[2] Cormack became a member of Maurice Browne's Little Theatre Company in Chicago, but his duties as a general handyman were so demanding he was dismissed from the university as a result of poor class attendance.

To gain experience as a writer, he got a job at the Chicago Evening Journal and stayed there a year, covering "hangings, race riots, street car strikes and other diversions characteristic of Mayor Thompson's turbulent town".

[7] The events take place over a period of about 18 hours in a police station on the outskirts of Chicago, and features wisecracking crime reporters who dash to the telephone and holler, "Get me the desk!"

"[8] The play was considered so inflammatory that it was denied a presentation in Chicago, allegedly at the orders of Al Capone; the ban remained in effect for nearly two decades.

The play premiered in Princeton, New Jersey on January 21, 1937, with Lucille Ball as Julie Tucker, "one of three roommates coping with neurotic directors, confused executives, and grasping stars who interfere with the girls' ability to get ahead."

Cormack wanted to replace him, but the producer, Anne Nichols, said the fault lay with the character and insisted that the part needed to be reshaped and rewritten.

In his book Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood, author Robert S. Birchard relates how DeMille wasn't sure Cormack's script had a sense of current slang, so he asked high school student Horace Hahn to read the script and comment (at the time, Hahn was senior class president at Los Angeles High School).

[13] Briefly relocating to England in 1938, Cormack helped write the screenplays for Sidewalks of London, and the Charles Laughton film Vessel of Wrath (released in the United States as The Beachcomber).