Hecht-Hill-Lancaster/United Artists

The Little Tax Write-Off That Could

When Harold Hecht, a professional dancer-turned-agent, saw his friend Paddy Chayefsky's TV-movie Marty, he thought the story might be good on the silver screen… and he was totally right.

Hecht had been producing movies with action star Burt Lancaster (whom he discovered), and they were looking to make a movie that would look good as a tax write-off. No one expected Marty to be as successful as it was (source).

Most Hecht-Lancaster (a.k.a. Flora Productions, Norma Productions, and Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, when a third partner joined) films were of the action-adventure variety, including Vera Cruz and Apache, which both starred the company's most famous partner, Big Burt L. This new venture was a real departure, but since the company was expecting it to lose money anyway, that was no big thing.

Maybe because Hecht and Chayefsky were old friends, and maybe because Hecht wasn't expecting much, the producer gave the writer full control of the script, plus casting approval, and a job to Delbert Mann, who had directed the TV version.

The finished movie would turn out to be more or less identical to Chayefsky's script, and most of the cast—besides Marty and Clara—remained the same.

Going Indie, Kind Of

Hecht and Lancaster landed a distribution/funding deal with United Artists, a dinky little company (maybe you've heard of it?) that was started in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin and a handful of other cinematic art-makers who wanted control over their own work.

In the thirty years between UA's founding and Marty's making, the company had gone through a series of identity crises, having made a lot of failures and only a few successes, but was finally leveling out, winning box office cash and acclaim with movies like The African Queen and High Noon.

Soon Marty would become another hit for United Artists, a kind of indie movie before indie movies were a thing, with a small budget and lots of awards.

Credit Where Credit [is Kinda] Due

Burt Lancaster, perhaps a little uncomfy with being uncredited and behind-the-scenes, made sure to step out in front in the camera when introducing the theatrical trailer for Marty. "No, I'm not in it," he says. "But I'm proud to be associated with it" (source). 

Okay, Burt. Showoff.

Even though United Artists planned on spending very little on the film's distribution, the production company's own PR guy went all-out, getting Marty covered positively by critics and media outlets the world over. The film became the definition of a sleeper hit: an underdog movie about an underdog dude that would go on to become a classic.