Joseph Moncure March (July 27, 1899 – February 14, 1977) was an American poet, screenwriter, and essayist, best known for his long narrative poems The Wild Party and The Set-Up.
Due to its risqué content, this violent story of a vaudeville dancer who throws a booze and sex-filled party could not find a publisher until 1928.
In 1929, March moved to Hollywood to provide additional dialogue for the film Journey's End and, more famously, to turn the silent version of Howard Hughes' classic Hell's Angels[4] into a talkie — a rewrite that brought the phrase "Excuse me while I put on something more comfortable" into the American lexicon.
His most prominent late script is probably the left-leaning John Wayne curio Three Faces West, a knockoff of The Grapes of Wrath that ends with a faceoff between Okies and Nazis.
[3] During World War II, he worked at a shipbuilding plant in Groton, Connecticut, and wrote features (mostly acid assessments of the movie business) for the New York Times Magazine.