Harry Spalding

Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and brought to the US when he was six, Harry Spalding credits his interest in writing to his mother, who read the classics aloud to him when he was a child. Early on, Spalding did some short story and newspaper writing, then went into the theater business as a film booker/buyer in San Francisco. Working in this capacity brought him in contact with exhibitor/moviemaker Robert L. Lippert, who asked Spalding to read and critique scripts that his company was preparing to shoot in Hollywood. In 1956, when Lippert got the go-ahead to make a steady flow of low-budget features for 20th Century-Fox release, Hollywood's doors opened wide for Spalding, who moved from San Francisco to become part of the Lippert unit. He often used the pseudonym "Henry Cross" because "I wrote 18 original scripts in three years, and I didn't want people to start thinking that the only writer in Hollywood was Harry Spalding!"