Preferred Citation: McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0z09n7m0/
 | Backstory 2Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950sEdited and with |
Preferred Citation: McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0z09n7m0/
Acknowledgments
This book, a labor of love for all involved, owes its existence to an unusually supportive editor, Ernest Callenbach, and to the writers who did the hard work of some of the interviews: Tina Daniell, Dennis Fischer, Joel Greenberg, Margy Rochlin, Steve Swires, David Thomson.
The scriptwriters themselves were generous with their time and comments, with (in some cases) photographs from their personal stock, and, generally speaking, warm encouragement.
Pat McGilligan compiled all the filmographies, except Walter Reisch's (contributed by Joel Greenberg). The people who conducted (or, in the case of Tom Flinn, "edited") the interviews wrote the respective introductions.
Alison Morley (in Los Angeles) and William B. Winburn (in New York City) volunteered their time and special talents for portrait photography of several of the screenwriters.
The transcriptions were rendered by the reliable Cindy Walker. The copy editor, whose remarks were appreciated and suggestions invariably adopted, was Lieselotte Hofmann.
The Leigh Brackett interview was originally published as "Grab What You Can Get: The Screenwriter as Journeyman Plumber" in the August–September 1976 issue of Films in Review . An edited portion of the Ben Maddow interview originally appeared as "The Invisible Man" in the Summer 1989 issue of Sight and Sound . The Daniel Mainwaring interview was first published as "Screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring Discusses Out of the Past" in the Velvet Light Trap (Fall 1973). The Curt Siodmak interview was originally published, in slightly different form ("An Outspoken Interview with the Sultan of Speculation"), in the December 1988 and March/April 1989 issues of
FILMFAX . An extract of the Philip Yordan interview appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and in the Los Angeles Times (Sunday Calendar section). Alison Morley's photographs and interview snippets were published as "The Script Men" in the August 1990 issue of American Film . All interviews are reprinted courtesy of the authors and/or the respective publications.
The Walter Reisch interview was originally conducted under the auspices of the Louis B. Mayer Oral History Program of the American Film Institute, and is excerpted here by permission of Mrs. Elizabeth Reisch, Joel Greenberg, and the American Film Institute.
Friends and colleagues who are to be thanked for advice and assistance include Leith Adams, Walter Bernstein, Ned Comstock, Mary Corliss, Andre de Toth, James Greenberg, Penelope Houston, Faith Hubley, Harlan Jacobson, Stuart Kaminsky, Ron Mandlebaum, Ric Menello, Rod Merl, Gerald Peary, John Pym, Leo Rosten, Marian Seldes, Wolf Schneider, Sheila Schwartz, Bertrand Tavernier, Tise Vahimagi, and Martha Wilson.
The still photographs are courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, British Film Institute, Richard Brooks, Collectors Bookstore, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Davis Freeman, Film Comment, Elizabeth Reisch, Curt Siodmak, Stewart Stern, USC Special Collections, and UCLA Special Collections.
This book is for Joseph McBride—a contributor to the first Backstory —in fond memory of riding along with him to visit the great ones, learning from him, and almost always, having a good time.
Introduction: The Next Wave
The year 1939, generally regarded as the high-tide mark of the Golden Age of Hollywood, is the informal starting date for the chronology of movies and movie-writing careers covered in this book. The film industry was having a heyday. It was a time of B pictures galore (with many a nugget among them) and already highly evolved, quintessentially American genres—the Western, the musical, the gangster film.
An estimated 483 films were produced and released by the studios in that year. But by 1959, that number had plummeted to 187.[*] In twenty years, dramatic events had overtaken the motion picture industry, reshaping the studios, the films, the scripts.
The first thing one notices about the screenwriters and writing credits of the 1940s and 1950s is the significantly fewer number of each, screenwriters and credits, when compared to the generation of motion picture writers who rose to prominence during the early sound era of the late 1920s and early to mid-1930s.
As the deluge of motion pictures dwindled, so of course did the pool of screenwriters. Indeed by 1959, and the dawn of the unruly 1960s, the studio contract writer could be said to be an endangered species.
In his provocative yesteryear chronicle City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, Otto Friedrich makes it plain that the 1940s were a decade
[*] * Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records by Cobbett Steinberg (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
of transition for the motion picture industry, from an era of hope and glory to a period of caution and upheaval.
World War II was a jolt to the system. The recruitment of writers dropped off. The scripts changed to accommodate new social imperatives and genre demands. There were topical themes, extremes of escapist froth, and paranoical film noir .
Several of the writers interviewed here functioned meritoriously behind the scenes on armed forces documentaries during World War II—Richard Brooks, Garson Kanin, Arthur Laurents, Ben Maddow, Daniel Taradash. But, in general, the war put a gap in careers, and after it ended there were some abrupt transitions.
Garson Kanin stopped directing and started writing movies. Poet Ben Maddow found himself in Hollywood, usually writing film scripts instead of verse. Richard Brooks was elevated, thanks to a novel he had written during his tour of military duty, from the B to the A status of Hollywood scriptwriter.
Then came a cycle of misfortune. The year 1946 saw the first regular network television service; the year 1947 brought the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to Hollywood for closed-door hearings; and beginning in the late 1940s, antitrust rulings prescribed the divorcement of the theaters and the end of block-booking.[*]
Massive studio layoffs accompanied the decline in production. There were also deaths of major (and minor) film executives who had figured, for three decades, in the established network of power and relationships. The rules as well as players of the game were in flux.
As early as the mid-1950s, there were no longer armies of writers on each studio payroll competing for A and B credits. Indeed, many of the studios ceased to make B movies altogether. For all intents and purposes, some studios (RKO, for example) ceased to make any movies.
(W. R. Burnett, the novelist and screenwriter of Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle, and many other titles, who survived three decades of the system at Warner Brothers, said in Volume 1 of Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age that the handful of scribes remaining on the payroll in Burbank grimly referred to the studio as "Death Valley.")
For some writers, the bête noire of television production offered a kind of haven.[**] No longer succored by the studios, old-time screenwriters, with credits
[*] * The Paramount antitrust ruling came in May 1948. The "consent decree" actions came at intervals thereafter and called for a complete divorcement of the affiliated circuits from production and distribution branches. For further background on the antitrust dissolutionment, see "Part IV: Retrenchment, Reappraisal and Reorganization, 1948—" and "United States versus Hollywood: The Case Study of an Antitrust Suit" by Ernest Borneman in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976).
[**] ** The purists among the screenwriters abstained from television work, their métier being almost exclusively motion pictures. Only the youngest among the screenwriters in this volume, Stewart Stern, has any significant pre-1960 television writing credits.
dating back to the early silents, provided the backbone for certain of the prestigious television series that originated on the West Coast, from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" to "Bonanza." Of course, they were also busy tossing logs on the more conventional fires of sitcoms and action fillers.
Just as in the early days of sound, frequently the old-timers were assigned to collaborate with the new-timers. The old-timers might ensure the verities of structure and continuity, while the new-timers bolstered the contemporary slant and slang. In this fashion the older generation of writers was passing the torch of "story craft" to younger disciples who would emerge, in the 1960s and 1970s, as the bright lights of a reconstituted Hollywood.
In a way—though this was always a false dichotomy—the existence of television served to point up the more glittering nature of motion pictures. It was more fashionable to believe that, compared to television, motion pictures were the expansive, exploratory, serious medium, just as Broadway, especially for the 1930s generation, had once held the snob edge over Hollywood.
Films (according to this school of thought) could attempt bold social statements or intimate personal ones. Studios could afford the bloated expense of time-span epics, crowd extravaganzas, or special effects. The wide screen was more alluring to the "name" stars and directors. Movies could turn a quicker and bigger profit. The cinema could, and writers always felt this deeply, explore the outer limits of creativity.
Although the antitrust rulings and the inroads of television weakened the motion picture industry, it was the blacklist that especially injured screenwriters. Of the Hollywood Ten who went to jail in 1950 rather than testify before a congressional committee as to their alleged membership in the Communist Party, eight were writers. No one has done a strict accounting as to how many of the other several hundred blacklistees were screenwriters, but the implication in The Hollywood Writers' Wars by Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, and Naming Names by Victor Navasky—among the very best books on the subject—is that writers formed a disproportionate majority of the victims.
There was a ripple effect among those writers who were not blacklisted, especially the liberals who had to fend off suspicions. As a consequence of the climate of fear, much that was progressive, that advanced story material politically or thematically, was submerged or had to battle its way to the surface.
Of course, no one can say what the blacklisted writers might have written. And how one feels about the quality of the movies of the 1950s depends, inevitably, on one's analysis of the cause and effects, the extent, of the blacklist. There is still debate about the cause, and murkiness about the effects, among film historians. Although the blacklist is central to the experience of Hollywood screenwriters who, one way or another, lived through it, inevita-
bly there is disagreement, disparity, contradiction, and paradox in the collective memory—in this book, as in other chronicles that hinge on the blacklist.
Even in the case of the more famous people, the credits for that period are still being sorted out.[*] The "shared" noms de plume are confusing. In this volume Ben Maddow and Philip Yordan, the former operating as the "ghost" of the latter during the 1950s, cannot quite agree on who wrote what. (Between them, they encompass just about any issue one would care to raise about the blacklist.) Film noir exemplar Daniel Mainwaring also permitted his name to be used as a "front" by certain blacklisted writers, yet he always guarded the secrecy of such arrangements.
Naturally, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had trouble keeping the official credits straight during this unfortunate era. Despite the tremendous personal and professional odds against the blacklisted community, and the formal opposition of the industry, there were pseudonymous, blacklist-related Oscar nominees and Oscar winners in the different script categories practically every year of the 1950s.
(Not that, as Arthur Laurents and Philip Yordan relate in their respective interviews, there weren't some dubious credits—and Oscars—before the blacklist as well.)
The career climb for scriptwriters was perilous in the 1950s, and the creative atmosphere in the industry somewhat restrictive. A scriptwriter had to be determined—dead set on that sunshine and swimming pool (the perks were still attractive)—and in love with the idea of writing movies .
That, if anything, was the fundamental difference between the scriptwriters of the earliest sound era and those of the "next wave."
More of the "next wave" scriptwriters had prejudices in favor of, not against, motion pictures. The great film artists, such as D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, and Orson Welles, had conquered the effete critics. Now there were
* The Hollywood Ten themselves were effectively blacklisted by the joint statement of the Hollywood studio bosses at the Waldorf Conference of November 1947. However, the institutionalization of the blacklist is generally dated as beginning around 1950, when the appeals of the Hollywood Ten were denied and they went to prison. The second round of HUAC hearings began in 1951, and with it the dragnet and repression of hundreds of others. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund's The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980) is one of the many sources that date Dalton Trumbo's screen credit for Spartacus, in 1960, as marking the watershed beginning of the end of the blacklist, although for many others, the curtailments effectively lingered on until the mid-1960s.
Just as in this volume there is disparity in accounts, disagreement can be found in the best histories. There are Hollywood people who claim that manifestations of the blacklist were widespread immediately after the HUAC hearings of 1947, and others who say that the practical effects of blacklisting continued, for them, well beyond the mid-1960s. Obviously, the blacklist was not monolithic. Readers are advised to consult and compare these recommended books, among the most comprehensive and reliable ones on the subject: Ceplair and Englund's The Inquisition in Hollywood, Victor Navasky's Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980), and Nancy Lynn Schwartz's The Hollywood Writers' Wars (New York: Knopf, 1982).
museum retrospectives and celebratory books about "the cinema," along with well-documented admiration for the Hollywood-stamped product in such sophisticated foreign capitals as London, Paris, and Rome. Movies had been validated as an art form.
The screenplay itself had acquired grudging respect. As we know from FrameWork, Tom Stempel's valuable history of U.S. screenwriting, there were, early on, plenty of how-to books about motion picture scenarios, as well as, dating from the 1930s, prestigious script collections edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols (Oscar winner for the screenplay of The Informer in 1935). These preserved the best "film plays" for study and imitation by fans and practitioners.
The ambivalence towards Hollywood that haunted the group of screenwriters interviewed in Volume 1 of Backstory does not manifest itself, at least to the same marked degree, among the screenwriters of Volume 2.
The "next wave" of screenwriters may have had flourishing sidelines. They may have had independent bodies of work as novelists or playwrights or even, as in the case of Ben Maddow in this volume, as poets. But with notable exceptions, they became the first generation of scriptwriters who put films on the same aesthetic plane as novels and plays.
The impaired state of the film industry in the 1950s did offer some advantages for the younger, more resourceful up-and-comers, who in any case would not have the sentimental perspective of having experienced the good old days of studio writing assignments.
Thanks to the Screen Writers Guild, the scriptwriter was in a better position to protect himself or herself creatively as well as financially. There were benefits and a basic scale owing to the historic guild settlement with the producers in 1941, as well as a formal arbitration process to adjudicate the credits.[*] Although it is impossible to calculate such things, it seems there was much less "forced collaboration" as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, less rewriting behind the backs of screenwriters. Now, if nothing else, producers had stringent budget incentives to stick to one or two writers.
Broadly speaking, individual writers had more authority and status than in the preceding generation. Writers were compelled less by the machine-belt production that was slowing down or by the need to compile roving "fix-it" credits to justify a studio sinecure. There were still the aggravated relationships between writers and producers (and directors), there were still the familiar shackles of genre axioms. But there were obvious strides in creativity, too.
Perhaps the major changes in post-World War II (and pre-Vietnam War
* See Nancy Schwartz's excellent The Hollywood Writers' Wars for a fully fleshed chronicle of the decade-long struggle to organize the Screen Writers Guild (nowadays known as the Writers Guild of America).
era) film narrative came in areas of content rather than form—sex and politics, Freudian psychologizing, racial problems, and life-style issues (booze, drugs, rock and roll). As the world turned, so did Hollywood.
The scriptwriters of the 1940s and 1950s responded to the changing attitudes and concerns. Featured in this volume are the writers of Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Blackboard Jungle (1952), From Here to Eternity (1952), and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), among other seminal films. Some of these movies may seem tame nowadays, but in their time they were perceived as landmarks in their depiction of inflammatory social issues.
If the best scripts of the "next wave" reflected society more truly, they also seemed to reflect their particular writers more transparently. That was one of the advances over the past. The identity of the writer was manifest in his recurrent concerns and motifs, in a thread of consistent personality throughout a varied career. Writers still could not be autobiographical, strictly speaking, but neither were they constrained to be as impersonal as before. In a word, screenwriters could express themselves more freely.
The Hollywood screenwriters of the 1930s, the "first wave" of sound-era writers, were an extraordinarily versatile group. But their versatility was imposed in part by the studio assignment merry-go-round and in part by the more developmental nature of the task. To some extent, however, the career versatility mitigated against any personal subtext in the writing.
As Stewart Stern remarks in his interview, he always responded better to a script subject that rose "out of the soul." And as Betty Comden and Adolph Green attest, they found themselves echoed, to a surprising degree, in the musical comedies they wrote. What bothered Ben Maddow in the 1950s was the alienation he felt from his true self when he ghosted impersonal scripts for Philip Yordan.
The writers of the 1940s and 1950s were not quite the interchangeable, amorphous creatures that they once appeared to be, at least to many producers of the 1930s. "Send in the boys!" was the old refrain—a couple of writers, the more the merrier. The "next wave" were known to have precise strong suits—distinct literary personalities—outside of which they, and Hollywood, rarely chose to venture.
Writers could also direct. Big revelation!—and yet that's what it was. Before the recognition of the Screen Writers Guild and the flexing of writers' muscles, this dual role was not a given.
Beginning in the early 1940s there was an onrush of top-notch writer-directors like Preston Sturges, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and John Huston, not to mention such less impressive examples as Nunnally Johnson, Norman Krasna, and Dudley Nichols. It became practically de rigueur for any important screenwriter to make a stab at directing.
In Volume 1 of Backstory, there were precisely three writers from the
generation of the 1930s who traveled that path. In the present volume, seven writers of the fourteen interviewed also served stints as directors.
Ben Maddow (for independent films and documentaries) and Garson Kanin (whose directing career preceded, and was largely independent of, his scriptwriting career) are each a saga unto themselves. Walter Reisch's directing résumé was, with the exception of one U.S. venture, restricted to Europe. Daniel Taradash tried directing only once. The horror specialist Curt Siodmak tried it several times but never quite enjoyed the authority and obligation as much as did his brother, Robert. These were all intermittent directing careers, whereas the iconoclastic Richard Brooks, of course, was one of the preeminent writer-directors of his generation, able to master both professions.
Directing could be lonely, arduous, stressful. More than one screenwriter in this volume found that it was not the end-all and the be-all. Yet surely the lesson is not lost on the current generation of Hollywood writer-directors that people like Brooks, who armored their integrity by directing their own scripts, have turned out to have the longest, most productive careers.
Many critics consider the 1940s to be an exceptional period of studio movie-making. As books like Nora Sayre's Running Time and Peter Biskind's Seeing Is Believing[*] point up, the 1950s are the more arguable decade. Some seasoned directors hit their stride (Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, George Stevens, Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, and Anthony Mann, to name a few), while others (among them Frank Capra, Charles Chaplin, Fritz Lang, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, Preston Sturges, Lewis Milestone, and William Wellman) stumbled. One's point of view on the decade depends, inevitably, on whether one focuses on the riches, the dregs, or the vast in-between.
Here are reminiscences from fourteen screenwriters responsible for some of the treasure trove, not only from the Truman-Eisenhower era, but from the span of their respective careers, whether they began writing in the 1930s and continue today, into the 1990s, or whether they may have resided, for long stretches of their careers, in Europe or New York City—even Ohio! or Florida! (For as Hollywood quaked, one of the beneficial side effects was that screenwriters could and did scurry to live elsewhere.)
Their backgrounds run the gamut from hardscrabble roots to silver-spoon upbringings, just as their careers include every type of writing challenge, every happenstance, every studio experience. There are undeservedly obscure writers and there are distinguished Oscar winners, unbelievably prolific writers and those who suffered from an occasional "block."
There are updates on the studios and their chieftains of the 1940s and
* Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial Press, 1982); and Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
1950s; vignettes of directors (like Cukor) who respected the script and others (like Hawks) who fiddled with it; glimpses and anecdotes of eminent colleagues, including an assortment of tales about Faulkner; insights into the tricks, traps, and technology of films; philosophy about the illusions and realities of the craft.
These Hollywood scribes have differing approaches to scriptwriting. Some (like Richard Brooks and Walter Reisch) believe story and construction to be paramount. Some (theater animals like Garson Kanin and Arthur Laurents) assert that characterization is the cardinal basis. Others (like Leigh Brackett and Dorothy Kingsley) say they were largely content to contribute highlights to other people's screenplays.
There is the usual cheating on the part of the editor to include interviews with people who do not fit tidily into any generational—or genre—concept.
The last gasp of "talkies" screenwriters lured to the film capital with pomp and publicity by the studio talent scouts arrived in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The resourceful Walter Reisch came over by boat in 1937 as a guest of Louis B. Mayer, along with other European refugees escaping Hitler. After winning a national playwriting competition, the intelligent adaptor Daniel Taradash signed with Columbia, the better to escape law practice, in 1938. The mystery man and master of many modes, Philip Yordan, arrived in Hollywood in 1937. Richard Brooks timed his first visit to coincide with the World Series of 1940.
The others are all 1940s arrivals. Stewart Stern, an infantry veteran whose war experience colored his sensitive view of the world, is the only one to affix his name to his first screenplay as late as 1951.
Among the fourteen interviewees are included paragons of most Hollywood genres. Private-eye yarns, neurotic potboilers, and pulp horror seemed to proliferate in the 1940s, and in this book there are one-on-one transcripts with several geniuses of those categories. These writers, with their dark themes, may have been yoked, ineluctably, to the anxiety/fear/suspense of the film noir organism, yet each also manifests unmistakable quirks and signposts.
For example, Daniel Mainwaring's fatalistic scripts are rooted in his own identification with, and suspicion toward, small-town Americana; while Richard Brooks' lone protagonists are, like their creator, self-made men, answerable only to themselves.
Curt Siodmak (from Germany) as well as Walter Reisch (from Austria) had flourishing film careers in Europe for a decade before arriving to cope with Hollywood axioms in the late 1930s. It is interesting that both of them, refugees from Nazism who long, long ago worked together on a science-fiction film classic, F.P.1. antwortet nicht (F.P.1. Does Not Answer, 1932), ultimately trod such divergent ground. Siodmak, a prolific novelist consigned to B studios and producers, became the ultimate shlockmeister of his era, the creator or co-creator of many horror, adventure, and science-fiction film clas-
sics. Reisch, for directors Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor, for MGM and for Twentieth Century-Fox, refined the elegant Kammerspiel and documentary-style melodrama.
Among the story genres that seemed to dominate the 1950s were the anti-Red parables, the biblical and historical epics, the troubled-teenager pictures, the hard, unsentimental Westerns, the soapy family-dynasty dramas, the "meaningful" science fiction, and the larky musicals. With the exception of the anti-Red offshoot, in this volume we have representative exponents of every territory.
Included are writers of scripts that somehow seem to reflect perfectly that era—time capsules, as it were, of the 1950s—whether it be Richard Brooks' shaping of The Blackboard Jungle, or Comden-Green's ebullient musical Singin' in the Rain (1952), the Philip Yordan psycho-Western Johnny Guitar (1954), or the quintessential James Dean vehicle (co-written by Stewart Stern), Rebel Without a Cause . Typical or topical, these films also reflect something of their writers. That is one of the themes sounded, repeatedly, in this volume.
These writers, presented in alphabetical sequence, brought style and distinction to every project they tackled.
The cult science-fiction and mystery novelist Leigh Brackett began as a "ten-day wonder" at the shoestring studios. Then, on the mistaken assumption she was a hard-boiled male, she was hired by director Howard Hawks to work with William Faulkner on adapting Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1946). She worked almost exclusively for Hawks for twenty-some years before being lured away by the fine contemporary directors Robert Altman, for his version of The Long Goodbye (1973), and George Lucas, for the second installment of Star Wars (The Empire Strikes Back, 1980).
In the 1940s and I950s, there was no more gutsy screenwriter than Richard Brooks. He was responsible (often as writer-director) for such diverse material as the novel (The Brick Foxhole ) that was the basis for Crossfire (1947); the Bogart films Key Largo (1948), Deadline U.S.A. (1952), and Battle Circus (1953); and faithful screen adaptations of Joseph Conrad, Dostoevski, Tennessee Williams, Sinclair Lewis, and Truman Capote. Though his career faltered in the 1980s, Brooks's finest films will never go out of fashion.
Arguably the "first couple" of Hollywood musicals (though they aren't married to each other), Betty Comden and Adolph Green co-wrote the scripts for many of our best-loved song-and-dance comedies, including Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), and It's Always Fair Weather (1955). They stuck to the Arthur Freed unit at MGM and worked primarily with old friends Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly and with director Vincente Minnelli. New Yorkers to the core, Comden and Green left Hollywood with the dissolution of the studio apparatus and returned to stage work, but left an indelible mark as the perfectionists of the modern screen musical.
Garson Kanin 's career was as varied and spectacular, behind the scenes, as the more public one of his wife and frequent collaborator, actress Ruth Gordon. A Broadway and Hollywood wunderkind as an actor and director, he co-directed an Oscar-winning documentary during World War II, then scored his first major success as a playwright-director with the smash Broadway hit Born Yesterday (film version, 1950). He and Gordon provided the witty repartee of sparkling Hepburn-Tracy vehicles and the combustible situations of the early Judy Holliday comedies, all of them directed by their friend George Cukor. After Kanin left movies, he became "the Boswell of Hollywood," a novelist and social historian of Tinseltown's glamorous past.
The fix-it writer Dorothy Kingsley, a former socialite from the Midwest who forged a long comedy career at MGM, graduated through the years from innocuous (and profitable) Esther Williams poolside musicals to splashier (also profitable) tune-filled vehicles with the more imposing names of Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter, and William Shakespeare prominent in the credits.
The novelist, playwright, and stage director Arthur Laurents lived in Los Angeles for all of two years in the late 1940s, but scripted memorably for directors Alfred Hitchcock, Anatole Litvak, Max Ophuls, David Lean, and Otto Preminger. Though blacklisted to some extent, Laurents kept busy in the 1950s and eventually wrote the books for two Broadway perennials, West Side Story and Gypsy . The screen adaptation of his novel The Way We Were (1973) became one of the box-office blockbusters of the early 1970s. Though Laurents is self-deprecating about his film work (and his reasons, as recounted in this interview, are hilariously convincing), he has a reputation as one of the screen's consummate romantics.
Another exceptional, variegated, ultimately checkered career: Once associated with the documentary movement of the 1930s (he co-wrote the seminal Native Land in 1942); Ben Maddow began to write studio features in the late 1940s. His studio assignments (Intruder in the Dust in 1949, The Asphalt Jungle in 1950) were acclaimed, but the flow of work was cut off by the blacklist. Later, after years of "writing underground," Maddow dabbled in directing noteworthy avant-garde features. His Hollywood period was blighted by his role as a House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) cooperative witness, which Maddow speaks about for the first time, and painfully, in this interview.
Walter Reisch had a remarkable life story—spanning involvement with the nascent, post-World War I Austrian film industry; a stint with UFA, producer Erich Pommer, and "talkies" in Berlin; work with Alexander Korda in London; and long contract years with MGM and Twentieth Century-Fox, in Hollywood. An adept originator as well as a director of note in Europe, Reisch became a specialist in "story construction" in the United States, conforming admirably to the disparate studio regimes of Louis B. Mayer and Darryl F. Zanuck.
The younger brother of atmospheric suspense director Robert Siodmak,
Curt Siodmak is the author of many prescient science-fiction and speculative novels, including the well-known Donovan's Brain, which is never out of print and has been filmed three times to date. Though Siodmak likes to say he worked as a screenwriter only for the weekly paycheck, his motion picture contributions—imaginative stories with various dread creatures run amok (to some extent allegorical nightmares of Hitler, who drove him from Europe)—make him one of the leading exponents of the fantastic cinema.
The questing screenwriter Stewart Stern, who has written for Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Dennis Hopper, can be said to be a link between the antiheroes of the film generation of the 1940s and those of a more contemporary mold. Unable to cope with the exigencies of Hollywood in the 1970s, Stern left Los Angeles and active screenwriting, retreating to Seattle, where he resides today. As with his screenplays, Stem's emotions are close to the surface, and he speaks movingly of his own limitations, of career disillusionment, of his writer's block.
A somber note is contributed by Daniel Taradash , the Harvard-educated lawyer who became one of Hollywood's most respected literary recyclists, with significant credits ranging from Golden Boy (1939) to Rancho Notorious (1952) to From Here to Eternity (1953) and Picnic (1955). Taradash himself describes the early half of his career, still in the studio heyday, as "triumph," and the latter half, in the hands of independent producers and iffy properties, as "chaos."
As the prototypical "businessman-writer," Philip Yordan deserves, perhaps, a book of his own. A prolific self-promoter with many hard-hitting screenplays to his credit, including Dillinger (1945), House of Strangers (1949), Detective Story (1951), Johnny Guitar (1954), God's Little Acre (1958), and Studs Lonigan (1960), Yordan is controversial for the use of "surrogate writers." He admits to having employed certain blacklisted writers under his aegis in the 1950s. Yordan specialized in crime thrillers, weird Westerns, ancient and religious epics, and nail-biters about rotten families and doomed heroes. Though he lived overseas for many years, Yordan emerged unscathed from the collapse of the Bronston film empire, and returned to the United States in the 1970s to live in San Diego, where he continues to churn out low-budget exploitation features.[*]
Oral history is not, strictly speaking, factual. Fact is increasingly presumptive in the realm of Hollywood history and hard to pin down amid so much
* According to Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia (New York: Perigree Books, 1979), p. 168: "[Samuel Bronston] made little impact until the late 50s, when he began producing spectacular epics in Spain. Early success encouraged him to invest in the building of enormous studios near Madrid; he was single-handedly responsible for putting Spain on the map as a center for international film production. But he borrowed heavily and overextended his investment and by 1964 was forced to suspend all business activities. The ensuing court litigations prevented him from further production."
conflicting rumor, gossip, legend, folklore, and reminiscence. A dozen people will tell tales of Harry Cohn's funeral, and who cracked wise what. The historian might attempt to organize the most plausible and narrowed-down scenario. The oral historian takes a kind of glee in the loose ends, in the cacophony and din.
Naturally, screenwriters get the benefit of the doubt here, and that may be cause, for some, for skepticism. Although the editor admits siding passionately with the writers' point of view and their generally unsung contributions, he also tries to be fair. Where an obvious or glaring error of fact has been detected, the correction has been noted in the text or footnoted.
The strength of a group portrait such as this lies, it is hoped, in the cross-weaving of viewpoints, in the chorus of voices, as well as in the close-ups of the individuals.
So there will be din and the cacophony, yes, some questionable assertions—and some clarion truth—as fourteen of the best screenwriters of their time recollect their lives, their careers, and the backstories of writing their motion pictures.
A Note on Credits
It is not a simple job to compile the filmography of a screenwriter, for as Richard Corliss has written in his indispensable book, Talking Pictures, "A writer may be given screen credit for work he didn't do (as with Sidney Buchman on Holiday ), or be denied credit for work he did do (as with Sidney Buchman on The Awful Truth )." Which is to say, there are irresolvable gaps in the best sources.
The American Film Institute's Catalog of Feature Films (1921–1930, 1961–1970) is incomplete for the years that are missing and not always reliable for the years that are covered. The joint project of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Writers Guild of America-West, Who Wrote the Movie (And What Else Did He Write)? (1936–1969), is less than authoritative. It overlooks movies written before the inception of the guild and toes the official guild line of accreditation thereafter. Consequently, excluded are many famous and not-so-famous instances of uncredited complicity. The blacklist years are riddled with aliases and omissions. And the guild maintains rules (disallowing screen credit to any director who has not contributed at least 50 percent of the dialogue, for example) that, while they may protect screenwriters, do not promote a full accounting of the screenplay.
The credits for this book were cross-referenced from several sources—those cited above, the New York Times and Variety film reviews, International Motion Picture Almanac and Motion Picture Daily yearbooks, A Guide to American Screenwriters: The Sound Era, 1929–1982 by Larry Langman (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984) and The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz (New York: Perigree Books, 1979). In individual cases there was additional spadework by the original interviewers. As a final
resort, whenever possible, the interview subjects were confronted with the results of research and asked to add to or subtract from the list. Richard Brooks, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Garson Kanin, Dorothy Kingsley, Curt Siodmak, and Stewart Stern all reviewed their transcripts and filmographies, clarifying aspects of their interviews.
As to specific claims and counterclaims concerning who wrote exactly what, there is another kind of cross-referencing to be done. The oral historian cannot always separate fact from factoid or opinion from the ax-to-grind. Likely there is much in this collection of reminiscences that contradicts, or is contradicted by, material in other books. Partly, such conflicting tales are to be expected of a branch of the film industry that has been relatively untapped for its perspective, where egos and careers have been so trampled. And partly such differences arise inevitably from individual points of view on a group enterprise.
Leigh Brackett: Journeyman Plumber
Interview by Steve Swires
She wrote that [The Big Sleep] like a man. She writes good.
Howard Hawks, quoted in Hawks on Hawks
In many ways, Leigh Brackett was the archetypal Howard Hawks woman. She was energetic, stubborn, self-sufficient, and self-deprecating, as were many of the female (and for that matter, male) characters in her scripts for Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), El Dorado (1967), and Rio Lobo (1970), as well as for Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973). Besides being one of the few successful women screenwriters, she was one of the earliest successful women science-fiction writers, having entered the field professionally in 1939. Her best-known character is the larger-than-life swashbuckling hero Eric John Stark, who first appeared in the pages of Planet Stories in the 1940s and who returned in a series of novels she wrote for Ballantine Books.
Brackett was married to the well-known science-fiction writer Edmond Hamilton, and they lived in Kinsman, Ohio, where, according to her husband, she spent her time "at a typewriter under the eaves of our old farmhouse, writing science fiction and mysteries, with frequent interruptions to run a tractor, clear paths in the woods, and spray the orchard." She also edited a collection of her husband's stories, titled The Best of Edmond Hamilton .
(This interview was conducted several years before her death and the post-humous release of The Empire Strikes Back, her final screen credit.)
Leigh Brackett (1915–1978)
1945
The Vampire's Ghost (Lesley Selander).[*] Story, co-script.
1946
Crime Doctor's Manhunt (William Castle). Script.
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks). Co-script.
1959
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks). Co-script.
1961
Gold of the Seven Saints (Gordon Douglas). Co-script.
1962
Hatari! (Howard Hawks). Script.
13 West Street (Philip Leacock). From her novel The Tiger Among Us .
1967
El Dorado (Howard Hawks). Script.
1970
Rio Lobo (Howard Hawks). Co-script.
1973
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman). Script.
1980
The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner). Co-script.
Television credits include episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Checkmate," "Archer" and "The Rockford Files."
Books include No Good from a Corpse, Shadow over Mars (a.k.a. The Nemesis from Terra ), The Starmen (a.k.a. The Galactic Breed or The Starmen of Llyrdis ), The Sword of Rhiannon, The Big Jump, The Long Tomorrow, Eye for an Eye, The Tiger Among Us (a.k.a. 13 West Street ), Rio Bravo, Follow the Free Wind, Alpha Centauri—or Die!, The People of the Talisman/The Secret of Sinharat, The Coming of the Terrans, Silent Partner, The Halfling and Other Stories, The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, The Reavers of Skaith, The Best of Leigh Brackett, The Best of Planet Stories No. 1: Strange Adventures on Other Worlds (edited by Brackett), and The Best of Edmond Hamilton (edited by Brackett).
Brackett was a winner of the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award and of the Jules Verne Fantasy Award. In her official Writers Guild résumé, she was also noted as "a proud Ohio potato grower."
Your first screenplays were for The Vampire's Ghost [1945], a "ten-day wonder" at Republic, and Crime Doctor's Manhunt [1946], part of the Crime Doctor series at Columbia. You went from those B movies to The Big Sleep,
* In the filmographies in this volume, the directors' names appear in parentheses following the titles.
directed by Howard Hawks, in 1946. How did you manage so prestigious an advancement?
The "ten-day wonder" was because my agent, Hugh King, had been with Myron Selznick, my agency at that time, and he had gone over to Republic as story editor and had sort of managed to shoehorn me in because they were doing this horror film. They decided to cash in on the Universal monster school, and I had been doing science fiction, and to them it all looked the same—"bug-eyed monsters." It made no difference. I did The Vampire's Ghost there, and just out of the clear blue sky this other thing happened, purely on the strength of a hard-boiled mystery novel I had published. Howard Hawks read the book and liked it. He didn't buy the book, for which I can't blame him, but he liked the dialogue and I was put under contract to him.
You worked on the screenplay of The Big Sleep with William Faulkner. I wouldn't say that you collaborated, but both of your names are in the credits as having written the script, along with Jules Furthman .
I went to the studio the first day absolutely appalled. I had been writing pulp stories for about three years, and here is William Faulkner, who was one of the great literary lights of the day, and how am I going to work with him? What have I got to offer, as it were? This was quickly resolved, because when I walked into the office, Faulkner came out of his office with the book The Big Sleep and he put it down and said: "I have worked out what we're going to do. We will do alternate sections. I will do these chapters and you will do those chapters." And that was the way it was done. He went back into his office and I didn't see him again, so the collaboration was quite simple. I never saw what he did and he never saw what I did. We just turned our stuff in to Hawks.
Jules Furthman came into it considerably later, because Hawks had a great habit of shooting off the cuff. He had a fairly long script to begin with and he had no final script. He went into production with a "temporary." He liked to get a scene going and let it run. He eventually wound up with far too much story left than he had time to do on film. Jules came in and I think he was on it for about three weeks, and he rewrote it, shortening the latter part of the script.[*]
If you try to watch the film as a standard mystery, fitting all of the clues
* Jules Furthman was classed as "damned good" by Howard Hawks, who ranked him in the company of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Hecht and MacArthur (see Joseph McBride's Hawks on Hawks [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982]). An ex-newspaperman, Furthman began doing screen stories in 1915, worked regularly with directors Hawks and Josef von Sternberg, and has credits on such vintage films as Underworld (1927), Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), Bombshell (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Come and Get It (1936), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Shanghai Gesture (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), Nightmare Alley (1947), Jet Pilot (1957), and Rio Bravo (1959).
together to logically develop a hypothesis as to who the murderer might be, you find yourself continually frustrated by the narrative development .
I think everybody got very confused. It's a confusing book if you sit down and tear it apart. When you read it from page to page, it moves so beautifully that you don't care, but if you start tearing it apart to see what makes it tick, it comes unglued. Owen Taylor, I believe, was the name of the chauffeur. I was down on the set one day and Bogart came up and said, "Who killed Owen Taylor?" I said, "I don't know." We got hold of Faulkner and he said he didn't know, so they sent a wire to Chandler. He sent another wire back and said: "I don't know." In the book it is never explained who killed Owen Taylor, so there we were.
In writing your portion of the screenplay, did you have any concept in mind of the role of the private eye as an archetypal hero?
I don't think I dissected it that much. I was very much under the spell of Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and I have written a few stories myself in that same vein. Something struck me. I liked it and I felt it, but I don't think I really analyzed it as I might do now, but I was a lot younger then. I just sort of accepted it.
Are there contributions you made to the characterization of Philip Marlowe which are distinct from Hawks'?
I don't know that I contributed too much to Marlowe, because I was taking directly from the book. This was the bible, and I wouldn't dream of changing it. I think that the characterization of Marlowe as done by Bogart and directed by Hawks was entirely their own. On the other hand, I think Bogart was ideal and, as far as I was concerned, he was the greatest actor that ever happened. I adored him. Actually, it was a joy to watch him on the set because he was stage trained. On a Hawks film nobody gets their pages until five minutes before they're going to shoot. Bogart would put on his horn-rims, go off in a corner, look at it, and then he'd come back on the set and they'd run through it a couple of times, and he'd have it right down, every bit of timing, and he'd go through about fourteen takes waiting for the other people to catch up to him.
I don't like to say this, because it sounds presumptuous, but Hawks and I kind of tuned in on the same channel with regard to the characters, and I think this is probably one reason that I worked with him so long. He was able to get out of me what he wanted because I had somewhat the same attitude towards the characters as he did.
There is a revisionist effort popular with such critics as Pauline Kael and Richard Corliss to consider the work of the screenwriter in contrast to the auteur theory, which postulates the director as the author of the film. When you look back on the movies that you wrote for Hawks, do you see them as Leigh Brackett films or Howard Hawks films or as collaborations?
It's a collaboration. The whole thing is a team effort. A writer cannot
"Tuning in to the same channel": Leigh Brackett and director Howard Hawks at
work on Rio Bravo (Photo: Museum of Modern Art)
possibly, when he's writing a film, do exactly what he wants to do as when he's writing a novel. If I sit down to write a novel, I am God at my own typewriter, and there's nobody in between. But if I'm doing a screenplay, it has to be a compromise because there are so many things outside a writer's province. Hawks was also a producer, and he had so many things to think about that had nothing to do with the creative effort—with the story—like cost and budget and technical details that you must learn to integrate. You cannot possibly just go and say: "Well, I want to do it thus and such and so,"
because presently they say: "Thanks very much and goodbye." it just has to be that way.
You came out of the tradition of the pulp magazines, where you were allowed a degree of creative control. How did you react to having less control over your work in Hollywood?
I sort of went off into corners and wept a few times at things that made me very unhappy. I think the hardest thing about adapting to working with other people was that. Because I was a fiction writer primarily, and I was used to writing in a little room with the door shut, just myself and the type-writer—all of a sudden I'm sitting in this room with film people and I've got to talk ideas. God I froze. Everything I was about to say sounded so dreadful. It took me quite a few years to adapt and also to learn my craft, because I don't think there's anything better than screenwriting to teach you the construction of a story.
I was very poor on construction when I first began. If I could hit it right from the first word and go straight through, then it was great. If I didn't, I ended up with half-finished stories in which I had written myself into a box canyon and couldn't fight my way out. In film writing you get on overall conception of a story and then you go through these endless story conferences. Hawks used to walk in and he'd say: "I've been thinking . . ." My heart would go right down into my boots. Here we go: Start at the top of page one and go right through it again. But you still have to keep that concept. It's like building a wall. You've got the blocks, and you've got the wall all planned, and then somebody says: "I think we'll take this stone out of here and we'll put it over there. And we'll make this one a red one and that one a green one." You're still trying to keep the overall shape of the story, but you're changing the details. It took me a long time, but I finally learned how to do it. It was exhausting.
One of the observations gleaned from an auteur-oriented examination of Hawk's films is that certain sequences keep repeating themselves, being remade in different settings with different actors. For example, the scene in The Big Sleep where the gangster is in the house with Bogart and Bacall while his henchmen are waiting outside. Bogart throws him out and hawks cuts to a shot of the door being riddled with bullets. That scene is reshot in El Dorado where John Wayne throws a cowboy out of a saloon and Hawks again cuts to a shot of the door being riddled with bullets from the henchmen waiting outside. Your wrote the screenplay for El Dorado. Did you do that deliberately, or was that Hawks?
That was Hawks. I have been at swords' points with him many a time because I don't like doing a thing over again, and he does. I remember one day he and John Wayne and I were sitting in the office, and he said we'll do such and such a thing. I said: "But Howard, you did it in Rio Bravo . You don't want to do this over again." He said: "Why not?" And John Wayne,
all six feet four of him, looked down and said: "If it was good once it'll be just as good again." I know when I'm outgunned, so I did it. But I just don't like repeating myself. However, I'm wrong about half the time.
El Dorado is virtually a remake of Rio Bravo, with a certain reversal of characters . In Rio Bravo, John Wayne is the upstanding sheriff and Dean Martin is the drunken gunfighter . In El Dorado John Wayne is the upstanding gunfighter and Robert Mitchum is the drunken sheriff . Why bother to make El Dorado when you had already made the definitive version of that story in Rio Bravo?
I wrote the best script I have ever written and Howard liked it, the studio liked it, Wayne liked it, and I was delighted. We didn't make it, because he decided to go back and do Rio Bravo over again. It could have been called The Son of Rio Bravo Rides Again . I wasn't happy, but I did the best I could to make it a little different. Amazingly enough, very few people, except film buffs, caught the resemblance. I thought, my god! The critics will clobber us, because we did this before, practically word for word. The scene where Jimmy Caan threw himself in front of the horses we had done in Rio Bravo, but it was cut out of the final print because the final print was overlength. I said: "Howard, you can't do that. Warner Brothers owns it." He said: "All right, I'll buy the rights back." So what can you do?
Of the two, Rio Bravo was infinitely better cast . Arthur Hunnicutt in El Dorado played what was essentially Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo, but his performance is in no way comparable . Brennan as "Stumpy" is one of my favorite film performances, and was certainly of Oscar calibre .
He deserved it. Arthur Hunnicutt is a nice man and a good actor, but he's not Walter Brennan. When we began working on Rio Bravo we were harking back to To Have and Have Not [also directed by Hawks, 1944], in which Brennan played a similar character. We took him off a boat and put him in a Western town. That didn't work too well, so it got gradually worked around, after about the fourth or fifth version of the screenplay. Howard has a certain number of things that are very important to him. Usually the relationship between two men is a love story between two men. The obligations of friendship—what a friend is required to do for a friend. I suppose if you look at it, there are great resemblances.
You also helped write the screenplay for Hawks' last film, Rio Lobo. There are sequences in it which are in his earlier pictures, so for a third time he reshot some of the same scenes .
I didn't do the original script. Hawks asked me to work on it in the beginning, but I said: "I'm sorry. We're leaving for a trip around the world tomorrow, so I can't." Instead he got Burton Wohl. I came in on it, actually, as a rewrite. Not being used to working with Hawks, Mr. Wohl had some difficulty adjusting. Howard drives writers right up the wall. He will throw you a whole bunch of stuff and say: "This is what I want." And then he goes away
and you don't see him again for weeks. He leaves it to you to fit it all together and make a story out of it. He doesn't go into all the ramifications of motivation—that's what he's paying you for.
Writers get very confused. Most of what I did on Rio Lobo was to try and patch over the holes. If these people ride into town and go into the saloon and shoot somebody—why? Nobody knows. And you try to figure out why. So that was mostly what I did. I was unhappy that he went back to the same old ending of the trade, because it was done beautifully in Rio Bravo and done over again in El Dorado . As Johnny Woodcock, the film editor, said, "We get better at this every time."
I'd like to get your observations on working with John Wayne . When I interviewed [director] Mark Rydell at the time he was promoting Cinderella Liberty [1973], he shared an anecdote with me about the filming of The Cowboys [1972] . He noticed that, on the set Wayne became very friendly with Roscoe Lee Browne, who is a man of impeccable taste and sophistication. They would sit around quoting poetry to each other and sharing their love for the classics. Did you find any unexpected qualities in Wayne's personality?
I don't think I ever quite came across that facet of his personality. I didn't ever work too closely with him. On Hatari! they went to Africa for a number of months and came back with magnificent animal footage, but there was no people story. Of course, I had written five scripts, but none of them was the script, as it were. That was the year that Howard was not buying any story. He didn't want plot; he just wanted scenes. So I wrote ahead of the camera.
Normally, once a picture starts shooting, a writer's job is finished. He doesn't have anything to do with the people. But I was on the set with Duke, and to a certain extent, for a short while, on El Dorado as well. He is a highly professional actor. He is quite without [an arrogant] side. He's been the number one box office star for God knows how many years, but he doesn't come on that way. He's just there to do his job and do it as best he can.
I remember him working with the baby elephant in the scene at the end of Hatari!, where the critter gets on the bed and it crashes down. They tried about eighteen takes, and he said: "He's doing it right, I'm not." The elephant had his cues down perfectly, but it was Duke who was blowing it. He's a much more complex person than people give him credit for being.
What do you think of the Westerns that have been made in recent years, coming after the classic work of Ford and Hawks?
Every once in a while I go back and read a little Western history, which is a marvelous corrective. Hollywood has created a totally mythic West, which never existed on land or sea. The whole concept of the hero, I think, began with Owen Wister's The Virginian, more or less. Ever since, there's been a too great feeding on oneself. When you utilize the same elements over and over, you finally begin to turn out excrement. The trouble is we've gotten away from what actually happened in the West. I wish that somebody would
just read a little history. The pioneers were hardworking people who worked like mad to scratch to stay in one place. It was a hard, cruel country out there. These were heroes in a different sense, because they fought however they could to hold onto what they had. They didn't worry about who drew first. They just went up from behind with a shotgun. The idea was: "Don't get killed yourself—kill him."
Of course, I like the Hollywood Western because it's fun, but I think that some people are taking it far too seriously, because they're not dissecting anything real to begin with.
From what you've said, it sounds as though it was a very lively atmosphere around the sets of the Hawks films, with his spontaneously creative working habits. It must have prepared you, then, for Robert Altman, who I understand also likes not to inform the cast as to what they'll be shooting the next day. In fact, many times he doesn't bother to worry about it himself. How were you brought into the project of writing the screenplay for The Long Goodbye?
Elliott Kastner, who was the executive producer, used to be my agent at MCA a long time ago and we're good friends. He remembered The Big Sleep and he wanted me to work on The Long Goodbye . He set the deal with United Artists, and they had a commitment for a film with Elliott Gould, so either you take Elliott Gould or you don't make the film. Elliott Gould was not exactly my idea of Philip Marlowe, but anyway there we were. Also, as far as the story was concerned, time had gone by—it was twenty-odd years since the novel was written, and the private eye had become a cliché. It had become funny. You had to watch out what you were doing. If you had Humphrey Bogart at the same age that he was when he did The Big Sleep, he wouldn't do it the same way. Also, we were faced with a technical problem of this enormous book, which was the longest one Chandler ever wrote. It's tremendously involuted and convoluted. If you did it the way he wrote it, you would have a five-hour film.
I worked with another director who was on it before, Brian G. Hutton. He had a brilliant idea which just didn't work, and we wrote ourselves into a blind alley on that. It was a technical problem of plotting—the heavy had planned this whole thing from the start. So what you had was a prearranged thing where everybody sort of got up out of several boxes and did and said exactly what they had to do and say in order to get you where you had to be. It was very contrived and didn't work. Brian had to leave because he had another commitment, so when Altman came onto it I went over to London for a week. He was cutting Images [1972], which was a magnificent film—beautiful, powerful. We conferred about ten o'clock in the morning and yakked all day, and I went back to the hotel and typed all the notes and went back the next day. In a week we had it all worked out. He was a joy to work with. He had a very keen story mind.
Mark Rydell played the character Marty Augustine in The Long Goodbye.
He is an old friend of Altman's, so I imagine they were able to work together more easily. Rydell claimed that he knew intuitively what Altman' s conception of the movie was, which many critics, as well as many members of the audience, missed—the satirization of the genre of the private-eye film, by placing the conventions of the forties in direct conflict with the realities of the seventies. Were you aware of Altman' s intentions during your story conferences?
Actually, I was more aware of the construction of the thing, which is more my department. What he does with it after he gets the script is something else again. I don't think I was quite as aware of the satire as I became later.
Jay Cocks of Time magazine accused Altman of mocking "an achievement to which at his best he could only aspire," because he tried to demythologize Philip Marlowe. I imagine a lot of critics who are in their forties and fifties now grew up with the myth of Bogart as Marlowe, and hated to see the end of the film in which Marlowe murders Terry Lennox with no remorse. In fact, after he commits the murder, he dances down the road whistling "Hooray for Hollywood!" You are responsible, to some degree, for helping to create and propagate that original myth with The Big Sleep. Then you turned around and helped to sabotage it in The Long Goodbye. Do you consider that a betrayal of your earlier values?
No. Actually the ending, where Marlowe commits the murder, was in the script before Altman came onto it. The ending of the book was totally inconclusive. You had built up a villain. You feel that Marlowe has been wounded in his most sensitive heart, as it were—he's trusted this man as his friend; the friend has betrayed him. What do you do? We said let's just face up to it. He kills him.
In the time that we made The Big Sleep you couldn't do that because of censorship, had you wanted to do it. We stuck very closely to Chandler's own estimate of Marlowe as a loser, so we made him a real loser—he loses everything. Here is the totally honest man in a dishonest world, and it suddenly rears up and kicks him in the face, and he says: "The hell with you." Bang! I don't know whether we were right to do it, but I don't regret having done it. It felt right at the time. This was the way it turned out.
What do you think of the conceptions and characterizations of Marlowe as portrayed in the other film versions of Chandler's novels?
I thought Murder My Sweet [1944] was a beautiful film. The others all had points of excellence and also points where they didn't quite come across. The experimental business of "I am a camera" in Lady in the Lake [1946] didn't work too well.
It has been said that Philip Marlowe was sort of the son of Sam Spade. As Chandler said: "Down these mean streets must go a man who is not himself mean." In other words, here is the knight in shining armor with a shabby trench coat and snap-brim felt hat. I think he is a universal folk hero who does not change down through the ages except in the detail of his accoutre-
"A real loser": Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) with Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden, at
left), Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt), and Dr. Verringer (Henry Gibson) in the 1973
version of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye . Leigh Brackett updated the
quintessential 1940s private-eye novel for director Robert Altman's film.
ments. He's not carrying a sword but a .32 automatic. The essential is that here is a man who is pure in heart, who is decent and honorable and cannot be bought—he is incorruptible. I think the concept was damn good, a very moral concept.
What did you think of Gould's performance, miscast as he was?
I thought he did a beautiful job. However, the thing about Elliott is that he isn't tough. His face is gentle, his eyes are kind, and he doesn't have that touch of cruelty that you associate with these characters.
With all of the disappointments that you've suffered—having your scripts revised without your approval to produce inferior versions of previous pictures—will you continue to write screenplays? Is there anything on the horizon that we can look forward to?
There's nothing definite at the moment. I have an original Western screenplay out and around, and I'm hopeful. It's a comedy. There are a number of things on the fire with television. As you know, the whole picture has changed out there very greatly in recent years. You grab what you can get. I wrote a script for "The Rockford Files" that was telecast last season.
But I greatly enjoy the work. It's a challenge. It's more technical than creative. What you have to be is a very good journeyman plumber and put the parts together. And then, if you can still inject a little bit of something worthwhile, you've done as much as can be expected.
Richard Brooks: The Professional
Interview by Pat McGilligan
He [Richard Brooks] was a strong, tough, agile man of about forty-two years who looked and dressed like a bum most of the time because he hated the codes of the front-office contingent. But were those flashes of street survival instinct that dominated his personality in unexpected moments the real Richard Brooks, or were they a meticulously nurtured camouflage that a forceful personality had chosen in order to ward off, and forever frustrate, simple definitions of itself? Puzzlement. Yet could he not be both?
Sidney Poitier, writing in This Life about meeting Richard Brooks before the filming of The Blackboard Jungle
Sunset Boulevard. Driving west. Pass the Beverly Hills Hotel. Turn right on Benedict Canyon. Big houses for big movie stars. Another mile. Up there to the left, where Manson's gang committed bloody murder one night—beautiful Sharon Tate.
A traffic light. Turn off Benedict Canyon. Finally, a stone wall. Behind it a two-story stone house. Ring the doorbell.
Richard Brooks opens the door. Old sweat pants, faded, wrinkled old T-shirt with the MGM lion.
Quiet. First thing you notice: the quiet. No TV, no voices, no sounds.
Then the books. Every wall: books. Thousands of them. Room after room. Dictionaries: Italian, German, French, Swahili. Books on or about religion, science, crime, theater, movies, dance, fables, fiction.
"Big house."
He doesn't answer.
"Who else lives here?"
"Nobody."
"No woman, children, not even a dog? You look like a man, who—"
"Yeah. I love dogs. But who'd take care of a dog when I'm working? On location? You think I'd condemn my dog to a kennel?"
We settle in the kitchen. I plug in my tape recorder. Brooks gets a bottle of Akvavit from the freezer.
We talk and drink.
Born in the slums of South Philadelphia. Immigrant parents. Both worked in a factory. Learned to read and write from newspapers. The Bulletin and the Inquirer . The family moved to West Philly.
He was an "only" child. He went to grade school. They worked six days a week. He didn't see his parents except maybe half an hour at night. And Sunday. He was a street kid. A loner then. A loner now.
Finally started high school. Parents moved. Went to trade school. Learned carpentry. Parents moved. Went to a different high school. Graduated: 15 years old. Worked that summer in a gasoline station. On Saturday another job. Usher in the Earle Movie Theatre on Market Street.
Then, the big time—Temple University. School of Journalism.
Then—disaster. Stock market crash. The big Depression. One parent fired. Family struggling. No money for college. Two semesters a year, about $250 for each semester. Big money. Too much for this family. He left Temple at the start of his senior year. He tried to get a job on the Bulletin . They were firing, not hiring. Same story at all the papers.
One morning he left a note for his parents, hopped a freight train, and left town, heading west to find a job. About two years on the road. Hard times. Hundreds of people for every job.
Drove a truck in Missouri. Washed dishes. Restaurant in Arkansas. Dug irrigation trenches in Oklahoma. Picked cotton in Texas. Fixed flats. Gas station in Nebraska. Two hard years. Living day to day. Rescued from a hundred freezing nights by the Salvation Army. Hot soup. A cot and a blanket. And they deloused your clothes.
Sold a few stories to newspapers. Learned about survival. Learned, too, about farmers and workers and housewives who refused to quit in the face of a killer Depression, with absolute faith in themselves and in America.
Another winter coming. Grabbed a fast freight. Unloaded in York, Pa. Hitchhiked into Philly. Within a week landed a job with the Philadelphia Record . Sports department. Eight dollars a week, covering high school sports. Hired on for one year. Heard about a job in Atlantic City. Hit the road. Landed a job on the Press Union . Sports. Ten dollars a week. Occasional features brought an extra couple of bucks. One year. Clean room with a toilet down the hallway.
Finally: New York. Every writer's dream. The New York World-Telegram . Crime news. Special assignments. Within a year: Radio. WNEW. On the air 24 hours a day. Played records 23 of those hours. The "Make-Believe Ball-
room" and "The Milkman's Matinee." WNEW needed a newsman. He was it. Then NBC. Blue Network. News.
1939. World War II. Europe, Africa, Asia were in it. We'd be in it soon.
1940. He wanted to see California before the war got him. Drove west in a secondhand old ratty car. Same route he had taken by freight car once.
Los Angeles. Lotusland. Sunshine. Grapes, oranges. Hollywood Boulevard. Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Magic of the movies.
Corner of Sunset and Vine—NBC. Didn't need another newsman. Had a spot open on their Blue Network. Fifteen-minute shot, five times a week. They wanted an original story complete, not a serial, written and read by the same person. Twenty-five dollars a day. Two hundred and eighty stories and a year later, ready for a change.
Universal Studios needed a rewrite on White Savage (1943) starring Maria Montez, Jon Hall, and Sabu. Six days' work. One hundred dollars and a shared screen credit: Additional dialogue by. Rewrite on Cobra Woman (1944) starring Montez, Hall, and Sabu. A few chapters of a serial: Don Winslow of the Coast Guard (1943).
Orson Welles' "Mercury Theatre on the Air." Not more money but a helluva lot more respect.
A couple more scripts at Universal.
Joined the Frank Capra Motion Picture Unit as a civilian. Documentaries. The Why We Fight series created for the U.S. Army. Prelude to War, Battle of China, Battle for Britain, Battle of Russia, War Comes to America, etc.
Pearl Harbor attack.
1943. Joined the U.S. Marine Corps. Boot camp in San Diego. Then to Quantico, Va. Attached to 2nd Marines, Photographic Section. Learned to fight. Assembled combat film into documentaries. Marines in action: Battle of Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, The Marianas Islands, etc.
During the next two years, he also wrote a novel. Wrote it at night. Wrote it in the "head" with forty gleaming toilet bowls as witnesses.
Sinclair Lewis wrote: "The Brick Foxhole is a powerful, shocking tale about soldiers fighting the war from a stateside barracks. For them it became a war without meaning. Their driving force was hate. Hatred for Negros and Jews and Catholics and especially homosexuals. Hatred, finally, for each other and themselves. It's a blistering novel you'll never forget."
The Brick Foxhole became Crossfire (1947). The antihomosexuality became anti-Semitism. Brooks returned to Hollywood with a job offer from Mark Hellinger, a former journalist with a reputation as the producer of hard-hitting films.
Worked in Hellinger's stable. (Later, after Hellinger's untimely death, he wrote a first-rate novel about someone similar to Hellinger, titled The Producer .) Successful collaboration (particularly with John Huston). A writer-
director contract at MGM. A decade of worthwhile projects that are distinguished by their literary roots, their social edge, their deeply felt emotionalism.
Then Brooks struck out on his own, producing as well as directing, and turning to such vaunted and disparate literary properties as Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry (1960), Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1965), and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1967).
In time came The Professionals (1966), a thoroughly satisfying Western that is a metaphor for his own professional code; and the offbeat genre variations $/Dollars (1971) and Bite the Bullet (1975), which, though somewhat less successful, had humor, style, and—something to be expected in any Brooks film—bite.
In general, a remarkable oeuvre, combining the finest entertainment values with personal high principle. Hallmarks as a writer: ringing dialogue, provocative characterizations, challenging material, and superior script orchestration. As a director: high visual standards and a consistently engaging, expressive camera style.
Many of the Brooks films were considered impossible, unfilmable, in their day. A novel by Dostoevski (The Brothers Karamazov) was not only formidable in length and content, it was unavoidably "Russian" at the height of the Cold War. Something of Value (1957) dared to confront colonialism in an era that still embraced colonialism. Elmer Gantry outraged religious groups and, in an era that has seen the undoing of some scurrilous television evangelists, is still exceedingly apt.
He has demonstrated a passion for exploring themes of guilt, responsibility, and justice, the relationship between upbringing and antisocial behavior. The Blackboard Jungle, in 1955, with its gritty verisimilitude and social pleading, was only the first of Brooks' trilogy of adaptations of bestsellers about the roots of violent crime. In Cold Blood and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) were to follow, over the next two decades, each film in the triology becoming more difficult and controversial.
Like other screenwriters who came to the fore in the 1940s, Brooks did not write about himself or his life overtly—the ego was always submerged. Yet obliquely (as in The Catered Affair, in 1956, which Brooks directed only and whose script is by Gore Vidal from a television play by Paddy Chayefsky) or more expressly (as in The Happy Ending, in 1969, which was Brooks' conception from start to finish—a somber prefeminist fable about love, marriage, and alcoholism, starring his then wife, actress Jean Simmons), the thread of autobiography is there. If there is a recurrent motif in his films, it is one that is organic with his life story—that of the self-made man who, caught up in some crisis, must answer to himself.
In recent years, with Hollywood in flux and in the grip of ever-changing executive hierarchies, Brooks has worked less often and less momentously,
Richard Brooks in Los Angeles, 1988. (Photo: Alison Morley)
which has hurt his standing with the contemporary critics. (One film, Fever Pitch, in 1985, was taken away by the producers and recut, the worst insult.) Once the ultimate studio man, he has become ferociously independent; the secrecy of his scripts is zealously guarded; and (more so than while at MGM) he takes on obsessive hand in the postproduction.
Not in the least casual about this interview, Brooks labored over the tran-
script as if it were footage of a Brooks film to be edited. All to the good—it must be said that this ex-newspaper reported, now in his mid-seventies, took me to school with his editing, changes, and criticisms.
Richard Brooks (1912–1992)
1942
Men of Texas (Ray Enright). Additional dialogue.
Sin Town (Ray Enright). Additional dialogue.
1943
White Savage (Arthur Lubin). Script.
Don Winslow of the Coast Guard (Ray Taylor, Lewis D. Collins).
Serial, additional dialogue.
1944
My Best Gal (Anthony Mann). Story.
Cobra Woman (Robert Siodmak). Co-script.
1946
Swell Guy (Frank Tuttle). Script.
The Killers (Robert Siodmak). Uncredited contribution.
1947
Brute Force (Jules Dassin). Script.
Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk). Adapted from his novel The Brick Foxhole .
1948
To the Victor (Delmer Daves). Story, script.
Key Largo (John Huston). Co-script.
1949
Any Number Can Play (Mervyn LeRoy). Script.
1950
Crisis (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
Mystery Street (John Sturges). Co-script.
Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler). Co-story, co-script.
1951
The Light Touch (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
1952
Deadline U.S.A. (Richard Brooks). Story, script, director.
1953
Battle Circus (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
Take the High Ground (Richard Brooks). Director only.
1954
The Last Time I Saw Paris (Richard Brooks). Co-script, director.
The Flame and the Flesh (Richard Brooks). Director only.
1955
The Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
1956
The Last Hunt (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
The Catered Affair (Richard Brooks). Director only.
1957
Something of Value (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
1958
The Brothers Karamazov (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks). Co-script, director.
1960
Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
1962
Sweet Bird of Youth (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
1965
Lord Jim (Richard Brooks). Script, director, producer.
1966
The Professionals (Richard Brooks). Script, director, producer.
1967
In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks). Script, director, producer.
1969
The Happy Ending (Richard Brooks). Story, script, director, producer.
1971
$/Dollars (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
1975
Bite the Bullet (Richard Brooks). Script, director, producer.
1977
Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks). Script, director.
1982
Wrong Is Right (Richard Brooks). Script, director, producer.
1985
Fever Pitch (Richard Brooks). Script, director, producer.
Novels include The Brick Foxhole, The Boiling Point, and The Producer .
Academy Awards include script nominations for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Professionals, and In Cold Blood; and Best Screenplay (Based on Material from Another Medium) for Elmer Gantry in 1960.
Writers Guild awards include nominations for Key Largo, The Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Professionals, and In Cold Blood . Brooks' adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry won Best-Written American Drama in 1960. Brooks was named the winner of the Laurel Award for Achievement in 1967.
You were many things in life before you became a screenwriter. At what point did you say to yourself, "I am a writer"?
Well, I am not sure about that. I couldn't get a job when I got out of Temple University and the School of Journalism. This was in Philadelphia during the Depression and [at the time] they were firing newspapermen from the Bulletin, the Inquirer, the Ledger . They were firing guys who had worked there for thirty years! When I went to job interviews, they asked, "What makes you think you're a newspaper man . . .?" and I answered, "I went to a School of Journalism . . ." so they threw me out! That was the worst thing I could have said.
I got on a freight train and left town. Went as far as Pittsburgh the first time. Sold a story in Pittsburgh for a dollar and a half or two dollars. A
newspaper story. There was interest in what was happening on the road and that is what I wrote about.[*]
The next stop was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I think. I got four dollars for that piece. They wanted to know who was traveling on the road, what were the conditions under which people were traveling, etc. And they were right to ask those questions, because at the time whole families were traveling by freight train, carrying a birdcage, a blanket, and a mattress.
I was asked to embellish by writing a few more paragraphs on the problem of getting off the trains. There were problems because as soon as you got off, you had to have a place to eat and sleep. Every town, every city, wanted you out . They had thought it was the other way around, that the problem was getting on the trains. They had heard stories about fellas with axe handles coming around and beating people if they found them on trains. But really, they just didn't want you to get off the train!
I arrived the second winter at a big railroad yard in Wheeling, West Virginia. I was hanging around there with some guys who had got off a coal car. I was talking to a fella who looked like an old man to me—he was probably thirty—who had a railroad watch in the watch pocket of his trousers. Every time a train would go by, he'd look at his watch. He seemed to know about trains. I was interested in finding out which ones were going south, because the weather was turning cold. The ones that started south weren't necessarily going south, as they might just be leaving the yard. But he knew which ones were going south and which ones were really just heading out of the yard to pick up a load somewhere.
Finally he said, "What do you do?" Meaning, what do you do when you could be hired to do it? I said, "I'm a writer." He said, "What do you write?" I told him I worked at some newspapers, lying a little bit about the extent to which I had worked on them. I also told him I was writing short stories. He said, "Ever get any published?" I said, "Not yet." In those days you could get twenty-five dollars if you wrote a short story for Liberty magazine, but it was not so easy to get published. He said, "What kind of reading do you do?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, have you ever read Dostoevski?" I said, "I think I read part of one of his novels, yeah." He said, "Ever read Tolstoy? Whitman?," He rattled off a string of other names. "Well, kind of," I said.
Knowing that I hadn't read most of what he was talking about, he said, "As a matter of fact, you haven't read much of anything, have you?" I said, "I've read a lot of short stories, some novels, I've read some Upton Sinclair,
* Brooks' experience is quite similar to George Orwell's as Orwell described it in his Down and Out in London and Paris (1933). And, later on, Orwell's deadline radio writing for the BBC interestingly paralleled Brooks' own with NBC's Blue Network (see pp. 36–38). Both Brooks and Orwell liked to draw on fables and both had their writing affected by the pressures of radio drama: it forced them to a quicker pace and perhaps mandated a brisker style.
Willa Cather. . . ." He said, "Well, you ain't a writer yet. You gotta read 10,000 words for every one you write. Maybe then you'll become a writer."
I realized that my education was not over. It was just beginning. (Laughs .)
So when you say, When did I realize I was a writer . . . ? No matter how many newspapers I worked on, I guess it wasn't until I wrote my first novel and Edward Aswell at Harper told me he thought I ought to have another chapter written at the end of my book [The Brick Foxhole ]. I said, "Yeah, well, Mr. Aswell, are you gonna publish the book? Because every publisher has already turned it down . . ." None of the major publishers wanted to touch it. My agent had not sent it to Harper [initially] because it was too high-class a house.
I had gone to Chappaqua, New York, to see Mr. Aswell on a forty-eight-hour pass from Quantico [the Marine Corps center in Virginia]. "Fine, I'll write as many new chapters as you want," I told him, "but are you going to publish it?" He said, "Didn't they tell you? It's on our spring list." I don't remember what he said as he drove me to the railroad station, or the ride from Chappaqua to New York City, then overnight in the station in New York, then getting on another train in New York to take me down through Washington, D.C., and then south down to Quantico. I don't remember anything that happened except I arrived in Quantico and all I could think of was "They're going to publish the book!" When it came out, Mr. Lewis—this was Sinclair Lewis—wrote a complimentary review in Esquire magazine. Then I thought that maybe I had become a writer.
Your father was a factory worker?
My mother, too. They both worked in a factory.
But you had nurtured dreams, from an early age, of becoming a writer?
My father was a literate man in his native language. When he came to this country, he learned to read and write [English] from reading the newspapers. I rarely saw my parents because they worked 12–15 hours a day—they even worked half a day on Saturdays—but on Sundays he'd play Caruso records on the phonograph, and he would be reading all the time, trying to learn English. If it wasn't for my mother, I might not have gone to school every day. She wanted to make sure I was going to class—a very embarrassing situation for me. She'd show up in class to see if I was there!
I never thought I was going to become a writer, so to speak, but I thought if I could just work for a newspaper, that would be terrific. I did, as a matter of fact, work for a number of newspapers. But the extent of writing was a kind of dream. It was not something realistic in my mind.
You had more newspapers than books around the house .
Some books, mostly newspapers.
Where were your parents from?
The Crimea. When they came to this country—I was born about four or five years after they came here—they realized that without education every
lower-class person was doomed. They knew that money was power. They felt that [strongly]. So they hounded me all the time [about learning to read and write]. The first time I had a steady job on a paper, they thought I was set for life. They felt they didn't have to worry about me any more. They were both still alive when my first book was published. Greatest day in their lives, they said. They used to carry it with them when they went to work. They had read it nine times already, but they carried it under their arms as proof of something.
That's really lovely. Now, you say that you thought of yourself as a writer, finally, when your novel was published. But hadn't you already been in Hollywood for a couple of years and written several screenplays?
The stuff I wrote before the war, in the main, was pretty much junk. See, when I came out here to California, I knew there was going to be a war, and that we were going to be in it. I just wanted to see California. In all the time I'd been bumming around the country I'd never gotten to California. I had gone to wherever there was a job.
Why did you want to see California?
I don't know. It just seemed to me that it was the land of cowboys, movies, sunshine, exciting people. I began going to movies when I was six years old, when it cost six cents to go to a movie house on a Saturday afternoon—the movie and a short subject or a newsreel, and maybe another short subject—all for six cents! Some people I knew from New York were in Los Angeles on a radio station doing the news and they kept saying, "You have got to come out to L.A. Look me up!" I got out to California just about the time of the World Series [of 1940]. I stayed in a hotel across the street from the [Grauman's] Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. I made calls [to all the people I knew], but nobody ever called me back!
Were they screenwriters, these people?
No! They were actors. I had not met any screenwriters. Screenwriters didn't come to New York; or if they were that good, I didn't get to meet them. But I had worked for NBC in New York. One day I was driving down the street toward NBC in Hollywood, which used to be on the corner of Sunset and Vine. Waiting there for the light to change, I heard a voice yell out, "Hey, Brooks!" There was a guy standing on the pavement who used to be with an advertising agency by the name of Lennen and Mitchell. I even remember his name: Mann Holliner.
I pulled over. He said, "What are you doing here?" "Going home to New York any day now." He said, "Don't you like it here?" I said, "Yeah, terrific, but I don't know anybody well enough to get a job here." He said, "You worked for NBC in New York—they're all the same ship!" I said, "Well, do you know anybody here?" He said, "Sure."
They had two networks at that time: the Blue and the Red. We went in
together to see the news department. We talked to a man who said, "We've got more newsmen here than we know what the hell to do with. . . . Why don't you go see the creative-something department?" So we went up there and the editor said to me, "You think you can Write a short story a day?" I said, "Every day?" He said, "Every day." I said, "Why?" He said, "Well, we got a spot on the Blue Network, fifteen minutes, 4:15 in the afternoon here, 7:15 in New York. Short story every day." I said, "You mean an original short story?" He said, "It'll have to be original—or as close to it as you can get!" I said, "What will I do with the short story after I write it?" He said, "Then you'll read it. That's what you'll do. . . ." I said, "You won't even give me an announcer to read it?" He said, "We can't afford an announcer." I said, "What'll you pay?" He said, "Twenty-five dollars a day. That'll be $125 a week, five-day week." I said, "Short story every day . . . ? Well, I could try it for a while." So every day I wrote a short story.[*]
Was this your first foray into fiction?
I'd written some short stories before, but none was published. Anyway, every day, another short story. Everything became grist for a short story. It began to drive me crazy . . . a different plotline every day. My ambition: write one story a week instead of a different story every day. In about eleven months I wrote over 250 stories. I even devised a system whereby on Fridays I wouldn't have to write a short story. I called that day "Heels of History." I would take a fable and convert it. As a matter of fact, I used one afterwards in [a scene in] The Blackboard Jungle .
"Jack and the Beanstalk," for example. Jack: Now there's a hero for you. His father is bedridden, unable to work. No food in the house. Jack's mother is desperate. She decides to sacrifice their only cow to stave off starvation. She tells Jack to take the cow to market and sell it. With the money, she will be able to feed Jack's stricken father and perhaps buy medicine to alleviate his pain. Here's the "right stuff" all right. The stuff of which heroes are made.
On the way to market, Jack meets a con man. Jack trades the cow for a couple of magic beans. So our hero has already disobeyed and cheated his mother. He has also forsaken his father. His mother throws the beans out of the window. At once, the magic goes to work. Out of the beans a mighty beanstalk grows, taller, higher, finally into the clouds. Jack climbs the beanstalk. [From the giant and his wife who live at the top] he steals the goose that lays the golden eggs, and steals the harp that plays music by itself, so he's a thief also. When he climbs down the beanstalk, the giant chases after him—why? Because the giant is a bad guy? No, he's the victim of a thief! Why is he bad? Because he's taller than other people? He's a giant! As the
* Arthur Laurents (see interview) was another Hollywood writer who cut his teeth, professionally, on radio programs, a well-paid and respectable occupation in a relatively new medium in the 1930s and even the 1940s.
giant chases down the beanstalk after Jack, Jack chops down the beanstalk and commits murder! And Jack is supposed to be the good guy!
"The Heels of History." One day a week. When I had trouble writing a story, all I had to do was convert one of these fables.
Finally, I read somewhere that if you wrote a movie, you would be paid $1,000 a week. I set up a meeting with a producer at Universal, whose name was George Waggner with two g's. He said to me, "Yeah, yeah, as a matter of fact we need somebody right now to do a rewrite on a script. How are you at dialogue?" I said, "Great!" He said, "Well, all right. . . ." I said, "What'll you pay?" He said, "What are you asking?" I said, "$1,000 a week." He said, "I'll call you back." A week went by, he didn't call. So I called him. He said, "Are you crazy! I'm the producer of the goddam movie and I get $200 a week! What do you mean $1,000 a week?!" I said, "What will you pay?" He said, "$100 a week." I said, "I'll take it!"
That was my first job. The picture was a rewrite of White Savage, with Maria Montez, Jon Hall, and Sabu. I worked about eight days and the job was over! I got paid $100 plus a day or two prorated, and they put my name on [the screen] as "additional dialogue." I didn't quit the job at NBC because I didn't know how long this was going to last. A few months went by, and I got another job on a movie, Men of Texas [1942]. Then I worked on a serial, Don Winslow of the Coast Guard . They wouldn't even let me sit at the writers' table, because anybody who worked on serials wasn't a writer to begin with. (Laughs .) Anyhow, this went on for almost a year.
During which time I also worked for Orson Welles on his Mercury Theatre, the radio series. Welles was something!
Did you actually write with him in a room, collaborating on scripts?
No, no, no. He was acting at the time I was working for him. Most of the time he was doing a movie! He had an office at Fox and was acting in Jane Eyre [1944].
What is it that you learned from him?
With Welles, everything began with the writing. And he was very good at it. He was a terrific guy. After I had done a few days' work, we'd go over the scenes. He had such a remarkable memory that if we'd get into a dispute about the way the story should or should not go, he'd say, "Well, let's see now in Lear . . . ," and then he would review the whole second act of King Lear, doing all the parts! Or he could quote from the New or Old Testament, by the yard. His wealth of information and background about story lines was inexhaustible. He was inventive. Fearless.
Most of the scripts I was working on in Hollywood at that time were somebody else's first or second or third draft. My name was on scripts with other writers, but I never met them or worked with them. With Welles, he began really with original work, so it was not a matter of doing somebody else's
story. And if you did do somebody else's story, it was a fine piece of work to begin with.
Were you working with a pool of other writers, with Howard Koch, for example?
Never saw any another writer. When I was with Welles, there was nobody else around. The only guy that came around once in a while was a man by the name of Mr. Solomon, who never paid me. (Laughs .) He always owed me money! It wasn't that he was trying to do me out of it, it was just that Orson had spent it all!
How did your screenwriting career progress, meanwhile?
It came to an end very shortly. I was called over to Universal one day. By then I had already worked on another screenplay of somebody else's called Cobra Woman, with Maria Montez, Jon Hall, and Sabu—and now they wanted an original for the same three people. The producer said to me, "This time the story has got to be about a desert, so name me a desert." I said, "What do you mean, name me a desert? What's the story?" He said, "I don't know the story yet. It's going to take place in the desert. We can't use the American desert because that's cowboys and Indians. Same good guys, same bad guys. So, name me a [new] desert." I said, "How about the African desert?" He said, "That's already been done a hundred times. The British do all that crap." I said, "How about the Australian desert?" He said, "Big desert?" I said, "Big as the United States." He said, "Really? Who are the bad guys?" I said, "Hey, I don't even know the story!" He said, "Well then, the natives, who are they?" I said, "The original natives are people they call bushwhackers and they're black." He said, "Black! I don't want to get into that whole black thing." I said, "Chinese desert?" He said, "No, they just did that in The Good Earth [1937]." I said, "Indian?" He said, "British. All those helmets and all that crap. They got a license on it." I said, "Turkish desert!" He said, "They got a desert there?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Look it up, write me a story about it."
So I got out some National Geographics and looked up Turkey in the period right after the First World War when the country was going through an interesting transformation. The women were beginning to put aside some of the veils, they were learning how to read and write, and this story was going to be about a girl played by Maria Montez who sat on the corner [of the marketplace] and wrote letters for people who didn't know how to write. I sent the story in, about twenty-one pages—not the screenplay, just the story. The producer calls me up and says to come over. He said, "You let me down, boy. Where are the Riffs [the Berbers]?" I said, "The what?" He said, "The Riffs!" I said, "There are no Riffs in Turkey. That's in North Africa." He said, "Well, shit."
He had seen movies with Riffs [and that's what he wanted]. Now he said,
"All right, so do the story in North Africa." Again I get out the National Geographics . I found a very interesting story. The story itself wasn't in the National Geographic, but there was an incident [described that] I thought could be turned into a movie. To prove there was a shorter route from India to London than around the Cape of Good Hope, the British and the French had devised a race. Two packet boats left from India, one going around the cape, and the other going to the port of Suez, from where the packet was taken across desert land to Alexandria, where it was put on another packet boat. And this boat beat the first packet boat to London by almost two weeks. My story was going to take place between Suez and Alexandria. Maria Montez, Jon Hall, and Sabu were carrying the mail to Alexandria. In that sense, it was like the Pony Express, delivering the mail, cowboys racing across the desert.
The producer said, "Damn! That sounds pretty good! And that's why they built the canal?" I wrote the story, about twenty-five to thirty pages, and sent it over to him. He called me up and said, "You let me down, boy. Where are the fucking Riffs?" I said, "What've the Riffs got to do with this? There are plenty of bad guys trying to stop them. . . ." He said, "You come with me. Forget the canal. I'm going to show you some Riffs. . . ."
He took me to the projection room and he ran a movie. I think it was with Tyrone Power and Annabella, called Suez [1938]. Sure enough, in the first reel six guys in white sheets ride in and blow up the canal. I waited, however, to see the other five reels to find out if they were Riffs, whatever they were. It turns out that they were not Riffs. They were the British trying to stop the French from building the canal!
The producer said, "Well, okay, I'll call the boss." He had some kind of executive producer whom he called on the phone. The other guy had such a loud voice, he didn't need a phone. The producer said, "We got a story here. . . ." The voice said, "Sounds terrific, Jack!" The producer said, "It's the Pony Express in Egypt!" The voice said, "Yeah, sure she can wear a veil. . . ." The producer said, ". . . And they'll ride like hell . . . blowing up things. . . . Yeah, the boy dies a heroic death." There is a pause. And the producer turns to me, "When does this story take place? He wants to know when this story takes place." I said, "I heard him. Well, it's about 1830–1832, somewhere in there." The voice yells back, "1830! When the fuck was that?"
So I got up, left the office, took a trolley downtown on Hollywood Boulevard, and joined the Marine Corps.
Was there an upside to this early period of screenwriting?
Yeah. I could pay my rent. Met a few people. . . . I never thought it was wasted effort. Anything that you work so damned hard on, it's not wasted, but I just felt that the movies were not the kind of movies I wanted to do.
How much did you work on Crossfire as a film?
Only verbally. [Screenwriter] John Paxton came around with [producer] Adrian Scott to talk about the story, because they were a little afraid of changing the book [The Brick Foxhole ] that drastically. Paxton couldn't do the story about a homosexual—because of the rules at that time. Scott asked me would I mind if they changed the character to a Jew. I said, "No. They got the same problems. Everybody does."[*]
There is anti-Semitism in the book .
Yes, but the major character who is killed is homosexual. Servicemen used to pick up homosexuals and take their money from them and beat the shit out of them on their way into Washington. Clifford Odets was going to do a play based on the book. And [Elia] Kazan was going to direct it. That's how I met Kazan. But Kazan got into some money problems, and he had no time to wait for a play to be written; and Clifford was having divorce problems or something. So they abandoned the idea. But it was at Odets' house that I met Adrian Scott, who wanted to do the book [as a film].
They were generous enough to ask me about casting. Of course, I knew Robert Ryan from the Marine Corps; I had met him in a library in Quantico. He said, "Are you the guy wrote that book?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Well, I'm an actor." I said, "Good." He said, "One of these days they're gonna make that into a movie and I'm gonna play that character." I said, "Are you really?" He said, "Yeah. I know that son of a bitch. . . . No one knows him any better than I do." Three years later, coming out of the theater after the preview, there was Ryan and he said, "Well, what do you think?"
How did you get connected with Mark Hellinger after the war?
Bogie had read The Brick Foxhole, and Bogie was very friendly with Mark Hellinger. He gave Hellinger the book to read. Hellinger wasn't interested in making this kind of book into a movie. But he wrote me a letter, told me he liked the book, and told me if I ever got out alive, come out and see him, maybe we could work on a movie. I was determined to get out alive if I could. I did. I came to see him.
He gave me a play to read. A very good play, but I've forgotten what the name of it was [The Hero by Gilbert Emery]. He made it into a movie called Swell Guy [1946]. I wrote the screenplay for it. That's how I came back to work [in Hollywood].
The second or third night I was back, we went to a restaurant owned by Preston Sturges. The Players Club. A real expensive restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, right near the Chateau Marmont—and that's where I first met
* John Paxton, who adapted Crossfire, was an ex-journalist with a long, estimable Hollywood career, including script credits on Murder, My Sweet (1944), Cornered (1946), Rope of Sand (1949), 14 Hours (1952), The Wild One (1954), The Cobweb (1955), On the Beach (1959), and Kotch (1971).
Betty and Bogie. Bogie told me things were a little tough for him. He had worked for seven years for Warner Brothers, playing George Raft's brother-in-law, even after The Petrified Forest [1936], before he became a star. High Sierra [1941] and The Maltese Falcon [1941] didn't make him a star. Casablanca [1942] made him a star, after all those years. He was very funny [about it].
Anyway, that's where I first met Bogie and that's where I began with Mark. As a matter of fact, after Swell Guy I worked on another movie for Hellinger, called Brute Force [1947], a prison picture, and I had been working on that a month or two when he said, "Hold it. I was just up to meet Hemingway and I bought a short story from him. You ever read The Killers?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Good story?" I said, "Yeah, terrific." He said, "Well, it's five, seven pages long, something like that. Two guys come into a town, they go to a diner, they make some jokes, and then they go look for the Swede to kill him. So, what's the story?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "Well, write a story. If you'll write the story, John Huston, who is in the Aleutians just finishing up—he's gonna be discharged any day now—will write the screenplay."
So I stopped working on the prison picture to write a story. I went up to see Hemingway in Idaho just to find out if he knew something more about the story that was not in the story. I said, "Why do the two guys come in to kill the Swede?" "How the hell do I know?" he said. "That's all you got to say?" I said. "That's all I got to say," he said.
I went back to newspapers. I spent a week, I guess, looking up old newspapers and magazines until I came across a story about the holdup of an ice factory. A bunch of guys had robbed the joint of a payroll, and sped out of the factory in a car with the top down, heading the hell out of town, the police chasing them. The police caught the car with three, four guys in it, but there was no money. The guy who had the money was a former boxer who had run across the street and hid the money (in a suitcase) in a pushcart. That was the story in the paper.
Based on that, I wrote a story like in the old days at Universal, except that we invented a character who was an insurance inspector. The insurance company will have to pay back the money to the factory and they don't want to; what they want is to find whoever the hell did it! That was the Eddie O'Brien character.
When the killers do come to get the money, some of it is gone—because the Burt Lancaster character had become involved with a girl. That was [to be] Ava Gardner's first leading role. Up to that time she'd played a girl who sat around while the Marx Brothers made jokes! Or something like that.
I sent it off to Hellinger, he sent it off to John, and John wrote the screenplay. While we were shooting the movie, Mark said to me, "I'm not going to be able to put your name on the screen." I said, "Okay, that's all right."
He said, "I want you to know why. How's it gonna look, 'Story by Hemingway and Brooks'? Who the hell is Brooks? Nobody knows Brooks!" I said, "Hey, Mark, it's all right!"
He said, "Just so you don't feel too bad, I can't put John's name on it either." I said, "Why not?" He said, "Well, John's still under contract to Warner Brothers. You know how it is when you're under contract to a studio? You're on a seven-year contract, you go to war for three or four years, that don't count! You still owe them three years! So we can't put John's name on it."[*]
The screenplay [The Killers, 1946] was nominated as one of the best screenplays of the year, and the night of the awards we were sitting in Mark's house in his bar. I was sitting on the floor listening to the radio and drinking. Mark was pretty good with the bottle. I said to John, "Suppose the damned thing wins. Who picks up the award? . . . How is that gonna make you feel?" John thought about it for a moment or two and said, "Well, kid, let's pray it loses." (Laughs .) John was terrific. It lost. Saved us that embarrassment.
Do you feel you became a screenwriter under Hellinger?
Yeah. I think so. I was allowed to work on some pretty good material. And Hellinger worshipped writers. At that time, he himself was still writing, his column . . . a weekly page in the New York Mirror .
Was he a very creative producer, in terms of the writing, or more laissez-faire?
He was very creative. He couldn't write the way he wanted to write, but he loved writers and he loved storytelling and he loved movies.
At the end of the day, you'd gather in his office for a drink, sometimes separately, sometimes together. He liked nothing more than to sit with a writer and have a drink. Hellinger was a good man. Also devious. Somewhere in the bottom drawer of his desk, there was a phone that would ring—and that would be his girlfriend calling.
But no matter how much Mark loved writers, I never saw a movie made until I worked on Key Largo [1948] with John [Huston]. John told me, "They won't pay you, but stick around for rewrites; at least you'll see how a movie is made." That was the first movie I ever saw being made from a screenplay that I had worked on. All [of Hellinger's] writers were barred from the sets. They were a pain in the ass! They always asked why their work was being changed, so nobody wanted them around.[**]
* The screenplay for The Killers is jointly attributed to Huston and his frequent writing partner, Anthony Veiller.
** Hellinger was not alone in this. Arthur Laurents felt unwelcome when producer Ray Stark and director Sydney Pollack were filming his novel The Way We Were (see Laurents interview). Stewart Stern had a similar experience, despite his close relationship with Paul Newman (see Stern interview). Yet among the other screenwriters interviewed in this collection, Comden and Green, Garson Kanin, Dorothy Kingsley, and Walter Reisch, all worked closely with directors throughout their careers and were welcome on the set.
But Hellinger gave every writer of any value that worked with him a piece of the movie. So I had an interest in those movies, Brute Force, Swell Guy, and The Killers . Albert Maltz was, at the time when I was working for Hellinger, working on The Naked City [1948], and I got a piece of that picture and the other pictures that I didn't work on too, and Maltz and the other writers got a piece of the pictures I worked on.[*]
That's very rare .
Oh, at that time nobody gave a writer anything! There was no written contract with Mark; it was always a handshake. To this day, I still get an annual check for $52 for Brute Force . When he died, his widow [Gladys Glad] married some guy in Canada, but she still went through with the agreement. They were both honorable. Mark was only forty-four when he died. I thought he was an old man!
You said you learned a lot working with Huston. The first time you really collaborated with him was on Key Largo. Can you specify what it was that you learned from him?
Discipline. And that nothing was ever good enough. Nothing.
John [Huston] didn't like the story of Key Largo . He couldn't stand the free verse that [Maxwell] Anderson wrote in mostly.
He was intimidating. We used to shoot pool at his house, and every time I'd bring an idea over, John would say, "Let's shoot some pool." Finally, when I got together about forty or fifty pages, an outline of what the picture would be, he said, "Well, let's give it a try." We decided to go together to Key Largo, if there was such a place.
It was off-season, September or October. Some Irishman owned a hotel called the Largo Hotel. This guy said he would open the place, have somebody clean the rooms, and do some cooking.
Anyway, at the time John was involved with the Committee for the First Amendment.[**]
The anti-HUAC committee .
The committee to defend the idea of the First Amendment. That was a tough time. Very scary time. I was on the committee. John organized the committee. [David O.] Selznick was a member of the committee. But Selznick insisted that something be added to the charter [of the committee]. That
* Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten, wrote notable novels and short stories as well as films. Before he was blacklisted, Maltz scripted two Oscar-winning documentaries (the war propaganda film Moscow Strikes Back and the antiprejudice short subject The House I Live In ) as well as This Gun for Hire (1942), Destination Tokyo (1944), Pride of the Marines (1945), and The Naked City (1948). After the blacklist, he returned with a credit on the Clint Eastwood vehicle Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970).
** See Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund's The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980) for further background on the Committee for the First Amendment.
those who signed on as members of the Committee for the First Amendment were not members of the Communist Party.
John had organized a planeload of people to go to Washington. I was to meet him in Key West about four or five days later. He went to Washington with a planeload of people—Bogie and Betty and Danny Kaye and the Gershwins and so on. They were met on the tarmac in Washington by a newspaperwoman who wrote for the Hearst press. She challenged them on the tarmac, before they even got into the terminal.
So John came to Key West in a foul mood. He met me in the bar—the bar that Tennessee [Williams] used to hang out at. He was angry. He said, "You heard what happened? I guess you read about it." I said, "Heard about it on the radio, read about it, yeah." He said, "Goddam, they're tough, boy. Don't think the battle against this shit is going to be easy!" I said, "I never did."
