Though Karl Tunberg is the only writer officially credited with writing
the screenplay for "Ben-Hur", and although he was the only writer to be
Oscar-nominated for the film, he is also one of the few major creative
people involved with it who did not win the Academy Award that year,
and it has been documented that director William Wyler was completely
dissatisfied with Tunberg's script. It was he who called in a host of
celebrated writers, among them playwrights Christopher Fry and Maxwell
Anderson, to improve the quality of the script.