After working as a journalist and documentary filmmaker for Pathé and CBS-TV, he teamed with his wife Edna Anhalt, one of his five wives, during World War II to write pulp fiction.
[2] During World War II, Anhalt served with the Army Air Force's First Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, California as a scenarist for training films.
The works by him and his wife, Edna Anhalt had attracted Hollywood, and they moved from New York to Los Angeles, where he made his first screenwriting debut in 1946 with Strange Voyage.
[4] The Anhalts wrote the 1952 screen version of Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, which preserved the stage performances of Julie Harris, Brandon deWilde and Ethel Waters.
(1962),[6] The Boston Strangler (1968),[8] The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969),[6] and two for Ely A. Landau's American Film Theater, Luther (1973) and The Man in the Glass Booth (1975).