Most days John would go fishing off the end of the pier, and I would stay in the hotel and write. It was 110 degrees. John wore a turtleneck sweater and never sweated. I wore shorts and sat inside, sweated, and wrote! First in longhand, then on the typewriter. He would come in at lunchtime and say, "Well, let's see what you got!" We'd go over it and he'd say, "Well, this works . . . this doesn't work . . ." and so on.
One time he came in and said, "What have you got?" I had written a scene where Eddie Robinson says to Bogie, "Well, we've lost our skipper. You know how to run this boat. You're taking us to Cuba. . . ." And Bogie agrees to pilot the boat to Cuba. On the boat a fight breaks out and Bogie overcomes the bad guys.
John said, "Well, why does he do it?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Why does Bogie do it? Throughout the movie, up to this point in the story, whatever Robinson wanted him to do, he did. Why does he resist them now?" I said, "I don't understand, John." John said, "Why does he say yes the whole picture and now he says no?! Why?" I said, "You mean why is he going to start a fight with these guys?" He said, "Yes, why? The danger is just as bad now. . . ." I said, "Well, John, it's coming to the end of the movie. . . . That's the way the movie's going to end." He said, "But that's no goddam reason!" I said, "You want motivation . . . ?" He said, "Yeah, that's right." I said, "The guy maybe has to fight for his life now, whereas he didn't before. . . ." He said, "That's not good enough."
Off he went fishing again. By that time the hotel owner had moved in a crap table and wheel, getting ready for their season. In the evening John would put on his jacket and we would gamble, just the two of us! The dealer went by the name of Ziggy, which we used in the movie. We gambled for three, four days, while I worked on the scene. I must have written five, six, seven different kinds of scenes.
One day he said to me, "Let's not talk about the story. Let's talk about us. You ever been in a condition like this? Suppose you were in a car with
Story conference: Lauren Bacall (back to camera), Brooks, director John
Huston, and Humphrey Bogart, talking about Key Largo .
(Courtesy of Richard Brooks)
your girlfriend and a guy stuck a gun in your nose and said, 'I'm gonna fuck your girl!' You knew if you fought him, you'd die. Would you fight him? He's got a gun and you haven't. Would you do it for money? Would you do it for religion? Would you do it for politics? What would you do it for? Where do you lay your life on the line? For what?"
I said, "What about you?" He said, "I don't know! I'm just thinking about it now. I'm not sure, but it ain't because it's the end of the movie coming up! I don't think you'd lay your life on the line for religion or politics or something else like that, and not for your girlfriend, and certainly not your wife, if you had one. Maybe if somebody tried to sodomize you, you might decide to fight, though I can't decide, but yeah, you might. Because you'd think it was so shameful you couldn't live with it. So think of something!"
I said, "Are you thinking too, John?" He said, "Yeah, I'm thinking all the time."
I must have written a lot of different sequences, things to do with decency and honor and how Bogart just couldn't stand any more of this dictatorial attitude, and none of it really was the truth. But early in the story I had set up a guy whose name was Toots, a young, good-looking gunman; a guy who went out and shot a couple of Indians on a porch. Boats made him sick. I
rewrote the ending a little bit so that the hurricane was just ending the night they had to leave. The waters would still be extremely turbulent. The waves would make rough sailing.
Now, Robinson and the other guys are down below when Toots is at the stern of the boat, really sick, barely able to hang on. Bogie at the helm realizes there is a chance. So he makes it even a little more difficult by hitting the waves head-on. The boat's even more violent. Finally, as the guy is leaning over the side trying to throw up, Bogie handles the wheel in such a way that Toots is over the side of the boat. Once he's gone, Bogie's got a gun. They don't know down below that their man is gone. Bogie lashes the wheel, gets up on top of the pilot house. Robinson comes up. Nobody is at the wheel . . . Toots is gone. Robinson realizes maybe Bogie's got the gun. That's when the final confrontation takes place.
John read that and he said, "Okay, that makes sense. At least he's got a technical reason for feeling that he can confront them. He's got more than something technical, he's got a gun. They've got to come out through that narrow passageway. So he's in command of the situation. All we have to do is make sure we establish early on that this guy hates boats because they make him seasick. . . ."
That's what I learned from John. That even though you may have all the best intellectual reasons, if it doesn't work from the point of view of the story, then it's not good enough. If you have to rewrite it, you rewrite it. If you have to rewrite it eight times, you rewrite it eight times! Until it's good enough. And maybe you'll find a way later on that's even better. You never stop rewriting.
You mentioned that you were a member of the Committee for the First Amendment. When did you yourself first hear of the investigation of Communists in the motion picture industry, and what was your attitude towards the blacklist?
The first I heard about that jazz was right after the war. One day I came into Hellinger's office to have a drink at the end of the day and there was a guy sitting there with a suit on. Mark said, "Meet Richard Hood. . . ."
The FBI section chief from Los Angeles .
That's right. How did you know that?
I'm interested in the history of the blacklist .
We shook hands. He said, "I'm with the FBI." I thought, "What's a guy from the FBI doing here? Am I gonna be investigated or something?"
Anyway, Mark said to me, "We've got a problem. When you wrote Brute Force, where'd you go [for your research]?" I said, "San Quentin. I stayed there for three weeks. Lived there for a couple of weeks so I could see what it was like living in a cell. And I think that whoever is going to direct the movie should visit a prison too, to see what it's really like."
Mark said, "Julie [Jules] Dassin is going to direct the movie, the first big movie he's done. Up to this time he's just done short subjects. But instead of going to San Quentin, he wants to spend a couple of hours every day at a federal holding prison outside of Los Angeles. But they won't let him in." I said, "Why?" He said, "That's what we're here to talk about. Tell him why, Mr. Hood." Mr. Hood said, "Because he can't get clearance. It's a federal prison and this guy is suspect." I said, "Suspect? Why suspect? What did he do? Who'd he kill?" Mr. Hood said, "He didn't kill anybody. We can't clear him because we've got information that he's probably connected with Communist organizations."[*]
I said, "Well, if that's the case, then we can't get him in any prison. . . ." Mr. Hood said, "That's right. You're going to have to build that prison right here on the lot." Most movie studios look like prisons anyway. High walls all around, all that jazz; all you have to do is build a guard tower and you'll have a prison. So we built the prison. That conversation occurred right in Mark's office.
A lot of the people associated with Crossfire were ultimately blacklisted. Was it difficult for someone like yourself, aware, and liberal, to be caught in the middle?
I was lucky. One night I was over at Ira Gershwin's house having some dinner and afterwards we were going to play penny poker. The doorbell rang and a man who worked in the house came and said somebody wanted to talk to me at the door. I go to the door and it was Adrian Scott's wife [the actress, Ann Shirley]. She was crying. They were moving to England and they were short of money. Could she borrow some? I said, "How'd you know I was here?" She said, "I called and they told me you were going to be over here for dinner. I don't want you to write a check because maybe they could hurt you." That broke my heart. I got her some money.
The point is, that's what it was like at that time. Christ, what did these people go through? I was never attacked that way. They said to me, "We got your license number. . . . You were at such and such a house where they had a meeting." I said, "Who had a meeting?" They had it all written down: we were raising money for Roosevelt or Wallace, or somebody, and they had taken the license numbers [of cars] outside the house. They questioned the politics of the guy whose house it was. I didn't know what his politics were, and I didn't care!
Two guys came to see me when I was working at Fox. They were investigators for the congressional committee. They asked, "Did I want to be a friendly or unfriendly witness?" I said, "What are you talking about?" They said, "Well, you know there are friendly and unfriendly witnesses. . . ." I
* After Thieves Highway in 1949, director Jules Dassin was blacklisted and thereafter worked primarily in Europe, especially in England and Greece. His second wife, actress Melina Mercouri, starred in some of his better-known films, including Never on Sunday (1960).
said, "That's what I read in the papers. . . ." They said, "Well, the congressman would like you to come . . ." I said, "Come where?" They said, "To Washington." I said, "To do what?" They said, "Names." I said, "You know all the names." They said, "Yes, but we'd like you to tell us the names, too." I said, "I don't know any names other than those names, and I don't even know if they're Communists."
They said, "Well, Mr. Kazan"—"Gadge" [Kazan's nickname] was working at the studio at the time—"he's coming . . ." I said, "That's fine with me." They said, "But you won't come?" I said, "No." They said, "Do you want us to send a subpoena?" I said, "You want to send, send!" They never sent any.
Was the blacklist an issue for Hollywood and for you, constantly, throughout the 1950s?
I don't know about constantly. One day I was called up by Marvin Schenck [nephew of Nicholas and Joseph Schenck, and a longtime MGM vice president] to the [MGM] office and asked to sign a loyalty oath. He said, "You owe it to the United States. You gotta sign, otherwise they'll picket the theaters. They got a guy with Red Channels here driving everybody crazy."[*] I said, "Hey, what do you think I was doing for three and a half years in the Marine Corps? I wasn't there because I was against the country!" He said, "So what's the big deal?" I said, "I don't want to sign. I don't think it's right for you to ask me to do that. . . ."
But Mr. [Louis B.] Mayer wanted to know why. I said, "Because it's an insult, Mr. Mayer. Some people say, if they sign a piece of paper it will prove they're American. That's insulting. Do you know it's not even against the law to be a Communist in this country?" He said, "It isn't?" I said, "No, it isn't. It so happens I'm not a Communist. I can't stand to belong to anything. I'd probably resign from the human race if I could! I don't belong to clubs, no country clubs, no tennis clubs. I only belong to a union because otherwise I couldn't work. . . ."
He said, "I understand. You know, they're making things difficult for us." I said, "That's something else. You sign a paper for me that says they're making it difficult for you. Sign a paper that says they're gonna hurt you unless everybody signs a loyalty oath, and I'll sign one right now." He said, "But, but, why would I do that?" I said, "That's exactly what I'm talking about."
It was frightening. That's what it was like at the time. I was lucky they didn't stop me from working.
I understand that you have been working on a screenplay about the blacklist era in Hollywood .
* Red Channels was published in June 1950 by American Business Consultants, headed by three ex-FBI agents. Regarded as the "bible" of the graylist, it offered a list of 151 show-business people linked to purported Communist-front activities.
When David Puttnam came to Columbia Pictures as head of production, he asked me to make a movie about the fright-filled times of the McCarthy period and the Hollywood blacklist. The movie was also to deal with the attempt of C. B. De Mille and others to remove Joe Mankiewicz from office as president of the Directors Guild.
When Mr. Puttnam left Columbia Pictures, the project was abandoned by the new bosses. When the new "new bosses" come in, perhaps they will revive the project. However, I think it doubtful. They may be so very new, they may ask, "Who was this 'McCarthy'? What the hell is a blacklist? 1950? When the hell was that???"
I notice, during this middle period of your career, after Hellinger and Huston and principally at MGM, that you still have a lot of shared script credits. Were you collaborating a lot?
The only actual collaboration I ever had, with someone in the same room with me, was John Huston. As I say, I learned a lot about the craft from him. I never worked with other writers. Some of them I didn't meet until years later. John collaborated with somebody else because he didn't like to be alone. He functions best when he's with someone.
What about the Epsteins [Julius and Philip]? Didn't you collaborate with them twice, on both the Fitzgerald film and the Dostoevski one?
No. Those scripts were already written. They were terrific screenwriters, by the way.[*] The producer of the Fitzgerald picture was a relative of Mr. Mayer, a nephew, Jack Cummings. A very bright fellow who was married to the daughter of the composer who wrote "The Last Time I Saw Paris." That's why the title of that picture was changed to The Last Time I Saw Paris [1954]. It's a very sentimental movie. Pretty good, really.
Didn't you collaborate with Sidney Boehm?
In the case of Sidney Boehm and Mystery Street [1950], I worked more with the director, John Sturges. I did a little more research on the crime [which forms the basis of the plot], and worked with Ricardo Montalban. I never worked with Sidney Boehm.
What about Delmer Daves and To the Victor [1948] ?
He was a director when I worked for him. We talked a little about story, but that is all. A very fine fellow, a decent man, Delmer Daves.
Gore Vidal and Paddy Chayefsky on The Catered Affair?
No. I did a little rewriting on the soundstage, but that's all.
James Poe?
Poe had worked on the first script of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [1958] before me, with [director] George Cukor, but you couldn't even mention the word homosexual in those days. George expected to do the third act exactly the way
* Julius J. Epstein is interviewed in Volume 1 of Backstory .
it was written. When the studio said no, he withdrew from the project. The screenplay written by James Poe was very good; it was almost like the play. I began with a whole new third act, since we couldn't use that element. I never consulted with Tennessee [Williams], who was usually in a bar in Key West somewhere, but I did consult occasionally with Kazan, who had directed the play on Broadway.
Your credits during the fifties have an incredible range. I cannot understand how you were able to survive that decade, particularly at MGM, making such unusual projects. From such a graphic juvenile delinquency movie like The Blackboard Jungle to a social-consciousness picture like Something of Value, from the Gore Vidal-Paddy Chayefsky picture to directing and adapting such literateurs as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dostoevski, Sinclair Lewis, Tennessee Williams. You were certainly blessed with the best material .
Why did you become the point man at MGM? Was that partly because of the chaotic nature of the industry at that point, or because of loopholes in the marketplace as a result of the blacklist and television?
Actually, I never initiated any projects with MGM, with the exception of The Blackboard Jungle . They said, "This is what you've got to do. If you don't do it, you're off salary." Once I took the job I was the proprietor—until it was completed.
Were things like The Brothers Karamazov [1958] and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof not considered the best projects on the lot?
No. They were not the best projects; they were the toughest projects. The best projects were the musicals.
Do you not feel that they are your pictures as much as MGM's, ultimately?
At MGM, yes, because I felt that once I said okay, they became part of me, and I of them. Except for a couple of pictures.
One of them was a picture [The Flame and the Flesh, 1954] with Lana Turner that originally had been a marvelous French movie, a comedy with Viviane Romance and a French actor by the name of [Michel] Simon, about a hooker and a guy who played the organ in a church. Very funny, marvelous comedy.
MGM bought it. [Joe] Pasternak was the producer. It was written by a lady [Helen Deutsch, based on the novel Naples au baiser de feu by Auguste Bailly] and became a tragedy. I said, "You people are crazy. Why are you doing it this way?" They said, "It's going to be terrific." I said, "But it doesn't work this way. It only works because there were some great actors in it who were funny . Are you making it into something that's supposed to mean something? What does it mean? That's one of those kind of movies . . ."
Yet some of your fifties movies do seem very personal and passionate. I assume that Fitzgerald and Dostoevski were literary idols of yours —
I'm a big fan of Fitzgerald's. Dostoevski, too.
And Tennessee Williams . . . ?
Yes, but I didn't choose the two Tennessee Williams plays. They asked me to do the first one [Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ]. That really came up because Cukor walked off the picture. It was in October and Elizabeth Taylor's contract ran out the end of February. They wanted to be shooting before the end of February. The second one [Sweet Bird of Youth, 1962] Paul Newman asked me to do.
Let's talk about The Blackboard Jungle for a moment. It set your career in high gear. It's almost more of a Warners picture. That must have been an uphill battle all the way, to convince MGM to let you direct such a hard-hitting picture .
Yes, but at MGM there was a split in their thinking. I did have a lot of trouble making The Blackboard Jungle . First of all, they hated the music. That was the first time rock music had been used in a movie, and they didn't understand it. Dore Schary hated it, and Mayer hated it even more than Schary. They couldn't stand to watch dailies because of the music. They shut the sound off during the dailies because they couldn't stand it! I said, "I can't help it, I need the music."
Another example: There was a light switch as you came through the door into the classroom. When we got ready to shoot for the first time, I had all the kids get some dust on their fingers from the floor and put their fingerprints around the light, because at any school I ever went to all the light switches were stained. When we came in to shoot the scene the next day, everything had been cleaned off. I said, "What did you do that for?" They said, "Well, it was dirty." I said, "It was supposed to be!" They said, "Not in an MGM movie!"
One time, I was doing a scene where [actor] Jamie Farr—his name was Jameel Farah in that movie—picks up the flag and the flagpole and runs at the kid holding a knife, using it as a ramming rod, to knock the knife out of his hand. Just as I was going to shoot, three heavyweights came down: Eddie Mannix, and Benny Thau, and the producer [Pandro Berman]. They said, "Are you going to use the flag to hit a guy? Are you crazy? Are you some kind of Communist?"
I said, "If you were the standard-bearer in the war, and you were carrying the flag, and the enemy was running at you, that's the first thing you'd hit him with. It's the most patriotic thing you can do! What else would you use the flag for?" They said, "You think it's patriotic to do this?" I said, "Yes!" They said, "All right, but cover yourself in case we have to take the scene out." Those are the kinds of things . . .
I can see that it wasn't only your choice of subject matter, or what the story was about, that worried MGM—but that it was also a question of the style of presentation .
"Even in a bleak picture, I try to offer a little hope": Vic Morrow (with knife) and
Glenn Ford face off in a scene from writer-director Richard Brooks' film of Evan
Hunter's novel Blackboard Jungle .
I couldn't stop them from coming on the set. They would walk on and say, "We don't like Elizabeth Taylor to look like that. . . ." There was a woman [an MGM department head] who came on during Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and she looked down at Elizabeth Taylor sitting beside me and said, "We'll have to reshoot this. Look at the cleavage." I said, "Who the fuck asked you to come down on the set?" She said, "I was told about it, here I am, and they were right." I said, "Do you know where the camera is? Do you think the camera is where you are? Is it looking up or looking down? Why don't you ask those questions first?" She said, "Where's the camera?" I said, "None of your fucking business. Now, if in the dailies, if you see what you think you see, take it out of my salary. I'll reshoot." Those were the kinds of things . . .
I ran into Mr. Mayer [when I was making The Blackboard Jungle ] and he said to me about Sidney Poitier, one of the stars of the movie, "I hear he's very good. But I don't like those people, those smart-ass people, you know. You should see our movie, Stars in My Crown [1950], where they all say, 'Good morning,' and they're not wise guys." What he meant was he didn't
like a black man looking for his rights, one who didn't cringe or cower. That was his point of view.
Finally it got to the point around the time I was making Something of Value, a movie which Mr. Mayer didn't like at all, when I had had enough.
I said, "Mr. Mayer, why are we fighting each other all the time? Maybe I don't belong here. Maybe you're right. Maybe I don't make your kind of MGM movies. Let me go. I'll go someplace else. It's no big deal." He said, "Nope. They tell me you're a bright fella. Maybe you make a different kind of movie. Maybe I don't understand them. But I think people who got talent should be here." There was that split in their thinking.
And the studio did allow you to make movies like Something of Value, very atypical of MGM, again with Poitier as the star. It is not revived much today, perhaps it is dated, but its view of white-black relations in Africa must have seemed a radical one in the 1950s .
The producer, Pandro Berman, had the courage to go through with it. It like very much the way Something of Value turned out, but I was helped with that story by the anthropologist Professor [Louis] Leakey, of all people.[*]
He was involved in the script?
He was involved in the making of the movie. When I was scouting locations in Kenya, a lawyer met me on the second floor of my hotel in Nairobi. This guy, black as purple, said to me, "The script is wrong, Mr. Brooks. I know you won't believe me. Would you believe Professor Leakey?" I said, "Where is Professor Leakey?" He said, "He lives fifteen miles from here on a farm. Would you believe him?" I said, "Let's go talk to him." I got in his car, and he took me to meet Professor Leakey.
"The story's all wrong," Professor Leakey said, "How do you even know what the story is?" He said, "Well, if it's like the book, it's wrong. the man who wrote the book used to drink in the bar here, all day long. He didn't know what was really going on. It's about the struggle for independence. We're in a Mau Mau war right now. Why don't you go meet the Mau Mau?" I said, "Yes. There are only two Europeans that speak Kikuyu, the language of the Mau Mau here in Kenya. I'm one of them. The other one is Captain Ian Henderson. Captain Henderson will take you."
Four or five days later Rock Hudson arrived, as did Sidney Poitier. I took them with me, four or five of us in a Land Rover. We drove up to Mount Kenya and stopped at an elevation of about 5,000 feet. Our aide looked at his watch and said, "Anybody here have any weapons?" I said, "Weapons?" He said, "A penknife?" I said, "Well, I have a penknife for my pipe." He
* Anthropologist and archaeologist Louis S. B. Leakey (born in Kenya) and his wife, Mary, discovered tool and fossil evidence that pushed back the dates of early humans and postulated that human evolution originated in East Africa rather than Asia.
said, "Give it to me." I said, "Why are we stopping here?" He said, "They're looking us over. . . ."
Ten minutes later he looked at his watch and off we went again. We stopped a second time, same thing, about 11,000 feet high. Finally we arrived at the camp, a place where elephants were roaming around. There were about fifteen guys with their hair like Whoopi Goldberg. The women's heads were shaven, just like in the movie [Something of Value ]. They knew we were coming for a half hour or more before we arrived because they could smell us by the European soap.
Captain Henderson said, "They have a question they want me to ask you." I said, "What is that?" He said, "The question is this, Mr. Brooks. . . . Let me get this straight. . . ." He talked to the Mau Mau spokesman, then continued. "The question is this, 'And how are things in Little Rock, Arkansas? . . .' " Three months before, Governor Orval Faubus had stood in the doorway of the University of Arkansas saying, "No niggers are going to come to this university." I said, "How did they know about that? I don't see any radios here. How did they find out—tom-toms?" He said, "They know." I said, "You can tell them that things are not so good in Little Rock, Arkansas." That was their opening gambit.
They knew Sidney was not from Africa—how? Not by the clothes he wore, because he was wearing blue jeans. But they knew by the way he walked; no African walks like that . . . so free. The things we learned up there at that camp!
The author had written a romantic story, an adventure story about the farmers hiding in their houses at dark and how everybody was afraid—
From the white people's view . . . ?
Yes. Leakey got me in to see Jomo Kenyatta [a leader of the pan-African movement and later the first president of Kenya] in prison. What Leakey and Kenyatta said to me was that whites were called Europeans, Africans were black; it didn't matter if a white was born in Africa, he was not an African, he was a European. Leakey and Kenyatta said that unless the Europeans could get along with the Africans, the Europeans would have to get out of Africa. Leakey told me that might be difficult to believe, so he gave me a book written by Winston Churchill which said the same thing.
He was trying to show you the tide of history .
That's what he was doing. And I was so impressed by what Winston Churchill wrote that I decided to try and put it in the film. For months, I tried to get Winston Churchill on the phone. He was in the south of France, painting, at Somerset Maugham's house.
Finally he called back. First his secretary, then he was on the phone. "I want you to be in this movie," I said. He said, "What are you talking about?" I told him. "I don't talk about movies," he said. I said, "I don't want you to
talk about movies. I just want you to talk about your book." "Why? What's my book got to do with it?" he asked. I said, "Well, that's what the theme of the movie is." "Oh," he said. We talked some more and he said, "How long will I have to talk?" I said, "As long as you want to—thirty seconds, a minute, or an hour. It's up to you." He said, "How long will it take?" I said, "Depends on how long you want to talk." He said, "Come up to the house."
He lived on the Thames. We went up there with two cameras. He talked for forty seconds about the same thing Leakey had talked about. I put it on the front of the movie. Took the movie out to [a preview in] Encino in the [San Fernando] Valley and there was almost a riot at the theater. The next morning, in Mr. Mayer's conference room, all of the heavyweights gathered. One of them said, "Before we start talking about what we think is rotten about this movie, I want to tell you something right now. You have got to get rid of this fucking Englishman. . . ." I said, "What are you talking about? Who?" He said, "The guy at the beginning of the movie! That's who! Out! Out of the picture!" I said, "Are you talking about Sir Winston Churchill?" He said, "Whoever the fuck he is, I don't care!" I said, "He's the greatest statesman in the world." He said, "I don't care. Out of the movie!" I said, "What's the reason?" He said, "First of all, I didn't understand what he was talking about. Second of all, audiences won't go to see an Englishman. If they think there's an Englishman in the movie, they won't come." I couldn't believe I was hearing any of this. Around the table they went saying, "Yes, let's get him out of the movie. . . ."
That's the first thing that got torn out of the movie. He was only on for forty seconds. But it was terrific. Imagine starting the movie with Sir Winston Churchill talking about Africa! Picture was released, no Winston Churchill!
I went back twenty or thirty years later, to MGM to make a movie, and I said to Roger Mayer, who runs the lab, "Roger, you know when we made this movie, there was a piece of footage on Winston Churchill, about forty seconds. You think you might still have it in the lab?" He said, "Oh, I doubt that. But I'll find out." They had it. And he gave me a 35-mm print!
Did MGM change the movie in other ways?
Oh yes, sure.
Did they eviscerate it?
No, but you see, they hurt it. Sure, hey, it's not going to change your personality and everything if we just cut off one of your ears, or all of your teeth, but you would be different afterwards. The ritual of the blood oath, the dealing with both sides of the issue of who really belonged there—they changed it a little bit at a time. But you can't cut out that part of it which is what it is all about.
It was there, still enough of it left so that the film was banned around the world. Banned around the world! It's a true movie, to this day it's a true movie.
Let's talk about The Brothers Karamazov momentarily. Though MGM had a history of adaptations of "great literary classics," the Cold War climate of the 1950s must not have seemed like the best time to film a Russian masterpiece. How did you persuade the studio to go ahead with it?
Oh, I didn't [have to] convince them. They already had the script, by the Epsteins. Pandro Berman was going to produce it. Marilyn Monroe was going to play Grushenka, and Brando was going to play Dmitri. When Pandro asked me to do it, I read the script and thought it was a good script, and I liked the people who were going to play in it. I said sure. I started to work with the script. I felt I'd like to have the "[Legend of] the Grand Inquisitor" scene, which is a great chapter in the book, so I wrote a reel and a half on the "Grand Inquisitor."
By that time I got a call from New York, from Monroe, where she was going to classes in the Actors Studio. She said she couldn't play in the movie. She was afraid of losing her baby. She was married to Arthur Miller at the time. She had lost a baby before. Would I please forgive her? She didn't want to take the chance.
When she withdrew, Brando dropped out. It all had to be recast. Now, Yul Brynner became Dmitri. When he and I were down in Acapulco, where he was vacationing, I began to think, "Why don't we go to Russia to make the movie? How the hell can you make this movie in the studio? There are no people, no mosques, no temples. . . . It doesn't look like Russia."
The Russian cultural committee, in a letter, said, "Yes, come and make the movie. You can have all the mosques you want. You can shoot on the Russian steppes. Whatever you need, we'll give you! The period sleighs . . . we got warehouses filled with that stuff. We have only one request. When you do a scene with your cast, do a scene with our cast, so we have a picture with our own people. The same movie." I said, "It's okay with me." It sounded pretty good, yes?
A guy who was running the studio at that time out of New York (I can't remember his name, he was a theater man)[*] came out to California and said, "What is all this bullshit about going to Russia? What! Are you crazy? Is it going to be a Commie movie or something?" I said, "Hey! The book was written in 1880, sometime. There wasn't even a Communist Party at that time. It's got nothing to do with politics." "I don't care," he said, "you go to Russia, it becomes Communist." I said, "The picture will cost less, it'll be a better picture, an authentic picture." He said, "No. NO."
I went to Pandro and said, "So, where are we going to shoot the movie?" He said, "You'll find someplace." I said to Cedric Gibbons, head of the art
* Brooks probably means Joseph Vogel, chairman of the MGM board at the time and president of Lowe's Theatre chain during the years Variety dubbed as "Metro's No-Fun" era. Vogel's first act, after assuming power in 1956, was to depose Dore Schary as head of production. Vogel himself lasted, amidst controversial studio policies and bitter proxy fights, until 1963.
department, "Where are we going to make it?" He said, "Let me read the script again." He read the script, we had a talk, and he said, "Make it on the back lot." I said, "You are insane. You can't do it." He said, "You can do it. You'll have to rewrite it, but you can do it." So, with the exception of one scene of the horses and another at the railroad station, which we do with some fog, everything [takes place] at night! (Laughs .)
On Lot 3 they had the old railroad station from the Garbo picture with John Gilbert [Flesh and the Devil, 1927]. It was an old narrow-gauge railroad which had been used by everybody, mostly at night because you could see the oil wells in the background. That's the way the picture was done. The whole movie is a night movie!
What happened to the "Grand Inquisitor" scene?
Out. The studio said, "Let's not get involved with the Church!"
So MGM wanted to film the book—but only according to the MGM way .
That's right.
I gather that you could not persuade MGM to make Elmer Gantry—no matter what .
I couldn't get anybody to make the movie. Nobody would make it. Finally I had to leave MGM. United Artists agreed to make it. As a matter of fact, we rented space from Columbia to do the movie, but Mr. De Mille and the guy who used to run Paramount [Y. Frank Freeman, vice president of Paramount since the mid-1930s] tried to stop the movie from being made. They thought it was antireligion. They thought it was un-American, not in the sense of Communism, but because it was the wrong image of America. They asked the United Artists people to tell me that they would reimburse me for whatever I paid for the book and the time it took me to write the screenplay. I still have that correspondence. That picture was very tough to make in this town.
That was not a studio assignment. That was a labor of love .
I'll tell you a story about Sinclair Lewis. When I read the review of my book [The Brick Foxhole ] in Esquire magazine, I wrote Mr. Lewis a letter and thanked him. He wrote back a letter on the back of my letter because he didn't waste a page. He said, "If you ever get to New York, give me a call, I'll buy you a drink. . . ." About two or three months later, I got a pass to New York and I phoned. He said, "I'll meet you at the Astor bar." He came. We went inside. He wanted to know what I did in the Marine Corps. I said, "I'm in the photographic section." He said, "Oh, well, at least that's not dangerous." I said, "We lose more people than the infantry because somebody has to be on the fucking beach when they come in. How do you think the pictures get taken?"
He said, "Do you make movies?" I said, "Well, of a kind. There's a book of yours I'd like to do one day." He said, "Which one is that?" I said, "Elmer Gantry ." He said, "You liked that book?" I said, "Yeah, it's an
interesting story about America today." He said, "Well, if you ever do it, make sure you read all the criticisms that have been printed. Some of them are very harsh, some are pretty good. The toughest of them all was [H. L.] Mencken. Mencken and I have been fighting for years. We disagree about everything, but he's good, and he was rough on the story. Read it, read them all. Maybe that'll help you."
He added, "There's only one real word of advice I have to give you. If you ever do make this into a movie, make a movie, don't make a book."
So with the money I got from The Brick Foxhole I took a first option on the book [Elmer Gantry ]. I kept taking options every year for eleven years. It was $2,000 an option. The book finally cost [me] $25,000 or thereabouts.
Did you know what Sinclair Lewis meant, initially, when he said, "Make a movie, don't make a book," or is that something you learned gradually over the course of years?
I learned. I didn't know what he was talking about. He meant, don't make a bookish movie, make a movie. So I didn't worry about what I had to change. I based that character on Billy Sunday to some degree—not just on Gantry and Mr. Lewis' book, but on the radio evangelists and all up and down the line to guys preaching out of prisons.
How much opposition to the film was therefrom religious organizations?
[After the filming,] I was called to New York to talk to the Catholic Legion of Decency, which made out the list of movies that Catholics were not supposed to see. I had to go to Madison Avenue, someplace around 51st, in Manhattan, where the cardinal lived, to talk to three Jesuits about the end of the movie.
They liked everything but the ending. Gantry turns down the job of running the new tabernacle by quoting from the Bible, "When I was a child I spake as a child and I thought as a child, but now that I'm a man I have put aside childish things." And Gantry walks away down the pier. . . .
The newspaper guy says, "See you around, brother!" Gantry stops, glances over his shoulder and says, with a smile and a wave, "See you in hell, brother." That was the end of the movie. They asked me, "Why does he say that? That's what we object to."
Three days [we talked]—they were good. These Jesuits were good! They could dance around on the head of a pin for hours! "Why did you write this? Why did you want to do this story to begin with?" They questioned all parts of it; they didn't want to take anything out, just those last two lines. Not even two, the last one. Lancaster was calling on the phone, saying, "What do they want?" I said, "They just want to take out the last two lines." He said, "Well, take them out for chrissakes!"
I was fascinated by them; I couldn't stay away from these three guys in this room who were like Talmudic teachers.
It got to this point, which shows you the humor and wit of the Jesuits.
Finally I said to the monsignor, "Well, sir, obviously you know a great deal more about religion and the formal teaching of religion than I do. I concede that you are probably right. I'll do what you want. We'll remove the line. I'll have to remove the line before it too, otherwise it doesn't make much sense. He'll just walk away on a pier and that's it." They said, "Now, wait a minute. We didn't tell you that you have to do anything. We're just telling you that we cannot approve the movie." I said, "However you want to put it, I'll take it out. I'm not knowledgeable enough to dispute it with you anymore." And the monsignor says, "Be careful, Mr. Brooks. Such humility has no humility." I'll never forget it. The very last word was still on the head of a pin!
But you had to compromise .
It wasn't that serious. What's worse, I recognize now, is the disclaimer someone put on the front of the film saying that the film is not dangerous.
Dorothy Thompson of the New York Herald-Tribune, a tough lady herself, was married to Lewis. She got into a lot of problems with the Nazis during the war. Anyway, she wrote me a letter after seeing the film, in which she said, "I saw the movie. I'm sure 'Red' [Lewis] would have loved it."
I find it surprising that such an important part of your career, most of the 1950s, a period in your career that a lot of people think very highly of, that it was accidental in a sense .
But that's life, isn't it? When I began to shoot my own subjects, I didn't always choose them wisely, either. At least I had a choice—and I would go to that material as a rule which meant something to me.
Because the studio system was collapsing, and the motion picture companies no longer owned as many properties, were you buying and developing your own properties, partly in self-defense?
Lord Jim, for example, was a book I wanted to make for years. I couldn't persuade MGM to make the movie, because nobody at the studio could finish the book!
I always liked Jim very much. It deals with subject material which is close to me. It has to do with someone who aspires to a certain code of ethics and, when put to the test under stress, fails, and is looking for a second chance. That's the story of mankind. That's the story of me and everybody else. But when you get that second chance, how does it work itself out?
Do you have any idea why, in your life, you became so interested in that theme?
I don't know. Maybe some kid beat the shit out of me when I was a kid and I wanted another shot at him. Maybe I was humiliated by some employer somewhere, at a garage or a factory or wherever the hell I was working, and though I knew what I should have said to him, I didn't say it. Maybe I failed
in times and places where nobody else knew about it at all except myself. That story was very close to me but it's a universal theme—of someone who is clean, but got himself dirty somehow, and now he is trying to wash it off.
In the case of In Cold Blood, I also felt very strongly about the material, but Capote chose me . That was the strange thing.
On the basis of what? The Tennessee Williams films?
Yes, all the material I had done, which he knew about. But that wasn't the main reason. The picture was finished and about to open in New York when I learned the real reason.
Truman and I went for a walk on the cold streets near the United Nations building. We stopped for a drink at a little diner on Second or Third Street. It was near where Monty Clift used to live. We were having a drink. I said, "Truman, why did you want me to do the picture?" He said, "You'll be surprised. I don't know if you'll remember it, even. It all began in London. I was working on the story with Bogie and Lollobrigida, Beat the Devil [1954]. John [Huston] was doing that picture and when the picture was finished, John threw a dinner at the White Elephant restaurant. Do you remember that night?"
I guess you can gather by now that I love John Huston, not only respect him, but love him. He can be a great, terrific, generous man, with everything he has—everything! He'll share anything with you except his women. Money, time, whatever, he'll share. But John can also be a hard man.
[That night] Peter Viertel was there and Ray Bradbury was there and the whole cast was there, Bogie and Betty and Lollobrigida and her husband, the doctor [Yugoslavian-born physician Drago Milko Skofic], and Capote. John was in a foul mood. I don't know why. He started in [on Ray Bradbury], saying, "Now there's Ray Bradbury."—Ray was working for him doing the screenplay on Moby Dick [1956]—"Now, Ray writes all these stories about Mars and interplanetary travel, but did you know I was going to take Ray over to Paris with me one weekend"—John had a girlfriend in Paris—" and Ray said—how did you put it, Ray?"—and Ray is beginning to cry—"Ray said to me, 'I don't fly, I don't even drive a car, Mr. Huston.' Isn't that right, Ray? The fella who writes all about missiles, going to Mars and Venus and all of these other planets, he doesn't drive!" By that time Bradbury is weeping. We took him outside—he was staying at the Dorchester Hotel, which was two blocks away from the White Elephant. Peter walked him to the hotel. I went back in the restaurant.
By this time John had gone after Lollobrigida. "And now we have Miss Lollobrigida . . ."—she's already beginning to cry before he says anything. He starts in on her husband. "What's your name, doctor? What kind of doctor are you, doctor? . . ." And he goes on like that, around the table. Bogie: "Can't wait to get back to your boat, can you, Bogie?" Betty said, "Hell, John, you know we all have our weaknesses." And John said: "Except some
of us have more than others! How about you, Betty? . . ." Now she was in tears, she got up and left the table. He had gone around the table by now and he started in on Capote. Capote was already crying for the other people, let alone for himself.
Finally he got to me. "Well now, here we have the heretic. Here we have the great maverick. This man never wore a suit, I mean a whole suit! Isn't that right? Now, he's got a foreign car, an MG, haven't you, Richard? Pretty soon you're going to have a swimming pool, I hear. A pool, right?" I said, "Well, that's what they say." He said, "All these columnists out in Hollywood that you think are phoney. Now you are being quoted by them, aren't you? . . ."
So it went, that evening. A dreadful, disastrous, tear-soaked evening.
Here I was listening to this story as Capote was rehashing it, and I said, "Yes, I remember that evening. What's that got to do with why you wanted me to do the picture?" He said, "You're the only guy in the room who didn't cry." I said, "That's why?" He said, "That's right. You didn't rage, you didn't hit him, you didn't cry. That's the man I wanted to do this film."
Good story .
Somehow it stuck in his mind. Somehow it mattered to him.
Heretic is a good label for you .
Maybe. (Laughs .)
You began to originate your own stories in the 1960s. Why did it take such a long time before you began originating your own films? After all, you were a novelist at the outset of your career .
Well, I was working at MGM, and before MGM, with Warners and Hellinger. They owned a story and you worked on it. Furthermore, how the hell do you convince the studio to put up the money [for an original story]? And not just the studio, but the bank?
Your generation could not really write and direct films autobiographically the way today's generation can. Are there films which are more autobiographical for you? I know some of the later ones are: The Happy Ending, Fever Pitch . . .
It [Fever Pitch ] was a much better picture before they took it away from me.
Which among the earlier ones? Deadline, U.S.A. [1952], I would guess—because of the newspaper milieu .
Yes.
The Catered Affair?—the picture with Gore Vidal's script of Paddy Chayefsky's teleplay. In many ways it is an inconsequential picture, atypical of MGM, but it has wonderful performances [from Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine], wit and charm and, and I feel it is a kind of valentine to your own
"My code of honor": Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin (background) in the Western
that is a metaphor for Brooks' career, The Professionals .
background and the hardscrabble life of your own parents. It's an extremely personal movie. The movie must be so resonant in part because you so strongly identified with the material .
I love it! I ran it for my daughter when she was getting married and she came out a changed lady! (Laughs .) That was a movie that made me feel warm and good.
The Professionals . . . ? We haven't talked about that movie much. Yet I have a feeling that the entire story was a kind of metaphor for your career .
That's right.
Just being a professional .
That's right. I am fond of The Professionals because it's a lean job, and it has my code of honor in it without talking about it.
I thought Ralph Bellamy's character was a stand-in for a studio producer in that movie .
(Laughs .) He was. You know, [Lee] Marvin's last line in the movie was written the night before we shot it. I didn't have a finish. I didn't want any more talking. I wondered, isn't there something we can do? So I wrote this exchange where he says, "You bastard . . ." And Marvin says, "Yes sir, in
my case, an accident of birth, but you, sir, you're a self-made man." That's how I feel about those kind of people.
The Happy Ending was a rare picture, for you, with a woman at the center of the story .
The Happy Ending turned out to be a real story about women's rights. Before its time. That's a problem I have, doing stories that are a little before their time. I wanted to do a story about a woman with a marriage that was breaking up—and why.[*]
Which of the others do you feel closest to?
Pieces of the movies are part of me. There is a bit of all of us in the movies that we make. Lord Jim. Gantry is half me. That minute-and-a-half speech about what is evangelism—that's me. Bite the Bullet was my love poem to America. I love those people and the beauty of our country.
There are parts of me in most of the movies I worked on. Each of them reminds me of something close. I like the weak ones, the unsuccessful ones, sometimes as much as the others. Each one means a part of my life. Key Largo means as much to me as any movie I've ever seen or made! All the experiences I had on it. That's what made me a director—that movie.
Did it hamper you and the people of your generation not to be able to write autobiographically?
I don't know. We wrote it into the story one way or another. Where I come from, it's not cricket, it's not sportsmanlike, to write an autobiography. You don't tell stories about Mommy. You got some beef?—fight it out. But don't put it into print.
So your generation would not feel frustrated by not being able to write about yourselves?
You just had to do it another way, that's all.
That's the trick. And it is all the more satisfying if you manage to write something about yourself, even if in some veiled fashion .
Of course. That is a basic reference for any of us. And the thing is, it was like not being able to say "fuck" or "fuck you" on the screen. You had to find another way. So it was there but it wasn't there.
How helpful was your training as a reporter towards becoming a screenwriter?
An invaluable prelude. A good newspaper reporter quickly learns the basis of his craft. The "who, what, where, when, and why" of a story. How to write with clarity and brevity. How to "hear." How people really talk. Not the way a writer wants them to talk. Real speech patterns instead of bookish sameness. How to write without "fear or favor."
* Richard Brooks was married to lead actress Jean Simmons at the time (she also played a significant role in Elmer Gantry ). She was Oscar-nominated as Best Actress for her work in The Happy Ending . Simmons and Brooks were divorced in 1978 after eighteen years of marriage.
The search for fact is vital to screenwriting. Certainly, screenplays are often fiction. But fact is essential in research and in the comprehension of character and situation. I'd say my time as a reporter was excellent training, the perfect "boot camp" for survival in Hollywood or any other battlefield where movies are made.
How did you learn to write and think visually?
I think I always did [think and write visually], though not to the extent that you eventually develop this art. It seemed to come quite easily to me. I remember when I was in school, the only place we could get books was in the library. Nobody bought books, unless it was a Dick Merriwell, which only cost fifteen cents or so. One time I went to the library to get a Tarzan story; I saw a book which I thought from its title was a Tarzan book. I took it to the lady [at the checkout] holding the pencil with a rubber stamp on the end of it. She said, "You sure you want this book?" I said, "Yeah." She stamped the book and I took it home.
It was called The Hairy Ape [by Eugene O'Neill]. I opened the book. Why, there was a name in the center of the page and underneath the name was what [that person] said—it was a play! The Hairy Ape ! I was about eight years old and I'd never seen a play form before. I said to myself, "That's the way to write something. You leave out all those 'he saids,' 'she saids.' It's not telling you what they're thinking . It's telling you what they're saying and what they're doing. That's pretty good. How long has this been going on?"
Back I went to the library and I said, "You got any more of these things?" She said, "Like what?" I said, "Where they talk like that." She said, "Well, don't you know, that's a play! That's not a novel! Would you like to see more of those?" I said, "Yeah." And she introduced me to the play department.
That was the first time I ever realized there was another kind of writing. Matter of fact, when I came to MGM, doing my first work there, I wrote the screenplay in the form of a play. At that time the script form consisted of the page divided—the action on one side, the dialogue on the other. I said, "I can't read it." The importance was inverted. The most important thing was the action, and the dialogue went from side to side, the action was sort of in the center, but you couldn't figure out where the dialogue fitted! I was always looking in the center for the dialogue.
Mr. Mayer's office sent a man down who said to me, "What are you doing? You're not writing the screenplay the way it's supposed to be written. Nobody can read it up there!" I said, "But I can read it down here! I'm going to have to shoot it, so I've got to write it the way I see it." So from the beginning really, I wrote this way, based on seeing things in these books which are written with an eye to the image. . . .
In the old days, were you ever writing scripts with the words "cut" and "close-up"?
No. (Laughs .)
Just dialogue and action?
Tell the story. I may stop somewhere and give some information to the cameraman. I may stop and add a parenthetical remark that has to do with special effects. But most of the time, I don't even do that.
When screenwriters got together in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s and had a drink, did they ever discuss screenwriting theory, or was it more . . . ?
Not so much theory. Screenwriters were always getting together someplace—in those days, 1,000 percent more than now. Nowadays, screenwriters never get together unless they accidentally fall over each other somewhere. But in those days there was a screenwriters' table at each studio. There was a directors' table, a producers' table, and as for actors, they ate everywhere. But screenwriters would have discussions mostly about the horrors they had run into from producers or studios.
However, the difference was, I could call Clifford Odets and say, "Gee, I got a problem with this story," and we could talk about it. And Odets felt the same way. At the time he was doing the play The Country Girl, I was on my way to Europe to look for locations for something, and he came to see me at my hotel. I read his play during the day and then we took a long walk, all the way to Harlem. "What do you think?" he asked me. I said, "Terrific play." He asked, "Any thoughts on it?" I said, "Only one, but I don't think it's important." He said, "What is it?" I said, "I don't know why the Wife is still trying to make him a successful actor. He's a drunk. She knows it. She's had a bad time with this bum for such a long time. Why does she stay with him? Why is she trying to make him a star? Why didn't she leave him a couple of years ago?" He said, "Because she loves him." I said, "Bullshit. I don't believe it." Now, I'm John Huston. (Laughs .)
"What don't you believe?" he asked. I said, "I don't believe that one partner stays with another out of love when either one is a drunk. I don't believe it." He'said, "Why do you think she should stay with him?" I said, "She stays with him because she wants him to become a star on Broadway again, so that she can leave him. She can't leave him when he needs her. She doesn't love him, but she can't leave him." He said, "That's not bad. Let's talk about it." So we walked back to Harlem. And he included that in the play.[*]
* The Group Theatre's seminal playwright Clifford Odets had several of his plays produced as films (Golden Boy, Clash by Night, The Country Girl, The Big Knife ), directed a couple of admirable films (None but the Lonely Heart and The Story on Page One ) but did not write many Hollywood screenplays. After his cooperative testimony before the HUAC, Odets lived out his days largely as a highly paid "script doctor." The first half of his life is well told in Margaret Brenman-Gibson's Clifford Odets, American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940 (New York: Atheneum, 1981); and Odets' own posthumously published one-year Hollywood journal, The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets (New York: Grove Press, 1988), is worth reading for insights. Odets is also mentioned in the Daniel Taradash interview.
With some people you could talk theory, but it wasn't college film-class discussions about theory. More likely you would meet with a writer and say, "I have a problem. I can't make this thing work." You could talk with a writer or a group of writers without being afraid that someone was going to steal your idea and get it on TV before you were able to finish it. There was a different feeling among writers at that time.
One thing which is different is that people from that generation were humanists as part of their upbringing, the era of the Depression, and the general hopefulness of the Roosevelt presidency. I am thinking of directors like Capra and of stars like Cagney, but also of an entire ethic which seemed to infuse the motion picture industry. That's part of the credo of that generation, of the thirties and the forties, as opposed to the camera tricks and razzle-dazzle technology of today's film-school whiz kids. A more humanistic credo .
I think you're right. That's nothing to be ashamed of.
Humanism has gone out of movies .
Is it not interesting that Cagney would kill twenty-two guys in a movie and you could still love him? Why? That wasn't just his personality. There was something built into those stories. It had to do not only with the glamor and excitement of a gangster; it had to do also with what made him a gangster in the first place. It had to do with the psychological background [of the character], where and how he grew up.
Why do the blacks look with such hatred on somebody who walks through their neighborhood if he is white? They haven't approached the answer yet in [film] stories, or very rarely. The big, successful pictures with blacks in them have blacks in them who are not really black. They're really white guys. They don't have any danger in their eyes. But if you go into Harlem or downtown here [Los Angeles] on the south side, and you see those kids standing in the school yard around the basketball hoop, you have to ask yourself, "Do they stand there every day? How long do they stand there? Why are they there? Do they think that the world is really made of basketball?"
A lot of Caucasians would say, "Well, why don't they get a job?" But that's the problem: they can't get a job. If they had a job where they could earn money, maybe they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Today, you have stories about black pimps—it seems that all blacks play pimps, with the exception of Sidney Poitier and [Bill] Cosby. But you don't have that kind of psychological background for those characters. They used to do that [sort of thing] in the early days at Warners. You don't do that with close-ups. You do that with story.
Humanism is not in the texture of movies anymore—it's not in the writing of the movies; it's not in the making of the movies; it's not in the playing.
World War II killed off a lot of that idealism, and what was left of it the blacklist helped to stifle in Hollywood .
I worked with Frank Capra's unit writing documentaries in the Why We Fight series during World War II. Capra was a prime exponent of the story of the little man. When he no longer believed that the public cared about the little man, Capra stopped making movies.
Meet John Doe [1941]—that's a heartbreaking, marvelous story. [Gary] Cooper, who was a very conservative man, [was of the generation that] could play those parts with such compassion and humanism, you couldn't believe it. I remember I appeared on "The David Susskind Show" once, and [director] Fred Zinnemann was there, [producer] Jerry Wald, [screenwriter] Daniel Taradash, and [director] George Cukor. The theme of the program was "Hollywood" actors and "real" actors, whatever the hell that meant. If I had known that was the subject, I wouldn't have shown up in the first place.
Anyway, Cukor was talking about how great an actress Garbo was, and she was. And Zinnemann was talking about the movies he'd made and the actors who were in them . . . and every once in a while, maybe it was just to provoke discussion, I really don't know, Susskind would say, "What about Marilyn Monroe? She can't act!" And nobody would say anything. Or, "What about Jimmy Stewart? He's such a shit-kicker!"—he didn't use that term, but that's what he meant.
Finally, he asked Zinnemann, a very quiet man, about Gary Cooper. "What in the hell?" Susskind said. "He makes a lot of faces on the screen but he doesn't act!" So finally I said to Mr. Susskind, "You don't know what you're talking about, do you?" Thinking now he's got a sucker, he says, "Well, what is your opinion of him?" And I said, "I think he's a great actor—not a stage actor, not a radio actor or a television actor, but he's a great movie actor." "Why?" he asked. I said, "Because you're looking at him, no matter who else is talking, because when he reaches for a gun, if he's playing in a Western, you believe he's touched that gun before. He works at it. He has your full attention. Not only that, but he can make you feel something, something visceral, something deep, something that matters. He is who he plays."
Mr. Susskind said, "Well, but he couldn't act in a play." I said, "Hey, I don't know whether he could act in a play and I don't care. It doesn't matter. There are various forms of painting; there are all kinds of music. I don't expect Fats Waller to play the second concerto, but nobody could play 'Honeysuckle Rose' any better!" I said I had to go to the toilet, I got up and left, and never came back.
A couple of months later I went to a dinner party at [Henry] Fonda's house where he was raising money for something. I had to leave early because I was shooting the next day. As I was leaving, this tall guy [Cooper] accompanied by a beautiful woman stopped me and he said, "My name is. . . ." How could you miss that face? He said, "We've never met before." I said, "No, sir, we haven't." He said, "I saw you on the television show about actors." I said,
"Yes?" He said, "I wanted to thank you. It meant a lot to me." I said, "That's the way I felt. Good night." That was that. Four months later somebody was accepting a special Oscar for him because Cooper was dying of cancer. And I thought to myself, what if I hadn't said what I said? What if I hadn't said what I believe? Why should I hold back? Life is too damn short!
That changed my life a lot. I didn't know Gary Cooper. All he'd done was provide entertainment for me. When I was shooting Lord Jim, we used to run movies at night on a white sheet. It was 110 degrees and everybody was going to quit! We ran different movies every night, sometimes the same movie for three nights. Most of them were Capra movies because they came from Columbia, and some of them were Gary Cooper pictures.
You can't believe what that does for you out there in the Cambodian jungle. A million and a half miles from anything that is familiar to you. The storytelling power of a movie. And those faces that are telling you the stories. It doesn't matter whether it was a happy ending or not, whether it is a comedy or a stern melodrama. As long as it has that element in it that you can recognize in yourself, as long as it has a pinch of the truth in it—terrific!
That's what I learned from guys like Capra and Zanuck and Cagney and Cooper—or Bill Wellman, for all the plates he was supposed to have in his head. Look at the kind of movies Wellman made—from Wings [1927] to A Star Is Born [1937], the one Wellman directed with a screenplay by Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell [and Robert Carson]. My God, what a movie that was!
Bogie used to run that every Christmas Eve. Christmas Day was Bogie's birthday, so you can imagine all the jokes about that. But every Christmas Eve he had a 16-mm print that he owned of A Star Is Born, the one with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. They'd decorate the tree, then they'd run this 16-mm film, and Bogie would cry all the way through it, every Christmas. Picture began; he was crying. "Why, Bogie?" people would ask, "What the hell are you crying about? You've seen the movie already!" "I don't know," he would say. "It just makes me cry." It was the March character that made him cry. He knew what was going to happen to himself.
In your films I detect that Capraesque humanism—only the vision is darker. From The Blackboard Jungle to In Cold Blood to Looking for Mr. Goodbar, for example, films which have in common an interest in crime and social justice, the perspective becomes grimmer as time goes on .
If my outlook seems darker as time goes on, it's because I reflect the human condition. Not that I'm less optimistic nowadays. I believe that "hope" is essential in life and drama. Without hope, we're blind animals clashing in a noisy melodrama, screaming, with automobile tires and gunfire, all to no purpose except to murder an hour or two. Without justice, we would return to the cave and the jungle.
But as I'm a creature of my environment, I see things as they "are," not as I'd want them to be.
Let's talk about your writing habits. When do you write?
Whenever I can. All the time. I write in toilets, on planes, when I'm walking, when I stop the car. I make notes.
If I am working at a studio, I work at the studio in the morning, then come home. I am really writing two days instead of one. After the studio, I have my second day [at home]. I write whenever I can.
Do you keep particular hours?
I only sleep two or three hours a day, so I'm writing all the time. I make notes wherever I can make them.
Do you work with pencil and paper?
Pencil and paper, then typewriter, then back to pencil and paper.
How do you approach a script?
Let me show you what I do with a good book—a book that there is a good possibility for making a movie out of—how I break the book down.
I write an outline of the book. It's like a dictionary of the book. What is its structure? Who does what when? Is there a flashback? If so, then I may make a note of two words in the margin, forty or fifty times throughout the book: "How Dram?" meaning, how do you dramatize this? For example, somebody's thinking about something, or the author is talking about something—how do you dramatize it?
Do you have a preference between originals and adaptation?
I have no special feeling about it. Whatever. But it's easier to adapt in the sense that it already has a structure; because a movie is structure. I can make a movie with half-assed camerawork, or with actors who are not quite up to par, or with composition that misses, and the picture may still work because of good structure. But if the structure is not right, you can have forty great scenes in a movie and still have no movie. Structure is the beginning and end of a movie.
Do you feel you have any weak points as a writer?
Sure! I'm not good enough! Writing is the hardest part of it all. There are some writers who are great. I'm not a great writer. At best, I'm a second- or third- or fourth-rater.
Do you see yourself as an artist or a craftsman?
Oh yes, both. I may not be a good artist, but I'm an artist, yes. (Laughs .)
Because I make pictures, or because I have something to say [when I make pictures] which has to do with hope. That is a very important adjunct in any of the work that I do. The difference between man (and I mean "man" for men and women both) and all the other animals in the world is that other animals can know hunger, fear, pain, but they know nothing about hope. Man
does. That's the big difference. That's what makes man a different kind of animal. He knows about hope.
That's what I try to put into a picture, even if it's a bleak picture. That there is something worthwhile [to aspire to]. Sex is a tremendous drive, and love, but that is not enough. People have to care about each other, too. Then the picture means something. People care when someone reaches a hand out to someone. Then you begin to care about the movie, whether you know it or not.
Where does the directing come in? Is it an extension of the writing for you?
Everything connected with movies is a form of writing. Directing and editing—and there is even another step after that, which is the music—are a form of writing. Writing a script is about people, not about the camera. The camera comes later! If I were to compare it with a painting, the writing of it is the idea: What are you going to put on the canvas? You make little pencil marks for composition, you think about color and subject material—that's the writing. When you pick up the brush, that's when you begin to direct. From that moment on, it's technique. Directing is an extension of writing.
The real hard part about the writing is when you're alone and you have to fill that page—and not just fill it. I hear all the sounds: the opening and closing of doors, the traffic, the music, the voices. I feel the pain [of the characters]. . . .
There's a big difference, in my opinion, between movies and the spoken and/or written word. It seems to me that when you read something—a book, newspaper, whatever—before you can understand it, the primary emotion has to be intellectual, because first of all it must go through the brain. You have to translate whatever has been written. Same with the stage—it's all one master shot. You do the editing with your eyes, but to hear the words and understand the words and translate the words, it first has to go through your mind. The first reaction is intellectual. The second may be emotional, if the words are put together skillfully.
With movies, it's my opinion that the opposite is the case, because movies are images, and you don't have to hear the words. I could ask you about your favorite movie right now, and unless it came from a stage play, I would doubt that you could remember any lines from it. You can remember that you saw the movie, you can remember moments . You can remember Bette Davis walking up the stairs to die in Dark Victory [1939], but I doubt if you can remember what she says, if anything. The images come first, and with images, like music, the primary reaction is emotional. If the images are put together expertly, you may get an intellectual reaction after that. It helps to have good dialogue, too—it helps at the moment you are watching the movie—but the effect has to be orchestral.
Is writing the final draft and directing the polish?
That's right. Then, when you see it on the movieola, you wonder: Why don't I feel about it right now the same way I did as when I wrote it? What's wrong? What's happened?
Then you begin to re-edit and you begin to put it together in a different way until it has the same effect as when you wrote it. Editing is also writing and it is all part of the same process, except different elements are at work. It's what is called making a movie.
Betty Comden and Adolph Green: Almost Improvisation
Interview by Tina Daniell and Pat McGilligan
Betty Comden and Adolph Green, ever bracketed as a team, stand with a select few at the summit of the musical film and, with the exception of one nonmusical outing (Auntie Mame, in 1958), are among the handful of screen-writers to express themselves purely through that form. Though they were active in motion pictures for only fifteen years, and are credited on just ten produced features, they are generally recognized as being responsible, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for writing the scripts and often the lyrics for some of Hollywood's most exhilarating and enduring musicals.
They met while performing skits in a Greenwich Village troupe that also included Judy Holliday. Their first Broadway smash, On the Town, with Leonard Bernstein's musical score, led to an MGM contract in 1945. At MGM, they flourished and, rare among screenwriters, they have no horror stories to tell. The fabled Arthur Freed unit sustained and nurtured their talent. They specialized in "catalogue musicals" created whole-cloth from MGM's ownership of a composer's entire backlist and in close collaboration with old New York theater-world pals Gene Kelly and director Stanley Donen.
They reached their acme with the film version of On the Town (1949), the radiant Singin' in the Rain ("perhaps the greatest movie musical of all time," opines Leonard Maltin in his TV Movies and Video Guide ) in 1952, the buoyant "backstage" musical The Band Wagon, and the more worldly-wise It's Always Fair Weather (1955). Their story lines were always bright and inventive; their dialogue witty and sophisticated; their world, innocent and unreal, nonetheless sparkling with humanity.
They do not claim to be very "personal" writers, but their work is suffused with their affection for show business and for their beloved New York City. Typical of many, latter-era screenwriters, they did not stay in Hollywood ery long at any given point. Keeping up residence in New York City, they divided
Betty Comden and Adolph Green in New York, 1989.
(Photo: William B. Winburn)
their time between Broadway and the movie studios. They haven't written a film in over twenty-five years, though they have acted colorful small parts in quite a few in recent years (Adolph Green in My Favorite Year, Betty Comden as Garbo in Garbo Speaks ). Indeed, in 1989, Green was the unlikely star of Alain Resnais' comedy I Want to Go Home, about an elderly has-been cartoonist (with a script by syndicated cartoonist Jules Feiffer).
We spoke in Betty Comden's apartment near Lincoln Center where she and Adolph Green would convene for work sessions.
Betty Comden (1919–) and Adolph Green (1915–)
1944
Greenwich Village (Walter Lang). Performers (of their own revue material).
1947
Good News (Charles Walters). Script.
1949
The Barkleys of Broadway (Charles Walters). Story, script.
On the Town (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen). Script, lyrics, adapted from their musical play.
Take Me out to the Ball Game (Busby Berkeley). Lyrics.
1952
Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen). Story, script.
1953
The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli). Story, script
1955
It's Always Fair Weather (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen). Story, script, lyrics.
1958
Auntie Mame (Morton DaCosta). Script.
1960
Bells Are Ringing (Vincente Minnelli). Script and lyrics, adapted from their musical play.
1964
What a Way to Go! (J. Lee Thompson). Script, songs.
Television credits include "I'm Getting Married, Stage 67" and "A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Mobil Summer Showcase."
Plays include On the Town; Billion Dollar Baby; Bonanza Bound; Two on the Aisle; Wonderful Town; Peter Pan; Bells Are Ringing; Say, Darling; A Party (a.k.a. A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green); Do Re Mi, Subways Are for Sleeping; Fade Out—Fade In; Hallelujah, Baby; Applause; Lorelei; On the Twentieth Century, Singin' in the Rain and The Will Rogers Follies .
Books include Comden and Green on Broadway and Off Stage (Comden).
Academy Award nominations include story and screenplay for The Band Wagon in 1953, and story and screenplay for It's Always Fair Weather in 1955.
Writers Guild awards include nominations for The Barkleys of Broadway, The Band Wagon, and It's Always Fair Weather; and awards for Best-Written American Musical for On the Town, Singin' in the Rain, and Bells Are Ringing .
I know that you began as cabaret performers. Why did you start writing together? Why did you choose a career as writers? Did writing give you something that performing could not?
Green: Well, at least you didn't start by asking us to say something funny. People always seem to expect us to be funny.
Comden: Yes, they ask us and then they sit back and wait . . . sometimes for a very long time.
Green: But to answer your questions about writing and performing, they went together, rather than one instead of the other.
Comden: We started at the Village Vanguard, as performers, as part of this group called The Revuers that included Judy Holliday. You had to pay royalties for material, and we didn't have any material of our own, so we like to say we chipped in and bought a pencil and started to write so we would have something to perform. The writing and the performing started at the same time. We didn't think of one as separate from the other.
Green: We've combined, somehow, both careers, and made them not choices or conflicts, but all part of the same thing.
But one did become dominant .
Comden: It did.
Why is that? Were there economic factors?
Comden: Not at all. While we were still in the Revuers, the idea of On the Town came up. [Composer] Leonard Bernstein was a very old friend. He got us the job because he knew our material thoroughly and thought we would be marvelous to write the book and lyrics. It was our first chance at Broadway.
Green: After we had made good as writers and had a distinguished success, we decided this was our calling—to write musical theater.
Comden: We also acted in On the Town —every night and two matinées a week. In the second show [Billion Dollar Baby in 1945] there were no parts for us—we didn't write everything with the idea that there had to be two good parts for us. And then shortly after that we went to Hollywood and wrote our first movie [Good News in 1947].
We wanted to keep writing. But we never consciously decided to stop performing. And we do still perform to this day. We go out and do our evening of entertainment, called A Party . We love to perform!
Your specialty, in theater and films, became musical comedy. You may have become writers by happenstance; but did the fact that you became specialists in musicals, was that at all accidental? Or has musical theater always been your ruling passion?
Comden: We were expressing ourselves. We performed musical material—and out of that grew the longer form, if you like, of doing a full show instead of these little satirical sketches down at the Vanguard. It was a natural progression. We always loved music and musical theater. We're crazy about Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Gilbert and Sullivan. Those are people we love. And music in general—serious music of all kinds—is a big part of our enthusiasms.
When you came to Hollywood under contract in 1947, how did you adjust?
Green: We had to uneasily adjust to this other world we knew nothing about, and then gradually make it a way of life and work. As such, it became very satisfying. It didn't take us that long to feel a part of some kind of family, at MGM, in the Freed unit. And Arthur Freed—I don't know what it was like in the other units [at MGM]—was outstandingly appreciative of talent.
Comden: He collected a terrific group of people around him, mainly people
A light-footed Betty Comden and Adolph Green, re-creating their nightclub act in a
scene from the 1944 MGM film Greenwich Village .
(Photo: Museum of Modern Art)
he brought out from New York. There was Alan [Jay] Lerner, Vincente [Minnelli], [designer-producer] Oliver Smith, Gene [Kelly] . . . all kinds of people.
Green: One person we had close connections with was Roger Edens. Roger was a very important part of the Arthur Freed unit. He was Arthur's associate
producer on many pictures, and later, when he left MGM, he became a producer himself of pictures like Funny Face [1957]. He was a pianist, a terrific musician, a wonderful arranger. He was greatly responsible for Judy Garland's early years at MGM; in fact, he wrote "Dear Mr. Gable" for her. Because Arthur realized his worth, Roger would be in on the earliest story discussions with us.
Comden: He was a complete coordinator of all the departments.
Green: He oversaw the sound and music of every film. He helped mix the picture and supervise the recording sessions. He was on the set most of the time and was very active in the filming.
Comden: As we would finish sections of the script, we would meet with Roger, read and discuss things, and have him as somebody to bounce off of.
Green: Of course, we were also fortunate to have a guy [at MGM] as ambitious as Gene [Kelly], who had real feelings about the dance and the movies.
Comden: Not just as a performer. Gene was a star, but he was also a director and choreographer.
Green: And of course, [directors] Stanley [Donen] and Vincente [Minnelli]. They were all people of outstanding taste and intelligence and feeling for show business.
Comden: Gene and Stanley are old friends of ours. With them we have a lot of the same frame of reference. They knew our nightclub act very well. They knew our kind of humor, our craziness. . . .
Green: All four of us would laugh at many of the same things. . . .
Comden: The film version of On the Town was the first thing they directed, so it was comfortable for us. We knew we all understood each other. Particularly, for Singin' in the Rain, we put things in the script that might have puzzled a lot of other directors, but knowing us as well as they did, they knew exactly what we wanted. And largely because of them, we had the happy experience of being authors who saw up on the screen what we had written.
What kind of place did writers occupy within the MGM system?
Comden: Well, we were very lucky, because in the Freed unit we were treated very well. I think writers have always suffered a great deal in Hollywood—have had their work rewritten by other people, and so on. We usually did not have that happen to us.
Green: From a creative viewpoint, generally we've been very lucky. In those days we finished the script and it went in front of the camera, instantly.
Comden: We had an office in a big administrative building that they used to call "The Iron Lung." It was a bleak office and we went to work every day about nine o'clock. People always think you go to Hollywood, whee! Playing tennis! Wow! But we worked very hard. All the writers worked very hard. And we worked evenings, too. Almost around the clock.
Green: No one was at us with the whips, but it was a good idea to get the
job done and do it right. Since we loved the movies, we were always aware of the fact that we were writing for movies . We felt the responsibility of it, I think, all the time. We didn't think: "Oh, we'll dash this off and they'll fix it up."
Comden: We always wanted it to be really good.
Green: We were naive enough to think it would be filmed. As it turned out, almost every picture we did, did get filmed.
Comden: No other writers were ever assigned to our pictures, either. We were wonderfully protected by Arthur Freed.
Did musicals have the same stature and standards in Hollywood as on Broadway?
Comden: At that time, a high standard. The Freed unit made marvelous movies and there were other big musicals also being done at MGM. Musicals were big moneymakers then. They had a certain amount of prestige—when they were good.
Did you miss the cultural whirl, the theater world, of New York?
Comden: We never moved out to California to live on a permanent basis. We would go out there and write a picture and then come back East.
Green: We would be there for a number of months—
Comden: —then we'd come back and do a show here.
Green: We could've stayed out there and made all kinds of deals, but we never did, by choice.
Comden: Because we wanted to keep writing for the theater.
Green: And because we lived in New York.
Did you feel that Broadway was more exciting or prestigious work for you, or did you not make that distinction?
Comden: Most people thought the theater was more prestigious in those days, but happily we divided our time. We didn't always, at the beginning, get to do pictures that we were cuckoo about.
Green: We got to like them, after a spell, the early things we wrote.
Was there much creative exchange between MGM writers?
Comden: Not that I recall.
Green: At any rate, not with us. We went inside our office and worked. We might have lunch with Gene [Kelly], or Gene and Stanley [Donen], or Roger [Edens]—just the people we were working with or those people who were our close friends. Then we'd go back into our office and work. We really worked very hard.
Were the members of the Freed unit, the writers, considered interchangeable, or did MGM have you on hand for certain specific strengths or kinds of stories?
Green: We never got to discuss any of that, not analytically.
Comden: You would just get a call and come out to do a movie. We usually didn't know what it was beforehand, specifically.
Did you ever pick the project or suggest a project to Freed that you wanted to write?
Comden: It didn't work that way. We writers just weren't in that position.
Did doing film musicals present any kind of unique structural or creative challenges?
Green: We love films, we've always loved films. We grew up on them.
Comden: We knew the musical structure. We understand almost everything about movies, I think. Certainly musical movies. Adolph is an expert on movies in general. And we both grew up with silent movies, remember. They were a big influence on us. So we were steeped in film. The form didn't present any real problems to us.
Were there movie writers you admired—say, writers of musicals?
Green: We used to think more in terms of movies, not musicals, and not even, I'm afraid, movie writers; we would think more in terms of directors than writers, actually.
Comden: Or the actors. Like [Fred] Astaire. It was wonderful to write a couple of pictures for Astaire, when as kids we had worshipped him.
Green: I dreamed of writing a picture for Fred Astaire!
Did you not feel admiring at all of any Hollywood writers?
Green: We found out about writers. We got to meet them. We found out about their craft from them. We did not know much about writers [at first]. We were moviegoers. Films!
Comden: Directors, we knew. That's always been the case. The names of writers, to this day, are not the ones people know. I'm not saying this is good, but it happens to be a fact. Movie directors and the stars are what you tend to know about.
Can you compare and contrast working with Vincente Minnelli, and [as co-directors] Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, for me?
Comden: Let's see, we did two pictures with Vincente—The Band Wagon and Bells Are Ringing [1960]. Vincente was a highly visual director. It was very important to him where an ashtray was placed; it could not be an eighth of an inch out of the way. He was a great designer of sets and costumes and—
Green: —a terrific sense of humor—
Comden: —with a real feeling for story and character. A wonderful director, a perfectionist.
It's hard to contrast them, isn't it? Stanley and Gene were also the choreographers as well as the directors. But because they were in charge of the entire project, they were naturally involved with visual design as well.
Green: Singin' in the Rain is beautiful to look at.
Comden: Stanley and Gene were terrific storytellers and they were also great with the actors. They too had a terrific sense of humor. With them we had an advantage because we had known them from so far back that we had a kind of shorthand with them and understood each other very well.
From left: Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O'Connor doing what the title
says in the vintage MGM musical, written by Comden and Green, Singin' in the Rain .
(Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
You say a "shorthand"—were your scripts too subtle perhaps for other directors?
Green: I wouldn't say subtle so much as foreign to other directors. Possibly they wouldn't know what we were talking about.
When you had script conferences with Stanley and Gene, what was being discussed? Was it more in the nature of structure rather than characterization?
Green: More structure, yes.
Comden: Not specific lines, but if they were going to change a number—put one number in instead of another—then of course there'd have to be a different lead-in to the scene. We had to stay very close in touch on those things.
Green: Occasionally we'd read our pictures to the stars that were going to be in them. Arthur loved to have Astaire come in and have us read the script to him.
Did Astaire make suggestions?
Green: Not one!
Comden: No. He just enjoyed watching us. He loved to hear us read.
Green: He'd say, "Gee, how am I going to do that, or anything near that?"
Comden: Fred didn't do any writing.
Green: Fred never presumed to be creative in that department.
Comden: But the ones he was creative in, he was very creative.
Green: Very creative indeed! (Laughs .)
Did you have your first conferences with the directors after you had a start on the story, or would they come to you and say, "I would like to do a period piece about the coming of talkies . . ."?
Green: It's a long and complex process, what happens with each director, and something we don't want to go into, not because we're hiding anything, but because the creative beginnings are very fuzzy.
Generally, are not the other people reacting to what you propose? You propose, they dispose?
Comden: We'd write something and then come in and present a certain amount of it to the producer and the director.
Green: In the case of Singin' in the Rain, we were sitting around a lot with Stanley, who:wasn't at the moment doing anything, and we were running old movies, things of that sort, saying, "Gee, how about doing this?" Stanley was in on the genesis, in that sense, worrying along with us both, as friends, and hopefully as a future co-director with Gene of whatever evolved.
How did that picture, for example, get centered around the end of the silent era? Did you have to do a lot of research on the subject?
Comden: We knew the subject pretty well. We didn't have to do any research on it.
Green: We were aware of the silent stars that did not make it to talkies. John Gilbert—one scene [in Singin' in the Rain ] is based on, it seems to me, His Glorious Night [1929], in which he said, "I love you, I love you, I love you . . ." over and over to the heroine—and was laughed off the screen. It was tragic. He was a great star.
Comden: Also, for Singin' in the Rain, we were handed the catalogue of [Nacio Herb] Brown and Freed, which were written for that period—'29, '30, '31. We listened to all of those songs and suddenly realized that they would fit best into a story about that period.
Typically, would you stay around for the filming or for rewriting on the set?
Comden: Often we were there when the picture started, and then we went back to our New York life and to writing in New York. We wrote a couple of added scenes for Singin' in the Rain in the East, and we would get called up for a line, occasionally. We were lucky to work with directors we were very comfortable with, so that once we had left we knew the script was going to be wonderfully handled.
It all sounds so pleasant and easy .
Comden: (Laughs .)
Green: Easy, in retrospect. In the case of Singin' in the Rain, we had endless conferences the first month and a half. We were tempted to go up to the front office and say, "Here's your money back. . . . The whole thing's off. We can't write this goddamned thing."
What was the problem?
Green: The picture. (Laughs .)
Comden: The whole thing.
Green: And then we solved it.
Comden: When a thing is really good, it seems inevitable, it seems natural, and it seems easy.
Green: When Betty and I are at our best as writers, the quality that seems to come across is spontaneity.
Comden: Almost improvisation.
Green: Which is not improvisation. It's very tough work.
When you were at your best, then, was it because there had been a lot of tough work and revision, or because something had come up that was perfect, just a moment, between the two of you?
Comden: Any of the above.
Were there no creative frustrations?
Comden: Some, of course.
Green: Endless! (Laughs .) But there always are.
Comden: And there are limitations. And many departments. It's a collaborative process, after all, so there are always adjustments and negotiations. That's inevitable in any collaborative art form.
Did you feel the encroachment of television, in Hollywood in the fifties, and realize at the time that it was changing everything?
Green: It was just beginning to creep in.
Comden: We used television as a subject in the last MGM movie we did—It's Always Fair Weather . We were well aware of the dreaded tube.
Green: We were also very aware of the fact that divorcement had taken place between studios and theaters, and that's what finished off the studios, actually. More than television.
Comden: They no longer could own movie chains, so it was the breakup of the big studio system.
Green: People were let go by the dozens. It was no longer a necessity to have the staff that had been there forever as part of the studio family.
Comden: MGM had this superb musical department, wonderful people—[composer-arranger] Conrad Salinger, Lenny Hayton [who scored the music for Singin' in the Rain ], [music director] Johnny Green—along with completely perfect costume departments and 'scenery departments. All at your disposal. You knew whatever you wanted, you could get at days' notice. Now that was over. All the departments ceased to exist.
Bells Are Ringing was, in fact, the last picture of the Freed unit. Did you know it at the time?
Comden: I don't think we knew we were doing the last thing; we were just doing it.
Green: We were no longer under contract, in any case.
Comden: MGM had bought the play and brought in Judy Holliday to star in it, which was something we wanted very much. This was totally different from the other movies we did which, apart from On the Town, were original stories for the screen.
After Bells Are Ringing, you went back to Hollywood a couple of times to work on scripts for pictures that were never made?
Green: There was really only one.
Comden: There were two—Wonderland and Say It with Music . They couldn't cast Wonderland .
Green: Oh, yes. That was the Cole Porter catalogue. We wrote a wonderful script (laughs ), but—
Comden: It just didn't get made. We got more focused on living in New York and raising families and writing more for the theater. I don't think we made a conscious decision. It just sort of happened. And more and more time went by.
Which are your favorite pictures?
Comden: Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon . Those two. Is that fair to say?
Green: We feel those two are very special.
Comden: And a picture we're very proud of is It's Always Fair Weather . We wrote the screenplay and an original score with Andre Previn. Again, Gene and Stanley directed, so we had those close creative connections. It's a movie that got wonderful notices. But it came out at a time when the musical era was fading away, and although it got great press, it didn't get the kind of treatment that the other movies had gotten.
That picture was a sort of departure for you, in that you set out to do something different, more serious and to an extent downbeat .
Comden: We didn't think of it that way.
Green: We just got an idea we liked: Three guys meet during the war, they think they'll be friends forever, and years later, when they're reunited for a day, they have to deal with a lot of disillusionment, in the others and in themselves.
Comden: It just seemed like a wonderful theme—the corrosive effect of time. What ten years can do.
Green: The sense of failure in each one, the defiance towards the others.
Comden: That's more serious.
Green: Yes.
Comden: Under- and overtones. (Laughs .)
Was there at all a downside to having been at MGM for so many years?
Comden: Downside?
Green: Well, as the years have gone by there has been a big downside in that we don't own any of our pictures. That's a helluva downside.
Comden: In those days we didn't think about it because we had a contract and worked for a salary, or a set amount per picture. We had no further rights on the pictures. A lot of people think Singin' in the Rain made us rich, but we don't get a penny out of it.
I had assumed you made money from the Twyla Tharp Broadway presentation. Did you have any input at all?
Comden: We don't want to talk about that. (Laughs .) How's that?
Green: Since we didn't own any rights on that picture, it could be sold to anyone.
Did writing together, as partners, come easily for you, at first?
Comden: We never questioned it. It just grew—sort of. At first it grew out of our writing material for the Revuers, out of necessity and then finding out that we could write and that we had lots of ideas and fun writing. After we wrote On the Town, it began to seem natural. I guess we always knew we were meant to be writers.
You know, things weren't planned or thought out [in our career]. I don't remember making decisions. Things kind of happened to us. They rolled over us and we kind of went with them.
When you write together, is one of you the junior partner and the other the senior partner?
Comden: No.
Green: No.
Comden: It's really quite even. We often say that at the end of the day we don't know who contributed what idea or what line. That's quite literally true.
In some collaborations, people have quite different personalities or approaches. Are your backgrounds and personalities so similar, then?
Green: I think it's based on mutual enthusiasms and things we discover that are shared in our backgrounds that sort of light us up.
Comden: Our frame of reference is very similar. We are on the same wavelength and it is sort of instant radar, working out things between us. We find it very easy to work together.
Who is the walker and who is the sitter?
Comden: In the old days I used to hold a pad and do the actual writing down. Now, I use a typewriter—
Green: I pace about—
Comden: I have a carbon, an old-fashioned thing, but it's good to have a carbon, so we each can have a copy at the end of the day. That's the sort of modus operandi. Not very thrilling.
How many drafts do you work on before you're satisfied?
Green: How do we know?
Comden: You never know. It varies wildly.
Green: Of course.
Comden: You think the first time you write it, it's pretty good. (Laughs .) Then you just begin to work on it. . . . And there's always the contribution of the directors, and how the thing is shaped for certain specific performers or actors. And then just getting the script into as perfect shape as possible.
Do you differentiate at all between yourselves in terms of relative strengths or contributions?
Green: No.
The better joke in the tough situation?
Green: No.
Comden: Not really.
Is one of you better at characterization, and the other at structure?
Both: No.
Comden: We're both perfect at everything. (Laughs .)
One a specialist in male characters, the other at female roles?
Green: No, we're both bisexual (chuckles ), writing-wise, that is.
So, you find yourselves interchangeable?
Comden: In terms of the work, yes (chuckles )—our wardrobes, no.
When you reach a block, or an impasse, do you have any tricks or habits that stimulate your ease of mind?
Green: Weeping. (Laughs .)
Comden: Clutching other peoples' lapels. Bemoaning our fates. (Laughs .) There's endless hours of just staring at each other. Endless! Sometimes weeks!
Sharpening your pencils? Going for a long walk?
Comden: Sometimes at the very beginning of a project, when we can't get going, we don't begin at the beginning. That's one little technique. We pick a scene somewhere along the line where we hope we already know the characters, and just write some dialogue. That often gets us moving.
An insignificant or a crucial scene?
Comden: It's hard to say. I think in The Band Wagon the first scene we wrote was on the train where Fred Astaire is going back to New York to do this play. He's a forgotten article, and two businessmen are sitting in a smoker discussing him, this has-been. We started with writing that dialogue between the two businessmen. We didn't know what Fred was going to say. In fact, he doesn't say anything until the very end of the scene—when he lowers his newspaper, lets them know he is there, and walks out.
Green: That stayed in the script.
Comden: It was the sort of thing that might never be in the movie, but it just gave us somewhere to start. We found that a very difficult movie to write, as they all are.
In the cases of Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon—the two you mentioned—was the difficulty enhanced by the fact that partly what you were starting with, from the studio, was a blank page, a totally original script?
Green: That's the entire difficulty in a nutshell.
Comden: Plus there is a stack of music, which makes it even harder. Both of those are catalogue pictures. In other words, we were handed the song catalogues—in the first case, of Singin' in the Rain, of Freed and Brown, and in the second case, of [Arthur] Schwartz and [Howard] Dietz. All we were told was to write a movie and to get twenty or as many as you could of these wonderful songs into a story.
Green: Nothing about period or locale or people.
Comden: No clues.
The whole concept of a catalogue picture was unique to Hollywood of that period .
Green: There's nothing more difficult. It's like higher mathematics.
Comden: Because you don't have a situation and then write a song that will express it, the way you would if you were doing an original show. You have these songs and you are going to have to fit them all together and have it make sense.
You say a lot of people don't identify the writers of films the way they identify directors. But you yourselves have become fairly well known. They will be known as MGM films, always, but many people also know them as Comden-Green films .
Green: We've been very lucky in that sense. Many of our pictures have been given their first showing in New York—
Comden: —usually at the Music Hall—
Green: —with our names up on the marquee: Comden and Green. We're always mentioned in the New York Times reviews. . . .
Comden: We have not been slighted as writers of films. That's been lucky and, I think, unusual.
Do you see your own personalities reflected in the films? Or were they submerged in the process?
Comden: Not very submerged. I think we were allowed to give free rein to the kinds of humor that we like and the ideas that we enjoy.
The optimism, the good nature, of the films?
Comden: We're very gloomy people! (Laughs .)
Would you say, instinct takes over, and your instinct is to entertain?
Green: The fact that we are performers takes over in our writing and, most of the time, in our thinking. A certain kind of energy seems to come through.
Comden: We know what performers need to perform to register—to be effective.
Is some of that inextricably part of the MGM studio style?
Comden: MGM is such an impersonal entity. We were within a specific unit within this big place, and our unit was itself an unusual one.
Green: That was our world, and though we were interested in the rest of MGM, fascinated by it, we never worked outside of the Freed unit.
Comden: We never worked with any other producers at MGM.
A lot of writers like to communicate something about themselves or their lives through their work. Do you see that in your films?
Comden: Well, there are characters in The Band Wagon that everyone thinks are Adolph and me, though they are a married couple in the film, played by Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray—but they are a writing team. We just wanted to put in some of the experiences we had had in the theater and to give it a basis of reality.
Green: Those two characters do reflect something of us.
Comden: Somewhat. But there's another thing about that picture and that's the kind of music we were handed. The Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz score was written mainly for revues of the New York stage—wonderful songs, but they suggested to us a theater background. It isn't that we set out to write about show biz or only draw from our experience. It didn't happen that way. It came out of the nature of the music in the show.
Was it any more gratifying because it did reflect to some extent your own experiences?
Green: We didn't know at that time whether it was satisfying. As usual, we had our backs to the wall.
Comden: And we had to dream up something . We enjoyed just as much working on It's Always Fair Weather, which is a realistic story about three guys, not necessarily of our own background.
Certainly, there are recurrent motifs in your stories—the love of New York City—
Green: Surely. We find that, looking back, the films do represent us and reflect our point of view. No doubt about it.
Do they sometimes surprise you by revealing things to you about yourselves that you regarded, at the time, as just the job of doing your writing?
(Long pause.)
Comden: We never set out to get across on film something about what we are like as people, or about how we feel about life. Instead it was just get up in the morning and go to the office. Instead it was the problems of a jigsaw puzzle—how to fit the songs into the story we were dreaming up. Work!
Green: You sit down to do a job. By the time it's over, if you're lucky, it's been much more than a job. Yes, you've poured a lot of yourself into it, much more than you knew.
Comden: Something has emerged. Maybe. Glinda the Good Fairy—maybe Godzilla.
Both: But it's you .
Garson Kanin: Self-Expression
Interview by Pat McGilligan
When, in 1961, New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons wrote that Garson Kanin's writing "was influenced by Gertrude Stein," author John O'Hara, for one, was highly amused. "There it was," wrote O'Hara in a letter to a friend, "just casually tossed away in a more or less routine paragraph; the answer to the question that has been bothering the literati since dear knows when: who influenced Garson Kanin? People have sat up half the night arguing the question. . . ."
Once upon a time, O'Hara mused, "some stuffy fellow" reading the New Statesman posited the theory that as a matter of fact nobody influenced Garson Kanin. That Kanin was sui generis . "Some pundits have held out for Molière," said O'Hara, "some for Sheridan. Racine has been mentioned. Walter Pater. Corneille, of course." O'Hara himself held no firm opinion. "But nobody had thought of Gertrude Stein!" he exclaimed in wonderment.
For Kanin enthusiasts, there are two major periods of Kanin's work in Hollywood: the years 1938–1941, when he directed seven varied and entertaining films at RKO—a productive stint interrupted by military service and war documentaries; and the years 1946–1954, his heyday as a playwright/screenwriter after World War II.
During the latter period, the redoubtable Kanin wrote, alone or with his wife, actress Ruth Gordon, six enduring motion pictures: A Double Life (1948); Adam's Rib (1949); Born Yesterday (1950), based on his stage hit; The Marrying Kind (1951); Pat and Mike (1952); and It Should Happen to You (1954). (On her own, Ruth Gordon wrote The Actress in 1953, an adaptation of her autobiographical play Years Ago .) Showcased in two of these films (Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike ) was the romantic Hepburn-Tracy screen pairing; and
Garson Kanin in New York City, 1989. (Photo: William B. Winburn)
in four, the comedienne Judy Holliday in show-stealing performances as a birdbrain. All were directed by George Cukor.
The Gordon-Kanin team (for that was the order of their billing) was probably the greatest pure screenwriting collaboration in all Hollywood history—pure because no one rewrote their scripts; because their screen stories were all original; because they never worked under contract; and because director Cukor, a close friend, filmed their scripts as written. The films the Kanins wrote together signaled, to a large extent, the high tide of American sophisticated comedy. No films were (are) more admired by other Hollywood com-
edy writers—few films play as well today, without embarrassing concessions to yesteryear's artificialities.
All the more unfortunate that Gordon and Kanin split up as a scriptwriting team after only four acclaimed movies (and only wrote together once again in their lives, a 1980 made-for-televison feature). All the more inexplicable that Kanin would so completely turn his back on Hollywood, in the early 1950s, to concentrate on theater and books. Kanin's motion picture career after It Should Happen to You was spotty and was usually confined to an adaptation of one of his plays or works of fiction. A brief comeback, at directing, in 1969—his own scripts of Where It's At (1969) and Some Kind of a Nut (1969)—only pointed up how long Kanin had been away.
Something obviously happened to put him off Hollywood. Or was it just that, as he says, his love of the theater was so strong?
Kanin is many things besides the compleat motion picturemaker: an award-winning playwright, a first-rate director of plays and opera, a novelist and short-story professional, a compulsive essayist, a superb memoirist. He is a character in his wonderful book Hollywood, which is one of the best Tinsel-town chronicles in the form of never-ending Sam Goldwyn anecdotage.
We talked in his New York office across the street from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Carnegie Hall, where Kanin had been an eager young acting student in the early 1930s. Nothing fancy about the surroundings: rather modest and worn furnishings; walls decorated with framed photographs and commendations; bookcases piled with stacks and rows of his scripts and books. Born Yesterday was being prepared for a Broadway revival, and rumored as a film vehicle for Whoopi Goldberg.
As the appointed hour neared, Kanin's office assistants rushed to the window and waited to spot the 75-year-old writer as he walked from his nearby Central Park apartment and wended his way across a busy intersection, several stories below.
Garson Kanin (1912–) (and Ruth Gordon, 1896–1985)
1938
A Man to Remember (Garson Kanin). Director only.
Next Time I Marry (Garson Kanin). Director only.
1939
The Great Man Votes (Garson Kanin). Director only.
Bachelor Mother (Garson Kanin). Director only.
1940
My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin). Director only.
They Knew What They Wanted (Garson Kanin). Director only.
1941
Tom, Dick and Harry (Garson Kanin). Director only.
1942
Woman of the Year (George Stevens). Uncredited contribution.
Fellow Americans (Garson Kanin). OEM (Office of Emergency Management) production.
Ring of Steel (Garson Kanin). OEM production.
1943
A Lady Takes a Chance (William A. Seiter). Uncredited contribution.
The More the Merrier (George Stevens). Uncredited contribution.
1944
Battle Stations (Garson Kanin). OWI (Office of War Information) production.
Night Stripes (Garson Kanin). OWI production.
Salute to France (Garson Kanin, Jean Renoir). OWI production.
1945
The True Glory (Garson Kanin, Carol Reed). OWI production.
1946
From This Day Forward (John Berry). Adaptation.
1948
A Double Life (George Cukor). Co-story, co-script, with Ruth Gordon.
1949
Adam's Rib (George Cukor). Co-story, co-script, with Ruth Gordon.
1950
Born Yesterday (George Cukor). Adapted from his Broadway play, uncredited contribution to film script.
1951
The Marrying Kind (George Cukor). Co-story, co-script, with Ruth Gordon.
1952
Pat and Mike (George Cukor). Co-story, co-script, with Ruth Gordon.
1954
It Should Happen to You (George Cukor). Story, script.
1956
The Girl Can't Help It (Frank Tashlin). Based on his short story "Do Re Mi."
1960
High Time (Blake Edwards). Co-script.
The Rat Race (Robert Mulligan). Script, based on his play.
1961
The Right Approach (David Butler). Based on his play The Live Wire .
1969
Some Kind of a Nut (Garson Kanin). Director, story, script.
Where It's At (Garson Kanin). Director, script, based on his novel.
1974
That's Entertainment! (Jack Haley, Jr.). Script.
