Robert Lees (July 10, 1912 - June 13, 2004) was a television and film screenwriter. Lees was best known for writing comedy, including several Abbott and Costello films.
Robert B. Lees (1922-1996) was an American linguist.
Lees went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956 to work on its machine translation project. He first came to notice with an influential review of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957), and his 1960 book The Grammar of English Nominalizations. Lees was later dismissed by Victor Yngve from his research position, as he had wanted to continue working on straight linguistics rather than on machine translation. He then enrolled in the electrical engineering department at MIT, where he obtained his PhD in linguistics.
Lees was known as a fierce partisan of Chomsky's brand of linguistics, and could be withering in his criticism. A famous example is his response when informed that Nelson Francis had received a grant to produce the Brown Corpus: "That is a complete waste of your time and the government's money. You are a native speaker of English; in ten minutes you can produce more illustrations of any point in English grammar than you will find in many millions of words of random text."
He was blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy era and so continued in the 1950s and 1960s to write for film and television under the name of "J.E. Selby", being credited for episodes of "Rawhide" (1959) and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (1955).
In 1999 he had a prominent role in protesting the decision by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to award director Elia Kazan a lifetime achievement Oscar. Kazan named names during the McCarthy era and continued to work while others were blacklisted.
He pleaded the 5th Amendment while testifying at the House Un-American Activities committee and was blacklisted as a result.
Frederic I. Rinaldo was his writing partner for 18 years until they were blacklisted in the early '50s.
Was an atheist and a staunch Democrat.
He was found murdered in his apartment. He was decapitated. His murderer also killed his neighbor, a Mr. Engelson. Because this man was on the phone at the time, the police were alerted quickly. According to the Associated Press, Kevin Lee Graff, 27, was arrested for the murders on June 14, 2004.
Grandpa of actress Tania Verafield.
