John Lee Mahin (August 23, 1902, Evanston, Illinois – April 18, 1984, Los Angeles) was an American screenwriter and producer of films who was active in Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1960s.
[1] In the words of one profile, he had "a flair for rousing adventure material, and at the same time he wrote some of the raciest and most sophisticated sexual comedies of that period.
He then tried to make a living as an actor, starting as a chorus boy in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience at the Province Playhouse.
[4] Mahin became friendly with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who he would meet on the ferry while commuting to work in New York.
[1] Hecht and MacArthur were working on The Unholy Garden (1931) for Sam Goldwyn and brought in Mahin to help at $200 a week.
Mahin wrote the script in collaboration with Hecht, Seton I. Miller and the director Howard Hawks (W. R. Burnett had done an earlier draft).
[6] It took a while for Scarface to be released but advance word was strong and MGM offered Mahin a long-term contract at $200 a week.
Mahin then wrote Riffraff (1936), Wife vs. Secretary (1936), Small Town Girl (1936), The Devil Is a Sissy (1936), and Love on the Run (1936).
[13] He did a gangster film for Mervyn LeRoy, Johnny Eager (1941) and some uncredited work on the ending of Woman of the Year (1942).
[18] Mahin wrote the screenplay for Show Boat (1951), the Technicolor remake of the noted 1927 stage musical, which had previously been filmed in 1936.
According to Kreuger, Mahin and producer Arthur Freed introduced the plot device of keeping the lovers Magnolia Hawks and Gaylord Ravenal young to the end, rather than having a passage that showed them forty years older, as in the original stage musical.
He redid his Red Dust script as Mogambo (1953) for Gable and John Ford, and worked on another melodrama in the tropics, Elephant Walk (1954).