1993
Born Yesterday (Luis Mandoki). Remake of 1950 film.
Plays include Born Yesterday, The Smile of the World, The Rat Race, The Live Wire, The Amazing Adele, Fledermaus, Do Re Mi, The Good Soup,
A Gift of Time, Come On Strong, Remembering Mr. Maugham, Dreyfus in Rehearsal, Peccadillo, and Time and Chance .
Television credits include "Born Yesterday" (adapted and co-directed, 1956), "Mr. Broadway," "An Eye on Emily" pilot, "Something to Sing About," "The He-She Chemistry," "Josie and Joe" pilot, "Scandal" (adapted from Movieola, 1980), "The Scarlett O'Hara War" (adapted from Movieola, 1980), and "Hardhat and Legs" (written with Ruth Gordon, 1978).
Novels include Blow Up a Storm, The Rat Race, Cast of Characters (collected short stories), Where It's At, A Thousand Summers, One Hell of an Actor, Movieola, Smash, and Cordelia?
Non-fiction includes Remembering Mr. Maugham; Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate. Memoir; Hollywood, It Takes a Long Time to Become Young; and Together Again! Hollywood's Great Movie Teams .
Academy Awards include best-script nominations for A Double Life, Adam's Rib, and Pat and Mike . His co-directed wartime documentary The True Glory received the Oscar for best documentary in 1945.
Writers Guild awards include script nominations for Adam's Rib, Born Yesterday, The Marrying Kind, Pat and Mike, and It Should Happen to You .
Ruth Gordon's solo plays include Over 21, Years Ago, The Leading Lady, and A Very Rich Woman .
Ruth Gordon's books include Myself Among Others, My Side, An Open Book, and Shady Lady .
Ruth Gordon's films (solo writing credit, without Garson Kanin) include The Actress (play basis, screenplay, directed by George Cukor, 1953) and Rosie! (play basis, directed by David Lowell Rich, 1968).
Ruth Gordon died on August 28, 1985. In reviewing her life and career, the New York Times commented that she was at heart "a seaman's daughter" who "never tired of exploration or conquest."
You speak in your various memoirs, particularly Hollywood, about falling in love with motion pictures at a very tender age. I remember your description of your feelings when you owned your first Brownie camera. But you do not talk much about when you first started reading and writing, or when you might have owned your first typewriter .
Reading—we always read. My father's idea of a gift for his children was a book. He hardly ever bought us anything but books. I remember when my father first got us The Book of Knowledge, about twenty-five or thirty volumes
(I think) broken up into various categories for young people. We sat down and read the whole damn thing from beginning to end. It took six months.
I was always a reader, from a very, very early age. The writing developed professionally rather late, because I had other careers that came before it. In a nonprofessional way, the writing began early on. My brother, Michael, and I were constantly making up sketches and performing them, even in grammar school, and writing what amounted to short plays.
Like most Jewish boys, I was destined to become a lawyer. That was what you did. You became either a lawyer or a doctor.
I was supposed to become a lawyer and I pretended that I was going in that direction, but it didn't last very long, because shortly after I graduated from grammar school and started to go to high school, the Depression hit very hard. I left school and I went to work.
My first job was as a Western Union messenger. Then I had other jobs clerking and as a delivery boy, and finally I wound up at R. H. Macy and Co., where I worked for over a year as a stock boy in the silverware department. All this time, I was playing saxophone and clarinet in little bands, mainly to make some money, on Saturday or Sunday nights at clubs, for dances and weddings. From that experience, I conceived the idea of being a musician. The only thing that stood in the way was that I had no particular talent for it. I just wasn't a very good saxophone player.
In order to hang on to my jobs as a saxophone player, I had to be the one that got up and did the funny numbers or the songs.
That led to other things—to performing and to playing in vaudeville. And I began to be aware, more and more, of the Broadway theater, the legitimate theater, and that interested me greatly.
Why?
It just fascinated me. We always went to the theater. I remember, vividly, going to the theater with my mother and father, and I would sit up on the arm of the seat. I was maybe four, five years old.
It was affordable?
My parents always found the money. We were not poor people per se. My father was very able, and there were times when we were really quite affluent. He was in the real estate business, a builder. That business has its ups and downs. It was feast or famine all through my early days.
But along the way, the theatrical impulse became very strong. At the first opportunity I had, I learned about the American Academy of Dramatic Arts right across the street here in Carnegie Hall. That excited me very much. So I went to the academy, and after that I went into the theater as an actor. I was very lucky, very successful, hardly ever unemployed. Those also were the early days of radio, so you could supplement your income by, all day, running around to different networks and doing radio programs. Not very much money—
five, six, eight dollars a program. There was no AFTRA [American Federation of Television and Radio Artists] in those days.
Were you writing at all in those days?
Not much.
Not even thinking about it?
No. Single-minded, I was just interested in being the greatest actor in the world. Then I began to face the realities, which were that I wasn't going to get sufficient opportunities as an actor. By that time I was working for [producer-director] George Abbott.[*] I had been in several plays for him, and I admired him very much. More or less, I insinuated myself on him and became his assistant, and I was his assistant for about four years. I put on all the road companies, did most of the casting, began to be his play reader, and made myself generally useful. I was good at that and built up a kind of reputation as being a bright kid around Broadway.
What, primarily, did you learn from Abbott—producing or directing?
Directing. I was never interested in producing, anymore than I am now. Too much business involved in that.
So, what is it you learned from Abbott?
A standard of excellence. Precision. A whole methodology of directing. When I directed road companies for him, I was sort of imitating his method—his way of getting the play on, his ideas of pace, his ideas of cutting out the boredom, of keeping it moving and keeping it alive.
Was it reinforcing your native comic sensibility, working on such hit stage comedies as Room Service and Boy Meets Girl?
Oh, I have no idea. I would not be the judge of that at all.
By working with entire scripts, as opposed to vaudeville bits or radio parts, were you learning dramatic structure?
Subliminally, I suppose, yes. I wasn't studying it in any way, except by osmosis. I was putting in long, long hours. I was going to the theater incessantly. I went every single night and to all the matinees, and over a period of eight or nine years, I'm sure I saw every single thing on which the curtain was raised in the city of New York—and a lot out of town.
My position with George Abbott led, quite easily and logically and simply, to an offer from Sam Goldwyn to come out and learn the movie business and work in motion pictures.
* One of the giants of twentieth-century show business, Abbott wrote, directed, and produced hit Broadway shows dating from the 1920s. Many of his plays were adapted into popular films. Abbott worked intermittently in Hollywood, collaborated on the script of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), produced some films (among them Boy Meets Girl, 1938), and directed a handful of others (including film versions of his own stage musicals, The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, both co-directed by Stanley Donen).
So now I was in Hollywood working for Sam Goldwyn, but that was a kind of Tiffany studio. He only made very classy, important pictures. He somehow had a misconception about me. He had it in his mind that he was going to develop me as an assistant to himself. A nice man—I liked him very much—and eventually he liked me. But he had no idea, or at least he never listened when I told him, that I was interested in being a director.
When I finished a year with him, I thought that was enough. By that time I had acquired a kind of training, an expertise, that I couldn't have got any other way, because in'36 or '37, when all this was happening, there was no such thing as the American Film Institute, there was no such thing as a film course at any university in the United States, there was no such thing as film being taught as it is now.
Was it a psychological leap for you to go from Broadway to film?
No. I was never as interested in film as an art form per se as I was in the theater. Which is still quite true. The theater is my love and my life and my wife, and the movies are a mistress. A very delightful mistress, and a very valuable mistress—but no, I consider myself a theater animal.
But I had a good time in Hollywood, working first for Goldwyn. When I wanted to leave him after a year, he was rather irritated with me. I told him I was interested in directing, and I never would get an opportunity there with him, and eventually he understood that.
So I left his employ on a Saturday—in those days, in Hollywood, we would work a six-day week, with only one day off, Sunday. And I went to work at RKO on Monday. There, things went a little better, and after about six months there, I eventually wormed my way into directing my first picture.
In your various memoirs, I don't detect much nostalgia or warmth toward your RKO years .
Oh, you are wrong. I was given tremendous opportunities that I took full advantage of.
Was that because of someone like Pandro Berman, who was head of production, giving you such creative license?
Partly—Pandro was head of the studio most of the time—not all of the time. He was a very nice man.
I had met a fellow by the name of Robert Sisk, who had been the chief press agent for the Theatre Guild in New York. In my theater days, working for Abbott, I had come to know Bob Sisk. We were theater friends. When I came to RKO, he had become an RKO producer. We used to see each other and lunch together once in a while. Dalton Trumbo was writing a picture for him. I got to know Trumbo—who had an adjoining office to mine. We used to talk late into the night.
I got to talking about this picture he was writing. It wasn't called A Man to Remember [1938]; that's the title I put on it later. We talked and talked and, as people do when they talk, I sparked some ideas from him, and he
from me, and at the end of that process, he said to me, "How would you like to direct this picture?" I said, "I'd like to if they let me. Do you think they'd let me . . . ?" He said, "Let's go and talk to Bob Sisk."
No one seemed to have any objection. Because I was very cheap—I think I was getting $400 a week, which was nothing from Hollywood in those days. Actually, on my first picture, the cameraman was making more money than me; he was making $800 a week. That didn't bother me. I would have paid them for the opportunity.
So began my whole work as a film director, and in that stretch I think I did seven pictures.
In your period at Goldwyn, when you were studying films and filmmaking behind the scenes, and then later at RKO, were you growing interested in a career as a screenwriter, now that you were working with writing and keeping company with writers more?
I just wanted to be a director. Something has to be remembered here, and that is that the director occupies the important creative position in Hollywood, even today. I deplore it, I think it's a fake, I think it's a mistake, I think it's terribly unfair. You can imagine how I feel when I pick up, say, the New Yorker magazine and in the front are all the listings of the revival pictures. Adam's Rib is always listed—they're crazy about Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike . And they always refer to it as "George Cukor's Adam's Rib." "George Cukor's Pat and Mike." It's always the director who has that possessive on a picture.
Quickly in Hollywood I got the idea that the director is the kingpin, and that was the thing to be. The directors were the royalty and everyone else was small fry. That still obtains, I'm sorry to say.
Were you dabbling at scripts at night?
I always worked with the writers. From the very beginning, from the first picture with Dalton Trumbo. I worked with him daily, I made a lot of suggestions and cuts, I had a lot of ideas, and we had a lot of quarrels; but they were professional quarrels, not personal ones.
It was the same when my wife and I were writing films together. In real life we never quarreled at all. But when we were writing together, we quarreled incessantly. It's part and parcel of the profession, which is why I don't collaborate, because I don't have the energy or the time or the patience to go through quarrels, disagreements, fights, and compromises. I could never be induced to collaborate again.
Can you tell me something about the RKO writers you worked with? I am thinking of Trumbo, but also of a writer who is not so well known today, John Twist, with whom you worked on two films and who had such a long and intermittently fruitful career .[*]
* John Twist could boast over seventy-five script credits over his extended Hollywood career. He won an Academy Award for his short subject La Cucaracha in 1934. Apart from helpingwrite The Great Man Votes and Next Time I Marry, both directed by Garson Kanin for RKO in 1938, Twist often worked as an adjunct to director Raoul Walsh. His other screenplay credits include The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1937), Bombardier (1943), Sinbad the Sailor (1947), Colorado Territory (1949), So Big (1953), The Big Trees (1952), Serenade (1956), The FBI Story (1959), and None but the Brave (1965).
John Twist was a darling fellow in every way. He was an adorable hack. I don't think he took his writing very seriously. He took his assignments very seriously. And he was very good at playing the political studio game. Everybody liked him. He would be called in on pictures and sometimes originate them. In terms of what he was asked to do, he was extremely good, very productive, very swift—oh, there were many years in which he did six or seven pictures a year.
When George Abbott, my old boss, came out to do pictures—he never did very much in film; I don't think he was very interested in pictures—he came to RKO at one point, strangely enough where I was already established as a sort of hotshot. Now our positions were reversed: he was the tyro, I was the old experienced fella. He came to me and asked me for advice, and I immediately suggested John Twist, and indeed John went to work for Abbott on that picture with him, starring, I believe, Lucille Ball [Too Many Girls, 1940].
Dalton [Trumbo] was a first-class, A-one, fine American writer. I think if he hadn't gotten caught up in the movie business in the way that he did, economically, he would have become a much more important writer than he turned out to be. As you know, he had at least one extremely successful book—Johnny Got His Gun —a memorable book. And he wrote some plays that were less successful.
Playwrighting is a difficult mystique. I remember my master and mentor Thornton Wilder once saying to a group of friends, "Playwrighting is not an intellectual pursuit. Nor is it particularly a literary pursuit. I know some very fine and successful plays that have been written by dopes, by near-illiterates." I didn't appreciate the fact that he was looking right at me as he said all this.
Yet it's quite true. You cannot imagine a man who does not have a solid, sound literary background sitting down to write a good or successful novel. To write a good novel or even to write a passable novel is an extremely difficult job. It takes long preparation. But Thornton was right: I have known some very lowbrow, near-illiterate guys who wrote successful plays. Writing plays is something quite different from writing a novel or short story.
I knew you were friends with Thornton Wilder. I hadn't realized you had such a close relationship with him that you regard him as your mentor .
I met Thornton Wilder when I was still an actor. I Was playing an important part in a play by Robert Ardrey called House on Fire, which was produced and directed by the great Arthur Hopkins.[*] Thornton Wilder had been a teacher
* Robert Ardrey had a remarkable career. Apart from several successful Broadway plays, he also wrote notable screenplays for They Knew What They Wanted (directed by Kanin, 1940), The Three Musketeers (1948), Madame Bovary (1949), The Wonderful Country (1959), and Khar -toum (1966), among others. Also a novelist, later in life Ardrey wrote acclaimed and influential anthropological works, including African Genesis (1961), The Territorial Imperative (1966), and The Social Contract (1970). His 1935 play, House on Fire, is not listed among Ardrey's theater credits in some sources because it never ultimately made it to Broadway.
of Robert Ardrey's at the University of Chicago, and one weekend he came to New York to see a run-through of the play. Robert Ardrey took me to lunch with him. Thornton didn't think I was any good in the play and he told me so, so that didn't make a big hit with me, but on reflection I saw that he was right, and I followed many of his suggestions. I got better in the play.
On that weekend we became great friends. Thornton Wilder was basically an educator. That's what it said on his passport: It didn't say "playwright" or "novelist," it said "educator." He considered that his playwrighting and novel-writing were a kind of avocation. I think he was wrong about that, but that was his perception of himself.
When he heard that I had never gone to college, he was astonished. When I told him I hadn't gone to high school much, except for a few months, he was absolutely appalled. Not only that, but worried. He'd say, "What is going to become of you? You're not equipped for life . . ."
He helped me. He really took me in hand. And he stayed my friend for close to forty years. Coincidentally, when Ruth and I were married, it turned out that Thornton. Wilder was her closest friend in the world, so that was a bond. The three of us would meet frequently, we traveled a lot together to Europe, and then of course Ruth did his play The Matchmaker, and that brought us together a lot too.
Did you learn a lot about writing as a result of your friendship with him?
He really was the one who encouraged me to write to begin with. First, he wanted me to write a journal. I used to tell stories about things that had happened in the theater, and he'd say, "Write that down. Make that into a story." So I did. I did that more and more. Finally, when I was in the army, I was complaining to him about the major essence of trouble about being in the army—the boredom. The drills, the chores, the ditch-digging, the basic training were so boring. And Thornton said, "I think you could relieve that boredom by doing something creative. Why don't you write something?"
By this time I had already directed a number of movies and I was equipped. So I wrote a lot of movies and sold them, too, and was able to bridge those years by writing movies, not always using my own name, of course, because I was so terrified of the army roles. All of the work that I did during the war while I was in the service, both in the United States and overseas, was done sub rosa, because first as an enlisted man and then later as an officer, it would have been improper for me to take any screen credit.
Movies that, even today, do not bear your credit or are not known to have been written by you?
Some of them. . . . Then I began to write a movie based on some experi-
ences I'd had in Washington when I was stationed there, in the O.S.S., for about a year, during which time I was married. I wrote this serious exposé about Washington—I hadn't thought of writing a comedy. It turned into a comedy without my meaning for it do so. It turned into Born Yesterday . The first play I directed after the war was The Rugged Path by Robert E. Sherwood, starring Spencer Tracy, but Born Yesterday turned out to be the first play I ever directed that I had also written.
So, Born Yesterday was your first concerted, serious piece of writing from beginning to end?
Yes.
That late in your career?
Yes.
I know that during the period at Goldwyn, when you studied filmmaking and studied the films of great directors, you professed admiration for John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and a few other directors. Did you have gods among the screenwriters?
No. Because they weren't gods. They were workaday men.
Not even people like Ben Hecht or Robert Sherwood or Sidney Howard—the best of them—people whom you worked with or who were in Hollywood, screenwriting, at the same time as you?
The three that you've mentioned, they went to Hollywood to make a few bucks. They weren't really interested in film per se. Ben Hecht became interested in films a little bit later when he and Charlie MacArthur set up a studio here on Long Island to make a string of pictures. But basically they were in the business of screenwriting to make money. Bob Sherwood was never very interested in pictures. He was a playwright. That is what he did.
Why do you think you developed in the direction of comedy, so that a story like Born Yesterday would turn into a comedy even as you were writing it? Did your comedic bent have anything to do with your upbringing?
I've never thought about that. I just think I'm a cheerful, funny guy. I don't take life all that seriously. I can see the funny side of almost anything, and I enjoy making other people laugh. And I find it much more enjoyable to write in a comic vein.
If I could define what is for me the ideal style and the ideal accomplishment, it is to treat a serious subject lightly. I feel I succeeded with Born Yesterday . It's a very serious play—and it's funny. I've tried to do that again and again, and I've never succeeded as well as I did that time, but I still try. To write a comedy which is a lot of jokes doesn't interest me at all. I don't mind making jokes in real life, but in the theater I prefer a play to be something far more substantial. It ought to be laughter based on something a little more meaty.
When you were writing Born Yesterday, your first from-start-to-finish piece of work, was it hard for you?
From left: cast members Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, and William Holden in
the film version of Born Yesterday, the serious play that turned into a comedy during
the writing because Garson Kanin was having "a whale of a time."
(Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
No. I had a whale of a time. I was in the army and I didn't have much free time, but I wrote evenings, after my work was done, until I got bleary, and weekends when I had no duties. I found that very enjoyable, as I do to this day. For me, there's nothing more deeply and thoroughly enjoyable in life than writing. That's the apex of true enjoyment. I know how many writers talk about the torture of it all and how difficult it is and how they sweat blood and how they can hardly bear to face that empty page. I'm sure it's true. I don't think they're pretending. I'm sure there are many writers who find writing extremely difficult. I'm not saying I find it easy . It's not easy at all. But I do find it enjoyable.
Were you surprised to find it so enjoyable? After so many years as an actor, as an assistant director in the theater, then as a motion picture director—to come around to something that you had, until then, never truly considered?
Absolutely. I thought writers were those poor sobbing creatures locked in their rooms, suffering. I had no idea writing could be so enjoyable.
Do you feel that World War II affected or deepened your comic point of view? I think there is a qualitative leap in your RKO films and then in the later films that you wrote or co-wrote, a maturity as well as a sober quality .
George Stevens once told me that, after being with the photographic unit that liberated the concentration camp prisoners at Dachau, he could never quite bring himself to direct a comedy again .
I'm not aware of that in my case. That's for others to look at, examine, interpret. I have no objective sense of what I do. I do it deeply and automatically, which is a result of the teaching I got from Thornton Wilder. When I sit down to write, I don't have any idea what I'm going to write. As I told you, when I sat down to write Born Yesterday, it was going to be a serious play. It turned into a comedy.
The same thing happens when I write novels. Things happen in the novels that astonish me. I can't believe they're happening when they do. As Thornton used to put it, "When you sit down to write, you never know what's going to run down your sleeve." Because if you're truly writing fiction or plays well, you're writing with your unconscious. If you are writing imaginative literature of any kind, whether it's poetry or plays or films or novels, it's inside of you, somewhere.
To give you an example: What makes people laugh? Only one thing, not two: surprise. That's the only thing that ever makes me laugh, or makes anyone laugh. However, it's not as simple as it sounds for a writer, because there are perhaps 200,000 different kinds of surprises and variations on surprises. But any time an audience laughs, it is because it's been surprised by the use of a word, by a piece of business, by a look.
So the question is, If you're writing and you suddenly laugh, if it is true that you only laugh at surprises, how can you laugh at something you yourself have written? The answer is, you didn't know you were going to write it a moment before you wrote it. You were writing along in an unconscious way. Your conscious mind observes it, your eyes see it, your sensibility digests it quickly, and it makes you laugh, because you really are surprised at what you wrote. That's one of the most important lessons of writing anything. People who write strictly on a conscious level do not write well.
Do you have any advice as to how to get to that unconscious level?
You have to learn that for yourself.
On the other hand, I can remember in one of your books that you wrote about staying up late on coffee and Benzedrine in Hollywood—one of the few screenwriters I've talked to who will admit to any kind of stimulant. Are there other tricks that you have to get the creative juices flowing?
Certainly not coffee and Benzedrine. I haven't had coffee for years. And Benzedrine was for emergencies, when you couldn't stay awake.
Do you have any pragmatic suggestions?
The most important thing is concentration. The two enemies of any kind of creative work are interruption and distraction. Which is why so many writers feel they have to go away somewhere. When you sit down to write, you have to make a journey, a journey from the real world into the world of the
imagination. Part of learning the lesson is learning how. I cannot advise young writers on how to make that journey into the imaginative self. I can tell them what other people have done. I can tell them what I do. It's not really going to help them until they find their own way.
Now, Ernest Hemingway had a very exact system. Ernest Hemingway always wrote on blocks of paper with pencil. When he had finished work, usually in the late afternoon, he would pick up a handful of his pencils and he would slam them down on his desk, successfully breaking every point of the pencils. Then he would throw the pencils down on the desk and leave his workroom, and he wouldn't see that room again until the following morning.
When he got up in the morning, he'd get some air and eat some breakfast and do whatever else it was he had to do; then he would go into his study and close the door and sit down at the desk. He had some penknives that he especially liked. He used to acquire them all the time and carry them everywhere. He would pick up one of his favorite penknives and he would pick up the first pencil and he would very carefully, laboriously, brilliantly, carve a perfect point on that pencil. Then he would lay it down. Sometimes he would pause and sharpen his knife; that would be another little distraction. Then he would pick up the next pencil and put another point on it.
He told me once that sometimes it would take four, five pencils—he said on some days when he had a hangover it might take seven or eight pencils to be sharpened—but somewhere along the line, when he finished sharpening either the fifth or the sixth or the eighth pencil, he would put down the penknife and he would pick up the pencil and he would begin to write again.
Thornton Wilder had a way. Thornton Wilder used to get up in the morning and he always liked to go where people were to have breakfast—a lunch counter or a diner. He'd have breakfast and talk to a lot of people; then he would go home and read over the last chunk of material that he had written. Then he would go for a walk. And as he walked, he would mumble to himself some of the passages that he had just read, and he would project his imagination into future roads of that material, and when he felt excited enough, he would go home, go into his study, pick up his pen, and begin to write.
Willa Cather had an interesting mnemonic device. She used to read a chapter of the Bible every morning before she went to work. Sometimes more than one. When she finished reading, she'd put the Bible down and go to work.
But, as you can observe, each of these mnemonic devices—
Wouldn't help anyone else —
They might, they might. Each one was a bridge from real life and the laundry list, from the bellyaches, from the argument with the wife, from the frustration of some idea, from an unfortunate headline in the newspaper—which [reading the newspaper], by the way, is a great mistake. If you're a writer, what you have to do is get up in the morning and go to work. It's best to have nothing interfere, no conversation, certainly no newspaper, no tele-
vision, no listening to news on the radio. You should get as soon as possible from your one form of unconsciousness to the next form of unconsciousness, and not have too much intervene.
I remember Somerset Maugham once said he worked every day for four hours. Ruth pointed to this great big shelf of his work and said, "You mean to tell me that all of that was accomplished by just working four hours a day?" He said, "I never worked more than four hours a day. . . ." Then he raised a finger and said, "But—never less." So working four hours a day, he accomplished, as we know, one of the greatest bodies of work in English literature, comprised of novels, a couple hundred short stories, many works of nonfiction, criticism, and articles on every conceivable subject, including bridge, on which he was a great expert. And he only worked four hours a day.
Does the way you get started, as an individual, differ from the way you and Ruth got started in the morning, as a team?
We would always simply read over the previous day's work, just to get the "join."
My own way is to write one page of journal. Journal—meaning anything that comes into my head. Maugham was asked by Ruth, "What if you sit down one morning at your desk and you can't think of anything to write?" And he said, "Well, my dear, in that case, I sit down and write, 'W. Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham' . . . until something occurs to me, and it always does." In other words, he was saying to Ruth, the motor of actually writing itself.
Like calisthenics, warming up .
That's right. I'm very interested in this particular subject. These days, as you know, we are in the midst of a kind of mechanical revolution, and we have word processors, screens, printers, and all kinds of new devices. My associates here in the office use them. I'm a demon reviser—everything I write is written seven, eight, nine, ten drafts—and they tell me that for going throughout and making revisions, [these devices are] extremely useful and helpful, but I haven't ever touched one. Nor do I intend to. I'm an expert typist, and that's as far as I want to go.
I'm the president of the Authors League of America, and I preside at the council and annual meetings, so I know a lot of writers. In the last couple of years, it's astonishing how much they've been talking about their word processors. It's almost as though they're talking about mistresses; they're talking the way writers used to talk about girls. They criticize each other's choices, and they have very sophisticated and esoteric combinations of the typewriter and the printer and the kind of paper they prefer to use. One very important drama critic told me that if he didn't have his word processor, he couldn't write!
Somerset Maugham never wrote anything except with a fountain pen and a block of paper. Then you think of Charles Dickens and everything he turned
out: everything was written . Or Balzac—we know that is how Balzac wrote because he only wrote at night. He was a terribly social man and he lived on excitement—parties and balls, theater, and opera. So he was out every night of his life, and he would come home at midnight or beyond, he Would brew an enormous pot of coffee, and then he would sit down and write till daybreak. Then at daybreak he would go to sleep until the afternoon. Then he would get up, take care of some business, and then get ready for the next social event.
Of course, he died at forty-nine, so it's not such a hot recommendation for his routine, but he did turn out an enormous number of books. And that wasn't easy, because he used to rewrite incessantly. He rewrote so much that finally there was not a single publisher in France who would publish him. They would set up his work and send him the galleys, and he would rewrite the whole damn thing in galleys. They'd set it up with corrections and send the galleys back, and he'd rewrite it again. By the time they got him into print, he had used up seven or eight sets of galleys, which made the cost prohibitive and which is what drove him into publishing his own work at his own expense.
The methods of writing are extremely individual, but I'm sure if I spent ten minutes digging into this, I could tell you a dozen more names of important writers, novelists, playwrights, poets, who never in their lives used anything but a fountain pen and a block of paper. . . .
Are you saying this technology is negative for writers?
I don't know enough about it, but I think it would be worth the examination of some scholar. Because when they talk about speed—that's not the point, to write fast. The idea is to write deeply and clearly and well. And anything that promotes what I call facility is, I think, probably in the end working against the depth.
When, exactly, and why did you and Ruth start collaborating as writers?
I was in the army for five and a half years and overseas for over two of those years, and we had just been married. When I came back [to the United States], it just seemed that if I went to work in the normal way, say, writing and directing movies in California, and she went to work in her normal way, being an actress in the theater in New York, we'd be separated again, or still, and we wouldn't see each other. I was going to write something, an idea I had in the army, a theater subject—a Ronald Colman picture called A Double Life —and I said to Ruth, "Why don't we write it together?" It meant that we could be around each other all the time: get up in the morning and go to work together and talk together.
That simple?
Yes. So we wrote that. We intended just to write that one together, and then she was going on with her own stuff and I with mine. But it turned out
to be a big hit. Ronald Colman won the Academy Award and we were nominated ourselves. Big stuff. Pretty soon we were asked to do another picture together, and we did Adam's Rib with Tracy and Hepburn—and that was an even bigger hit. We were sort of hooked into writing as a team for a couple of years.
Was it a great leap for you and Ruth to decide to write together?
Ruth had always written. She was a published writer for some time before I was.[*] She had written many, many articles for the Atlantic Monthly, and she has since written lots of books and plays.
But was it a risk and a challenge for you to set aside your careers and reputations, individually, and to collaborate as one?
Oh, always, But I suspect collaboration as a real form of what I call expression—which is what all real writing should be, self-expression—always falls short. I cannot name a single fine novel or great novel that was written in collaboration, can you? Has there ever been a great poem written in collaboration? Even a short story?
How does it happen that so many plays are written in collaboration? It's because one person may have the theatrical expertise. He might be a director or an actor; many actors used to collaborate on plays with writers and take the credit and a share of the profits. But I'm not sure how many really fine plays have been written in collaboration, either. That is not to say, successful plays. We know of, say, the example of Kaufman and Hart. Or Lindsay and Crouse. But I mean, really fine plays.
How did yours and Ruth's strengths and weaknesses complement each other in the writing?
Her strength was always tremendous, tremendous theatrical expertise. She knew more about the theater than anybody that I ever encountered in my life. And she, being a very great actress, could recognize the strengths and the weaknesses in a role, so that she wouldn't allow a part in any of our films to be anything less than a wonderful acting part. Not only the female roles, but especially the female parts—it was almost as though she was going to act them herself. Was it a good enough part? Was the part boring? Was it consistent? Was it flat? Did it lack variety or humor? And she always stuck with that idea of what was going to make a good part. That was a tremendous strength in writing films.
What were your particular strengths?
Well, I'm good at that too. (Laughs .) We both just slugged away at all of them with everything we had.
Norman Krasna told me that in a collaboration one person is always the
* In the 1930s and 1940s, leading up to her marriage and writing partnership with Garson Kanin, Ruth Gordon wrote articles for Literary Digest, Forum, Reader's Digest, Scholastic, and Atlantic Monthly . She made her debut as a playwright with Over 21 in 1944. Her autobiographical play, Years Ago, followed two years later (see credits for a complete listing of her plays).
junior partner and one is the senior. Who was the junior partner in your collaboration?
Moss Hart used to say, "In a collaboration, there's always a sitter and a walker. One guy sits at the typewriter and the other guy walks." In his collaboration with George S. Kaufman, I think Moss was the sitter and Kaufman was the walker. In the case of Ruth and me, we used to talk, talk, talk, talk endlessly, and then after the talking I would put it down on paper. Then, after it was down, she would go over it and revise it extensively. Or sometimes there would be scenes which she had dreamed up or created, and she would do the first draft of those.
It was a very eclectic way of working, without any particular system. I think systems in writing are created out of the necessity, aren't they? Created out of the necessity of the moment, of the deadline, or of where you are in the world physically. When we were in the country, we used to get up at six o'clock in the morning and go to work very early on. . . .
What is it about having been an actor—or, in Ruth's case, an actress—that helps one so tremendously in the writing?
Because what you're doing is acting out all the parts all the time, unconsciously. Digging down, you'll find there is a long, long list—from Molière on (Molière was a wonderful actor)—of actors who became the very best dramatists.
Being an actor gives you an insight into characterizations?
I suppose so. It is also just writing good parts, which is the essence of writing a play or a film. You have to write good parts for actors to play. If you don't, you're not going to get good actors.
Usually, if you write one smashing part in a play, it can be enough, if the other parts are at least adequate. It's been pointed out to me, what makes Born Yesterday what it is, is that it has not only one marvelous part, but two and sometimes three—if they're lucky in the casting of the third part. They're good acting parts.
And I would say to young playwrights, especially, don't worry so much about the story. There are no original stories. All the stories have been told in one form or another. The only thing that makes a successful play is the delineation of character. Be sure you write good parts. Interesting, dramatic, amusing, romantic—it's the characters that make the play.
Were your characters, to some extent, alter egos for yourselves?
Ruth's play Years Ago, since it was an autobiographical play, her vision of herself at 17 or 18, was indeed a self-portrait. Over 21, her wartime play, was also highly autobiographical, about herself and me, her experiences as an army wife.
As you write, how can you avoid the autobiographical strain? You're only one person, you see everything with your own sensibility and your own reactions; so all writing is to an extent autobiographical. And you shouldn't be
afraid of that. You shouldn't be afraid of revealing yourself. The more you reveal yourself, the better, in a way.
Isn't that the best part of the fun of writing, that self-discovery?
It's a tremendous release. I think writing, if it's done right, is the healthiest thing I know of as a human activity, whether you're a professional writer or not. I think everybody ought to write a diary or a journal or letters to friends. It amounts to self-expression, and self-expression is extremely healthy.
Did MGM put any special demands on you, when you wrote for Tracy and Hepburn?
You have to remember I've never been employed as a screenwriter. Nor was Ruth. Neither one of us, individually, or as a team, were employed for so much as a single day as writers by any motion picture studio, ever. All we ever did was write original screenplays and sell them. To this day, that's all I do in the movie business. I have never worked on other people's material and I am not employable as such.
That was our method, so that we could write freely, for ourselves. And in the case of Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike, of course, we had Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in mind as potential players. As it happened, Pat and Mike was first rejected by the studio and only after a year or so did they reconsider. In the meantime, we felt that we did not want to sell it elsewhere because it had been so specifically designed for Tracy and Hepburn that any substitution would have diminished it.
Was it an advantage for you and Ruth, on your films together, that your director, George Cukor, didn't write?
There have not been many writer-directors. Clearly, that's the ideal. I think the best we have ever produced in America is Preston Sturges. That is because he wrote every word and directed brilliantly. Then we have Billy Wilder, who writes in collaboration. I don't know much about his present collaboration, but knowing him, I think it's'mostly his stuff that Izzy [I. A. L. Diamond] puts down very well.
What isn't ideal is to get a powerful director who monkeys around with a script. As my brother Michael once said quite brilliantly, "Isn't it curious that hardly anyone can write, but everyone can rewrite?" Give me a Shakespearean text, I can fix it up, make some cuts, change some words, and think I'm improving it. It gives me a vicarious sense of creativity, but it isn't creativity, and it's one of the things that we deplore as screenwriters, the fact that our stuff is always monkeyed around with, without exception. It's always sullied in one way or another by a producer, by a director, by a head of the studio, by a censor, by a powerful star. That's why I say, three cheers for the theater and the Dramatists Guild.
Yet I would have guessed that Cukor was very sympatico with you and Ruth, with Hepburn and Tracy .
"We were all great pals": MGM publicity photo, at the time of Pat and Mike, with
(from left) Spencer Tracy, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin, and Katharine Hepburn.
(Photo: British Film Institute)
Oh, yes. We were all great pals, in addition to being co-workers. He certainly was a great respecter of the text, once it had been set. We used to have a lot of conferences and talk about the script. Not only with him. When we were doing the Tracy-Hepburn pictures, Kate and Spencer were in on some of the talks, too. But no one ever made any important contributions to any of our scripts. There were, of course, these discussions and questions of clarifications, but in almost every case it was a question of educating the people involved as to the form, the meaning, the themes, and the resolutions of these works.
Why did you and Ruth stop writing together?
As I say, we didn't enjoy it really, because we'd quarreled a lot. After the fourth picture, The Marrying Kind with Judy Holliday, we said, "Let's not work together anymore." From that point on, Ruth wrote her own stuff, and I wrote mine. In fact, I never saw any of her writing until it was finished, and she never saw mine until it was finished, and in some cases I never saw hers until it was published . That proved to be a much more efficacious way of working.
I think it's incomprehensible to people that you and Ruth, who were prob-
ably one of the finest screenwriting teams ever, split up as a writing team after you had reached such a creative level —
We were just as good after we split up!
Didn't you lose something by splitting up?
Just the company. It had relieved a little bit of the loneliness, because you have to sit by yourself in a room for four, five, six hours a day. That's something you have to conquer in your own way. I don't find the loneliness oppressive. I find it peaceful and I enjoy writing.
But you had gained something, hadn't you, the wisdom of the experience at least, by writing with Ruth?
Oh, I gained more than I can say, just from living with her and being married to her for forty-four years. In a rich relationship, you always gain something—that's part of it. We civilize each other, don't we? That's why good relationships and good influences are so important.
For example, I cannot imagine a writer who reads nothing but thrash being a good writer. The good writers I have known were also good readers. I'm not, not any longer. I used be an omnivorous reader. But Maugham once said, "Nobody after the age fifty reads anything." I used to argue about that, but more and more I see that he was probably right. As you grow older, you just don't'have the same time anymore to sit down and read the Encyclopaedia Brittanica or a thirty-four-volume set of Mark Twain, as my brother and I used to do.
You had all the time in the world then .
But life catches up with you. Reading is a tremendous luxury, a luxury that sometimes I can ill afford. I would advise young writers to, among other things, read the best writers, the classics, and as much as possible read fine English rather than translations.
You say you are a "theater animal." And except for a couple of credits, in the late 1960s, indeed you turned your back on originating Hollywood scripts after your last picture directed by Cukor, It Should Happen to You. Do you think the best films ever can be as good, in terms of the writing, as the best plays?
Never! Never for a moment. And the reason is clear: When you sit down to write a play, you are expressing yourself. You're expressing your own experiences, your own beliefs, your own religion, your own knowledge, your own hopes, your own fears. But in Hollywood you're always writing under very close supervision, and you know goddam well as you're writing a screenplay that the next day you'll be off it and somebody else will be on the same piece of material. This is the realistic point of view. And once you begin to face that, you don't break your heart, you don't get suicidal, if you know that that is the position of the screenwriter.
Haven't a certain few managed to escape that syndrome?
Only very, very, very recently.
Billy Wilder?
To some extent, in his own way, just because of his own power—when it was power. I think he is an extremely important figure in the history of film, a great man, an incomparable director, and a very, very fine screenwriter (though he seldom wrote on his own, as you know—it was almost always in collaboration, either with Charlie Brackett or with Izzy Diamond). I know him well and I love him. However, even the most important directors never had what we call the final cut. They just didn't have it. John Ford didn't have the final cut. Frank Capra didn't have the final cut. He may have thought he had the final cut, but when the chips were down, he didn't.
Of late, in the last ten years, a few of the newer fellas have managed, because of enormous commercial success, to put themselves into a position where they are literally self-employed. Three or four of them are in a strong, solid position. I admire them very much. I applaud them. They have caused a kind of breakthrough.
But they represent perhaps 2 percent of the 100 percent of American screenwriters, whether they are employed or whether they write original material and submit it to the studios. Because the minute you sell it, it's all over: you have sold your copyright, you've been paid for your work, and therefore you are an employee who can be discharged or replaced. That's the division.
It's a paradox. In Hollywood, you are paid handsomely, yet you do not have any controls, whereas on stage, you are taking a huge gamble which pays you so much less, and yet you have tremendous creative freedom .
You get paid less except—except—if you succeed. If you get a hit, you can make much, much more money than you could ever make in Hollywood. I've earned a great deal in Hollywood, but nothing to compare with what I have earned out of one play. Not even close. So that is a paradox . . . and a challenge. A gamble. You can spend a year writing a play and it runs one night. But, as I say, there are these tremendous compensations, working in the theater.
I've been on the council of the Dramatists Guild, a beloved organization, for forty-four years now. I have observed the economic changes in the theater. A great many things have changed: the Dramatists Guild has made a great number of concessions to the producers in terms of money, in terms of royalties, in terms of out-of-town tryouts. We've done everything we can to make it possible for plays to be produced and run successfully and to pay off the backers and then to move more and more into the sharing. There have been a great many innovations in the contract—some of them very good, some of them more in favor of the producer.
But in all of the changes, in all of the discussions and conferences and arguments and fights that have gone on—and I spent a little over two and a half years as part of a five-man committee negotiating the new contract with
the [theater] producers—the one thing that was steadfast, that was sovereign, the one thing that did not change and could not change and was never challenged or even mentioned, was that the playwright has the final say about his work.
Nothing can be changed without his permission. No member of a cast can be engaged without his approval. No director can be engaged, no designer, no musician—nothing about the artistic elements of a play can be altered or compromised without the permission of the playwright. In other words, the playwright is king, as well he should be. Without the playwright, there's no theater.
That's the essential difference between films and the theater and why, of course, I prefer to work in the theater. I love films and I love writing films, but up until the present time I have not found it possible to keep artistic control in the same way that I do in the theater.
Dorothy Kingsley: The Fixer
Interview by Pat McGilligan
In Chicago, where she and her husband had a business layover on their way to the East Coast, I met with the former MGM screenwriter Dorothy Kingsley for a leisurely lunch at a downtown hotel.
Almost eighty, she resides in northern California, and it has been twenty years since her last motion picture credit. But Kingsley still travels in the high-society circles that she grew up in, as a young socialite, in exclusive Grosse Pointe, Michigan. In New York City and Washington, D.C., Kingsley and her husband had a pending whirl of engagements—including dinner with former White House Chief of Staff Al Haig—and then she was off to Florida to attend the opening of a play written by one of her sons.
The week prior to our interview she was at a social gathering with media-sports magnate Ted Turner. She buttonholed Turner about an idea she had for updating Angels in the Outfield (1951), one of her few nonmusical films: she suggested substituting San Diego football for Pittsburgh baseball, and a Mexican migrant boy for the white-skinned little girl of the MGM version. Turner, who owns the MGM backlist of films, was noncommittal, but Kingsley was hopeful that she might yet get the project off the ground.
Kingsley has family ties to show business. Her mother was a legitimate actress, with appearances on Broadway and in silent pictures, and her father was a newspaperman and press agent. But their divorce brought her to Michigan, and it was her own divorce, after an unsuccessful first marriage, that brought her to California in the late 1930s. An ability to think up quips on the spot landed her, first, a stint as a radio comedy writer for Edgar Bergen, and, eventually, a job as an MGM contract writer, where Kingsley specialized in patchwork construction and on-the-spot dialogue for frothy musical come-
dies—especially the spectacular, escapist Esther Williams vehicles, and later on, the more prestigious Broadway adaptations. Her motion pictures are invariably lightweight and lavish, entertaining and jokey without any overt social significance. Although something of an anachronism nowadays, they were popular with audiences in the years following World War II.
Though Kingsley could originate stories, she tended to do adaptations. She often worked without credit; and though hers is usually a co-credit, she usually worked alone, before or after the other screenwriters had finished up. Her value as an MGM team player was enhanced by her modesty, her flexibility, and—photographs attest—her relative youth and winsome, blonde good looks.
Kingsley is a vanished breed: the studio utility player. But her ability to rethink a scene or to provide an appropriate snapper in a situation was much needed and much admired in the assembly-line days. And her stature among her generation of peers is evidenced by a string of Academy Award and Writers Guild co-writing nominations for her scripts in the 1940s and 1950s.
Dorothy Kingsley (1909–)
1941
Look Who's Laughing (Allan Dwan). Uncredited contribution.
1942
Here We Go Again (Allan Dwan). Uncredited contribution.
1943
Girl Crazy (Norman Taurog). Uncredited contribution.
1944
Bathing Beauty (George Sidney). Co-script.
Broadway Rhythm (Roy Del Ruth). Co-script.
1946
Easy To Wed (Edward Buzzell). Adaptation of Libeled Lady .
1948
A Date with Judy (Richard Thorpe). Co-script.
On an Island with You (Richard Thorpe). Co-script.
1949
Neptune's Daughter (Edward Buzzell). Script.
1950
Two Weeks with Love (Roy Rowland). Co-script.
The Skipper Surprised His Wife (Elliott Nugent). Screen story, script.
1951
Texas Carnival (Charles Walters). Co-story, script.
Angels in the Outfield (Clarence Brown). Co-script.
Cause for Alarm (Tay Garnett). Uncredited contribution.
1952
It's a Big Country (multiple directors). Episode 6 (story, script).
When in Rome (Clarence Brown). Co-script.
1953
Dangerous When Wet (Charles Walters). Story, script.
Small Town Girl (Leslie Kardos). Co-script.
Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney). Co-script.
1954
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen). Co-script.
Dorothy Kingsley in Pebble Beach, California, 1988.
(Courtesy of Dorothy Kingsley)
1955
Jupiter's Darling (George Sidney). Script.
1957
Don't Go Near the Water (Charles Walters). Co-script.
Pal Joey (George Sidney). Script.
1959
Green Mansions (Mel Ferrer). Script.
1960
Can-Can (Walter Lang). Co-script.
Pepe (George Sidney). Co-script.
1967
Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson). Co-script.
Half a Sixpence (George Sidney). Adaptation.
Television credits include creator of TV series "Bracken's World."
Academy Awards include best-screenplay nomination for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers .
Writers Guild awards include best-script nominations for On an Island with You, Angels in the Outfield, Kiss Me Kate, Don't Go Near the Water, Pal Joey, and Can-Can. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers won the Best-Written American Musical award in 1954.
The reference books are a little sketchy on your background. How and why did you come to Hollywood as a writer?
How it started? I was in Detroit, left with three little boys, and I wanted to make some money. I had a very severe attack of the measles, and while I was in bed listening to all the radio programs I began to think, "You know, I could write something that funny. . . ." So I wrote some stuff out for Jack Benny and others, and sent it in . . .
It was impossible to get hired if you were a woman gag writer, as there wasn't such a thing at the time. Especially one that young. I had a friend who lived in Los Angeles, and I came out to visit her and made the rounds of various agents. They all said, "What experience do you have?" I said, "I haven't had any, but here are samples of my work." They said, "We can't handle you if you haven't had any experience." Well, how could you get experience if they wouldn't handle you? It was a "chicken or the egg" situation.
Finally I found an agent who liked my work and said he'd take a chance on me. I went back home, packed up the children, and drove out here. When I went to see the agent, he was out of business! Here I was, and I had to start all over again.
Had you any prior occupation?
No, no. I was what you call a socialite in Grosse Pointe [an exclusive suburb of Detroit, Michigan].
The biographical sketches say that you are from New York .
I was born in New York City, on Park Avenue, as a matter of fact, if we want to be explicit.
Were your parents wealthy?
My father, Walter J. Kingsley, was a very well-known man in New York. He started out as a foreign correspondent with the London Daily Express from England. He covered the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion, all that sort of thing. Then he went into public relations and handled people like Sarah Bernhardt, George M. Cohan, the kaiser (before the war), the mikado, Florenz Ziegfield . . .
My father was a fabulous guy, but my parents divorced and I went to
Detroit with my mother. She remarried, and I was brought up in Grosse Point from about the age of thirteen on.
Did your mother have an occupation?
Her name was Alma Hanlon. She was an actress for a while.
On Broadway?
She did a few things on Broadway—The Red Mill, for one. Then she did some movies, including a picture called The Whip [1917, directed by Maurice Tourneur].[*] But she never liked acting, so when she went to Detroit, she retired. Her husband was well known in Detroit.
As an industrialist?
No, he owned a lot of property. I was brought up with all the automobile people, the Fords, the Briggses, the Sorensons . . . Growing up, we used to go to the forge and watch them pour the steel at night. Everything [in Detroit] was automobiles, automobiles!
Still, you had this family background of show business .
Not really, because I didn't spend any time with my father, to speak of. I remember visiting him once. His office was in the New Amsterdam Theatre building and there were beautiful Ziegfield girls waiting around, and Fanny Brice and Will Rogers. But I didn't have much contact with him, and I was brought up in an entirely different way.
So now you're out in Hollywood, without an agent, with three little boys in tow . . .
I started going to offices again and trying to get people to read my stuff. It was hard, because I stutter in the first place, now and then, and I certainly looked like anything but a gag writer. And I had no experience as a comedy writer, except on the school papers.
What did you look like—if you looked like anything but a gag writer?
I had blonde hair down to my waist, I was very young, and I looked much younger than I was—about fifteen. And they had never seen any women gag writers or comedy writers.
But I happened to meet Constance Bennett and we became friends. She was a big star then, and appearing on all these radio programs. She said, "You write much better stuff than what they give me," and she took a couple of my gags and used them on one of her shows—"The Pepsodent Hour," I think it was.
That's when you started writing radio gags for Bob Hope?
Oh, that's a pitiful story. I went in to see someone—I think he was the account representative for "The Pepsodent Hour"—and he said, "Your stuff
* Alma Hanlon's screen appearances include Keep Moving (1915); The Final Curtain, The Devil's Prayer-Book, The Faded Flower, Gold and the Woman, and Wild Oats (all 1916); God of Little Children, The Golden God, The Great Bradley Mystery, The Law That Failed, The Mystic Hour, and Public Defender (all 1917); Sins of the Children and When You and I Were Young (both 1918); and The Profiteer (1919).
is good, but we're up to here in writers. I don't dare hire another writer. Bob [Hope] won't let me. So I'll put you on my private payroll . . . at $75 a week. I'll call you and let you know what the subject is going to be each week. You bring your stuff in to me quietly, and I'll slip it in with all the other writers', and if Bob uses some of it, or quite a bit of it eventually, I'll tell him it comes from another writer and that he should hire you. . . ."
I started to give him some gags, and when I listened to the show, I heard Bob using some of my stuff. But nobody knew about this, except for the account representative. It came Christmas Eve day, and I was supposed to come in and get my check for Christmas—for my three little boys—and when I asked to see the account representative, they told me, "We're sorry, you can't. He has had a nervous breakdown and is in the hospital . . ." (Laughs .) That was the end of that.
Then I saw an ad in the paper in the employment section asking people to submit two different scenes to Edgar Bergen, who said he would read anything submitted. So I wrote one for Bergen and the other I wrote for a guest star—I used Clark Gable, I think. Bergen got four hundred of these submissions, I understand, and he selected two people. Another young man and me. We went and were interviewed, and Bergen said he would take us on for a month, I think it was, and let us sit in with the other writers at about $50 a week. At the end of the month, he let the other boy go and he kept me on. Anyhow, I was with Edgar for several years at the time when he was on the top show on radio. We wrote for all the top stars.
I'm surprised you say you just happened to meet Constance Bennett. You couldn't go to Hollywood today and just bump into Meryl Streep. Was the social whirl more fluid in that you could just meet somebody like that?
Well, my background was such that I could meet people socially.
Then was working for Edgar Bergen your first professional writing job?
Yes. We'd select a subject that we were going to talk about, perhaps something of interest to the guest star, and we'd invent jokes about it. . . .
For example, we had Clark Gable [on the show], who at that time had a ranch out in the valley, and he was very interested in ranching. I remember I had Charlie [McCarthy] say to Edgar, "What's a gentleman farmer?" and then, "Someone who takes his hat off in a grain elevator!" Little things like that.
Then I had always wanted to get into the picture end of things, so I started writing scripts and submitting them [to studios]. Arthur Freed got hold of one, and he thought I had promise. I was taken over to MGM by my agent. Arthur said he'd like to hire me and put me on contract. I said fine, and he asked how much I got [from Edgar Bergen], and he doubled what I was getting. I liked Edgar very much—he was very talented—but I was grossly underpaid on Bergen's program, and I wasn't under contract.
When I told Edgar, he went wild. In fact, I remember I was going to stay
with him for two more programs, and Gary Cooper was on one of them. During a rehearsal I walked in the studio and sat down front, and Edgar, who was talking to Gary, turned and said to me, "What are you doing here? Are you slumming?"
So I went to work for Arthur [Freed]. He had a picture shooting called Girl Crazy [1943]. The writer was off somewhere doing something else, so he asked me to go down [to the set] and just do a little work. That was my first picture, with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.
My list of credits for you shows that Bathing Beauty [1944] was your first movie .
While I was working on Girl Crazy, I met [producer] Jack Cummings, who was having a lot of trouble with a picture called Bathing Beauty . I had some ideas about it, so he asked [MGM executive] Sam Katz if he could have me to work on it. There'd been a million writers on it [before me][*] but the script was just bleh, lying there. They couldn't shoot it, even though they had commitments with Esther Williams and Red Skelton, with Harry James, the trumpet player, and with Xavier Cugat, the cha-cha-cha man. They had shot the musical numbers and they had no story! They had shot a great number with Xavier Cugat, only nobody in the script had any reason to be there to see this number!
I had to think up something and then send a page down [to the set] for them to shoot. It was really wild. That's not the way you should make a picture, on the whole. I had a real baptism of fire. But the picture worked out, it was a big hit, Esther's first big picture.
During the war, people liked the escapism. I was told that Bathing Beauty was the biggest hit in Russia! Because it was gay and light and had so many pretty girls [in it]. It was too ridiculous!
In radio you were writing bits and pieces. Here, you were beginning to write wholesale scripts .
Outside of Girl Crazy, the whole thing.
How did you adapt to the visual demands of motion pictures?
It was easier [than radio]. You could use the camera to do things instead of just talk, talk, talk.
Did you have to learn to think visually as a writer?
I learned through practice. Jack kept me busy, busy, busy. Arthur Freed always laughed, "I bring this girl to the studio—and I can never get her. She's always busy with these other people."
Were there many other women writers at MGM?
There was Zoë Akins. (Laughs .) I'll tell you a funny anecdote about that.
* In the official files of the Writers Guild of America (formerly the Screen Writers Guild), seven writers share credit for writing Bathing Beauty .
Zoë was a playwright, originally. She was very bright, but no longer very young, or at least as young as I. I remember I was working for some producer, once, who used to have his wife read all of his scripts [and give him an opinion]—which, incidentally, drives a writer crazy, because the wife will always come back and say, "I don't think she should wear a polka-dot dress in that scene. . . ." (I used to say, "Why don't you let your wife write the script?")
One night we went to a party and I met the wife. She looked at me and said, "This is Dorothy Kingsley!?!" She thought I would look like Zoë Akins, who was past her prime.
I remember another time—I was single at the time—when I was going out with Arthur Hornblow, a very good producer. We were having dinner with Billy Wilder, who was going with an attractive girl. During dinner Billy turned to his girlfriend and said, "We don't have any writers like this at Paramount!" And she said, "No, and we don't need them!" (Laughs .) Because I was kind of unusual, at that age.
Helen Deutsch was in and out; there was Isobel Lennart, who was a love; Dorothy Cooper, who started as a junior writer; and Marguerite Roberts . . .
Was there camaraderie among the women writers?
Oh yes. Isobel and I were very close. She used to run into my office [to talk] all the time. She was a "real writer."[*] I never think of myself as a "real writer." I only wrote because I needed the money. I had no desire to express myself or anything like that. I couldn't care! Couldn't have cared less.
When I got home [at night], I never thought about my work or mentioned it. I mean, I wanted to do a good job, but I certainly wasn't going to pace the floor at night. Isobel lived for her work. She would get up in the middle of the night and write down a line. If someone didn't like her script, she'd throw up. I just didn't care. Just give me the money. I needed the money.
Was there a division of subject matter for women writers, particularly subjects that the studios tended to ask you to do over and over again because you were women?
No. I don't know. I never thought about it particularly. It depended. I did an awful lot of the old MGM musicals—three quarters of the Esther Williams things. You just did the best you could with what you were working with [there], you know. They were after a certain thing, a kind of spectacle. Esther was very popular. Finally, I ran out of ways to get her in the water.
I know some things were offered to me that I wasn't too keen on, but not because I was a woman.
* Author of the musical Funny Girl, Isobel Lennart wrote many distinctive films, alone or in collaboration, including Anchors Aweigh (1945), It Happened in Brooklyn (1947), East Side, West Side (1949), Love Me or Leave Me (1955), The Sundowners (1960), Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960), Two for the Seesaw (1962), and Period of Adjustment (1962).
Was it a plus or a minus for a screenwriter that everything was such a committee decision at a studio like MGM?
You had to go through a lot of people. Normally, that's a minus, because everybody wants to get into the act. They all felt they had to have some input. But I was with pretty powerful producers, as a rule, where once you got the okay, you didn't have too much trouble.
Did you have little tricks, or a specific strategy, when it came to story conferences?
If we were having a conference and I wanted to sell a story or any idea, I would pretty much act the thing. That helped, if they could see me getting up and could hear how the dialogue would sound.
Another little trick I had was, if I really wanted to get a certain line or idea over, and I wasn't sure how the producer would take it, I would usually say [something like], "As you suggested the other day . . . ," when they'd never suggested anything at all. But if they thought they did, fine; it was very hard for them to say no. There are little tricks like that, occasionally. (Laughs .)
Did you learn more from the producers or the directors at MGM?
Directors more than producers. Now, Jack Cummings was an excellent producer, though he was L. B.'s [Louis B. Mayer's] nephew, which reacted against him. He let it react against him. Everyone else would go up and ask L. B. for something, but Jack never would because he was his nephew. He went through every department in the studio—cutting, music, sound, everything. He had a good story mind, too. He knew about everything and he was one of the best producers.
Give me an example of a director who taught you something .
Roy Del Ruth. He was one of the first directors of musicals, and he was tough. He would go over a scene with us and say, "You don't need that line. You can say it with the camera." I learned to write less. I learned not to use dialogue if I could show something another way. And if I was using dialogue, [I learned] to make sure the audience knew what the character was thinking.
I think the writing is so overdone today. People don't use the camera. People will talk and talk and talk. And quite often they don't resolve everything. To me, a story has got to be resolved at the end and leave you satisfied . They don't do that in many pictures nowadays.
There was a line that [producer] Joe Pasternak always used to say if he didn't think the scene actually told what he thought the audience wanted to know. He'd say, "Give me a house number." Let us know what the number of the house is—what's happening? You see things on TV nowadays where you suddenly say, "What? How did they get out of that?" I think writers today are very sloppy and they cheat. They'll just jump ahead and you don't see what happened or why.
When you see the MGM musicals today, it is hard sometimes for someone
who is not a buff to differentiate between the directors, people like George Sidney or Walter Lang or Charles Walters .
Oh, Chuck Walters. He was very good. The only thing, I used to think he sometimes didn't get enough close-ups.
I remember there was a funny scene in one of his pictures with Red Skelton—Texas Carnival [1951], I think. Red was posing as someone else, a big-time millionaire, who gets into this poker game where they're using jelly beans as poker chips. He keeps eating his and they think, "Oh, my God, five thousand means nothing to this guy. . . ." Afterwards, when he finds out how much he ate, he nearly dies. They ask him, "How are you going to make it up?" and he says, "If I can get a stomach pump, I know where I could locate $10,000!" I probably shouldn't say this about poor Chuck, but he wasn't in close enough on Red to get the full effect. It played, but Chuck used to get a little tired of taking close-ups, I think. Today, you know, they're practically in their tonsils in all the pictures.
George Sidney was very artistic, oh boy. Really artistic—and one of the real showmen of the studio. The others were in it more for the business, but George Sidney used the camera beautifully.
Did the MGM directors have differences in how they related to the script?
They were all of different temperament. With all of them, you'd talk it over. Some of them had good suggestions, which I always welcomed. Some of them didn't have anything to say, to speak of.
I didn't mind changing things at all. A lot of, as I call them, "real writers," to them the line became sacred scripture. I couldn't have cared less. You could change anything if I didn't think it really hurt the script. I always felt if you couldn't write another line as good as the one you wrote before, you weren't that great anyway. One of the reasons I had a lot of people asking for me, I think, is because I was easy to get along with.
Did the MGM stars have much script influence?
You didn't really work with them that way, until it was all done. Then they might come in and say, "I don't feel comfortable with this line . . . ," and you'd change it. They were all very easy and flexible.
What about someone like Esther Williams?
She was easy to deal with. But they were not soul-searching lines. She knew what she was good at.
Being there all the time under contract, when you started a picture certain actors would come in and say, "Don't you the think I should have that line instead of this one, or don't you think I should do this [in that scene]?" One actor in particular I remember, he thought he was rather pretty and he used to flutter his eyelashes at me. He must have thought I would be impressed by something like that. I won't tell you who it was.
I would think that sort of lobbying for dialogue would be frowned on in the MGM system .
Oh, the studio wouldn't know anything about it. They would come right into the office and talk to me.
Conversely, if you liked the star a lot, would you butter up the part?
No. The script was the main thing. Whoever I thought would be the best to do it would get the lines.
Strangely enough, after I'd been at MGM a while, I sort of got the reputation as a fixer in construction. They'd call me down [to the set] all the time, just as a "favor." Because I was under contract and knew everyone, I'd get calls all the time [to help out]. Some producer I knew would ask, "Would you mind coming down to the set? We're having a little problem with this or that. . . ." It would be a script by someone like Philip Barry, long gone back to Broadway, and they were stuck with some little problem. I was good-natured about it. I did many pictures like that.
Can you give me an example?
I remember once, Loretta Young was doing a picture with [her husband] Thomas Lewis, the producer [probably Cause For Alarm in 1951, co-written by Lewis]. They had a preview and it didn't go over too well. The producer asked me to run the picture with Jack Cummings. We could see what was wrong. There was something left out [of the story line], which didn't explain why this woman felt the way she did about something; there was one scene missing, really. It wasn't hard to fix at all.
MGM kept me working all the time. Everyone was awfully nice to me, very protective, because there I was so young, with the three little boys. I remarried finally and I had three [more] children—six, ultimately!—but I always worked practically up to the time they took me to the delivery room. I remember Joe Pasternak would call, just as I came out of the delivery room, asking, "What are we going to do about Esther . . . ?" Everybody used to kid me about it. My contract [at MGM] went on forever, and kept going up, up, up.
Did you have much freedom in what you were assigned to work on at MGM?
You'd suggest something, or they'd bring in something from Broadway. I'd say 70 percent of the things I wrote came about because I went to the producer and said, "How about this?" or "I've heard about this and I'd like to write it. . . ."
(Laughs .) Whenever [producer] Joe Pasternak didn't have a picture going, or if he didn't have an idea for one, he used to put an item in the columns that said, "Dorothy Kingsley's working on a new script for Pasternak called 'Baby Needs Shoes.' "[*] Now, "Baby Needs Shoes" was never made—there
* Hungarian-born producer Joe (Joseph) Pasternak started out as a waiter and busboy at Paramount studios before working his way up to executive status in the 1930s. He was known for his lightweight hit musicals, first in Europe, then in Hollywood at Universal and, later, at MGM. Pasternak is also mentioned in the Walter Reisch and Daniel Taradash interviews,
"My contract went on forever": Dorothy Kingsley at her desk at MGM in the 1940s.
(Photo: USC Special Collections)
was no such picture—but either Isobel Lennart or I was always working on it!
Did you have some particular interest in musicals and musical comedy, or did it just evolve that way?
I started out that way and it just evolved. I love comedy. I love music. I had a box at the Hollywood Bowl forever, and in San Francisco, when I lived there, we always went to the symphony.
I loved working with the songwriters, because they were so clever. As a rule, you'd write the script, or certainly a draft, before you ever talked to a songwriter. I'd always indicate so-and-so should have a song "here." You'd come in and talk to them and say what you wanted expressed in a song, talk over the plot, and they'd come back later and play something wonderful. And very often, when you talked with them, something else would open up.
Cole Porter was so charming, and he didn't take himself seriously at all. We went to his house for lunch one day and he gave me a recipe for a fabulous cold soup. In fact, there was one song of his that didn't work out too well, and he just asked, "Do you want me to write another one?" We used another song of his that wasn't in the original score of Kiss Me Kate —"From This Moment On." George Sidney let Bob Fosse help direct that number. That was his [Fosse's] first real break—and the best number in the show.
Sometimes the songwriters would have songs that we just had to fit in because they were so good. I remember talking with Frank Loesser one day, and he told me he had a good song but he didn't know what to do with it. Then Frank played "Baby, It's Cold Outside" for me, and I liked it so much I wrote a scene for it with Esther [for Neptune's Daughter in 1949], and it won the Academy Award.
Nowadays, the Esther Williams films are really chuckled at. Were they, at the time, considered lesser vehicles by the studio?
No. There was the musical unit and there was the serious unit, but the musicals made great money. During World War II, you had fighting all over the world and people wanted to escape from all of the problems of the day, I think. The Esther Williams pictures were never taken that seriously, but she was popular. They were intended to get Esther into the theaters, they were spectacles, and they made a lot of money.
Only one picture didn't work and that was when Dore Schary was at the studio. I wanted to do a musical version of [Robert Sherwood's] The Road to Rome . I got Esther and Howard Keel [in the cast of Jupiter's Darling in 1955]. It was a satire and, in fact, we even had Hannibal's elephants painted pastel colors—orange and green. Dore was always against it, I must say. He was worried about doing satire and I have to agree with him: there were some wonderful visual things in it, even an elephant dance, but the satire didn't work. We took it out to a preview and I was sitting behind people in the front rows who took it seriously. It wasn't until halfway through the picture that someone in front said, "Oh, it's a satire." That's the only flop I had, I think.
Angels in the Outfield seems like quite a departure for you, not only because it is a baseball film, but because it came at the end of the Esther Williams cycle .
Oh, I was a big sports fan. I love baseball. I was brought up in Detroit with the Detroit Tigers. I'm a terrific football fan, too.
"They were spectacles and they made a lot of money": swimming star Esther
Williams, suspended above the pool, in one of the popular musicals of the era.
Because I had three little boys, I used to take them to boxing matches and things like that. In fact, well-known male stars used to ask me out partly because they loved the boys and were happy to take these little boys places.
Clarence Brown, who was a good friend, asked for me for the baseball picture with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and I said yes. Eisenhower's favorite picture was Angels in the Outfield . He ran it so many times that the staff said, "Please, Mr. President, not again . . ."
There is a tremendous religious aspect to that picture, and to the other one you wrote for Clarence Brown, When In Rome [1952].
Yes, though Clarence is not all that religious. It just happened.
But I am a Catholic, and there is an interesting story about the casting of Angels in the Outfield . We wanted a nice little girl to play the orphan in the movie. A lot of them applied. A maintenance man at MGM came to my office and said, "I have a little girl I think would be perfect in this. Would you consider her?" He brought her in, she was very cute, and I introduced her to Clarence Brown.
But she didn't have any experience, so we were considering other little girls. I went to Mass one morning, where I was saying a novena. Who should be in front of me, making a novena herself, but this little girl? Of course, I
knew darn well what she was making it for. So I went to Clarence and I said, "Clarence, this is the one! This is a sign!"
Though you have a lot of co-credits, it seems that you usually wrote alone, without a collaborator. On Seven Brides for Seven Brothers [1954], did Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett work on the script before or after you?
They worked on it [before me] and they didn't get along with Stanley Donen. They were lovely people, darling . . . but the script just wasn't coming out right, they were unhappy, and he was unhappy. They wanted to bow out.
Stanley Donen called me in and I looked at the script and said, "The big trouble in the original short story is that the Howard Keel character is the one that tries to get all of these boys married off, and that's not right. The girl has nothing to do, and she's got to be the one to engineer all this stuff." That was changed around and seemed to please everyone, and we went from there.
You worked with Frank Sinatra twice. How did you become involved with Pal Joey [1957]?
They were going to do Pal Joey at Columbia with Kirk Douglas. George Cukor was going to direct it. Lillian Burns, the assistant to Harry Cohn, called me and said, "This is very hush-hush, but as much as we like Kirk Douglas, there's only one person in the world who can play this . . . and that's Frank Sinatra. But Harry and Frank didn't speak. They've had this terrible feud for years." I said, "I can't believe that. Let's talk to Harry." So we went and talked to Harry Cohn. It was my first conference with him.
I said to Harry Cohn, "I love Kirk, but there's only one person for the part . . . Frank Sinatra." "Absolutely impossible," said Harry Cohn. "He wouldn't do it!" I said, "How do you know he wouldn't do it?" "I'm not talking to him," he said. "You mean you would let a thing like that stand in the way of a picture?" I asked. "There is no use [talking about it], because he wouldn't do it," he said.
So Lillian and I got together and I quickly did a synopsis of how the movie would go with Frank [in it]. Frank was making a picture somewhere and he had to drive to location every day. We got Abe Lastfogel of William Morris Agency to give him this synopsis to read on the way to location. Frank called me and said, "I'll do it." So I went to Harry Cohn and said Frank would do it. And Harry Cohn committed without ever seeing the script.
Was the script so very different from the play?
There was quite a difference. There was a lot more to it. We could enlarge it. Also, that was the first time a musical had been done that was a little sexy.
Did Frank Sinatra have any script input?
Oh, Frank has ideas of his own, of course. But Frank will attune himself to whom he's with and what he's doing. I remember when George Sidney [who ultimately directed the picture] and I went over to his house to discuss Pal Joey . He invited us for tea. It was beautifully served—everything was
just so. Frank was the perfect gentleman, always charming, always. He liked Pal Joey so much—what I had done with it—that he committed to Can-Can without a script. That is rare.
Which of your films are your favorites?
I like Pal Joey and I like Angels in the Outfield . The others, I always think, "Gee, why didn't we do this?" or "It should have been better. . . ."
What were your working circumstances like at MGM?
Well, I had a very lovely office, a desk, my secretary, a big davenport . . .
Typewriter?
I don't type, really.
Pencil and paper?
I had a secretary for a long time, and I would dictate it to her and she'd write it up. I'd look it over and scratch it up about six times. I'm very fussy that way. When she wasn't around, I'd just sit on the davenport with the yellow pad and pencil. That's how I'd write.
Door closed? Phone off the hook?
Not particularly. I'd just as soon be interrupted. Because I don't really like to write much. I only write because I like the money.
So, you can write with distractions?
Oh, yes. I remember, when two other writers and myself went with the Edgar Bergen show to New York for three weeks, we all worked in a big suite there, and the noise and the traffic left the others a wreck. It didn't bother me a bit, and I wound up writing more of those three shows than anyone.
I can sit down in the middle of Hollywood and Vine and write. As I told you, I turned everything off when I came home [at night], but when I had to do it, I could write with children crawling over the typewriter, always.
Arthur Laurents: Emotional Reality
Interview by Pat McGilligan
Of all the screenwriters in this book, Arthur Laurents lived in Hollywood the least amount of time—just over two years, in the late 1940s, when the blacklist dovetailed with his own inclination to travel in Europe and, eventually, to concentrate his energies in theater on the East Coast.
A member of the National Theatre Hall of Fame, he has been primarily active, and is perhaps better identified, as a Broadway playwright, among whose many successful plays are included the "books" for the landmark musicals West Side Story and Gypsy . Also a noted theater director, Laurents won a Tony for his staging of the musical La Cage aux folles and recently directed the Broadway revival of his own Gypsy (for which Tyne Daly earned a Best Actress Tony).
In spite of the fact that his résumé includes only a handful of motion pictures scattered over three decades, and that he regards his work in that field with (at best) mixed emotions, Laurents is to be found in most reference books and is acknowledged by most students and scholars of the cinema as a screenwriter of distinction.
There has been a lot of hooey and mystification about his film credits, which he is pleased to dispel. Laurents does not glow with happy things to say about Hollywood, then or now, no matter that motion pictures provided opportunity, growth, and recognition in his career.
• Some source books indicate that the script for The Snake Pit (1948) is not his, particularly. Laurents says, yes, it is, very much so; it is just that the credit was stolen.
• Critics rhapsodize about Max Ophuls' melodramatic film noir Caught (1949). Laurents tells a hilarious anecdote about the low-budget economiz-
ing necessary in the script and shooting, and debunks director Ophuls, an auteurist favorite elsewhere elevated to Andrew Sarris' pantheon of directors.
• The screen rendition of Laurents' play The Time of the Cuckoo, which is David Lean's Summertime (1955), was mangled by none other than Katharine Hepburn, according to Laurents.
• Rare among U.S. screenwriters, Laurents tried to broach homosexuality as a subtext in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope in 1948 (the casting agents and the stars of choice—Cary Grant and Montgomery Clift—wouldn't go for it) and as a context for the ballet-world drama The Turning Point in 1977 (it was snipped out of the picture).
• Laurents also airs caveats about Otto Preminger's screen adaptation of Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse (1958), the film versions of Gypsy (1962) and West Side Story (1961), his box-office triumph The Way We Were (1973) . . . and so on.
A man of integrity and virulence, Laurents does not give many interviews on the subject of screenwriting, but he agreed to see me after reading some of what I have written, sympathetic to his point of view, on the subject of the Hollywood blacklist.
Laurents is adamant on the injustice of that period, which saw careers abridged and lives destroyed by the anti-Red hysteria. Laurents says the blacklist took all the best and brightest people out of Hollywood, ushering in the blandness, compromise, and conventionality of much of 1950s film culture. Laurents himself left on the cusp of the worst fallout—it is unclear to what extent he was blacklisted, as he chose not to wait around for the bad tidings—and never returned to the West Coast for any extended period.
The blacklist is the backdrop for the popular motion picture starring Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, The Way We Were . The love story between a quintessential Golden Boy and kooky Jewish radical begins on a city college campus, against a panorama of 1930s causes, and climaxes at the height of the Hollywood inquisition. Laurents wrote the screenplay for the adaptation of his own excellent novel (though he was fired at one point, he returned to complete the script during filming).
But the thematic crisis of the novel, which revolves around the Golden Boy's decision to surrender to career pressures and cooperate with the anti-Red forces, was too complex and bitter a plot pill for the producers of the movie. The crucial scene, the moral confrontation between the Redford and Streisand characters, was left on the cutting-room floor, much to Laurents' anger and regret.
Even so, The Way We Were is the kind of romantic movie Laurents is most identified with—not only a funny, sentimental, broadly appealing love story,
but one that is ultimately star-crossed, tragic, bittersweet. The trajectory of a character melodrama set against the exigencies of a particular social milieu has been the territory of much of his writing: the attraction of peculiar opposites, poignant ideals in conflict with hard reality, the collision of emotions against the boundaries of class. These ideas mirror, to a certain extent, his own upward striving, but one of the things that people admire most about Laurents is his ability to weave a script that is, above all, a grand entertainment.
After some coordination with his busy schedule, I met with the seventy-year-old playwright-screenwriter at his Greenwich Village address. He proved to be articulate, opinionated, provocative, and bitchy, as is his reputation (People magazine once dubbed him "a put-down artist"). He picked an argument with me about the current Broadway musical sensation Les Misérables, which he detested and I rather liked; and throughout the interview he weaved around and dodged my more personal questions, insisting that I was trying to categorize him. (I was not.) Much that was interesting was uttered off the record.
Even at that, when I showed Laurents a transcript of the interview, he wondered if they were really his words. Then, taking some imagined offense, he said he would not pose for a portrait photograph.
Arthur Laurents (1917–)
1948
The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak). Uncredited contribution.
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock). Script.
1949
Home of the Brave (Mark Robson). Based on his play.
Caught (Max Ophuls). Script.
Anna Lucasta (Irving Rapper). Co-script.
1955
Summertime (David Lean). Based on his play The Time of the Cuckoo, uncredited contribution to film script.
1956
Anastasia (Anatole Litvak). Script.
1957
The Seventh Sin (Ronald Neame). Uncredited contribution.
1958
Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger). Script.
1961
West Side Story (Robert Wise). Based on his musical play.
1962
Gypsy (Mervyn LeRoy). Based on his musical play.
1973
The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack). Co-script, adapted from his novel.
1977
The Turning Point (Herbert Ross). Script, co-producer.[*]
* Film Facts (1980), the revised edition of Reel Facts (1978 ), lists Avery Corman as co-writer with Laurents of The Turning Point, winner of 1977's "Best Written Drama—Written Directly for the Screen" from the Writers Guild .
A publicity photo (circa the 1960s) of playwright-screenwriter Arthur Laurents.
(Photo: Photofest)
Novels include The Way We Were .
Plays include Home of the Brave; Heartsong; The Bird Cage; The Time of the Cuckoo; A Clearing in the Woods; West Side Story; Gypsy; Invitation to a March; Anyone Can Whistle; Do I Hear a Waltz?; Hallelujah, Baby; The Enclave; Scream; The Madwoman of Central Park West .
Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for The Turning Point in 1977.
Writers Guild awards include best-script nominations for Home of the Brave, Gypsy, and West Side Story. The Snake Pit won the Best-Written American Drama award in 1948, though Laurents' contribution went uncredited. The Turning Point earned Best-Written Drama Written Directly for the Screen in 1977. That prize was shared by Laurents with writer Avery Corman, although Corman was not credited in publicity or on the screen.
Tell me why you became a writer .
I'd always wanted to be one since I was ten years old.
But why?
I don't know.
Were your parents writers?
No.
Were you an avid reader?
Of course. I don't think anybody knows why he became anything. I think there is a terrible desire to overexplain such things.
Some people have mentors, teachers or parents who nudged them along. Some people read and admired writers greatly. Some people grew up in the shadow of Broadway and devoted themselves to a Broadway career for that reason .
Well, those are people who are ambitious. That doesn't say anything about wanting to do whatever comes out of you. Some people write, some people paint, some people do neither. I see you go in for categorized thinking.
No. Not at all. I don't come here with any presuppositions. I might say I wanted to be a writer when I was ten years old, too, but I wanted to be a lot of other things, too .
Well, I wanted to be a writer, period.
Did you write when you were ten years old?
Yes.
When did you begin to write professionally?
Oh, I guess when I was around twenty.
That's when you were in the service?
Actually before. I had some friends who were all performers. They wanted to do one of those bright-young-thing revues, and they asked me to write some stuff for them. That was the first. Cabaret. Nightclubs. There was no off-Broadway then.
Then actually I began writing radio before the service.
Why radio?
Because I could sell to radio. I have always believed in supporting myself by my writing, and I have been very fortunate in that I always have.
What kind of radio? Serious radio drama?
Yes. After I graduated from Cornell, this girl I knew told me about a course in radio writing, so I went. The teacher was one of the directors of the Columbia Workshop. He asked us to do an adaptation, which I didn't do, because I wasn't interested [in adaptation]. But when he asked us to do something original, I wrote something, and the Columbia Workshop bought it. The going price for a script then was $100. They gave me $30 because that was [the cost of] my tuition. That was my first encounter with capitalism.
And your first professional sale?
Yes. Then, I did a lot of radio scripts when I was in the army. As a matter of fact, the army acted as my agent. There was a program called "The Man Behind the Gun." That was a commercial CBS program about the army. The army negotiated a deal for me, because [from their point of view] I was writing army propaganda. I made what seemed a great deal of money. Three hundred dollars a script.
Did you write your first play, Home of the Brave, after World War II?
I wrote Home of the Brave while I was in the army. And that, for me, was the end of radio.
Was Home of the Brave based on a real occurrence?
It was based on a photograph in a newspaper of some soldiers in the jungle. When I was writing this government propaganda program, I used to make up stories. I looked at this photograph, I made up some story, and that led to Home of the Brave .
Actually, how I came to write Home of the Brave is rather interesting. If, at a certain time of your life, someone says something to you, and you're ready to hear it, it'll have an effect. I used to drink and carouse quite a bit in the army. One time I went to a cocktail party and there was an actor there named Martin Gabel. He said to me, "You keep writing these things and you'll never write a play. And you're good enough [to write a play]." So I went home and I wrote that play in nine days while I was also writing army stuff. It took a long time to get it produced. Too long. I was in the army for almost five years. The war was over by the time it was produced.
Partly because of the nature of the subject?
Uh-huh.
I have seen the film version [Home of the Brave, 1949], and I thought it was surprisingly good. It stands up well, considering what I had read about it in reference books, before I caught up with it, one late night on television .
Well, the play was about a Jew.
The movie is about a black man .
Yes, because the film people said Jews had been done.
Really, who said that?
Stanley Kramer. Which is a real Hollywood story. But it's not just a joke. That's what Hollywood is like. Kazan had made a picture called Pinky [1949],
about a mulatto, played by Jeanne Crain with heavy makeup. They also made a big success of a movie called Gentleman's Agreement [1947]. I thought the point of that novel and movie was, you had better be nice to a Jew because he is probably a Gentile. It was silly. I knew it then.
My objection to the movie of Home of the Brave is that [after they changed it to being about a black man] they stayed too close to the play, and therefore the movie was untrue. You would never have found, in those days, what was called a Negro, in a white unit.
So, in other words, when they transposed it, it became unreal?
Well, yes. At the same time, the film was successful. After all, movies are a mass medium, a lot of people saw it, and I hope it helped about prejudice.
And even though Stanley Kramer's remark is ludicrous, making the theme about black-white racism was equally brave .
Oh, it was. I don't mean to castigate him, because in all of his movies he [Kramer] has really tried to combine something that he feels is important to say with something that is commercial. I see no virtue in finding something important to say in a failure. If you say it is "too artistic for the people," I think you're kidding yourself.
When I have written movies, I have been very aware that you have to adjust your head. When somebody says to me, "We're going to make a picture for X million dollars," that means it has to reach X million people. That day you have to come down from your very fancy mountain and say, "Okay, how can I do what I want to do without compromising myself, and yet reach those people?" It's hard, but you can do it.
Were you thinking that, specifically, when you just started out? When you wrote something like Home of the Brave?
Oh, that was for the theater. You don't think that way in the theater. That's one of the beauties of the theater.
Because in the theater, they can take it or leave it. They'll come if it's good . . . ?
I don't know if they'll come or if they won't. I don't think about that. When I write a play, all I think of is: I want it to be as good as I can make it. You are more calculating in screenwriting; at least I am. In a movie you're a hired hand and if you think you're anything but, you're kidding yourself. I worked in movies, beginning in 1947, for the first time, and in 1978, for the last time, I think. The situation has not changed. The writer is low man on the totem pole unless he is the director. Not the producer. I was co-producer of The Turning Point . Didn't mean a damn.
You learned how to write for radio in a workshop, and then you learned by doing. How did you learn to write a Broadway play?
By writing. I went to the theater as a child. I'm from New York, my Dad was a lawyer, and his secretary used to take me to the theater. Then I went as a kid—alone. I would go to the theater alone when I was thirteen and four-
teen. I could hear them say, "Oh, look at that kid sitting there!" I just loved the theater.
I also read a lot, and mainly I learned from seeing [plays] and reading.
I also studied playwriting at Cornell. But the man who conducted the course was terribly didactic, an anti-Semite, and very contemptuous of me because I came from New York and was Jewish. The only thing I learned from him was "Never begin a play with the telephone ringing." So later I wrote a one-act play that began with a telephone ringing. Boy, I learned nothing from him!
One of the things I said to myself [when I was young] was, if I ever write a play, it's not going to have a cast of one gender, and it's certainly not going to have outdoor scenes, because they look awful [on the stage]. Then I wrote Home of the Brave . It's [a cast of] all men, and most of it takes place in the jungle, which shows you that no matter what you say or think, ultimately it's what comes out of you. And you have to go with that.
What brought you to Hollywood? Home of the Brave?
No. What brought me to Hollywood was needing money. [Director] Anatole Litvak, who became a great friend, wanted me to do The Snake Pit, after Home of the Brave, because they were both "psychiatric." I didn't want to go to Hollywood. I wanted to stay in the theater, so I wrote another play. It failed, and by that time I was in debt. So I had to go to Hollywood. I ended up going to California for Metro.
Is that where The Snake Pit was being filmed?
No, no. Litvak was at Fox and he had two writers working on The Snake Pit —Millen Brand and Frank Partos.[*]
So I was at Metro. The interesting thing about the studios is their attitude towards writers. They treated you as though they knew they needed a writer. And they knew that, unlike [the case of] an actor, you could not get a writer to do something he did not want to do, because it would just be a disaster. So they would assign me things to write, I would say I didn't want to do them, and they wouldn't fire me. I had a sixteen-week contract with renewals, and I kept turning down everything.
When Tola [Anatole Litvak] asked for me on The Snake Pit, MGM wouldn't let me out of my contract. I asked to be released, and finally MGM loaned me to Fox to do The Snake Pit, because Fox paid MGM more than I was getting [in salary]. Tola was on deadline with that script, because they were
* The Snake Pit is Millen Brand's only screen credit in the official Writers Guild catalogue of credits, Who Wrote the Movie (and What Else Did He Write)? (1936–1969) . Frank Partos (né Partes), a short-story writer from Budapest, had been in Hollywood since the early 1930s and had numerous screen credits, including Jennie Gerhardt (1933), The Last Outpost (1935), Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), The Uninvited (1940), and And Now Tomorrow (1944). His film credits stop after 1956.
ready to go into shooting and the script was no good. I sat all day and all night with Tola, rewriting at the Fox studio. Finally the script was done and they began shooting it.
A friend of mine, Irene Selznick, said, "You ought to do something; your name's not on that script." Well, credits never meant anything to me. But I said something about it to Tola, who, as I say, remained a great friend despite this incident which I'm going to tell you about. He said, "Well, that's ridiculous. You wrote the script! We had to throw out what they wrote." When the picture was finished, the credit went to the Screen Writers Guild [for arbitration], and they ruled that Millen Brand and Frank Partos had written it. There was no screen credit for me. The guild hearing was during the shooting of the picture, and Tola said he was too busy to attend to testify. So I didn't get screen credit!
I remember being at the closing party. . . . The other screenwriters weren't there, and Olivia De Havilland and all the others were all very nice to me. I was a little annoyed, but not really, because I thought, and I still think, what difference? I mean, I know I wrote it, most of it. Credits never meant anything to me.
Then the irony. Hollywood is an irony unto itself. I stayed on [in Hollywood], and I rented a little house which belonged to Millen Brand, who, interestingly enough, was a Communist. I say that because in my experience the Communists out there were extremely decent people, as left-wing people always are, in my opinion. Not all, but most. And Millen Brand apologized to me. It was wrenching for him to do this because he was a very moral man. But he had a wife whom he was insane about, and she was telling him it [the screen credit] would help him get other jobs. He didn't want to write movies anyway. So he lied. And the wife left him anyway.
It would have been a shared credit in any case, right?
Well no, because they do it on percentage.
And your percentage would have —
Knocked them out. They did something really clever, but dastardly. There was a whole slew of scenes that were nothing like anything they'd written, so they typed them up and threw away the originals and kept the carbons as though they had written them. I didn't learn about that [trick] until after on.
Later on I wrote another picture [The Seventh Sin, 1957], a modernization of a picture called The Painted Veil [1934], a picture Garbo had made. It was supposed to be for Ava Gardner, or somebody like that; an extremely glamorous person; then they changed the casting to Eleanor Parker, so I knew the picture wouldn't work. They wanted changes [in the script]. I said I was not going to make any changes, for that reason. They got somebody else in to make the changes who then went over the whole script and when it said, "I don't do this," he changed it to, "I do not do this," because, you see, that gave him the percentage.
When you live in a town with that going on, if you let it get to you, you're an ass. If you stay there, you're a hack.
How did you learn screenwriting—again, by doing?
By doing.
Did you know any screenwriters?
No. You visualize. I happen to be very visual. And if you have some talent, you know there's a rhythm to all writing, even the rhythm of a sentence. Rhythm if particularly important in film. So you write with a rhythm. That you can't teach. You either feel it or you don't.
I have never imposed any discipline when I am writing. When I'm ready to write, I write.
I walk around with an idea. I don't know where it comes from. It usually begins with an image. In working it out, for whatever medium, you relearn the same things, or at least I do, every time. You make the same mistakes. The cardinal thing is always trying to remember that a script begins with character. Not with what you want to say. It begins and ends with character.
Did any screenwriters take you in hand simply to learn the screenplay form? Or did anybody?
The second picture I did [Rope ] was with Hitchcock, and that was a weird one because it was originally a play. Hitchcock wanted to do it as a play, which is why he got me. That picture was made with nine [ten-minute] takes.[*] He photographed it as a play, on one set. I loved working with him. The really first-rate directors I worked with, Litvak and Hitchcock, I got on marvelously with. The ones I had iffy relationships with were second- and third-rate.
Why did you get on marvelously with Hitchcock? Was it because he had useful script ideas?
You have to remember I was in my twenties. But Hitchcock treated me with respect. And soon I was learning from him. For one thing, he never had to use the viewfinder. He knew what was in every frame. It was always worked out beforehand.
We didn't agree entirely on everything. There were two big battles. I won one and lost the other. You know, the play is about a boy being strangled. Well, [in the film] he wanted a bottle of red wine to tip over on the chest as some kind of frisson . I said, "But if you strangle someone, there wouldn't be any blood, so it's pointless [as symbolism] and it would be obvious." And he finally agreed.
The other [battle was about the picture beginning] with seeing the murder in silhouette. I was against that. I said you should never know until the end whether there was anything in that chest or not. He tacked that [beginning] on after the film was made.
I was very close to Hitch. He was a child, you know, a very black-comedy
* In actuality Rope is composed of ten unbroken takes of approximately ten minutes each.
child. A really macabre humor. Very weird, sexually. I would go to these parties at his house and there were always the same people: Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly and Hitchcock's entourage. It sounds like I'm dropping a lot of fancy names, but [at the time] you'd think, "Oh God, I have to go again to Daddy's. . . ." Except I didn't feel that way, really. They were sweet people.
Later, Hitchcock got mad at me. Because he worked with the same people as much as possible, and when he liked you, you were in his family. He wanted me to do the next picture, which was something called Under Capricorn [1949], I think, with Ingrid Bergman. I didn't want to do it, and he got very angry with me. Then we became friends, even after that. I turned down several things he wanted me to do, including Torn Curtain [1966] and Topaz [1969].
Why were you turning down films with Hitchcock if you liked him so much? Because they weren't good.
And you thought Rope was good when you started working on it, or were you in a different position, professionally?
No. I thought Rope was good. I thought Rope could have been marvelous if he [Hitchcock] had been able to cast it the way he wanted to, with Cary Grant and Monty Clift. But since Cary Grant was at best bisexual and Monty was gay, they were scared to death [of the casting] and they wouldn't do it. So Hitchcock got Jimmy Stewart as one of the leads, and he was dead wrong for the part.
The credits also say Hume Cronyn did some writing. I can't understand why it took so many people to adapt a play for the screen that was essentially filmed as a play .
I threatened to sue Cronyn because he was going around saying he wrote the screenplay. Cronyn was in Hitch's family. I don't know what that credit was about except that Cronyn was a friend of Hitch's and Hitch was like a boy when he liked you. If you ask me what the adaptation credit was for—I never saw the adaptation. But what did I care? Again, so what?
I have read that Ben Hecht also worked on Rope. Is that true?
No. I don't even think he was around.
In a short period of time in Hollywood, you went from being unemployed and having had just one successful Broadway play to being a writer of some stature, working for Hitchcock .
You have to remember I got awards for that play [Home of the Brave ]. Second of all, to this day no matter what they say, if you have anything done in the theater, and it runs three nights, they're impressed [in Hollywood]. Also, I was very young. So that made them more impressed. The only one who wasn't impressed was me.
Did you perceive differences in the way some studios treated writers? Was there a studio which was more of a haven?
Well, you could hardly call it a studio. Yes, there was a place called En-
"I don't think he [Max Ophuls] was such a genius": Robert Ryan (foreground) and
James Mason in director Ophuls' Caught, script by Arthur Laurents.
(Photo: Museum of Modern Art)
terprise, where I did a picture with a director named Max Ophuls, who was supposed to be this great European genius, according to all these Film Comment and Sight and Sound articles. He was a very amusing man, wonderful with the camera. I don't think he was such a genius. I think his pictures are vastly overrated. The picture I did with him was called Caught .
