Walter C. Mycroft

Walter Charles Mycroft (1890 – 14 June 1959) was a British journalist, screenwriter, film producer and director.^[1] In the 1920s he was film critic of the London Evening Standard, and a founder of the London Film Society, before joining the film industry.

In 1928 he became Literary Adviser and Scenario Editor at the newly founded studio British International Pictures at Elstree, sometimes working with his friend Alfred Hitchcock. He was by his own account the principal author of Hitchcock's first BIP film The Ring (1927), and credited as the author of the original story on which Champagne (1928) was based. Their friendship does not seem to have survived their collaboration.

Mycroft was elevated to head of production at Elstree during the 1930s, during which time BIP was reconstituted as the Associated British Picture Corporation. The company released many films on which Mycroft was credited as producer, with varying levels of actual involvement.

His adopted son, David Rees Mycroft, worked as assistant director on a number of Elstree productions. David Mycroft, who isn't mentioned in Walter Mycroft's autobiography The Time of My Life,^[2] edited by Vincent Porter and published posthumously, was an experimental filmmaker, poet and psychologist who studied with R.D. Laing. David Mycroft's daughter Ruth Novaczek is a British experimental film maker.