Written on the Wind #515: George Zuckerman Papers

Published August 14, 2025 at 6:00 AM MDT

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Advertising poster for the film Written on the Wind. Box 36, George Zuckerman papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

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Advertising poster for the film Written on the Wind. Box 36, George Zuckerman papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

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Music for the theme song from the film Written on the Wind. Box 6, George Zuckerman papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

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Page of the outline for the screenplay of the film Written on the Wind, January 28, 1955. Box 6, George Zuckerman papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

George Zuckerman wrote the screenplay for the 1956 melodrama Written on the Wind. The movie was based on a real-life scandal involving the family of Zachary Smith Reynolds, heir to the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company fortunes. Zachary Reynolds died under suspicious circumstances in 1932 and the case drew nationwide attention.

Zuckerman’s screenplay went through multiple revisions as the Reynolds family threatened to launch a lawsuit against Universal Pictures, the company financing the film. Rather than setting the story in North Carolina, where the Reynolds family lived on a palatial estate, Zuckerman set the film in Texas. And in Zuckerman’s script, the family fortune came from oil, rather than tobacco.

The Four Aces performed the theme song for the film.

Written on the Wind clip1.mp3

Learn more in the George Zuckerman papers at UW’s American Heritage Center.