I love it. I think it is wonderful .
Well, there's a piece by Pauline Kael, I think, which typifies my feeling about film critics. She talks about a certain sequence where it's all murky because of the psychological murkiness of the character and all this stuff. It is a scene where there is a Howard Hughes character who comes to a pier where this girl is waiting. The truth of it was there was no money [in the budget] even to get a picture of a motorboat off Malibu!
In Paris, I had seen a stage version of Anna Karenina . It was staggering, because you saw her at the train station, and when the train came in, you saw her throw herself in front of the train—on stage. I wondered how the hell they did that, and I went backstage to find out. Well, they had a lot of smoke, dry ice, and there was a wooden bridge and a stagehand with a huge spotlight on his hat; he came round the bend and the light shone straight at the audience; with the noise of the train and all the smoke, you thought you saw a train and
you thought you saw her jump in front of it. So I told that to Ophuls. In Caught, if you look at it [closely], what the motorboat is, is a sound, and the stagehand with the light on his head is bobbing up and down in front of a black velvet curtain. That's Pauline Kael's psychological murkiness. (Laughs .)
There's a wonderful Hollywood story about that picture, do you want to hear it?
Sure .
Ophuls had decided to do a picture for Enterprise and he wanted me to write it, why I don't know. They had bought a book called Wild —something—December [Wild Calendar ], maybe. Written by a woman named Libbie Block. The reason they bought it is that they wanted Ginger Rogers under contract. She wanted that book. After they bought the book, she decided she didn't want to work for Enterprise, so they were stuck with the book. Then they had a big screenwriter named Abe Polonsky write the script. He wrote a script. I never read the book, but I read his script, which was something about two brothers—one was dying, and he wanted the other one to marry his widow—which, I think, he did. Very strange. Almost an incestuous love between the two brothers. That was the picture Ophuls was going to make.
I read that script, out of courtesy, because my agent [Irving] "Swifty" Lazar told me, "Read it, kid, you've got nothing to lose." When I met with Ophuls, he said, "I don't want to do that story; I want to do the Howard Hughes story." I asked why. He said, "Because I hate Hughes." Ophuls had worked at RKO [under Hughes, who had acquired controlling interest of the studio in 1948]. Mind you, the picture now had millions spent on it, or whatever it was in those days—costs for things that were totally never used.
We started over from scratch. Then we went after the people we wanted for the picture, Robert Ryan and Barbara Bel Geddes, who were under contract to Howard Hughes. So we had to show Hughes the script about himself. (Laughs .) Eventually, for the hero they had to get James Mason, for his first American picture, with an English accent, playing an American! It was wild.
When they were ready to start the picture, Ophuls came down with shingles. So they hired a director, a left-wing guy named Jack Berry, not a very good director. At least he never did anything very good that I know of.[*] Anyway, Berry hated women. (A lot of those men out there [in Hollywood] talk about fucking women in the American pejorative sense.) The girl in the picture was based on a girl I knew who had been married to Sam Spiegel. One of those Texas beauties who was very sweet and very dumb. The fact that she was after money didn't make her a golddigger; that was the way she'd
* Laurents may have lost track of director Berry's career, for Jack Berry was also a blacklist victim. A former actor and director with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre, Berry directed, among many other credits, a taut Hemingway adaptation before he was blacklisted, He Ran All the Way (1951), and afterwards, Claudine (1974).
been brought up; that was what you did, if you were successful, you married a guy who had some money. Well, Jack Berry turned the character into a whore, and he was also hot for Barbara Bel Geddes. They shot for twelve days, after which Ophuls got better, saw all the footage, and said, "Out! Out! Every bit of it."
Ophuls said to me, "We have to rewrite." We had only enough money left for four days of shooting, so I had to condense twelve days into four. It went on like that. That's Hollywood!
Did Ophuls have much script sense? Much script perception?
Not much. He was very easy. At Enterprise, the picture was produced by Gottfried Reinhardt's brother, Wolfgang, and he came from a whole literary tradition. He was the only one who talked script. He was charming and literate and weak. I mean, he was helpful—not about script, but about getting the money and getting the people—until it came to running interference with the studio.
Were you taking these early assignments principally for the money?
Partly. Also, for the time being, I had fallen in love with somebody. But I was also living in California, playing tennis, where it was all so beautiful. Then the [House Un-American Activities Committee] witch-hunt came. Though there was an extraordinary thing about the witch-hunt which I want to write about one day. It can sound very frivolous to say this, but it was exciting.
What was exciting was the lines were so clear. You saw who was good and who was evil, and I mean evil . In my book anyone who informed was evil. There was no excuse. They were evil, not just politically, because they were people who would have done something like that anyway. They were the kind of people who would always sell you out. In life . [Choreographer] Jerry Robbins, whom I did West Side Story with, did it to me on West Side Story .[*] These people had a streak in them. I don't care if it came from insecurity. I don't care if their parents were shits. After you turn twenty-one, you shouldn't be allowed to say that anymore. You are responsible.
I can remember sitting next to Eddie Dmytryk at several meetings to raise money for the families [of the Hollywood Ten] because these guys were going to the slammer. And what does Dmytryk do? He goes to the slammer, he comes out, and he testifies—because he needed a job. Understandable, but not condonable.
I thought Dalton Trumbo was disgraceful when he said, shortly before he died, that it didn't make any difference who were the victims [of the blacklist]. [**] That's absolutely balls. He worked all the time and he was fancy-
* Jerome Robbins' curiously "compliant" demeanor before the HUAC is discussed in Victor Navasky's Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980).
** "It will do no good to search for villains or heroes because there were none," screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, told the Writers Guild-West upon accepting theLaurel Award in 1970. "There were only victims." His speech provoked controversy among the survivors of the Ten and among the Hollywood Left in general. See Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980), pp. 418–421.
schmancy with his cigarette holder. I thought that was a disgusting thing to say. You shouldn't take that kind of lofty attitude. When it comes down to people having jobs, I don't want any of this ersatz sophistication. He wasn't being forgiving; it was a misplaced cynicism.
It [the blacklist] has never left me. It will never leave me. I was blacklisted, so I left [Hollywood]. I was going to leave anyway.
Was there a point at which you became disillusioned with California itself, the culture and the motion picture industry, having little to do with the blacklist?
No, it was the witch-hunt. There were people in Los Angeles, at that time, who were marvelous. I was very friendly with Charlie Chaplin and met people at his house. There was a woman named Salka Viertel. She had an authentic salon [at her house] where I met Thomas Mann and [Bertolt] Brecht—for a kid, which I was, this was thrilling. You couldn't have met them in New York.
This existed until the witch-hunt cleaned these people out, and then Hollywood became what it is today, cardboard people running around on Styrofoam. The thing about it is, it always was a town where everybody is Cinderella and is terrified that 12 o'clock is going to strike, and eventually it does. But while you had these people around, my God, you just wanted to sit and listen!
The other part, all the jazz, was dazzling. There was this glamor. Irene Selznick was my mentor [in that regard]. She had produced my second play [Heartsong ], the flop one, and I had gone to Hollywood to pay her off. She gave me a list of parties (this is true): A-plus, A, A-minus, B-plus, B, B-minus . . . After that, I wasn't allowed to go. She got me invited. Well, after I was there six months, they were having a triple-tent anniversary party one night for John Huston, a director named Jean Negulesco, and I forget the third one.[*] Irene said, "What time are you getting there?" I said, "I'm not going." She said, "Didn't you get your invitation?" I said, "Yeah." She said, "Why aren't you going?" I said, "I've had it." She said, "How can you not go?" I said, "How can you go?" She said, "Well, I think tonight, it might happen . . ."
They're all children. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen in the supermarket . . . you don't have to go to fucking draggy parties.
Again, like the Martin Gabel story, there was a writer named Harry Kurnitz who once gave a party [in Hollywood] that I went to. I encountered him
* In Things I Did and Things I Think I Did by Jean Negulesco (New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1984), pp. 199–200, the triple-tent party is colorfully recollected. The third director was Lewis Milestone.
there and he said, "What are you doing here?" I said, "You invited me." He said, "I mean, in Hollywood. Why are you still here?" I said, "Why are you?" He said, "You're a writer, I'm a hack. Get out." So I got out.[*]
At what point did the witch-hunt turn unexciting and threatening?
When everybody left. Then the town became unexciting. I remember an enormous farewell party for [producer-writer] Adrian Scott [one of the Hollywood Ten], who was leaving for France. Right after that [his wife, actress] Ann Shirley, backed out and left him at the last minute. That to me seemed to signal the end.
Was the left-wing politics at all helpful to the cultural atmosphere of Hollywood? Was it beneficial for writers? Was there any community of give and take?
Ah, no. I was in a Marxist study group [in Hollywood] and I learned a lot, but I learned a lot about politics, sociology, and economics, not about writing.
I thought people like John Howard Lawson were famous for coming up and making suggestions to other screenwriters .[**]
Well, I never met him. He was a left-wing majordomo, not a cultural majordomo. The people who influenced me were classier than John Howard Lawson. I mean, Salka [Viertel] was left-wing, yes, but [at her salon] you didn't hear people screaming, "Rise, ye prisoners of starvation." It was much more interesting than that. Charlie Chaplin was accused of being a left-winger, but he wasn't. He was totally individualistic, as a matter of fact—nonsensical, I thought, politically. But a marvelous man.
I read Lawson's book Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting, which had an influence on me until I realized that, again, it was what I was baiting you about. It was too codified, too rigid, too compartmentalized and departmentalized. That's not the way you do good work. You have to do what you feel with the governor of craft and experience.
* Harry Kurnitz's many Hollywood script credits include Thin Man installments, What Next, Corporal Hargrove? (1945), The Web (1947), One Touch of Venus (1948), The Inspector General (1949), Land of the Pharaohs (1955), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Hatari! (1962), A Shot in the Dark (1964), and How to Steal a Million (1966).
** One of Hollywood's more controversial figures of the 1930s and 1940s, John Howard Lawson was already well known as a politically committed playwright on Broadway before becoming a contract writer in Hollywood in 1928. A co-founder of the Screen Writers Guild, he was also its first president and one of the key organizers of its long struggle for recognition. At the same time, he was a behind-the-scenes eminence of the Hollywood branch of the U.S. Communist Party. His best films as a screenwriter include Blockade (1938), about the Spanish Civil War, and Action in the North Atlantic (1943). One of the Hollywood Ten, to some extent spokesman for the group, Lawson set the fractious tone for the public HUAC hearings into Hollywood politics when he vociferously refused to cooperate with the questioners. Blacklisted and eventually jailed, he was forced to quit screenwriting. He became a lecturer and the author of several noteworthy books on the theories and techniques of playwriting: Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting (New York: Putnam, 1949); Film in the Battle of Ideas (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1953); and Film: The Creative Process (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964).
I was not a member of the [Communist] party. But frankly, I believed in the goals [of the party], although I thought, even then, that the party members were extremely naive. But if somebody says to me, "Why were you never in the Communist party?" I would say, "Because they didn't ask me." Which is true. The reason they didn't ask me is because I would say things like "They don't have democracy in Russia. . . ." They'd say, "Well, you do vote . . ." I'd say, "But you have no choice, so it's not a vote. . . ." Well, that was heresy.
They were just children that way. Part of it was justified; part of it was just rebelliousness. Part of it was Jews and blacks, who felt understandably persecuted in this country and who were looking for an alternative.
I went to a fund-raising meeting once and had a big argument about the Hollywood Ten when they were standing on the First Amendment. I said, "I don't see anything in that First Amendment that allows you to do what you say. Stand on the Fifth. That's practical. Freedom of speech doesn't mean they can't fire you. . . ."
I think a lot of them [Hollywood members of the Communist party] wanted to be martyrs. You have to remember, and this is awful to say, a lot of them [party members] weren't very good at what they did. This [the blacklist] justified their not getting a job. That's the other side of it.
You mean a lot of the Ten —
No. Not the Ten.
A lot of the blacklisted people?
Yes. Some of them hadn't worked in ages. They were lousy actors and writers. But it didn't matter; they were decent people.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to be hacks like Harry Kurnitz?
Yes. But they shouldn't have pushed for the First Amendment, which didn't cover the situation.
How did you find out that you were blacklisted?
I know the specific incident, which concerns Jerry Robbins. He had asked me to do a musical [on Broadway] and I started to work on one. I did an outline; the title was Look Ma, I'm Dancing . It was about the ballet.
I was going to a terrible analyst then, Theodor Reik, who was very famous.[*] He said, "Oh, you mustn't do musicals." So I said, "Jerry, I can't do it," and I walked out on him. He [Robbins] was furious with me. I signed away the rights.
They did make a musical out of it. Anyway, later Paramount wanted to make a film of it, so Jerry asked me if I wanted to write the screenplay. I said yes. Suddenly "Swifty" called me and he said, "You're out." I said, "Why?"
* Eminent psychoanalyst Theodor Reik wrote many influential books, including From Thirty Years with Freud, Masochism in Modern Man, Psychology of Sex Relations, Listening with the Third Ear, Fragment of a Great Confession, The Secret Self: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Literature, and Myth and Guilt .
He said, "They say you want too much money." I said, "How much did you ask for?" He said, "I didn't ask for anything yet."
There was a man I knew, Paramount's story editor, who shall remain nameless, who called and told me [I was blacklisted]. I said to this man, "Now we've really got them. We can break the blacklist. This is the perfect thing. They claim they are doing it on the money, and no money has been asked for. We can break the blacklist. I'll sue." He said, "I can't testify." I said, "Why?" He said, "My job."
I wanted to go to Europe but I didn't have a passport. Jerry got me a lawyer, only I didn't know that the lawyer [was connected] to the FBI. I have an overdeveloped sense of morality, which saved me. The lawyer said, "Now you have to tell me everything, in order to get a passport." He grilled me for hours. But there were certain things he wanted to know about [that bothered me]. For example, the Soviet-American friendship affair at the Waldorf. He said, "Who was there?" I said, "You can look in Life magazine." He said, "No, you tell me." I said, "No, I don't want to. You look it up." He knew I was in a Marxist study group in Hollywood. He said, "Who else was in your group?" I said, "I'm not going to tell you." He said, "I'm your lawyer." I said, "I don't care." Luckily.
Finally, the lawyer said the best thing for me to do was to call the State Department, which I did for three months. I'd call them and they'd say, "Your name is on page so and so of this issue of the Daily Worker . Can you tell us what it says?" There would be a review of Home of the Brave, let's say. This went on for three months until finally the State Department man said to me, "Write and explain your feelings about everything." They already knew all the things that I'd given money, and my name, to, but I wrote down what I felt. . . ."
My lawyer said, "Now fix it up. . . ." I said, "I'm going to send it in just like this." He said, "It's too idiosyncratic." It was. But what's interesting is, I sent it in on a Friday, and on a Monday the passport arrived. On Wednesday I was sailing for Europe, and there was a telegram delivered to the boat from Metro offering me a job. That's how closely they worked [together].
After all that, why, at that point, did you leave —
Oh, I was young. Why not go to Europe? I was set to go to Europe. I had no place to live here anyway and I had made up my mind, so I went. And it was fun.
They gave me a passport only for six months, and when I crossed the border with that, the looks I got! In Europe they told me to go to Tangiers, since the list hadn't caught up with people there yet. In Tangiers, the guy at the consulate was being driven out—it was a shame, you know, how McCarthy decimated the foreign service—and he renewed the passport and gave
me a number 33, a diplomatic number. I've never forgotten that. Consequently, I got right through any border.
How long were you in Europe for?
Oh, about a year and a half.
Did you do any film work there?
I had an experience which is too long [to recount], with Sam Spiegel, writing a picture for [Marlon] Brando and [Ingrid] Bergman. It was a hilarious experience. But I don't really want to go into it.
It never came to pass?
No, Spiegel quit paying me.[*] I was going to sue, because I needed the money. My lawyer said to me, "Oh, it's an open-and-shut case. But the line of credit for Sam Spiegel goes around Rockefeller Center, so forget it." So I wrote a play, Time of the Cuckoo, and came home.
Did you meet a fraternity of people over in Europe who were blacklisted?
I have never been involved with people in the theater or in pictures. My friends are largely not in what's called "the business." And over there, they weren't. I met a very diversified group of people, had a wonderful time learning about Europe and about life in Europe.
It was easy to get by. We went to Tangiers, a group of us, people I met in Spain who didn't speak much English; I didn't speak much Spanish. We had fun. You know how we started the day? We'd [each] take $25—now, in those days Morocco or Tangiers was an international city, seven powers, with seven different currencies—so if you worked fast enough, running up and down the street, you could exchange that $25 and make $25. That was enough for the day. So you had your stake of $25 in your pocket and $25 to spend. Then the next day, you did it again. I had no responsibilities. I had no cares.
Were you in touch with what was going on back in the States?
Through friends. In Paris I had a great friend named Ellen Adler, Stella Adler's daughter. She and Brando were having an affair and were very close (and still are). I remember meeting them one day and saying to Marlon, "Well, [Elia] Kazan really topped off everybody," because Kazan had taken out an ad in the New York Times defending himself [for cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee]. Marlon said, "You're a shit." I said, "Get the Times and see it." Well, he did, and [then] what did Marion do? That big liberal. Went back to the United States and made On the Waterfront [1954], which is an apology for informing. That's what the picture is about—made by two informers, "Gadge" [Kazan] and [screenwriter] Budd Schulberg.
Actors rationalize. Understandable, and I say—okay. But don't try to make yourself out a hero when doing something you know is scummy.
* Spiegel was a notorious welsher, as is recounted in The Hustons by Lawrence Grobel and in other sources.
When you came back and put on Time of the Cuckoo, were you theoretically turning your back on film?
Yes.
I assume you had nothing to do with the film version directed by David Lean, Summertime.
I did the original screenplay.
You did?
Then Kate [Hepburn] came along and Lean was absolutely bewitched by her and they rewrote it. Oh, the credit says, "H. E. Bates," but they rewrote it.[*] She said to me, "I wouldn't give you ten men for any one woman. . . ." She threw out the meat of the play. The whole second act, she threw out.
Which is?
The man dumps the woman! He says to her, "You can only be sure of something you can touch. . . ." There's a whole plot subtext about the materialism of Americans. Kate's character is so complaining and mistrustful that finally he has had it with her. Then she learns—the beginning of a glimmer—that maybe she should go with her emotions more and not be so mistrustful. But it's too late. He has already kicked her out.
Kate's feeling was that you had written something that was antifeminist—
Not antifeminist! She, Kate Hepburn, is a very bossy, humorless lady. She has a sense of wit, but no sense of humor whatsoever. I like her, she's interesting, she's an original. But she wants to push everybody around, and nobody is going to tell Kate Hepburn anything! Including David Lean. I don't like that movie.
I don't think it is very good at all .
Terrible movie. She's awful [in it]. When the man tries to kiss this woman, suddenly she looks like she's going to have a catalyptic fit. Why? Over a kiss? For God's sake! Awful movie!
Why would she do something like that to herself?
She thinks it [Summertime ] is wonderful. She came back after shooting the movie, invited me over, and said, "Well, you may not like it, but I'm brilliant." And she was not kidding. That's why I say she has no sense of humor. Anybody who can say that with a straight face is humorless.
How could they justify removing your name from the screenplay credit?
Because I didn't want it on. It [the screenplay] was awful.
But it was your own play!
You have no say at all. Don't you understand?! No writer has any say about a movie! You can argue, but you can't say. They have the say. That's why they don't like writers. Because they wish they [themselves] could write. That really is why. They think, now they'll really fix you . . . now, we'll fix you . . . we'll make it ours .
How did your next film, Anastasia [1956], originate?
* Director Lean is co-credited, with H. E. Bates, for the screenplay.
Litvak asked me to do it and I said to him, on one condition. I said, "Tell it like it's a fairy tale. If you're going to do it seriously, I don't want to do it." He said, "No, no, no. Any way you want."
There were two things about that picture that I am very proud of. The big recognition scene of the empress is one. You know, originally Anastasia was a French play, and when they did it in England, they changed it; then when they did it in New York, they changed it again. I never believed the recognition scene. She always came up with some piece of [obvious] evidence. And I thought of the bit where Anastasia had this nervous cough and during the recognition scene, she has to cough. The empress says to her, "Take care of your cold," and she says, "I don't have a cold." The empress says, "Why are you coughing?" she say, "I always cough when I'm nervous." Ah! My long lost! I thought that was a very good piece of business.
Anyway, Ingrid couldn't get a job to save her life. But we wanted her [for the part], and this is where Litvak was terrific. Fox said, "Uh-uh, she's persona non grata." And Litvak says, "I won't make the movie without her." Fox said, "Well, tell her to come to America and we'll test the women's clubs, the Veterans of Foreign Wars . . ." Ingrid said, "I won't." She said (and this is where she was terrific too), "When I go, I'll go because I want to, as an actress, and either you want me as an actress or you don't." So they took her.
But they got Helen Hayes to play the empress to make Ingrid Bergman kosher. I remember I had not met Helen Hayes, and when I did, she said, "Oh, forgive me!" Because she was not an empress. She could play Victoria, a middle-class woman, but the Danish empress was not middle-class.
How about Litvak? Was he articulate at all in terms of script? Was he involved in the development?
In a way. There was always a battle with him. I had a much more interesting opening, I thought. I wanted this deranged character wandering around in a lower subterranean walk near the Seine; she hears music, and from her vantage point you look into the Seine. There's a piano playing there. She dives in, and drowns, presumably.
Well, he wanted this Russian Easter scene because he's Russian and he loved the Russian Easter. He said, "There's such a beautiful church in Paris; we'll photograph it there." So I gave up the fight. Then, typically, they wouldn't allow him to photograph there. So we went to Nice because they had some kind of cockamamie Russian church there. Then they had to build a facsimile of it in London, and, of course, the whole thing cost a fortune for that ridiculous opening.
We had battles, like: He would say, "She can't say, 'I don't.' She has to say, 'I do not.' " I'd say, "No, she can't say, 'I do not.' She has to say, 'I don't'." I would say, "Tola, you don't speak English, you don't understand about colloquial English . . ."
Litvak chickened out with the ending really, because there is [supposed to
be] a scene with the empress—after Anastasia has run off with the Yul Brynner character—where they say, "But what shall we tell everybody? They're waiting to hear . . ." I wanted the empress to look right at the camera and say, "Tell them the show is over. Go home." That would say, "This is entertainment." But when she says it [in the film], she doesn't look at the camera.
I'm surprised you could write films out in the open, in the 1950s, when the blacklist was still operative .
I never went near Los Angeles. Anastasia was Litvak and [producer] Buddy Adler. It was made in London and in Paris.
You have to realize the studios only wanted what was expedient. They had no politics; they didn't care. Again, later on, I was asked to sign something. Metro had the rights to any twenty of Irving Berlin's songs, and he was going to write five new ones for a movie. He wanted me—this was for the Arthur Freed unit—to write an original musical. They gave me an incredible deal, a lot of money, and I also had sixteen weeks off to direct because Stephen Sondheim and I had written a musical called Anyone Can Whistle .
Again I refused to sign. I remember Lazar saying, "You have to sign something . Write anything you want." You're not going to believe this, but I wrote, "I am not a member of the newsboys' shoeshine unit, nor have I ever bee . . ." That was enough. (Laughs .)
Did you ever go to Los Angeles again?
What for? Maybe I might've gone there on a visit, but I didn't work there. I haven't written there since '47.
How about Bonjour Tristesse? Also developed and filmed entirely outside Hollywood?
Wrote in New York and Paris. Made in Paris and London.
Bonjour Tristesse was a miscalculation. I needed money and I was doing West Side Story, which I thought would run three months. So I thought, "Well, I'll get some money from doing this thing with [Otto] Preminger," only it all went into taxes because West Side Story turned out to be a hit.
In Paris, Preminger introduced me to Jean Seberg, who was a shrewd cookie, I don't care what they say about her. Then he had Saint Joan [1957] run for me when I got back to New York. I sent him a cable: "I beg you to get rid of Jean Seberg. She will ruin you, herself, me, the picture, everything." He wouldn't. We had lunch at "21" and he bet me a thousand dollars that it would work. I said, "I'll bet you five dollars." He sent me a five-dollar gold piece after the picture opened. It was awful.
It was a picture about French people with Jean Seberg, Deborah Kerr, and David Niven. There's such a thing as behavior . Also, it's a very slight, ironic story, and that's the way I tried to write it. But Otto, whom I liked, was a heavy-handed Austrian, and he tried to make it so melodramatic.
Françoise Sagan was very heavily overrated. She had a kind of delicate French cynical look at love, and that's what you had to understand. Litvak,
whom I adored, wanted me to do [another Françoise Sagan novel,] Aimezvous Brahms? I said, "Forget her, it won't work. She got by once. Don't try it twice."
Did Preminger involve himself in the script of Bonjour Tristesse?
He left me alone totally. But then the way he shot it, it was ghastly.
Do you have any input on the film adaptations of your two Broadway hits, Gypsy [1962] and West Side Story [1961]?
West Side Story —artistically, I think, they never handled the problem. What are these boys doing—a tour jeté down the street!? The key to it was the decor. You cannot have ballet, I believe, in a realistic setting. They might have tried taking a New York street and stripping it of every bit of set dressing so it would be real but not real . Then I think there would have been more of a chance for the dancing. But the dance on the roof is too like Arthur Freed and company. And the performances are lousy.
"Krupke" was my idea, and Lenny [Bernstein] and Steve [Sondheim] and Jerry [Robbins] didn't want it in the original. I Sold it to them on the snobbish basis of it being like the porter scene in Shakespeare. For the movie they thought, "We're not going to interrupt the drama to have this jokey number . . ." So they put it up front where it didn't work. I don't remember much else about the movie. I didn't like it.
And Gypsy, you feel . . . ?
Gypsy was the worst. She [Rosalind Russell] was so awful. She shouldn't have been in it. It should have been Judy Garland. That's who we wanted, but they wouldn't take a chance on her. The reason was, when she did A Star is Born [1954], her weight went up and down. Well, in this picture, which covers so much time, it didn't matter if her weight went up and down. But that was their reasoning. Idiots!
They asked me to do the screenplay. When I found out it was [director] Mervyn LeRoy and Rosalind Russell, I said no.
You don't seem to have had much luck with your screen career, whether the films were original or adaptations—
They fired me from The Way We Were! They got, I couldn't keep track of them, eleven writers, including [Dalton] Trumbo. They asked two friends of mine, Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, who told them to go fuck themselves—that was the Eastern Mafia against the West.
They're so scurvy. I had gotten [director] Sydney Pollack the job. [Producer] Ray [Stark] didn't want him. I talked them into it. Then Sydney got Redford. Sidney never let me meet Redford; that's the way they play these games. Sidney said, "He [Redford] is not satisfied. . . ." I said, "Well, let me talk to him to find out what he is dissatisfied with. . . ." He said, "Well, I had a meeting with him. I'll give you this cassette which he gave to me. . . ." What it boiled down to was Redford finally saying, "Well, her part is bigger!"
Then Sydney called me up one day and said, "I have to tell you that Ray
is going to fire you." I said, "Well, Sydney, you're the director and you're my friend . . ." He said, "Well, there's nothing I can do." Half an hour later, Ray called. He said, "I have to tell you Sydney's going to fire you. . . ." So they fired me. Then they started shooting. When they got in terrible trouble, they called me back.
By that time I was over the hurt and the agony, and I said, "I'll come out there and try to fix it. But if you don't like what I'm doing, I'm leaving instantly." They were very nice, but it was all very cold. Only Barbra [Streisand] and I were fine together. He glared at me, Redford. And Pollack, when they had a rough cut of the picture in New York, we sat with the cutter afterward, and Sydney cried that it was so terrible. You don't hear about that anymore. Now it's his great masterpiece and all this kind of stuff.
Who saved it? The editor?
His [Pollack's] work wasn't that terrible. Not that I think he did a very good job. They cut the big scene out of the picture! The scene where the Redford character says to her, "The studio says I have a subversive wife and they'll fire me unless you inform," and she says, "Well, there's a simple solution. We get a divorce. Then you don't have a subversive wife." They shot the original, but they cut it out. Now, at the beginning of the scene all she says is "The simple solution is we get a divorce. . . ." You don't know anything about informing.
How could they justify that?
They said, we want a romance, not a political picture. The picture was an enormous success. That's the justification.
Sydney didn't have anything to do with that. At that time it was in Ray's hands; Sydney Pollack didn't have the power then. Ray had the final control. Ray had a screening in San Francisco, which to their surprise was a smash. But after that—I don't know whether it's true or not—Ray said the exhibitors didn't want so much politics [in the movie], so they cut a lot out. They emphasized the romance, and there you are. But they all play these games. . . .
There's been so much talk of a sequel. Will there ever be one?
It is very doubtful. I did another script, ages ago. There was all this stuff in the press about a sequel, and actually Redford and I have sat here having a lot of talks about it. But he's such a weasel. It turns out he won't do it because Ray Stark would produce it and he hates Ray. It's a whole long story with Redford. He's impossible, egocentric.
Here's why it will never happen. First of all, they [Redford and Streisand] are too old. Also, they won't agree. One agrees, the other one won't. Then Sydney Pollack is busy keeping them separate and together. Then this one hates that one. It's such intrigue.
I gather The Turning Point was equally disappointing, for you, even though you were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay .
I was on the set with that picture because I was co-producer until my dear
Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in a publicity pose for the blacklist-era Hollywood
motion picture The Way We Were . Writer Arthur Laurents adapted the screenplay
from his own novel.
friend Herbert Ross asked me to leave.[*] I said why. He said. "Well, you're not only a good writer, you're a good director. You make me nervous." So I said okay and left.
There was a whole gay subplot that was subsequently dropped, wasn't there?
It wasn't a subtext. It was a very skillful handling of the gay issue, I thought. It was absolutely subverted. Not by the studio, but by Herb Ross, and his wife [former ballerina Nora Kaye, the executive producer of The Turning Point ], who was an old girlfriend of mine, for personal reasons. Let's let it go at that. It was shameful.
In the movie the whole plot with Shirley MacLaine and her husband [Wayne, played by Tom Skerritt] doesn't come up until the last scene, this whole business about him turning out to be gay. You wonder, "Wait a minute, what is this? . . ." Well, it was in the beginning of the picture, and there were scenes—[especially one] crucial scene—that were not shot. I can say to you, "Oh, what you didn't see that was in [the script], and you would say, "That's all well for you to say, I can only go by what I saw. . . ."
If you do a play, it's not going to be totally the way you want it to be. Nothing is totally the way you want it to be. First of all, you're not that good yourself. But seeing it all [done the way you have written it] is on a percentage basis, and what you stand a chance of seeing in the theater is so much higher [a percentage] than what you stand a chance of seeing in the movies. They cut it out. They don't give it a chance.
At least you seem to have a pretty good batting average when it comes to seeing the scripts that you have been paid to write actually get produced .
Well, there is unproduced stuff. There are three screenplays—counting They Way We Were sequel. They were paid for.
What are the other two?
One of them was an adaptation of a play of mine called The Endplay, a wonderful screenplay, the best I ever did. But the hero is gay . . . and nowadays—forget it, it'll never be made.
The other one was interesting. This was where I chickened out. I had a deal with Orion, to write and direct, and at the last minute I quit. Because I just could not face all that time on a movie. I couldn't deal with the business end and all the people.
It was called After Love, about that stage in a marriage when the marriage is no longer passionate. That is the danger point. What happens? It's not that they don't love each other, it" that they don't want to screw on the kitchen table. What do they do then? That's what it was about.
* Film director Herb Ross was "musical director" when Laurents staged I Can Get It for You Wholesale on Broadway in 1962.
It doesn't seem as if any Hollywood project has turned out for you the way you envisioned it .
No, no. How could it?
Did any of your screenplays get filmed the way you wrote them, or close to the way you wrote them?
No.
Do any of them give you pride or gratification?
Moments in them. I don't think too much about it.
I like going to the movies. I call them "movies," not "films." There are very few of what I call "films." Moonstruck [1987], which I saw recently, is a real Hollywood movie-movie. You come out joyous, dancing. Romance?—the best. The John Patrick Shanley screenplay is wonderful, very clever. But it is not real. In my terms I can't call it a "film." Though it's a helluva "movie."
It is like minor Capra .
Oh, I never liked Capra. I thought he was saccharine.
I think of him because of all the time he gave to his minor characters .
No, the characters [in Moonstruck ] are fresh. Things like It's a Wonderful Life [1946] are such bullshit. It was bullshit at the time. Lady for a Day [1933]—such banal, saccharine stuff. Maybe they got by with it, then. Somebody wanted me to direct a musical of It's a Wonderful Life, once. That wouldn't stand a chance! People have grown up some; they're not twenty yet, but at least they are eighteen; they know better. It isn't that I don't believe in optimism. I'm an optimist. But when the little man gets up in the Senate [in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939], it's either hypocrisy or cynicism to think they won't cut his head off—who are they kidding? Everything has to be based, at least, in emotional reality, and there is no reality in Capra.
It's interesting to hear you say that, because your stories have that emotional reality. For one thing, so many of the films, in particular, are about cross-class or cross-cultural romance—perhaps influenced by your brief participation in a Marxist study group .
That's not Marxist. That's just life.
It's how Arthur Laurents perceives life. Not everybody perceives it as you do .
I know you—you're looking, again, for too much cause and effect from specifics. You know what I mainly learned from that Marxist study group? How to read a newspaper. I'm not kidding. To see what's behind the news.
I don't mean the study group overtly influenced you, per se, but I wonder why is it that your films are so often about romances between people from different strata?
Because of my age. I am a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who came up against anti-Semitism. That has an enormous effect on your life. It does. That makes you very aware and, at a [certain] time, overly sensitive. I got rid of it [the
sensitiveness] in Home of the Brave . I wrote that out of myself. But you are always aware.
Certainly I was influenced by Marxism. I have a thing about injustice and the underdog and a resentment against people who were born with a silver spoon—I don't resent them having the money, I resent them thinking therefore they deserve the world.
You weren't born with a silver spoon?
No, no. My parents were middle-middle class.
Then how did you become such an incurable romantic?
Isn't everyone? Everybody wants love. That's one of the major things that life is about. Freud says life is about work and love, but I think there's something else. There's some kind of—for want of a better word, I'll call it spirituality, which you must have. Work and love are the main things in the world.
By work I don't mean success. Nor do I mean achievement. I mean doing work that you like. That's what it is all about. Even if you're not so hot at it, writing is better than selling women's clothing at Bloomingdale's. I sold towels at Bloomingdale's. I hated it. When they fired me, I cried, because it was rejection. But to be able to do something you like, even if you're not very good at it, that's terrific.
It seems to me that, at this point in your life, you almost regret the time you spent writing motion pictures .
No! You can't regret what you've done; you can only regret what you didn't do. You learn all the time. So what?
But it also sounds as though you'd be interested in writing another movie if the right combination of circumstances came along .
It's possible, but it's highly improbable. They want to do Gypsy again. But Steve [Sondheim] and I don't want Gypsy done as a movie. We'd love to have Bette Midler do it on the stage and then film it as a videocassette, for the record. Ray Stark called the other day. Everybody's calling. They're desperate for material. But if you give them the material, off goes your head and your balls and your feet and your hands. And if you've got one eye left, you're lucky.
Ben Maddow: The Invisible Man
Interview by Pat McGilligan
The real Ben Maddow is cloaked by several overlapping careers and two distinct writing pseudonyms. In spite of this, if not because of it, his reputation is firm as one of the more subtle and intelligent Hollywood screenwriters of his era, even though Maddow insists that screenwriting, for him, was never much more than a job.
As "David Wolff," beginning in the early 1930s, Maddow Wrote short stories and poetry, often with an edge of social consciousness, that were published in leading literary journals. In 1935 he embarked on an association with Frontier Films, writing the narration and commentary for some of the best documentaries of the period, including the seminal Native Land (1942). (That association is explored in a first-rate book, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942, by William Alexander. And in the following interview, Maddow elaborates on the personal history that spurred his political commitment.)
Under his own name, in Hollywood, Maddow wrote, among other films, the scripts for the MGM adaptation of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust (1949) and John Huston's version of W. R. Burnett's novel The Asphalt Jungle (1950). These two assignments swiftly established him as among the most resourceful of the new, postwar scriptwriters. His subsequent scripts ranged the gamut of melodrama, but they managed to be deeply humane as well as beautifully constructed.
Although Maddow would occasionally turn down a project because he preferred to work on a poem or documentary, his motion picture career seemed secure—until the blacklist descended. Because of his long résumé as a left-winger, Maddow suddenly found himself unemployable.
Enter writer-producer Philip Yordan, and a decade of credits for Maddow
and Yordan that many others—from the Cahiers du Cinéma group to the writers of most standard film-reference books—have tried without success to untangle. Until now, Maddow had never been interviewed on the subject of Yordan, and his revelations clarify as well as deepen the questions of Maddow's masquerade as "Philip Yordan" during the murky McCarthyist years.
It seems that Yordan was a sort of "front" for Maddow on at least a half dozen films. Foremost among them, reportedly, was the cult classic Johnny Guitar (1954), which some critics regard as a political allegory about the anti-Red hysteria in the United States. Nowadays Maddow says he doesn't recognize that film in the slightest, while Yordan (see Philip Yordan interview) insists he alone rewrote someone else's script while on location in Arizona. The other Yordan jobs (usually involving, in some fashion, ex-Frontier Films editor Irving Lerner and writer-producer Sidney Harmon)[*] helped make ends meet for the writer. But Maddow's psychology, as a kind of invisible man, deteriorated.
There have long been reports that Maddow capitulated to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) towards the end of the 1950s, but they have been unverified in print. Friends of Maddow did not want to believe such disheartening news at the time. Maddow was considered among the most likeable, honorable people on the Left. Not only was he regarded as a stalwart, but he had weathered much of the decade with regular, interesting work.
When I first spoke to Maddow, it must be admitted that he dodged me on this subject. He said he had not cooperated with HUAC interrogators; he said he had not signed any statement or "named" anybody. Because that was my first face-to-face encounter with the mystifying forgetfulness of an informer, I was properly persuaded.
Later that summer, at a film festival in Vermont, I mentioned my interview with Maddow to the octogenarian documentary filmmaker Leo Hurwitz (one of the key figures of Frontier Films), to screenwriter Walter (The Front) Bernstein, and to animator Faith Hubley. Hurwitz's eyes went cold and he let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I had been conned. "He named me!" said Hurwitz. Bernstein and Hubley, both longtime acquaintances of Maddow,
* An intriguing filmmaker, Irving Lerner began his long career as a Frontier Films editor, cameraman, and second-unit director, working on such notable documentaries as Willard Van Dyke's Valley Town (1940) and Robert Flaherty's The Land (1941). After service with the Office of War Information and the Educational Film Institute of New York University, Lerner came to Hollywood, where he worked on the fringes of the film industry, making low-budget thrillers in the 1950s (Murder by Contract and City of Fear ) and later on, in the 1960s and 1970s, bigger-budget epics like Custer of the West (1968). He also co-edited the political thriller about the assassination of President Kennedy, Executive Action (1973). His filmography is studded with collaborations with Maddow, Joseph Strick, Philip Yordan, and Sidney Harmon.
Sidney Harmon was a writer-producer associated, in some capacity with Frontier Films and the Group Theatre in New York in the 1930s. In Hollywood from the late 1930s, his credits include an Academy Award nomination for a script contribution to The Talk of the Town (1942) and various work on many Yordan films.
Poet, documentarist, scriptwriter, and "hombre misterioso" Ben Maddow, photographed
in the mid-1950s. (Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
filled me in on other details of Maddow's "cooperation," something that was painful common knowledge among the community of blacklist survivors.
At this point I arranged a second interview with Ben Maddow and once again went over this highly sensitive ground. This time, faced with my insider information and my insistence on talking about the blacklist, Maddow opened up—somewhat.
His allegation that there was a payoff to clear his name has been echoed by others aware of this "escape route." Evidently, this was one subtext of the blacklist, though it has never been substantiated.
As if the Yordan confusion were not enough, Maddow also divulged, in this second conversation, other grey areas among his credits, including work on early drafts of High Noon (1952) and The Wild One (1954), and one subrosa stint with director Elia Kazan, whose own "friendly" testimony before HUAC remains a touchstone of any history of the blacklist.
In the end, Maddow's "informing-by-dispensation" (a separate category created solely for Maddow in Victor Navasky's indispensable chronicle of the Hollywood blacklist and the ethics of informing, Naming Names ) taints an otherwise admirable career and adds an unfortunate facet of complexity to someone whose hallmark as a writer was otherwise his integrity, his individuality, and his critique of society.
Though he never quite regained stature after the blacklist, Maddow worked intermittenly as a screenwriter and as a semidocumentary director. With distinction, he augmented his Hollywood career by branching into independent, avant-garde filmmaking with such notable films as The Savage Eye (1960) and Jean Genet's The Balcony (1963), both in partnership with Joseph Strick; An Affair of the Skin (1964); and Storm of Strangers (1970).
His last motion picture credit, to date, is the occult curiosity The Mephisto Waltz (1971), a genre piece whose story is a coded defense of his HUAC transgression, perhaps, for the heroine is the victim of a Satanic cult who achieves a dubious revenge by meticulously staging her own death.
A reticent and private man, Maddow retired from screenwriting in the early 1970s and presently devotes himself to writing fiction and books about photography.
Ben Maddow (David Wolff) (1909–1992)
As David Wolff
1935
Harbor Scenes (Ralph Steiner Productions). Narration.
1936
The World Today (Nykino). Commentary.
1937
Heart of Spain (Frontier Films). Co-narration.
China Strikes Back (Frontier Films). Co-narration.
1937
People of the Cumberland (Frontier Films). Co-commentary.
1938
Return to Life (Frontier Films). Narration
1939
The History and Romance of Transportation (Frontier Films). Co-commentary.
1940
United Action (Frontier Films). Co-commentary.
White Flood (Frontier Films). Co-commentary.
Tall Tales (Brandon Films). Commentary.
Valley Town (University and Documentary Film Distributions). Co-commentary.
1941
A Place to Live (Documentary Film Productions). Commentary.
Here Is Tomorrow (Documentary Film Productions). Commentary.
1942
Native Land (Leo Hurwitz, Paul Strand, Al Saxon, William Watts). Co-script.
As Ben Maddow
1944
The Bridge (Documentary Film Productions). Script.
Northwest, U.S.A. (Office of War Information). Co-commentary.
1947
Framed (Richard Wallace). Script.
1948
The Photographer (Affiliated Film Producers). Co-commentary.
Kiss the Blood off My Hands (Norman Foster). Co-adaptation.
The Man from Colorado (Henry Levin). Co-script.
1949
Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown). Script.
1950
The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston). Co-script.
1951
The Steps of Age (Ben Maddow). Director, co-script.
1952
Shadow in the Sky (Fred M. Wilcox). Script.
High Noon (Fred Zinnemann). Uncredited contribution.
1953
The Stairs (Ben Maddow). Director, script.
Man Crazy (Irving Lerner). Uncredited contribution.
1954
The Wild One (Laslo Benedek). Uncredited contribution.
The Naked Jungle (Byron Haskin). Uncredited contribution.
Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray). Uncredited contribution.
1957
Men in War (Anthony Mann). Uncredited contribution.
Gun Glory (Roy Rowland). Uncredited contribution.
1958
God's Little Acre (Anthony Mann). Uncredited contribution.
Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner). Uncredited contribution.
1960
Wild River (Elia Kazan). Uncredited contribution.
The Unforgiven (John Huston). Script.
The Savage Eye (Ben Maddow, Joseph Strick, Sidney Meyers). Co-producer, co-director, co-script, co-story.
1961
Two Loves (Charles Walters). Script.
1963
The Balcony (Joseph Strick). Producer, script.
1964
An Affair of the Skin (Ben Maddow). Director, script, story.
1967
The Way West (Andrew V. McLaglen). Co-script.
1969
The Chairman (J. Lee Thompson). Script.
The Secret of Santa Vittoria (Stanley Kramer). Co-script.
1970
Storm of Strangers (Ben Maddow). Director, script.
1971
The Mephisto Waltz (Paul Wendkos). Script.
Television credits include "Man on a String" (CBS, 1972).
Plays include In a Cold Hotel (one-act), The Ram's Horn (one-act), and Soft Targets .
Published works include Forty-Four Gravel Street, Gauntlet of Flowers, Poems, The City, Elegy upon a Certificate of Birth, Song of Twelve Fridays, Edward Weston: Fifty Years: The Definitive Volume of His Photographic Work (a.k.a. Edward Weston: His Life and Photographs), Faces: A Narrative History of the Portrait in Photography from 1820 to the Present, A Sunday Between Wars: The Course of American Life from 1865 to 1917, The Photography of Max Yavno, and Aperture, No. 92 .
Academy Awards include best-script nomination for The Asphalt Jungle .
Writers Guild awards include best-script nominations for The Man from Colorado, The Asphalt Jungle, Intruder in the Dust, and The Balcony .
Act One—
A Poet, So What?
When did you first feel that you wanted to become a writer?
It was in college [Columbia University]. I began writing a lot of poetry. Mark Van Doren was one of my professors and he was the adviser to one of the literary quarterlies, which printed a lot of my stuff. My poetry was pretty dreadful, so exaggerated, but you could see how it might be sensational at the college level because it was just so much more complex in thought and in words than what any of these kids were writing at the time. Anyway, that was the beginning.
What appealed to you about poetry?
I liked it. I had read Shelley and Keats and Walt Whitman, and also I was tremendously fond of Shakespeare's sonnets, even in high school. They had
a great influence on me. I had just discovered Emily Dickinson and through Van Doren I was learning about other poets.
Did poetry spring out of your upbringing in any way?
In no way, except my oldest sister, who is fifteen years older than I and who was going to be a concert pianist before she quit and went to work, was the intellectual in the family. She took us to concerts and so on. I remember as a little kid climbing all the way up those stairs to the top balcony to hear the Boston [concert] series. We lived in a small town [outside New York City], so she had to make some effort to bring us all in to concerts.
That was part of my upbringing, but a lot of my interest was self-generated. At least I don't remember any English teacher in high school who was particularly good, which is often the case.
Many of the Hollywood screenwriters of the thirties and the forties were enamored of newspapers, Broadway, or the movies. But very few were poets, either professionally or in their spare time. Why is it that you embraced poetry?
It expresses things that you cannot express well otherwise. The condensation of language and so on is one of the great pleasures of the craft. There are things that are too subtle to put into novels.
Did being a poet set you apart, even back in college?
In college, people would stop me and say, "What did that poem mean?" I was pretty scornful back then. Also, I wasn't quite sure myself! (Laughs .) But I was famous, or notorious, on campus. In fact, I won the Knopf prize for a book of poetry written by an undergraduate, only it was never published because they decided against it. They were probably right. I'd hate to have that book published! (Laughs .)
Let's see, I graduated from Columbia in 1930 and took postgraduate work through 1931, then was unemployed for about two years. It was a hard time for my whole family because my father lived on a farm and the family was essentially separated. But I had no needs, except for food. Occasionally, my oldest sister, who was still working, would give me a dollar or two, just for pocket money. My first job in that period was in a small factory for six dollars a week, which I would turn over to my mother, of course.
During all this time, were you nursing ambitions of one day becoming a writer?
I had no ambitions of the sort. I had no idea what I was going to be. I had no idea of what a writer was! For a long, long time I gave up writing almost entirely, except for poetry and some short stories. I never considered myself a writer, to tell you the absolute truth, until after the end of World War II.
I was a poet—so what? Where would you go with it?
Then, through my older sister, who had a friend at Bellevue Hospital, I got a job as an orderly and doubled my salary. I began to buy books and magazines. I'd do a lot of browsing and I read Dial, which had a lot of
influence on me, [because of] the poetry they published, the fiction and the art too. (That was the first magazine that published Picasso, and so on.)
Yet I foresaw myself working in the hospital the rest of my life. I really did. It depressed me, but I couldn't see any other way around it.
When Roosevelt came in [in 1932], because of his social service programs anybody with a college degree was considered an intellectual and could get a job as an "investigator." That meant going out into the field with a case list of sixty or seventy people, investigating backgrounds and that sort of thing, recommending people for relief. That's the job I got, for three years.
When I was first assigned to be an investigator, they sent me into a middle-class neighborhood. I was appalled because the parents would hide in the bathroom and leave their teenage daughter to conduct the interview while they would be crying behind closed doors. The shame was beyond belief. It was too close to my own family. I couldn't take it. I asked to be transferred to some poorer district.
Well, they picked the bottom [of the ladder], Sand Street, in lower Brooklyn, a mixture of nationalities. And I really had a wonderful time. When you came down the street, the kids would take your hand and start shouting, "Investigator!" You were a famous man! (Laughs .)
My left-wing poetry really began around this period—some of it was good and some of it was terrible. It was when I was working as an investigator and writing this poetry that I changed my name [to David Wolff], because I didn't want the people at the bureau to think that somehow I was uppity. In Frontier Films I was always known as David Wolff, the name I had adopted. My wife's relatives called me David for years.
Your period of unemployment, your job as an investigator for social relief—that must have also influenced your evolving social consciousness .
No question about it. You have no idea, unless you have experienced it yourself, how it is to be out of work for two years, to have this big gap of empty time which makes you feel as if your life is being wasted. You spend a tremendous amount of time walking around, just looking [for something to do], going to fifteen-cent movies and [sitting through] three features, and so forth. Tremendous waste of time. You feel bitterer and bitterer—no question about it.
Were you, even during this period, enthusiastic about films?
I was tremendously into film, of course. During the two or three years I was unemployed I must have seen hundreds of films—Hollywood films, but also Russian films, French films, and so on. What any intellectual would have looked at in those days. I particularly loved the [Alexander] Dovzhenko films, which essentially, when you look at them, are poetic films, really. Constructed like a poem.
Actually, I came to movies through poetry, in a sense, because when I was still working as an investigator I saw an ad in a New York newspaper for a
poet to write commentary for a short film—a 20-minute film mostly about baggage in a harbor [Harbor Scenes, 1935]. (Laughs .) The filmmaker was Ralph Steiner. A very remarkable man—not a great photographer, but a wonderful craftsman. I worked on the narration for his short film, and through him I met a whole bunch of photographers.
These still photographers were very anxious to make films and for someone to write for their films, and that is how I got drawn into doing the writing for documentary films, which was not too far [afield] from poetry.
As anybody who knows the history of the field can tell you, I invented a way of using narration in film which suited my purposes very well and has influenced other people—which was to construct the narration like poetry, in which every word modifies the image. I worked out a ratio of two words to a second, which worked so perfectly. In those days you ran the film as you were recording the narration, so you had this very, very close connection between the image and the writing. In that sense, I was not a writer, but a poet and a filmmaker. The, narration really meant carpentering phrases so they fit the rhythm of the film.
Had you thought about documentaries at all before answering that ad?
Of course not. I didn't know there was any such thing. I had never seen one in my life.
What appealed to you about documentaries?
It was an opportunity to lift what might seem like a flat, stale level into mountains and valleys, and to create a landscape that way.
On that first documentary, you contributed on the back end, after the footage already existed. Then you were asked to write the poetry, or narration .
That was often the case. And since this was a collective [of Frontier Films], there was at least the semblance of group discussion, so everybody collaborated to some extent. One of the reasons why it took awfully long to make these films was because there was so much talk—these committees went on endlessly. A lot of that history is covered in [William Alexander's book] Film on the Left .
As I worked on more documentaries and joined the collective, I was used to construct the stories as well as the narration. Although these stories were generally written in collaboration with others, the final responsibility for the narration itself was entirely mine.
What was the history of the group before you joined it?
Before I joined, the group was an adjunct to the Film and Photo League, which was formed originally as a cultural branch of the Worker's Relief League, which was a left-wing insurance setup to provide for sickness benefits and funerals and so on. This cultural wing was set up, among other reasons, to encourage photographers, who could pay minimal dues and get to use a darkroom or take instruction. Ralph Steiner was a member of this group, as were Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand.
There were two groups [later on] really, the permanent group and then, at first, the number of us who had other jobs. (I was still working as an investigator.) I joined the permanent group at a certain point when I was invited.
But this division between the elder statesmen and the younger members remained, and it divided not on ideological grounds so much as on aesthetic grounds. How do you construct a film? Leo Hurwitz had this theory straight out of a Marxist doctrine of dialectics. First, you establish thesis A, then you have antithesis B, then you have the synthesis. Instinct doesn't play any part! Actually, his [Hurwitz's] instincts were very much restrained.
These quarrels went on endlessly. I have a picture of some of us standing on a streetcorner arguing about something, when really the issue was: Where do we go for lunch? Couldn't make up our minds about that, either. (Laughs .)
Hurwitz's wife, Jane Dudley, was a prominent member of the Martha Graham dance troupe, as was my wife [Frieda Maddow], so Frontier Films had a connection to that circle. Since the men were all interested in women and these women were all interested in men, it seemed ideal for us to have a Halloween party together at one point and tell ghost stories, bob for apples, stuff like that. We assembled at somebody's studio. The Martha Graham dancers—beautiful girls, great dancers all—were terribly excited to meet all these great and famous men that they'd heard about (at least, famous within this tiny circle). The men arrived and stood around in their coats without ever unbuttoning them. They couldn't stop arguing! They never paid any attention to the women at all! What lumps! (Laughs .)
Would you say that the conceptual difference between the elder statesmen and the Young Turks, in Frontier Films, was that the older group were formalists and the younger group were experimentalists?
I would say so. But we never thought of it that way. We would argue about specifics. Someone like Sidney Meyers, for example, was a great editor. He would edit out of instinct and do crazy things.
And the formalists would come along and say . . .?
"This doesn't fit here . . ." Also contributing to the division was the fact that the group was always under tremendous financial difficulties. You would not be paid for two or three months, you couldn't pay your rent, you'd run out of money, you'd get very hungry—actually physically hungry. Whereas, the interesting thing, you see, is that both Strand and Hurwitz had independent sources of income. Hurwitz, through his wife, whose parents owned Reader's Digest .
How did the group construe itself politically?
The group felt that it was left-labor. You might say the group followed the Communist line, but the Communist line at that point was very Popular Front. [U.S. Communist Party Chairman Earl] Browder's point was "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism." That's the reason the party drew in a lot
of people, influential people like [composer] Aaron Copland, at the time, as well as a whole broad body of people.
I can't imagine that the people in Frontier Films had a positive attitude towards Hollywood .
Of course not.
Was that conflicting for you?
No, because I didn't have any feeling about Hollywood one way or another. I enjoyed the films, but I never felt ashamed of enjoying them.
I assume the culmination of this documentary period was the making of Native Land.
That was a big, huge project in which Frontier Films really went broke because Hurwitz was such a perfectionist. You can see it in the film. There are strange things in the film which you can only understand if you understand what was happening to the Left at that time. I explained to you about the Popular Front. Now, for example, in Native Land, there were long, long sequences of flag-waving in various situations. . . . Hurwitz could never let go of any one sequence because he loved the way the narrative flowed, so there would be sequence after sequence of flag-waving.
Then, of course, there was the glorification of the skyscraper. It does look beautiful, these marvelous camera movements which were really invented by Hurwitz, though Strand was a very ecstatic cinematographer. The equation of the white church spires of New England with the skyscraper, as equivalents of American aesthetics, is really a Hurwitz idea, though Strand was also very sensitive to that kind of thing. But that only works, you see, if you think there is an American aesthetic. Perhaps there is. It's a very difficult question. In addition to that, you had smokestacks as the ideal of prosperity. When this [film] is shown nowadays, people in the audience hoot! Spilling pollution into the air! (Laughs .)
All those values have been turned upside down .
Don't forget I was already in the army by the time the film was finished, and the war [World War II], in a way, perverted the film further, so that [in the editing] it became more patriotic perhaps than it was intended to be at first.
I had already done my work and moved on. Starving as I was on one meal a day or so, I took a job with Willard Van Dyke, a friend of mine who was also connected with Frontier Films in earlier days. Now he was making documentaries independently, and I was engaged to write a film for him. This caused considerable turmoil. It was like a betrayal to go and work for somebody else, to try to pay your rent or anything.
Willard Van Dyke was going on this expedition to South America, and I was taken along as a writer. There was an assistant cameraman; Van Dyke was the cameraman and director. It was all paid for by one of the foundations.
A vignette from the famous Frontier Films documentary about racism and
flag-waving in America, Native Land, script by Ben Maddow.
(Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
It [The Bridge, 1944] did not become much of a film, but we had a wonderful time. I had never seen a mountain higher than Bear Mountain [in New York], which is what, eight hundred feet? And Van Dyke had never been abroad. So we cruised all around South America in a sort of magical dream voyage.
So was your departure from Frontier Films acrimonious?
No, it was semifriendly, because when my credits appeared on this first film, it said, "David Wolff, courtesy of Frontier Films." (Laughs .) Which didn't mean a thing to anybody. The issue was not on ideological grounds, as it was really practical. The issue was the terrible tendency of any collective to hold on to its members and regard anybody as treasonable who strays.
How do you look back on those documentaries nowadays?
Oh, some of them are probably very interesting. I haven't looked at them in a long, long time. Native Land has some very marvelous things in it, but as a whole it does not work. It's too spread out, too theoretical in a way. Too much A-B, A-B, then finally C. I think that Strand did not really feel at home in structure, though, of course, Strand and Hurwitz quarreled bitterly later on over who was the person who should have major credit for Native Land .
Did you know many other writers during this period, in the thirties?
No. What I knew was a political circle of various shades of opinion. I also knew a circle of poets that included Muriel Rukeyser, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Kenneth Fearing. We'd often read our poetry [publicly]. Bodenheim always read with his back to the audience and his face to the poets. I once wrote a long story about Muriel Rukeyser which is probably the best short story I ever wrote. It was called "You, Johann Sebastian Bach," a title I later changed to "A Pianist." It won a couple of prizes. I was very moved by the fact that she was a lesbian who wanted a child and went deliberately about getting and raising one. She was really a wonderful woman who, all her life, felt she was very ugly.
How did you read your poetry?
Straight off! (Laughs .)
Act Two—
Pure Accident
Why did it take you so long to get to Hollywood?
That was pure accident. Everything in my life, actually, is an accident. Opportunities came up, or choices came up in which there was very little choice.
When I came back from South America, I was drafted. I just had enough time to finish the film before I went into the army. Because of my documentary background I was asked to join the Signal Corps. I went out to Long Island where there were writers sitting in boxes that had just been built for them. I had just come from a great adventure, and I was not going to sit in a
damn box and be a writer. I didn't feel I was a writer. Whatever else the army wanted to do with me, fine.
I was given a series of tests, and it was decided I'd make a great radio technician because my hearing was good and I could distinguish one tone from another. So I was shipped out to Los Angeles to radio school where there was a ten-week course in building radios. That is where I met a number of movie people because, as soldiers, we went to the Hollywood parties. One person I met turned out to be working for the Air Force motion picture unit. Well, the Air Force motion picture unit needed people badly, particularly people with experience on documentaries for their training films. I was asked to join.
That's how I got to Hollywood [the first time]. Most of the people in the Air Force motion picture unit were ex-Hollywood people. Ronnie Reagan was there. I used him as a narrator over and over again. He was very good at it. He could read things that couldn't have meant anything to him—you know, a B-29 electrical system—with the utmost conviction. Just take the script overnight and come back and read it with all the right phrases and emphasis. He was very good at it; he didn't understand what he was reading, and he wasn't expected to.
So during the war, ironically, you continued to make documentaries?
I must have done 200–250 documentaries. All in Los Angeles—except for trips that you had to take to do the shooting. I was writer and producer because I knew enough about the craft to supervise all parts of it.
Were you meeting Hollywood writers?
Actually, the only one who made any impression on me was Lester Koenig, who had worked with William Wyler as an assistant.[*] After the war, he wanted me to collaborate with him on a film about the OSS. He and I worked on the script, but it never got made. Meanwhile, my wife got an offer of a job through [choreographer-director] Michael Kidd to dance in Finian's Rainbow in New York, so I went back to New York with her and that was when I sat down and wrote a novel based on my social work experience, called 44 Gravel Street [1952].
Now then, another accident occurred. Someone who had been a dancer, a terrible dancer and a general phoney, named Harold Hecht, called me up and asked would I collaborate on a film [with him]. Because he admired my poetry, he thought I was the right man for the subject. He would pay me what seemed like an enormous sum! Frieda was getting tired of her job, too; she'd been doing the same dance over and over again for almost seven months. (Laughs .)
So we returned to Hollywood. That film was made—a terrible film with a most ridiculous title. Kiss the Blood off My Hands [1948] it was called.
* Lester Koenig wrote the narration for William Wyler's wartime documentary The Memphis Belle (1943). Later he served in a production capacity for Wyler on The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Heiress (1949), and Carrie (1952).
Everything about it was bad. I didn't know what I was doing. [Screenwriter] Walter Bernstein worked on it with me. He had actually been in the OSS in Yugoslavia and had written a book [Keep Your Head Down, 1945] about his experiences.[*]
Did having been a documentarist help you at all, in the beginning, as a screenwriter?
In both cases, you have to feel your way. In a documentary, you are not dealing with the paramount importance of the character decision. In Hollywood I always had to struggle with formal structure because structure in a documentary is quite a different thing, whereas in a dramatic story you have the same titanic problem every time. You are struggling with how to make things come out right [in the balance], the pace and everything. How much time you give to certain things, how much importance . . . it's very complex.
I can say this without humility. My mind is very elaborate and full of rich associations, and I have to fight that in order to squeeze into a formal structure, a dramatic time sequence.
Was poetry any use in screenwriting?
It's not [of any use], except that it might allow you to strike off a phrase that is "right" because you are interested in words. You see, a poet is a specialist in words. He knows that there is the center, which is the main meaning; beyond that there is a kind of umbra of associated meaning; and beyond that there is an emotional thing, a much larger penumbra. Now, as a poet, you're fitting these things together and making one penumbra yield to another and so forth. It's a wonderfully complicated process.
It seems like quite a leap from Kiss the Blood off My Hands to Intruder in the Dust.
Another accident. A close friend of mine at the [army] post happened to be a writer. He and I struck up a friendship because of a poem that I had published in an issue of Symposium which also had an article on jazz. I'd never heard jazz before, and the article made me want to listen to it and buy records. I became a wild enthusiast, which is also, incidentally, part of the intellectual atmosphere in New York. Anyway, we formed a jazz club, and we'd go out and buy secondhand records and play them. His wife happened to be the head of the script department at Metro, and because I had gotten a very good reputation at the post, she knew about my work. She recommended me to [director] Clarence Brown, who had bought this Faulkner novel and didn't know what the hell to do with it.
It was a very poor and complicated novel, which Faulkner wrote because he thought a series with a lawyer as a detective would make him a lot of
* Kiss the Blood off My Hands was Walter Bernstein's only script credit before the blacklist. Resuming his career in 1959, Bernstein worked often and well with directors Sidney Lumet and Martin Ritt, and after a period of hard-edged drama in the 1960s, turned successfully to comedy in the 1970s. His credits include That Kind of Woman (1959), Heller in Pink Tights (1960), Paris Blues (1961), Fail Safe (1964), The Train (1965), The Molly Maguires (1970), The Front (1976), Semi-Tough (1977), Yanks (1979), and The House on Carroll Street (1988).
money. There are some things I like about the novel, but you can't compare it with Light in August . After I did the screenplay, that screenplay became very famous at Metro and was shown around a lot. All my experience in documentaries, trying to put together and straighten out things out of a huge mass of chaotic material, paid off there. That was the beginning [of my Hollywood career].
Did you have a special feeling for Faulkner?
I was an enthusiast. I had read all of his novels, even the earliest ones. Clarence Brown couldn't think his way through the script, because in the original novel there are four disinterments, and you cannot have somebody dug up out of the grave four times. You had to simplify it to one disinterment at most, and then you had to straighten the plot out. Faulkner's plot is all told backward, which confused Brown. I had to explain the novel to him, though I think any bright person that was interested in the story could have worked it [the script] out.
Brown had a huge office, and he would sit at one end of it and I would sit in a chair facing him—it seemed like half a mile distant, although actually there was much more office behind me as well. He had a parakeet in a cage, and he would open the cage and this parakeet would fly around while Brown dozed off, which he often would do during long script conferences. The parakeet would land on Brown's head and sit there, and he and I would wait patiently until Brown woke up, and then the parakeet would fly around some more.
Why would Clarence Brown, a director best known for those highly romanticized Garbo pictures, want to make a movie of Intruder in the Dust?
When he was seventeen or eighteen and going to school in Atlanta, there was a full-blown race riot.[*] Brown had seen blacks pursued in the streets, killed and loaded on flat cars, and driven out of town to be dumped in the woods. He had never forgotten it, and he told me he wanted to make amends for this part of his own history that he could never forget. And somebody had recommended this book to him, which was about an unjustly accused black, although, as you know, the chief character [in the movie] is not played by a black person but by a Puerto Rican [Juano Hernandez].
Why is that?
That would have been going too far for Metro, at the time. This was block booking, remember. I was walking with Clarence Brown at Metro once when we passed Louis B. Mayer. We stopped and they shook hands and Mayer said, "By the way, Clarence, why do you want to make this picture about the South?" Brown said, "I just think it's a good story and I'd like to make it. . . ." And Mayer replied, "All right, Clarence, anything you want. . . ."
* Probably Maddow is referring to the spring of 1913 race riots in Atlanta, although that would place Brown in his early twenties at the time. Director Brown himself often referred to this event as inspiring his decision to film Intruder in the Dust, without pinpointing the details or date.
Because Brown had directed not only the Garbo pictures, but National Velvet [1944] and many other films.
How did you feel about the finished product?
I thought it was very, very good. Most times when a writer does a script that he himself likes, when he sees the film there is nothing but terrible shock and dismay. Because the screenplay is a daydream in which you put down certain key points. In between, you only imagine what happens. It's implicit in your head. Okay. Now, somebody else takes the script and directs it, and what you see are the same words [of the script] but the in-between is not what you imagined at all. The movements, the bodies, the locations, even the faces, the makeup, everything—they're not what you imagined.
But in this case, they were, because Faulkner is so precise in detail. That is one of his tremendous merits. No matter how foolish some of his ideas are, he sticks to the truth of the location itself. So you have this material [in the novel] that is so rich. The very movements are described, how people walk, and so on. That is really a great thrill to see [on the screen].
The one thing I thought was silly, a hangover [from his own upbringing], was Clarence Brown's idea of making a joke by having blacks' eyeballs pop. It was [an idea] straight out of the twenties. The blacks who saw the film noticed it and resented it, naturally. But that's not in the screenplay. Obviously, it could not be.
Did Faulkner ever say anything to you about the film?
I never met him. He was in Oxford, Mississippi. The writers were not at that time ever paid to go to the location. You finished your job and that was the end of it.
For a while [producer] Val Lewton became a friend of mine. He was a very interesting man. He was one of the people who admired Intruder in the Dust and went around Metro talking about it. We met later on and he told me stories about Faulkner. Faulkner lived next door to him in Palos Verdes. Every Sunday morning Faulkner would come over and visit him. Lewton would serve him whiskey and ice. There was a parapet [on his porch] which Faulkner would step over carrying a shotgun. He'd put it on the table along with the whiskey, and he'd break the whole shotgun apart in pieces and then carefully wipe and oil it. This would take him about two hours, until it was finally together to his satisfaction. Then he'd say, "Good-bye," which was the second word he would say. Then he'd go back over the parapet.
On the verge of this great success, were you beginning at last to think of yourself as a writer?
But I didn't think of myself as a screenwriter . To me, that was a pleasurable way of earning a living. And a writer didn't mean just writing screen-plays. It meant doing other things. I had lots of plans and began writing short stories and so on.
Did you keep company with other Hollywood writers?
No, I never knew any writers. There was a writers' table [at MGM], which
A key scene from Intruder in the Dust: Juano Hernandez (center) braves Southern
racism, while Claude Jarman, Jr. (far left), looks on. Ben Maddow adapted William
Faulkner's novel. (Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
I was appalled by, because they discussed nothing but agents and contracts. At the head of the table sat [screenwriter] Leonard Spigelgass, who was a fairly bright man, but who put on this rather silly demeanor. I got nothing out of that scene at all.
Do you mean the great writers' table at MGM is but another Hollywood myth?
Well, don't forget that I grew up where intellectuals got together and fiercely argued some great point, and there was nothing of that there. (Laughs .)
Albert Maltz, whom I knew from college, once told me that there were three secrets for success in Hollywood. One was talent, the second was luck, and the third and probably most important was social contacts. Well, I didn't believe any of this. I had a certain amount of ego, but I didn't think that they would hire me because I was such a great writer. I knew that it was all luck!
Did you have any cachet in Hollywood because of your involvement in the documentary movement? Was there any familiarity with Native Land?
Nobody ever heard of it. I never heard it mentioned. I was another name then, my name [at the time] was really David Wolff, so I was not known [to be the same person as Ben Maddow] for a long, long time.
Then Hollywood people were not aware of your poetry either?
No.
That must have been an odd schizophrenia to maintain, especially as your poetry was so very special to you .
Yes, of course it was, but it was like a private thing—so what! No one in Hollywood had ever read poetry journals.
In any case, my wife and I never cultivated the producers and the important writers, which would have made a lot of difference and would also have changed our life-style. We've always lived very simply while the others lived on the west side with swimming pools and all that sort of thing. Our friends were all different kinds of people, mostly professionals of one kind—civil engineers, doctors, lawyers—and people in the lower professions as well. I never threw a party where I invited Hollywood people and where you could take somebody aside and discuss some project that you were interested in. None of that which is part of the texture of Hollywood. Everybody does it. Maybe I just didn't know how to do it.
You didn't feel at all left out?
No, I didn't feel in any way isolated. Don't forget, I had an intellectual life of my own.
After Intruder in the Dust, obviously your stature went up, and you became in demand. In quick succession you wrote two rather interesting genre films, Framed [1947] and The Man from Colorado [1948] .
Both of those films were produced by a guy I met at the [army] post [Jules Schermer]. That was practice. They were both melodramas, after all. I have been described as "Ben Maddow, screenwriter of mystery and adventure films," but that is just accident. I think Framed was a pretty good melodrama. I remember I felt thrilled that I had invented the opening, in which there was danger from the very first, because there is a truck which is out of control with no brakes. But I never thought these films were a vehicle for any kind of ideas. They paid well, far more than I had ever earned in my life. I couldn't believe it!
Critics have written that you have always managed to imbue your scripts with serious social ideas .
Well, it was certainly not intentional. Maybe the ideas were there in the original material. If you want to look at Intruder in the Dust as a depiction of a certain kind of class structure of the South in which the old gentry, the old landowning gentry, had moved around to where they were really on the Left and were [now] forming an alliance with the blacks, although that is not true, of course—okay. But that is in Faulkner's novel, too.
On the other hand, the social ideas that are in these films, you may not have pondered them intentionally, but they are part and parcel of your fiber .
Oh, of course.
For example, though the story line of The Asphalt Jungle [1950] remained the same on the screen, the point of view of the script became more progressive than that of the novel .
I don't think that was done intentionally. I think it all came out of the novel, though [author] W. R. Burnett did not realize it. Burnett intended The Asphalt Jungle as a novel about the extraordinary difficulties that the police
have in an urban world that has become a jungle. As a matter of fact, the narrator in his book is the police superintendent, is he not?
The film takes the opposite point of view. That crime is simply normal endeavor, another form of business; therefore the concentration on the characters of the criminals makes you like them all and sympathize with them. Certainly you don't sympathize with the police at any point. In any case, I think many authors do not know what it is they are saying, and Burnett made those criminal characters so fascinating that as you read the novel you really didn't feel as though the police were the heroes.
Why would Huston want to invert the original emphasis of the story line if he liked the novel of The Asphalt Jungle so much?
I don't think any conscious decision was ever made, not that I can remember.
It just developed?
Yes. I don't think Huston thinks in those abstract terms. Don't forget that a lot of the power [of the movie] was due to the fact that these were New York actors who all knew one another and were trying to outdo one another—and who were stimulants to one another. There was nobody who had a name of any consequence.[*] It was a film for broad booking. Most of Huston's talent came in the choice of casting, which most directors will tell you anyway, in moments of frankness. It could have been quite a banal film if badly cast. Imagine Van Johnson or somebody else in the leading part! But it was not an important film, so it was easier to cast.
How did you get involved with Huston?
He accepted me on the recommendation of Clarence Brown. Huston and I must have worked on the script together, oh, close to six months, and really very little work was done. No pages were turned in. We were mostly talking. He always did very little at the typewriter anyway.
The day would proceed. You'd arrive at his beach house at 9:30 or 10 A.M. and Huston would just be getting up to have breakfast. He'd come down in this beautiful robe and play with the Weimaraner dog with blue eyes that he had just got. And if the dog had thrown up, which he often did, Huston would have to haul the carpets out onto the beach.
Then later, we'd have lunch, work a couple of hours, and it'd come time to have a drink and so on. I used to come rolling home and I'd lift my fingers to indicate whether I'd had one cocktail or two, so my wife would know what state I was in. (Laughs .)
I had rented a beach house just about a mile north, and one day Arthur Hornblow, who was the producer, called me up and asked me to come and
* The cast of The Asphalt Jungle included Sterling Hayden (Dix Handley), Louis Calhern (Alonzo D. Emmerich), Jean Hagen (Doll Conovan), James Whitmore (Gus Ninissi), Sam Jaffe (Doc Erwin Riedenschnieder), John McIntire (Police Commissioner Hardy), Marc Lawrence (Cobby), and Marilyn Monroe (Angela Phinlay).
see him. He said, "Look, I can't pressure John. He just won't take it. But I have to tell you that this is going on too long. . . ." Though we were getting paid weekly, I was getting bored with this situation, too. And I really felt guilty about it.
I promised Hornblow that I would talk to John. John's reaction was very interesting. He said, "Ben, you're absolutely right! . . . But my father [actor Walter Huston] is coming over to dinner tonight with his girlfriend. Why don't you have dinner with us and we'll work after dinner?" I said, "No, I'll go home and then I'll come back after dinner. . . ."
So I did. I guess it was about eight o'clock when I got back, and they were still talking at the table. They were talking about John's feeling that he was able to direct because he hypnotized the actors. Remember, he had made a film [Let There Be Light, 1945] during the war in which hypnosis was used as an example of how powerful it was. And he offered to hypnotize his father's girlfriend, a much younger woman. She said, "No, you'll make me do something I don't want to do." He assured her that he couldn't do that, which is not true, by the way. Then he wanted to hypnotize his father, and his father refused.
Huston turned to me, and by this time a whole hour had passed, so I said, "Okay." He had me stand up and he took his wristwatch off and shone a light on it, dangling it [in front of my eyes], saying, "Your eyes are closing . . ." My eyes closed. "Your arms are rising from your sides . . ." They did. "I'm going to pinch you and you won't feel a thing . . ." He pinched me. "Do you feel it?" "No." This went on until he gave me a posthypnotic suggestion. He told me that when he woke me up, he would offer me a brandy. I would taste it and say, "This is the most divine thing I have ever tasted in my life."
So okay, I wake up, we go back to the table and sit down, and he says to me, "Would you like some brandy?" I say, "I wouldn't mind." He hands me the glass, pours the brandy, and all three of them watch me. He says to me, "Aren't you going to drink it?" I lift it up, taste it, put it down, and there's silence. He says, "How was it, Ben?" I say, "Fair." (Laughs .)
That was Huston's hypnosis—just nonsense. (Laughs .) We didn't work much that night, but things proceeded a little more smoothly after that. And we finally did get the script done.
After The Asphalt Jungle, you wrote two films which I haven't seen and which I know very little about —The Steps of Age [1951] and Shadow in the Sky [1952] —
Steps of Age was a documentary which I made on the question of old age for a company back East. I directed and wrote that film. Shadow in the Sky was a Hollywood picture, a very bad one, too. It's about a returned vet with a lot of psychological problems. Nancy [Davis] Reagan was in it.
Why would you follow two such prestigious projects as Intruder in the Dust
and The Asphalt Jungle, in Hollywood, with something like Shadow in the Sky?
I think I took it because it was offered to me. Perhaps it was offered to me because it was the story of a returned vet who has psychological problems—and because Intruder in the Dust and The Asphalt Jungle do have certain social implications. I was considered somebody whom one would pick if the story had these values.
I didn't have any idea of an arc of a career. People just asked if I was interested in the material or if I was getting broke. I did turn a lot of things down. I once turned something down at Columbia because I said I was working on a long poem. "I just don't have the time to do it," I said. Well, this went around town. . . . People thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. The guy must be out of his mind! (Laughs .)
Interlude: The Blacklist
Shortly after The Asphalt Jungle, you were blacklisted, am I right?
I was blacklisted about 1952. I had been hired by Stanley Kramer. That happened because we had a common agent. I was working on two films [for him] at the time. One was an early version of High Noon, and the other was The Wild One . I had done a very rough, tentative version of High Noon, from the novel [actually, a short story, "The Tin Star," by John W. Cunningham], and a complete version of The Wild One .
Then Kramer called me into his office. He said, "I'm sorry, I have to fire you. . . ." Well, so many people had already been fired that I didn't really need any further explanation. But I took my name off The Wild One because I saw a version of it that I disliked very much. It was partly mine and partly not. That's always a very difficult thing, to assign the degree of responsibility [for a script]. I like to think that when a writer goes to heaven, he's going to go to this huge file room, where they can look up his name and tell him precisely what his credits are. No crap!
You seem to be relatively good-natured about the blacklist .
(Pause .) There were very unfair things done, but you can't be bitter about it. My view of the blacklist is that the FBI had people in every left-wing organization, often in prominent positions, and that they had complete lists [of leftists] all along. Their Hollywood campaign was not a malevolent and personal one. The general idea was to deny the Left funds, since the Hollywood people made a great deal of money.
The screenwriter John Bright told me at one point that the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party poured more money into the party than any other branch, except for the D.C. section. I would have figured that it would be the New York branch, not the D.C. one .
(Laughs .) That might be so. Well, the salaries here are far greater than any intellectual would make even if he was an editor in a publishing house.
So, you don't feel the blacklist was an attempt by the right wing to end any progressive influence of the content of motion pictures?
I don't think so, because there's nothing to influence. That was just a put-up job. In what way could you say that Intruder in the Dust was a left-wing film? Only in the sense that it is about a black man, unjustly accused, who is nearly lynched. That was a pretext. The whole thing really came down to money.
Wasn't it also a power struggle—in the unions and over who would produce the films?
There might be some aspects of that, but I think the number of people who were on the Left in Hollywood was rather small, smaller than the percentage among New York intellectuals. And they were not governed by the same influences. In New York there was a whole ferment of political discussion, and other left-wing groups outside of Communist groups, the Partisan Review and so on. I think the left-wingers here, like myself, were transplanted, in alien territory. In a way, the left-wing activity was a sop to the conscience.
Did you meet the writer-producer Philip Yordan before the blacklist?
Never met him before. One of the great characters of the world.
Were you in dire financial straits at the time you became associated with him?
We had some money in the bank and we had just bought this house for $19,500 at 4 1/2 percent, so it was not all that great of a burden. But we did need money, and a friend of mine named Irving Lerner, who was an editor and a director, was hired by this guy [Philip Yordan] to do a film: Man Crazy [1953] and—there was another one—Murder by Contract [1958]. Irving was a very wonderful editor but a terrible director. He just didn't know where to put the camera. (Laughs .)
You knew Irving Lerner through the documentary movement?
Oh sure. He was in Frontier Films. Yordan wanted a writer, so Irving recommended me, and, of course I could be gotten very cheaply then. I must have done—I really can't tell you how many—somewhere between six and ten scripts for Yordan [during the fifties].
That's where everything becomes vague in the filmography, because some films that I never did have been credited to me. In fact, a friend of mine sent me a notice from a Spanish newspaper last year that said, "Ben Maddow, hombre misterioso." And it stated as bold fact that I had actually written all of the Huston films [during this period]! (Laughs .)
Was Philip Yordan doing much writing on these films?
Philip Yordan has never written more than a sentence in his life. He's incapable of writing.
You're kidding .
Of course not. Look, I was intimate with him for several years. He always used somebody else, from the beginnings of his career. I could tell you a lot about Philip Yordan.
Please do .
Oh, it's a fascinating story. All right. In Chicago, where he is from, Yordan was a lawyer and an entrepreneur who marketed liquid soap. When the war started, Yordan was posted to the airfield in Ontario [California], but he used to spend Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles he wandered around saying to himself, "Jesus, I gotta work out here, but what can I do? I don't have any craft . . . maybe I ought to become a writer!"
So he walked into the Ivar Street Library and asked, "How do I learn to become a screenwriter?" The librarian said, "Well, have you ever written a play?" "No." "Have you ever been to see one?" "No." "Well," she said, "you should take a great play and study it and follow its rules and that will help you a lot." So she gave him this play, and he went home to look at it and then he wrote a screenplay from it, copying it scene by scene, only changing the heroine from this girl who comes back to her New England town, into this B-girl that he knew from a Chicago bar whom he was tremendously in love with.
Anna Christie —that was the play—which is why it [Yordan's version] is called Anna Lucasta . He once showed me a picture of this B-girl—a rather pretty, heavy-set girl. She didn't like L.A. She loved Chicago. She wouldn't move out here. The only person he ever expressed any tenderness for.
Anyway, he had this play—
He wrote it?
He copied it, really, changing it to Chicago dialect. That was probably the most laborious thing he ever did in his life.
Now then, he had a friend [writer-producer Sidney Harmon] who had had a smash success with Men in White . This friend said, "I'll show this play to my agent." Nothing happened for months on end. Then Yordan got a call from the agent, saying there was a black group uptown who was willing to pay ten dollars a night for [a production of] it. The agent said, "Take it!" The group put it on, it was a smash hit, and he was set.
Only, he couldn't write! He always hired other people to do the writing. I was not the only person; there were other people. . . .
What about House of Strangers [1949] for Joseph Mankiewicz, what about Detective Story [1951] for William Wyler, what about Yordan's Oscar for Broken Lance [1954]?
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he could write a word or two, or a sentence or two.
House of Strangers, about a man and his son who had a banking empire, did win an Academy Award for story. But Yordan's secretary, whose name
I've completely forgotten—she was a lady who had one crippled leg who I sort of inherited from Yordan—told me that the story was actually written by the producer of that film [Mankiewicz]. He sent it as a long memo to Phil. She typed it. The story for Broken Lance —Yordan got the Oscar for the story, incidentally [and not the script]—also came from the story for House of Strangers .
When you first met Yordan, what was his rationalization of what he was going to do, putting his name on the screenplay instead of yours?
Oh, it was "I want you to write and, of course, you can't use your own name because you're in trouble, but I'll pay you 50 percent . . . after all, on your best day, you could never make one tenth of what I make." It was true! But I was never sure of what percentage it actually was.
So although he would be credited as writer, he would actually be behind the scenes, functioning like a producer?
Well, you know Ben Hecht used to do the same thing. Hecht had a stable [of writers] down at the beach who would write for him. He would write the original two pages or so in Hechtian style, and since he had an enormous reputation, he would get a lot of money for it. Then they would sit down and do the screenplay in Hechtian style. Maybe Hecht would add a few flourishes, but he made a lot of money that way. That was all very well known here.
Were there other people in the Yordan stable besides yourself?
Oh, yes. But I think that during this period, I must have done all of the things Yordan did. He was always buying books; he had a dozen [properties] going at any one time. He would stack the books up in rows and he would sell [them to the studio on the basis of] the photo [the cover photo]. He would show the book covers to the producers. "This is what I own," he would say.
Did he have any politics?
None whatever. Only: Yordan. But he did keep saying to me, "I feel ashamed because you are really a fine cabinetmaker . . ." He had some guilt.
He had pitiful eyesight and a horrible home life and was married and divorced a number of times. God!
Did he have good ideas as a producer?
Occasionally. And if you gave him a good idea, he'd steal it from himself later on. There's an idea in Men in War [1957] in which the platoon commander is killed, they strap him into this jeep, and they drive him around as though he is alive just to keep up the morale. Well, Yordan used exactly the same idea in some film about Spain, El Cid [1961], where the guy is strapped into the saddle.
That brings me around to a really great story about Yordan. Somewhere along the line he said to me, "I'm sure we could sell a Western—there's always a market for one. Have you got an idea for a Western?" This was a Thursday and I said, "Well, no, but I'll think about it." He said, "Well, let's talk about it on Monday." So I came back with an idea for him on
Monday and he said, "Fine." He didn't really want to listen to it too much; he just said, "Do it. And get the screenplay done as fast as possible. I'd like to have it done in three weeks."
I actually wrote the screenplay in about three and a half weeks, and when I brought it back, he sort of cursorily looked at it to see how many pages it was. It was 134 pages, so that was okay. He changed the names of the characters because he carried with him a little book that said things like "James means 'noble,' " right?
He said, "Now, we have to go to work." I said, "What work?"—expecting him to talk about revisions. He said, "Now come with me." He sat in the study and he made the following phone calls. He called Simon and Schuster and said that he had just sold a screenplay of a Western to Warner Brothers and were they interested in the book from which it was taken? Well yes, they would be interested. Then, he called the script department at Warner Brothers and told them he had sold a book to Simon and Schuster and would they be interested in the screenplay? He'd send it right over, which he did.
He sat there and worried for about three quarters of an hour. Then he said, "This is really very shaky, I've got to make this certain . . ." He called up a minor executive at Warner Brothers and said, "I know you owe $14,000 in Vegas. I will pay that sum for you and get you out of this trouble. All I want you to do is the following. I have sent a script over to Jack Warner. It has a blue cover and is called Man of the West . Get to it before he does, in the morning, pick it up, and return it at four o'clock and say, 'I picked this script up by mistake, instead of mine, and I started reading the first page and I couldn't put it down.' That's all I want you to do."
Well, he had to pay the $14,000, but so what? Because the screenplay was sold. Now he called Simon and Schuster and told them he was going to send them the book manuscript right away because the film was going to be made. So I had to sit down and write the novel, which I did.
That was Man of the West?
The novel.
The novel that is supposed to have been written by Philip Yordan?
Exactly. It was published in Collier's in three sections. We split everything fifty-fifty, although I don't know that for sure because I never saw any contracts. Also, I happened to be in England several years later, and there was a Penguin edition of Man of the West with a picture of Philip Yordan [on the dust jacket], and he had never told me he had sold it to them. We happened to have the same accountant, who was very upset by this fact, so we settled for some small sum. . . .
Did you ever meet the directors of these various films? Nicholas Ray?
Never saw him.
Never once?
No. Well, I might have met him once.
Anthony Mann?
Not to my memory.
I have interviewed Philip Yordan. I also spoke with Bernie Gordon and Milton Sperling, who at one time or another collaborated with Yordan. Gordon and Arnaud D'Usseau, both blacklistees, ghosted for Yordan in the 1960s. And Sperling acted as a producer for him at various times, whether or not Yordan was actually writing the script —
Did I ever tell you my Milton Sperling story? My agent called me and said, Do you want to work for Milton Sperling? I knew who he was. I went up to his house. This was his idea. He wanted me to look at the last five winners of Best Picture of the Year, take the best scenes out of each of them, and recombine them into another film. (Laughs .)
I turned it down. Who knows? It might have been great!
Yordan has me stumped on one thing. He was frank about some things, evasive about others, but on one matter he wouldn't budge—that was Johnny Guitar. He insists he wrote Johnny Guitar.
Well, I looked at some of the film over at my daughter's house [recently], and frankly I can't remember [working on] it. As far as the underground list is concerned, that's very doubtful. I don't care, you know, one way or another.
When you looked at it, it didn't ring any bells?
No. but if I looked at any of the others, I probably wouldn't recall them either. I don't think, for any of these movies, that I ever saw anything beyond a rough cut. And if you work on something for six to eight weeks—and this was thirty-five years ago—you forget.
You sent me in the mail a list of films that you had written, including those which you scripted under the table in the fifties, and Johnny Guitar is on that list. What has made you claim it as a credit, up till now?
All I can say is I can't tell you if I wrote it or not. This filmography [I mentioned earlier] in which I'm credited with things I never did comes from France. A number of films are listed that I was supposed to have done for Philip Yordan. Perhaps I thought their information was accurate. It probably corresponded with some of the things I remembered, and since I think Johnny Guitar was on the list, that may have been how it was lodged in my memory. The French are very big on B films. Their idea of an American literary hero was Edgar Allan Poe.
Were you constrained at all in the writing of these films by the fact they were so impersonal to you?
Yes, but I didn't think they were that different from what other people were doing. I didn't feel as though I was being punished in some way. Punishment was that I couldn't use my name. Some of the films were probably pretty bad, because I didn't give a damn [about the subject matter], but I tried at least to be ingenious.
These scripts were, in relationship to myself, pretty much with the proviso of a lemma of mathematics. A lemma is a consequence of or a footnote to a theorem. (Laughs .)
Did you feel particularly proprietary about any of them?
Maybe God's Little Acre [1958], which I don't think was [based on] the greatest book about the South ever written because, after all, I do admire Faulkner, who was a far more profound writer [than Erskine Caldwell]. But there was some truth to Caldwell.
How did you end up feeling about Yordan?
Oh, we never quarreled or anything like that.
But you had a love/hate relationship with him?
No, but I was simply astonished about what went on in his house. You'd be working during the day, you'd stop there for lunch, you'd be sitting at the table, and his wife would bring some food in and say, "I poisoned it. I hope you die." To show his contempt, he would get up and take a leak with the door wide open. (Laughs .)
I never had a fight with him or anything, no. You couldn't fight the guy. In many ways he was very sweet. He was only doing what to him was a business. But something happened, I can't remember precisely what, and then he went to Spain.
You were grateful for the work?
It saved my life. But I also had a terrible psychological complex [about it]. In fact, I was close to a breakdown. At that point, I went into analysis. I didn't know it at the time, I didn't make the connection, which became very obvious, but it was an abdication of oneself. Because here were your ideas, which are very close to you, closer to you than you think as a writer—you don't think that they're a part of yourself, but they are. Here was part of your personality, not attached to your name—up there on the screen.
Were you writing poetry as any kind of release?
Yeah. I don't know how much. There were long periods when I didn't write.
So, you were undergoing analysis, you were writing all these things under a pseudonym, you were undergoing writer's block under your own identity. Did this result in some kind of personal catharsis?
I think analysis helped me a great deal. I had been having nightmares, night after night. I'd awake in terror. Of course, you invent these terrors yourself, but that makes it even more frightening. I don't know whether this all might not have happened independently of Yordan [and the blacklist]. It seemed to be attached to the whole question of damage to your self-image.
Incidentally, I did a couple of films under Frontier Films which also had other names put on them. Like Erskine Caldwell was given credit for one of my narrations [People of the Cumberland, 1937]. Because they felt his name meant a lot, which it probably did. I just wonder whether this assault on the ego didn't also tie into that.
