1876–1933 · American playwright, raconteur and Hollywood screenwriter
Wilson Mizner (19 May 1876 – 3 April 1933) was an American playwright, raconteur and entrepreneur who is remembered far less for anything he wrote than for what he said. After stints as a Klondike gold-rush chancer and a Broadway playwright, he landed in Hollywood writing screenplays for early talkies — his best-known credit is 20,000 Years in Sing Sing — and helping run the Brown Derby restaurants with backing from Jack L. Warner and Gloria Swanson. He called those Hollywood years a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat, and his one-liners circulated so widely under other people’s names that his brother Addison complained he was being robbed of credit — a complaint this quote proves was at least half right.