The next year, he collaborated with Robert E. Sherwood on
Cock of the Air (1932), a comedy about an army air force lieutenant (Chester Morris) who flies his fiancée from Italy to Paris so she can drink champagne at the Ritz bar. In 1933, he made contributions to Hecht's screenplay for
Topaze, but neither of them received screen credit.
Following Topaze, Lederer was largely inactive in film work, not receiving another screen credit until 1937, when he collaborated on two musicals, Double or Nothing and Mountain Music. His first solo screenplay, Broadway Serenade (1939), was a thinly plotted vehicle for Jeanette MacDonald, who played a singer whose career ruins her marriage to her songwriter husband (Lew Ayres).
Lederer married Virginia Welles, former wife of Orson Welles, in 1940. That same year he wrote what has remained his most popular and critically acclaimed screenplay, His Girl Friday, a remake of The Front Page. At the suggestion of the film's director, Howard Hawks, Lederer changed the sex of the lead character, Hildy Johnson, from male to female (played by Rosalind Russell) and then complicated the situation by making her the former wife of Walter Burns (Cary Grant), the tyrannical editor.
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