Did the culmination of your analysis and coming out of the blacklist, did they dovetail?
More or less.
What happened?
Well, the whole thing was falling apart, the blacklist, and as I understand it by implication from my agent, though I have no proof of it, the William Morris Agency was very anxious for me to make more money for them. So the agency paid [Donald] Jackson [a Republican congressman from California], who was then a representative on one of the committees, to erase my name from the lists.
Paid him off?
Paid him off, yeah. He died maybe three or four years after this happened, and there is no way of proving it at all. After that, bit by bit, I went back [to work], though I don't think that the films that I did [after that] were particularly interesting, actually. I didn't start at the same point; I had to start lower down. By this time I had been forgotten [in the industry], really.
You never got any explanation of why you were able to go back to work. Someone just said, "Okay, you can go back to work . . .?"
I believe I got some call from one of their attorneys [to start the process], but it took a long time [to go through], about a year and a half. I don't know whether that supposed payment did the trick, or whether there was actually a lapse in the whole system of the blacklist. Such arrangements were being made all over the place. Other people went back.
You never talked to Jackson .
I went to see Representative Jackson in Santa Monica. I signed some sort of statement. I can't remember what was in it. I never took a copy of it.
Walter Bernstein tells me that when he was in Hollywood in the late fifties, you told him you were working with Kazan at that point, after having cooperated with the committee .[*]
I did work with Kazan on a film which I refused credit on because the final script had no resemblance to what I had been doing. Wild River [1960] it was called.
Walter said he had breakfast with you and you told him you had named some names for the committee .
I don't recall any such conversation.
Did you not name any names?
* Stage and screen director Elia Kazan gave testimony before the executive session of the HUAC in April 1952, naming several former Group Theatre colleagues and others as having been fellow Communist Party members. He drew up a list of his motion pictures that "explained" their content as the exact "opposite" of Communist ideals. Shortly thereafter, Kazan took a full-page ad in the New York Times defending his "abiding hatred" of Communism and exhorting others to come forward with names. Kazan, the director of On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, is generally considered one of the most prominent people to have given validity to the HUAC investigations and resulting blacklist. See Victor Navasky's Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980), pp. 199–222.
Well, it might have been in the statement, but I don't recall.
He said you told him not to worry, they were all dead people except for Leo Hurwitz .
(Laughs .) Really! Well, his memory must be a lot better than mine.
You don't consider yourself a cooperative witness?
Well, I did cooperate. Obviously. I signed a statement.
But you insist you don't remember what the statement said. What was that meeting like? Was Jackson trying to extract some information from you?
Oh no. He was already rather ill, and he wanted to get it over with. It was formally an Executive Session, or something like that.
Didn't working with Kazan give you a kind of twinge?
Oh no. I thought it was a fascinating experience. Actually, most of the time I worked with Kazan, I was doing research in the South and he wasn't even around. But I did have several conferences with him and finally did a script on the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] question, which I was very interested in, having gone through that same period myself. Maybe my script was no good. I don't remember. Kazan told me he wanted somebody who had more experience organizing the material. There was a prolific amount of fascinating material.
I think he was right, incidentally. One of the things I've struggled with all of my life is organization. I didn't want any credit on the final script because it was so obviously the work of another man and superior writer, Paul Osborn.[*] A very good technician.
But you knew Kazan had cooperated fully with HUAC .
Oh, sure. Although I never read his testimony, so I wouldn't know. . . .
How did Kazan come to you?
We had the same agent.
He didn't know you?
I had some sort of reputation. I had never met Kazan before.
But you had spent so many years on the blacklist. And you had not been working publicly, using your own name in films, for quite some time. Wasn't it terribly convenient that Kazan would come to you at this point?
Well, I think probably he would have not hired me if I had not signed it [the HUAC statement]. Obviously! But it didn't make any difference to me that it was Kazan. I always regarded Kazan as a very, very talented man. A complex man, of course.
I never had the measured feeling that a lot of these people had, people like Alvah Bessie and Albert Maltz.[**] I regarded myself as caught between two
* Playwright-screenwriter Paul Osborn had an estimable list of film credits, dating from 1938 and including The Yearling (1947), Portrait of Jennie (1949), East of Eden (1955), South Pacific (1958), and Wild River (1960).
** Ex-journalist Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten, fought with the International Brigade in Spain, wrote several screenplays for Warner Brothers (including the Oscar-nominatedstory for Objective Burma! ), and never resumed his Hollywood career after the blacklist. Instead, Bessie wrote novels and one of the best memoirs of the blacklist era, Inquisition in Eden (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
sets of ideologues. I don't regard myself as having done something wrong [by cooperating]. Conscience had nothing to do with it. (Laughs .)
It was like saying, here's a flag and here's a flag, now which flag are you going to salute? And if you don't believe in flags . . . there you are! (Laughs .)
But when you signed a statement for Jackson, weren't you, in effect, saluting one of those flags?
Well, that's true. But it was a question of whether I would support my family or not. And since I didn't owe allegiance to either of these ideologies, it didn't matter to me. I thought they were equally foolish.
Did you not feel an affinity with the other Hollywood leftists?
I suppose I did. But I never became friendly with them.
Did you not consider yourself a leftist?
Yeah, sure. But never in a conventional sense. Because there's much of Marx that I always felt was just silly. The anthropological parts of Engels are just ridiculous, and people took them very, very seriously. Any theory, when matched up with life, doesn't begin to deal with complexity. And I'm interested in complexity.
I disagreed with a lot of the policies of the party and said so.[*] What's unfair about the blacklist is that it is a question of terminology. Because actually the Communist Party here was [more like] left socialists, not even that, compared with European standards. It's hopeless to think the Communist Party [in the United States] could overthrow anything here. I mean, what did they have, 20,000 members? Of which, I'm sure, 1,000 were FBI men! (Laughs .)
It's hard to understand why you signed something so late in the game, because the blacklist was almost over and you had stuck it out for the better part of a decade .
Well, it wasn't [over], obviously. (Laughs .) I don't recall the person who told me this, or why, but [union leader] Harry Bridges told someone, who passed it on to me secondhand or thirdhand, "Tell Maddow the strike is over!" I thought that was a very interesting statement.
Did you ever have cause to regret signing that statement before the committee?
No. I don't think so.
Was it the cause for any personal anguish or broken friendships?
Oh, there were a number of broken friendships. Leo Hurwitz never talked to me again. I don't know if that was a loss or not, to tell you the truth. (Laughs .)
* Note that, in this interview, Maddow carefully evades any discussion of whether he was ever a party member—or for how long—either in New York or in Hollywood. Nor would he discuss the subject, in regard to himself, for publication.
Actually, Leo Hurwitz is a very interesting person of great intellectual capacity, but, at least at the time I knew him, a very rigid character. I was sorry for the loss of his friendship, but it's just one of those things.
Once you had cooperated and the blacklist ended, at least for you, did that stigma continue to affect your career?
Only in the sense that when I was back in harness, so to speak, I might have done films that I wouldn't have done otherwise, had I not been blacklisted. Had I not been blacklisted, I would have become better known and would have commanded a higher price, and therefore could have been more selective. It [the blacklist] hurt the momentum of my career, if you want to think of it as a career in screenplay-writing, which I never did.
Interlude II—
God, at Last
Let's talk about your own films, beginning with The Savage Eye [1960] . They are the sort of films Hollywood never would make. The independent, avant-garde features, which you produced, wrote, and sometimes directed, after the blacklist. Did you have a lingering passion to be on your own, as an independent and as a director?
I would have loved to have thought of myself as a filmmaker. I had a great ambition to do that.
Some guys are very persistent, particularly when they start in their twenties. When I started, it was rather late in my life to undertake the problems that go with those things and to have the amount of persistence that is required to raise money. Films were getting more and more expensive. Maybe I was too lazy to undergo the problems.
Looking back, how do you feel about films like The Savage Eye, The Balcony [1963], An Affair of the Skin [1963], and Storm of Strangers [1970]?
Oh, I know what the defects are, but I like them all in ways.
The Savage Eye would be considered experimental even today .
Probably, yes. It was imitated many, many times. It's not easy to imitate. I like The Savage Eye quite a lot, even though I think there were excesses in the writing which was perhaps a little over-rhetoricized. But on the whole, it is a single tone, even if that tone is of lurid colors.
That film took about three years. It originated because [producer-director] Joseph Strick, who had made a film on Muscle Beach [Muscle Beach, 1948], wanted to make an extended film.[*] He asked me if I had any ideas, and I had always had an idea of making a film about [engraver William] Hogarth, using
* Maverick director Joseph Strick is known for documentaries (Muscle Beach, 1948, co-directed with Irving Lerner), innovative semidocumentaries (The Savage Eye, 1960, co-directed with Ben Maddow and Sidney Meyers), and ambitious adaptations of "unfilmable" literary material (The Balcony, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ). His documentary short Interviews with My Lai Veterans won an Oscar in 1970.
From left: Lee Grant, Peter Falk, and Shelley Winters in the film version of Jean
Genet's The Balcony, scripted by Ben Maddow.
the etchings, rephotographing them, and comparing them with modern London, to see whether there were parallels or changes. This was a development of that. I wrote about nine different outlines until we finally came on this rather simple idea. It's really an anthropological film about the lower middle class, anywhere, but it happened to be [set in] Los Angeles, so it was an investigatory job as well as a film job.
I did a lot of the photography in it. So did one of the great cameramen of the world who was out of a job here, because he was head of the Chicago local, but when he came out here to live, he couldn't get into the [Los Angeles] local. He happened to be an old college buddy of Joe Strick's. Haskell Wexler—a walking crane. He could follow a movement and move with it, just perfectly smooth. Interesting man.
I had a business divorce, after The Balcony, from Strick. We quarreled on aesthetic grounds. I didn't like the haste with which the takes were made. Of course I like [Jean] Genet a lot, but it's not a very good film, though it has some interesting passages in it. And it really exploited this idea of making this whorehouse a soundstage.
I didn't know it at the time, but Strick had pledged his entire worth in order to get the bank loan to make the film. He never told anybody. So he was in a panic. It showed.
But I had a great time on The Balcony . Strick hired an art director who'd never art directed in his life. The art director brought with him his girlfriend, but she regarded him as her baby and called him "My baby." She was a 27-year-old dazzlingly beautiful Puerto Rican/Brazilian who was a call girl. So she knew that world, perfect for The Balcony . She introduced me to many people, and she told me stories about herself that would make your hair stand on end. I've got a whole set of notes from my conversations with her, and I don't know what the hell to do with them. They're too outrageous!
The first feature you directed, without a co-director, was An Affair of the Skin. Did you find, after all this time, that you enjoyed directing?
Oh yeah. It's much harder than you think, but it's also far more thrilling. Here at last you're God! You're not some subordinate cherubin. (Laughs .)
And everybody's looking to you. There's no other audience.
Act Four—
Millions of Words
Let's talk briefly about your Hollywood credits after the 1950s . The Unforgiven [1960]?
After all, that was [producer Harold] Hecht, too. Hecht-Hill-Lancaster by then. In spite of the fact that I had been almost forgotten, Hecht had not forgotten.
Did Huston work on that script at all?
No, the script was pretty well done before he came on. There were some changes, but Huston was not very fond of the project.[*] There are other projects he did which I can't imagine he could do anything but hate. I mean, what was he doing on Annie [1982], for chrissake? He was trying to pay his debts, I suppose.
Huston is a fascinating personality, not an ordinary person. Very complicated, with contradictory parts of his personality. I had a strange insight into that when I was working with him on The Unforgiven .
We were in Ireland. I lived in a hotel and he had his estate. I'd drive out there every morning. He was separated from his wife, who had a boyfriend, a French boyfriend. So she lived in a really tiny house [on the estate], the interior of which was, according to my memory of it, covered with ivy wall-
* The Unforgiven is a provocative "theme" Western based on a novel by Alan LeMay, himself a screenwriter. Although ultimately disappointing, it has an interesting pretext—family tensions over a white lady with an Indian upbringing—and a superb cast in Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy, John Saxon, Charles Bickford, and Lillian Gish. Curiously, Huston said that "Maddow's script was better than he knew" and blamed the producers for the flaws of the film. (See The Huston s by Lawrence Grobel [New York: Scribner's, 1989], pp. 457–472.) Maddow's dismissal of The Unforgiven seems superficial here, as the story line dovetails with motifs of racial tolerance that the writer pursued, in documentaries and other films, throughout his life. Perhaps Maddow is being as ingenuous as when, on p. 191, he claims The Chairman, with its idealistic view of China's Mao, was "just a job." Certainly, both films, The Unforgiven and The Chairman, must have appealed to the writer more at the time than in retrospect.
paper. There was a courtyard of stones and then there were all these very old stone stables. Huston lived upstairs in the stables, along with all of his possessions. Mountainous things, you know. Marble horse's head, huge bolts of silk brocades that he got in Thailand—things of this kind. He lived like a Renaissance prince.
One evening, after we had been working most of the day, he asked me to have dinner with him. Then he said, "Well, let's ask my wife, too . . ." I walked across the courtyard with him and we knocked at the door, and she opened it, and he said, "Come on, have dinner with us." She said, "God, John, you must be terribly lonely . . . ," and she wouldn't come.
So the two of us went into town to dinner. When we came back, we went into her house, which was empty then for the evening, and he made a small fire. He got out a Bible and read aloud to me all of Ecclesiastes, pointing out to me that the last two verses were probably appended by the church authorities.
It was the action of a ham, but it was a ham who was revealing something. I think that Huston truly believed that vanity, vanity, all is vanity. But he practiced the vanities. It was very fascinating to see that gulf open up.
How about Two Loves [1961]?
I thought I did a pretty good script, but the director [Charles Walters] on that was terrible, as was the director [Fred M. Wilcox] on Shadow in the Sky . They were guys with very little talent. So I'd have to disagree with you that if you do a splendid screenplay, you're going to get a great film. It can be ruined.
And The Way West [1967]?
That was another piece of junk on which there is a joint [writing] credit [with Mitch Lindeman]. So was The Secret of Santa Vittoria [1969], which I did with [director] Stanley Kramer. Oh God, that was terrible. (Laughs .) The script had already been written and [co-screenwriter] William Rose did not want to bother making any changes, so I was just along for the ride.
How about The Chairman [1969]?
The Chairman was a better script. There was another film with Curt Jurgens about a pianist who is reincarnated—The Mephisto Waltz [1971]—which has gotten quite a reputation as a sort of cult film. I think those two films had better screenplays.
Being a leftist, did you have any particular feeling for The Chairman?
Just a job. It was just a melodrama, which they tried to make concurrent with the politics at the time. I didn't know anything about Mao, to tell the truth. Nobody else did really, either. (Laughs .) Although I had done a documentary [China Strikes Back, 1937] about China back in Frontier Films days.
Nowadays you are retired from screenwriting, and after documentaries, poetry, and Hollywood films, you have an entirely new career as a photographic biographer and essayist .
A guy called me up from New York whom I had never known before. He
heard that I had done an outline for a film on Edward Weston and asked if I would be interested in doing a profile on Edward Weston, the photographer. Without any financial arrangement or contract, I said yes. It turned out to be one of the most fascinating things I've ever done in my life, and I did far more than they had expected me to, because I came across this wealth of material that nobody had ever looked at before and became intrigued by his life.
The biography [Edward Weston: Fifty Years: The Definitive Volume of His Photographic Work ] turned out quite good, so I remained in the field. Don't forget, I had known all of these photographers. I had palled around with Cartier-Bresson when he was in New York, both before and after World War II. So I knew a great deal about them. It was very natural for me [to write books about them]. Right after the Weston book, I did this big fat book Faces [subtitled A Narrative History of the Portrait in Photography from 1820 to the Present ], then several more.
Now, in the last two years, I've gone back to writing novels, which I always wanted to do. At this point in my life I find it tremendously enjoyable.
Do you feel that screenwriting has been the least of your accomplishments?
Not the least. It's very important, obviously. Because just think of the million words that I must have written—a lot of words, considering the scripts that are not made. It's characteristic out here that of the number of projects you have in your mind, one out of ten is likely to get anywhere. Of the screenplays that you write, there are at least three or four to every one that is produced. That adds to the frustration.
Did working in Hollywood sidetrack you at all?
No. I only did films because, one, I was tremendously interested in film, and, two, it earned me a living so I could take off time to do my own work. I notice that most of the guys who were in the same position I was, writers with ambition, never got around to doing their own work. They would accept one assignment after another. Or they would spend three or four months between assignments doing nothing or getting drunk.
In the long run, has living in Hollywood suited you?
People say they hate it, I know. But it has suited me. Or I have become accustomed to it.
Don't forget, here your spiritual life is inward. It's enclosed in your house and grounds. It's in your books and records. And we'd always go out to all the plays and concerts, which was very unusual in our circle. In a way, that's a New York habit.
I found it interesting to live out here. At first I thought I didn't really belong here. But it's nice to have a large house, where you paid the mortgage years ago, instead of a small apartment [as in] New York. We have a vacant lot where I grow oranges and peaches, which is also part of my background as a farm kid. And, of course, the weather is marvelous.
Daniel Mainwaring: Americana
Interview edited by Tom Flinn
This is one of the things that makes me very close to Dan Mainwaring—his experience of Americana, the nostalgia of the good things about small towns. I remember the smell of burning leaves at night in the autumn too. And I remember the smell of Christmas, the sparkle in the air at football games, and the sound of distant trains. And Dan remembers them all. He's a much underrated writer and he's a really quite noble man. He damaged himself with drink and he was very badly hurt by the blacklist.
Joseph Losey, quoted in Conversations with Losey, by Michel Ciment
Daniel Mainwaring (pronounced Man-a-RING) wrote both the original novel (Build My Gallows High ) and the screenplay for Out of the Past (1947). He alone is responsible for the thematic density of the film in which such ultimate noir elements as betrayal, the femme fatale, and the frame-up are combined with reckless abandon. After completing Out of the Past, Mainwaring, in spite of a brush with Hollywood's witch-hunters, went on to script three films that represent the perfect cinematic realization of the burgeoning middle-class paranoia of the fifties. The first of these was The Hitch-Hiker (1953, directed by Ida Lupino), in which Kansas desperado Emmett Meyers (William Talman) systematically terrorizes two average family men (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) on a fishing trip. The second was The Phenix City Story (1955, directed by Phil Karlson), based on the real-life struggle of Alabama Attorney General John Patterson against the ruthless, entrenched power of the vice rings that controlled Phenix City. The third was Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, directed by Don Siegel), a marvelous marriage of film noir paranoia, political hysteria, and a science fiction premise. In addition to this trilogy (which exhibits a remarkable consistency of tone), Mainwaring wrote The Lawless (1950) for Joseph Losey, as well as The Big Steal (1949), Baby Face Nelson (1957), and The Gun Runners (1958) for Don Siegel.
Daniel Mainwaring (left) posed with Humphrey Bogart. Bogart had agreed,
originally, to star in the film of Out of the Past . (Photo: British Film Institute)
The following remarks, which pertain to Out of the Past and RKO, were excerpted from comments Mainwaring made when he appeared at a seminar on the gangster film held at Northwestern University in the summer of 1972, a project sponsored by the University of Illinois in conjunction with the American Film Institute and supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. Mainwaring prefaced his remarks with a short biographical statement.
Daniel Mainwaring (Geoffrey Homes) (1902–1977)
As Geoffrey Homes
1941
No Hands on the Clock (Frank McDonald). Script, based on his novel (as Homes).
Secrets of the Underground (William Morgan). Story, co-script.
1944
Crime by Night (William Clemens). Based on his novel (as Homes) Forty Whacks .
Dangerous Passage (William Berke). Story, script.
1945
Scared Stiff (Frank McDonald). Co-story, co-script.
Tokyo Rose (Lew Landers). Co-script.
1946
Hot Cargo (Lew Landers). Story, script.
They Made Me a Killer (William C. Thomas). Co-script.
Swamp Fire (William H. Pine). Script.
1947
Big Town (William C. Thomas). Screen story, script.
Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur). Story, script, based on his novel (as Homes) Build My Gallows High .
1949
Roughshod (Mark Robson). Co-script.
The Big Steal (Don Siegel). Co-script.
1950 The Eagle and the Hawk (Lewis R. Foster). Co-script.
The Last Outpost (Louis Gasnier). Co-script.
The Lawless (Joseph Losey). Screen story, script, based on his short story (as Homes) "The Voice of Stephen Wilder."
1951
Roadblock (Harold Daniels). Co-screen story.
The Tall Target (Anthony Mann). Co-story.
1952
This Woman Is Dangerous (Felix E. Feist). Co-script.
Bugles in the Afternoon (Roy Rowland). Co-script.
1953
Powder River (Louis King). Script.
Those Redheads from Seattle (Lewis R. Foster). Co-screen story, co-script.
The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino). Uncredited contribution.
1954
Alaska Seas (Jerry Hopper). Co-script.
Black Horse Canyon (Jesse Hibbs). Script.
Southwest Passage (Ray Nazarro). Co-script.
1955
The Annapolis Story (Don Siegel). Co-script.
A Bullet for Joey (Lewis Allen). Co-script.
As Daniel Mainwaring
1955
The Phenix City Story (Phil Karlson). Co-script.
1956
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel). Script.
Thunderstorm (John Guillermin). Script.
1957
Baby Face Nelson (Don Siegel). Script.
Cole Younger, Gunfighter (R. G. Springsteen). Script.
East of Kilimanjaro (Arnold Belgard, Edoardo Capolino). Co-screen story.
1958
Space Master X-7 (Edward Bernds). Co-screen story, co-script.
The Gun Runners (Don Siegel). Co-script.
1960
Walk Like a Dragon (James Clavell). Co-screen story, co-script.
1961
Atlantis, the Lost Continent (George Pal). Script.
The Minotaur [a.k.a. The Wild Beast of Crete ] (Silvio Amadio). Co-screen story, co-script.
Revolt of the Slaves (Nunzio Malasomma). Dialogue.
1965
Convict Stage [director unknown]. Script.
The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (Gordon Hessler). Script.
Television credits include episodes of "Rustler's Run," "The Californians," and "The Thin Man."
Books include One Against the Earth, as Mainwaring; and The Man Who Murdered Himself, The Doctor Died at Dusk, The Man Who Didn't Exist, The Man Who Murdered Goliath, Then There Were Three, No Hands on the Clock, Finders Keepers, Forty Whacks, Street of the Crying Women, Hill of the Terrified Monk, Six Silver Handles, and Build My Gallows High, all as Homes.
Daniel Mainwaring died on January 31, 1977, in Los Angeles. His Variety obituary noted that "in recent years he had [collaborated] in Europe with producer-director-author Hardy Krueger."
I went to Fresno State. . . . In the early twenties I worked as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner . . . . In 1935 I got my first job in the industry as a publicity man at Warner Brothers. Working in publicity you got to see and learn more about picture making than the writers did. . . . I didn't escape from the publicity racket until 1943. Bill Thomas of Pine and Thomas, who made very small and very bad pictures at Paramount, gave me my first real screenwriting job. I wrote six pictures in one year, all of which I'd just as soon forget except Big Town [1947]. At the end of the year, I fled to the
hills and wrote Build My Gallows High . Bill Dozier, head of RKO, bought it and me with it. Warren Duff, an ex-Warners writer, produced, Jacques Tourneur directed. Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Jane Greer were the stars. On the advice of Gallup's Audience Research, RKO changed the title to Out of the Past . I stayed at RKO until 1949. Howard Hughes dropped my option when I refused to work on I Married a Communist [1949]. He used that project to get rid of a lot of writers, directors, and actors. If you turned it down, out you went.
You'd written some mystery novels in the thirties. Did you sense different interests and different themes in this novel in the forties?
Well, Build My Gallows High was a different kind of book, entirely different. First I had a detective named Robin Bishop, and I got sick of him. Bishop got married and then got awfully soft, and I got fed up with him. I changed to Humphrey Campbell, who was a tougher one. With Build My Gallows High I wanted to get away from straight mystery novels. Those detective stories are a bore to write. You've got to figure out "whodunit." I'd get to the end and have to say whodunit and be so mixed up I couldn't decide myself.
What changes did you make [in the movie]from the novel?
Well, I haven't read the novel since about '46, but basically it was the same, although there were more characters in the novel.[*]
Was it told from Bailey's point of view?
From his point of view. The novel opened in Bridgeport, where he ran a gas station and the guy came looking for him. All the stuff in the mountains, the Tahoe and Bridgeport stuff, was in the novel. Much of the novel took place in that town and along the river. The fishing scene was in the book. That was one of the things that sold the book to pictures, the gimmick of the kid using a casting rod to pull the guy off the cliff. Warren Duff fell in love with that and bought the book.
The Mexican stuff was in there, too. I had been to Acapulco a couple of years before I wrote the book. It was just a little bitty town, not like it is today. There were very few cafes, and one hotel. I used to sit in this little cafe across from the movie house, and all day long there would be music blasting from the loudspeakers, so I thought I'd use that in a story someday, which I did.
The scenes in San Francisco, however, took place in New York in the
* An impossibly intricate story to synopsize, Out of the Past is about a double-triple-cross. A private detective re-encounters a former girlfriend and is lured out of a pastoral setting to San Francisco and Mexico to settle a score with old criminal associates. The girlfriend, who originally double-crossed him after she shot his boss, may or may not be double-crossing him again. Reviewer Bosley Crowther of the New York Times tried to keep up with the twists and turns, liked the film enormously, but admitted, "If only we had some way of knowing what's going on in the last half of this film, we might get more pleasure from it. As it is, the challenge is worth a try."
Novel into film: Richard Webb, Kirk Douglas, and Robert Mitchum in a tableau
from Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur. Scriptwriter/novelist Daniel
Mainwaring used his pen name, Geoffrey Homes. (Photo: Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences)
book. We switched to San Francisco because we wanted to shoot there. We did change the ending. At the end of the novel Bailey [Robert Mitchum] is killed by Whit's [Kirk Douglas'] men, not by Kathie [Jane Greer] and the police.
The title "Build My Gallows High" is from a poem and I never could find it again. It was a Negro's poem and I saw it somewhere. I happened to read it and jot it down.
Did you write the screenplay alone?
I wrote the first draft, and Duff wasn't sure about it. All I had done were those pictures for Pine and Thomas. When I finished and went on to something else, Duff put Jim [James M.] Cain on it. Jim Cain threw my script away and wrote a completely new one.[*] They paid him $20-30 thousand and it had nothing to do with the novel or anything. He took it out of the country and set the whole thing in the city. Duff didn't like it and called me back. (Frank Fenton had worked on it for awhile.) I made some changes and did the final. But that's the way things used to work. You'd turn around and spit and some other writer would be on your project.
* James M. Cain is interviewed in Volume 1 of Backstory .
What were some of the changes you made?
Originally we used a trick. The first script had the deaf-and-dumb boy as the narrator. We started with a shot of a stream with the boy fishing. Two guys came along, and one said to the other, "That's the kid who used to work for that son of a bitch Bailey." Cut to a close-up of the kid and a shot of the stream as raindrops begin to fall. Then you hear the voice of the kid saying, "He wasn't an SOB," and he told the story. Well, it flashed back twice, and it just didn't work.
At what stage did Jacques Tourneur work on the film?
After the script was completed.
Did you have any script conferences with him?
No.
Did you go on location?
Oh, I went up there but I didn't do anything. I just went up to look around.
I had some time off. . . . I liked it up there, and I just drove up to see what they were doing.
Did you like the way Tourneur handled the film?
He did what was in the script—very much so. One thing I didn't like was that mother [Ann's mother] in Bridgeport.
At one point I was struck by a similarity to The Maltese Falcon [1941] .
Well, don't think I haven't swiped from The Maltese Falcon often.
The thing which struck me was when Mitchum went in to see Douglas and said, "We have to have a fall guy ."
That was right out of The Maltese Falcon. Chandler swiped from Hammett. I thought I could, too.
How do you interpret that last business with the deaf boy? Are we supposed to think that the boy is purposely lying to her so she will go on to a better life?
Yes.
Even with the two people from the small town getting together and going away, it's not much of a happy ending because all of the interesting people are dead .
Well, the front office said, "Jesus, you can't end it with them dead there. You've got to put something on it." Nowadays they would have ended it right there with both of them dead.
Why did you choose not to stage the scene [in the novel] in which Kathie shoots Whit?
It was staged, but it worked out better the other way. There was a scene when Whit came back from Reno with the money and she shot him, but we found it was more effective if we stayed on Mitchum [Jeff Bailey], and he walks in and finds the dead man.
The first time I ever saw the film, they were showing it to some people on the lot. When Mitchum walked in and found that body lying there, all those people who worked on the lot said, "Oh no, not another one."
When you were doing the script, did you know that Robert Mitchum was going to play Jeff Bailey?
When I finished the script, I took it down to Newport where Bogart was living. He was going to do it, but Warners wouldn't let him. So then we took Mitchum. He had already done G.I. Joe [The Story of G.I. Joe, 1945], which was a beauty. He was fine, though he looks a little fat.
That was just before his trouble with the law .
He smoked marijuana all the time on the set. He had a vicious sense of humor. The executive producer on the film was a guy named Robert Sparks, a very nice guy, dignified and sweet. Sheilah Graham, the commentator, came on the set to see Mitchum, and she was talking to him when a drunken dress extra came up and started pestering Mitchum. Finally Mitchum had to tell him to get the hell out of there. Graham said, "Who was that?" Mitchum replied off-handedly, "That's a very sad story. That's our executive producer, Robert Sparks. He's an alcoholic." Sheilah was busily taking notes the whole time, but luckily the publicity man overheard, and afterwards he took her aside and said Mitchum was kidding. Well, she wouldn't believe him and finally had to be taken up to Sparks' office to meet him.
How did they decide what actor would play the part? Did they have readings or did they just say, "Well, Rhonda Fleming is available"?
Rhonda Fleming was under contract. Mitchum was under contract. Jane Greer was under contract. They fit the parts, so we used them. They [the studio] had to pay them anyway.
Had Jane Greer made many pictures before this one?
No, I think this was her first big role. Warren Duff decided to use her. They tested her and she was fine. She was in The Big Steal next.
How did you get along with Duff?
He was a sensitive man and a fine producer to work for. [Dore] Schary didn't like him. When Schary came to RKO, he fired him. Schary didn't like Out of the Past because it had been bought before he came. He didn't like anything that was in progress at the studio when he got there. He tried to get rid of all of them. He just threw them out without any decent publicity.
One thing I noticed was there are a lot of small towns in your films, and these small towns turn out to be not very safe places .
Small towns are miserable places. Farmers I know up in the San Joaquin Valley have been trying to put out a contract on [Cesar] Chavez to get him knocked off for organizing the migrant workers. They're sweet people.
Walter Reisch:
The Tailor
Interview by Joel Greenberg
It was Walter Reisch's good fortune to have been born at precisely the right time (1900, although some authorities give 1903) and in precisely the right place (Vienna) to learn the fundamentals of motion picture making. His own development paralleled the rise of his native film industry; he belongs to the generation that was young when the cinema was young, that brought youthful zest and ebullience to its formative years and a marvelous skill and confidence to the period of its great efflorescence—roughly the decades between 1920 and 1950.
In America, David Wark Griffith had made his momentous contributions to cinema art independently of Europe and ahead of it. World War I, during which Griffith produced both The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1917), isolated the Old World from the New still further. It also virtually destroyed what had gone before in Europe and forced filmmakers, after the war, to start anew.
This was when Reisch, still a student of literature at the University of Vienna, and a frequent "extra" player on the legitimate stage, first entered movies—as an extra in the productions of Austria's leading cinema tycoon, Count Alexander Kolowrat.
It was very likely owing to his literary background that Reisch found himself drawn most of all to screenwriting, although he later also functioned with conspicuous European success as a director. Gifted with a fertile brain and a facility for inventing cinematically viable original stories, Reisch found little difficulty in locating producers who were willing to accept his material. The pictures he wrote at this time bore titles like Ein Walzer von Strauss (1925),
Die Pratermizzi (1926), and Tingeltangel (1927)—lighthearted Viennese confections in the tradition of Johann Strauss and Franz Lehar.
The Viennese heritage is perhaps Walter Reisch's most distinctive characteristic. It pervades the films he made in Germany, England, Italy, and the United States—elegant, wryly satirical in their attitude towards relations between the sexes, formally as consummate as a Mozart minuet. In such comedies of manners as Ninotchka (1939) and The Mating Season (1951) it is still possible to discern traces of the cultural ambience of Der Rosenkavalier, of the mordant Weltanschauung of such Viennese writers as Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
Vienna is also, of course, preeminently the city of music, and music was one of Reisch's lifelong preoccupations. He wrote and/or directed biographical films based on the lives of Schubert, Bellini, Johann Strauss, and Rimsky-Korsakov; and in addition contributed original lyrics to some of the most widely known songs of the interwar years, notably "Frag' nicht warum" ("Don't Ask Me Why") from the film Das Lied ist aus (1930). But his range was wide enough to encompass melodrama and historical romance with equally professional results.
By the mid-1920s the postwar inflation that had begun in Paris and spread to Berlin hit Vienna, too, and Reisch joined many of his talented fellow Viennese in a move to Berlin, then the undisputed artistic center of Europe. His career flourished in the stimulating atmosphere of the northern capital, and he found himself writing vehicles for such leading stars as Harry Liedtke and Hans Albers, top idols of the German silent screen. All the time his prestige within the industry was mounting, and before long Germany's leading producer, Erich Pommer, invited him to join the great UFA organization, where his chief writing colleague was another Viennese, the dynamic and extroverted ex-journalist Billy Wilder.
Almost all Reisch's scripts were drawn from his own original stories or based on fact; and his lyrics for such popular hit melodies as "Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time" and "Goodbye, My Little Grenadier" were known throughout the globe.
The situation was too good to last, and by an odd irony it was another former Austrian, Adolf Hitler, who ensured that it did not. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Reisch, as a Jew, had to leave Berlin hurriedly and without funds. After a brief reunion in Paris with the similarly expatriated Pommer, he returned to Vienna, where his career renewed itself in an unexpected way through the Vienna-born actor Willi Forst. Ambitious to direct, Forst urged the writer to come up with a suitable subject. Reisch obliged with a Schubert romance, Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933; titled Unfinished Symphony in its English-language version, 1934), which scored a brilliant international success. They followed it with the even more successful Maskerade
(1934), starring Paula Wessely, and Episode (1935), which also marked Reisch's directorial debut.
By 1936 the Austrian political situation was clearly deteriorating, with the Nazis practically at Vienna's gates. So Reisch gladly responded to the invitation of his former senior mentor, Alexander Korda, to come and join him in London, where Korda's London Films were in the vanguard of the British film industry. For Korda, Reisch wrote and directed an original and clever comedy-drama with a theater setting, Men Are Not Gods (1936), as his first wholly English-language venture.
Despite its intriguingly offbeat nature and the presence of high-powered leading actresses Miriam Hopkins and Gertrude Lawrence, the film's relatively small physical scope seemed to Korda to indicate that Reisch was unsuited to handle the grandiose projects to which the producer was increasingly turning. So when Louis B. Mayer, then on a European talent-scouting trip, made a six-month offer for Reisch's services, Korda willingly let him go.
Having just married his second wife, a Viennese ex-member of the Imperial Ballet, Reisch turned his crossing to the United States on the luxury liner Normandie into a honeymoon trip. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, at the height of its glory in 1937, provided an ideal setting for Reisch's gifts. Its films were corporate products, anonymous-seeming reflections of the tastes and showmanship acumen of its production head, Louis B. Mayer. Its writers' roster was thronged with famous names whose bearers worked not singly but in batches to contribute their mite to the studio's fantastically profitable fifty-picture annual output.
In Europe, Reisch had written everything—story, scenario, and dialogue—himself. But in America he quickly adapted to the prevailing collaborative style. His strength lay in construction, in solving tricky story problems, while others, more in tune with the American idiom, supplied dialogue.
In addition to story construction, Reisch's other great gift was an ability to invent star vehicles, to supply original material tailored to the personality and screen image of a major star. That is how, for example, he came to co-write Ninotchka, where, working with the director Ernst Lubitsch from a slender treatment by Melchior Lengyel, he constructed the entire film around Greta Garbo. Not long afterwards he did the same thing for Clark Gable in Comrade X (1940). In both cases Reisch plotted the action, invented narrative, and worked out character relationships, while people like Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, or Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, supplied the dialogue.
Reisch remained with MGM throughout the years of World War II, often supplementing his major credits with anonymous minor contributions to other people's scripts; this was part of the MGM style, deliberately geared to ensure that the end product reflected not an individual personality but that of the studio. Reisch interrupted his Culver City contract only twice, to fulfill his
contract with Korda on Lady Hamilton [That Hamilton Woman, 1941] and to adapt a French boulevard play for Ernst Lubitsch's That Uncertain Feeling (1941).
Eminently successful as one of MGM's contract writers, Reisch still yearned to do what he had done in Europe and England: direct. His opportunity came when Universal offered to let him direct Yvonne De Carlo in Song of Scheherazade (1946), a Rimsky-Korsakov biographical romance. The picture was so savagely attacked by major New York critics that Reisch received no further directing assignments in Hollywood.
His standing as a writer was unimpaired. He did excellent work at Twentieth Century-Fox in the 1950s, and found working under its chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, enormously congenial. Unlike Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Zanuck believed in obtaining top results at top speed. Where Mayer favored sentimental women's romance or musical-comedy schmaltz, Zanuck preferred action, adventure, tough melodrama.
Reisch adapted himself brilliantly to the Fox tempo and working methods, delivering what was wanted with unfailing precision and punctiliousness. With the producer Charles Brackett, whom he had known since the days of Ninotchka, and whom he had frequently assisted on an informal basis when Brackett formed a writer-director team with Billy Wilder, Reisch concocted splendidly professional entertainments like Niagara (1953), Titanic (1953), and The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951), eloquent testimonials to his versatility and range.
By the mid-1950s, however, television, McCarthyism, and other factors had created a climate of depression in Hollywood that the supposedly revolutionary introduction of wide screens and CinemaScope did little to alleviate. So Reisch gladly accepted an invitation from the Continental actress Hilda Krahl, whose first film, Silhouetten, he had directed in Vienna in 1936, to create and film an original story for her in Germany.
The result was Die Mücke [Madame Mosquito, 1954], an elegant comedy about a lady spy. It proved so successful that Reisch followed it with a movie version of the Rilke classic Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, called Der Cornet (1955), which was government-financed. Both demonstrated that Reisch had not lost his capacity as an all-around movie-maker, although Hollywood still chose to ignore the evidence.
After returning to the United States in 1955, he resumed his activities at Fox with one of his most satisfying and underrated films, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), an admirable treatment of the Thaw-White murder case that scandalized New York in 1906. After that, with one notable exception, the films with which Reisch was associated were unworthy of his talents. The exception was Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), adapted by him with considerable flair from the Jules Verne novel.
The circumstances of his leaving Twentieth Century-Fox read like a cat-
Walter Reisch, publicity photograph. (Courtesy of Elizabeth Reisch)
alogue of catastrophes, none of his own making. The Screen Writers Guild strike hit Hollywood just after the completion of the Jules Verne picture. Reisch was then engaged in preparing a sequel to Jerry Wald's production of Peyton Place . The strike locked him out of the studio, which was shut down for six months, and when it was over, things were never the same again.
The studio's management changed: Jerry Wald died; Buddy Adler, the new studio production head, who entertained a high opinion of Reisch, died too; and that death was followed by those of Charles Brackett and Lou Schreiber, the latter another executive in the Buddy Adler mode.
One regime rapidly succeeded another at Twentieth Century-Fox; and the
last and longest-lived was also the least forgiving, for it exercised its contractual right to refuse to renew the contracts of those writers who had struck. One of the victims was Walter Reisch. Other projects were developed, but none made, and, sad to say, Journey to the Center of the Earth was his last credit.
Walter Reisch (1903–1983)
1925
Ein Walzer von Strauss [A Waltz by Strauss ] (Max Neufeld). Original story, scenario.
1926
Die Pratermizzi [Girl of the Prater ] (Gustav Ucicky). Script.
1927
Tingeltangel [Cabaret ] (Gustav Ucicky). Script.
Das Heiratsnest [The Marriage Bed ] (Rudolf Walther Fein). Script.
Ein Mädel aus dem Volke [A Girl of the People ] (I. Fleck). Script.
1928
Der Faschingsprinz [The Carnival Prince ] (Rudolf Walther Fein). Script.
1929
Dich hab' ich geliebt [Because I Loved You ] (Rudolf Walther Fein). Script.
Die Nacht gehört uns [The Night Belongs to Us ] (Carl Froelich). Script.
1930
Brand in der Oper [Conflagration at the Opera ] (Carl Froelich). Script.)
Das Flötenkonzert von Sans Souci [The Flute Concert of Sanssouci ] (Gustav Ucicky). Script.
Der Herr auf Bestellung [The Manservant ] (Geza von Bolvary). Script.
Ein Tango für dich [A Tango for You ] (Geza von Bolvary). Script.
Hokuspokus [Hocus Pocus ] (Gustav Ucicky). Script.
Wie werde ich reich und glücklick? [How Do I Become Rich and Happy? ] (Max Reichmann). Script.
Zwei Herzen im Dreivierteltakt [Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time ] (Geza von Bolvary). Co-story, lyrics.
Das Lied ist aus [The Song Is Ended ] (Geza von Bolvary). Script, lyrics.
1931
Der Raub der Mona Lisa [The Theft of the Mona Lisa ] (Geza von Bolvary). Script.
Die lustigen Weiber von Wien [The Merry Wives of Vienna ] (Geza von Bolvary). Script.
Im Geheimdienst [Inside the Secret Service ] (Gustav Ucicky). Script.
1932
Der Prinz von Arkadien [The Prince of Arcady ] (Karl Hartl). Script.
Die Gräfin von Monte Christo [The Countess of Monte Cristo ] (Karl Hartl). Script.
Ein blonder Traum [A Blond Dream ] (Paul Martin). Co-script.
F.P.l. antwortet nicht [F.P.l. Does Not Answer ] (Karl Hartl). Co-script.
Floating Platform No. 1 (English-language version of F.P.l. ). Co-script.
1933
Ich und die Kaiserin [The Empress and I ] (Friedrich Holländer). Co-story.
Heart Song (U.S. version of Die Kaiserin ). Co-story, co-script.
Saison in Kairo [Season in Cairo ] (Reinhold Schänzel). Script.
Leise fliehen meine Lieder [My Songs Run Softly ] (Willi Forst). Original story, script.
1934
Unfinished Symphony (English-language version of Meine Lieder ).
Original story, script.
Two Hearts in Waltz Time (English-language version of Dreivierteltakt ). Co-story.
Maskerade [Masquerade in Vienna ] (Willi Forst). Story, co-script.
1935
Casta Diva [Divine Spark ] (Carmine Gallone). Story, scenario.
Episode [Episode ] (Walter Reisch). Director, producer, co-script.
Escapade (Robert Z. Leonard). Story based on Maskerade .
1936
Silhouetten [Silhouettes ] (Walter Reisch). Director, story, scenario.
Men Are Not Gods (Walter Reisch). Director, story.
1938
The Great Waltz (Julien Duvivier). Co-script.
Gateway (Alfred Werker). Story.
1939
Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch). Co-script.
1940
Comrade X (King Vidor). Screen story.
My Love Came Back (Kurt Bernhardt). Based on Episode .
1941
Lady Hamilton [That Hamilton Woman ] (Alexander Korda). Co-screen story, co-script.
That Uncertain Feeling (Ernst Lubitsch). Adaptation.
1942
Somewhere I'll Find You (Wesley Ruggles). Adaptation.
Seven Sweethearts (Frank Borzage). Co-screen story, co-script.
1943
The Heavenly Body (Alexander Hall). Co-script.
1944
Gaslight (George Cukor). Co-script.
1946
Song of Scheherazade (Walter Reisch). Director, script, screen story.
1948
The Countess of Monte Cristo (Frederick De Cordova). Screen story.
1949
The Fan (Otto Preminger). Co-script.
1951
The Mating Season (Mitchell Leisen). Co-script.
The Model and the Marriage Broker (George Cukor). Co-screen story, co-script.
1953
Niagara (Henry Hathaway). Co-screen story, co-script.
Titanic (Jean Negulesco). Co-screen story, co-script.
1954
Die Mücke [Madame Mosquito ] (Walter Reisch). Director, script, story.
1955
Der Cornet (Walter Reisch). Director, script.
The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (Richard Fleischer). Co-screen story, co-script.
1956
Teenage Rebel (Edmund Goulding). Co-script.
1957
Stopover Tokyo (Richard L. Breen). Producer, co-script.
1958
Fraulein (Henry Koster). Producer.
1959
The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (Henry Levin). Script.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (Henry Levin). Co-script.
Academy Awards include a nomination for co-writing Ninotchka in 1939; an original-story nomination for Comrade X in 1940; and a shared best-story and best-screenplay Oscar for Titanic in 1953.
Walter Reisch died on March 28, 1983, in Los Angeles. According to Variety, "He had just completed a rewrite on the upcoming Volker Schlöndorff comedy, Hotel de la Paix, and had only recently returned from the Berlin Film Festival, where he had been an invited guest."
Can you tell us something about your early childhood and upbringing?
I was born in Vienna, which, as you know, is the capital of Austria. Vienna was the birthplace of great music in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Actually it was the cultural center and heart of the music world. To name a few names: Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, the Strausses. Even people who were not born in Vienna—like Beethoven, who was born in Bonn—made their headquarters in Vienna and regarded Austria as their real home country.
By a strange coincidence, this town, after the First World War, also happened to be the birthplace of many, many outstanding personalities of the motion picture industry who later on, in Germany, in France, in London, and
certainly in the United States of America, had enormous successes, became Academy Award winners, became pioneers in the field of motion pictures. So, in a way, without appearing to be immodest, I feel I belong to that generation.
The key year, in terms of my beginnings, was the end of the First World War, November 1918. The war on the German and Austrian side was lost, Germany was totally destroyed, and so was Austria—if not physically, from bombing, as in the Second World War, then culturally. At this time there were enormous losses among men. Millions of soldiers had been killed, and the theaters—in Vienna, especially—which traditionally played great Shakespearean tragedies, Goethe, Schiller, and Molière—needed (and this is somehow very entertaining) extras for their productions. There were simply no men. Those that were not dead, who came back from the war, immediately went into business and into some revival of their previous occupations.
Therefore the students of the first semester of the university—regardless of whether they were studying medicine, jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, or literature—were permitted by the government at that time to proceed with their university studies for free. But—and this was the happiest and most advantageous condition they made—we also had to go in the evening to the State theater and be extras. We had to play in the scene where Mark Antony makes his speech at Caesar's funeral: "Friends, Romans, countrymen," etc. We had to be the Romans! What a punishment!
The same thing happened with Hamlet, King Lear, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and all the other plays. They had everything—the sets, the protagonists, the theaters—which were not bombed, naturally—but they didn't have the hundred or two hundred extras they needed to yell at Caesar and Mark Antony and Brutus. So at 7:30 P.M. we young men had to go and put makeup on and play as extras.
Therefore today I still know—certainly in my own language, not in the original language—practically the whole of Hamlet, the whole of Caesar, and all the great plays in which we, night after night for years, were forced to play. As I said—what a punishment!
Now at the same time there began the film industry. They too needed extras. They didn't make any Shakespearean plays into motion pictures; they made love stories and other such things, but they didn't have any extras. And they did not need hundreds of extras for a big scene—they needed thousands of extras! During our vacation months, and even during our semesters, they sought out the very extras of the State theaters and said, "How about it?" And they really paid money, the equivalent of two dollars a day, regardless of whether the day started at five o'clock in the morning—which it did—or whether it ended at midnight. The equivalent of two dollars for a young man in those days was an unheard-of fortune. So certainly we said yes.
Many of us—I among them—gave up our studies. I didn't continue study-
ing literature. I became a fully fledged extra and "extra leader." Not only was I an extra myself, but I became responsible for bringing along ten of my friends, then twenty, then one hundred. . . .
Now we were connected with the theater, we were connected with films, we were connected with a lot of money and beautiful girls. At that time the Darryl Zanuck/Louis B. Mayer of the Austrian film world was a man by the name of Count Alexander Kolowrat. He was a Czechoslovakian who lived in Austria, one of a family who had come to prominence in the Turkish wars of five hundred years ago. He was the first man in Vienna to own a car and to have a telephone in his car, and he, with his enormous wealth, founded a motion picture industry.
This Count Kolowrat went to Hungary, and there were two young journalists there who had already started to work in that new medium, who had made a certain career for themselves, and who were so-called directors. Count Kolowrat told them, "Forget Budapest, which is a tank town compared to Vienna, and come to Vienna." The two men came. The name of one was Alexander Korda, and the name of the other was Michael Curtiz. Both of them hardly spoke the German language, and had no idea of German theater or actors; but they had a very good idea of how to photograph a scene so that it was alive, not stagey, not theatrical.
Therefore—and this is how I lead in to my own position—they hired for themselves people who were born in Vienna, who knew the theater, who would not interfere with their jobs as directors, but who would provide them with everything they needed to make a scene a going concern the next morning. At that moment the position of "assistant director" was born.
The assistant director in those days was everything. I had to help those Hungarian directors with the script. I had to translate—by guesswork, since I didn't speak their language—what they really meant when they said what they said in their own language. Then I had to get the actors and introduce them to the directors. Then I had to get the man who was supposed to build the sets and see to it that he did build the sets. The assistant director was also the auditor. I got the money to pay the actors. Everything was in the hands of the assistant director: the management, the girls' virtue, the budget—whether the money was available or not—everything .
Now, you understand, this was a school of fire. It was the most wonderful, elaborate, and thorough schooling anybody possibly could have had to become a motion picture maker. It was the university of life, per se. It was something that will never exist again because we really learned it from the ground up.
Alexander Korda was very different from Michael Curtiz .
Yes, Alex was a very cultured man, in contrast to Mike Curtiz, who was a man of the earth, of the soil. Alex was a man of the world, a gentleman, a grand seigneur . Alex Korda came to Vienna not only with his brother Vin-
cent, who became one of the great art directors of the British film industry, and his brother Zoltan, who became a very famous director of films made in India, but he also had the great idea of making his wife of that time, Maria Corda, a world-star. This was entirely a different thing from a motion picture actress. People went to see her beauty, her gestures, her glamor, her personality.
The production executive Count Kolowrat caught on that Alex Korda had a great idea, and Curtiz too took his own wife, who later on became a very important star by the name of Lucy Dorraine, and made many pictures with her. So they, in conjunction with their husbands, created the [Central European] star system.
Around that time we decided to make the most of the idea that Vienna is a world-famous city of music. Since everybody knew that Mozart and the Strausses were part of our tradition, I went to Count Kolowrat and said to him, "I've done a few semesters of literature, and I know how to write. Why can't we make a picture with, say, the background of a Mozart biography?"
At that time there was an inventor in Vienna who took recordings of famous music pieces—waltzes by Strauss, symphonies and sonatas by Mozart—and with a certain mechanical knack he synchronized these records with scenes being played on the screen. So, in a way, ten years before the actual invention of sound pictures, we made sound pictures of our own. Even if people did not buy a record, everybody had a copy of "The Blue Danube" in their own collection, and as they ran our picture they could also play the record—not always in synch, but almost in synch.
I wrote a story called Ein Walzer von Strauss [A Waltz by Strauss, 1925], which was really not about Johann Strauss but about the waltz itself. "The Blue Danube" played an integral part in the happenings and continuity of the screenplay. It was about two people in love—I've forgotten the details—who meet during the waltz, dance it together, then are separated. Years later, in totally different circumstances, they are reunited with the waltz. The film was a smashing success.
Fascinating, particularly since later in America you wrote The Great Waltz [1937] . . .
Right. At that time we really succeeded in establishing the Austrian film industry, which [before then had] meant nothing to the international market. The use of the words "Strauss" and "waltz" proved an "open sesame." It really opened everything up as if by magic. Vienna flourished as a motion picture center, and all of a sudden the whole thing collapsed because of the inflation which took place in 1922.
In those days what form did your scripts take? Were they shooting scripts, did they contain within themselves subtitles, or were they scenarios . . . ?
Well, to begin with, you knew a guy who had the money to make a picture.
That was the most inspiring germ of an idea for any young writer at that time, to know someone who would ultimately pay for what you wrote. Then you had to have an inkling of what his tastes were: Did he want to make mysteries, love stories, comedies, or, as in the case of Korda and Mike Curtiz, did he want to make big historic spectacles?
You met such a person in a sidewalk cafe, which was the great meeting-place and rendezvous of all European motion picture makers, and still is in Paris, Rome, Vienna, and Berlin—not in London and not in America. Then, over a cup of coffee and an aperitif, you told him the basic story, and if he liked it he paid for your coffee and sandwich. After which you saw no more money for a long time. Then you came to him with about ten to fifteen pages, just like today's very primitive outline. If he liked the outline, you got a little more money and an assignment to write the script.
Every week you came to him with twenty more pages and read it to him. Then, when it came to forty pages, and he could show it already to his executives and to his distribution outfit, or even sometimes to an actor, you got a little more money. You knew at the same time that, whatever payment you received, you would also be the assistant director if the picture was made. The two things went together; it was understood.
I wrote my scripts for a particular man. I knew how much money he had; I knew how many shooting days he could afford; I knew who it would be within his reach to cast; and finally, I knew who would sell the picture.
My forte was stories with a beginning, a climax, and an ending, with no holes, without too many murders, without chases, but with really sincere love—sometimes sentimental (although nobody died of TB in them), but never in bad taste. The stories never featured bedroom scenes. They were mostly love stories.
When you wrote a love story in those days, you had to think of two young people to begin with, and go from there. Making movies in this fashion we eventually found our bridge to Berlin, where an entirely new chapter opened up, bigger, more important, and altogether more workmanlike.
Berlin was considered superior to Vienna in status, wasn't it?
In Berlin everything Viennese was very much liked. We were received with wide-open arms. It was the most hospitable town on earth. Every Viennese was considered a genius—and in many cases, he was a genius. Out of Vienna at that time came Max Reinhardt, Elisabeth Bergner, Willi Forst, Rudolf Forster, Alexander Korda, Mike Curtiz, Fritz Lang, Joe May, Mia May—all these names of the past were Viennese, and they went to Berlin for one reason: It was enormously generous, the most hospitable town on earth, which sounds very strange because ten years later it was also very hospitable to one particular Austrian named Adolf Hitler, who destroyed a whole country, a whole civilization, and became a curse of mankind. Hitler was received
with open arms in Germany, just as we were ten years before, and he became a great, great protagonist, maker and destroyer of world history.
Our first years in Berlin were pure paradise. We made silent pictures there with many actors who later became famous; with writers like Carl Mayer (another Austrian, who wrote The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other profound message pictures for his Austrian fellow countryman Robert Wiene); with directors like Carl Froelich, Gustav Ucicky, and Rudolf Walther Fein.
It was the beginning of UFA. Lubitsch had already gone to America, and the Viennese very successfully took over, until three or four years later, when Berlin suffered a complete crack-up also: inflation. This happened simultaneously with the beginning of talkies, so we hardly noticed the great tragedy which the inflation in Germany brought about for many other people. Motion picture workers were unaffected because—and this was a great piquancy of the history of motion pictures (I hate to say it, but that's the way it was)—the worse the economy became, the better it was for motion picture people. Those without jobs hated staying home and listening to their wives complaining, so they went to motion pictures. The programs were very inexpensive and lasted a long time (each one two or three hours); sometimes they played a big feature, a comedy, a newsreel, a documentary, and trick films.
How did the transition from silent films to sound films affect you personally? Did you have to start again . . . ?
In all honesty, I had absolutely no feelings about it one way or the other. I always wrote my own title cards—which had to be very funny, to make people laugh as they read them, which is a different thing from laughing when you hear a joke. . . .
In other words, you wrote the captions as well as the scenario . . . ?
Right. I made no change in my system. Instead of writing captions, we wrote dialogue. I have absolutely no memory of any change. The only difference was that the pictures became a little smarter; we were a little bit more sophisticated, and not necessarily restricted to happy endings.
Tell me about your association with the great German star Hans Albers .
Hans Albers was to Germany in the years between about 1927 and 1929 what Clark Gable was to Hollywood. Not only did he physically resemble Gable, but his whole personality resembled Gable's, too: that of the athletic man who could conquer any woman without really fighting for her, and who deep down in his heart is a Rhett Butler, a born adventurer, a very warm-hearted son of a gun, hard-hitting, with a great sense of humor, and with total integrity within the realm of his adventurous spirit. When I describe him it's as if I were describing one of his roles, but in fact that's what he was, and the best example of that was his behavior in the first days of Hitler's regime.
For many, many years Albers had had a "free" marriage, a free liaison, with a Jewish girl by the name of Hansi Burg. When Hitler came, it was understood that such "marriages," even if they were legitimate, should be
dissolved, and could not be tolerated. And Hans Albers did not only not leave Hansi Burg at that time, he married her, at the very moment of Hitler's assumption of power, as a demonstration of his independence. It was absolutely impossible for the Nazis, who were omnipotent at that time, to touch him. He defied them totally. He defied Goebbels himself, whom Hitler sent personally to Albers to persuade him to give that woman anything she wanted to go abroad. He was untouchable. He laughed about them. There was no political issue as far as he was concerned. He stayed with that girl, who suffered enormously throughout all this, although she loved him. He went to premieres with her, he walked down the Kurfurstendamm with her, he went to receptions with her. He became a doubly important star in the Nazi era, despite many offers to go abroad.
Die Nacht gehört uns [1929]—this was his first talkie and you wrote it .
Right. Die Nacht gehört uns translates as The Night Belongs to Us . It was the first picture in which Albers played exactly what I just described to you. He was a racing driver who took part in Colpa Siciliana. We shot the picture in Sicily. But he simply couldn't remember the lines as written. He got the gist of the lines and dialogue and rehearsed it beautifully. But when he saw the microphone descending on him for the first time in his long career—he had been a theater man—he forgot every word, every comma, every cue, and instead translated it into his own vernacular in such a wonderful way that even a crying author like me, who saw his beautiful lines going to pot, had to acknowledge that in the last analysis Albers' lines proved to be much better, not only in the way he said them but in the way he invented them, because it all came out of his own personality. The result was an incredible success.
We made two versions at that time, a French version and a German version. Albers' part in the French version was played by a wonderful young actor, Jean Murat, who at one time was married to Annabella, who at one time was married to Tyrone Power and at one time was Oskar Werner's mother-in-law . . . small world, isn't it?
Carl Froelich, who directed Die Nacht—you wrote more than one picture for him. Can you tell me something about him?
Carl Froelich was yet another of these wonderful German personalities (and I hope it doesn't sound as if I were only praising them, but since you just happen to be asking me about guys like him . . .), a cameraman to begin with and a disciple of the famous camera pioneer Oskar Messter. I wrote many silent stories for Froelich as a director—Henny Porten played some of the leads, and several were played by Willi Forst. Froelich and I got along wonderfully, although we were of two worlds. He was very gregarious, a man who loved wine and women, and I was only a man of the typewriter. I never went out; I only worked. But that nevertheless resulted in a very good "marriage."
Tell me about Geza von Bolvary, another director you worked with, frequently, in the transition from the silent era to sound pictures .
Geza von Bolvary was the director of my first musical in Germany, called Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time [1930], whose theme song became a very famous waltz. In Australia at one time it superseded even "The Blue Danube" waltz in popularity. Geza von Bolvary was actually Hungarian by birth. He was in the Hungarian army, an officer of the Hundred Hussars, the most fearless and daring riders. After the war he became a motion picture director. I don't know how he landed a deal in pictures, but he was a very reliable man, and in his case the writer had a wonderful position: Since Geza von Bolvary was not too familiar with the language, with the vernacular, he relied totally on his authors. Whatever the author said was law.
We turned out a lot of pictures together. Three-Quarter Time was shot in only one version but outdid all other pictures that I ever wrote, commercially, without my having any [financial] participation in it, apart [from the royalties I received] from writing my own lyrics. I could have lived until today from [those] royalties if I'd remained a bachelor and alone.
Perhaps your most famous song is "Frag' nicht warum" from Das Lied ist aus. . . .
Yes. After Two Hearts came Das Lied ist aus [1930], one of the most important pictures ever made in Germany, what we called an intimate Kammerspiel . There is no translation for it, but it was just like a Noel Coward play, very elegant, three or four characters, drawing-room comedy, with sentimental or sad overtones; a few songs, no spectacle whatsoever, and practically no location work. In it Willi Forst played his first serious part, and his leading lady was Liane Haid. Von Bolvary directed, and the music was by Robert Stolz. It contained two numbers which have remained evergreens till this day: One is "Frag' nicht warum" ("Don't Ask Me Why"), and the other "Adieu, mein kleiner Garde Offizier" ("Goodbye, My Little Grenadier").
Did the composition of the lyrics of such a popular song just pop into your head?
Well, I always wrote my own lyrics for every song. The songs were integral parts of the continuity of the shooting script. My songs were always so built-in that you couldn't take them out. They were simply a link in the story, just as a love scene or a chase or a killing or a trial scene might be in another picture. Because it was my specialty, I would write a love scene up to a certain point and then segue into a song. They didn't suddenly burst into song as in The King and I, without any rhyme or reason—though The King and I was very good; I'm not criticizing it.
Instead of action or dialogue I wrote lyrics, and then other men—composers like Robert Soltz, Willy Schmidt-Gentner, Werner Heymann, and Friedrich Holländer—took over and wrote the music to the lyrics. Now I never
wrote the full lyrics [right away]. In German you need only write the first line. If the first line was sufficient inspiration for the composer to find the right melody, he then refused to accept ready-made rhymes, because his hits—the so-called Schlager, or evergreens—had to have thirty-two bars or sixty-four bars. He could not be fenced in by my rhymes, which might make the song too long, or out of symmetry, out of harmony, out of his counterpoint. He would only accept the first line for his own inspiration; then he sat down to make his music. Then I got the music and finished the lyrics. . . .
During this era you were associated with UFA on more than one picture. What was your relationship with UFA head Erich Pommer?
Well, that is not so easy to answer. Erich Pommer was already the undisputed czar of the German industry when I was a beginner. I had absolutely no chance whatsoever of working with Pommer, nor did I work with him until I had become a prominent writer myself. I wasn't in the same league as Erich Pommer or UFA. The pictures I have mentioned—the silent pictures with Henny Porten or with Forst—these had nothing to do with UFA. Only after I had attained a certain position, a certain standing, was I introduced to Pommer—by Billy Wilder, of all people, who was Pommer's favorite writer.
I don't know whether Pommer really needed Billy so much as a writer at that time, but Billy Was the life of the party. Pommer adored him, always had him around, always listened to him. Billy brought me to Pommer and recommended me, since Pommer was about to make musicals with Lillian Harvey, who was an important star at that time. Billy and I were teamed as writers, and our first picture for Erich Pommer was one called Ein blonder Traum [A Blond Dream, 1932], with Lillian Harvey in all three versions. She was an English girl by birth, and spoke English, French, and German fluently, and she always played her own part in each version. But the male lead changed in each version: English, French, German.
To work for Pommer was the crown of anybody's career in Germany, except that every story conference with Pommer started at nine o'clock in the evening. He spent all day in the studio without talking to writers. At 7:30 P.M. you had to report to him. You ate in his house—a beautiful dinner—and at nine o'clock, when everybody was ready to relax and go to bed, story conferences with Pommer began. They were murderous, because he already had the Hollywood knack, unknown in Europe up to that time, of making the producer the last court of appeal. There was nothing the director could say, nothing the author could do but fight, fight, fight. The last decision was Pommer's, and those nights, as you can imagine, were endless.
When you filmed more than one language version, were you involved in all the different versions yourself, personally, or only in the first German version?
We wrote the basic German version, and for economy reasons Pommer brought in English and French writers who simply translated our versions.
Every setup—close-up, long shot—was simply duplicated. There were no physical changes whatsoever. We used the same setups, the same directors: a young director who was also in Hollywood, Paul Martin; Wilhelm Thiele; and Curt Siodmak's brother, Robert Siodmak.
With Pommer also we made the top picture to top all top pictures, called F.P.1. antwortet nicht [F.P.1. Does Not Answer, 1932]. Curt Siodmak had the basic germ of that story. [See Curt Siodmak interview, p. 246.] He always wrote—and still does—stories with a kind of utopian slant. Many years ago he had the idea that floating platforms would be built in the middle of the ocean, islands for the refueling of planes. These islands would form a bridge over the Pacific and the Atlantic on which planes could land every three or four hours. The story I wrote was almost a Beau Geste situation—all communication with the platform has been severed, and when two fliers arrive to check up on the situation, they find clues to a tragedy that has taken place on the platform. Hans Albers starred in the German version, Peter Lorre in both German and English versions, and Charles Boyer in the French version.
Before we move on, I want to ask you about the German director Gustav Ucicky. He turned out to be a Nazi, yet I know that you wrote a lot of films for him. Can you tell us something about his background and your relationship with him?
He was an old-timer, a friend of mine. Ucicky was the illegitimate son of one of the great painters of all time, Gustav Klimt, and was an enormously gifted cameraman for Count Kolowrat. He had a burning ambition to become a director, but he had absolutely no artistic talent like that of, say, Fritz Lang—though he was a great technician and a great creator of pictorial scenes as a cameraman, a talent he inherited from his father, whom he strongly resembled. He took me on his staff and I became practically his leading writer until his Nazi days.
At that time we were united by a kind of friendship that doesn't exist anymore between director and writer. Anything I said was gospel, and anything he did was the greatest. We complemented each other completely. What I wrote he could translate into motion pictures as a director and cameraman, and he did it magnificently. This partnership lasted till the day Hitler came, when Ucicky changed 100 percent and became an out-and-out Nazi.
In Ucicky's case I was not shocked; I was not in any way disappointed. We [Viennese] were strangers in Berlin, and I, although I knew a lot about politics—I had studied politics and history—I behaved like the other Viennese, as a guest. I felt it my duty as a gentleman and as a citizen, and as an Austrian, to be in no way connected with the politics in Germany, which, as you know, were very, very hot, explosive. Everybody knew more or less what was coming, except me. I had no idea that Hitler was ante portas, was before the gates of Berlin, and I had no idea that Ucicky would switch. I had written his very first silent picture and a whole series of pictures after that.
It was rather odd for you to be writing a picture like Das Flötenkonzert [1930], for it was regarded at the time as German nationalist propaganda .
Right. I was politically a total idiot. I only worked. I don't want to apologize, but that's the way I was. I had no idea that Ucicky had been for years a secret member of the Nazi organization. When he said he'd been assigned to UFA to make a picture about Frederick the Great, the inventor of Prussian militarism, I said, "Here I am!" I brought him a story of my own. I took the famous painting by Adolf von Menzel of Frederick the Great playing the flute concert at Sans Souci Castle, the painting which is still in Potsdam castle, and that painting supplied the background for the picture I wrote. Later I was told it was a "Nazi" picture, and nobody could believe that I, who was anything but a Nazi, who was an Austrian, had written that picture. As a result I was the target for mockery from many of my friends.
Billy Wilder, for instance, never forgave me for ever having worked with Ucicky. Whenever he's in a bad mood—and I think he will acknowledge that we are very good friends, eternally good friends—he says, "How could you ever have worked with Ucicky?" And my answer to this is the same answer which I give you now: "I didn't know . . ."
When did you leave Berlin, and what did you do next?
We left Berlin after 1933, and for a very brief time I went to France, where Pommer had become the head of French Twentieth Century-Fox production. I had absolutely no money whatsoever. We had to leave Germany without a nickel. Pommer was very anxious to keep us in France, but we'd heard rumors that Fritz Lang's version of Liliom [1934] with Charles Boyer would be Pommer's last European adventure, which it actually was, and that Pommer would go to America; we knew he wouldn't take us all with him. Besides, I was in the middle of divorce proceedings with a Swiss wife who lived in Germany, involving endless litigation.
So I decided to return to Vienna, and in Vienna I met Willi Forst, who knew people capable of financing a picture and who wanted to direct. So I sat down in a hotel room and in six weeks I knocked out the story of Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony." I combed letters upon letters, and diaries of countless people in Budapest and Vienna, everywhere Franz Schubert had visited, until I found the exact week in which he started to work on his symphony. The Countess Esterhazy, in whose household he was teaching at that time, was then a very young girl, and the great first and last love of his life. I found enough clues and indications to prove that because of her he never finished the symphony.
Marta Eggerth, at that time a great European singing star, came to Vienna, and we gave her the part of the Esterhazy girl. We took Hans Jaray for the lead because he bore a certain resemblance to the young Schubert. And we
made the picture without salary, because nobody at that time could afford any salary. The producers paid just for our hotel [expenses]. Thinking themselves ingenious, the producers proposed that we receive one sixth of every dollar of profit—I, one sixth; Willi, one sixth; the company, one sixth; the laboratory, one sixth. . . . They thought we just had an ordinary picture. Little did they know it would be the most incredible success and that we would all make a lot of money from it. The picture (in the German language) went to Paris and played in a house called L'Etoile, near the Arch of Triumph, for three continuous years. We were lucky because [Jean] Cocteau, a member of the French Academy, wrote a magnificent review in Le Figaro, and that of course made all the other papers follow suit.
All of a sudden, living in Vienna, we had a windfall success with the Schubert picture. Now we resolved to make a picture set only in Vienna, not in Hungary or anywhere else. And in Vienna at that time the great actress was a girl by the name of Paula Wessely, not the most beautiful woman on earth: but a totally new and explosive talent. So we both decided to take a gamble and dare everything for her. I wrote a part [in Silhouetten, 1936] exactly tailor-made for her, and at the Venice Biennale she received the Best Actress prize, which at that time was the equivalent of the Academy Award. After that she became a great motion picture star.
Next we come to Episode [1935], the first picture you directed .
Produced, wrote, and directed—again for Paula Wessely.
Was your directorial debut congenial? Did it come easily to you?
As I told you, I came up from being an actor, an extra. And I was always present when my pictures were shot anyway, even if I had only written them. So one day I started directing. I don't even remember how it came about, or whether I was nervous. All these people were my friends and collaborators, except that the cameraman who shot it was an American, not one of our team. He became one of America's great outstanding cameramen—Harry Stradling. Harry, who was based in Paris at that time, fell in love with Vienna and approached me saying that he would like to spend three months in Vienna and asked if he could do anything for me. That's how it came about.
That film's script won first prize in the Venice Biennale, and Paula Wessely won the Best Actress prize for the second time. Episode was bought by Warner Brothers and Olivia De Havilland played in the remake, which was her first starring vehicle and was called My Love Came Back [1940]. She never forgot that. Whenever I would see her, she would say, "I'd like to have a part like that again. . . ."
From here, what was the process of your transition to England?
Well, Korda saw Episode and Silhouetten, and after all those years in which I had not worked for him, he took me to London where he was by then a big shot. He had Miriam Hopkins and Gertie Lawrence under contract, and
he wanted me to write for them exactly the same kind of story which I had written so successfully in Vienna, a Kammerspiel, an intimate drawing-room comedy.
I got a labor permit for ten months, which was an unheard-of accomplishment of Korda Productions, and on the strength of the quotation from Othello, "Men are not gods . . . ," I sat down and wrote a story about an actor who played Othello and wanted to kill Desdemona during the performance, and actually succeeded.[*] That was my first picture in London, and in the English language. I loved London. I married the girl who played the lead in Silhouetten —in London.
Unfortunately, right after this, Korda switched to color, and Korda began to lose all interest in intimate stories. He concentrated exclusively from then on on Four Feathers [1939], The Thief of Bagdad [1940], all the big color productions. He regarded me as a man who could only shoot intimate love stories. At that time, Ad Schulberg, the ex-wife of B. P. Schulberg and the mother of Budd Schulberg, was an agent in London. She had fallen in love with these pictures of mine, and she recommended me to Louis B. Mayer.
I'm surprised to hear that Louis B. Mayer was personally recruiting writers .
In 1937, during what could be called more or less the "Golden Age" of Hollywood—"golden" because there was no shortage of extras, no shortage of directors, no shortage of money—there was definitely a shortage of stories as far as Hollywood was concerned. Of course, every best-seller and every stage hit was immediately purchased by the studios, but there was still an extensive program on the major studios' schedules. There was no television, no Disneyland either in California or in Florida, and people didn't travel as extensively as they do now. Motion pictures were a weekly family entertainment, and many went twice a week. So the studios ran out of original stories, especially MGM studios, under the guidance of their wonderful and great leader, Louis B. Mayer.
Therefore L. B. went to Europe for two reasons. One was to go to Carlsbad, a very famous spa in Czechoslovakia, to get some rest and take the water cure. [The second was that], at the same time, he traveled through the cities of Europe—Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Paris, Rome, and London—to find writers who (in contrast to the American writers of that time, who concentrated practically exclusively, once their talent had been established, on adapting magazine articles as well as novels and stage hits) could write original stories for certain personalities once the studio assigned them to write for these characters.
* A Double Life, written by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon and directed by George Cukor in 1947, has a strikingly similar pretext.
L. B. Mayer, who had acquired the most famous picture I ever wrote, Maskerade, and made it into an MGM picture, Escapade [1935], with Luise Rainer and William Powell, called me and offered to have me come to Hollywood for six months. I arranged to go to Hollywood, combining the trip with my honeymoon. We were L. B. Mayer's guests on the maiden voyage of the Normandie, and this was the famous trip on which the Normandie, at that time the largest and most powerful boat afloat, lost a propeller between Le Havre and Southampton. We had to return to Le Havre for three days' repair, and all this time we were the guests of L. B. Mayer.
With us on the boat was a girl who blushed when you said hello to her—a Swedish skating champion by the name of Sonja Henie, who was going to America for the first time also.[*] She had a kind of agreement with Twentieth Century-Fox, but was also the guest of MGM—that is to say, of Louis B. Mayer and of his whole entourage. This happened because (and I think this is very interesting) the presidents of MGM and Twentieth Century-Fox were brothers: MGM was headed by its president Nicholas Schenck, and Twentieth Century-Fox was guided by Joseph Schenck. So it was really one big family.
Also on the boat itself, in the most luxurious circumstances, were Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Gertie Lawrence—going to New York for the first time for the Noel Coward [trio of] one-act plays, Tonight at 8:30 —Greer Garson and her mother (the former hired by Louis B. Mayer in London after he had seen her in Old Music ), and an array of other writers and actors. Mayer's entourage also included his first lieutenant Benny Thau and his great press representative Howard Strickling.
During the voyage, which was a terrible trip, I was called into Mayer's cabin at the height of a tempestuous sea storm, which made the Normandie sway to left and right like a nutshell, and he said, "Tell me a few stories which you think would work out in Hollywood." Well, I then had only one wish, either to die or to somehow walk back home. But still I pulled myself together and in desperation gave him one or two ideas. He, totally unconcerned by the weather conditions, listened, made notes, said "I like it!" and gave me the names of two or three producers to whom I would actually be assigned in Hollywood. As he told me later, he thought that my nervousness and excitement arose from my having to tell him those stories: Little did he know that I was seasick! It was my first great ocean trip.
At the same time the boat carried—and this will interest you—a young Viennese girl. I don't think I exaggerate when I say she was the most beautiful girl God ever sent down to earth. She had just run away from her husband, who was the most powerful ammunitions tycoon in Europe; his name was Fritz Mandl. He had bullied and terrorized her with his jealousy. That girl had had an incredible success in a picture called Ecstasy [1933], in which I
* In fact, Sonja Henie was born in Oslo, Norway.
think she was the first actress to appear in her birthday outfit. Imagine what that must have been like at the time of which we're speaking, September 1937. The picture, which was forbidden in every country, still found access to movie houses and was a big success. This girl was called Hedy Mandl, and had been born Hedy Kiesler [Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler]. I was born on the same street of the same city as she.
L. B. Mayer talked to her, immediately realized that here was a potential motion picture star, and offered her a lush contract. Everything changed rapidly for her. In the lower decks of the Normandie was a kind of mall, with the most expensive shops on earth—Dior and Poiret and Chanel. They had their little boutiques there, with clothes, with jewelry, with lingerie, shoes, hats, what have you. Hedy Mandl had fled on to the Normandie with only her grey tailor-made suit, one pair of gloves, no suitcase, a handbag, and not one dollar! By the time she left the boat in New York, she had a contract for a few thousand dollars a week, guaranteed for five years, and the most incredible array of suitcases filled with dresses.
Within those three or four days, Mayer gave her a buildup just like a motion picture production—except that she didn't have a name he liked. He didn't like Kiesler, because that sounded too German to him, and Germany at that time had fallen into deep discredit all over the world; and he couldn't use Mandl because the husband would create difficulties. So they tried to figure out what to do about her name: Every afternoon they held story conferences around the Ping-Pong table on the "A" deck of the Normandie with Strickling, Thau, and all the others, trying to decide how to go about introducing the young beauty to the members of the New York press who would infallibly arrive on the boat.
Now earlier, one of Hollywood's most famous motion picture stars, one of the most beautiful girls in Hollywood—well under thirty—had died. Her name was Barbara La Marr.[*] Somehow that name was the property of MGM. Louis B. Mayer, not superstitious at all, picked that name and said, "We are going to replace death with life." And he coined the name Hedy Lamarr. She had no idea that she was getting the name of a dead motion-picture star. When we arrived at Ellis Island, a girl more beautiful than any ever seen in America, by the name of Hedy Lamarr, came down the gangplank: not anybody's daughter, not anybody's sister or relative . . . a star was born.
What happened to you personally when you came to Hollywood?
After twelve hours in Hollywood I had an assignment, the typewriters were humming, I had two secretaries. At that time Irving Thalberg had just passed away, and the man who took over his job was a man by the name of Bernie
* Barbara La Marr, a beauty who starred in many silent films during the 1920s, died at age 29, ending a stormy and scandal-ridden career.
Hyman, who had made a very successful picture named San Francisco [1936].[*] When Bernie Hyman heard that a Viennese-born writer, an author of many original stories, was in town, he immediately called me in. They had a very grave problem with a property called The Great Waltz . It had been a Broadway-manufactured operetta about the life of Johann Strauss the younger, but they knew they couldn't make it [as a film] with the kind of sentimental, schmaltzy patina which the story had in the form in which they received it. The major problem was to give it a real Austrian flavor, so they decided to have a part written for Luise Rainer, whom they had under contract at that time.
So I got a guy who helped me with the American dialogue, with which I was not too familiar at that time, and we started revamping the whole script. I was teamed with a wonderful man, a great American poet, totally underrated—Samuel Hoffenstein. We had a great time together. He had absolutely no concept of story or construction, but he could write golden dialogue and beautiful popular aphorisms. His poetry, as you know, occupies four pages in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations . We made a wonderful team up to the moment when we wrote the last scene. Then he fell sick, and a few weeks or months later he was tragically dead.[**]
That became the story of my Hollywood career: Whenever they needed construction—a beginning, a new middle, and, more than anything else, a new ending, a finale (which they never had, as you know)—I was called in, fortunately; and I was always teamed with a very important dialogue writer. This was their great forte in Hollywood and in New York: these people could write magnificent words, beautiful lines, but somehow they always lacked—in contrast to British writers—a sense of story construction.
And this was your specialty?
My specialty, not being British—the British could write construction and good dialogue, like Noel Coward and many other writers—was to be called in to write a story, to invent characters, to give the outline scene by scene as in a shooting script.
But in dialogue they were very, very picky and choosy. They did not trust my dialogue, and I don't blame them, because, as you know, the American audience is very sensitive towards dialogue: They laugh only when it is written in their own vernacular, when it sounds colloquial to their ears; they will not respond if there is a "foreignism" in it. It has to touch exactly what they know about language.
* Thalberg was head of production. Upon Thalberg's death, Bernie Hyman inherited several of his pending or in-progress productions, including Camille (1936) and The Great Waltz (1938).
** Reisch has apparently telescoped years into months. Hoffenstein did not die until 1947. The Russian-born poet and essayist wrote many noteworthy screenplays in Hollywood, including An American Tragedy (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), Love Me Tonight (1932), Song of Songs (1933), Conquest (1937), The Phantom of the Opera (1943), Laura (1944), and Cluny Brown (1946).
It's entirely different in Europe. The English are far more broad-minded about this; they take French writers like [Jean] Anouilh and German writers like [Bertolt] Brecht in their stride. Not so the Americans, who were very spoiled at that time because of men like Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who could write gorgeous dialogue. The talkies were in full swing, nothing was without dialogue, and dialogue was a major contribution to every picture.
Although at first I was rather touchy about it—I thought it was kind of degrading that I should write the story, not being used to that American "team" way of working—I was fortunate to be teamed with men like S. N. Behrman, a great Broadway playwright, Johnny Van Druten, who was British, R. C. Sherriff, Sam Hoffenstein, Michael Arlen, John Balderston, and Charles Brackett. I learned in America what I did not have to learn in Europe. Everything here was teamwork.
What were your first impressions of MGM?
Well, I can only say it was an age like that of Athens in Greece under Pericles. On the second floor were doors carrying names like Anita Loos, Michael Arlen, Donald Ogden Stewart, Charles MacArthur, Ludwig Bemelmans, the Spewacks [Bella and Samuel], the Hacketts, Paul Osborn, Claudine West, Alice Duer Miller (who wrote The White Cliffs of Dover ), anybody who had a name—and myself.[*] I am very proud to have been one of them. It was an endless procession of great names, and, really and truly, with the exception of James Hilton, 'who at that time also had an office there, they did not know how to write an original story for a motion picture star. Either it was beneath their dignity, or they didn't have the time, or they didn't have the knack to do it.
So, after a few weeks spent getting my bearings, I caught on and made myself an integral part of the whole machinery. I too laughed about the New York reviews which referred to us as a "factory" because two or three writers' names always appeared on the script. I knew that the men who at that time dominated and ruled Hollywood did the right thing in not leaving it all up to one man alone as they do today. The results of that are very sad, as you know: When the so-called auteur directors write everything, direct everything, cut and edit everything themselves, the end results turn out to be lopsided, cockeyed. There is no control, no supervision. Those pictures [we made at MGM] conquered the earth for one reason: Whether right or wrong, the attitude of those dialogue writers towards the original stories was clear, was unmolested by their own vanity; they had an open mind towards them and kept a critical distance. It wasn't their own stories which they had to defend, to improve upon, or to polish. They had detachment. It just worked like a beautiful Swiss clock, the whole MGM machinery.
* The Hacketts (Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett) and Donald Ogden Stewart are interviewed in Volume 1 of Backstory .
You never felt they were in the habit of calling in too many writers on a project?
No—those things happened. But I must explain it to you, as a professional. It may have looked strange for credit cards to have carried three names, but in many cases this was a contractual requirement. For instance, I worked with a producer—I won't mention his name, he was a wonderful friend of mine—whose contract stipulated that each picture he produced should also carry his name as a writer. So things like that happened. But basically at that time—and this is the great difference between today and then—when we worked at Culver City we made MGM pictures, and we were all soldiers of the great army of MGM, whose general was Nicholas Schenck and whose first field marshal was L. B. Mayer. We made MGM pictures: We were wonderfully treated, we were never pushed aside, we had our say, we had our credits, we got our weekly check, we were happy, and the pictures were successful.
Shortly after your arrival at MGM, you began to write one of the most famous pictures you've ever been associated with, Ninotchka. How did this come about?
In 1934, Ernst Lubitsch had come to Vienna. He arrived on his way from America via London to Moscow. It was just like the king of England visiting Vienna: Lubitsch was very famous, enormously respected. And I'd just then happened to have directed my own picture, Episode . He, funny as this may sound, called my assistant director to ask whether he might have permission to enter the studio. So we all ran and put on our blue suits with new shirts and new ties and had a shave and a haircut. We picked the picture's best scenes in order to impress him. After looking at the rushes and the dailies, he said he adored the picture which I'd made, although I don't think he was as pleased about the picture as about the fact that he hadn't seen a German talking picture in years. It was the first time that he'd heard Paula Wessely's [screen] voice, and [seen] old friends from his former stage years with Max Reinhardt. So it was a kind of nostalgia trip.
At the studio he told me that, after his Moscow trip, he would be taking over as head of production at Paramount, and he would love me to come over and write for him. I told him that I had contractual obligations in Vienna and that I was not in command of the English language. However, he was very amiable about it, and we started a certain friendship.
When I finally came to Hollywood, my wife and I stayed the very first day, like everyone else, at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. That evening Billy Wilder arrived, bringing Lubitsch as a guest, and we had a happy reunion in a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. From then on it was a purely social relationship. That lasted until the day when, to everybody's surprise, Lubitsch made a clean break with Paramount and joined MGM for two pictures. One was supposed to be a Garbo picture. In that picture, based on a treatment by Melchior Lengyel, Garbo was supposed to play a Russian.
I never read the original treatment, but I don't think there was much more to it than that—a Russian coming into [contact with] the civilized Western world.
Lubitsch was very unhappy with the treatment, and one day in the commissary he told me about it. I replied that as I was on another picture, there was no point in discussing it. So he said, "Why don't you come over to my house on Sunday? We'll walk around the pool, sit down and have lunch together—and maybe you can give me a few pointers?" Accordingly, that Sunday, I went to his house on Bel Air Road, and we sat by the pool, where he told me his ideas. He told me that the picture had a beginning, but there was no middle and there certainly was no ending. At that time, the well-made play was everything. Lubitsch would never touch a story unless it had a [proper] beginning, middle, and end, and unless it offered enormous possibilities for the insertion of his own Lubitsch "touches."
As we talked—and this was my forte, my métier, my job—I gave him a few pointers, saying, "Why don't you start with this and that . . . ?" and so on. Before I'd even finished he was on the phone to Eddie Mannix, the guy at the time responsible for assignments at MGM, insisting that I be assigned to him. At 9:30 A.M. on Monday when I came to the studio I was told to report to Lubitsch. The other picture was forgotten or laid aside, and Lubitsch and I constructed Ninotchka, from beginning to end, from the ground up, within the next five weeks.
Then he wanted to have Samson Raphaelson for his dialogue, but Raphaelson was not available, being busy with a play in New York.[*] So I said to Lubitsch, "Why don't you take Billy [Wilder] and Brackett?" They were at Paramount, but I suggested them because I thought the whole thing would be better if it were done by friends. Lubitsch at that time only had to pick up the receiver and he got Brackett and Wilder. They came and joined us, Billy with his enormous ability to handle detail and with his superb gags, and Brackett, whose command of language was equaled by very few people in this town. So the whole picture was created within ten or twelve weeks without one line being changed, without any scene being revised or lost in the cutting room or redone.
The script was shot . . .
. . . shot as written. Lubitsch adored it, the three authors were very dear to his heart, and he made Garbo laugh for the first time.
This was your first collaboration with Charles Brackett. Tell us a little bit about him .
* Playwright-screenwriter Samson Raphaelson wrote many first-rate screenplays for director Lubitsch, notably The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), One Hour with You (1932), The Man I Killed/Broken Lullaby (1932), Trouble in Paradise (1932), The Merry Widow (1934), Angel (1937), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Heaven Can Wait (1943), and That Lady in Ermine (1948). His infrequent script credits, apart from collaboration with Lubitsch, include Hitchcock's Suspicion in 1941.
"Shot as written": Russian agent Greta Garbo and gay-blade Melvyn Douglas
in Ernst Lubitsch's film of Ninotchka, script by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder,
and Walter Reisch.
Charles Brackett belonged more to the membership of the social set than to that of the motion picture set. He was a well-known patrician, born in Saratoga, the son of a state senator from Rhode Island. He was one of this town's ten great hosts, and his social activities were proverbial. His wife, Elizabeth Brackett, had been born a Fletcher, with her own set of social acquaintances. He was, in short, an aristocrat, and made a charming and well-balanced team with Billy Wilder, who was aggressive, anything but a socialite, a rebel from Austria whose whole personality was that of a fighter and who dealt in snide remarks. They complemented each other very well.
Now at that time, as I said before, Brackett and Wilder were a contractual team. I don't know whether Brackett contributed all that much to the story [of Ninotchka ], but their names—Brackett's and Wilder's—were linked anyhow. Brackett's private personality within the room—and we always worked every morning in Lubitsch's office, the four of us, Brackett, Wilder, Lubitsch, and I; no producer was present, he didn't come in until the script was finished—acted as a soothing influence. If I may use a cliché, his class, his good taste, ensured that his name on the picture was well earned, so I have no beef about it.
It became a terrific hit and led rather naturally to Comrade X.
Right. Although directly after this I went on loan-out to Korda, who by
that time claimed the last seven months of his contract with me from L. B. Mayer. I had to go to London and write That Hamilton Woman for Vivien Leigh and [Laurence] Olivier, and I was very happy to go, although we wrote it under great difficulties inasmuch as bombs were falling right and left. Indeed we shot a few scenes in Italy, where the picture was set, and some soundstage scenes in America.
When I returned from London—and it was, of course, incredible to come out of that chaos and nightmare to California, with all the food on earth and no bombs, only sunshine and warmth—I was called in to Eddie Mannix. MGM needed a Gable picture very definitely, no strings, attached. By that time Hedy had had a big success with Algiers [1938], and they wanted to team Gable with Hedy Lamarr.
So I came up with the idea of making Gable a reporter in Moscow who, in his own way, with his own tricks and his own magic, gets the news out of Moscow via a radio and a camera. His byline is "Comrade X." Hedy Lamarr was to be a streetcar conductor in Moscow. I wrote the story in about eight weeks. The nephew of Marion Davies [Charles Lederer] was called in, and [Ben] Hecht wrote the script with him for [director] King Vidor.[*] I was taken off the script because I had another assignment.
What assignment was that?
It was at that time, funnily enough, that [producer] Joe Pasternak switched from Universal, where he had made countless pictures with Deanna Durbin. When he came to MGM—he was a very old friend of mine from European days, although I had never worked for him—he said he was going to make a musical with their new singing star [Kathryn Grayson] and he wanted me to write the script [for Seven Sweethearts, 1942]. That is why I never really finished the job on the screenplay of Comrade X; I only wrote the original story. That was fortunate because as an original story it got an Academy Award rating [nomination], whereas as a screenplay it was not significant enough. But it was a very funny story, and [director] King Vidor did a wonderful tank battle in it . . .
What was your contribution to That Uncertain Feeling [1941], the next Lubitsch picture among your credits?
