Nunnally Johnson (December 5, 1897 – March 25, 1977) was an American screenwriter, film director, producer and playwright. As a filmmaker, he wrote the screenplays to more than fifty films in a career that spanned from 1927 to 1967. He also produced more than half of the films he wrote scripts for and directed eight of those movies. In 1940 he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Grapes of Wrath. Some of his other notable films include Tobacco Road (1941), The Moon Is Down (1943), Casanova Brown (1944), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), The Mudlark (1950), The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951), My Cousin Rachel (1952), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), and The Dirty Dozen (1967).
Although he is regarded around Hollywood as something of a genius himself, Nunnally Johnson loathes geniuses. Once, after producing a picture whose director was an alleged genius, he explained: "It isn't worth all the extra trouble you have to go through to get a worse picture." He does not think very highly of directors in any event, as compared with writers. Once he said that the most important function of a good director is to see that the actors don't go home too early. He is, nonetheless, one of the best-liked men in Hollywood.
Johnson mots have become legendary around Hollywood and Manhattan. When Walter Winchell met Johnson at the opening of Tobacco Road, he sneered, gently: "That's all about your kind of people, isn't it, Nunnally?" Replied Columbus, Georgia's native son: "Hell, where I come from we call that the country club set."