Abby Mann has died at the age of 83. For many years there, Mann symbolized Serious, Hard-Hitting screenwriting on Moral Issues inspired by Contemporary Themes. Like his doppelganger, Paddy Chayefsky, Mann attracted attention for his work on such "golden age of television" shows as and Studio One., where his seriousness of intent and hard-hitting tone made it clear that he would be a natural collaborator for the director-producer Stanley Kramer. Kramer brought Mann into movies, where he won an Academy Award for his first screenplay, for 1961's Judgement at Nuremburg, and followed that up by adapting Katherine Anne Porter's novel Ship of Fools for Kramer. He also wrote A Child Is Waiting, produced by Kramer and directed by John Cassavettes; Vittorio De Sica's The Condemned of Altona; and the Frank Sinatra vehicle The Detective. By the end of the 1970s, his and Kramer's brand of speechifying topical melodrama was actually more in demand in TV than in movies, and Mann gravitated back to the small screen; he inadvertently created the hit cop show Kojak and made Telly Savalas a star by writing The Marcus-Nelson Murders, a 1971 TV-movie based on an actual case of police injustice, with Savalas's "Kojak" as the muckraking hero; in 1978, he had his sole fling as a director by filming his script for the 1978 miniseries King, starring Paul Winfield as the civil rights leader. That program stirred up controversy for speculating on a conspiracy behind King's assassination, much as his 1985 script for The Atlanta Child Murders was criticized for implying that the black man convicted for the crimes, Wayne Williams, was a patsy for a mysterious white killer, or killers. His last filmed scripts were for the HBO films Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story (1992), Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995), and Whitewash: The Clarence Bradley Story.