I wrote the original story, from an idea of his, I think. At that time he
* Apart from being well liked for his humor and pranks, Charles Lederer had an auspicious writing career. The son of a sister of actress Marion Davies, Lederer was intimate with Ben Hecht and worked frequently with director Howard Hawks on such films as His Girl Friday (1940), I Was a Male War Bride (1949), The Thing (1951), Monkey Business (1952), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). His many other credits include The Front Page (1931), Comrade X (1940), Ride the Pink Horse (1947), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), Ocean's Eleven (1960), and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Lederer co-wrote the Broadway musical Kismet, which he co-adapted to the screen in 1955. He is written about at some length in Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend by William MacAdams (New York: Scribner's, 1990).
wanted to make another picture with Melvyn Douglas, and with Merle Oberon and Burgess Meredith. I went on loan-out from MGM to Lubitsch. We worked on the whole thing around the pool again. But for the first time in his career he was running into enormous censorship problems. It was a marital triangle story with very suggestive scenes—such as, We didn't make any bones about the fact that the Merle Oberon character had a liaison with Burgess Meredith while being married to Melvyn Douglas, and that he [Douglas] was not a great lover. Lubitsch said, "Oh, I'll get away with that. . . ."
But just then a brand-new man took over the Production Code office, Joseph Breen, along with his assistant Geoffrey Shurlock. They were very strict, to Lubitsch's dismay. Walter Wanger, who was the producer of this picture—I don't know if he even signed it later—sided with the [Production Code] office and defeated Lubitsch for the first time.[*] So the picture really never came out the way Lubitsch had wanted it.
Your next picture, then, was The Heavenly Body [1943], again, with Hedy Lamarr—is this right?
Right. By that time, of course, they always teamed us up, us Europeans—the Viennese with the Viennese, etcetera. A producer by the name of Arthur Hornblow, Jr., had quit Paramount when Brackett took over production reins there, and had come to MGM. I had known Hornblow for many years, and he called me in, and since my line was the William Powell-type of funny light comedy, with [this time] Hedy Lamarr, I was assigned to write a picture for those two—again a marital comedy, not too heavy, not too profound, just to entertain the audience. I think Billy Wilder had a little bit to do with The Heavenly Body, too, indirectly: He [Hornblow] at one time hoped to get Billy away from Paramount to direct the picture, and Wilder was in on story conferences. It was all one of those great "family" pictures.
Then Billy and Brackett became totally independent, so Arthur and I went to New York, where we met with Michael Arlen, who was a great socialite who didn't care much about writing anymore. We convinced Arlen that this might be a good way for him to return to Hollywood, where he had been many years before. So he came, and was a great social figure here, but also very conscientious, every day at the studio. He had a great wealth of funny lines and crafty lines, well-balanced and civilized. It turned out to be a picture which didn't effect any great revolution, but it entertained a lot of people and had a good title.
A man by the name of Alexander Hall directed it, but he never finished the picture because he had to go back to his home lot, Columbia. So a young man by the name of [Vincente] Minnelli took over, after having just come to Hollywood from New York, where he had made stage settings, actually. Then
* Ernst Lubitsch is credited as producer of That Uncertain Feeling .
Minnelli took over another picture for [producer] Arthur Freed, and Bob Leonard, who had made The Great Ziegfield [1936], took over the picture and finished it. As I say, it didn't set the world on fire.
Now we come to a picture which I admire intensely. I think it's one of the best ever done by its director (George Cukor), and its writers, and this is Gaslight [1944] .
Well, as you know, an English stage thriller had started running in Hollywood, with Vincent Price and a girl named Judith Evelyn. MGM wanted to film it, until they discovered that a minor company had already made it in England with Anton Walbrook and Diana Wyngard.[*] They ran the picture and it turned out to be exactly like the stage play, not bad at all. There was nothing that L. B. Mayer abhorred more than just taking a play and making it into a picture. So we were given the job of revamping it completely.
I was immediately assigned to Arthur Hornblow, Jr., and to a collaboration with Johnny Van Druten. Hornblow knew we would come up with a shooting script within ten weeks, that we would be easy to handle, that there would be no writers disappearing for weeks on drinking sprees. We were writing it for a girl like Luise Rainer, fragile and delicate like a toy, when suddenly, in the middle of the work, David Selznick, who was omnipotent at that time, persuaded L. B. Mayer to take Ingrid Bergman for a part. He had her under contract, had no picture for her, didn't want to pay her her salary, and Louis B. Mayer was very happy to take Ingrid Bergman for a picture.
Now Ingrid Bergman is a powerful woman with enormous shoulders, strong, healthy, and no man on earth can talk her into being silly or insane. It was absolutely insane casting! John Van Druten, who was a wonderful man, very sensitive and tender, was just out of his mind at the prospect. "What's the difference?" I said. This was a challenge! Van Druten went for a whole week to his ranch—his "runch" as he called it—at Indio, south of Palm Springs, and sulked and sulked. But he came back and we took the bull by the horns.
Then David Selznick not only sold Ingrid Bergman to MGM. He had another actor under contract for whom he had no part, Joseph Cotten—a very great "Britisher," as you know—a total Yankee! It just didn't add up. Now came the topper: The most romantic man of the screen, who'd played in love stories with Irene Dunne and in the remake of Pépé le Moko [Algiers, 1937], Charles Boyer, was also sold by David Selznick to L. B. Mayer. So we were stuck with a cast that didn't add up to anything!
Except that everybody connected with this picture had an enormous sense of humor, we all had our salaries, and it turned out to be a real challenge. Minnelli had been first choice as director, but then Homblow was wise enough
* This is Gaslight (1939), a.k.a. A Strange Case of Murder or Angel Street, directed by Thorold Dickinson for British National Films. MGM reportedly tried to destroy the negative and buy up all prints of this first version of Patrick Hamilton's play (with a script by A. R. Rawlinson and Bridget Boland) but failed.
to yield to the consideration that only George Cukor, with his wisdom and experience, could make this picture a going concern with so many practically miscast roles. George Cukor, who is a magician with any actor, with any actress, said, "What's the difference? What if we do have a powerful woman? It will be twice as interesting to see whether she will be able to fight back, whether he will be able to really ruin her, or break her. . . ."
At what stage did John Balderston pitch in on the script?
John Balderston's was one of those cases where a guy had a contract and had to get his name on a picture. I never had any contact with him, he was never on the set, he never had anything to do with the script . . . maybe he polished a few lines.[*]
So it was yours and Van Druten's work exclusively?
But of course! Although Patrick Hamilton's original play was magnificent. You simply couldn't ruin it, whereas we had the chance of adapting it to the personalities who would be playing it: That was our real contribution. That and the whole beginning—and certainly the idea—we built the whole house from that idea—of where the jewels were hidden. These were not in the play.
My only justification for being on the script was that I could empathize myself into the life of a woman and write it so that the woman's character became plausible. All those scenes of Ingrid as a little girl, down-to-earth and happy and wealthy, were my contribution.
And that final great scene where she confronts him [when he's] tied up in the chair—was that in the play?
Yes, that was very much in the play. But it was really a contribution of Cukor's, too, in making her a goddess of vengeance. Well, Cukor's contribution is recognized, and deservedly so.
Were you present throughout shooting, on hand . . . ?
Every day! Cukor would never shoot a scene without the author being present, and Van Druten was already in New York. I had to be on the set every day. Cukor always compared notes, asking me, "How did you like it?" When he wanted a word changed for Ingrid, you had to change it right there on the set.
What were the circumstances of your leaving MGM when you were so apparently happy there?
Total stupidity. I left six months before my pension came up, before my ten years were over. But I had written a story for myself—and now I come to a chapter in my life which is not the happiest—called Song of Scheherazade . Pasternak wanted to buy it, but I knew that MGM would not let me direct it.
* Ex-newspaper war correspondent John Balderston wrote many superior plays and screenplays, dating from the early 1930s. Balderston specialized in horror (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Mad Love) and romantic adventure (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prisoner of Zenda, Red Planet Mars) .
Why wouldn't they let you direct it? You had proven yourself as a director in Europe .
Because they did not think that they could spare me as a writer. They didn't need directors. They had wonderful directors under contract on the lot, directors who were lazy or free or without assignments. They didn't care to create new directors when their roster already held twenty who could make pictures.
But I was ambitious, and my agent, Charlie Feldman, had discovered a girl, Yvonne De Carlo, at Universal, whom I met. She was a [Paul] Kohner client, and I didn't dislike her. She was a dancer. All, including Billy Wilder, recommended her, except one man who warned me, "Don't make a picture with this girl, because, while she may be a star, she's not your type. She's much too—let's say plebeian—in her bearing." That was [producer] Sam Spiegel, strangely enough.
So I wrote and directed this picture. The company had an enormous success with it because I succeeded in making the picture very inexpensively. But I got catastrophic reviews, and I suffered very much under the effects of it for years and years. If you make a picture called Song of Scheherazade, with "Song of India" in it, and the "Caprice Espagnole," and "The Flight of the Bumble Bee," all by Rimsky-Korsakov, and if Yvonne De Carlo is the inspiration for all of this, you are leaving yourself wide open for criticism. Today I accept it with a certain sense of humor. But the studio people just didn't believe in my direction [as a consequence], and I never got a picture to direct in Hollywood again.
Shortly after this, you went to work at Fox?
No, I went to Paramount to work for Charles Brackett on The Mating Season .
How did this come about exactly?
Charles Brackett had a falling-out with Billy Wilder, and they separated as a pretty famous Academy Award-winning team.Now, Brackett and Wilder had always used me as a story consultant in previous years—
Although you received no credit on their pictures?
Well, I was under contract to another studio, and I helped them as a friend, just as they helped me . . .
Informally?
. . . Informally. Brackett had a great appreciation of my sense of construction and my flair for original stories. When he became an independent producer, he had one dream: He wanted to make a picture with a New York actress, Thelma Ritter, who was from an altogether different world. Whereas he was an aristocrat, an American patrician, she was a totally down-to-earth personality. He couldn't find a studio that was interested in a story about a middle-aged woman. The last such star had been Marie Dressler. Otherwise, actresses of that age played character parts. . . .
Now he had the position and the strength to see it through, so the very first day after he and Billy separated, he called me in and gave me the following assignment: "I want to make a picture with Thelma Ritter in the central part. I have John Lund, who is under contract to Paramount, whom I can only see as her son, and we have a very good chance of getting Gene Tierney on loan-out from Twentieth Century-Fox. Try to find a story for that." Then he added, "Of course, you realize that Gene Tierney can always be a very high-class girl, and Thelma Ritter a girl from the other side of the tracks. Therefore you have a ready-made conflict in that."
So we invented a story in which John Lund falls in love with Gene Tierney and marries her. Although he is not ashamed of his mother, she is the one who thinks she might upset the marriage by turning up as what she is. Miriam Hopkins had just returned to Hollywood after a long sojourn in London and New York on the stage, and cleverly and with great generosity she said she was through playing leading ladies and femmes fatales . So I suggested her for the part of an ambassador's wife, the mother of Gene Tierney, and she made a very funny comeback.
Out of that came The Mating Season, which was of course a great success for all of us, particularly for Charlie Brackett, who got a terrific contract as a producer from Darryl Zanuck, and for Thelma Ritter, who before the end of her life made at least half a dozen pictures in which she had a central part.
Now, coming over to Fox: How did you find conditions there as contrasted with other studios, particularly MGM?
I loved MGM, and I adored every day I spent there, but I changed completely to suit the climate of Fox. That is my only talent, that I can adjust myself, at will.
Fox was totally different from MGM. At Fox it was like being in a big newspaper office. Everything went according to Zanuck's taste, Zanuck's speed, Zanuck's way of making pictures—that is, fast, topical, very little conversation, very few arguments. I personally just loved it. Zanuck would call you in to announce that he needed a picture in ten weeks' time and not a day later. And you didn't have one day more. I worked to a deadline, and I simply loved that way of working. It is very productive, you cannot stall, and if you are under pressure you always come up with something topical because you just don't have time to do a lot of research. I personally, in contrast to many other people, loved to work at Twentieth Century-Fox.
Did you have much personal contact with Darryl Zanuck yourself?
Nobody had much personal contact with Zanuck, then or ever, which was again one of the advantages in that outfit. When the day came that he needed you, you got an appointment via Esther, his secretary. She'd say, "Tuesday, 4 P.M. , half an hour," and on Tuesday at four in the afternoon you got your half hour. You walked in, and he told you exactly what you needed to know. There he sat with his cigar. He didn't even know your second name; ad-
dressed you only by your first name. He'd say, "I have to start a Clifton Webb picture on December 1st, and today is June 15th. I need the script within eight weeks because Webb has to read it, and as a perfectionist he takes a long time to learn his lines." He told you what he wanted, whether he wanted a comedy or a mystery story, whether in black and white or in color, the whole production setup . . .
Including the budget?
Of course. He'd say, "I don't want to make a picture that will cost more than $1,200,000 or $1,500,000, or even less. I have three directors lined up. Let's see which one of them likes it well enough to do it." He wouldn't argue with a director. He'd give the script to Henry King, to Jean Negulesco, to Henry Hathaway, or to George Cukor, whoever came in first, and say, "I want you to do it," and [that man] got the picture. I adored the system.
Then you didn't see him for ten weeks, and he didn't ask you to see him. You'd get another call from Esther saying, "You're supposed to see Mr. Zanuck and tell him the story on Wednesday at three o'clock in the afternoon. You have forty minutes—use your time well." You walked in; he didn't want to read what you had written. No director was present, only a secretary, no witnesses. The secretary always took minutes of the conversation during which you told him the story. Either he hated it and you walked out—and there was no argument, you couldn't convince him that you could do better—or he loved it and you had the assignment before you returned to your office. After that he read the finished script, took it home on a Friday at noon, came back on Monday at eleven in the morning with his marginal notes, and those notes had to be observed.
What was the next step?
Well, I don't think he ever read it the second time around, because he knew that his amendments would be followed.
He delegated power: If the picture was good, it was your success; if the picture was bad, he took all the blame and said, "I never should have let it go into production." He never interfered on the set with a director or an actor. He saw the rushes, he wrote notes about them, and these notes had to be observed, too. Then came the great moment when he took over everything, and for many, many productions that was very dangerous. Once a picture had been shot, and the director had, according to his contract, submitted the first cut to Zanuck's office containing everything that had been shot, regardless of whether it was long enough or too long, Zanuck took over and edited the picture every day from after dinner till long after midnight.
But he didn't edit it the way you would think pictures should be edited, with subtlety, with patience, a little frame from here and a little frame added there; he took out whole sequences. Sometimes that worked like magic, and it gave the picture speed and tempo, dynamism, and something which every really good newspaper has, topicality. It gave it . . .
Punch . . .?
. . . a "headline." You didn't have to read long unreadable editorials or long leading articles; you read the essence, the gist of it, and that was a Zanuck picture. Many times a picture simply got buried that way because people couldn't follow it anymore, when like a vandal he'd thrown out whole sequences. But it was his studio, his money—his family were majority stock-holders—and the failures were his, not the successes. The successes were yours. He never said, "I told them to make the sequence that way." He'd say, "My boys did it!"
A very fair man, was he?
Very fair. Many directors suffered very much under his arbitrary way of cutting a picture, but I never suffered because I adapted myself to his way of thinking. I wrote it to be played fast; I didn't write long, dragged-out sequences or conversation pieces, as was the case at MGM. At MGM every picture was talked either to death or to life. They would talk, talk, talk—endless sessions with producers, story editors, directors, writers, actors, other executives, distributors, agents. Everybody had something to say. It never ended. Whenever a picture got made, it was a miracle. At Fox there was only a script and Darryl Zanuck. He okayed it or he threw it out.
The first picture you were involved with at the studio was Otto Preminger's The Fan [1949], wasn't it?
That was precisely a non-Zanuck picture. Nothing could be further removed from his way of thinking than Oscar Wilde, or Lady Windemere, or Mrs. Erlynne. It was just too Victorian, too elegant, and too slow. Everyone spoke like everyone else, very stilted and mechanical dialogue—brilliant, the most wonderful dialogue on earth, but totally inhuman. Zanuck just didn't care for it, so Otto was left alone and it was dragged out.
But I was only a consultant on this picture. I don't know how my name got on it. The basic story was, of course, Oscar Wilde's, adapted by Dorothy Parker and an Englishman [Ross Evans]. I think Otto brought me in hoping I might be able to give it some cinematographic values, some movement, but it just wasn't in the cards. Nobody was hurt by the picture, and nobody was elated either.
The Model and the Marriage Broker [1951] was another picture which you conceived as a vehicle for Thelma Ritter .
That was exactly Zanuck's cup of tea. Thelma Ritter spoke his language, and although we had the same girl as in The Fan, Jeanne Crain, it worked like a million dollars. Zanuck loved the picture so much that I don't think he eliminated one frame. I don't remember one marginal note in a script of 140 pages. We came in on budget, and Cukor's work was lovely, sensitive.
We had a big success, and the reason The Model and the Marriage Broker didn't score an even bigger success was because it came just at the start of the age of CinemaScope and color, and that story certainly did not lend itself to
CinemaScope and color. It was very intimate. The "big" office of the marriage broker was no bigger than a couch. The whole idea was small. Five years before, it would have been a Frank Capra success. But when it was finished—which was a year later, of course, after its inception—Zanuck was so involved in CinemaScope and had put so much money and publicity into CinemaScope that he simply treated this picture as a stepchild.
He let it go . . .?
He let it go. He didn't really hurt it, but he didn't help it, and every picture needed promotion at Fox.
There's a fascinating story behind Niagara, isn't there? How it got off the ground?
Brackett was the producer. He'd been born very close to Niagara Falls and had lived [around] there all his life. In contrast to other cases where we had to focus all our attention on an actress, this time he said, "Let's get the whole spectacle in as beautifully as possible." And since he was not a man to make pictures about the Riviera or about Paris, he said, "Let's make a picture about Niagara."
As [Richard] Breen was not yet on the lot, I was the one who had to invent a story.[*] I had only one argument with Brackett. I said, "Anybody hearing the name Niagara thinks of honeymoon couples and of some sentimental story of a girl walking out on her husband on their wedding night and their getting together again. It would be foolish to start up with Sonja Henie tricks here or Esther Williams-type swimming extravaganzas. I would like to make it a mystery story, with a real murder in it. . . ."
Brackett was not sufficiently convinced to take on the responsibility for that decision, alone, so he went down to Zanuck's office. Half a minute later he walked out elated, because that was exactly what Zanuck wanted. Then Zanuck left us completely alone.
He sent you to Niagara, though, didn't he?
Yes. By that time the original story had been invented and covered some twenty or thirty pages. That original story was mine from beginning to end. All those original stories were mine. I was present throughout the writing of the dialogue until the very end, but I would usually subordinate my thinking there to Richard Breen's taste, which enabled him to invent very funny lines.
Brackett and Breen and I went to Niagara Falls, lived for a while on both the Canadian and American side of the falls, and we . . .
. . .blocked out the script there?
* Former radio writer Richard Breen collaborated successfully with Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett (A Foreign Affair), and then with Brackett and Reisch (The Mating Season, The Model and the Marriage Broker, Niagara, Titanic), as well as flourishing on his own (Dragnet, Pete Kelly's Blues, The FBI Story, PT-109, Captain Newman, M.D., Do Not Disturb, Tony Rome) . Breen directed only one film, Stopover Tokyo (1957), produced by Reisch. Breen's productive career was cut short when he died in 1967 before the age of 50.
Yes. Then Zanuck wired or phoned us that he wanted to put Marilyn Monroe into the picture. We thought that was a nice idea, until there came a second telephone call that he wanted her to be the villainess, not the girl . . .
Not the Jean Peters part, eventually . . .?
. . . in the honeymoon sequences. My God! Here was the prettiest girl in the whole United States of America! But he insisted it was a great idea, so we finally did it. We didn't know whether she would like it, but she had no objection, whatsoever—on the contrary. I think it came out pretty well, although that was a picture on which Zanuck really used the scissors in a very, very—how shall I say?—arbitrary way. There were sequences—not with Marilyn Monroe or with Jean Peters—but sequences with the police which he simply cut out.
There is one major scene that is missing, isn't there?
I think there are six major sequences missing. After he'd seen it, Zanuck simply couldn't accept the fact that the police at Niagara Falls were of Canadian extraction. We had British actors playing Canadian police commissioners and detectives and various cops, and he just abhorred it. He wouldn't let us go back to the stages to finish it or to repair it—no, he just took it out! The American audience, he said, does not know, does not understand, that the Niagara Falls are bisected by the border . . . and we should have used Americans. And [director Henry] Hathaway, who didn't like the idea either, sided with him. So there are big holes in the story.
But how can I argue with that decision today? There are five or six sequences [in Niagara ] which many people call memorable. . . .
Your next picture, Titanic [1953], presented you with quite a tall job of research. How did the inception of this production come about?
It actually started at a moment in Twentieth Century-Fox's business when CinemaScope was completely established, except that—and this is very funny to talk about today—the cameras were not always available. Therefore a production sometimes had to take a back seat, or be canceled, or Zanuck might suddenly decide to reshoot it in black and white. Bell and Howell, or whoever produced those CinemaScope cameras, couldn't keep up with the demand; they were not made on an assembly line like a Toyota. They were custom-made and tested, because, after all, millions went into a film once it was shot. They had many [initial] setbacks, and therefore when Titanic was supposed to start shooting, there were no cameras! The cast was assembled, the director was assigned, the sets were standing, but you couldn't get a camera. They were stuck with a picture somewhere, maybe with Lew Milestone in Australia for Kangaroo [1952], or maybe in Rome—I've forgotten which. All of a sudden they told us it would be in black and white.
It wasn't conceived that way. When Brackett and I were first called in, Zanuck, in the prescribed manner, said, "I have Clifton Webb under contract, and we have CinemaScope, and I now want to do something big [and in
"There are big holes in the story": Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten in Niagara,
script by Charles Brackett, Richard Breen, and Walter Reisch, directed by Henry
Hathaway.
color]. You'd better come up with something good. Don't make Clifton a clown. I want him to start a new career as a character actor. Use all the young people we have on the lot, like Audrey Dalton and Robert Wagner . . ."
Well, I was delighted. We left the office, I locked myself in my own office for a couple of days and came back with the Titanic idea, and shortly we had Zanuck 100 percent in our camp.
My idea—and I knew this would get Zanuck—was for me to go to London and New York and study the old newspapers, and I could come up with 60 percent truth, completely documentary. Clifton Webb would play one of twenty-five multimillionaires who went down on the Titanic —only a multimillionaire could afford to go on that maiden voyage from Southampton. The dialogue of the people was to be drawn almost exactly from life: We took it out of the newspapers. The famous line coined that night—"No cause for alarm"—drew big applause at the [film's] preview at the Academy Theatre because people recognized it [from newspaper accounts].
Breen and I wrote the screenplay. Brackett always got [screenplay] credit, too; that was his contractual commitment. We put in a beautiful part for Thelma Ritter, that of the "Unsinkable Molly Brown," which was later made into an
From left: Richard Breen, Charles Brackett, presenter Kirk Douglas, and Walter
Reisch, the screenwriters of Titanic clutching their Oscars for best script of 1953.
(Courtesy of Elizabeth Reisch)
MGM musical with Debbie Reynolds. [Director Jean] Negulesco and Barbara Stanwyck were also assigned.
Breen contributed one very interesting touch. I was violently against it, because I just didn't know enough about it. Breen, himself a militant Catholic, said, "We're going to have an alcoholic priest . . ." I just fainted. I come from a totally Catholic country and the fact that a priest can drink is hushed up, if it ever happens. But Breen made a big point of it, and at that time a young man named Richard Basehart made a kind of a career as a villain in many pictures, so we put him into the part, and it all worked out pretty well.
This leads us, by a natural progression, into your returning to Germany for the purpose of resuming your directorial career with German-language pictures. How did this come about?
My standing as a director in Germany was not in any way endangered by the failure with Scheherazade . An old friend of mine had become a great star over there. Her name is Hilde Krahl, a very good actress. I had guided her through her very first picture, Silhouetten, directed by me in Vienna. She called me one day wanting me to come and make a picture for her. Nothing
could have pleased me more. I had about four months' leave of absence from Fox, and gave up a lot of money just to make a picture with her.
I wrote and directed a picture for her called Die Mücke [Madame Mosquito, 1954]—that's an insect, you know—the story of an aging spy à la Mademoiselle Docteur [Edmond T. Greville, 1937] who in today's age of computers and electronic devices, when her beauty and her feminine charms can no longer beguile and deceive officers of the enemy's army, has lost her job. A very good picture. It was released in all six countries in which they could release German-speaking pictures. Then the company which made the picture in Europe litigated with its financial backers. The picture was lost in the shuffle and went into a vault, and it can't be seen today. There are lawsuits against it, the negative is frozen with the lawyers, and the American deal to sell it as a story for Shirley MacLaine never came about. . . .
But as a result of its success, you got financing for Der Cornet [1955], another picture which you directed in Germany. What was the background of this story, which was based on Cornets Christoph Rilke by Rilke?
It's not "based on it." It's the story. By contract, I had no right to change a single line. Rilke, and especially this story, is sacrosanct. Almost every German of some literacy or education knows it by heart. It starts with "Riding, riding, riding . . ."—I've known it by heart all my life long.
It was a very good picture, in color, with a lovely Swedish actress, Anita Björk. And it was completely paid for by the government. That picture wasn't made to make a profit. It is still running in universities. The German government, which is enormously culturally minded, subsidized such pictures at that time. I didn't have much work to do; I didn't have to invent anything. I couldn't change a single line of the book.
Having used up your leave of absence from Fox, then you came back and became involved with a very underrated and very fine picture called The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing [1955] .
Again, I can only credit Darryl Zanuck. Fox had just signed up a beautiful British girl by the name of Joan Collins, and it was the usual procedure: Zanuck called me in for 4:30 P.M. on a Tuesday afternoon, instructed me to look at the tests of that girl, have lunch with her, and then tell him a story for her. I went in with the Thaw-White murder case. There was a very good headline story involved here, so when I suggested it to Zanuck—backstage background, murder in high-class society, beautiful girl surviving everybody—he went for it. There was a go-between in Charles Brackett, whose family had been very friendly with the architect Stanford White, who was killed by Evelyn Nesbit's husband [Harry Thaw]; as a little boy Brackett had known White. I wrote the whole script in about ten weeks.
The script was 70 percent fact, and only 30 percent was fictionalized. The courtroom sequences came from the transcripts, as much as possible, and the
settings were copied from original drawings, mostly by Gibson, the great magazine illustrator and cartoonist of that time, and from contemporary photographs. Brackett had a private archive of photographs, and from his other home in Rhode Island, which is now a museum piece, he had props brought to California such as spittoons, chairs, bookshelves, chimneys, and all kinds of bric-a-brac from his personal collection. They were almost identical with those in the Stanford White mansion.
But there was a difficulty: everybody knew the woman, Evelyn Nesbit, was still alive. I had written the script, we were very close to shooting, and we still hadn't found that woman. Zanuck never would have started the picture without her permission: Imagine the consequences if she had seen the picture without our having made a contract with her!
She'd have slapped a lawsuit on you!
My God, she could have ruined the company! Now, the legal department failed to locate her, the agents failed, everybody else failed, and finally I took hold of the situation. I wrote countless letters. Our difficulty was that this gift wasn't called Nesbit anymore, of course; that was her maiden name. She had remarried two or three times, always changing her name because for many years hers was a household name. I made it my business to find her. One of the letters I wrote was to an actress who knew she had married a man with a certain name, and I followed that up. You know where we found her? Fifteen minutes from the studio down Pico Boulevard, near the Music Center, in an art school where she taught drawing and painting.
I went in and she was sitting there: that girl, the most beautiful gift of her day, painted by none other than Gibson—the original Gibson girl.[*] She had a painter's smock on, full of paint. Her face was just as beautiful as then, except her figure was like this couch. She was enormous, with blond, whitish hair. But beautiful! Her eyes! When she opened her eyes it was like two simultaneous sunrises! And her hair! Her chin was completely part of her body by then, a triple chin, but her face and that aquiline nose and those eyes—beautiful! Anyway, I explained to her what we were doing, and when she heard "money"—oh, boy!—all the other students were sent away. She said, "Well, this has to be discussed . . ."
A few days later the studio sent a limousine out to get her, and Brackett and I had lunch with her at Romanoff's. She was given a box of her own because she couldn't fit in one seat. Mike Romanoff himself sat with us. He, of course, was a real contemporary of hers, even older than she, and knew everybody of that era. She had about three or four margaritas, and then Mike himself treated us to a champagne which really only Princess Alexandra could have gotten from him. We explained the story to her, and she said she was
* The Gibson girl was the idealized girl of the 1890s and turn-of-the-century America as represented in illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson.
only interested in who would be playing the girl. When we told her it would be a British girl, she was very pleased—although she spoke with a terrible American accent—that a "refined" girl would play her (Joan Collins, very "refined"!).
Then she made a deal with us: She never wanted to see the script, she never wanted to see the picture, she never wanted to come to the set, she didn't want to see any lawyers or pressmen—shall I tell you why?
Vanity—personal vanity?
No, no, no. She'd had a lot of trouble with many of her husbands who were still alive—and Harry K. Thaw's son was still alive—and she was scared that someone would come and take the money away from her . . . as common property. Why else would she have been reluctant to come to the studio for publicity? It would have made a wonderful photograph—Evelyn Nesbit and Joan Collins! But she wouldn't do it for anything.
She's dead now, poor creature, but she was so amusing, and all you could do was look into her eyes! From Romanoff she demanded another bottle of champagne, and another bottle of champagne . . . She told us, "I'm not going to let you show any whipping, because it's all a lie. I was never whipped by him." It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and she was still telling stories, always about Mr. Harry K. Thaw.
I liked the picture very much. I'm not familiar with the details of the case, so I can't distinguish fiction from fact in the script .
Well, I can only tell you that today that woman's life and her marriage could be shown in an entirely different way.[*] That man did use the whip. We even had to camouflage the adultery. There was a man at the Breen Office who later wrote a book about the office, Jack Vizzard, who saw the picture.[**] In it, that girl on the swing in Stanford White's home swung . . . swung . . . swung . . . higher and higher till she was able to touch a balloon near the ceiling with her slipper. That man wouldn't permit us to do the scene that way because he said it symbolized the penetration of her virginity.
This is nonsense . . .
Everything in the film was completely true, except that we had to be very subtle . . .
Charles Brackett was co-scripter, besides producer, wasn't he?
Yes, in a way. He always influenced the script and had his name on it.
Also he is credited on your next assignment, which was Teenage Rebel [1956] .
* Ragtime (1981), director Milos Forman' s film version of E. L. Doctorow's fictional mosaic of 1906 America, also treats the Stanford White-Evelyn Nesbit-Harry Thaw story, without constraints—with some nudity and frank sexuality and with a decidedly hip and contemporary slant.
** See No Evil: Life Inside a Hollywood Censor by Jack Vizzard (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970).
Teenage Rebel was one of our favorite pictures, and totally underrated. It was a beautiful story. It began as a New York play called A Roomful of Roses, written by a woman [Edith Somers] and starring Patricia Neal. I was in New York at that time on my way back from Europe when Charlie Brackett called me and said, "Go and see that show. We have a commitment with Ginger Rogers. Maybe we can change the whole thing to suit her." It was a beautiful idea: a girl, the daughter of a woman who had meanwhile remarried, comes to the house to meet her new family. [Edmund] Goulding directed it. We only used the nucleus, the germ of the play, and made a lovely picture, a big success. But it was in black-and-white CinemaScope; again we couldn't get the color camera.
What was your contribution to The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker [1958], again with Clifton Webb? As a play, the comedy revolved around bigamy, didn't it?
Yes. On the stage it was funny, but on the screen it didn't come off at all. Neither Clifton nor Brackett, the producer, nor Henry Levin, the director, really believed that Clifton would have a family in Philadelphia and another whole family in Harrisburg. I was only a kibbitzer on that, helping them to break up a few sequences. I really did it in order to get the assignment to Journey to the Center of the Earth . That turned out to be my biggest critical triumph in America.
The only other science fiction picture of yours that I can recall among your credits is F.P.1. antwortet nicht.
Yes, but science fiction was my forte. I had written a lot of science fiction for magazines, and Charles Brackett knew about that. They also knew that I had written magazine articles on Jules Verne. I had studied Jules Verne, and always wanted to write his biography, but I never got around to doing it. When they bought the Jules Verne novel from his estate and assigned me, I was delighted.
The master's work, though a beautiful basic idea, went in a thousand directions and never achieved a real constructive "roundness." With the exception of the basic idea, there is very little of the novel left in the film. I invented a lot of new characters—the Pat Boone part, the part of the professor's wife played by Arlene Dahl, the [part of the] villain—and the fact that it all played in Scotland.
Zanuck called us in and said, "At least include a gigantic part for Clifton Webb . . ." That was absolutely the most beautiful idea, because Clifton Webb had a certain tongue-in-cheek style, suited to playing a professor with crazy notions, which could be paired with Pat Boone as his favorite disciple. Every week Clifton visited Brackett's office, where we described scenes to him and he became very excited at the prospect of playing that kind of part.
Maybe two or three weeks before we actually began to shoot, Clifton Webb went to the hospital for a checkup, and they never let him out. He had to
undergo major surgery. Unless my memory fails me completely, it was a double hernia, and he was, as you can imagine, a very sensitive man, very touchy about sickness. He called Zanuck himself on his private line, and said he could not play the part because it was such a physical part.
At the last moment I think it was [longtime head of Twentieth Century-Fox casting] Billy Gordon or Lew Schreiber [Twentieth Century-Fox production executive] who suggested James Mason. James Mason was, of course, British, with a beautiful voice, and he liked the idea [of the part]. He felt it was his duty as Clifton's colleague to take over. From there on it was clear sailing, except that Pat Boone had about three or four songs, if not more, and I think all of them died in the end, with the exception of one or two. The moment that Zanuck saw [their effect on] the action, those songs just fell by the wayside.
How do you set about writing a screenplay? Do you block it out first?
The spark of inspiration is if a producer calls you in and says he has a certain actor and wants you to write for this actor. I am a tailor; I can make tailor-made "clothes," and this is my preference. A producer calls me in and says, "I have Paula Wessely, or Lillian Harvey, or Clifton Webb, or Joan Collins, or Greta Garbo . . ," and my mind immediately functions in that direction. Half the battle is won. It is all geared towards a personality.
What's the next step?
The next step is if somebody says, "I have money to make a film—have you got an idea?" Nothing is more inspiring than to hear a man say, "Here's a down payment!"
You believe in the well-made film, of course .
I believe in the well-made film, but not necessarily.
Deep down in my heart I'm an original writer. From my earliest beginnings I've been a motion picture man who can write original stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end; and I know how to write a good part, a brilliant stellar role—these are my advantages. But I can write anything as long as somebody wants it.
I've always been a motion picture maker who made clean pictures. My films have never had suggestive scenes, and my ultimate reputation has been as a maker of family entertainment. I never really wrote a profound picture, either. My pictures didn't have any messages like those of, say, Dalton Trumbo. I've never made a picture which was intended to better the world, or better mankind. I don't pretend to try to improve the world, and I don't think I can improve the world.
To return to your actual working methods: Do you just put a piece of paper in the typewriter and start writing away, or do you do a rough draft in longhand, or what? How does it work?
I have a lot of little papers in my pocket all the time, and I make notes
wherever I go. I throw them into a box, and when the box is full, I take them all out and dictate it or I write it by hand. I've no real method. I can write in an airplane, in a train, in a hotel room deluxe, in a motel, anywhere where a down payment may be expected.
You use dictation a great deal?
That also . . . I don't care. I can adapt myself to any possibility.
I can work with any collaborator, man or woman, famous or not famous. Again I can say this without any false modesty: The reason why I have a record of at least eighty or ninety pictures, silent and talkie, is that I can adapt myself to any personality.
I wrote for a Charles Brackett production, adapting myself cleverly, I must say, to the tastes of that man, not only because I liked him but because it was easier to convince him if I worked towards his style. If you had come to Lubitsch with a Hitchcock setup, he wouldn't have made it. You had to come to him with a Lubitsch idea, and the scenes had to be Lubitsch-wise, and so forth.
That is why, for instance, I've never worked for my oldest friend, Billy Wilder, who in the meantime has became a very famous director in his own right. For twenty-five years he never asked me, never let me write a screenplay for him. Why? Because the things I know he knows too: He wouldn't get anything new out of the collaboration. He knows how to write a well-made screenplay, he does not believe in dirt, he does not send out messages, he's not as profound as, let's say, [Peter] Bogdanovich today or one of the Russians. In short, he makes total entertainment, and for that, unfortunately, he doesn't need me.
Curt Siodmak:
The Idea Man
Interview by Dennis Fischer
Curt Siodmak is not a name one normally conjures with. He is noted mainly as the creator of Donovan's Brain, which spawned three adaptations and countless other uncredited "brain" movies, and of Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, eternally part of the horror folklore created by the famed series of films made by Universal in the 1930s and 1940s. While Siodmak views his writing self-deprecatingly, and prefers his novel-writing to his work for the screen, he nonetheless was involved in the scripting of over seventy motion pictures and has lived to see many of his ideas taken for granted and used, uncredited, by other hands.
Siodmak was bitten by the writing bug when, at the tender age of eight, he wrote a short piece that was published by a German newspaper. While a reporter, he tried to get on the set of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), but was told that it was closed to the press. Undaunted, he and his girlfriend—and later, wife—Henrietta applied for and received jobs as extras on the film, which allowed him to make more money than he would net for writing an article about the experience.
With his brother, Robert Siodmak, Curt worked on the innovative and unusual German film Menschen am Sonntag [People on Sunday, 1929]. His novel F.P.1 antwortet nicht [F.P.1 Does Not Answer, 1932] was bought by Erich Pommer and made into German, French, and English versions, each with a different cast and crew. Another important film was Der Mann der seinen Mörder sucht [Looking for His Own Murderer, 1930] for his brother Robert, based on a story by Jules Verne, in which a man hires an assassin to kill him and then changes his mind, only to be unable to contact the hired
killer. This plot has been given countless variations and employed for a number of film and television thrillers.
While Siodmak's writing career was paying off handsomely, the rise of the Nazis caused the Siodmaks to flee the country. They gave up their house and cars as a bribe to cross the border, passing through Switzerland, France, and England, where Curt once more became involved in the film industry.
Eventually, they settled in the United States, arriving, naturally, in Hollywood. Siodmak was never considered a premier screenwriter and largely struggled to make ends meet as a contract writer. Most of his credits were unimportant B films, which, much to his surprise, have become better known than many of the "important" A films they supported. He does take pride in having come up with some clever ideas. But he despairs when looking back over his work, seeing that there were always ways that his writing could have been improved, and as a result he has never been fully satisfied with his own work. Nevertheless, while recognizing that film is a collaborative art, he knows that all the producers, directors, and actors in the world would be at a loss if they didn't have a good idea to work from, and he sees himself as that indispensable idea man.
He lives in a quiet, out-of-the-way rural community in the middle of California on a fifty-acre ranch with his wife, Henrietta. Realizing that he never received much in the way of money or recognition, he takes comfort in the fact that he is a survivor. His eyes twinkle and, with an elfin smile, he observes, "My pictures run on television and I don't get a penny out of it. But the guys are all dead and I'm still alive, so who's winning?"
Curt Siodmak (1902–)
1928
Südsee-Abenteuer [director unknown]. Co-script.
1929
Flucht in die Fremdenlegion (Louis Ralph). Script.
Menschen am Sonntag [People on Sunday ] (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer). Story.
Mastottchen [director unknown]. Co-script.
1930
Der Kampf mit dem Drachen [The Fight with the Dragon ] (Robert Siodmak). Script.
Der Mann der seinen Mörder sucht [Looking for His Own Murderer ] (Robert Siodmak). Co-script.
Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier (Alfred Zeisler). Co-script.
1931
Der Ball [French version, Le Bal ] [The Party ] (Wilhelm Thiele). Co-script.
1932
Marion, das Gehört sich nicht [a.k.a. Susanne im Bade or, Italian version, Cercasi Modella ] (E. W. Emo). Script.
Curt Siodmak in Los Angeles, 1989.
(Photo: Alison Morley)
F.P.1 antwortet nicht [F.P.1 Does Not Answer ] (Karl Hartl). Co-script, based on his novel.
1934
La Crise est finie! [The Crisis Is Over ] (Robert Siodmak). Story, co-script.
I Give My Heart [a.k.a. The DuBarry ] (Marcel Varnel). Co-adaptation, co-script.
Girls Will Be Boys (Marcel Varnel). Story.
It's a Bet (Alexander Esway). Co-script.
1935
The Tunnel [a.k.a. Transatlantic Tunnel ] (Maurice Elvey). Adaptation, co-script.
Non-Stop New York [a.k.a. New York Express ] (Robert Stevenson). Co-script.
I, Claudius (Josef von Sternberg). Co-script, unrealized production.
1938
Her Jungle Love (George Archainbaud). Co-story and idea.
Spawn of the North (Henry Hathaway). Uncredited contribution.
1940
The Invisible Man Returns (Joe May). Co-screen story, co-script.
Black Friday (Arthur Lubin). Co-screen story, co-script.
The Ape (William Nigh). Co-script.
1941
The Invisible Woman (A. Edward Sutherland). Co-screen story.
Aloma of the South Seas (Alfred Santell). Co-story.
The Wolf Man (George Waggner). Story, co-script.
Pacific Blackout (Ralph Murphy). Co-screen story.
1942
The Invisible Agent (Edwin L. Marin). Screen story, script.
London Blackout Murders (George Sherman). Screen story, script.
1943
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Roy William Neill). Screen story, script.
I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur). Co-script.
The Purple V (George Sherman). Co-script.
False Faces (George Sherman)). Screen story, script.
The Mantrap (George Sherman). Screen story, script.
Son of Dracula (Robert Siodmak). Story idea.
1944
The Lady and the Monster [a.k.a. The Tiger Man ] (George Sherman). Based on his novel Donovan's Brain .
The Climax (George Waggner). Co-script, adaptation.
House of Frankenstein [a.k.a. Chamber of Horror ] (Erle C. Kenton). Screen story based on his "The Devil's Brood."
1945
Frisco Sal (George Waggner). Co-screen story, co-script.
Shady Lady (George Waggner). Co-screen story, co-script.
1946
The Return of Monte Cristo (Henry Levin). Co-screen story.
1947
The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey). Script.
1948
Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur). Story.
1949
Tarzan's Magic Fountain (Lee Sholem). Co-screen story, co-script.
Swiss Tour [a.k.a. Four Days' Leave ] (Leopold Lindtberg). Co-script.
1951
Bride of the Gorilla [a.k.a. The Face in the Water ] (Curt Siodmak). Director, screen story, script.
1953
Donovans' Brain (Felix Feist). Based on his novel.
The Magnetic Monster (Curt Siodmak). Director, co-screen story, co-script.
1954
Riders to the Stars (Richard Carlson). Screen story, script.
1955
Creature with the Atom Brain (Edward L. Cahn). Screen story, script.
1956
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears). Screen story.
Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (Curt Siodmak). Director, screen story, script.
1957
Love Slaves of the Amazon (Curt Siodmak). Producer, director, screen story, script.
1959
The Devil's Messenger [a.k.a. 13 Demon Street ] (Curt Siodmak, Herbert L. Strock). Co-director, script, based on his story "Girl in Ice."
1962
The Brain [a.k.a. Vengeance ] (Freddie Francis). Based on his novel Donovan's Brain .
Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace [a.k.a. Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes ] (Terence Fisher). Script.
1963
Das Feuerschiff [a.k.a. Les Tueurs du R.S.R.2.; Der Ueberfall; Ich kann nur einmal sterben ] (Ladislaus Vajda). Script.
1967
Ski Fever [a.k.a. Liebesspiele im Schnee ] (Curt Siodmak). Director, co-script.
1970
Hauser's Memory (Boris Sagal). Based on his novel.
1977
Der Heiligenschein [director unknown]. Based on his story "Variations on a Theme."
1979
Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert). Uncredited contribution based on his novels City in the Sky and Skyport .
Television credits include "Donovan's Brain" (CBS, 1956).
Published fiction includes "The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika," "Sturmflut!," Helene droht zu platzen!, Schuss im Tonfilmatelier, Stadt hinter Nebeln, F.P.1 antwortet nicht [F.P.1. Does Not Answer ], Rache im Aether, Die Madonna aus der Markusstrasse [a.k.a. Downtown Madonna ], Bis ans Ende der Welt, Strasse der Hoffnung, Die Macht im Dunkeln, Donovan's Brain, "Epistles to the Germans," Whomsoever I Shall Kiss, The Climax (by Florence Jay Lewis based on Siodmak's screenplay), The Magnetic Monster (with Ivan Tors), Riders to the Stars (by Smith Roberts, based on Siodmak's screenplay), Skyport, Despair in Paradise, I Gabriel, For Kings Only, Hauser's Memory, The Third Ear, "The Thousand Mile Grave," "Variations on a Theme," City in the Sky, "The P Factor," and The Wolf Man (by "Carl Dreadstone," based on Siodmak's screenplay).
Awards include a Writers Guild nomination for his story for Berlin Express in 1947.
What was the motion picture industry like, in Germany, when you were just starting out?
When I was 27, I worked on a picture called Menschen am Sonntag, and out of that picture came six guys who made it internationally—Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Eugene Shuftan [né Eugen Schüfftan], Fred Zinnemann, and myself. It was a great success. Robert was a film cutter for the Harry Piel detective serial. His job was to compose "new" films from old films of that serial, since the same actors played in both. Robert wanted to be a director. There was Billy Wilder, who was a poor journalist. He picked up a few bucks at the thés dansants, the afternoon tea dances at the hotels where rich ladies went without their husbands in the afternoon. He got tips from those ladies. He was a good-looking young man and an excellent dancer. Zinnemann, whose original name was Zimmerman, was the camerafocus man, a quite nondescript chap who left, after six days' shooting, for America. And there was Edgar Ulmer, who also went to the United States. He now has become a belated cult figure. He shot a great many B pictures for David Selznick. I understand that Selznick treated him very cruelly. As for me—I was already "affluent" since I had sold my first serial novel to the Woche magazine, which paid very well. I gave Robert an idea and 5,000 marks to start Menschen am Sonntag, which was half of the production money.
He brought the picture in for 9,000 marks, which was $2,500 at that time! That film, Menschen am Sonntag, has become a major classic and is mentioned in almost every film anthology. There is a copy at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That was the beginning of our careers, though actually only Robert and the camerman Eugen Schüfftan were responsible for its completion. Robert and Billy Wilder were engaged by UFA, the Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, the most prestigious film company of those days, well known for its pictures all over the world. Robert liked Billy Wilder, and when UFA asked for him, he teamed up with Billy again. They took off like meteors.
Wilder has a screenwriting credit on Menschen am Sonntag.
Robert gave him screen credit. I got: "Based on an idea by Kurt Siodmak." I didn't script it. Nobody scripted it.
I had an idea, and the idea was very simple. The story is about a big city full of traffic, like New York or Berlin. A boy meets a pretty girl and makes a date to take her on Sunday to the Wannsee, which is a big lake near Berlin. He brings his best friend; she brings a girl prettier than she is. The first boy goes after the second girl. One boy and one girl stay in the empty city.
The people took the city, with all its noise they wanted to escape, along,
while the couple that stayed behind had a real holiday. That was the frame. That was all we had to begin with. That idea has been stolen many times, as Bank Holiday [1938], which Carol Reed made in England, and as La domenica d'agosto [1949] or A Sunday in August, in Italy. As happened many times in my life, my ideas were lifted. I never got paid for any of them.
We had no money and Kodak donated overaged film, which they would have destroyed anyhow. We devised scenes [day by day] for the next day's shooting. Whatever we had in mind, we talked over. I remember I had a still camera which, I used as a reporter, and I climbed up on the roofs of the big apartment houses in Berlin and photographed the empty courtyards from above, which Schüfftan afterwards used in the picture to show the deserted city.
I noticed that it employed new techniques like the freeze-frame, years before Truffaut, and people who had never acted before, as Roberto Rossellini did .
Robert and Schüfftan did what the French and Italians did thirty years later and called the "nouvelle vague," or the—New Wave. Robert and Schüfftan never got the credit. They did all that years before the New Wave.
I gather there was always some sibling rivalry between you and your brother . There was tremendous sibling rivalry, though we were the best of friends. As a director, he was paid a day what I made a week, but we both lived well. One day it dawned on me that I had a "brother complex." The term "brother complex," like in psychoanalysis, solved that question for me, and all of a sudden our competition became funny. But Robert never understood it. It went on until he died, in 1973. I still cannot figure out his lifelong "sibling" jealousy, since he had a tremendous career and made internationally famous pictures. It might be, since he was the firstborn, that I, two years younger, deprived him of much of our mother's love. Those reasons seem to be irreparable in people's lives.
My brother and I started in the film business writing German "intertitles" for Max Sennett comedies. But I wanted to write novels and short stories, and he wanted to direct. He wanted to be the only Siodmak in films, and asked me to change my name to Curt Barton. The Curt I accepted, the Barton I didn't. You never know what goes on in people's minds. Still, he helped me all my life when I was in a squeeze, which often happens to writers, and I helped him. Looking back, I supplied many of the ideas which made him well known, here and in Europe. But we rarely worked, together. I wouldn't take orders from him and vice versa. He was a very complex character whom only psychoanalysis might be able to explain.
Of course, his and my behavior came from our family background. We never had a "real" family which would supply the love children thrive on. My parents' marriage wasn't a happy one, and though we were brought up in our early life with governesses in an affluent surrounding, we were rebels and left the family at a very early age. Robert started as an actor; and I, while
"Sibling rivalry": director Robert Siodmak (with viewfinder) and writer Curt Siodmak,
in 1962, during the shooting of Robert Siodmak's feature, Tunnel 28/Escape
from East Berlin, in Germany. (Courtesy of Curt Siodmak)
studying mathematics, which is perhaps the basis for my writing science fiction, drove a steam engine for the German railway and worked in factories to make a living.
Robert was a star-maker. He could work with difficult actors as no other director could. He made the unknown Burt Lancaster a star in The Killers, gave Ava Gardner her first lead, found Ernest Borgnine, and other future stars. . . . I heard Tony Curtis tell this story on television: Robert was shooting a picture called Criss Cross [1949] when he picked Tony out of a group of extras to dance with Yvonne De Carlo. He took close-ups of Tony. Universal put Tony under contract, and the rest is history. But as soon as Robert's discoveries became stars, he wasn't interested in them anymore.
He did do a second picture, The Crimson Pirate [1952], with Lancaster. But he had trouble with Lancaster, since his manager, Harold Hecht, wanted to take the picture away from: Robert, to give Burt a director's credit. It is uncanny that every actor to become a director. They try it, but mostly only once, like Marlon Brandoin One-Eyed Jacks [1961] and Lancaster in Apache [1954].[*] Then they learn how much less work it is to act than to direct, and they lose that desire.
Robert was a top director in Germany. When he the could not work on account of the Nazi persecution in Berlin, he went to France, where he 'also made highly successful films. He sailed with the last boat from France to America the day World broke out. You know about his career over here. Then he went back to Germany after the war, because he was too independent to take orders from studios. There again he got many Bambis, which are the German Oscars.
He was excellent when he got a screenplay which he had to start in a few days, and when he had no time to mess with it. But maybe since I was successful as a writer, he had to prove to himself that he was not only a great director but also a great writer. He could tell a scene so vividly that you would say: "My God, what a marvelous scene!" But, unfortunately, that scene didn't fit his picture. To be a writer is quite different a profession than to be a director or producer.
After Menschen am Sonntag, Robert and Wilder were engaged by UFA .
Yes, but actually: didn't want them. They got their salary but no assignment. Meanwhile, I wrote a twelve-minute screenplay Der Kampf mit dem Drachen [The Fight with the Dragon, 1930], the story of a lodger who kills his landlady because she is so mean. It was a surrealistic tale, and the big shots at UFA, without reading it, let Robert shoot it in two days. When they saw it, the staid UFA bureaucrats became—panicky, since it was abstract and unconventional. It was only shown in the Berlin suburbs as a filler for one of UFA's prestige pictures.
* Robert Aldrich directed Apache . Siodmak probably means The Kentuckian (1955), the only film Burt Lancaster directed.
A scene from the 1932 German film F.P.1 antwortet nicht. Walter Reisch and Curt
Siodmak both worked on the screenplay. (Photo: British Film Institute)
Since Robert's name as the director of Menschen am Sonntag was interesting to the press, the reporters drove specially out to the suburbs and wrote glowingly about that short instead of the new UFA film. Robert was an excellent PR man for himself. He showed the short film to the secretaries and mailboys at the UFA studio. Erich Pommer, who was the greatest producer I have ever worked for, too was present, and I saw him for the first time. Pommer's productions ranged from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1919] to the Emil Jannings pictures. When Pommer saw that short, his eyes became as big as wagon wheels. He took Robert and Billy into his production.
I was working on a UFA screenplay assignment, Der Mann der seinen Mörder sucht [Looking for His Own Murderer ]. Pommer took me and my half-finished screenplay into his production. Whatever I know about motion pictures, I know from him. We worked in his villa at the Wannsee, an exclusive part of Berlin. Pommer worked with writers on two or three different productions at the same time. After one conference, he went to another. Mörder sucht too has become a kind of classic, since it gave Heinz Rühmann, a young comedian, his first part. Rühmann became the foremost German comedian for decades. He even thrived under Hitler.
After F.P.1 Does Not Answer, you left Germany. Could you see the handwriting on the wall?
I didn't have to see it. I received a letter from the National Socialist Cham-
ber of German Writers informing me that I was not going to be permitted to write for any German publisher or motion picture company.
What year was that?
1933. When I think back, I wonder how I and my wife survived that time. It is so long ago! But still, it is a nightmare to me. I gave a speech once at an American high school and a boy shouted, "How old are you?" I said, "I'm forty-eight and my wife is forty'six, and my son is fifty-three. Because forty-eight years ago I came to America. . . . I had to learn a new language, which isn't easy for a man who makes his livelihood writing. I had to start from scratch. This day of coming to America was the day of my second birth. To emigrate is like starting your life all over again."
From Germany, I went to France and tried to make a living, which I couldn't. Then I went to England and was quite successful over there—making good money writing for British International films and Gaumont British. But I was always older than anybody else, because when I went to England, I was thirty-one, and I started working with twenty-years-olds. When I came to America I was thirty-five, and again I started working with the kids. So I always integrated myself with the young generation, which is a plus.
Did you have some trouble in the British film industry? Is that why you left for America?
The British Home Office threw me out overnight, because my labor permit had run out. I had to leave in twenty-four hours and couldn't come back. I went to France. But I had given a story, "For Kings Only," to a lovely English actress, Frances Day. She convinced Gaumont British to take an option on it, which permitted me to return to England. That story was never made, but I received two hundred pounds for the screenplay of The Tunnel [Transatlantic Tunnel, 1935]. It was the first British film that used American actors: Richard Dix, Madge Evans, Fay Wray—the girl from King Kong [1933]—and Walter Huston. I got a year's contract, and fifteen pounds a week, which at that time was good money. I paid two pounds a week rent for a house. Henrietta and I bought gold pieces and counted them at night, putting them in stockings under our pillow. They became the basis for my trip to America. It was Henrietta who wanted me to go to America. I guess she felt the war coming.
I got a job the first week I arrived in Hollywood. An agent took me to Paramount studios. I disliked the story editor, Manny Woolf. I called him the Jewish Charles Boyer, which shocked him, because he had these dark eyes and this sexy voice. He signed me up for a big picture for Dorothy Lamour [Her Jungle Love, 1938]. (Sings .) "Moonlight and shadows and you in my heart . . ." That song, incidentally, was written by Friedrich Holländer, who wrote the songs for The Blue Angel [1930] and Looking for His Own Murderer .
I rented a house, engaged a Filipino servant, bought a Buick convertible, the usual stuff of Hollywood success. And all the girls! I was here alone for
almost a year. All the pretty Hollywood girls would come to the house. I always had a case of Scotch, Old Rarity, in my bar, to be sure to find some friends when I came home from the studio. Henrietta arrived and I had to tell the girls that I had a wife. From that time on, my guests were mostly male.
Was there much of a German colony in Hollywood, as there was a British colony?
To begin with, yes, of refugees. But then we worked with American actors and American writers, and that group dissolved. The successful ones separated from those who couldn't make it. Many refugees couldn't adjust themselves to the American mentality. They never learned to write in English, or perhaps they didn't want to give up their German language. Thomas Mann wrote in German, Brecht and Remarque wrote in German. When you live in a new country, you have to be reborn, learn what the natives know, integrate yourself; otherwise you will never be a part of that country.
How did you get involved in the Invisible Man pictures [ Invisible Man Returns, Invisible Woman, Invisible Agent],which you began working on in 1940?
When Henrietta came over here, I lost my Paramount job and didn't get a job for eleven months, though I sold a story called Pacific Blackout [1941] to Paramount, which helped me stay alive. Then Joe May, who was a friend of mine, directed a picture at Universal [The Invisible Man Returns, 1940]. He pushed me through to write the screenplay. It was the first picture for Vincent Price, as a young man.[*] Although I had only written comedies and musicals for Paramount, this was a success, and I fell into a groove. At the studios, if you have a success in a special kind of picture, you are condemned to getting similar jobs, and soon I had to write only horror pictures. Your mind changes, too. You are brainwashed.
You wrote so many horror pictures. Not only the Invisible Man series, but The Wolf Man [1941], Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man [1943], Son of Dracula [1943], and many more. There must have been something latent in the subject matter which you found congenial to your sensibility .
The fantastic and macabre is a "German" trait. Look at their fairy tales, which are pretty gruesome. But we writers are known for our successes, and mine were in the horror field. But among the novels I wrote was lighter Stuff, like, for example, For Kings Only, a semihistorical story of Hortense Schneider, Offenbach's leading lady, during the world exhibition in Paris in 1867. It has a musical background. Then many space novels and adventure stories. A writer has to be versatile, and among my output (about sixty motion pictures and a score of novels) is much material which cannot be classified as horror.
We refugees suffer from the past, the Hitler persecution, which we will
* In reality, Vincent Price had previously appeared in Service de Luxe (1938), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), and Tower of London (1939).
never be able to absorb completely. We were often so close to death that we are branded for life. No success could wipe out the past which we went through. The play I have just finished, Three Days, shows the background of those terrors in my life which might have found an outlet in writing horror stories. But certainly not the modern kind, which in my opinion is vulgar in its spilling of blood. I don't think I ever wrote a truly violent scene. I left the horror to the imagination of the audience.
There was a fair amount of humor, also, in the second "Invisible" picture, The Invisible Woman [1949.] .
That was a spoof about the Invisible Man series. John Barrymore was in it. He was so gone with alcoholism that we had to hang him up with wires so that, in close-up, he wouldn't sway out of focus. . . . He had his dialogue written up and down a staircase on cue cards, so that coming down he could read his lines. I think it was his last picture before he died.
The Wolf Man is certainly a classic. It has this fairy-tale timeless feel about it. It's not set in the past or in the present day. It's set in a Europe that never existed. It has a bit of poetry in it .
It even goes much deeper than that, though I didn't know that when I wrote it. One day many years ago, I got a letter from a Professor Evans from Augusta College in Georgia about the parallel between The Wolf Man and Aristotle's Poetics, which is a critique of Greek plays. I thought the guy was nuts. Not true. In the Greek plays, the gods reveal to man his fate; he cannot escape it. The influence of the gods over man is final, and that's like the domineering father the character has in The Wolf Man . He knows that when the moon is full, he becomes a murderer. That is his preordained fate.
The film was constructed like a Greek tragedy, without my intent at the time, but it fell into place and that's why it has run for forty-eight years. I made $3,000 on the job. They have made, so far, $30 million on the picture.
We writers don't think, actually. We do things out of emotions and constructions in our mind as to how a character or a story should develop. There's a story told about Balzac. A friend found him in tears and asked him the reason. Balzac said, "Hélène died." Hélène was one of the characters in the story he was writing; she had died and he was breaking out in tears.
How can you teach aspiring writers? You can teach technique, like screenplay technique, but you cannot teach emotions or how to find ideas. God has to kiss your forehead, and that's why I am bald, to leave as much room as possible.
With The Wolf Man, I know you did a lot of research. Did the research inspire any particular ideas?
Well, in all of my writings there is tremendous research involved. Wolf madness, lycanthropy, goes back to the Stone Age. People wanted to become as strong as the strongest animal they knew of, which was the wolf in Europe, the tiger in India, the snake in the Pacific. Man tried to identify himself with the strongest animal he knew.
"Like a Greek tragedy": Lon Chaney, Jr., in the outstanding horror film, The Wolf
Man, script by Curt Siodmak, directed by George Waggner.
(Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
I remember how that film was initiated. Universal director-producer George Waggner said to me, "We have a title called The Wolf Man . It comes from Boris Karloff, but Boris has no time to do it, he is working on another picture. So, we have Lon Chaney and we have Madame Ouspenskaya, Warren Williams, Ralph Bellamy, and Claude Rains. The budget is $180,000 and we start in ten weeks. Good-bye . . ."
After seven weeks I gave George the screenplay. I don't think he made any changes, except to telescope a few scenes to save sets.
I've noticed that your early horror films seem to be more science fiction films with gothic touches. For example, The Ape [1940] became one of the first "bring me the spinal fluid" films . . .
That was at Monogram studios. Maris Wrixon, [who played] the blind girl, is now editor Rudi Fehr's wife. I sometimes see them. She likes to talk about that early film with Karloff. We were groping around for new ways of presenting my stories.
In addition to horror stories, you also scripted a number of jungle pictures .
They were actually assignments. Mostly there was only a title. Almost all my films were based on original ideas. I don't know how I thought of all those stories. I've been asked, "How do you get your ideas?" "Very easy," I say, "My weekly check."
How did you get started on the Frankenstein films once they restarted those up in the forties?
I was at Universal, writing other "Invisible" stories for the same producer. I was in the groove. He would say, "Give it to Siodmak; we'll get the script and we can shoot it in a few weeks." That was my reputation. It has nothing to do with the value of things., it was that they knew they wouldn't lose money.
Was it your idea to start combining monsters in films with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man?
That idea started with a joke. I was sitting at the Universal commissary during the war with a friend of mine who was drafted and wanted to sell his automobile. You couldn't get an automobile in those days since those companies only turned out war material. I wanted to buy that car, but I didn'thave the money.
George Waggner was sitting with us, and I made a joke: Frankenstein Wolfs the Meat Man, I mean, Meets the WolfMan . He, didn't laugh. He came back to my office a couple of days later and asked, "Did you buy the automobile?" I said, "For that I need another job." He said, "You have a job. Frankenstein Meets the WolfMan . You have two hours to accept." That taught me never to joke with a producer.
But then you needed a gimmick for the story. And the gimmick was that the Wolf Man meets the Monster and both want to find Dr. Frankenstein, because Victor Frankenstein knows the secret of life and death. The Wolf Man wants to die, whereas the Monster wants to live forever.
I always put a funny scene in my scripts because I know that the director didn't really study my script before shooting. There was a scene in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man where the Monster walks along with the Wolf Man and the Wolf Man says, "I change into a wolf at night. . . ." And the Monster says, "Are you kiddin'? . . ." When they broke the screenplay down on the shooting schedule, they finally read it and threw that scene out.
A strange thing about that film is that the Monster is supposedly blind from the previous film; so for the first time he walks around with his arms outstretched. But there is no reference to his being blind in the movie .
That was the idea of Bela Lugosi. Listen, you ask me so many questions, I don't know the answer to half these things anymore. People find so many secret meanings in my writings which I never intended. It's true. Sometimes the critics point them out and the writer is surprised. We just wrote stories for the weekly check. But we did the very best we could. There are 100,000 words in the dictionary. What the writer is paid for is to find the right ones. That knowledge makes him a writer.
One of my favorites of the ones you've been involved in is I Walked with a Zombie [1942] .
Yeah, that was interesting. The producer Val Lewton was a marvelous man
to work for. He was erudite. I mean, really knowledgeable. He understood what the writer was saying.
I remember I had a friend named George Froeschel, a writer, who got the Academy Award for Mrs. Miniver [1942]. Once we were talking about a script to producer Sidney Franklin. He is dead now so I can tell the story. Franklin was paid $5,000 per week, which in those days was a tremendous amount of money. When we came out of his office, George said, "Isn't it marvelous? Franklin understood what we were telling him!" I said, "That's very funny. Here's a man getting $5,000 a week and we only get $500 a week, and he understood what you're saying and you admire him for it." We looked down on those people. . . .
Irving Thalberg once said: "The most important man in the motion picture business is the writer. Don't ever give him any power!" Even today the writers are oppressed. Even today a writer gets little appreciation. That's why good writers become writer-directors, or writer-producers, to get more standing, and of course to make more money. I haven't met a writer yet who owns a yacht like producers or directors. But don't let them kid you. Where would they be without writers?
One of the striking things about I Walked with a Zombie, apart from its horrible title, was that it gave off a feeling that death is everywhere—in beauty, in life itself. I find the film very poetic. There's also a very fatalistic approach in that something is cursing this family .
They made changes in the script. My idea was a little different. I started with a beautiful wife married to a plantation owner on one of the voodoo islands. The husband knew that she wanted to run away from him. He would not let her go. So he turned her into a zombie. He could continue to have an affair with her beautiful body. But it was like sleeping with a lifeless doll. I said to Val Lewton, and he laughed about this: "She has no vaginal warmth." This idea—you only need a trickle like this—shows the whole character of the woman. That's why she walked around like a zombie. She was in a living death. But I don't know if they kept it this way. I never saw the picture after it was finished.
You should see it sometime. Lewton made it more like "Jane Eyre in the tropics ."
Right, with Frances Dee and Tom Conway. He died terribly poor.
Did your brother take you off Son of Dracula?
Yeah. I finally got him a job on a film I had written, and the first day he starts working with another writer, Eric Taylor. I understand that, because, between brothers, who is going to have the authority? He was very unhappy taking the job. He had to accept $125 a week. But after two years he was pulling down $1,000 a day! I never made that kind of money as a writer. No writer in Hollywood did at that time. Only directors, producers, and actors.
Boris Karloff returned to the screen and made his first color picture with The Climax [1944], which seems designed to reuse the sets from Phantom of the Opera [1943].
Well, that was my idea. The idea was that Boris Karloff had a big love affair with an opera singer and killed her in a fit of jealousy. He kept the body somewhere. When he visits a conservatory, he hears the same voice again in a young girl. I wrote it for Susanna Foster, I remember that. And around that idea, I wrote the screenplay. For every story you need a sharp idea which you should be able to write on a postcard. A friend of mine sold stories that way, like: "There is a terrible housing shortage in Washington during the war, and a rich, young couple has the idea to hire themselves out as butler and maid in the house of an important government official . . ." That was the "weenie" and that was all it took to get him a job in a studio.
I've heard that [director] Robert Florey and Peter Lorre were not terribly happy with The Beast with Five Fingers [1947]. Did you ever get much feedback from them?
That is all baloney. I wrote The Beast with Five Fingers, not for Peter Lorre, but for Paul Henreid. Paul said, "You want me to play against a god-damned hand? I'm not crazy." I would love to have shot it with him, because I thought a man looking so debonair was a much more interesting murderer than that freakish Lorre. [Luis] Bufiuel says he was involved in the story. I never met Buñuel, nor did I see any other script on that subject.
I believe Buñuel said somewhere that he wanted to be involved, not that he was .
Who knows, he might have done an interesting job. I remember Bill Jacobs was the producer and he called me in to talk about that story. I had the idea that the murderer had a guilt complex, so the hand of the murdered man comes to life in his mind and kills him. That made the picture.
Oliver Stone lifted the same idea for The Hand [1981] .
Sure, all my stuff has been stolen many, many times. I can trace them when I see them. Did you see that Steve Martin made a picture called The Man with Two Brains [1983]? In the picture they showed cuts of the film Donovan's Brain on a television screen, but they never asked my permission. If I ever meet this director, Carl Reiner, I would say to him, "I'm a poor writer. You take the story, you take the idea, you show the idea on the screen, and you never gave the writer credit. . . ." Because they have the money and I don't have the money. I'm not going to put my good money into lawyers. They have a battery of lawyers and could drag the case out for ten years. I haven't got ten years. It's depressing, the power money has over creativity. I never thought of money in my life when I was writing. I would like to have more, of course, but I don't know the game. I'm writing a play now, and that takes my whole time. Compulsives. We can't help it.
Despite the fact that your most famous work is Donovan's Brain, you've never scripted any film versions of your own book. Why is that?
Well, I was always busy with something else.
I have here a book by Stephen King. I never met him. He wrote Danse Macabre . In it he talks about Donovan's Brain . He gave me the greatest writeup I've ever seen. "Nobody has ever written a book like that." So I wrote to him, "Please send me your autograph, to put in that book of yours." Big case came with all the books he had ever written, every one with a dedication! Only writers do stuff like that. They're human beings.
Donovan's Brain has been done three times. First, there is The Lady and the Monster [1944]. I sold Republic the rights, back then, for $1,900. Old man Herbert Yates, the owner of Republic studios, called me and said, "Siodmak, you're crazy!" I said, "Why am I crazy?" He said, "A scientist of that size . . . he should live in a castle. I have a title for the picture—The Lady and the Monster . Vera is going to play that part; she'll play the Lady." Vera Hruba Ralston, a former ice skater, was his girlfriend and later his wife. So I quit.
Then I started with producer Allan Dowling, who bought the rights from Republic and made it with Lew Ayres, Gene Evans, and Nancy [Davis] Reagan, and with Felix Feist as the director. I had lunch with Nancy Reagan when she was twenty, before she married Ronald Reagan. In Feist's version, God destroys Donovan's brain with a thunderbolt. So I didn't see the picture [Donovan's Brain, 1953].
They did it in England again and it was done by . . .
It was directed by Freddie Francis as an English-German co-production in 1962 [ The Brain, with Peter Van Eyck, Anne Heywood, Cecil Parker, Bernard Lee, Frank Forsyth, Miles Malleson, and Jack MacGowran] .
Yeah, they added a cancer cure to that version, and I didn't see why.
They used it as motivation for someone close to Donovan who would want to kill him, because he was withholding this vital cancer cure .
Then why buy the book?
Well, for the most part, it does follow your book very closely; it just changes the motivations and some other things around .
Silly. The smartest guy in the whole business was John Huston. We started together, though actually he made it bigger than I did. He got The Maltese Falcon [1941] and he went to screenwriter Allen Rivkin and he said, "How do you write a screenplay?" Allen Rivkin took the book and telescoped it, just by marking the scenes. Huston shot it exactly as Dashiell Hammett wrote the book; didn't change the dialogue at all; everything was there, and he had a smash picture. If something is a success, why change it?
I used to know the whole gang in the old days. I used to play chess with Humphrey Bogart, but I couldn't afford it.
Why is that?
He went through my bottle of Scotch in one sitting. John Huston was a very interesting man. He could recite Shakespeare, the whole of Shakespeare, when he had a few drinks. I knew all of his wives. If I could live it all over again, I would like to live his life. I wouldn't smoke as much as he did. I asked him once, "What kept you alive?" and he said, "Operations."
Your first film as a director was Bride of the Gorilla in 1951. What prompted you to take that risk, to segue from being a screenwriter to being a director?
Jealousy. Because my brother was a good director; I wanted to show that I could do it too. When I got that first picture to direct, he came shooting down to my house from the hill where he lived and he said, "Don't do it, you'll never be able to." His wife came too and tried to talk me out of it.
It has a few interesting ideas in it, but it looks as if the film was never properly financed .
That was the first time I directed. Seven days of shooting for a full-length picture! The idea wasn't bad. There is a man who commits a murder, but he cannot cope with his guilt. Since an animal can commit murder without being punished, the man thinks of himself as an animal. However, they decided that whenever he looks into a mirror, he should see a gorilla. I thought he should see himself in animal form, but certainly not as a gorilla. They forced me to cut in the gorilla. My title was The Face in the Water . I never wanted to call it Bride of the Gorilla .
He lives in the jungle with animals, since he considers himself an animal and not a human being. I had Lon Chaney and Raymond Burr. They obviously didn't like each other. They looked at each other and sparks flew out of their eyes. Since Lon played the policeman and Ray the murderer, it was just perfect. I didn't have much to direct.
I understand that Lon Chaney was an alcoholic at that time and that he suffered from a difficult and tragic childhood .
Yeah, very tragic. His father, Lon Chaney, Sr., must have been a beast. He beat Lon up for nothing. Sent him to the shed to get the leather strap to be beaten. Sometimes even when Lon hadn't done anything. Lon told me his story. A terrible shock from which he never recovered. When I shot television with him in Sweden, he drank on the set in front of the crew. I stopped him. What he was looking for was a father figure, who would tell him what to do. That is why he was so good in Of Mice and Men [1939].
Riders to the Stars, in 1954, was a very strange film, with the science being really off .
Don't blame me for that! [Producer] Ivan Tors had that story and I wrote it for him. There was no money for decent special effects, I guess, or the picture would have looked much better.
The Magnetic Monster [1953], also for Ivan Tors, was an interesting science fiction film for the fifties because it was much more realistic than most
of the films and it had an offbeat and different premise. Of the films you directed, it's my favorite .
Me, too. I shot the computer scene at UCLA, in a hall filled with gadgets which made up the immense computer. That was before transistors were invented. Now you can buy the same computer, even better, for seven dollars.
The story was that Andrew Marton, the best second-unit director in America, who also directed King Solomon's Mines [1950] and shot the chariot scenes in Ben Hur [1959], returned from Berlin with ten minutes of special effects from a German Nazi film called Gold [1934, directed by Karl Hartl], which must have cost millions. He and Tors came to me to write a screenplay around those shots, which were of a gigantic atom smasher which at the end exploded. That's how it started.
We formed a corporation. Tors got the money from United Artists. We shot the film for $105,000! We made very little money on that film. My ideas, as usual, were premature. The Andromeda Strain [1971] had the same idea twenty years later. It made millions. Also, our title was silly. United Artists, which released that film, put that one on. But it got a half-page write-up in Time magazine, and it became the prototype of many future science-fiction films.
I noticed that it was intended to be the start of a series about an Office of Scientific Investigations .
Yes, that's why we started that company, A-Men, for Atom Men. Tors went to New York to United Artists with The Magnetic Monster and came back and told us that they didn't want Siodmak, they didn't want Marton or Richard Carlson, who was the lead in that picture. They only wanted Ivan Tors. Ivan was a very good salesman for himself. He had big successes with "Flipper." He died tragically in the jungles of the Amazon of heart failure.
After I made an underwater TV pilot called "Captain Fathom," Tors saw it and came up with "Sea Hunt." Look, I'm an idea man. That kept me in bread all my life, not because I speak the language better than anyone else. Everywhere I worked they paid for the ideas. Then other people lifted those ideas, because they had none of their own. They are smarter than I in one respect: they know, like Tors, how to find the money for the productions. I couldn't be bothered with that.
I know that for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers [1956] you adapted the book Flying Saucers from Outer Space by Donald E. Keyhoe [New York: Holt, 1953]. But the final script is credited to two other people [George Worthing Yates and Raymond T. Marcus]. Were you originally going to be more heavily involved?
I never heard about or met Marcus. Yates was desperate to get a screen credit. Just before he died, he wrote a nice letter to me, apologizing that he fought so hard to get that credit. It really didn't matter to me. I wrote that script for producers Sam Katzman and Charles H. Schneer. It certainly wasn't
based on Keyhoe's book. Katzman was too stingy to buy any book. Funny enough, they still talk about that picture. It was a milestone, too. Charles E. Schneer did a number of pictures in the same vein. He destroyed nearly every big city in America on the screen.
I remember that a number of kids who went to see your film Curucu, Beast of the Amazon [1956], were disappointed to discover at the end of the film that the monster was really a native who was pretending. It really seemed like a cheat .
It was done in Brazil for $155,000, and I had a near nervous breakdown when I returned with the finished picture. Nobody had ever shot a picture in Brazil and brought it home completed. It was a tough job, and I have never really recovered healthwise from it.
Beverly Garland certainly has an interesting screen presence .
She was such a good trouper! To run away from her husband, an actor, I understand, she went as far away as she could. That's why we got her for Brazil.
We made masks of the leading actors, John Bromfield and her, since I had a second unit going to Argentina to shoot the gigantic waterfalls. They wore Beverly's and John's masks, and I kept my actors in Brazil. It worked. But making the masks was tough. They stick straws in your nose so that you can breathe, and then lay on some goo. I couldn't do that; I have had a fear of suffocation since I was a child. But she did. Since Carolyn Jones had done it, it became a competition, and Beverly said, "If she can do it, I can do it too."
What is this thing, Love Slaves of the Amazon [1957]?
That was a mess-up. I was responsible. I let Don Taylor influence me, making it a kind of comedy. It should've been a sexy horror picture. I had a pool and we were going to show those beautiful girls swimming naked under the water. But they put the water in too early, the algae came up, and we couldn't shoot it.
The idea wasn't bad: A young scientist, Don Taylor, is captured by the Amazons. He is the only man among them and sleeps with all those beauties, but they give him something to drink, and he has no memory of the past. So what's love good for if we can't remember? I could bring in only 40,000 feet of film for the whole picture, which I did for Universal, because Universal wanted to convert their cruzeiros, which they couldn't take out of the country, into film. You couldn't import any film stock, I don't know if by law or why. And you had to develop the film in Brazil, only it was color film and they didn't have a color lab. How could I develop a color film when there was no lab?
So I had to smuggle the film out. I had rocks in film boxes, which I kept in my hotel, to keep officials, keeping an eye on the production, from becoming suspicious. Ruby Rosenberg, the production manager, who died later during the shooting of Mutiny on the Bounty [1962], wanted to take the film over
and become the director. One day, I asked him how much film was left. He said, "10,000 feet." I wasn't even half through. I said, "What now?" He said, "You have no more film. You go home." I said, "You so-and-so . . ." So I rehearsed every scene, took one take; I never saw dailies and just knew I could never forget a shot. Somehow, I got through the whole picture. Anyhow, Love Slaves of the Amazon is still running on TV. They got their cruzeiros out with interest.
You only directed once again, ten years later, with Ski Fever [1967]. Were you glad to get out of directing?
Of course, yes. I don't like that. Of course, but it is where the money is, the glamor is. "Good morning, Mr. Siodmak? You feel well? You want a glass of orange juice?" Nobody ever asks the writer that.
What was the connection between your book City in the Sky and the James Bond film Moonraker [1979]?
They bought the book because there were two gags in it which they badly needed.
Which were the two gags?
Well, at the end of the film James Bond is making love to that beautiful girl in zero gravity. That was in my book; and also the rotating space station that stops spinning suddenly and all hell breaks loose, everything and everybody starting to float freely. Maybe they used some more. They owned the novel and could do whatever they want with it. Every minute of shooting costs $225,000, so they paid me for twenty seconds of this picture. For me, it's a lot of money. I still have that money. Everything is relative.
You don't seem to take your screenwriting seriously .
I was never married to it. Screenwriting is a sideline for me. I did it just to make money, because I'm one of the few screenwriters who was destined to write books. William Faulkner did the same: He worked for MGM as a screenwriter to be able to afford to write Sanctuary .
I have a trick with writing sci-fi—For Kings Only and Hauser's Memory and City in the Sky . In all these books there is a tremendous amount of research involved. I pick up the telephone and call the most important scientist I can think of in that field in America. So far they have all worked with me because they all are frustrated writers anyhow. If someone is writing [a book] for them, then they can correct it, which makes them feel they wrote it. I siphon off years of knowledge and research from those people for a small fee, or for a percentage of the book, whatever the case. But at the end, I have a story that is scientifically right.
You would be surprised at the names of those people. They go up to the Nobel Prize winners! Some of my books, basically, are based on science. There aren't many science fiction writers in America like me anyhow. There's a difference between science fiction and science fantasy. Science fiction is a
projection of the future as it would happen today; science fantasy is trying out different kinds of social problems and social systems on other stars. Star Wars [1977] and all—this is sci-fantasy.
Since my youth I have written much science fiction about future discoveries which we have now in this day and age and which have become commonplace. I wrote about the laser beam in 1932. I had a book with radar in it in 1931 [F.P.l. antwortet nicht ]. I have a book called The Third Ear [1971] which actually tries to create ESP in people biochemically. Which certainly is possible.
I remember reading in Hauser's Memory that you had RNA (ribonucleic acid) reactivating memory, and I was interested to discover that now research has linked the brain's ability to store information with RNA .
That's right. In researching that book, I worked at this hospital where they had 2,500 retarded children, insane and old people, too. I remember two old guys asking me, "Tell me, sir, are we going to lunch or coming from lunch?" They didn't know which. But they remembered what they had done when they were eight years old.
So we might have a greater amount of RNA—ribonucleic acid—when we are young. As we get older, that substance dries up. That's why we can't learn new languages so easily when we get older, but kids pick it up right away. The growing process of the brain is based on RNA, which is why we learn so fast as kids. Even memory—and also what is right, what is wrong—is information you pick up easily as a child. I find that out now. I'm losing memory slowly. But sometimes you wonder about things, and they come back to you clearly. It might also be that we cut out in later life what is not important from our memory, and only remember what is important, like perhaps having lunch with a pretty girl.
But I'm through with science fiction. The subject has become too esoteric and too far away from my knowledge. You have to study all your life in a certain direction in order to understand part of what they're doing today. I have a compact disc with a laser beam, but who can tell me how it works? I wouldn't know. And so these things have gotten out of my mental reach.
There has been a tendency towards greater specialization .
The present generation is now educated visually, not literarily as we were. They grasp what they see on a TV screen. That's all right. When you see something, something stays in your brain and something drops out. You don't need to think in that respect. As a reader, you have to be logical and understand the written word. Looking at pictures now, and they make very good pictures, the story often falls apart . . . of which the public is not aware, but I, as a writer, see it and suffer.
In what ways have stories changed?
The conflicts have become different. Nothing can shock us anymore, except perhaps bad taste. You ever see Fatal Attraction [1987]? There's a love
scene in there, a sex scene which is funny and wild. The picture I made in Czechoslovakia [Ski Fever ] was about girls in ski resorts who have lost all morals and about some ski instructors who fool around with them. Anyhow, when I came back from working on it, the sex wave had started in America. You could see all those naked dames and couples in bed, of which I could only talk, but never show. The picture was outdated the day it was released. The permissiveness of the audience had turned 180 degrees.
Donovan's Brain, which is still being published—I must have sold five million copies so far—has no sex scenes in it. It's even used in schools as a prototype of science fiction because it doesn't contaminate the children. There are no women's breasts.
I wouldn't know what to write as a motion picture today, except historical themes. I can't sell my novels here anymore, but I sell big in Germany. I just sold my novel The Witches of Paris to Goldmann in Munich—one of my better books, which so far couldn't find a home in America. But you don't go into writing to make money anyhow. If you want to make money, sell condoms to China. One per customer and you will be rich. Why go to the trouble and uncertainties of making motion pictures?
There are certainly plenty of people who create things for reasons other than, or in addition to, making money .
Rarely. It is terrible what the motion picture and the publishing business has become. I remember when I started out and I first met Alfred Knopf—a lovely man. He loved writers. I had an agent, Harold Matson, who got tears in his eyes telling about a book he represented. When you told him about a story you wrote, he really was interested. Today, first, you can't get an agent if you don't make a million already. Second, you send it to a publisher who can't read it. He has little schoolboys reading it.
When I started out in Hollywood, my agent was MCA, which now owns Universal. I had a finished screenplay. A messenger boy picked it up from my apartment. He wore a suit and tie. I handed him the script. Six weeks later it was rejected by MCA (they didn't want to handle it)—rejected by the same boy who had come to pick it up because in the meantime he had become a reader for that company. It's sad how writers are treated with contempt in this business.
Why do you think there is this attitude in Hollywood that anyone can write? The director can write, the producer can write, the actors can write; even the messenger boys can write. [Why this attitude] that anyone can do what the writer can do and therefore the writer has very little status or control?
Well, I'll tell you, it's a conundrum. I may be the worst writer in the world. After I've written it, everybody thinks he can write the same thing better. But I have to write it first!
I would like to take one of those directors or producers and give him a sheet of paper and a pencil and have him come up with a scene and have it
put on the screen. After I've written it, they scribble on it and "make it better," and the damned thing falls apart. Writing doesn't have to do only with a pencil and a piece of paper. Just because you have a violin, you can't play it; just because you have a piano, you can't play it. There are rules and regulations in writing.
Also, we are the echoes of our energies. The more energy we put into work, the bigger the echo; from a love affair to writing, to painting, to anything. You can feel the energy. There is something physical in creation you can almost touch.
But if that energy is not there, all my craftsmanship, which I have now after half a century of writing, doesn't mean a damned thing. I can write a story at the drop of a hat, but it is no good without that energy. There is an inner spring that has to be released, which gives you a response and an echo. This you cannot teach. The producers, except for some rare exceptions, don't have it. They might suggest ideas, but everybody has "ideas."
You will also find out that writers—I am talking about authors like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, and so on—were all alcoholics . Why alcoholics? As soon as they stopped drinking, they were not good anymore. Because they had some formulations in their mind for which there were no words to express. We writers have that feeling that we haven't reached what we want to say.
The dictionary has a finite amount of words, and that very precise word you want to find doesn't exist. So now, we invent new words which express what we have in mind. I myself have invented a couple of words which express exactly what I want to say. Writers, and I mean the driven ones, are full of frustrations. Writing is a release of frustrations. I've never picked up a book in my life that I've written and read it again. Most of the motion pictures I've done, I don't want to see.
And why is that?
For example, I wrote a screenplay here which might yet be done in Israel, based on my novel The Third Ear . The book was published in '74, and only now do I know a better ending to the book. So you see, we don't ever write the thing we want to write, the perfect thing!
You seem to have been fairly fortunate in your experience as a scriptwriter. At least in the sense that most of your work has been produced and endured .
I only have two screenplays that I have written that have not been done. . . . The others have all reached the screen. The studio wanted dependable writers, and I certainly was one. Universal was always on the brink of bankruptcy and couldn't waste any money. What writers wrote was put on the screen, mostly without rewrites. That's why the pictures had unity and why many survived the time.
It was very satisfying work, knowing that our screenplays would not be messed up. I remember working for George Waggner, who passed away last
Curt Siodmak at his writing desk, 1950. (Courtesy of Curt Siodmak)
year; I made eight pictures for him, yet I could never talk to him. He'd say, "I don't want my idea. I want your ideas. . . ." I guess my pictures have a kind of bridge and roundness to them. You don't find in them other ideas coming from someone else, which don't belong.
For the most part, though, you were just concerned with making a living .
I had an invisible altar in my office at the studio. When I couldn't take it
any longer, all that crap, I went to it, in my mind, and said, "My weekly check! My weekly check!" Then I continued working. It wasn't more than a job. One year I wrote seven different screenplays, because you have to live, and I was in demand.
How did the system work for you, exactly?
There's this producer, right, who's pulling down $10,000 a week. He doesn't want to make a picture, because he might fall and break his neck. But after he got paid half a million dollars, what can he do? He has to make a picture, only he doesn't know which one. So the agents come in, with their lists of writers. They have all these prices—$500, $750, $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a week. The producer looks at the writers available, and let's say he comes across my name and he knows that I haves track record. He says to himself, "Maybe Siodmak might know what I want, so I don't fall flat on my face."
So I come in and meet a man I've never seen in my life. I have twenty minutes with him where he tells me the idea for the film he would like to make. I have to convince him that this is the best idea that a man could ever have; it will make a zillion dollars. You have to be convincing, because he is watching you. The slightest doubt he will see in your eyes—just as if you're talking to a girl you want to make. If she sees any doubt in your eyes, you're out of the game. Then the producer says to himself. "Siodmak is so convinced, my idea must be good." We shake hands. I have a job. I go to work right away, get my weekly check. This is how you got your job. You had to know how to sell yourself. . . .
What screenwriters did you admire in Hollywood?
The Epstein brothers [Julius and Philip] were marvelous comedy writers, and Budd Schulberg . . . There are many. Hollywood had very independent writers. Every one did his special job and there wasn't much personal contact between the different writers inasmuch as we worked mostly on assignment and were not under contract. I never was. Though I had written a number of musicals for Susie Forster and Ginnie Sims, I fell into the groove of writing "horror" films which actually were gothic stories. But I could write on any kind of subject. . . .
Making pictures is not a one-man job. It's a collaboration of a group of people. I think a cutter does at least as much constructive work as a director, or the actors. Writing is only a part of the motion picture machine. But without the writer . . .
Filmmaking is a cold-blooded business. I don't know why there should suddenly be such a tremendous interest in the pictures we made in the forties and fifties, of which I'm part.
What films would you like to be remembered for, as a screenwriter?
Well, look, I didn't make big pictures in America, not the blockbuster. I made mostly B pictures, accompanying pictures for the big show. Strangely, some small pictures that we wrote survived the expensive ones. It is the idea
of the story and the precision of the screenplay which make a film survive the decades, not the money which is spent on it. And I have written a few pictures which have been shown for the last forty years. So we never know what we do, eh?
While Siodmak is not currently active in Hollywood, he continues to write and publish. His novel I, Gabriel was recently published in Germany, where many of his early novels have come back into print. Also, he's written an opera, Song of Frankenstein, and a play about Jack the Ripper, and is finishing his new play about three important days in his life that will incorporate one of his best works: "Epistles to the Germans," a series of letters he exchanged with former German friends after World War II, looking into the reasons for the Nazi movement and how and why Germans collaborated with it. He is working now on a television miniseries for Europe, adapted from his novel For Kings Only, which was published nearly thirty years ago in America. He believes that every story has its time. All you have to do is wait .
Stewart Stern:
Out of the Soul
Interview by Margy Rochlin
Even though several of his films have been adaptations of other works, and even though he has sometimes been poorly served by less-than-gifted directors, in the opinion of the professor, Stern is the single artist working only in films whose writing matches the best of contemporary playwrights, who aspires to serious themes, and whose words and subtext, despite all odds, have more often than not been transferred faithfully from page to screen. Not a blockbuster flick on the list, yet none to cause shame. And years from now, when the count is in on all the films made while Stewart Stern functioned as a writer in the movie business, maybe five of the ten will stand up among the best American films we've had. And the career is not over.
Robert Alan Arthur, in the February 1975 issue of Esquire magazine
Stewart Stern, the screenwriter responsible for Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and, in part, for the other version of The Last Movie (1971)—the brilliant script of which cinema buffs always whisper about knowingly and of which Dennis Hopper never shot a frame—doesn't write films anymore. When he refers to screenwriting, it's as a self-contained siege of "stark terror." Then, he'll rub his chin anxiously at the thought.
Before his leave of absence, Stern created the kind of screenplays that subverted the traditions of conventional movies as well as the values of the privileged class that he was born into. (Stern learned of Hollywood's hollow promises from the very men who invented the business: He's related to Paramount co-founder Adolph Zukor and the Loews of MGM and, through them, to well-known stars and movie executives.)
Stern was a frontline soldier during World War II, and his career began, appropriately, with Teresa, in 1951, the saga of a sensitive World War II
soldier and the Italian war bride he brings home to New York. It earned him a reputation for an emotional immediacy in his story lines, a fascination with the psychological flaws of his characters. (Even those merciless critics who find Stem's work overripe concede that he always wrote with great earnestness, that a heart throbs beneath his words.)
For the next thirty years he served as something of a mouthpiece for the alienated middle class—the isolation of the American bourgeoisie is the recurring theme in Stem's work. He wrote dialogue for, and hung out with, an all-star chain gang of male antiheroes—Marlon Brando (The Ugly American, 1963), Montgomery Clift (a researched, but unproduced treatment called "Sabra"), Paul Newman (The Rack in 1956, Rachel, Rachel in 1968, and Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams in 1973), James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause ), and Dennis Hopper (The Last Movie ). And many of his collaborations with this mysterious, often troublesome generation of actors have held up throughout the years, perhaps because Stern identified so deeply with their "lostness" and shared their drag-it-up-from-down-deep aesthetic. Years of psychotherapy, as well as the contact with these angst-addled stars, probably helped Stern construct his best-known script of the '70s, the television miniseries adaptation of "Sybil," the true story of a young woman's multiple personality disorder that jump-started actress Sally Field's enervated career.
These days, Stern writes about his old friends. No Tricks in My Pocket, his account of the twelve days of rehearsals of Paul Newman's film production of The Glass Menagerie, was published by Grove Press in 1989. He is currently editing interview transcripts—15,000 neatly marked-up pages' worth—for a Paul Newman biography he is assembling.
Very early one morning, I met Stern at his small office, located in the courtyard of picture-book cottages in Seattle, Washington, where he lives with his wife, Marilee. My first impression of this astonishingly youthful-looking 66-year-old is that he's a world-class conversationalist. For the next three hours it seemed as if he were relating not stories, but finely articulated confessions. His anecdotes were never delivered without mood swings, without excitedly bouyant highs and gloomy lows.
Months after our visit, as we began the slow process of fact-checking via long-distance phone calls, Stern began to anguish that on that day his memories had come whooshing out all at once and too harshly; he wanted to see the manuscript, to make sure he had paid his old friends their proper due. At first, I refused as a matter of principle. ("Don't interviewees have rights too?" he moaned back in protest.) Finally, we settled on an agreement: Stern could see select portions of the interview and make additions, not changes. An honorable man, Stern sent back pages with a few minor corrections and the occasional gilding of an opinion.
The last time we spoke, he told me he feared "coming off bitter" about the producers and directors whom he worked alongside, those who had in-
Stewart Stern in Seattle, 1988. (Photo: Davis Freeman)
vited him to participate throughout a film's production. "The main feeling I have is of enormous appreciation," he said, "of what a privilege it was—a privilege that was not necessary to accord me, legally or in any other way. My concern was that in the process [of being interviewed] I only talked about the things that made life difficult for me. Things that, had I not been invited to be there, I wouldn't even had known about."
Stewart Stern (1922–)
1951
Teresa (Fred Zinnemann). Co-story, co-script.
Benjy [short subject] (Fred Zinnemann). Original story, script.
1955
Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray). Script.
1956
The Rack (Arnold Laven). Script.
1957
The James Dean Story (Robert Altman, George W. George). Screen story, script.
1959
Thunder in the Sun (Russell Rouse). Adaptation.
1961
The Outsider (Delbert Mann). Script.
1963
The Ugly American (George H. Englund). Script.
1968
Rachel, Rachel (Paul Newman). Script.
1971
The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper). Co-story, script.
1973
Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (Gilbert Cates). Script.
Books include No Tricks in My Pocket .
Television credits include "Thunder Silence" (Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, NBC, 1954), "Sybil," and "A Christmas to Remember."
Academy Award nominations include a co-story nomination for Teresa and Rebel Without a Cause (Nick Ray's credited story only), and best script (based on material from another medium) for Rachel, Rachel.
Writers Guild awards include best-script nominations for The Ugly American and Rachel, Rachel .
When my cousin Arthur [Loew] was nine years old and I was twelve, I went to spend weekends at his father's [Arthur Loew, Sr.] estate at Glencove, Long Island, which was a "Great Gatsby" estate that had come down from Marcus Loew. It was a neo-Renaissance Italianate palace with everything from a Tiffany glass-dome breakfast room to a nine-hole golf course, a dairy farm, two private yachts, and a seaplane that he would use to commute to the city every day. It was everything you read about. And that was slumming, because we'd spend the summers at the Zukor estate [Mountain View Farms at New City, New York], which was 1,000 acres with an 18-hole golf course. Did you see this? [Points to an inscribed photograph of Mary Pickford .] That's where Mary Pickford used to come on weekends.
Anyway, there were a lot of guests one weekend, so they had me in a room with Arthur. And Arthur sat up in bed and he said, "What we're going to do is go to MGM and we're going to be big shots. That's what we're going to do. And we're going to live together."
I can't tell you how many years passed before I saw him again. Arthur had asthma as a kid, so he moved to Arizona. I was raised in New York and went to the University of Iowa. Went into the army. Came back, was in a show in
New York. Came to Hollywood. Arthur was still in Arizona; he had been in the Signal Corps in Beverly Hills, fighting the "Battle of Beverly Hills."
All of a sudden I got a call one day and Arthur said, "Well, you'd better look for an apartment if we're going to live together and work at Metro." We got an apartment. By then, I was already a dialogue director at Eagle-Lion Studios.
Was Arthur your good-luck charm?
In a way. I mean, he was adored by everybody because he was so funny and so generous. He and I were just the odd couple. I would be worried about him staying out late and fussing over his drinking and making breakfast for God knows who would come out of the bedroom. And besides being my best friend, Arthur really respected my talent and made a wonderful habitat for me to write in. Later on, Arthur produced what I think is one of the best scripts I've ever done, which is The Rack . I thought he produced it elegantly; he resisted all temptation to do what the studio wanted him to do.
How did coming from a real Hollywood family affect you?
Negatively.
How so?
Uncle Adolph, he would never hire me. Sam Katz [a business friend of the family and an executive at Paramount and later at MGM], who had known me since I was born, wouldn't either. Uncle Adolph always said [in a growling, Yiddish accent ], "Ven you ready, you come and ve'll send you to Paramount. Ve need talent!" So, right after I got out of the army, I went. I told him, "I want to work for the studio." He said, "I have nothing to do vith it. You have to talk to [Paramount executive] Henry Ginsberg."
So I went to see Henry, and Henry said, "What do you do?" I said, "I'm an actor and I'm a writer. I'm Phi Beta Kappa . . ." He said, "Well, how do I know you're an actor if I've never seen you act?" I said, "You don't." He said, "How do I know you're a writer?" I said, "I can give you something I've written." He said, "I don't read. . . . Give my regards to your mother." That was the end of my chances at Paramount.
What was the problem?
I don't know. Didn't want to be accused of nepotism? His son and his grandson were [already] working there. Anyway, I was making the rounds of all the producers on Broadway. And Joe Fields, whom my mother knew because he had married the divorced wife of a distant cousin of ours, said, "Why don't you send him in and I'll interview him." Joe had written a play.[*]
* Joseph (Joe) Fields was a prominent writer, in Hollywood off and on from the early 1930s, of light fare, comedies, and musicals. He wrote many Broadway plays, including collaboration with Jerome Chodorov on My Sister Eileen (film version, 1942), and Junior Miss (film version, 1945). He also collaborated with Anita Loos on the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (film version, 1953), with Peter de Vries on The Tunnel of Love (film version, 1958), and with Joshua Logan on Flower Drum Song (film version, 1961).
He hired me to be the assistant stage manager. Then I understudied the lead. I played the lead one night in a preview and everyone thought I was wonderful.
What play was this?
It was called The French Touch . René Clair directed it. René Clair was amazing. He had the only black pinstripe suit that I had ever seen that had crimson stripes. He was elegant, elegant. He looked like a ballroom dancer, like a Valentino. Very petite, intense, wonderful. Where were we?
About Joe Fields and breaking into Hollywood . . .
So then I went out to California and went to see Sam Katz, my second ace in the hole. Sam did take some of my stories and send them to the story department. I still have the report that came back, which said, "The kid has talent, sensitivity, but nothing for us. He's not commercial." That was the end of that . There were no favors coming from anywhere.
Then Joe Fields came out at the invitation of Brynie [Bryan] Foy, who was starting up this new studio called Eagle-Lion that was going to make low-budget films. Brynie Foy asked Joe to be writer-in-residence and to direct some things. So Joe called me up and said, "What are you doing? Come over for Sunday brunch. Marian and I would like to see you." I went over and he said, "What's happening? What studio are you working for?" I told him the story. He said, "That's disgraceful. The hell with them . I'm gonna put you to work. You come to Eagle-Lion on Monday and only say yes. No matter what you hear me say, you agree."
So I went in and he took me to the head of the studio and he said, "Stewart directed the road company of My Sister Eileen . He did the Chicago company of Junior Miss . . . ." Joe lied about everything . He said, "It's amazing that this phenomenal kid has been able to accomplish so much in such a short time . . . and fight the war for all of us."
So they hired me for seventy-five bucks a week as dialogue director. That's where I began.
Joe Field's deception worked so well. Did it teach you that, as many people believe, to succeed in Hollywood you often have to bend the truth?
No. I always played it fair and square, but only out of self-defense. I warned everybody about what I was like to work with. I'd paint the worst picture of myself. I'd say, "I'm slow, I don't know if I'll be able to finish this, I'm this, I'm that."
How did you get your break as a screenwriter?
Arthur Loew, Sr., had commissioned a script by Alfred Hayes called Teresa . Arthur, before he became president of MGM, gave it to me and asked me to look at it, make comments, tell him what was wrong. I took it away to a farm in Delaware. I wrote a list of about fifty questions, all of which were motivational. "Why this?" "Why did this happen?" "Why did this person react this way?"
I gave it to him and said, "This is not going to help anything. It's just really questions which let you know what I think is not fulfilled about the script." I'd never written a script, but my uncle took me seriously. He sent it to his co-producer in Switzerland [Lazar Wechsler, who co-produced The Search (1948) with Arthur Loew, Sr.], who wrote back and advised him to hire me to write the screenplay. So he did.
I knew that I didn't like Alfred Hayes' story. I didn't like the girl he had written. And when I say "didn't like," it's just that I didn't relate to them [the main characters]. I felt outside of them. And I didn't understand why the boy did what he did [in the story].
What I wanted to do was to tell the story of somebody who had a terrible war experience, but [to make the point] that the terrible war experience was not the result of the war. That it was the result of who he was before he got into the war.
Is that what happened to you?
Personally? No. But nowadays, you hear nothing but blame among the Vietnam vets: "It was the war that did it to me." My experience in World War II, although it was a very, very different war, was that a lot of people were badly damaged, emotionally and in many other ways. I don't believe, and didn't believe then, that it was the war that did it. I think that you are who you are and you take it with you. Maybe the war dramatized it in ways that had not been dramatized before.
Anyway . . . I went to the Veterans Administration and asked them to open up their files to me. I said, "I'd like to psychoanalyze [the character of Philip Cass, the highly sensitive World War II soldier of Teresa ] just from the symptoms I'm giving you. Then tell me as a result of the psychoanalysis what your prognosis would be for his relationship with a girl whom he met in an Italian village and brought to America as his bride. What the prognosis would be for his relationship with his father and his mother, given who they are."
They opened up their files to me. All the psychometric testing they'd done on individuals like that. Interview material. The notes that psychologists had made after the sessions. The material just absolutely opened the story up . . . and as a result, I got a much clearer idea of what motivated the character.
That's the way I have worked ever since, looking as deeply into the records available to me, to get as accurate a picture of the psychodynamics of the characters [of my scripts], as I possibly can. "Sybil" certainly is the prime example. With "Sybil," I was privileged enough to hear and be allowed to do transcriptions of all the actual sessions of analysis [by Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, who psychoanalyzed the real-life Sybil] that had been recorded. And Sybil sent me all of her journals so that I could follow the course of how those selves took over. It was really apparent in the journals how one would stop and another would take over.
Why did the psychological approach, in scriptwriting, work so well for you?
I think it had partly to do with my own therapy. I was very influenced by therapy. I've been through every kind. I went through a fourteen-year Kleinian analysis and didn't know it was Kleinian.[*] I was in analysis for five years with someone who was a Freudian. I've had eclectic this and that. I mean, it has never stopped.
I have to be sure that I really understand what the deepest psychological motivation is for whatever action I give the characters. Even if I'm doing an adaptation, I have to work that out for myself. The action of the script becomes the inevitable result of the psychological progression of the character. Not simply because that's what's given. It has to be justified—psychologically, emotionally, mythically.
You have said that this first experience as a scriptwriter, working with director Fred Zinnemann, scalded you .
He had a very difficult time understanding the script I had written that he had agreed to do after declining the one by Alfred Hayes. We had an endless period of rewriting in California after he had sent me to Italy to find the girl [Stern helped "discover" Pier Angeli] and to find locations. Arthur Loew, Sr., loved my first draft and he didn't see any reason to change it. Zinnemann kept wanting me to change it, but was very unspecific about how. What became apparent was that he really didn't understand the whole psychological understructure and was desperately trying to understand. Whether he was resisting it, whether it was too close to him emotionally, whether the "unheroic" dependency of my young soldier and veteran was threatening to him, I still don't know. I just know that his understanding slid in and out in a curious way: He would understand and then he wouldn't understand.
He asked me at one point to do a psychological explanation of every scene. So I retranscribed my entire script and put my dialogue on the left-hand side; and on the right-hand side, opposite every single line, I put the subtext, the psychological subtext of why that line was there and what its effect would produce in human behavior that he could direct. It was about three hundred pages long. I wish I still had it.
Zinnemann read it, and then came more revisions! Arthur Loew, Sr., was in New York, saying, "When are you guys gonna stop this and start casting the movie?" Finally, Arthur Loew, Sr., came out [to California] and said that we had one more week [to finish the script] and then he was going to put a stop to it.
Then Zinnemann sent the script to all the paraplegics who had been in the film he made with Marlon Brando for Stanley Kramer, The Men [1950]. He
* Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic belief is that infants who do not get proper mothering grow up seeking the mothering aspect in every relationship.
didn't think my treatment of soldiers was authentic. He didn't know why he didn't think so, but he didn't think so. Now, I had fought as an infantry man in the Battle of the Bulge, been declared missing in action, and had a fair idea of what soldiers were about, but whatever the comments of those paraplegics were, he began to give them to me. He seemed to be giving the script to people in order to get some kind of clarity about his own feelings.
One Sunday I was working on the script at home and I needed to get a version of a scene that I had left in our office at the studio, but I didn't have a key. I called Zinnemann and I went up to his house up above Mandeville Canyon. He gave me the office key and said, "It's in my briefcase." So I went to the office and opened his briefcase and took out the script. I opened the cover and there was something in his handwriting. It said something like "Stewart has no love. Stewart has no understanding of these characters. Find another writer. Maybe, get [Alfred] Hayes back."
Well, I guess the worst moment in my life, even to this day, was finding out, that way, what he really thought of me. I didn't know what to do. I cried. Barely made it back home. I copied the note. I still have it somewhere. I showed it to Arthur Loew, Jr., and he said, "Well, you have your choice: Either you can quit or you can go ahead." I decided to go ahead.
It was very rough for a beginning young writer whose confidence depended utterly on his teacher's good opinion, and Zinneman had taught me all I knew. I knew that as a story man Zinneman usually knew precisely when a story was right, just the way he did with performers. He often couldn't tell an actor what to do. But if the actor delivered it right, Zinneman could tell it was right. The same held true with story. But, in this case, it was very hard to be at the other end of his attempts to understand. The instructions were never very clear.
Yet you continued .
Part of the reason I continued was because I liked Fred, I was enormously grateful to him because he was the first one ever to take a chance on me, and I adored him as a director. Also, I knew that I had to stay close to the filming if the picture were ever to reflect my vision at all.
So I didn't say anything about the note and I did the rewrite. Then Zinnemann let me help him cast it. I prepared all the kids for their screen tests and was in the screen tests with them. He gave me an enormous amount of responsibility.
But the next thing that happened, another thing that nearly killed me, was that he wanted Bill Mauldin, the marvelous cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, to be technical adviser. At first, I thought, "That's fine." But when we got to the hotel in Rome, where we were preparing the Italian half of the film, Fred told me—rather mysteriously—that he wanted me to rewrite the American part of the story. He said, "The Italian part is fine now." I knew that
there were things about the Italian part that still needed work. But he kept insisting on that. We'd have lunch together and talk about the rewrites of the American section.
One day, Arthur Loew, Sr., called me to his room and said, "I have something very difficult to do." I said, "What is it?" He said, "Fred has been working with Bill Mauldin on the Italian half of the script while he's had you rewriting the American half. Bill has written a treatment, and Fred wants me to ask you to rewrite the [Italian] half of the screenplay from it." And he handed Mauldin's treatment to me.
I can't even . . . I don't want to bring back that moment, it was so ghastly. This had been going on without my knowing it. To a beginner who trusted everybody it felt manipulative, high-handed, cruel. I read what Mauldin wrote, and it had nothing to do with the sensibility of the character I was writing about—who was, of course, myself.
There were certain things that Bill did which were wonderful: a little vignette of two guys, after the war had ended, who were sitting in a shack with their homemade still, toasting V-E Day with canteen cups—it was a typical Mauldin cartoon. It was wonderful and I wanted to use that. There were one or two other things: the way the platoon sergeant took over the house where Teresa lived and told the lovely Italian family who lived there that the American replacements were simply moving in. Other things that were really wonderful ideas.
But I didn't want to use the treatment. I wanted to incorporate the ideas into what I had without disturbing the behavior of my character. I think it all came from Fred's need to make my story comprehensible. It was legitimate for him to ask Mauldin to collaborate. But not that way! The proper way would be to have the writer in and Mauldin in and say, "You two guys talk because I have a feeling that what Bill's seen here during the Italian campaign could really enrich what Stewart's done." Not to have someone come in and start dealing with your characters behind your back.
But I swallowed hard. Arthur Loew, Sr., said, "I love your script. I loved the first draft. But now we're in production and we have to move ahead. If you want to go home, go home and I'll understand. But I don't want you to. I need you here. I need you to protect this script. As far as I'm concerned, you don't have to change anything. But Fred is the director, and it would be a good thing if you could use whatever felt right."
So I did.
Arthur and I never raised this issue again. I never told Fred how betrayed I felt. The night before we started shooting, Fred called me to his room and said, "Stewart, I tried to get close to this story, but I have to admit to you that I don't understand a lot of it. Maybe it's the age difference. Because you're so much younger, and the character is close to you. You've been an
Stewart Stern with his mentor, director Fred Zinnemann (foreground), on location
in the Apennines for Teresa in 1950. (Photo: Harold Zegart; courtesy of Stewart Stern)
actor; maybe it would be good if you worked with these young actors alone. Prepare them for their scenes and show me the next morning what you did when we come to the set, and I'll stage it."
So that's what we did in all the scenes with Pier Angeli [who played Teresa] and John Ericson [who played the American soldier]. It revealed Zinnemann to be a very big man with a spacious spirit, a man in creative conflict
because of the curious nature of a subject which at the same time repelled and attracted him, yet a man who took a very big chance with me.
Why do you think he took a chance on you? Generosity? Desperation? What?
Probably a little bit of both.
Apart from Teresa, I know you worked on a treatment for Zinnemann called "Sabra," which was to star Montgomery Clift. Did you and Montgomery Clift become close friends?
He was someone I never knew what to say to. He was so bright, so funny. But I never knew what to say to him, so I would avoid him.
One night I got a call from . . . Dennis [Hopper]. He said that he was in New York and that they were all sitting around Monty's. I said, "Monty who?" He said, "Clift." I said, "Well, I'll come down, but I didn't even know you knew him." I went down there, and there was Dennis and Roddy McDowall and a bunch of people . . . all whispering in the living room. I said, "Why's everyone whispering?" They said [in a stage whisper], "Monty's asleep upstairs." I said, "Well, I want to see him." They all said, "Oh no! You can't go up." I said, "Why not?" So I went upstairs and just kept opening doors until I found a bedroom with a lump in the bed. I went in and sat on the bed and shook Monty until he sat up and screamed and threw his arms around me. He asked me what I was doing in New York and what I was up to. He asked, "Can't we get together?"
I said, "Do you like Bea Lillie?" See, Beatrice Lillie was probably the greatest comedienne who ever lived, the female Charlie Chaplin. She was replacing Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame, which was a big hit on Broadway. She and I had become friends, so she had gotten seats for opening night for my parents, for me, and for someone [I'd like to invite]. I didn't have a date yet. So I asked Monty and he said he loved her . I was sure he would forget. Two nights later, I drove up in a taxi and he came stumbling out of that house . . . I don't know how much he had had to drink. His shirt was curled up, his tie was askew. My mother took over in the taxicab, smoothed him out, and he couldn't have been sweeter.
We went to the theater and sat in the third row. He laughed so hard. Nothing went right. Rosalind Russell had very long legs, so all the business was staged for her; she could cross that stage in three strides. Bea Lillie is five foot three. She would have to skip in order to be where she had to be on every cue. She had never worn wigs this way. She would have to take hats off, and the wigs would come with the hats! It was terrible! Monty couldn't stop laughing and neither could I. He was finally in my lap saying, "Am I embarrassing you?" But he had to be controlled, physically controlled, because he was throwing himself all over the aisle. Bea loved it. She didn't know who it was, but she knew that someone was down there having fits.
When it ended, we went backstage. The place was packed with people
waiting to see her—all being very elegant. Monty and I were kind of standing at the back. She saw us. She kind of waved to me. She said, "How was it?" Monty leans over somebody's shoulder and shouts, "Terrible! You were terrible!" And they had never met before. So she says [in a delighted tone], "Come right in to my dressing room." She took us in and closed the door. She just loved him for it. Of course, he didn't mean it at all. That was the night she showed us this amazing letter she had gotten from Jack Benny, who had read a review that Brooks Atkinson had written about her. Benny wrote her something like "Darling Bea, I've just read this review of your enormous success. Brooks Atkinson says that with the flick of your eyebrow you are the funniest person in the world. And I just want to give you my love. P.S. So why don't you just go fuck yourself?"
Afterwards, I remember, Monty and I went to a bar on Third Avenue and we both commented on how comfortable it was to be together. We had never been comfortable before, always very stiff. I said, "The thing that makes it easy is that your face is gone. I couldn't even look at you, you were so . . . impressive." (He was so beautiful before he had that terrible accident.)[*] I said, "It's probably not tactful to talk about it, but I find your face now so available, and it makes it possible for me to be with you. The other one kept me out. I wonder what it's like for you to be behind this face instead of the one you had?"
What did he say?
He said, "It's easier to be with you."
How did you get involved with Rebel Without a Cause?
Rebel came about because Arthur [Loew, Jr.,] made me go to a party at Gene Kelly's house. I had known Gene for a long time, but he was a star and I wasn't comfortable. He had invited Arthur over for dinner and to play charades. We went over that night, and among the people there were Marilyn Monroe and [director] Nick Ray. And Jimmy [James Dean] and [composer] Lenny Rosenman had gotten to Nick [about me]. Nick came over and said that he had seen Teresa and that he had liked it so much. We started talking and he said, "Why don't you come to the lot?" But I think even with Jimmy and Lenny speaking to Nick, had I not gone to that party, it might not have happened.
Was Rebel already in script form by the time Nick Ray hired you?
There were two [scripts]. There was a script by Leon Uris, which I never saw because they didn't show it to me. They did show me the script by Irving
* On the evening of May 12, 1956, Montgomery Clift's car "crumpled like an accordion" into a telephone pole on Sunset Boulevard. The actor suffered severe whiplash, a broken nose, and a broken jaw that was set incorrectly—and had to be rebroken and reset. As a consequence, his mouth was permanently twisted, the left side of his face immobile, his once-perfect nose bent. See Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift (New York: Bantam, 1979).
Schulman, which I took certain elements from. There was one scene which took place in the Planetarium, not my scene, but I thought the Planetarium as a set was something so powerful and could really incorporate the speed at which [events in] the movie should go. That everything happens in one day. Impossible, but that's the way it feels when you're that age: You live and die a thousand times in a single day when you're a teenager. I knew that I wanted the picture to kind of begin and end there.
There were also character names [from the Schulman draft] that I used. But my script wasn't an adaptation [of his]. It was so little an adaptation that [Schulman] then was given permission by Warners to novelize his script as a book.
There was a seven-page outline that Nick Ray claims to have sold to Warner Brothers that started the whole project. It's something that I've never seen to this day.
How did Nick Ray describe the project once you were brought on board?
Nick told me about all of the research that he had done: about middle-class young people. He wanted it to be specifically about them because he said that there was a big misconception that so-called juvenile delinquency was a product of economic deprivation. He felt that it was emotional deprivation. He had done a lot of research, and one of the things that he wanted in the story was a "Chickee Run," which would happen in the Sepulveda Tunnel. That was one scene that he wanted in the movie. That was virtually the only requirement.
That's when, at my request, he called his contacts at Juvenile Hall, and I went down and began researching it. I spent ten days and ten nights there, or two weeks, posing as a social worker, talking to the kids or just being there when they were processed. Then they opened up all of the psychological workups that they had done down at Juvenile Hall on the kids they brought in. Family backgrounds, records of their behavior. Whatever they had, they opened up to me. So, I was able to dig as far as it was possible to dig, in order to understand who these kids were and to create a prototype.
I couldn't figure out what to write until I went to see On the Waterfront [1954] and got all charged up and came home and just began writing. But I wrote the script really as an original, keeping in a variation of the "Chickee Run" scene that Nick wanted and the names that Irving Schulman had created—a Jim and a Judy who loved each other, and a third one, Plato, who was sort of an appendix.
You'd have to inspect both scripts to see [how the final one] really developed. [Long sigh .] Anyway, there was a terrible situation at Academy Award nomination time, because in those days the story and the screenplay were nominated separately. The story was nominated . . . and Nick Ray had story credit. There had been no story until my script was written.
What did you do?
Well, Nick Ray claimed there was. He said, "I sold Warners my seven-page story," and I said, "Well, I've never seen it. . . ." He said, "What do you think was original from you?" and I said, "Nick! How can you ask me that?" He said, "Give me an example." I said, "For one, that this whole story took place in twenty-four hours. I remember coming to you at two in the morning once when I couldn't sleep and wanted someone to talk to, and I said I'd gotten this wonderful idea that it was all going to happen in twenty-four hours." He said, "That was in my notes before I even met you. . . . I'll tell you what: You give me co-screenplay credit and I'll give you co-story credit." I said, "But you didn't touch the screenplay! If you take story credit, then I want Irving Schulman to have adaptation credit, because he was there too." So he gave [Schulman] adaptation credit. But Nick got the nomination.
Later on . . . I was in Paris and noticed a book published in French. I can read some French, so I opened it up and it was my screenplay! Novelized! It was all my dialogue with the credit line "By Nicholas Ray." Not a mention of me! Not on the cover, anything. Not any acknowledgment that I had anything to do with it.
What did you do?
I told Nick that it wasn't very fair, and he said that he had nothing to do with it.
Was he a compulsive liar . . . or a Hollywood rat?
I don't think he was either a compulsive liar or a Hollywood rat. I think he was a man who was hungry for recognition, who really didn't trust that his talent was authentic. He adored Elia Kazan. Kazan was his model, and the first person he wanted that script to go to was Kazan.[*] He gave it to me to give to Kazan, and he wanted me to stay in Kazan's house while Kazan read the script. And I did. And Kazan read it. That was a bad experience.
Were you satisfied with what Nick Ray ultimately did with your script?
I was horrified. It was one picture that I had volunteered not to be present at during the shooting. Because once the script is done and the production is in process, the most important thing is the relationship between the director and the actor. The actors are completely without their skins. They're asked to reveal, without any chance to prepare, things about themselves that they have never revealed to anybody. That's what ends up on the record. To in any way upset that relationship is very, very dangerous . . . and is one reason why writers are not traditionally welcomed on the set. They don't know to cope with that, don't really appreciate that. The power of the writer who is standing in a dark corner of the soundstage, rolling his eyes to the ceiling . . . it can demoralize the cast and take them away from the director for the rest of the production.
* Coincidentally, director Kazan had just finished filming John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955), Dean's first major motion picture.
Jimmy ran away just before they were going to start shooting Rebel . He disappeared. They were going to suspend him and cancel the picture completely. Finally, I got a call from him and he told me he was in New York, but he wouldn't tell me where. He didn't know whether to come back or not. "What are they saying?" I told him what they were planning. He said he didn't know whether to come back and to trust Nick. He said that he had turned himself over entirely to Kazan. He said, "Do you want me to come back and do this movie?" I said, "I can't tell you that, I really can't. Because if you're experiencing this kind of mistrust, I can't reassure you. But I know that Nick adores you and that he's passionate about this movie. Partially because he feels so guilty about what he's going through with his own son right now." He said, "If you want me to do it, I'll come back." I said, "You don't know the temptation I have to answer you the way I want to, but I can't." And I didn't. But he came back.
I knew that if I were there that Jimmy would be coming up to me after takes, or I would be going into that trailer. Even if I didn't talk about the picture, just the sight of me going into the trailer and closing the door and not having Nick Ray in there would have been a calamity for the film. Would have hurt Nick and put his anxiety just exactly where it shouldn't have been. He had a lot to think about. It would have not served Jimmy. This was something that the two of them had to work out for themselves.
Did you explain your absence to either of them?
No, I was simply about to start The Rack at MGM and I had an apartment in New York, and I said, "This is the best time for me to drive east and get my furniture and bring it all back here."
Then how did you handle rewrites on Rebel?
We had an agreement, Nick Ray and I, that I would call him every night and he would have rehearsed the scene from the next day. He would tell me if anything needed adjustment. I would do the rewrites overnight and would telephone him or Fay, his secretary. There were very, very few rewrites. Nick went back on his word because he did add some lines which I find incredibly offensive. Like when the mother, on being driven to the site of the Planetarium at the end [of the film], kind of looks into the camera and says, "[You] can't believe this really happens to you, until it happens to your children . . ." Something frindle like that.
Also, I felt that we were both unfair to the parents. [In my case] I was still in the process of thinking that if my father stood up, I could finally start my life.
Meaning?
The man I needed him to be—the father in Rebel . So I was blaming my parents for everything because I had just started analysis. Nick was blaming parents for everything because he felt guilty about his son—his mixed-up family life. So there was a slight exaggeration in the portrayal of the parents
which sometimes makes me cringe. I think the writing is good, and I like Jim Backus very much: He did a good job. But the casting—it's comedy casting of those parents. We just didn't give them any credit.
Was there was someone else you would have liked to have seen cast instead?
No. I think Jim Backus played it with extraordinary integrity. I just think, between the writing, the exaggeration, and the fact that the directing did not go against the writing at all, but simply implemented it, that the effect was simply an exaggeration. It wasn't really clear in the way the picture was shot that this was the interpretation of a very young person. That this was parents seen through the eyes of these kids.
Did James Dean have a lot of input in his lines?
Not at all. We had one reading where he and Nick and I sat down and went through the script together. Jimmy laughed, I remember, because I had him mooing in the Planetarium. That's how we met: mooing. That was the kind of signpost of our beginnings. He came up with some line, "Quick! Fill the pool . . ," but I don't know if that was on the set or that night.
Did he ever let you know how the role spoke to him as an actor?
He said he liked the script, it felt comfortable. He let you know in funny ways that he liked or respected you. He picked me up sometimes to go to the studio. There'd be mornings when I'd hear his motorcycle outside, and I'd come out and he'd be there waiting, saying, "Here, c'mon." And I'd get on the back or follow him in my car.
Do you remember where you were when you found out about his death?
Yeah. [Long sigh .] I was staying at Arthur's above The Strip. Henry Ginsberg, who produced Giant [1956], called. He was a great friend of Arthur's and an old friend of mine. He said, "Where's Arthur?" I said, "He's having dinner with Uncle Al on La Cienega at the Encore Room." He said, "The kid's dead." I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "Jimmy was killed in an automobile accident. You gotta find Arthur and tell him before this gets on the radio."
Jimmy and Arthur were very close friends?
He loved Arthur. Arthur was one of the world's funniest people, and Jimmy would hang out at his place practically every night. . . . So, I went down to the Encore Room and went in and told Arthur. I was smoking a cigarette and it turned to . . . shit . . . in my mouth. Then, I just wandered around. I left the Encore Room because I wanted to be alone. I couldn't believe it. I turned on the radio. There was nothing on the radio. There was no confirmation in the real world that this had happened. I thought it couldn't have.
I walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard. I went to Googy's and had coffee. I looked around. Here were all these faces that were there when Jimmy would go in. Nobody knowing anything. I was afraid to say anything. I was afraid I'd be wrong. Then sometime during the night, there was an announce-
ment. And you could tell. You could tell in the way it was when Kennedy had been shot. Cars pulling off the road. Traffic stopping so people could control their agitation while they heard the news. It was like a strange wind that came right through the streets of Hollywood. People's rhythm changed. They began to pull into little groups like mercury rolling across a tabletop, collecting other little pieces of itself. Consoling each other. These eerie sounds, these cries would come up from places. It was a nightmare. But at least then I knew that the world knew and that it had really happened.
[Long silence. Stern begins to cry.]
Are you all right?
[Long silence.] . . . It was such a terrible loss. He was the only one that I've never gotten over. I think it's true for everybody: I know that this is true for Elizabeth [Taylor]. For Natalie [Wood]. For Dennis [Hopper], in his way. I don't know whether Dennis has ever mourned Jimmy, but he was tremendously affected. I can't explain it, what [Jimmy's] impact was. I've had better friends. I've certainly known people longer—it was only months that I knew Jimmy. I don't know what it is that makes his disappearance as much of an ache as it is. It's never abated.
How did the script for The James Dean Story [1957] come about?
There was a guy named Abby Greshler, who is an agent and a very nice guy. He called me about this movie about Jimmy which was, really, practically on the heels of his death. I was just so offended by the thought that anyone would do any such thing about him. So I said, "No."
Then all of the sudden this film came about [anyway]. And I told [the filmmakers] how I felt, and they said, "Well, we're going to do it anyhow. We've already shot all these interviews. So if you don't do it, somebody else will." So I figured that I had better do it.
I hated the James Dean legend because I didn't think it had anything to do with him. I thought that all the things that his character in Rebel said were not important to his fans. I didn't understand then what I understand now. That it's like a punk haircut. The leather jackets and the stomp boots in the days of Rebel were not marks of rebellion. I think they were emblems of the ridiculousness of the facade. They were saying, "This is the thing that the grownups can't see past . . . but we can. What we see is what they can't see, which is that we are human, we are loving, we are sweet, and we wish people no harm. . . ." Partly the fiction that the script provided: a child who simply could not please a parent, who tried in every way to grow up and was full of nothing but love. Who needed understanding . . . I didn't know what I had written, in a funny way.
[For The James Dean Story ] I wanted to present Jimmy in a different way. I wanted to make it a preachment against violence. I wanted to say through that documentary what I thought that Rebel Without a Cause had not said. I found letters of Jimmy's that talked about that and quoted them. And I tried
to create him as a sensitive, wandering soul that haunted the nights and tried to spread compassion to the world.
In a way, that was a fiction. That was a partial truth. Jimmy was much more complicated than that. It was also unnecessary and redundant . . . because that's what Rebel had said to these kids anyway. That's why they still see it.
What do you mean by "more complicated"?
[Long silence.]
If you had the chance to do it over again, would The James Dean Story be significantly different?
I would do it differently, but it would be difficult to do because I feel very protective of him. It's more important to me now that the legend be preserved than that the real Jimmy be known. One hears a lot about what Jimmy Dean really was and what he did to people and what his preferences were. And I don't think that's interesting. I think what's interesting about him is the legend that he left behind. It was that aspect that came out of East of Eden [1955] and out of Rebel and that young people generation after generation are responding to.
I'm disappointed in [The James Dean Story ]. I don't blame it for anything. I just think it was a very idealized partial piece of propaganda. For which I was entirely responsible. I was very moved by the language as I wrote it. Now, I would take a scissors to it. I would be a lot more prudent about some of those images. Stuff like walking on the beach, seeing the dead seagull. That stuff never happened to Jimmy! That was me doing stunts. . . . And I thought it was badly, badly hurt by Martin Gabel as the narrator.
I did a narration track myself, as a dummy track, just so we could see what the film looked like, and it was better than what [Gabel] did. He did to my words in a way what Nick Ray did. Instead of going against them, he larded them with his rich, vocal tones. Resonances that had nothing to do with the movie.
At the time, I pleaded with George [producer and co-director George W. George] and [director] Bob Altman to let Marlon do it. I wired Marlon—he was in Japan or somewhere—and told him about it. He agreed to do the narration. On the provision that the whole thing go to charity. Everybody's profit go to charity. That was not acceptable to anyone.
Then I tried to get Dennis [Hopper], because I thought he would be wonderful. They wouldn't hear of it. So they got Martin Gabel. I think that if there were a young voice reading that narration, a lot of my objections to the film, to what I wrote, would be gone. But I think it was written out of my own grief. My own feeling about being the custodian of the flame.
Were you able to connect with male stars you have worked with—Montgomery Clift, Dean, Dennis Hopper, Marlon Brando—because they were un-
able to express their angst and isolation in words? Because you too felt isolated, but as a writer could articulate it?
No. I don't think of it in terms of me functioning as a writer for them at all. It's more on a personal level. Those friendships went on for a long time. With Dennis . . . there was a kind of big falling out over The Last Movie . And though I don't see Marlon much, we talk from time to time. But nobody sees him.
I know with Marlon there's something that goes back to 1956, when we first met, and that is totally unbroken. I once got really frightened one night . . . I don't know why. I hardly knew Marlon, but I was scared. I couldn't stay in my apartment alone. I had a lot of friends, but the one person I thought to call was Marlon. I did. I said, "I'm scared," and he said, "Come up." I went up there at about one in the morning, and he was right at the door. He'd made some tea, a sandwich. He'd made up the guest room; the light was on. He couldn't have been more understanding. He didn't push, he didn't ask, "Why?" He just said, "If you want to talk, that's my room. Bang on the door anytime during the night." I had to be somewhere the next morning at about nine o'clock, so I just got up and left. We didn't talk again for maybe five months. You [rarely] encounter that kind of trust, especially on short acquaintance.
Independently, around this time, he, George Englund, and myself all got the idea of doing a film about the United Nations. About what the people did out in the field—the unsung people—in health, midwifery, agriculture. George, who was very young, not out of his twenties yet, somehow or other persuaded Y. Frank Freeman at Paramount to underwrite our adventure, so that the three of us could go in search of a story all through Southeast Asia.
Was it common for studios to be so generous towards a project still in the development stage?
No! Especially not without a property or a story or anything. The other thing George did, which was extraordinary, was to persuade the Secretariat of the United Nations to cooperate. They never cooperated [with film productions]. With Paramount Pictures? Why should they? They're supra-supranational. But they agreed. They sent word to every resident representative in Southeast Asia, in all the capitals of all the countries, that we were coming, and requested them to meet with us when we arrived and to bring in from the fields all the experts that we wanted to see. They were to expedite our visits and make us comfortable wherever we wanted to go. Unprecedented . . . and for this kid to organize it!
Marlon and George had a wonderful relationship. George was the top executive of Marlon's independent company called Pennebaker Films. I think Marlon, Sr., was president. They were the entity that Paramount was dealing with.
I remember one day, in 1956, when George took me up to Brando's house—
he lived on North Crescent Heights, up above the Strip, just above the Chateau Marmont, in a big house with a white tower. It was rented. We heard this drumming, and we paused on the spiral stair that went down this tower to the room where he was creating. He was whaling away at that drum, conga, bongos—he seemed to be playing everything at once. George whispered to me that we mustn't move too fast. Marlon looked magnificent. He was absolutely in top form. George and I froze on the stairs and suddenly Marlon looked up . . . and fell right over backwards. The intrusion on whatever was going on with him was so enormous that it literally knocked him right off his chair. Then he laughed.
I never got over my awe of Marlon during that whole period. He was the greatest star in the world and probably the most important actor. May still be. I had seen him in everything he'd done in New York, in Streetcar, in Candida, everything. I was just overwhelmed. Marlon knew that.
I was thirty-three. [Takes deep breath .] [On our way to Southeast Asia] we took a suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York, a three-bedroom suite with a huge living room. I was in my bedroom one night, trying to figure out some approach to this thing before we even got going so that I would have some fishing line to follow. It was snowing. I was standing there in my jockey shorts, letting the snow blow in the window all over me. I don't know what I was thinking of, but it was one of those mystical moments that people who are chronologically thirty-three, but feel about fourteen, go through. I was thinking, "God, this is the town I went to high school in. Where are all my high school friends? Where is everybody when I need them now? [In a mock tearful voice .] "Where's Mommy? Where's Daddy?"
Suddenly—I didn't even hear him come in—there was this arm around my shoulder. He said, without my having said anything, "You wouldn't be here if we didn't want you to be here. You wouldn't be here if we didn't need you here. You wouldn't be here if we didn't value you." Then he said, "I wouldn't be here if I didn't recognize that you and I came out of the same crucible of pain." Then he sat down and began telling me about his relationship with his mother, with his father, about his childhood. . . . He just made it so easy for me to be his friend. It set the tone for the whole next period, which was very difficult. Even to arrive at an airport with him took . . . It took six police cars to get him through the streets of Manila. The streets were packed; the airport looked like snow, there were so many white shirts that had been waiting there all night.
As time went on, I began to feel more and more as if I just didn't belong [in his company]. I was afraid I wouldn't find the story. I was so overcome by the responsibility of traveling with this guy. By having to hold up my end of the conversation every day for eight weeks. I was feeling less and less qualified as the minutes went by. Traveling around the world and comparing
myself with people I knew he knew. The writers I knew he knew . . . like Tennessee Williams.
What did you come up with, eventually, as a story?
We didn't come up with anything. I came up with a story which Marlon decided that he didn't want to do because it wasn't enough like an Alan Ladd film.
Meaning?
I don't know. He wanted a wide-shouldered adventure film, which none of us realized until he looked at the story I wrote. He never said anything about it all the time we were away together. I don't think that was the real reason. It was a time when he was turning everything down. Every piece of material was an enemy to him.
Because he didn't feel like working?
I don't think he really wanted to work. I think he's always had a tremendous conflict about that anyway. He has enormous regard for people who do useful things in the world. He thinks in some part of his soul that acting is silly. He has a kind of contempt for it. He considers it game-playing and trickery. I've never really heard him speak of an actor with any kind of respect or disrespect. I've never really heard him discuss acting . . . and never his own acting, except in a very jokey way. Delighting in all the tricks he's pulled as an actor.
Brando is very literate, right?
Highly, highly well read and sophisticated. It's hard for him to read, too. He sort of has to read aloud to himself. And it's curious reading. It's all over the place, and it's very much in line with whatever the core sampling of his interest is at the moment. He's full of remarkable little-known facts. He's like an anthropologist.
What happened after he rejected the screenplay? Then you wrote another version and that became The Ugly American?
No, no. That was the end of it. The script was called "Tiger on a Kite" and it was never made. That was the funny thing, because three years later [the book of] The Ugly American came out and I was called by Universal to write it. I said, "Well, there's only one person who you should get to be the producer for this thing, George Englund." I told them about this whole experience and they laughed. They said, "Well, George Englund is the one we hired . . . and Marlon is interested in doing it too." But the fact that we had the experience of being together in Southeast Asia for those eight weeks, and noticing what we noticed, made it really unnecessary to go back and do research.
I read somewhere that Brando had to have such a specific idea of what The Ugly American [1963] would be like that he had George Englund read him the script line by line before he would agree to do the film .
Stewart Stern (at right) with Marlon Brando and producer George Englund in Hong
Kong in 1956, searching for a story and forming the triumverate that went on to make
The Ugly American . (Courtesy of Stewart Stern)
There are probably pieces of truth in that story, and it probably didn't really happen that way. I think Marlon sometimes has to hear something and he has to read his own scripts aloud. He read me the movie he directed for Paramount [One-Eyed Jacks in 1961]; he read that whole thing aloud to me. Marlon fell asleep while he was reading his script to me—so did I. . . . Who knows why he would make George do that?
Was it your political outlook that informed The Ugly American script, or was it a story about the foolishness of the self-righteous?
That was what it was. The politics was as much an expression of that attitude as a painting is of the artist who paints it. We absolutely paint the world wrong, and when it doesn't correspond, we feel betrayed and act aggressively.
[Long silence.]
The reason why moviegoers felt that it didn't follow the book was because it didn't follow the book. I spent a long, long time writing a script that did follow the book—including the part about using bicycle power to pump water into the paddy fields.
George took the script to a village which we wanted to use, a wonderful village with terraced paddy fields. He sat down with the village elders and started explaining the story through the interpreter. Suddenly, all these mouths, which were red with betel juice, just broke into the most helpless laughter; they were falling all over in the dust at the notion of all these bicycles pedaling water straight up hill! First of all, the village spokesman said, "Do you know what it requires for us to be able to afford bicycles? And to have these bicycles being used as power to pump water? For centuries we've known that water comes down . . ." Then he showed us this elaborate, amazing series of aqueducts and bamboo sluiceways and water-powered wheels and things. The bicycle pump thing couldn't have worked at all on the scale described in the book.
So that was the springboard for you to rework the script?
That was the springboard for them to fire me. George felt that we had come to the end of a good try and that it simply hadn't worked. That we had been barking up the wrong tree. He thought we'd exhausted ourselves and that it would be good to get a clean start with somebody else. So, I was fired and I went and wrote The Outsider [1961]. David Zelag Goodman wrote another script for The Ugly American, which was not usable. Goodman was let go, as I had been before him, in the grand tradition of "blame the writer." George came to my office when I was doing my final rewrite on The Outsider and said, "You've got to come back." I said, "I can't come back. I won't come back. Impossible." He said, "Please, let's talk. You and I have a much more important story to tell than [Eugene] Burdick and [William J.] Lederer [co-authors of the bestselling novel The Ugly American ] did. We can use their characters. It's not about the rice fields, it's not about the bicycle pumps. It's not these people on the ground. It's what we do on a big scale, at the top."
So George had a series of ideas which was practically an outline. We sat down and worked on it and worked on it and worked on it, from scratch. George wasn't an official writer, but he contributed enormously and creatively to the story we finally told.
Was Brando a collaborative actor? Did he want to contribute to your script?
Not at the beginning. He was very concerned about the political balance. He did not want to have a script that was full of jingoism, except on the part of Joe Bing [the character of the U.S. public information officer in Sarkhan, played by Judson Pratt], who represented that attitude. But he wanted to be very, very careful about how the Soviet Union was portrayed and how the whole Cold War was treated. Especially when it came down to the relationship between Ambassador MacWhite [U.S. ambassador to Sarkhan] and Deong [a resistance fighter, played by Eiji Okada], his counterpart.
He also was inflamed about our own conduct overseas. I guess he felt more ashamed and infuriated by our clumsiness in a Third World society than any of [the rest of] us did. I think he's more sensitive. He noticed things. The smallest things would offend him deeply. On the most profound human level he would suffer if he saw acts of disregard, ones that could have been tiny and completely unconscious. It was really from watching Marlon respond, as much as from anything else, that I realized that the crime that could no longer be tolerated in the political arena was . . . our innocence. Which had once been so charming, the innocence of the "new" country, America. You couldn't be an innocent abroad any longer, there was no excuse for it.
At one point, Marlon finally approved the script. But what we'd find was that every morning on the set it would suddenly become his enemy, the way whole projects had become his enemy before. Except now he couldn't reject the project, because he was signed to do it and it was something that he had agreed to do. He had approved the script, he liked the scenes, he had worked on them, they all represented his input. Yet, when forced to confront a scene, to account for the fact that he might not have memorized it the night before, it became his enemy. So he would attack "it," in order, partly, to deflect attention from himself. Start blaming the script.
You must have felt extremely embattled .
It was very difficult. I was pretty rhino-hided by that time. It had happened to me so horribly before: those earliest moments in my career with Fred Zinnemann, who was my mentor and teacher and whose work I revered. I loved Marlon and I knew he loved me—it wasn't personal. I had seen him rage and blame, just hurl the blame around in a kind of mythic stance. He's Jovian when he flings the thunderbolts. You know part of it comes out of an easily offendable ethic and part of it comes out of simply not wanting to be caught doing something wrong. If he felt guilty about something, it was easier to attack everything around him than to face what he felt guilty about. Or to admit it.
One of the reasons that he and George Englund were friends was that George wouldn't accept this behavior. When Marlon would begin blaming George, George would just start laughing and say, "What are you feeling guilty about? Didn't you learn your lines? Is that what's going on?" They had a wonderful relationship, extremely trusting.
One day, we were supposed to film the confrontation scene between Marlon and Kukrit Pramjo, who played Kwen Sai, the prime minister of Sarkhan. Marlon looked at it and just thought that it was . . . terrible. He thought it was full of what he called "plot clinkers," those things you knock out of a pipe when the ash is dead and everything is hard. He said that's all it was, just a mess of plot clinkers. I said, "But you approved this scene. We worked on this. You said it was great and everything had been cured." He said, "Well, it hasn't. I looked at it again and it doesn't work."
Writers, well, a lot of us go on the assumption that if someone thinks what we write is bad, they might be right. So I was very sensitive to that, and he knew that too. Marlon used to say he could play me like a pipe organ. He just knew what valve to pull and what peddle to push and that he could get any sound out of me that he wanted to. I'm sure that he's right. And it's kind of fun to be played by a great player.
This was one of the key turning points of the film. I thought I had sort of covered over my own inefficiencies in that scene. But suddenly the radar was on it, and this thing that had been a friend to him was an enemy. And I realized that this time it was not to cover up anything that Marlon was guilty about. He was right, unquestionably right. And I didn't have a solution. He began challenging me, he began improvising as the ambassador. He would stand up in his dressing-room trailer and glare right in my eyes and demand to know what the Communists were doing up on the northern border. Challenge me to respond. Force me to be the prime minister. He was saying things like [in a loud, enraged shout ] "I don't care if I approved this scene before—I PISS ON IT!" And he would throw [the script] across the trailer. Then I would pick it up and throw it back.
The heat of it, the emotion of it, got us both screaming at each other. One or two very good lines passed our lips in the course of this that we then sat down and talked about. I wish I could remember the specifics of it. But something was generated in me that ideas began to come, that I felt this flush of emotion . . . that I had to write down. So, I went back and wrote a new scene—really a brand-new scene and brought it to him.
That didn't happen to me much on The Ugly American . It was an arm's-length film for me, it wasn't a revelation about some teenage boy who had problems. Marlon laughed the next day. He said, "Boy, to see you fight. I can't tell you what that meant to me. You got shoulders . It was wonderful to go head-to-head with you."
Had you ever had to defend your scripts in that manner before?
I had had to defend my scripts a lot. But I had never before let myself get that mad at somebody I needed that much.
A common thread in your films is that they could be extremely candid. Take, for example, the final scene of The Ugly American: While Marlon Brando as Ambassador MacWhite attempts, in an impassioned televised speech, to
right all the damage he has done, you have an apathetic viewer switch off the television set while he is mid-sentence. That scene displays a cynicism that must have been extremely rare in American films of that time .
For that scene, I had written a very long narration for Marlon that went on and on and on. To our amazement, he actually memorized it. I mean, we were thunderstruck. He hates to memorize things. He writes things on the inside of his hand, on the back of couches, has fake earphones so the dialogue can be pumped into his ear. It's partly, he feels that he wants to protect his own spontaneity. Like, in The Ugly American, he wore wax earplugs, and I didn't know why he wouldn't answer me when I would talk to him on the set. He wouldn't even see that it was me asking. One day he told me that he had plugged his ears with wax because the ambassador had to listen in a certain way; he had to listen as if through a wall . . . because he needed the information so badly. So Marlon will resort to anything.
About that [television] scene, I remember thinking, "We are sending this movie out and it will be perceived as a Marlon Brando movie, and nobody is going to give a shit about anything we're really trying to say, and say through him! [Begins to shout .] How could I tell the people of America that [Americans] don't give a shit . . . and that that is what is wrong?" That's how I got the idea of them not giving a shit and showing them to them . Maybe, in some indirect way, they would get the importance of what we were saying. Get it to step out of being a movie and get it to become their experience. That's how it occurred to me.
I remember going in to see Mel Tucker, who was the executive in charge of that film, and explaining to him what I wanted him to do. I thought it was amazingly courageous for the studio that was investing all this money in an uncertain project to put that ending on it. I never thought they'd buy it. I love that ending.
What was the official reaction from the U.S. government?
George Englund and I were denounced by Senator Fulbright, who stated in the Congressional Record, before he even read the script, that we were taking a very sensitive area of the world and turning it into an Elizabeth Taylor movie. She was never even considered for it.
There was a lot of animosity [towards the movie]. Also, the world hadn't caught up with what we knew. We were Cassandras then. No one from Hollywood knew that Laos was going to happen, that Vietnam was going to happen. We knew from our trip to Southeast Asia in connection with "Tiger on a Kite" that it was inevitable and that it would be worse. That it would go on and on and on until people finally got the message. Which Nicaragua proves perfectly that we haven't gotten. We will continue to mix around in other people's business because they're not like us . . . forever! Until finally we're taught a lesson.
Were your collaborations with Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman the most positive experiences you've had in writing screenplays?
They were very difficult. Never difficult with Joanne. But very difficult with Paul. Because of difficulty in communication. I tend to be very verbal. And Paul is minimalistic. Very often I won't get what he really means. Also, he is refined in a way that I'm not. He is selective in a way that I'm not. He refers to me as "baroque" and I refer to him as "linear Cleveland mind." To each other. I mean, that's how we talk to each other.
Are these difficulties over the script?
There were times on Rachel, Rachel, for example, both in the script and on the set, where he would feel things got too emotional or too overdramatized. That we didn't need it. He is very much in favor of the actor retelling an experience, so that we see the actor's experience through the actor's performance. Instead of showing it literally. He had a lot of resistance in that picture to showing Joanne making love with the character played by James Olson. When we got on the set, he didn't want to shoot it.
Because it was his wife?
I think that had something to do with it. But he didn't want excess. He thought things were much better left implied than stated. It informed the way he shot it. I saw it the other night again. It is the most beautiful sex scene I've ever seen on the screen. Because it's so implied, so discreet. It stays with her experience of . . . is she good enough? That's Paul's sensibility.
But he wasn't going to shoot the scene at all. [Editor] Dede Allen and I had to practically break his arm with the argument that it's better to shoot it and have it than to make that kind of decision on the set. Because he could always decide not to use it. So he agreed to shoot it. He agreed to shoot the embalming scene, where the character of young Rachel [played by Nell Potts, Newman and Woodward's daughter] goes in and sees the little boy being embalmed. I mean, we were all set up, the camera was there, and he didn't want to shoot it.
Because he felt the scene would be too disturbing for his young daughter to witness?
Yes. Once he saw what the scene looked like, he didn't want Nell to have to see it. He thought it would be too much for the audience, too.
What was it like trying to cope with Newman's sudden surges of protectiveness towards his family? Especially when it meant that your script would suffer as a result?
Very, very difficult. To try and maintain the friendship throughout was very difficult. There were times when we simply didn't talk to each other. Still, every day I was on the set. My obsessive watchfulness became a very heavy burden both for Paul and for Joanne. Finally, they had me sitting on a catwalk with a plank in front of me, looking through a knothole, so they couldn't see my expression. It bothered them that much.
Stewart Stern (with dark glasses) being "helpful" on the set while Paul Newman
endeavors to direct Terry Kiser and Larry Fredericks in the Tabernacle scene
from Rachel, Rachel . (Photo: Muky, for Kayos Productions, Warner Brothers;
courtesy of Stewart Stern)
It begins to sound like a painful process of collaboration, for you, working with Newman .
Difficult, but rewarding. . . . When the Tabernacle scene took three days longer than Paul thought it would, and we wanted to catch the beginning of the changing of the leaves for the very last sequence, he told me to go out and storyboard the whole thing so that he could just come out [and film]. And I did. I did the whole sequence shot-for-shot and checked my directions with Dede Allen, making sure that I had people looking camera right and camera left when they should. I storyboarded the whole design of Rachel's walk through the countryside, after the kiss with Calla [Estelle Parsons], where the child flees and becomes Rachel, picking the flowers in the meadow. Long shot of Rachel walking down the hill, discovering the farm—all that, I designed entirely. And Paul Newman just simply filmed it, moving from location to location.
It was the kind of collaboration that could support that. We simply supported each other all the way through. By the last shot, we were short of equipment. The dolly and everything had had to go back because we were out
of money. Instead of a dolly, for the last shot, the cameraman sat in a Safeway supermarket basket and I pushed him. He had the camera between his knees.
You've continued to collaborate with them. You've recently completed a book-length account of twelve days of rehearsals of The Glass Menagerie, a production which Newman directed and Woodward starred in. And aren't you working on an authorized biography for Paul?
Well . . . I'm having a problem now with Paul, whom I've known for thirty-three years. He did ask me me to write his biography and, as well as I know him, I have real difficulty about making up my mind about the book. There's a lot I know simply as his friend that I don't want to talk about. There's a lot that I only suspect because he doesn't know himself that well. Which I could string together and make some kind of theory of and try to prove it. Probably three theories and take my choice, because there are so many streams in him.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
I can't really. He is so—not contradictory—it's just like streams, like four or five streams in him that run parallel and that never seem to cross. They appear and disappear; you see the shine and then it's gone. There's nothing, not an echo. Then there's a flash of light further on. You could put it all together and make a theory out of it, any one of these streams, saying, "This is the real Paul Newman." But I don't know. I wouldn't presume to do that. Even knowing him as long as I've known him.
Your relationship with Dennis Hopper has had similar ups and downs .
Dennis and I had such a love-hate relationship. It was a really painful time for me, the making of [The Last Movie ]. I have known Dennis since Rebel . He kind of hung around the Chateau Marmont. Paul and Joanne [Woodward] were staying there. And Tony Perkins. Jimmy Costigan, the writer. Warren Beatty, I think. We were friendly with Joan Collins, because she was going with Arthur [Loew]. We were always kind of together, either around the Chateau pool or up at Arthur's. Anyway, Dennis was one of the kids. And he and I got to be friendly after Jimmy [Dean] died. He fascinated me because he had ideas before anybody else did.
I always thought they were silly ideas. He would point out paintings that he thought were art, and I would get infuriated because the art seemed to have no history, tradition, background. I felt many of the artists that he was admiring seemed to come from nowhere. I felt they were sort of starting from each other. History was suddenly being looked upon with great contempt.
I feel it's important to have a sense of oneself as part of artistic continuity. It's the same thing that infuriates me when I go to the film department at a major university where they are giving out film degrees and no one has ever heard of Clifford Odets. To me, it's the Dark Ages. There's going to have to be a Renaissance where people again discover their own history. Film didn't begin with [Steven] Spielberg, you know. I just don't understand. It's a re-
markable lack of responsibility on the part of the educators. It's like giving degrees to people who can't spell. Suddenly, improvisation is supposed to be better than literature.
Is that what happened with The Last Movie?
I know that's what happened. That script wasn't taken out of my hands so much as put aside. It's still perfectly serviceable.
Were you on location while the movie was being shot?
No.
How did you discover that the script had, essentially, been discarded?
When I began reading articles, interviews with Dennis in which he said that there was no script and the [film] was all his idea . . . that he didn't need a script.
I wrote to him about it and told him that that was . . . not . . . accurate. Not an accurate representation. Later, he called me from Taos and said he was having trouble editing it, and would I come down there and help him? So I did. I went down and he ran all of the footage for me and for his agent at the time. We looked at film for about two days. Mainly, what I felt was very disappointed, not only that he didn't use the scenes as they were written in the screenplay and that he chose to improvise with people who were not up to that kind of improvisation, but also that he hadn't shot scenes that were essential. Including the ending of the picture.
Did you tell him that?
Well, I very strongly supported the idea of his going back and shooting the scenes as written. He wouldn't do it. Dennis and I have different opinions about the value of the movie he made. I think that he would have been much better off had he stayed with the screenplay. He acknowledges the value of the screenplay, but feels that that wasn't the picture that he had in mind then, and that he certainly isn't ashamed of having done what he did. I absolutely respect him for that.
Maybe you can still go back and do your version of The Last Movie, one of these days .
I suggested it. And Dennis thought it was not a bad idea. I said that we should double-feature them. Do the script. Cast it with somebody who should really play that stuff. Then show them as a double feature: The Last Movie and The Next Last Movie .
Despite your unhappy experience with The Last Movie, would you collaborate with Hopper again?
Anytime.
Do you feel that Dennis has grown as an artist since then?
Much. I think that what he has accomplished as a man in overcoming the habit, the addiction [to drugs], takes such courage. . . . You don't get addicted for no reason; you get addicted because it's the only possible way you can live your life. For him, without finding a way to live his life, to be able
to let go of that . . . to have that courage . . . was what changed him from what I felt was really a negative force, a dark spirit, into someone who can do enormous good.
To me, the performance in Hoosiers [1986] was the best that I've seen from Dennis. I long for Dennis to start dealing with the things that really, really have touched him. Kansas, the farm in Kansas, his grandparents. I always told him that I didn't know how deeply his connection to other people really ran. And that until he could really feel what they felt, he couldn't be an artist. I saw some of that in Hoosiers, a vulnerability. And I wish that he would let himself be moved again by his own childhood. There's a side of him which is authentic, and certainly much simpler than Robert Frost. That is absolutely American. Not just America at its hippest, but America at its most traditional.
Why did you decide to leave Hollywood, ultimately? Did you feel that those who run the New Hollywood are not people you can create for?
I didn't ever really come across the New Hollywood. The people who continued to offer me assignments were not New Hollywood. They were people who also felt besieged, or thought they were about to be. That's not why I left. I left because I just got . . . scared of the writing process. I seemed to have given over power to other people's minds. It's the thing I swore would never happen. The thing Clifford Odets once told me was the death of all writers. He said, "When you start seeing the other person's point of view, that's when you're in ultimate danger."
So your confidence was shattered?
It was assailed. I think as much from the inside as from the outside.
Producers and directors begin to tear down or diminish or reject ideas that are in the process of being born. . . . I'm talking about sitting in a story conference a third of the way into a screenplay, and when you venture a notion, it is cut off at the ankles—the pain of that, the insult, and I mean an insult that you physically feel [throughout] your whole system; because it's your offering, and it's not yet finished, and you're exposing it in the hope that the person you trust who is there to grow the project with you is going to be tender about it. When they're totalitarian, it breaks your bones. Rather than go through that pain, you shut down. You turn over the decisions. It got to the point where I was handing them my research and saying, "You check the margins and tell me what interests you." I got so fearful of offering ideas that I no longer even knew what ideas I had. I made myself available to absorb theirs.
So did your writer's block about screenwriting come from years of being abused at the hands of insensitive filmmakers, or did the rules in Hollywood change too much?
I think it was more of an internal announcement. One of the reasons I came
up here [to Seattle] was to see whether, without all of that outside pressure, I could originate something out of the soul as I once did before there was a job waiting. Of course, I immediately filled my time to the point that I haven't had the opportunity to face that, which is the thing I'm going to have to face. To just start with five-finger exercises. To see what it's like to put words together that I like to read. Or that feel good coming out. That come out bravely.
I look at my manuscripts, like Rebel . It was written in green ink on a legal pad. There's not a hesitation, not a correction. I look at the thing I did for [producer] Jerry Hellman, which was never made, a script called "Jessica," and the page is black with reconsiderations. You almost can't find your way from word to word because of the arrows and the balloons and the crossing-out on the page. That tells me something about what I'm allowing to come out. If it's so hard to permit something to see the light of day, it must be coming out in a terrible state of defensiveness. That's a cost that finally became unbearable to me.
So I don't blame anything, except the attrition of a process which may inevitably work that way on certain people. All the people that I have worked with range from magnificently talented to honorable men. I say men, because I've never really worked with a female producer or director. All of them aspiring, trying to do the best, all having picked me for the most generous human reasons. . . . I don't come as an easy package: I'm slow, I'm deliberate, I do a lot of research, I suffer, I make people feel guilty if they hurt me. Yet, even with all of that, even with their best efforts to share in the vision and to be supportive, I guess if you offer ideas enough times that are nailed before they're born, something finally happens. You say, "Well, I'm not going to offer them." Next, you can't remember what they are. After that, ideas only exist in someone else's mind, and all you can do is execute their ideas.
Is this the same thing that happened to the antiheroes you feel so close to? Work, to Marlon Brando, as you've described, has become his enemy. Do you think that this would have eventually happened to James Dean as well?
Well, Jimmy was the curious one, because, in a way, he was tougher than any of us. He was wily, shrewd, political. He used people in the way that Marlon does. He drank people in order to feed, in Jimmy's case, not only his art, which is why Marlon does it, but also his ambition. I never saw that kind of ambition in Marlon. His digestion of other human beings was to inform his art. And when I say "digestion," I don't mean that he sucked the sap out of people and then threw them away. He's one of the most loyal friends. When you go to Marlon's sixtieth birthday party, you see the same people there that were there when he was in his twenties. Plus whoever he has gathered in the meantime. He's an honorable man, really honorable.
Some of us just have one story to tell, and the only reason we tell it as
"A real need for connection": Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, and James Dean, in a
publicity pose from the film Rebel Without a Cause, script by Stewart Stern,
directed by Nicholas Ray. (Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
writers is that we couldn't make ourselves heard as people. It comes from a very private place, very, very long ago. When we were trying to appeal for understanding . . . to our parents. And then created a series of symbols in the hope that somebody, whom we didn't even know, would hear us. I know, looking back on all the films I've written, that they're all the same story.
Which is?
[Long silence .] They have to do with the acknowledgment that someone has value, though he may not think he has. That someone who is injured, crippled in some way, finds through someone else the courage to conceive of himself as different and whole. About someone who is willing to go through a wall of risk, to trade whatever comfort that he might have extracted out of an impossible situation for an unknown, where calamity is just as likely as redemption.
Do you believe that is why a movie like Rebel speaks to every generation of youth?
In the case of Rebel it may be universal only because it's so specific. That was a group of very particular characters. I did a lot of research and collected a lot of things. But the only research you ever use is what reflects you.
I think one of the things that it [Rebel] talked about was love, a real need for connection. And for the recognition that everything that people condemn in us as some kind of nefarious behavior—experimental behavior, dangerous behavior—is absolutely pure, sweet, incorrect reaching-out. Living on the assumption that people are trustworthy. On the assumption that, as Marlon said, we all come out of the same crucible of pain. That we are all human and that nothing stands in the way of that.
Daniel Taradash:
Triumph and Chaos
Interview by David Thomson
"Please tell Dan Taradash how much I liked it," wrote James Jones to the producer of From Here to Eternity (1953). "I don't see how in hell he could have managed all the rearrangements he has . . . and still come up with an interpretation that hits so close to the original intention of the book."
This was no polite praise. Jones had had an inglorious shot at adapting his own book first. Even Columbia's chief, Harry Cohn, was losing heart with a property so damning of the army and so riddled with "pornographic" language that maybe no one could bring it to the screen in a manner fit for Eisenhower's America.
Dan Taradash's visionary solutions—especially the handling of the Maggio character—seem so "right," it is hard to believe they are not in the original novel. Moreover, as this interview makes clear, Taradash was a leading supporter of Fred Zinnemann as director of the film, and a participant in the cunning casting program that had so much to do with the artistic success and the overcoming of audience distaste for the famously "dirty" book. After all, if Donna Reed and Deborah Kerr could do it, then surely the Midwest could see it.
From Here to Eternity remains a brilliant example of Hollywood's constructive compromise. It is not quite the book, yet it can have disappointed very few readers; it does not go easy on the army, but only because it soars on the romantic individualism of its lead characters. Montgomery Clift's Prewett may be the most appealing and least self-pitying rebel Hollywood has ever produced. The picture had a domestic film rental of over $12 million in 1953–1954; it won Best Picture, as well as Oscars for Sinatra, Reed, cameraman Burnett Guffey, Zinnemann, and screenwriter Daniel Taradash.
Who could have guessed then that nothing would ever again be quite as good for the writer? In hindsight, Taradash can be seen as a master of adaptation, and a quiet, gentle craftsman, always inclined to go home to Florida, who somehow got along with the abrasive, overbearing Harry Cohn. From Golden Boy (1939) to Bell, Book and Candle (1958), Taradash worked for Columbia on most of his projects, despairing of the boss frequently, yet feeling the hole left in the business when Cohn died. However rough he was to deal with, Cohn got good pictures made and he allowed Taradash his chance at directing, on Storm Center (1956).
The disappointments that began around 1960 have not dimmed Taradash's humor or goodwill. Still, the list of projects shelved or spoiled in the making is a chronicle of the disasters that befell independent production in the 1960s.
A great deal of Taradash's best time and effort were given to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and to the Writers Guild. A member of the guild since 1939, he has served on over thirty of its committees, often as chair, and he was president of the Writers Guild West from 1977 to 1979, as well as a trustee of its Pension Plan from 1960 to 1973.
As for the academy, he was a board member from 1964 to 1974 and president from 1970 to 1973. It was in that period that the building on Wilshire Boulevard was approved as a home for the excellent theater and the Margaret Herrick Library. In addition, Taradash is proud to have urged the giving of the Thalberg Award to Ingmar Bergman and to have led the campaign for a special "homecoming" award to Charlie Chaplin.
Not that he has given up screenwriting. In December 1987, when this interview was conducted at his home in Beverly Hills, Taradash was at work on a script about the life of Polish labor leader Lech Walesa, with old friend Stanley Kramer as director and television game-show producer Ralph Andrews as the "nut" who thought it could work. There had been a trip to Gdansk as far-fetched and turbulent as anything from the days with Cohn or Jed Harris. The Walesa project seemed less viable than many other scripts Taradash had believed in. But in the film climate of the late 1980s, that was no reason for thinking it wouldn't get made.
Daniel Taradash (1913–)
1939
Golden Boy (Rouben Mamoulian). Co-script.
For Love or Money (Albert S. Rogell). Co-screen story.
1940
A Little Bit of Heaven (Andrew Marton). Co-script.
1948
The Noose Hangs High (Charles Barton). Remake of For Love or Money .
1949
Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray). Co-script.
Daniel Taradash in Los Angeles, 1988. (Photo: Alison Morley)
1952
Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang). Script.
Don't Bother to Knock (Roy Baker). Script.
1953
From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann). Script.
1954
Désirée (Henry Koster). Script.
1956
Storm Center (Daniel Taradash). Director, co-script, co-screen story.
Picnic (Joshua Logan). Script.
1958
Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine). Script.
1965
Morituri [a.k.a. The Saboteur: Code Name Morituri ] (Bernhard Wicki). Script.
1966
Hawaii (George Roy Hill). Co-script.
Alvarez Kelly (Edward Dmytryk). Uncredited contribution.
1969
Castle Keep (Sydney Pollack). Co-script.
1971
Doctors' Wives (George Schaefer). Script.
1977
The Other Side of Midnight (Charles Jarrott). Co-script.
Plays include Red Gloves (adapted from the Sartre play) and There Was a Little Girl .
Television credits include "Bogie" (1980 teleplay). Academy Awards include Best Screenplay for From Here to Eternity .
Writers Guild awards include a best-script nomination for Picnic and the award for the best-written drama of 1953 for From Here to Eternity .
When I look at the facts of your life, it looks like someone who was heading for one career, the law, but there was something else under the surface .
Well, that's not altogether true. I was an only child, and my father was extremely anxious for me to be a lawyer. I didn't really know what I wanted—I just had a feeling I wanted to be a writer, because I had done some writing at Harvard and received favorable indications from some of the professors that there was possibly something there. But because my father wanted me to, I went to Harvard Law School—I think I had the largest number of cut classes in the history of the law school. And eventually I passed the New York bar exam. But while I was in law school I wrote a play which I sent to an agent in New York, and she indicated that it wouldn't work on Broadway, but there was something there.
I looked at my father and I said, "You've supported me seven years. And I want you to give me enough money to live on one more year. I want to try to be a writer." And then he looked at me and said, "Well, I think you're a damn fool. If you would ask me for five years, I'd take that seriously and respect it. But the notion you can spend one year in New York and you're going to be a writer is damn foolishness."
But he did it, because, he said, "I don't want you in ten years to say to me, if you'd only given me that one year I would have been so forth and so forth."
Except I fooled him. I wrote a play that year and entered it in a nationwide contest, and the money for the contest was put up by the motion picture companies, which were fairly intelligent in those days about reaching out
and finding people. There were three fellowships as prizes, and I won one and Helene Hanff won one![*] There was a playwriting course we took, and out of that—it was a great lucky break—came the first job in Hollywood.
We're talking about Golden Boy?
[Director] Rouben Mamoulian was going to do Golden Boy for Columbia, and they gave him a script which they had had prepared by two older writers. He threw it in the wastebasket and said, "I can't use this. We'll go to New York and try to get Clifford Odets." But Odets was apparently pursuing Luise Rainer, and she was in Paris. So somebody said to Mamoulian, Why don't you take a look at stuff the people at the playwriting course are doing? He did, and he liked two of us—Lewis Meltzer and me.[**] He called us together and said, "I'll have Columbia employ you both for a couple of weeks. Go away and each write me a script for the first twenty minutes of the film." I wrote in one part of town and Meltzer in another, and we gave Mamoulian the material. He said, "I simply can't decide between you. I'll take you both!" He told Harry Cohn he was going to take two $200-a-week writers. Cohn screamed at him and said, "For Christ's sake, forget that nonsense and get yourself a $5,000 writer." Well, Mamoulian wasn't that type, and it worked out.
Did you work as a team then?
Oh yes. Mamoulian never wrote anything, but he talked about it all the time as we went along. He was so intelligent, and he had a very private, very charming sense of humor. Harry Cohn was driving him crazy. I remember meetings with Cohn where I was writing down notes from Cohn—"Make it more Capranese!" Stuff like that. Mamoulian was fed up with it. "Look, Harry," he said, "you're driving me nuts. I know a guest ranch in the desert near Victorville. Let me take those two boys out there and we'll bring you back a script in eight weeks." One of the most delightful experiences I ever had was working with Mamoulian and Meltzer in the desert.
Was it chance that there is a resemblance between the young man's situation in Golden Boy and what you'd been through in the law and writing?
To be honest with you, it never occurred to me. I don't think that much creative work was involved. It was a structural job and a dialogue job. We stuck pretty close to the play.
Did you foresee, then, that movies would be your career?
I wanted to be a playwright. When we finished Golden Boy, Meltzer stayed in California, but I went back to New York to finish my play, and Columbia
* Helene Hanff is known principally as the author of many dramatic television programs of the 1950s, as well as children's books, other books, and magazine articles. Her twenty-year transatlantic correspondence with the owner of an antiquarian bookshop in London became the source of a play and of the film 84 Charing Cross Road (1981).
** Apart from Golden Boy, Lewis Meltzer's long list of scripting credits includes The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942), Along the Great Divide (1951), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), and High School Confidential (1958).
was very angry with me. So they punished me: when I came back they put me in the Katzman [producer Sam Katzman] unit, the B pictures. I did a script there based on Warden Lawes of Sing Sing—it was never made—and at the end of that they dropped my option.
Almost immediately after that I had a strange job with Joe Pasternak at Universal. They were grooming a girl named Gloria Jean to be the next Deanna Durbin, and it was a picture called A Little Bit of Heaven [1940]. I was one of three or four writers who worked consecutively on it.
Then there's an interval in your screen work which is the war?
I went back East because my mother was dying, and I just stayed with her and my father in Florida, and I wrote another play which I sold to a Broadway producer. I had a very low draft number. I would have been in the army earlier, but my draft board let me remain in Florida until my mother died. That was the end of February 1941, and in May I was in the army. But I was over twenty-eight, and there was a rule that civilians drafted over twenty-eight were discharged. With the proviso that if something important happened, you would be jerked right back in—and something important happened, so the play never got done.
The army was a big shock. I had been a Boy Scout, but not a very good one. My mother's death was somewhat traumatic, and then joining the army right afterwards in a whole different world was very good for me. But I didn't think it was good at the time.
I went to Officers' Candidate School after a while, and I hoped it would send me to the Signal Corps Photographic Unit, which was making the films for the army. It did, except they sent me first to the Army War College in Washington, where I helped write a Fighting Men series called Kill or Be Killed . Ed North was the other writer on the series.[*] Then they sent me to Long Island City and I worked on training films. One of them, Lifeline, was shown everywhere by the Red Cross to get blood donors. I was working with "film" there, which a writer would normally never get near in Hollywood.
How did you get back into the business?
A good friend of mine at college was [producer] Julian Blaustein and he was at the Signal Corps Photographic Unit—he made the famous film with Harold Russell which really led to Russell's getting the job with Willy Wyler on The Best Years of Our Lives [1946].[**] Well, he went to work after the war
* Edmund H. North, who also served with the Army Signal Corps, wrote for the screen from the mid-1930s and was responsible, alone or with co-writers, for several outstanding scripts, including Colorado Territory (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Proud Ones (1956), and Cowboy (1958). North collaborated on the Oscar-winning script for Patton in 1970.
** Harold Russell was a World War II paratrooper who lost both hands in a grenade explosion. The army documentary The Diary of a Sergeant, which depicted the rehabilitation of an amputee, led to his role in William Wyler's 1946 film about civilian life after World War II and to an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.
with [David O.] Selznick as a story editor. Allan Scott was producing for Selznick, and Julie told him I would be good on an idea he had.[*] It was a thing called "Intimate Notes"—I read it again just last night and I was pleased—but Selznick didn't make any movies that year.
Did you still have attachments or obligations at Columbia?
I did know a story editor there, Eve Ettinger. That's how I got the job on the movie Bob Lord produced—Knock on Any Door [1949]. Eve called and said, "Why don't you come in. I think Bob Lord needs you." John Monks had written a draft, and they weren't happy with it. I knew Bob slightly from the army. He was a pleasant man and he did know what he wanted. Since he had also been a writer, there was the temptation of picking up the pencil and making changes. It wasn't good writing in my opinion. But he was an oddball. He was doing yoga when nobody had heard of it! I had a very good time with Bob on the picture, and Bogart was very pleasant. I think Nick Ray was strange and remote—I never got to know him in a personal way. He did a good workmanlike job, and he got as much out of John Derek as anybody could.
By that time were you living in Hollywood?
Not really. My wife and I had an apartment in New York, and my father had the house in Florida. I was a legal resident of Florida until 1977. We would drive from Florida to California in the spring every year, with a dog usually—we were breeding Dalmatians and showing them. I never could accept that I was living permanently in California. I guess if I had believed I was in Hollywood, then I would have given up this dream of the theater.
And it was at this time, 1948, that you had your Broadway experience with Red Gloves and [producer] Jed Harris?
It ran over 100 performances, but by the time the play opened I was—disenchanted is not the word—I loathed Jed Harris. He was a terrible sadist. He would humiliate you in front of the whole cast at rehearsals. The thing that disappointed me most was I never saw his "genius." He'd walked over to me one night in Murphy's, a prime-rib place, and said, "My name is Jed Harris." And he asked me would I do this play. I fell in love with him—I don't mean physically, but I revered him. I'd seen the plays, I'd even liked The Lake with Katharine Hepburn. Anyway, it wound up with my being physically afraid of the man! At one point he was screaming, about one o'clock in the morning. We were infuriated with each other about something in the play. He picked up a glass—I think it was a cognac glass—and I swear to God he was going to throw it right in my face. I tried to calm him down: "Come on, Jed—maybe you're right."
I've often said Jed Harris had two ambitions: to be a Gentile and to be a writer. But he could be one of the most charming men I'd ever met. I recall
* Allan Scott is interviewed in Volume 1 of Backstory .
sitting in a bar with him late at night, and he put his arm round me and told me wonderful things. I don't even remember what they were, but they were calculated to make me feel awfully good. Then he said, "Now, Dan, you know I've done a lot of work on this, don't you?" And then it led up to the fact he wanted my royalties! My God, I really believed him for a while. He was evil, enjoyed hurting people. He hurt [producer] Jean Dalrymple all the time. I don't know how the hell she took it—I guess she was in love with him. Red Gloves was a nightmare. Charles Boyer was the only ray of hope and light because he was a wonderful actor.
Rancho Notorious [1952] comes next. Did that always seem like a parody of a Western?
Well, it was. An agent named Milton Pickman called and said, "I can get you a job with Fritz Lang if you're interested, but I want to be the agent." Now I was doing something else, an anti-McCarthy picture for Stanley Kramer [which became Storm Center ], so I said, "I'll ask for something outrageous and they won't give it to me: $1,500 a week." They agreed!
Another thing was I met Lang. I read the story which had been written by Sylvia Richards,[*] but Lang had a great influence on it. He was a devotee of the American West, with a wonderful library. I said, "Mr. Lang, the only way I can see to do it is to put in something special. But instead of a narrator, I think we should use a ballad and jingles." This threw him for a loop, but it didn't change the picture much. Couple of days later, he said, "All right, let's do it." I learned more about screenwriting from Fritz Lang than from anyone. We would sit at his house over his dreadful coffee (the worst I've ever tasted) and we'd go over the stuff I was writing. I was showing him pages—that was mandatory. And he was literally working in every angle, over-the-shoulder shots, stuff like that. I learned how to choreograph a script. I said, "Why are you doing it this way?" He said, "I'll tell you, Dan. I love this story and what you're doing. But I am close to falling out with these guys"—our producers—" and it would not surprise me if at some point I am off the picture. I want a script that even an idiot can shoot."
But Fritz finished the picture, and he told me he had turned it in at an hour and forty-five. A few weeks later I ran into Howard Welsch, one of the producers, and asked how did he like it. "Oh, fine," he said. "I cut fifteen minutes out of it." Now I knew it had been a tight cut for Fritz, so I said, "What did you cut?" And, so help me God, Welsch said, "I cut the mood!"
I think on From Here to Eternity your own great success was in "solving" how to do the book .
Well, the only person I know of who had worked on it was Jim Jones
* Sylvia Richards's other script credits include another Fritz Lang film, The Secret Beyond the Door (1948), as well as Possessed (1946), Tomahawk (1951), and Ruby Gentry (1952).
himself. He wrote a treatment, and he ruined his book. He was worried about censorship—everyone was—and in his treatment, the captain's wife (the Deborah Kerr role) is his sister! No movie. And the captain didn't apply the "treatment" to Prewett. He was a nice fellow and when he found out about it, he got furious.
I read the novel and thought, How the hell are you going to make a movie? And my wife and I were driving and I just sort of saw this movie. I went to Eve Ettinger and said I thought I could lick it. She got me in to see Buddy Adler, I told him a couple of ideas, and he flipped. In no time I was in Harry Cohn's bedroom. This was where he liked to have his meetings.
I said, "I'll give you two ideas. The first one is, instead of Maggio just petering out and being discharged and sent back to Brooklyn Maggio should be just the way he is [eventually portrayed] in the film." And the moment in the book when Prew played "Taps" had no reason. I said, "It's when Maggio dies! You've got a great second-act curtain." And I said you should intercut the two love stories, but they should never meet. The audience will get the impression that somehow they are related.
So Cohn said, "Negotiate with Briskin [staff executive Irving Briskin]." I asked for 2 1/2 percent profit participation—which was really the first time a writer had had that. I believe they went with it because they never thought it would happen! We're never going to get anywhere with this movie, so give him whatever he wants! Cohn, I think, had got discouraged about it. He paid $85,000 for the book, and he wondered if he had made a mistake, because the New York office was laughing at him. They thought, with all the "fucks" all over the book, you can't do it. They didn't stop to think you don't need that word. So I said to Harry, "Do you mind if I do some of this at home?" I think I meant Florida. He said, "As far as I'm concerned, with this book you can write it in a whorehouse!"
And the screenplay you did was very close to the final movie?
Very much. There were innumerable conferences with Harry Cohn, and with Fred Zinnemann after he got on the project. Cohn always liked to talk primarily to the writers, and his whole method was to irritate you, ask the same thing over and over until he drove you to the wall. When he saw you were about to attack him physically, he said all right, go ahead, do it, because he knew you really believed in it. But that can drive you crazy after six months. At one point I walked out because I thought I was going to vomit. [Producer] Buddy Adler calmed me down. He had a soothing influence, and he helped Freddie by being a buffer.
I had seen Teresa: I thought Zinnemann had done a marvelous job with the GIs in that picture. I said to Adler, take a look, and he was very impressed. And we said, Let's see if we can talk Harry into this. Zinnemann was then shooting a picture up in Stockton, Member of the Wedding [1952],
and word was coming down that he was being very difficult. Cohn said, "Look, I can't do it, Dan. I got too much at stake on this picture to take any chance with a guy who may be trouble."
By then Zinnemann had seen the script, and we had a very good relationship from the word go. I said, "All right, Harry, it's your studio. But one day I'm going to work with Zinnemann." I think that impressed Cohn. He said, "I'll tell you what. Zinnemann is finishing next week in Stockton. I'm going to have him in my office, and I'm going to have the other fellow who's been feeding me the information about the trouble. At the same time. Is that fair?" And that's the last we ever heard of Zinnemann not doing the picture.
Were you part of the casting process?
Yes. Zinnemann said he couldn't do it without Monty Clift. Cohn said, "No. I've got Aldo Ray here. He's going to be a big star. Let me make a star out of this picture. This is my studio, and the people in New York have a right to expect something." Freddie said, "I know Aldo Ray. He will be a big star"—nobody believed that—"but this isn't the right picture for him." But Zinnemann said he would test him. And they did the scene in the New Congress Club. They had to get an actress to play with Ray, and they sent over a girl under contract at Columbia. It was Donna Reed. She wasn't in there to be considered, but just to read back the lines. Zinnemann didn't do a typical test; he did a scene, with angles on her and on Ray. I think Freddie was, in a way, testing the scene. Nobody ever heard of Aldo Ray as Prewett again, but Reed got the part of Lorene, the prostitute. And Clift got Prew.
Cohn could see things like that?
He had instinct. There were aspects of Harry Cohn which made certain people like him very much. A lot of people just despised him. And I know that he could be brutal, particularly to little people and in having people watched and followed and tapped. But there was a moviemaker there.
Donna Reed was not chosen immediately. Roberta Haines was testing, but I began to like the idea of Reed because she had given the part something I had never thought of.
Lancaster was almost a given from the word go. Joan Crawford was mentioned for the wife, and Cohn kind of liked the idea. Zinnemann had a long conversation with her, and he said, "I think she can do it, and she says she'll play it without the frills and the glamor." She was more or less cast until one day they got a call saying she wanted her own cameraman and makeup. Cohn and Zinnemann shook their heads, and that was the end of Joan Crawford.
So there was nobody. Well, I was driving back to Miami, and I stopped in Tucson to call the studio, and they told me, "Bert Allenberg has come up with a notion that we all like, which is Deborah Kerr." I said, "My God, that's as crazy as Donna Reed."
Now Sinatra did campaign for the part. He came back from Africa, where Ava Gardner was shooting Mogambo [1953], to test. He did the scene where
Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in the famous love-on-the-beach scene in the film
version of James Jones' novel From Here to Eternity, script by Daniel Taradash,
directed by Fred Zinnemann. (Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
he throws off most of his clothes and says, "Can't a man get drunk?" He came up to my office and said, "How do I play this part?" I said, "You make them laugh and cry at the same time." And it was a good test. But they were testing Eli Wallach in the same scene and he was better—no doubt about it. But then Wallach's agent asked double the amount Wallach made on his last picture; otherwise he was going to do Camino Real on stage with Kazan. Cohn said, "Tell him to go to hell." This was the kind of thing you couldn't pull with Cohn, and an agent should have been smarter than that.
So we took another look at the Sinatra test. And there was one part about it that was better than Wallach's. Stripped to the waist, Wallach looked as if he could take care of himself. But this poor little Sinatra looked like a plucked chicken! You know, he was pitiful. Just what you wanted. And we looked at each other and said, let's go with it.
Were you on the Eternity set much?
A few times. It was a happy experience, and Geoffrey Shurlock at the Breen office was leaning over backward to help us. One thing that bothered them: In the fight where Lancaster confronts Borgnine, Lancaster picks up a bottle of beer and smashes it. That was in the script. They said don't do it, because there are countries where they won't run that. So we said, all right,
if it's that important. Just hold the bottle, as though he's going to hit him over the head with it. Well, I came on the set as they were shooting that moment. I'm standing with Adler and the camera's running and I see Lancaster pick up the bottle and smash it on the table. I say, "For Christ's sake! We said we wouldn't do that!" And Fred says, "Oh, fuck it!" That was the attitude—we were going to make this movie our way.
But I lost one line I loved. After Maggio dies, Lancaster picks him up and walks back to the jeep and puts his body down, and the guy starts the jeep. And Clift was to say to the driver, "See his head don't bump." But Clift read it so badly, they didn't use it. Zinnemann told me they didn't use it because Cohn didn't like it, but I don't think so.
Clift was terrific, and worked like a dog. He took it all so seriously, learning to march, to bugle, to box—things he had never done before. He was awful at boxing, and there's a double in some of those scenes. There's one scene, after he's stabbed and comes to the bungalow where the girls are, and he has to fall down [some] stairs. I watched that actor do it and I said, "My God, he's going to kill himself!" I think it was one take. He could've fractured God knows what!
When did the picture open?
August '53. Broke every record for twenty weeks. And it's the first movie where the screenwriter stole the reviews. Because it was still felt that the book was impossible to film.
Désirée [1954] was a big change of pace .
Julie Blaustein and I wanted to make a different picture, based on the idea that Napoleon should not be the leading man. We thought Bernadotte was a more intriguing subject—a man who renounces his country to become the monarch of another country and then comes back to wage war against his former country and marries a French woman who had been Napoleon's mistress.[*] Zanuck read that treatment and said no way. I guess it's because he was a little man and he was Napoleon over at Fox. He said you can't have Napoleon as number two in a motion picture. So we did it his way, but I wrote it with the idea of Noel Coward as director. We got Henry Koster instead. And Brando just walked through most of that picture like a moose. But it was kind of a silly story.
Picnic [1956] seems like a much happier job, and a fine adaptation .
There was much transposition. Also, there's no picnic in the play; it all takes place in the backyard. You've got to have a picnic in the film, and the
* Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte (1763–1844), a French soldier who took part in the French Revolution, served in the diplomatic service for Napoleon (1798–99) and rose from the ranks to become one of Napoleon's marshals. In 1810, Charles XIII of Sweden, aging and childless, adopted Bernadotte, who was then elected crown prince and took the name Charles John. In 1813 he allied Sweden with England and Russia against Napoleon and aided in defeating him at Leipzig. He succeeded Charles XIII in 1818, and, as King Charles XIV John, founded the present Swedish royal line.
At the Oscars: adaptor Daniel Taradash and Best Supporting Actress Donna Reed,
clutching their statuettes for From Here to Eternity at the 1954 Academy Awards.
(Photo: UCLA Special Collections)
picnic I wrote is one you see . [Director Joshua] Logan was such an enthusiast about it.
He had also done the stage play?
And he had persuaded [playwright] William Inge to make it a happy ending. Inge was always disappointed about that—even after the Pulitzer Prize. I went to see him before starting to write and he said, "Look, it's yours now." I said, "But isn't there anything you want me particularly to hang on to, that you'd feel awful if you lost it?" He said, "No. DO it your way." He was not rude, but he seemed uninterested, and may be it's because there was going to be a happy ending in the movie, too. But Logan did a fine job staging it.
At one point, I was supposed to direct it. I gave it up because I wanted to do Storm Center [1956]. Anyway, I would never have gotten the picture Logan got out it. And Cohn was happy I didn't direct it, because he didn't like the way I directed Storm Center .
Had the wish to direct been growing slowly?
From about '52. From Here to Eternity had lifted me into a position where you could think about it seriously. It wasn't because my scripts were being ruined. They were being directed very well.
So how did Storm Center work out?
Well, Elick Moll and I did script for Kramer. And then there were many more drafts over the years. Once Ingo Preminger told me he thought the drafts got worse. I believe we refine pictures too much sometimes. I have a feeling that my first draft is my best shot and I'm not really as good on revisions and polishes. And I think it was that first draft Mary Pickford committed on.
Irving Reis was supposed to direct it then. I thought of Mary Pickford [for the part of the librarian]. This was a terribly difficult picture to make because it ran counter to the entire mood in the country, with the Unfriendly Ten [ *] and a picture where we defend a book called The Communist Dream being in a library. Nobody could accuse Mary Pickford of being un-American. And I had read that she would like to do another film. Stanley got in touch with her and we went up to Pickfair. I read the entire script to her and she was wild about it. I think she was crazy about the gigantic part. It ran the gamut, and she had great scenes to play with a little boy. I don't know whether she realized what the score was when it came to politics. I remember we walked out of Pickfair, and Stanley threw his arms round me and we were in seventh
* The Hollywood Ten were called "unfriendly" because they chose not to cooperate with the HUAC hearings of October 1947. The first ten film-industry figures to be subopened by the HUAC were writers John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., Sam Ornitz, and Albert Maltz, producers Adrian Scott and Herbert Biberman, and director Edward Dmytryk. All served time in prison for refusing to testify about their supposed affiliation with the Hollywood section of the Communist Party. Dmytryk, after his stint in prison, backpedaled and gave widely publicized testimony "naming names."
heaven. She came to the studio for fittings and then she backed out—Hedda Hopper got to her. Still, we'd had a New York Times story on her return in which she'd said, "It's about the most important thing in America today!"
So Columbia said forget it. Stanley went after Barbara Stanwyck and she liked it, but that fell apart. Then Kramer finished up at Columbia and left two or three of his things in exchange for a property. That's how Columbia came to own it. But they never wanted to make it.
Well, we said, we'll get Bette Davis. She was very excited about it. She agreed to take less than her normal deal. I'll never forget when Cohn finally agreed to it. I launched a campaign with him. We would go up and tell him it was a big commercial picture. He didn't believe it. And we didn't—Blaustein and I. We said, we'll get every schoolteacher in America and every librarian. We're really giving it to him. Ben Kahane [Benjamin B. Kahane, longtime Columbia vice president and one-time president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] was in Cohn's office the day Cohn finally said, "Okay, go ahead and make your goddam picture—$800,000, and not a penny more." Kahane says, "Harry, you can't do this. This is an absolute flop, and you know that!" And Cohn says, "Ben, Columbia's had flops before. But we've never had a flop with such enthusiasm!"
How did you enjoy directing when it came to it?
I enjoyed Bette Davis. We got along very well in our preproduction talks. The cast was to meet at nine o'clock on the first day of rehearsals. On my way there I got held up in the production office, five minutes, eight minutes. Anyway, we [were supposed to] read the script, except that Bette didn't read it. She knew it, word for word. She was a wonderful thing to watch. When we'd finished, she took me aside and she said, "Look, when you ask me to be on the set at nine, I will be there and you will be there. I will not stand for anyone coming late."
But we got along well. We were shooting up in Santa Rosa and she finally got a day off. We had to shoot with some little boys on a residential street. We made the tracks and we had these boys going past a house when some shrew starts screaming from the house: "Get away from there! Don't you dare shoot your pictures here." I turned to the assistant director and said, "What is this?" He said, "They got the money, for God's sake!" So I walk in to see the "shrew"—and it's Bette! That's the way she used her day off.
But I must say something the Writers Guild won't like. I always used to think the writer was the loneliest guy in the world. But when I was directing—and I had good help—I felt the director was the only person thinking about the movie. I guess Julie was, too, the producer. I never realized the possibility of directing. I was more caught up with the glamor of talking to the actors. It was interesting, but it was frustrating.
I had spoken to Wyler and Kazan and asked, "Tell me in a sentence—
what should I do?" Gadge [Kazan] said, "Do everything your own way." And Wyler said, "Resist the temptation to be a good fellow." Unfortunately, I did neither.
How was the picture received?
The reviews were not good. The McCarthyites didn't have to kick it. Nobody was coming to the theaters anyway. It really had "message picture" all over it. The only way you can do a message picture is obliquely.
Bell, Book and Candle [1958] I think, you bought from Selznick; and his ex-wife, Irene, had produced it on stage .[*]
We had a problem getting Cohn to buy it. Selznick wanted $100,000, which was modest, I thought. Cohn kept saying it's a fantasy and we can't do fantasy to make money. I said, "Fine, Harry, but how did Here Comes Mr. Jordan make money?" He said it made $800,000, and it would have been $8 million if it hadn't been a fantasy.
We were going for Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, and we tried to get Alexander Mackendrick to direct. Mackendrick wanted changes we didn't want to make. Grant the same. Then Kelly got married. So we were hoping for Rex Harrison then, and Cohn kept saying, "You know, [Kim] Novak has got to play it." But he couldn't give us Novak for ten months and Harrison wouldn't wait.
Cohn forced Kim Novak on people?
I think he forced her on Logan for Picnic . She came to me one day, almost crying, and said he was teaching her how to walk down a staircase. I said, "Tell him you're afraid and sometimes you get nervous." She said, "I can't do that—he'll throw me down the staircase." But I thought she came out well in Picnic . On Bell, Book and Candle, the first couple of weeks she was playing as if she were a witch. There was none of that old-world chemistry between her and Jimmy [Stewart] on screen.
This is 1958, I think, the year Harry Cohn died. How much of a milestone was that?
Cohn in a way was lucky he died when he did. Because he would never have been able to cope with the type of independent production that began. On Bell, Book and Candle, for example, we gave him the script and he said, "I'm not going to tell you what I think of this. Because you can turn me down. Unless I get the last word, I don't want to get involved." It was bothering him terribly. There's another picture which I didn't get made—Andersonville, the MacKinlay Kantor novel, which Cohn bought against the wishes of his New York people, I was writing the script when Cohn died, and i think it could have been a remarkable movie. But it's interesting [that] you say an
* Bell, Book and Candle, from the John Van Druten play, stars Jimmy Stewart as a publisher under the seductive spell of a witch played by Kim Novak. The 1958 film version was directed by Richard Quine.
era sort of died with Cohn and people like Cohn. Because my credits after that are not very good.
Hawaii [1966] must have proved a great disappointment .
It was. It took up a solid year, '60–'61, and I was very depressed after I left the picture. It was my proposal to Freddie Zinnemann that we do two pictures and sell tickets as a pair—there's no way of doing that whole book even in three hours.
United Artists liked the idea and so did [producer] Harold Mirisch. We had a big meeting planned in this house. Freddie and I were here and Harold was late. He had had a heart attack and he died a year or so later. It was a bad omen. And I overresearched the picture. I had written forty pages of screenplay, and I felt I just couldn't do the two pictures in time. I suggested getting Dalton Trumbo in. But they read the forty pages and they were crazy about it. They said they'd wait. The two films were budgeted at about $17 million. Well, I got 180 pages of script and I had lunch with Freddie and told him, "Do just the one film and call it a day. I don't know whether any one director would have the stamina to cover this entire thing." He wanted to go all the way, though, and that's when I left. They brought Trumbo in and then [director] George Roy Hill. Freddie could never get the money for two pictures.
Morituri [1965] is another sad story?
Fox was in chaos. This was '62. Zanuck was living in Paris with Bella Darvi. The studio had this German novel, Morituri . I did the script on the third floor of that long, long administration building. I swear rabbits were running around! There was no business. No cars parked. A deserted village! Then Dick Zanuck came in. Then Darryl came back from Paris, and we had wild meetings with him in New York. He wasn't drunk, but he wasn't making much sense. He was furious about the room being overheated, but he didn't know to fix the gadget that turns it down. He did the same kind of things on the script!
It was absurd. I couldn't write like that, and the producer, Aaron Rosenberg, said even if I could, he wouldn't want to produce the film. Two years pass and Aaron meets Brando on Mutiny on the Bounty . They talk. One day my phone rings and it's Akim Tamiroff. No doubt about it—except that it's Brando doing the most marvelous imitation. And he was raving about Morituri, about what he thought it was! By God, we'll do this! On and on. And I signed.
We talked many times at Brando's place up on Mulholland, and he had a giant Newfoundland up there. He'd come in at eleven, hung over, sexed over, and God knows what. Then he wanted Bernhard Wicki to direct it. Wicki is a darling man, probably a good director in German. But he only spoke enough English to have dinner with. Brando changed enormous quantities, cut things, added. Wally Cox was in there, not credited, monkeying around.
Brando would come to a story conference and curl up in a chair in the corner in a fetal position. He was the Method actor carried to the wildest extreme. And he had complete control! He would like a scene one day. Next day he would say, "I can't do this. Let's do it this way." I would say, "You 're not doing this. It's the character."
Then my wife and I went to Egypt on a trip. When I got back a month or so later, I guess it was almost in the can. Aaron said to me, "It's just terrible, the things that have been going on. Brando barring the director from the set, then walking in at 5 P.M. and going to a dressing room, coming out at 6:30 and handing the scene to Wicki and saying, 'This is the way we're going to shoot it.' "
One scene was impossible. Rosenberg told me: "You've got to look at this scene and do something with it. We can't let the picture go out this way." It was a scene with Brando and the girl in the cabin and there was a porthole, but the porthole was covered over because this was a ship that was not supposed to be at sea. I'm watching the scene in the projection room and Brando walks over to the porthole and looks out. Aaron says, "What in the hell is he doing that for?" Well, he went over there because the blackboard was right outside and he was trying to read his lines!
I shouldn't have done the picture. I don't know—I thought it could make a good adventure story.
I believe you feel that, of the later films, Castle Keep [1969] could have been the best?[ *]
I knew what it was about: self-respect. Before the book was published there were reviews in Life and Time raving about it. It was so adaptable, I begged [producers] Arthur Kramer and Mike J. Frankovich to get it for me. Frankovich said they'd go to $75,000. Well, I was at a party and they told me the bad news: Marty Ransohoff had bought it for $150,000. A couple of days later they made the deal with him to produce it, and of course they took on the $150,000. The old story: they were afraid someone else might do something.
Ransohoff was crazy about the book. There were no changes. It was an unorthodox script because it was an unorthodox book. It had a chance to go, and I liked an actor named Robert Redford, who had then been in two pictures, and Marty talked to Redford, with [director] Arthur Hiller. I think Hiller would have been good because he'll shoot the script and he's a very good director of comedy—and there was wild comedy. Marty could have put it together for $3.5 million, but neither Columbia nor Paramount would do it.
Finally Burt Lancaster wanted to do it and they spent over $8 million, and lost it all. They shot the picture in Yugoslavia, which I thought was a mistake
* Castle Keep is a World War II melodrama, based on a William Eastlake novel, that stars Burt Lancaster and Peter Falk. It was directed by Sydney Pollack.
because I had never seen a good picture come out of Yugoslavia, and I'm not sure I have yet!
There was a scene on the rewrites. I was in my agent's office in Westwood and I said, "I want you to call Ransohoff and tell him the following: Dan figures it'll take two weeks and he wants $100,000."
Screaming over the phone. "Or he will do it for guild minimum"—which was about $350 a week then—"but you have to shoot what he writes." The screaming over the phone got louder!
To hear you talking, the disappointment was getting to you .
There was another fine novel Columbia got for me, The Ordways, by William Humphrey [New York: Knopf, 1964]. But before I got into that, Frankovich asked me to do him a big favor. There was a picture in trouble, a Western, Alvarez Kelly [1966]. It was a very serviceable script, but it needed juicing up. But that was another crazy trip down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I was writing either in front of or behind the cameras—I never could determine which. They were out in the field with a bunch of cattle and I was in a motel, and I would write the scenes and then see the rushes end up saying something different. I said to Eddie Dmytryk, who was directing, "What is the sense of my sweating out this dialogue if you're gonna let Bill Holden ad lib whatever he wants to say?" And he said to me, "Dan, you take the script too seriously." Holden was in a strange state then. He was on alcohol a lot. We would meet in Bill's room after the shooting and go to dinner. Bill would drive so erratically I would just shut my eyes. A couple of years later a man got killed in Italy.[*]
Then I came back and did The Ordways . But I was stumbling into troubles now. I go over to Fox, there's nobody there. Now, the Bank of Paris was trying to take over Columbia. So Columbia was worried about their stock and they didn't make any movies. I don't know whether The Ordways had a chance—it would have been an odd picture—but it didn't get made.
Guy McElwaine then was supposed to be my agent, and I guess he was for two weeks. Then he turned me over to Arlene Donovan at ICM. She called me and asked if I'd like to do a big book about the Mexican Revolution, The Adelita by Oakley M. Hall [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975]. The Xerox copy weighed about eight pounds, but I liked it very much. [Producer] Marty Bregman owned-it, or had an option. I wrote a first draft and Bregman seemed to like it. He and [director] Sidney Lumet and I met and Lumet loved what I had done—and Lumet hadn't liked the book. But he said, "Unless you do it the way I want, I really can't do it." I didn't want to start over, and neither did Bregman. Lumet was talking of doing it in Spain with Al Pacino.
* See Golden Boy: The Untold Story of William Holden by Bob Thomas (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983). Valerio Giorgio Novelli was killed on July 26, 1966, after his Fiat was struck from behind by a silver-grey Ferrari driven by Holden on the autostrada between Florence and the Tyrrhenian coast. Charged with manslaughter, Holden received a suspended sentence in an Italian court.
Work in progress: pictured for publicity purposes (from left), director Stanley Kramer,
Polish labor leader Lech Walesa, and writer Daniel Taradash, in 1987, planning a
film about Walesa's life.
But somehow it never happened. Suddenly one day, a year or so later, I got a call from Marty and he said he was going to make it now. He wanted Richard Sarafian to direct it. But it involved taking out another character. I said, "Well, let me do it sketchily, so we see how it works." But Bregman and I got into a salary dispute, and finally I just sent the script to him. Last I ever heard.
Then I was in Florida and I get a call from Donovan and she said Frank Yablans wants to talk about [Sidney Sheldon's novel] The Other Side of Midnight . I had never met Yablans before, and he was a very vigorous, enthusiastic guy. I said no, because I didn't like the book. Then I came back to California and Ransohoff talked me into doing it. I did it very quickly for me; but I said, I won't show you any pages. One day I got a call from Yablans or Ransohoff, and he said, "Can you please, please, let us see the first 100 pages? Because if we can give it to [Twentieth Century-Fox executive] Dennis Stanfill and if he likes it, we can get $1 or $2 million in advance." So I showed the pages. And they had a lunch. Afterwards, Yablans came back to my office and said, "If you ever work for another producer in this town, I'll kill you." Stanfill had given him the money. I was off the picture about two
months after that. Fired, I mean. They were sort of shabby about it, because I was working over a weekend, patching, and they were talking to other writers, which they weren't going to tell me about at all.
What I guess I'm telling you, and it's beginning to sound like it to me, is a story of early triumph and later chaos. But I think the biggest disappointment of my writing life was that Andersonville was not produced. Andersonville was the Civil War prison camp where, I think, 15,000 troops died. They were out in the sun, completely uncovered. I set it all in the camp and on a plantation nearby and at the Widow Tebb's house. She's a whore, and I wanted Tallulah Bankhead for her, with Fredric March as the plantation owner. MacKinlay Kantor was a strange fellow: he got the Pulitzer for fiction in '56 [for Andersonville ]; but he wanted to get it for history because of the research. He wrote me a six-page letter about inaccuracies in the script—uniforms, regiments, that sort of thing—and then he ended with a great line, "You have the sublime admiration of the original author."
Philip Yordan:
The Chameleon
Interview by Pat McGilligan
He was dead, I was told. Or at least he wouldn't answer my letters (he didn't). He didn't have an up-to-date address listed with the Writers Guild (San Diego?). When I finally trapped him on the telephone, he said he was far too busy to grant an interview. I said I was coming anyway. Would he talk? He said: We'll see.
Philip Yordan is the great mystery man of the post-1930s generation of Hollywood screenwriters. No writer has more protean credits for the last forty-fifty years: from the noirish Dillinger (1945), House of Strangers (1949), Detective Story (1951), The Big Combo (1955), and The Harder They Fall (1956) to the quintessential Westerns Johnny Guitar (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955); from the literary adaptations of God's Little Acre (1958) and Studs Lonigan (1960) to the science fantasy Day of the Triffids (1962); from the historical/biblical King of Kings (1961), El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1962), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), to . . . roughly 100 titles in all (credited and uncredited), Yordan estimated. And he is still at work, in his mid-seventies, spawning one or two films a year.
No screenwriter is the subject of more "in" Hollywood hearsay and legend. To believe the half of it, his own life might be filmed as an Amazing Story . Three of the four Yordan "collaborators" I spoke with pursuant to this interview were themselves working fitfully on works of fiction inspired by this true-life character: one a play, another a novel, a third a motion picture. Each of them had a seemingly inexhaustible store of incredible but maybe-not-true anecdotes to relay about a writer who has snake-charmed and mind-boggled everyone he has come in contact with in Hollywood.
His biography, according to the lore, begins in Chicago, where, after a
term as a would-be actor at the Goodman Theatre, he decided to become a lawyer. Only he was too preoccupied with his various mushrooming business enterprises to actually attend classes, so he hired someone else to go through law school under the name of Philip Yordan and to pass the necessary boards. Maybe so, maybe not—this anecdote was repeated by many old friends and associates; Yordan denied it vehemently.
Cut to his first major Broadway triumph, Anna Lucasta, a plot with a distinct resemblance to a certain Eugene O'Neill play, set in Harlem with an all-black cast. (It was filmed twice, once in 1949 directed by Irving Rapper, and again in 1958 directed by Arnold Laven.) Named by critic Burns Mantle as one of the ten best plays of the 1944–45 season, Anna Lucasta has been the object of some speculation among Yordan insiders. One told the tale that Yordan, incapable of writing such a showpiece entirely on his own creative impulse, painstakingly copied Anna Christie structurally and plotwise, adapting it to a Chicago setting with a Polish family background. When that failed to excite producers, according to another version of the same apocrypha, Yordan hired an out-of-work black dramatist to provide a revision with Negro dialect and characterization. Maybe true, maybe not—but a pattern in his career of such, shall we say, innuendo, has not only haunted Yordan but enhanced his mystique as Bigger Than Life.
In 1938 Yordan came to Hollywood to work for director William Dieterle. It was the perfect jungle for expression of his genius at supplying the demand. In short order, he became known among producers as a bravura "spitballer": that is, someone who can talk a good script (and one has only to meet Yordan to appreciate how spellbinding is his vernacular). More of an adaptor, less of an originator, often a final-draft man, he became a much-sought-after script doctor and coarsened dialogue specialist, arriving at the eleventh hour to contribute the famed lightning-quick "Yordan touch."
That was part of what he did, often uncredited. The other half of the time, Yordan was de facto producer of his own films: for the King brothers at Monogram, for longtime partners (producer) Sidney Harmon and (editor/director) Irving Lerner with Security Pictures, for friends Anthony Mann (who directed seven Yordan films) and Nicholas Ray (who directed three), and for producer Samuel Bronston in Spain.
Actually, according to Milton Sperling, a veteran producer-screenwriter, Yordan was more of a "businessman-writer."[*] Said Sperling, who worked with Yordan both as a producer and as a co-writer, "Phil's talent as a writer
* Milton Sperling was in Hollywood from the early 1930s, first as a secretary to Darryl F. Zanuck and Hal Wallis, and then working his way up to screenwriter and producer. His scripts include Sing, Baby, Sing (1936), The Great Profile (1940), and The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), and he was involved with the scripts of several Yordan films, including The Bramble Bush (1960, also producer), Battle of the Bulge (1965, also co-producer), and Captain Apache (1971, also co-producer). Sperling's films as producer include Cloak and Dagger (1946), Pursued (1947), The Enforcer (1951), and Distant Drums (1951).
collided with his interests as a businessman, always. He used writing as a tool to make money." According to Sperling, it was because Yordan was so frugal, so trapped in business procedures that he would take on more deadlines than he could possibly handle, that Yordan began his practice of employing "surrogates" to write his screenplays in order to multiply his earnings and his prestige.
Previous published reports to the contrary, Yordan's practice of employing "surrogates" did not begin or end in the 1950s with his hiring of the victims of the Hollywood blacklist. Certainly that practice proliferated and was made easier because of the blacklist—and the scripts Yordan "supervised" that were actually written by Hollywood leftists became yet another aspect of his legend, particularly with the French film critics. But in this interview Yordan admitted at least one instance of " surrogate" scriptwriting dating back to the 1940s; so we can be relatively sure there are still more to be revealed.
"Surrogate" scriptwriting is really not so unusual. Ben Hecht, Mr. Prolific, professed to detest screenwriting, and he would sell a film idea based on a two-page treatment written in the grand Hechtian style. If he was too busy or too disinterested to write the script, a stable of junior writers he kept for that purpose would give form and sense to his spew of words and hold him to deadline; they were always careful to add the Hechtian flourish. But in Yordan's case, he was employing unemployables during an era of political and cultural repression. Brave and exciting, no? No—it was more complicated than that . . .
The best-known of the "surrogates," and one of the first of the blacklistees to join the Yordan payroll, was the poet, documentarist, and screenwriter Ben Maddow (see Ben Maddow interview). Introduced to Yordan through Irving Lerner, who knew Maddow in the 1930s when both were in the forefront of the American documentary movement, Maddow had adapted Intruder in the Dust and The Asphalt Jungle for MGM before finding himself persona non grata at the studios because of left-wing affiliations. Out of work under his own name, he was grateful to Yordan for the opportunity to "write underground," and Maddow is credited in various film encyclopedias as having scripted such Yordan-signed films during the 1950s as Johnny Guitar, The Naked Jungle (1954), Men in War (1957), God's Little Acre (1958), and two directed by Lerner, Man Crazy (1953) and Murder by Contract (1958).
Though Yordan admitted to some of this (he even conceded that Maddow wrote the only novel "by Philip Yordan," Man of the West ), he bridled at the question mark of Johnny Guitar and told a long anecdote about the writing of that "bold excursion into camp" (David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film ) that was convincing in its detail. When I first asked Maddow about writing Johnny Guitar, he was adamant that he had written the screen-
play, though he said he never met Nicholas Ray (nor Anthony Mann, for that matter) and he could not remember ever having seen the finished film at a screening. After I mailed him a video copy of the motion picture and he had had a chance to view it, he had to confess he did not recognize any of the script as his own. In short, Maddow himself may be mistaken about Johnny Guitar .
(The missing link may well be the overlooked writer of the novel, Roy Chanslor, a career Hollywood screenwriter whose list of fifty-some crime and Western programmers includes the source basis for Johnny Guitar and Cat Ballou .)
After Maddow, there came Bernard Gordon, Ben Barzman, Arnaud D'Usseau, Julian Halevy (a.k.a. Julian Zimet), and probably others—all Hollywood progressives reduced by the atmosphere of the McCarthy era to pseudonyms and/or working abroad.[*] It should be emphasized that the ones I have talked to spoke warmly and protectively of Yordan; they felt they reaped professional rewards as well as his friendship. There were individual fallings-out: Yordan's "oral contracts" left a lot of loopholes, and Ben Maddow, for one, remembered his anger and astonishment at passing through England and discovering a Penguin edition of Man of the West for which he had not been compensated.
But, in general, Yordan lit up the lives of these cultural lepers. They admired him for being physically courageous (he almost went blind at one point and had to submit to dangerous experimental surgery), for being glamorous/repulsive (an inexplicable ladies' man, he was catnip to the Hollywood sex sirens and was forever introducing a new wife), and for being an endless touchstone of outrageous experiences.
There seems to have been very little political camaraderie, if any. Yordan claimed never to have voted, never to have read a newspaper before the 1970s, and to have regarded the Hollywood leftists as pesky insofar as their politics was concerned.
"I can only tell you this," said writer-producer Milton Sperling (not a blacklistee, incidentally). "When I went to Paris and visited him [Yordan] during the Algerian crisis, he lived down the street not far from the prime minister. So his neighborhood was barricaded by a tank in the street and
* Bernard Gordon has pseudonymous script credits on several Yordan-affiliated films, including 55 Days at Peking (1963), The Thin Red Line (1964), Custer of the West (1968), and Krakatoa, East of Java (1969). Ben Barzman, one of the script contributors to Back to Bataan (1945) and The Boy with Green Hair (1948), worked often with expatriate directors Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin during the blacklist era and well into the 1960s. Barzman was a key writer on Yordan's film El Cid (1961). Arnaud D'Usseau, a playwright, had Hollywood script credits dating back to the 1930s, and worked with Yordan on several films, beginning with Studs Lonigan (1960). All three were blacklisted, and each worked under one or more pseudonyms at various times.
soldiers carrying guns on the roofs. I said, 'What is a tank doing on the street?' Philip looked out the door and said, 'What tank?' I said, 'Maybe it's because of the Algerian crisis.' He said, 'What Algerian crisis?' "
After the 1950s, Yordan spent fourteen years abroad, developing Samuel Bronston's production slate and receiving $300,000 a script before his cut of profits. The practice of "surrogate writing" was more in the open; his "factory" of writers congregated on the top floor of the Hilton in Madrid.
"Yordan was always eager," recalled Bernard Gordon, "to pick the brains and/or talent of anyone who might be around, never appeared to have much interest in the matter of what credits might accrue to other writers, and turned everyone loose on every project. Sometimes, it seems, as on The Circus Story [produced as Circus World in 1964], the rooms of the Madrid Hilton were filled with writers who were all working simultaneously on a script—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not."[*]
Among these latter "surrogates," the baffling assertion is often encountered that Yordan, owner of an Oscar and credited writer of so many film classics, did and does very little actual writing.
"Philip Yordan has never written more than a sentence in his life," said Ben Maddow flatly. "He's incapable of writing."
"He was primarily a deal maker," said Bernard Gordon, "a very creative one who, once the deal was made, lost all interest in the actual process of filmmaking. Being on the set was an agonizing bore for him and a waste of time. He did take the time to work with writers and offer ideas, good or bad, but I think his strength was that he was an instinctive showman. He never wasted time catering to his own taste in films; rather, he had a sense of what could be promoted, and concentrated his energies on that.
"During the years I worked with him I saw very, very little of his own writing efforts, though he fancied he had an ear for dialogue, and he was always willing to pick up a pen and scribble on a scene. His own speech was salty and witty, so perhaps he could write good dialogue. I just don't recall any instances of his doing that. As to what went on before I started to work with him, I just can't say."
When the Bronston financial empire collapsed, Yordan emerged unscathed, produced some low-budget quickies in Europe, and eventually returned to the United States, where he affiliated with a number of fly-by-night production companies that got mention in the trades but failed to generate much of a splash at the box office, or otherwise.
* It was during this period, in 1962, that Yordan enhanced his reputation with a rare interview in Cahiers du Cinéma conducted by Bertrand Tavernier. Ever the chameleon, Yordan wore his coat of protective coloration to this rendezvous. with the critical elite. Surrounded by cinéastes who no doubt put a gloss on the translation, he spoke knowingly of the anti-McCarthyist allusions of Johnny Guitar, eloquently about his quest to rediscover the purity of classic heroism, and adoringly of Shakespeare (!). Today, thirty years later, Tavernier says he realizes that "Yordan fooled me. He understood very quickly what I wanted to hear, and he said it."
His business dealings have been shadowy, to put it politely, and old-timers in Hollywood got a chuckle out of a recent (1984) sighting in Variety reporting that Yordan, a defense witness at a murder-conspiracy trial in Florida, was apprehended while trying to flush key documents down a toilet in a Tallahassee court building.
The key documents? His (presumably ghosted) "script for perjury," a three-page written statement repeated virtually verbatim by Yordan on the stand. According to a U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, which involved a dummy film corporation in the Cayman Islands, "one of the documents contained instructions from the defendant in the trial on how Yordan should testify, in the event that another document directly contradicted information that Yordan had previously given Federal agents and prosecutors."
Maybe true, maybe not—Yordan said they were only personal documents that had nothing to do with the trial (and he was not otherwise implicated). But it brought to mind the old Hollywood anecdote about Yordan's Oscar acceptance speech in 1955. Some say he did not have the foresight to have a "surrogate" prepare a script, which is why he said all of two words, "Thank you."
Milton Sperling said that Yordan's habit of employing "surrogates" was already an open secret in Hollywood by the time of Broken Lance because Yordan had made the mistake of shopping too many scripts around town at times when he was under exclusive contract to this or that studio. Yordan was working so fast and furiously that he could not keep the assignments straight. Once, said Sperling, who was producing films at Warners, Yordan dropped off a script on his desk on the same day that he delivered one to Darryl Zanuck at Fox. Sperling received an angry phone call from Zanuck: "I believe you have a script of mine, and I have one of yours!"
Yordan had mixed up the two scripts. "Zanuck charged Yordan like a rhinoceros and said, 'I'm going to blackball you in this business!' " recalled Sperling. "It was a very difficult moment for Yordan because he was exposed in this dubiously legal situation. It was shortly after that that he departed for Spain.
"They were both very good scripts, by the way," added Sperling.
In 1959 Sperling himself fired Yordan when the screenwriter delivered his script for The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960). Yordan's secretary materialized a few days later to claim that she had written it. Confronted by Sperling, Yordan admitted this woman had indeed taken down his words, but insisted she had been awarded a proper secretarial bonus. Sperling dismissed Yordan from the project and promptly hired a new writer. (This same secretary, "who was with me for years," according to Yordan—and is variously described by Yordan collaborators as "a Southern gal with something of a hunchback" or "a small dwarflike lady "—seems to have been rather adept
at polishing Yordan's dictation over the years. Strange, no one can remember her name.)
But Sperling is a stalwart Yordan defender, among many: He said that Yordan is a first-rate writer when he chooses to be and that he could have been the best if he had not been seduced by the big money that flows from the profits of motion pictures. Sperling co-wrote several Yordan films, including the latter-day Captain Apache ("a real shlock operation") in 1971, and said he was eyewitness to the fact that Yordan would sit and work at a desk on the screenplay just like any writer. Indeed, Sperling said he himself was more the "walker" and Yordan was more the "sitter."
"What he [Yordan] did generally [in his career] was to have someone else write a first draft; then he would put in his Yordan thing. It was an abrasive, tough, very crisp, very colloquial kind of writing. And it was very good. Don't let anyone tell you he couldn't write. He could write exceedingly well. . . ," said Sperling. "He had a kind of Jungian memory of film, a kind of collective unconscious, a memory bank, that would work for him in any given situation.
"He could have been one of the best writers. He had ability, no question about it. But his greed overcame his creative talent. He was born twenty-five years too late. Had he been in Hollywood in the twenties, rather than the late thirties, he would have ended up running a studio."
In effect, he did. A one-man studio. So many credits, so many tough and bizarre characters in memorable film stories—despite the "surrogates," the common denominator of the movies is the "gutsy" (Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia ) Yordan personality. The best Yordan films are of a piece: bitter-edged and uncompromising. The noble beast in the lawless jungle; the ruthless, chivalric villains and pragmatic, doomed heroes; the loner on some internal quest at odds with external forces; cataclysm and apocalypse, pocket-size and world-scale—these were his motifs, springing out of his life and his imagination.
As for Yordan himself . . . as of this writing he is alive and kicking in San Diego, where he is a co-founder of Visto International, which churns out low-budget videocassette exploitation features primarily for the European market. It might be said that the cheapo bloodbath videos are the modern-day equivalent of Monogram programmers.
One Saturday morning in 1987 Yordan welcomed me into his office-in-a-garage in a suburban tract, where there were stacks of film cans, file cabinets, and office supplies, and an extensive library of reference books, many of the "most unforgettable character I ever met" type. His Oscar statuette was nowhere in evidence. For three hours, interrupted by phone calls and express-mail deliveries, he answered my questions, chewing on a succession of unlit cigars.
In the end, we turned the tape recorder off, chatted amiably about recent
Philip Yordan in San Diego, 1988. (Photo: Alison Morley)
films (he loved Taxi Driver because "it stayed with the killer, and a killer is an interesting person"), and he walked me to my rented car.
He said there was a heckuva lot he had left out of our conversation, like his Hollywood girlfriends: Ava Gardner, Simone Simon ("I lived with her for about a year and a half"), Lili St. Cyr, and, of course, others. The publishers were after him to write a book about his life. Maybe after the article
came out, I would consider working on his autobiography? I could fly to San Diego for a week, stay in a motel at his expense, bring my tape-recorder . . . ? The eyes of Philip Yordan closed in on the potential "surrogate." I was flattered. I said: We'll see.
Philip Yordan (1913–)
* It has been alleged that the blacklisted writer Ben Maddow wrote these screenplays, sold and signed by Yordan. Yordan disputes that in the cases of Johnny Guitar and God's Little Acre .
** The blacklisted writers Arnaud D'Usseau, Bernard Gordon, Ben Barzman, and Julian Halevy all had varying degrees of involvement in the writing of these scripts.
*** These films are listed in the 1979 International Motion Picture Almanac as Yordan productions, but they may have never been released.
1941
All That Money Can Buy [a.k.a. The Devil and Daniel Webster ] (William Dieterle). Uncredited contribution.
1942
Syncopation (William Dieterle). Co-script.
1943
The Unknown, Guest (Kurt Neumann). Story, script.
1944
Johnny Doesnt Live Here Anymore (Joe May). Co-script.
1945
Dillinger (Max Nosseck). Story, script.
Why Girls Leave Home (William Berke). Uncredited contribution.
The Woman Who Came Back (Walter Colmes). Story suggestion.
1946
The Chase (Arthur Ripley). Script.
Whistle Stop (Léonide Moguy). Script.
Suspense (Frank Tuttle). Story, script.
1948
Bad Men of Tombstone (Kurt Neumann). Co-script.
Tap Roots (George Marshall). Uncredited contribution.
1949
House of Strangers (Joseph L. Mankiewicz). Script.
Anna Lucasta (Irving Rapper). Co-script, from his play.
The Black Book [a.k.a. Reign of Terror ] (Anthony Mann). Co-story, co-script.
1950
Edge of Doom (Mark Robson). Script.
1951
Detective Story (William Wyler). Co-script.
Drums in the Deep South (William Cameron Menzies). Co-script.
The Enforcer (Bretaigne Windust). Uncredited contribution.
1952
Mara Maru (Gordon Douglas). Co-story.
Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk). Co-script.
1953
Houdini (George Marshall). Script.
Blowing Wild (Hugo Fregonese). Story, script.
Man Crazy (Irving Lerner). Co-story, co-script, co-producer.*
1954
The Naked Jungle (Byron Haskin). Co-script.*
Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray). Script.*
Broken Lance (Edward Dmytryk). Remake of House of Strangers .
1955
Conquest of Space (Byron Haskin). Co-adaptation.
The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann). Co-script.
The Last Frontier (Anthony Mann). Co-script.*
The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis). Story, script.
Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray). Uncredited contribution.
Scarlet Coat (John Sturges). Uncredited contribution.
1956
The Harder They Fall (Mark Robson). Script, producer.
Joe MacBeth (Ken Hughes). Script.
The Wild Party (Harry Homer). Uncredited contribution.
1957
Four Boys and a Gun (William Berke). Co-script.
Men in War (Anthony Mann). Script.*
Gun Glory (Roy Rowland). Based on his novel Man of the West .*
No Down Payment (Martin Ritt). Script.
Street of Sinners (William Berke). Script.
1958
The Bravados (Henry King). Script.
God's Little Acre (Anthony Mann). Script.*
Island Women (William Berke). Script.
The Fiend Who Walked the West (Gordon Douglas). Co-script.
Anna Lucasta (Arnold Laven). Script, from his play.
Edge of Fury (Irving Lerner and Robert Gurney, Jr.). Uncredited contribution.
Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner). Uncredited contribution.*
The Lost Missile (William Berke). Uncredited contribution.
1959
Day of the Outlaw (Andre De Toth). Script.
The Bramble Bush (Daniel Petrie). Co-script.
City of Fear (Irving Lerner). Uncredited contribution.
1960
Studs Lonigan (Irving Lerner). Script, producer.**
The Time Machine (George Pal). Uncredited contribution.
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (Budd Boetticher). Uncredited contribution.
1961
King of Kings (Nicholas Ray). Script.
El Cid (Anthony Mann). Co-script.**
1962
55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray). Co-story, co-script.**
The Day of the Triffids (Steve Sekely). Script, executive producer.**
1964
The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann). Co-script.
The Thin Red Line (Andrew Marton). Uncredited contribution, producer.
Battle of the Bulge (Ken Annakin). Co-story, co-script, co-producer.
Crack in the World (Andrew Marton). Uncredited contribution, producer.
Circus World (Henry Hathaway). Co-story suggestion.
1965
Bikini Paradise (Gregg Tallas). Uncredited contribution, producer.
1968
Custer of the West (Robert Siodmak). Uncredited contribution, producer.
1969
The Royal Hunt of the Sun (Irving Lerner). Script, co-producer.
Krakatoa, East of Java (Bernard Kowalski). Uncredited contribution, producer.
1971
Captain Apache (Alexander Singer). Co-script, co-producer.
Badman's River (Eugenio Martin). Co-script.
1972
Horror Express (Eugenio Martin). Uncredited contribution.
1973
The Mad Bomber (Bert I. Gordon). Uncredited contribution.
1974
Psychomania (Don Sharp). Uncredited contribution.
1975
Pancho Villa (Eugenio Martin). Uncredited contribution.
1977
Brigham (director unknown). Script contribution.***
1978
Cataclysm (several directors, including Gregg Tallas). Uncredited contribution.***
1986
Cry, Wilderness (director unknown). Script, producer.
1987
Bloody Wednesday [a.k.a. The Terrorists ] (director unknown). Script contribution, producer.
1988
The Unholy (Camilo Vila). Co-script.
Novels include Man of the West .
Plays include Any Day Now, Anna Lucasta, and The Bride Got Farblondjet .
Academy Awards include Oscar nominations for best original screenplay for Dillinger in 1945 and best screenplay for Detective Story in 1951. Yordan won an Academy Award for best screen story for Broken Lance in 1954.
Writers Guild awards include a nomination for best-written American drama for Detective Story in 1951.
Researching Yordan's screen credits, I encountered enough claims and counterclaims to append this unusual "anti-filmography."
Philip Yordan Anti-Filmography
1944
When Strangers Marry (William Castle). In this early instance of "employing surrogates," Yordan paid Dennis Cooper to write the screenplay; then Yordan rewrote it, Yordan says.
1945
Dillinger (Max Nosseck). Robert Tasker, a Hollywood screenwriter with an armed robbery conviction and a San Quentin prison past (for many years, he was John Bright's writing partner), is said to have contributed substantially to the screenplay which is credited solely to Yordan.
1949
House of Strangers (Joseph L. Mankiewicz). According to Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz by Kenneth L. Geist (pp. 148–149), Yordan was hired by producer Sol C. Siegel to develop the character of a shady lawyer who figures fleetingly in a Jerome Weidman novel, I'll Never Go There Anymore . Yordan was fired after "spitballing" roughly seventy-five pages of a first draft, or two thirds of the script. Mankiewicz's rewrite made a "night and day" difference, as Mankiewicz "scrapped all of Yordan's dialogue and substituted his own." The Screen Writers Guild decreed a shared credit, and Mankiewicz angrily refused to split, so Yordan was awarded a solitary credit.
1953
Man Crazy (Irving Lerner) and The Naked Jungle (Byron Haskin). Blacklisted writer Ben Maddow claimed to have written both of these scripts, signed-and supervised by Yordan.
1954
Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray) and Broken Lance (Edward Dmytryk). If one film is the cornerstone of Yordan's reputation, it is the oddball Western Johnny Guitar . Yet who wrote the screenplay is unclear. It is based on an obscure novel by Roy Chanslor, a capable, prolific screenwriter whose credit appears on upwards of fifty films, including Tarzan pictures, Black Angel, and the basis for Cat Ballou . Apparently Chanslor also wrote a screenplay draft. Some film encyclopedic sources credit Ben Maddow as having written the script. Maddow may or may not have written a script draft [see accompanying Yordan interview], but he is less and less certain of it. Yordan, meanwhile, insisted he rewrote Chanslor's script on location in Arizona. For Broken Lance, on the other hand, Yordan admittedly did not write a
single word. He won his Oscar for Best Original Story for material in the story files that had formed the basis for House of Strangers, salvaged, provided a Western context, and refurbished by producer-writer Michael Blankfort.
1957
Men In War (Anthony Mann), No Down Payment (Martin Ritt), and Gun Glory (Roy Rowland). Yordan did not dispute that Maddow wrote Men In War for him, as his surrogate. For No Down Payment, Yordan said he, in effect, employed Life magazine writer John McPartland to write a novel, then derived the script from the novel. To add to the confusion, there is a draft of the script by Dalton Trumbo in the University of Wisconsin film archives. Gun Glory, finally, is based on Yordan's only published novel, Man of the West, from 1955 and copyrighted in the name of Yordan's production company, Security Pictures. Yordan himself admitted that Maddow wrote the novel.
1958
God's Little Acre (Anthony Mann). Ben Maddow said he wrote the screenplay for God's Little Acre, which Yordan denied without adding particulars.
1959
Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth). Director De Toth told Bertrand Tavernier that "a lot of people," including himself working against deadline on the spot, rewrote the screenplay.
1960
Studs Lonigan (Irving Lerner). Blacklisted writer Arnaud D'Usseau wrote much of the script as Yordan's surrogate (Yordan admitted). Another blacklisted writer, Bernard Gordon, came in on the back end for some polish and continuity. As to The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, director Budd Boetticher told Cahiers du Cinéma that it was he who fired Yordan, and then worked on the script during filming.
1961
El Cid (Anthony Mann). Blacklisted writer Ben Barzman (director Joseph Losey's frequent collaborator) was instrumental in the screenplay, which is co-credited to Yordan. Director Anthony Mann told Bertrand Tavernier that "not one line" was written by Yordan. Also, Bernard Gordon said he wrote "almost all of the personal scenes for the two stars [Sophia Loren and Charlton Heston]."
1962
55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray) and Day of the Triffids (Steve Sekely). Though Yordan is co-credited with the screenplay for 55 Days at Peking, Bernard Gordon said, "The story and script were written entirely by me. . . . He [Philip Yordan] did no writing at all." Arnaud D'Usseau was aboard (uncredited) for
some spot writing. As to Day of the Triffids, a British film magazine reported: "Howard Keel later said the script was so sparse he had to make up lines for himself so he had something to say. No one seemed to have any confidence in the script or in the film." In any case, Bernard Gordon said he wrote the entire screenplay and Yordan "did no writing at all on the script or the adaptation."
1964
Circus World (Henry Hathaway). Though Yordan is credited with "story suggestion," Bernard Gordon said he wrote the first two or three script drafts, and "the original concept, the story, and some of the script were mine."
1968
Custer of the West (Robert Siodmak). According to Bertrand Tavernier, actor Robert Shaw wrote "half of the script" while on location during the filming.
Let's start with your coming to Hollywood. When and why?
I had a play down at the [Studio Theatre] New School for Social Research in New York—this was in the late '30s—which was seen by a Hollywood director named William Dieterle. I was living in Chicago. He called me from New York and asked me to meet him between trains from New York to California. He said he was doing a picture and he wanted me to come out and write it for him. I asked him what the subject matter was, and he said, "King Zess." That was it.
Now, he was coming in twenty-four hours on the Twentieth Century from New York, so I had twenty-four hours to bone up on "King Zess." I really didn't know who Dieterle was, because I hadn't followed movies that closely. I called up the Goodman Theatre, which I once attended, and nobody there had ever heard of "King Zess." I went to the library and looked up Dieterle and found out he had done, I believe, [pictures about] Zola [The Life of Emile Zola, 1937] and Pasteur [The Story of Louis Pasteur, 1936], so I figured it was [going to be] some biblical picture.
Well, Dieterle arrived with his wife. His wife was an aristocrat; she came from a very wealthy wine-growing family in the Rhine. She adored him. Dieterle himself was a German actor/director, a big, hulking, handsome man, very far to the left. He conducted himself very dramatically, reserved, polite. Not at all as I had pictured a Hollywood director.
We had a short discussion between trains and he said I would be his first choice to write "King Zess" because of the fact that I was from Chicago. I had no idea at all [what he was talking about]. (Laughs .) At that time, your attitude towards the great in Hollywood was that you didn't ask questions, you just kept your mouth shut. You were in the presence of royalty, of divinity. These were the chosen people. So you didn't dare ask questions.
Even years later, I remember I was shocked in a meeting with [Darryl] Zanuck and Joe Mankiewicz where Mankiewicz actually asked Zanuck a question.
Getting back to this, after Dieterle had left Chicago, I still couldn't find anything out about "King Zess." When I arrived in Hollywood and Dieterle's chauffeur picked me up, I asked him what Dieterle was working on. He told me Dieterle was making a picture about jazz. The king of jazz! "King Jazz" was what he meant. Chicago, I guess, was the jazz center [of the country] at that time—it had shifted from New Orleans to Chicago.
It was the Depression, late '30s, probably '38. Dieterle set me up in an apartment a block from Hollywood Boulevard. I had my own Murphy bed and kitchen, and outside the window were orange trees and the sky was blue—no smog. Hollywood Boulevard was beautiful. Just delightful.
Anyhow, that was my first job in Hollywood. The film was called Syncopation [1942]. It was quite dreadful. It was a picture that somebody else [based on a story by Valentine Davies and co-written by Frank Cavett] had written beforehand, and I tried to fix it up. I knew very little about screenwriting. It was an impossible idea. Dieterle had one of these intellectual concepts that made absolutely no sense of combining the rise of modern architecture and the rise of jazz.
What was your background as a writer prior to your writing plays? Had you gone to the Goodman Theatre as an aspiring playwright?
I had gone to the Goodman Theatre as an actor. I had just passed my bar and was working as a lawyer. I always enjoyed writing; that is, I enjoyed reading, and I always thought I would write, because I wanted to live in a one-room kitchenette and wear a tam and not go to work. I hated a job, I hated work. I hated the idea of having to go down to an office. If I had had to go down to an office, I would have resorted to something far more desperate.
I decided I'd write short stories. I wrote some short stories. I don't remember them—they were all rejected. But when Esquire rejected one, I wrote a personal letter back to the initials of the person who had rejected it and enclosed the story again, asking if he couldn't take a few minutes to give me some help. The person wrote me back a letter and said, "Look, your prose is stilted, but your dialogue is excellent. You have a flair for dialogue. Why don't you try writing plays?"
This was what kicked me off. I had never seen a play in my life. Seen a lot of movies, but never a play. So I went to plays. I think the first play I ever saw was in Chicago, called The Spider [a mystery melodrama by Fulton Oursler and Lowell Brentano]; I didn't learn much from it. I went to the library and I got plays and started to read them. Shakespeare was, well . . . I couldn't grasp it; Shakespeare didn't do anything for me. At that time, the Philip Barry sophisticated sort of comedy and, a little later, the John Van Druten comedies
were popular in New York. They did nothing for me—these superficial people bothered about certain things. I couldn't see the comedy. I couldn't see anything in plays, until I read Eugene O'Neill, whom I had never heard of. Well, I said, this I can write. This is it. This is people. People!
Was your class background upper class, or middle class, or lower class?
I'd say middle class. Jewish neighborhood in Chicago. Not the rough neighborhood.
Where did you get your interest in ordinary people off the streets?
Chicago. That's Chicago. Chicago is full of Poles, and I come from Polish immigrants, so the Poles interested me. Because they're a brutal people—well, you can't make any broad designations—but in Chicago, in my period, they were. Life was very hard, very difficult, especially in the Depression. It didn't affect us because my dad got into the beauty supply business and that was excellent throughout the Depression, because any gift that could raise seventy-five cents would go get her hair set.
[Producer-writer] Robert Blees told me a funny story once about how you started out by marketing some liquid soap back in Chicago .
Oh, I made anything. Made that. I didn't do any research, I used to think up everything myself. I wanted to go to law school, but I also wanted to write and to have free time. So I started a company called Cooperative Buyer Service, a mail-order business with all the beauty supplies that my dad was selling. I would fill orders for cost and charge one dollar for handling. I was getting in three hundred orders a week. I couldn't handle it. So I sold it to a [law school] classmate of mine, a much older man who was a CPA for Colgate Palmolive, and he made the American Beauty Company, a million-dollar company, out of my idea. Which is still a good idea. You sell at cost, you charge for handling. It's terrific for the beauty shop where they can buy one hundred dollars' worth of stuff and there's a 10 percent override.
There's a great Hollywood story that is part of your legend, about you hiring somebody else to go through law school for you. Is that apocryphal?
That's nonsense.
When you studied at Goodman, were you taking acting seriously? Were you playing leads or character parts?
Oh, I played leads because I was five foot ten and husky, and most of the students at the Goodman were wimps, so I got good roles. In fact, two producers from New York saw one of my plays and offered me a small part in a play on Broadway. But I was, even then, in my last year of law school, and I said this is nonsense, being an actor.
I didn't have the face of a leading man. There were no character [leads] like today. Guys like Richard Dreyfuss couldn't play waiters. They would never get a chance to go before the camera. I still don't enjoy seeing these [kinds of] faces. . . .
You prefer a handsome leading man?
Not the Bob Taylor type, but at least a Steve McQueen, who wasn't good-looking but sort of rugged. Pacino is good, even though [he is not conventionally handsome] . . . and [Dustin] Hoffman happens to be a very fine actor with an unfortunate face.
Let's return to Dieterle. I know you did some uncredited work on his The Devil and Daniel Webster [1941] . But Syncopation is your only credited screenplay for him .
Dieterle had an opportunity to become a giant, but you couldn't talk to him, and he was very narrow. He had a lovely home near Warner Brothers, and I would go to dinner there about three nights a week, and who would be there?—Leon Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann, the Reinhardts [Gottfried, Wolfgang, and Max]—the older German refugees that came to Hollywood, the great artists. Because Dieterle was successful, they'd come to his house, and I would just sit and listen to these people.
But Dieterle went bust. He was such a fine man, he carried me at $35 a week, which paid my rent and meals, comfortably. My rent was $32.50 a month—no car—who needed a car?
So I ran into a writer by the name of George Beck, who needed a collaborator. He took me into Columbia Pictures as a junior writer. I was getting $250 a week, a fantastic salary, working with George there. And they gave us an assignment. This was in the good old days. The Golden Days. I call them the Shit Days.
Imagine getting this assignment: Sam Bischoff was the producer. Nice fella, but this is a guy who should be running a bookie joint. What's the idea? It's called . . . something like Victory Caravan . Three name-orchestras—like Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw—are on a train with their girl singers and their whole orchestra (this was during the war), and they're going from Los Angeles to New York. . . . Imagine, you have to go back to your office and write a movie about three orchestras and three girl singers on a train. It was enough to make you commit suicide. I don't think anybody today would ask anybody to write that.
How is it that somehow you ended up at Monogram, working with the King brothers?
Well, George Beck comes in one day after lunch and says, "Look, I just had a meeting with the King brothers. They want me to write a script for them, but they can't pay any money." George was then getting about $1,500 a week. So he says, "I told them you're a good writer, why don't you go to see them?"
I went to see Frank and Maurice [King]. Frank was like a 300-pound Chinaman. Always a big cigar in his mouth and his drawer full of Hershey bars, a couple hundred Hershey bars. Always wondering why he was so fat because, he says, "I don't eat." Maurie had been a prize fighter and would always have black coffee, but he was heavy, too.
When I first met them, they wouldn't pay for a script. I came into the office and they were, uh, they weren't gangsters, but they had [investments in] slot machines and they were probably running something [illegal] in town. Nobody questioned it. They had a few bucks, not rich, but they had a few bucks. They asked me to write them a gangster picture.
I wrote them a gangster picture [Dillinger ]; they liked it. Frank was intelligent. I don't think he graduated from grade school, but he was intelligent—he could read, he could understand. He gave it to [studio head Steve] Broidy. Broidy says, "Are you crazy? It's expensive! Well, this picture looks like it's going to cost over $50,000. The one I made before cost $26,000. We have got to protect our investment, so Chester Morris has to play Dillinger." I said, "Chester is fifty years old and he can't play Dillinger."[*] He says, "Well, I'm not going to put up the money unless . . ."
It's only been in the past ten years that you could make pictures without names. For years in Hollywood you couldn't even make a little picture without a name. That's one of the things I didn't like about the so-called Golden Age. The audience was at the mercy of the stars.
There was a kid that came in the office by the name of Larry [Lawrence] Tierney. Boy, he looked like Dillinger, and he was mean, and I wouldn't sell the script until they agreed to put him in it.
So Frank says, "Look, write something simple [next time]." He put me in touch with a fellow by the name of George V. Moscov. George I spent a week with and he taught me production and the fact that you can't make a million moves [in a script]. The next script I wrote was very tight. They decided to make it. I said, "Frank, you make the picture any way you like. But you haven't made any arrangements to buy it." Maurie turns to him and says, in Yiddish, "Give the bum a few dollars." I guess they didn't know if Yordan was Jewish or not. I understood [their Yiddish] explicitly.
I said, "Look, I don't want to sell it." They said, "Listen, we want you to become one of the family." I had already started on another script they liked, so they said, "What do you want?" I said, "I don't want to get paid for the script. I'll write. If you don't make the picture, you don't pay me. If you make it, I want a third of everything. Your producer fee, the writer's fee, the profits, the three of us together." Well, Maurie says, "Meshuggener," which means "He's crazy." And Frank says, "No, look, he writes, he's good and he writes for nothing. If we don't make it, we don't pay. So what the hell's wrong with it?" I said to Frank, "Look, Frank, I don't use an office, I don't use a secretary. I type it myself and I bring it in to you, you read it, you get a free look. I consult with you, I help you with the casting, I work with the director, I work with the production manager. I'm not part of your company. You can go off and make as many pictures as you want. When
* Just for the record, actor Chester Morris would have been about forty-five at the time.
you make a picture with me, it's just an extra picture that takes very little effort. All it takes on your part is a nod." I learned that if you presented the thing logically and said, "I'm giving you two thirds for nothing and you can always go ahead and make other pictures," they would buy it. They were very honest. And they always paid me.
We made that picture before Dillinger, called The Unknown Guest [1943]. It all took place on one set. It was the first Monogram picture to play the Chinese theater [Grauman's in Hollywood] as a B. But every picture I did for them played the Chinese, which was almost impossible for Monogram.
Did you find it more compatible to work on a shoestring budget out of the limelight?
No, because I was never in the limelight with Dieterle. He didn't see many people. He was a recluse himself except for the German refugees. He lived in a hilltop place and they had no children.
It's working with someone who appreciates what you're doing. [Producer Samuel] Bronston appreciated me like Frank King. Some of the pictures [I wrote] were [budgeted at] $16 million and some were [budgeted at] $60,000, so this wasn't the question.
I worked for Walter Wanger once. Walter was a gentleman. He was brought out to Hollywood because he was the only educated Jew [among the film executives]. He was a Dartmouth graduate and they wanted to bring somebody out here with some class. So they brought Walter. Walter says to me, "I don't want to read this script. Scripts are shit. They're nothing. It's the subject matter, the story, the title, the cast, the costumes, and the set. That's the picture."
Like Cleopatra [1963]—names, costumes, sets. Wanger wasn't interested in the rest of it. Didn't believe in scripts. So there was no sense working with Walter. I consider myself a good writer and the reason I enjoyed working on the B pictures is that all there was was the script. You didn't have anything else. I knocked out one after the other, and they all played the Chinese.
Do you know a critic by the name of Agee?
James Agee?
Yeah. I just read a book of his. Just the other day. Here. [Takes a book off the crowded shelf .] Read this paragraph here.
(Reading .) "I want to add to Manny Farber's and Orson Welles's my own respect for the Monogram melodrama, When Strangers Marry . The story has locomotor ataxia at several of its joints and the intensity of the telling slackens off toward the end; but taking it as a whole, I have seldom, for years now, seen one hour so energetically and sensibly used in a film" [James Agee, James Agee on Film, p. 155].
It shows you that there was some appreciation. I also have a book of [François] Truffaut's.[*] I never met Truffaut, even though I lived in Paris off and
* Truffaut, one of the Cahiers du Cinéma group, calls Yordan "one of the most gifted writersin Hollywood" in François Truffaut's The Films in My Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978).
on for fourteen years. He wrote a book in which I'm mentioned. He says out of all the Hollywood writers, the true artist is Philip Yordan because everything is there in his scripts. The director has to put it on the screen. But the sets, the characters, the dialogue and the humor—it's already there. And I never met the guy.
Did you feel that gratification at the time, in the 1940s, when you were making the films?
Well, it was always hard to get the money to do the films, and there was always a hassle with the directors and all that, so no, I just felt that I was getting what I was writing over on the screen. When Strangers Marry [1944], by the way, had Bob Mitchum, Kim Hunter, Dean Jagger, and a couple of other names in it, but it was a cheap little picture.
What difference does it make to you, writing on a small level or writing on a big-budget level?
Same thing. I don't write any differently.
Is it harder either way?
No. It's the same thing.
Do you have to put in more narrative description [for the more expensive set-pieces]?
No. I never do that anyway. When I was at Columbia during my early period [in Hollywood], Sidney Buchman had become the [de facto] head of production. [Harry] Cohn had evidently made some flops, and had been temporarily semiretired. Well, Buchman had a meeting with all the writers. He says, "Look, don't put any shots in. I can't read the script with the shots. Do not describe the characters. We're gonna cast it. Just write the script—like you would a play." That's how I write 'em.
Now, if I were writing a Western, I'd just say, "There's a lone rider on the horizon and his name is Tom Early." That's all. I wouldn't describe anything else.
Were there drawbacks to working with the King brothers and for Monogram on such a bargain-basement basis?
No, no. I loved it. I loved it because Frank would pick me up every morning for a delicious breakfast; unfortunately, he came by at 6:30 A.M. , which is a little early for me. And Frank didn't have a night life, but Maurie did. Maurie would take me to nightclubs where we'd have dinner and the broads and stuff. So I had a very good life with them.
Did they have any story sense?
Oh, Frank could tell you, "I like it" or "I don't like it."
And he would be right?
I agreed with him. He very seldom commented. I must tell you that, except under special circumstances, I never rewrite, and my best work was no re-
write at all. Because of the pressures I could usually write an original screenplay faster than I could doctor somebody else's screenplay. Practically everything I did was solo. I never collaborated with a writer. When there's two names on the script, there was not a collaboration. Not that I'm opposed to it. But I work with directors, not writers.
When you write, do you write the way they say [Georges] Simenon does? In a kind of blind passion, without sleep, without eating; just sitting down and writing in a fury, and afterwards feeling totally exhausted, debilitated, and having to sleep for many days?
I need eight hours sleep. I need a full breakfast. I cannot write until I have my breakfast. I stop for a big lunch and I stop for a big dinner. In those days I needed a lot of good Havana cigars. No drinking, no booze—none of that bullshit. No. The writing has always been fluid. I can do practically any script in five days.
But they're always challenging me. Eddie Small called me in once and said there's a picture at Republic called something like Why Girls Leave Home [1945]. They had built a set and hired the actors and Yates [Republic studio executive Herbert Yates] had a pickup on it, maybe $200,000 on the picture. This was on a Friday night and they had to shoot on Monday morning. The Bank of America was on the hook for the $200,000 and Yates, who had script approval, had turned down the script.
It wasn't Eddie's picture, but he says, "Look, Wanger and all the independents, we met, and this mustn't happen. All of the banks will suddenly start looking deeper [into our business] and we'll be in trouble [if the picture doesn't start on time]. So I talked to Yates and mentioned you, and he says if you'll write the script, he'll honor the pickup. But he wants to read the script Sunday night."
That time they had to hire me three secretaries. I started Friday night, I dictated the script Saturday, I worked till Saturday afternoon. Then I went to the Turkish bath and got a rub and I snoozed for about an hour and went back to work. They were typing as I dictated Sunday, and we finished about noon. It's about the only time I worked really straight through. And, of course, they made the picture.
How were you able to write without rewriting? To what do you attribute that? Most people revise and polish and revise .
I must tell you, I don't make outlines and I don't think them [scripts] out. Oh, I don't say they're always good, but . . .
I would say that, almost from the very beginning, I've always worked where somebody was in trouble, so there was no chance to think of anything but to get the picture made. To get it made; then everybody's off the hook. To get it made, to get the element, to satisfy the directors and the actors.
Like once when [producer Walter] Wanger called me in on a picture [probably Tap Roots, 1948] where there was trouble with Susan Hayward and Van
Heflin. I wrote a couple of scenes for them. He never paid me. He sent me a box of cigars.
When I wrote Reign of Terror [1949] for him later on—they were shooting the picture at Eagle-Lion—he didn't pay me for that script either. I went down to the studio, and Wanger had disappeared. He was in New York.
I went to the company lawyer and said, "You're shooting the picture, but nobody bought the script." He says, "Are you kidding?" I said, "No. Walter never paid me for the script, and you're shooting it." Well, he called in Krim—who owned Eagle-Lion—and that's where I first met Krim.[*] He says to me, "Jesus, what the hell's the matter with Walter? Phil, you've got to give us a release!" I said, "Of course, I'll give it to you—pay me! What is this, the Salvation Army?" He says, "Phil, we've only got about $15,000 in the company. That's all the cash the company has, except for the money set aside for the shooting. I'll give you $10,000 . . ." I said, "$10,000!?" He says, "That's all I got." I took it. And when he became head of United Artists, he remembered.
The best example of this troubleshooting came later on when MCA was my agent and Lew Wasserman took a personal interest in me. Lew, at the time, was setting up deals for the studios. He'd go into Paramount and he would work out their schedules for the year, for the most part. He would sell them books or originals, he would sell them to writers or to directors; then he would package the actors. That's how MCA became an important agency, because they were really running the studios.
Well, Herbert Yates, at Republic, wanted to do something big. And Joan Crawford had dropped out of Metro, so Lew Wasserman says, "Why don't you make a picture with Joan Crawford? A Western . . ."
A favorite of Lew's was Nick Ray. Lew liked him. Nick was a very difficult man. Nobody understood him. This guy had the hardest life of any person I knew in Hollywood. Totally misunderstood. But Lew sold them Nick Ray and a Western called Johnny Guitar . A stupid book that made no sense at all, with a script by the author of the book.[**] It was terrible.
That would be Roy Chanslor?
* Arthur B. Krim, an attorney, was president of Eagle-Lion Films in the mid-1940s and was elected president of United Artists in 1951. In 1978 he became one of the co-founders of Orion Pictures.
** Chanslor's novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953) is dedicated "to Joan Crawford." Indeed, it reads as if it were written for filming and is striking in that it contains all of the major characterizations, relationships, and set pieces of the movie. The story line is virtually identical. The differences in the film story are more in the background than in the foreground, more in the nuances and high style than in the primary concepts. In the book, Emma (the Mercedes McCambridge character) is just as ornery, for example, just as obsessed with Vienna (the Joan Crawford character), just as determined to seal Vienna's death. Instead, through a plot twist, Emma and another female character kill each other during the final shoot-out. Someone—whether it was Yordan, Crawford herself, or whoever—decided that that cathartic showdown ought to be between Emma and Vienna, the single major departure from the book and the cult-climax of the film.
Cast members: from left to right, Russ Tamblyn, Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden,
and Scott Brady. The original publicity caption reads: "The incandescent Joan
Crawford has eyes for guitar-strumming Sterling Hayden before blazing gunplay
interrupts the music in Johnny Guitar ."
Yes, yes. I don't want to demean Roy, but you just couldn't make a picture out of it. It was nonsense. I guess Republic had bought it for Gene Autry or something. Then, when Yates was looking for something for Joan Crawford, Lew remembered Johnny Guitar, and he sold him a package.
I got a call about eleven at night from Lew. That's when Lew was really working, before he took over at Universal and became what he is today. He said, "Phil, I'm in deep trouble. I've got Joan Crawford and Nick Ray and a bunch of our people in Arizona and they've been shooting for a week. And Joan won't go before the camera [anymore] because she says the script stinks." I got it through the grapevine that she had called up from Sedona, Arizona, for a Carey Cadillac [a limousine service] to drive from Beverly Hills to Sedona to pick her up.
Lew says, "If she leaves, Republic will go out of business. They can't take a loss on two million dollars' worth of commitment. They'll save only a couple hundred thousand by not shooting. They'll sue me, MCA will sue Joan—but she doesn't care. We can't let that happen. I want you to go there and satisfy her to go before the camera. There's a car on the way to pick you up. I chartered a plane for you and you're leaving right now."
I said, "Sure."
So the car was there, took me to the airport. I'll never forget the trip. The pilot was flying a broken-down tramp plane. He had never been to Sedona, Arizona, and he didn't know where the hell he was going. He kept looking at a map and asking me to look out the window, and I couldn't see any damn thing. It was just black as your bottom out there. Finally, we go over some place where there's some guy swinging a lantern in a field. We landed in this field and there was another guy there who took me to the location, a beautiful motel and a big ranch house for the cast and crew. There were about seventy-five people living there.
When I saw Nick Ray, I said, "Nick, what is it?" He says, "Well, look"—he was getting $75,000 a picture; he owed money in Vegas, he was a gambler and he was in hock up to his ass—he says, "I need this picture; I can't be abandoned, so do something with her. I can't talk to her anymore. She feels I betrayed her. She read the script before and she needs the money too, but she just doesn't want to go ahead."
So I went to see her. She was expecting me. I had already done Anna Lucasta [1949], so I had some reputation. She says to me, "Phil, it's just a crock. Did you read it?" I said, "I read it." She says, "It's terrible." I said, "Well, listen, Joan, you know the situation. If you go, the company goes down." She says, "Well, I gotta protect my career. I'm not on the way up. And this picture could finish me." I said, "I agree with you." She says, "Can you rewrite it?" I said, "Yeah, though with the shooting and all, I don't have much time. But tell me, what bothers you?" She says, "It's non-sense. I have no part. I just stand around and walk around with boots on and have a few stupid scenes." I said, "Well, what's your idea?" She says, "There's Sterling Hayden in the picture and he's not much and some other actor and he's not much and Ward Bond, one of the actors who John Ford is always using in those pictures with [John] Wayne, and he's not much. So I want to play the man. I want to shoot it out in the end with Mercedes McCambridge, and instead of me playing with myself in a corner, let Sterling play with himself in the corner and I'll do the shoot-out." I said, "Ah, uh, um . . . if I do that, will you do the picture?" She says, "Yeah." I said, "Okay."
I went to see Nick, and this was already three in the morning, and I knew that the Cadillac was going to be there in three hours from Beverly Hills to bring her back. Now, Nick didn't hardly ever say anything. In fact, he would sit with his back to you when you talked to him. Look out a window, even if it's night. And I would say something and wait fifteen minutes, then Nick would turn around and he still wouldn't say anything.
Finally I said, "Nick, look, you need the money. I can use the money. MCA is good to us (because they always found me work). So, why don't you get up in. the morning and when you shave in the morning, say, 'I'll never
work with Joan Crawford again,' and then in eight weeks it'll be over!" I remember Nick waited fifteen minutes and then he says, "Never is a long time."
Well, I went and wrote the script. I think it took me about a week. But Lew says, "You better stay on. You're on payroll for the whole picture, so you better stay on." I just stayed. And do you know the picture became a cult picture?!
In fact, I was working at Warner Brothers when the picture opened at the Paramount Theatre, and one day I was having lunch with Jack Warner and he says, "Yordan, what the hell is this?" This was when Hollywood was in really bad shape in the fifties. He says, "Joan Crawford is finished. And here you do a stupid Western with her called Johnny Guitar, it's the name of a man, and she is the one that shoots it out [with the villain], and that doesn't make any sense. At ten in the morning" —this was like noon on a Thursday and the picture was just opening— "they're standing in line at the Paramount downtown in Los Angeles. Why? Her last couple of pictures have dropped dead. So why?"
I never did understand why. How did the audiences know to go to see this picture? I don't know. Anyhow, that's the story of Johnny Guitar .
I had the same situation years later at Fox. [Producer David] Brown, who was partners with [Richard] Zanuck, was the story editor, and I had a seven-year contract at Fox. But I had a seven-year contract at Columbia too once, and I never lasted more than eight or nine months. The pay [at Fox] was good, they treated me fine, and Zanuck even let me work at home. But it was a harder life, I don't know why. There was something wrong with me that I couldn't stay at a studio.
Anyhow, Brown called me in; it was in the morning on a Thursday. He said they had a Western with Gregory Peck called The Bravados [1958]. He handed me the book. He said they had a script [based on the novel by Frank O'Rourke]. I read it and again it was a situation like Johnny Guitar . It wasn't a good script and Peck had turned it down.
Brown says, "You know, Peck in a Western is bread and butter. We need that picture, I can't tell you how desperately, for our banks. We need this picture. So, can you write it?" I said, "I can write it if I don't use the script or the book. I'll have to write you an original from scratch." He says, "I don't care what you write, but I want Peck." I said, "Well, I don't know, I never met Peck, but I can do something with it." He says, "What's the deal?" I said, "Well, if Peck doesn't want to do it, there's no deal. If Peck wants to do it, I'll make a deal with you." He says, "Fine."
Well, I went home and I had a secretary, little Southern girl, and I just dictated this story straight through. Beginning to end. Their top director, Henry King, read it and says, "I'll do this." When King says he'll do it, then Peck says, sure, he'll do it.
The story was very simple. A rancher comes back after a cattle drive to find out that his wife was raped and killed, and he's out to get the guys. The picture opens in a town where there are four guys in jail for holding up the bank and shooting the banker, four outlaws; they are going to be hung the next day. Everybody is armed, on guard, and they don't want anybody interfering with the hanging. In rides Gregory Peck and he comes to see the sheriff and he says, "I want to see the hanging." What kind of creep is this that has ridden two hundred miles to watch a hanging?
Guy likes hangings! Then Gregory Peck asks, "Can I look at the prisoners?" The sheriff says, "What the hell do you want to look at the prisoners for?" But he takes him down to the cells and the prisoners look at him and they don't know who he is either.
In the middle of the night, some other guy arrives, the hangman. Only he isn't really the hangman, he's their outlaw friend, and he springs them. When he springs them, they kill a couple of guards. Now, a posse is going to get them, so Peck says, "I want to join you." He joins them. And by and by, you find out that these are the guys that killed his wife.
The posse chases them to Mexico, only they have to stop at the border. But Peck's not an officer of the law, so he goes over the border and he gets them one by one. The first guy he captures and he hangs him. The second guy he shoots. The third guy, I don't know, he kills in some way. The fourth guy is a Mexican and he tracks him all the way down to his house with his wife and baby, and he's about to kill him when he realizes that these aren't the four guys. They're four outlaws who held up a bank, they deserve to die, but these aren't the guys that raped and killed his wife. He has killed three guys out of blind revenge. So he spares the fourth guy.
I don't think there had ever been a picture like that. It was something I just invented on the typewriter as I went along. So when you have an idea like this, what's to rewrite? It's simplistic, you go along and you wait for the kicker—you find out that he's chasing the wrong guys.
I'll tell you how apropos it was [of Johnny Guitar ]. I had a problem. Peck says, "I'll do the picture but I want a few changes." Brown says, "We're all set but we still don't have Peck. He likes the script, but you've got to sit down with him . . . because he won't sign [a contract] until he talks to you."
Well, this guy comes to see me in my little office at Fox and he says, "You know, I lynch three guys. That's not me. I don't lynch innocent people." I said, "They're not innocent, they're . . ."
Well, he had thirty-three changes [he wanted], all written down, which destroyed the whole script. The basic premise was this character didn't want to kill. I said, "Mr. Peck, the whole strength of this picture is you're killing murderers—but not the murderers that killed your wife. And in the end, you do spare the fourth guy, when he proves to you he couldn't have been there. And, of course, you go back to church, because you're a Catholic, you con-
fess, and you get absolution." Henry King was a Catholic, and he loved the ending.
Anyhow, I must say, that after a couple of hours I whittled down his objections one by one. I prefaced the discussion by saying, "Look, Mr. Peck . . ." He says, "Call me Greg . . ." I said, "Greg, you're the boss. Without you, we're in the shithouse. I need this picture because of the banks." And I told him everything that Brown had told me and that my job was to make him happy. I said, "Anything you say, I'll do. I'll do to the best of my ability. You're the boss, so I want your opinion. I'll give you my opinion, but I don't want to make you feel that you shouldn't do the picture." So he didn't say much, he just listened. When I was all through, I made two small changes, and he did the picture.
The picture didn't work. [Director] King was too old. It didn't come across the way it should have.
You buttered Peck up?
I didn't butter him up! I was honest. The same with Joan [Crawford]. Honest. Direct. Saying, I work for the studio, and I'll do anything you want. Anything you want, I gotta do. That was my approach.
[Producer-writer] Jerry Wald had another approach. He once went to see Joan Fontaine at her house about a film. She ordered tea. He says, "Look, before we sit down and drink the tea, you have read the script and here's the writer . . . Are you or aren't you going to do the picture? Are we gonna talk about how you're going to do the picture, or are we going to talk about how you're not going to do the picture? Because if you are going to talk about how you're not going to do the picture, let's have the tea and cookies and tell some dirty jokes and then we'll go. Why discuss a thing you're not going to do?"
Which sets up a negative framework .
Yeah. That was his approach.
Were you aware, during the time you were writing these films, films like Johnny Guitar and The Bravados, of conceiving conflicted, neurotic characters who were driven by psychology to behave in ways that seemed different from [the behavior of characters in] films of the past? Were you at all influenced by Freud?
No. I just tried to make them interesting. Never thought about psychiatry. Never read Freud.
You worked often with directors Anthony Mann and Nicholas Ray. Can you differentiate between them for me?
Oh, night and day. I knew Tony in New York when he was with Selznick, one of a dozen directors testing girls for Gone with the Wind [1939]. Tony never graduated from grade school. He was an orphan. He and I were about the same age, but ah, [he was] very poorly bred. He loved the theater. He used to sleep in the theater at night. He was an assistant stage manager and maybe he directed one or two plays, I really don't know.
Then when he came to Hollywood, he called me. I avoided him because I figured, jeez, this is a no-talent guy. You couldn't even have a conversation with him, he was so ignorant. And it turns out we made ten, eleven [actually, only seven that are credited] pictures together.
What was the first picture I ever made with him? Ah, Walter Wanger had a script written by some starved little screenwriter [Aenas MacKenzie] about the French Revolution [Reign of Terror ]. Imagine a low-budget French Revolution picture—that's the one Walter Wanger picks to make. I read the script. It was nothing but speeches, Robespierre and all this, and I said, "Tony, this is such shit, it doesn't make any sense. You have a good cast, but you can't follow the script unless you're a student of the French Revolution." He says, "Look, what can you do with it so I can shoot it?" I said, "You've got Bob Cummings. You've got Richard Basehart, a fine actor. I'll tell you what, let's make it very simple. Let's set it in the French Revolution, but what happens is there's a black book that's got all the names [of the enemies of the revolution] in it and if Robespierre gets hold of that book, all of these people are going to go to the guillotine. Bob Cummings is the good guy. He's got to find that book before Robespierre. So the whole picture is about the black book. In the meantime you've [still] got the French Revolution and all the characters making their speeches, all of that."
He says, "Yeah, it makes sense." Then I began to appreciate Tony. He had a camera eye. I went on location with him once on a Western. He saw things. He understood the camera. He would say, "Phil, I'm not that concerned about the dialogue. Nobody listens, they look, they watch . . ." My forte is dialogue, as you know. But . . .
On the other hand, that means he won't tamper with the dialogue .
He never changed it, he never changed it. I remember once, I wrote Men in War [1957] at 150 pages. When he went through the script, he reduced it to eighty-two pages. He threw out all the dialogue. Of course, I put all of the dialogue back in to get Aldo Ray and Robert Ryan to play it. I said to him, "What am I going to do if you send them this script? They won't show up!"
What was Anthony Mann's understanding and contribution to the script versus Nick Ray's?
Mann understood concept. For instance, we did a picture called The Last Frontier [1955] which didn't make any sense. I had to rewrite it while I was at Columbia. Victor Mature was an Indian scout, and there was a fort with all the blue-coated Union solders and the captain of the fort had a beautiful wife. Vic Mature, this rough mountain man and deer-skinner, he was in love with her. I said, "I'll tell you how we can make sense out of this. This man is a primitive. Her husband is a wimp. The woman doesn't care about her husband and they deserve each other. But the only way Victor Mature can get her, because she's a lady, is if he is as cultured as her husband, a West Point man. And what's culture to him? He wants to wear a blue uniform. His character
doesn't have to change or anything, but he has to wear a uniform. But they don't want him in the army because he's impossible and undisciplined. In the end, he gets the uniform. That's the whole picture—about a guy trying to get a blue uniform."
Tony understood. He says, "Now I got the spine of the picture."
How did that compare with Nick Ray? Was Ray more fussy about the script?
Oh, Nick could give you cancer. Actually, I think he died of cancer. He had the most miserable life of anybody I have ever known. Nobody liked him. Nobody was close to him. Actors respected him, because Nick was an educated man—an architect, I believe—but he never spoke. Finally I said to him one day, "Nick, I didn't bring my X-ray machine with me. Goddamit, talk! Say something, for chrissakes." It was very difficult to get anything out of him, except when he recognized it was right.
I knew Nick Ray from before. I'll digress. I'll tell you how I met Nick. I was at a party and there was an actor there by the name of Frank Lovejoy who liked to drink too much. For some reason, he started to pick a fight with me. I never knew why, but he got very aggressive. And Nick, who was a very big man, defended me. I didn't know him then, but I knew of him. I think [director Elia] Kazan brought him out [to Hollywood].
He had a reputation of being a little difficult, even then. But we became friends and he called me in on one or two of his pictures, not to write, but always to doctor a scene or two, which I always did for him. I never got paid, but it wasn't an evening's work. And I never forgot this kindness, this intervening for me.
For Johnny Guitar, he had an interesting concept. He put Joan Crawford in red all the time, because I had written that the posse comes directly from church, at one point, to lynch her. They are all wearing black suits and white shirts and shiny shoes and black hats and black ties—this is the way I wrote it—and Nick seized on that and he used the color system of the black and white of the town, and her in red, throughout the whole picture. So he took that from the script, though I hadn't written it with that in mind.
Who was the better director for your money?
They're totally different. When Nick was doing Rebel Without a Cause [1955], I was at Warner Brothers working for [producer-writer Milton] Sperling on a Bogart picture [unfilmed, because Bogart was dying], some piece of crap. And I went to see Nick at the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying with the kid, Jimmy Dean, a very insecure kid to whom Nick gave support. I had written a couple of scenes for Rebel in-between [my other work]. I'd written the scene where the father's walking around with an apron and vacuuming the floor and is down on his knees picking up something when the kid comes in and pulls his dad up off his knees, or something—I remem-
ber that. Nick couldn't really tell me what he needed, but he gave me an idea of what he needed.
Tony didn't need that much help. What Tony needed was, like on El Cid, in the scene where [Charlton] Heston and Sophia Loren meet for the first time. I was on the set with him. Heston starts in from one side—it's a big garden scene with a fountain in the middle—and Sophia comes in from the other side. He grabs her and kisses her, and I said, "Jesus Christ, this is a scene from the eleventh century, Tony, you can't do that . . ." He says, "Well, what do I do to get away from the [style of a] Western?" I said, "Have him walk across the garden and hold out his hands. She holds out her hands, and they just touch hands. In those days, they just touched hands." He says, "Okay." He understood right away and he did it.
I must say I am surprised by what you say about Johnny Guitar. In many film reference books, Ben Maddow is credited with writing some of the films you worked on throughout the 1950s, including Johnny Guitar.
Total fabrication.
Did you know Ben Maddow?
I knew Ben Maddow through Irving Lerner. Ben Maddow was having a hard time making a living. I had one or two jobs for him. I don't recall which ones—they had nothing to do with Johnny Guitar. Johnny Guitar I wrote on the set, there in Sedona.
There was one picture, it could have been Men in War, where I sat down and dictated a thirty-page treatment and gave it to Ben and he wrote the script and then I polished it.
I did the same thing on Studs Lonigan [1960] with a playwright who was working on it. I sat down with him and I really dictated every scene, the dialogue, and he wrote in the description. But Ben never wrote any of these things, really.
Who was the playwright working on Studs Lonigan?
Arnaud D'Usseau. A nice man. In fact, when I went to Spain, Arnie came there and worked on a couple of scripts when I was with Bronston. But Arnaud was essentially a playwright, not a motion picture man. And Ben . . .
Ben has a credit sheet filed at the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences where it lists at least five films that he says were supervised by you but actually written by him .
Baloney.
Johnny Guitar, God's Little Acre . . .
Johnny Guitar? That's a total lie. This I resent, because Johnny Guitar was written on location.
Could it be that he had written the script you were rewriting?
No. The original script was by Roy Chanslor, sure.
How about God's Little Acre?
No. Men in War he worked on . . .
How about your novel, Man of the West?
Yes. I sat him down and dictated the thing, as I did with Arnaud D'Usseau. What I would do is dictate the dialogue, and he [Ben] filled it in, I guess. Ben filled that one in.
I mean, the novel—which I have a copy of, with your credit as author. Ben claims he wrote the novel .
Yes, he worked on the novel too, for me, and the screenplay [of the novel, filmed as Gun Glory in 1957]. But if you read the screenplay, you'll see it fits the hero character that I've always written. I've always written the one character. The hero. A man with a cold, hard, bad past—and I never like to go into the past—with his own set of morals and everything else.
Under what auspices were people like Ben Maddow and Arnaud D' Usseau working with you? Were you functioning more as a producer-writer at this point? Or did you have too much work?
No, I didn't have too much work. But I was making a lot of money, and Sidney Harmon, a producer I knew from New York, was some sort of leftist. Sidney produced Men in War; he produced most of my pictures. Really, I produced them, but I always gave Sidney the credit. Sidney helped me out years ago, so when Sidney came to me and says, "Look, Irving Lerner can't find work," I gave him [Lerner] a job as an editor. Then Sidney says, "Ben Maddow is starving to death, can't you find something for him?" And: "Arnie D'Usseau can't pay his rent . . ."
Ah, I'm not saying that they didn't deliver, but they couldn't write with my speed and they couldn't write in my style. If you've ever seen anything Ben's written, Ben hates the establishment, hates everything, it's all negative. Ben could not write a hero. He could never have written the hero of Man of the West . He could write the heavy, but not the hero. Because he didn't believe in a Gary Cooper.
In the 1950s; it was courageous, wasn't it, giving these blacklisted people work? A lot of the blacklisted people worked under pseudonyms, but you gave them work under your own reputation, and then gave them money. Wasn't that good for them at the time?
I'll tell you, I never read a newspaper until I was fifty. I never looked at television until the 1970s. I never read Time magazine. I never tended to be political, I never voted. So I didn't understand this whole blacklist thing. In fact, because I never went anywhere or attended any meeting, I used to get calls from the Right [wing], asking me to come to meetings. They thought I was on the other side of the fence.
In fact, on my first picture [Syncopation, 1942] with Dieterle, I had [the character of] an architect [who] goes broke during the Depression. I had this scene where he's a bum in the woods and he's sitting around a campfire with
all the other bums who are telling him that he ought to get out of the country, when he gets up and makes a speech for about two pages, saying "America is great, all you gotta do is pull yourself together and get out of this hobo jungle and go back to the city and make your way."
There was an arbitration on screen credits, and John Howard Lawson was an arbitrator. He called me in and did he give it to me! He said this was the most reactionary speech he had ever read. He says, "Do you realize what you are saying . . . ?" I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I said, "It's George Bancroft. Dieterle asked me to write a good scene for George Bancroft. I don't know anything about political. If he's out of a job and a bum in the woods, what's he gonna say? So I wrote him a speech." He says, "It's so horrible, what you wrote. You're setting the country back a hundred years . . ."
No, I gave these people work, because Sidney, in a sense, was my conscience. He says, "Phil, you've got so much money, you've got a play on Broadway, you're making $5,000 a week, and these guys are starving to death. Give them some work, for chrissakes."
Was Ben Maddow valuable to you as a writer?
Wouldn't I have brought him to Spain, if he was valuable to me? Ben is a good writer, but he really belonged to the documentary school. His documentaries are excellent. He and Irving Lerner. I gave Irving Lerner [the directing assignment of] The Royal Hunt of the Sun [1969] and he ruined it for me. He couldn't direct the picture. He's a tremendous editor, but he couldn't direct. And the problem with Ben is that everything had to have this social consciousness. Aagh! And no hero. Negative.
Look, I don't give a damn about all this. But I'll give you another example.
Irving Lerner came to me and says, "Leo Golden[*] has got a wife and two kids and they're throwing him out of his house. Phil, he needs $1,200 to save his house . . ." Well, at the time I was working at Columbia and I had that deal at Republic. So I wanted to sell Republic a script, but I couldn't put my name on it, because I was on an exclusive contract with Columbia. So I said to Irving, "Okay, I'll give him $1,200 . . ." Leo came over and I said to him, "Leo, have my lawyer draw up a release on the picture I wrote. I'm putting your name on it, and I'm giving you $1,200 for your name, because I'm selling it to Republic. All you have to do is sign your Republic check over to my company." It's a picture I wrote for Vera Hruba Ralston. So, fine.
The picture comes out and a year later, Leo's broke again, and I get a lawsuit. He says, "You sold the script [to Republic] for $20,000." I met his lawyer. I said, "Sure, I sold it for $20,000. I had a deal with Republic. Yates knew I was writing the film for Vera Hruba Ralston. This was after Johnny
* "Leo Golden" is a pseudonym. Yordan did not identify the specific Vera Ralston vehicle, which is not accounted for in his filmography.
Guitar . But I was at Columbia, so I put Leo's name on it and gave him some money. He never wrote the script. He had nothing to do with it." Leo never wrote a script in his life.
Well, he sued me, and we went to court. They had a little improvised small claims court or something. He sued me for the guild minimum, which was about $5,000 or $6,000 in those days. Before the trial, I met with his lawyer and showed him the contract, the complete release, and everything else. I was indignant. But here the judge was looking at this big, rich Hollywood producer and here was this poor writer being foreclosed, and the big, rich Hollywood producer has paid him $1,200 for the script and sold it for $20,000. His lawyers says, "I think he should get a third." My lawyers says, "Here's his release . . . besides, he didn't write it!" The judge listens to everybody and says, "Give him a third." You know, it cost me $6,000?!
I got so mad at Sidney Harmon. I said, "Stop bringing me these guys! From now on, I don't want you bringing me anybody at all. Forget it! I'm sick and tired of these guys. I need them like a hole in the head."
Believe me, when I worked at Fox for Zanuck, Zanuck read my scripts. Tony Mann wasn't going to work with anybody but me. Nick Ray wasn't going to work with anybody but me. I was in Spain with Bronston. Hell, I must have written over a hundred pictures, so there's a couple of incidents where I helped guys out and all it did was backfire. Though I must say, in Ben's case, he never asked me for anything. He was always very grateful.
Was Irving Lerner introduced to you by Sidney Harmon?
Yeah. Sidney was always bringing me guys that needed jobs. Irving directed five pictures; I gave him all five pictures. He did a picture for me once with Vince Edwards [Murder by Contract ], whom I found off the street and then he became Ben Casey [on television]. I look at the rushes, and there were four gangsters in a room, standing up, walking around and talking. But I didn't see heads. I heard all the dialogue but I didn't see heads, and I said, "Irving, what the hell is the matter with the framing? There's no heads!" He says, "Everybody shoots pictures with heads talking, I'm sick and tired of it, I'm going to be different." I said, "Jesus Christ, Irving! There's such a thing as being different, original, but not shooting guys walking around without heads! Everybody in the theater will yell, 'Frame it! Frame it!' "
You stayed associated with someone like Irving Lerner and even gave him five directing jobs. Didn't you care about what he would do to your films on the back end?
He was a friend. Irving would do anything for me. I would call Irving up at twelve o'clock at night and he would get up out of bed and come over to the house. He was a friend.
At RKO, when I first worked for Dieterle, he took me in a projection room to see somebody else's picture. The director was there, a big director. The
picture stunk and the head of the studio turned to the director and says, "Well . . . bad luck." I never forgot that. They were friends.
Did you work with any of the other famous blacklistees working prolifically and under pseudonyms during the 1950s—people working for the King brothers, occasionally—like Dalton Trumbo or Michael Wilson?
No.
You have mentioned one example where you put somebody else's name on a script that you wrote. Were there other such instances?
No. There was once a fella who worked in a Pickwick bookshop. His name is Dennis Cooper. He was a clerk there. I gave him a story to write and he wrote a script. I had to rewrite it, but I put his name on it [When Strangers Marry ]. This was in the early 1940s.
I am told that one of the great Hollywood screenwriting anecdotes of all time is the story of how you won an Oscar for the screen story of Broken Lance.
Whereby?
I'm told it's credited as a story by you, though it is actually a loose Western remake of your story for House of Strangers.
Fox had bought a book [for House of Strangers ] which didn't make any sense at all, about a New York Italian family. I sat down with [producer] Sol Siegel and said, "I can't do this book." Sol was a man who appreciated writing and Sol says, "Well, can you do an original?" I said, "Sol, I've been trying for about three weeks now and I can't get the opening scene. But I've got a helluva scene somewhere in the middle of the picture." He says, "Let me read it." He reads it and says, "This is great."
Next week, I brought him another scene. I said, "I don't know how this fits, but read it." He says, "This is great also." So I said, "Sol, do I have your permission just to write scenes, and somehow I'll fit them together?" He says, "Go ahead." And he'd call me up every week and say, "Get on your bicycle and bring the pages over. . ."
I wrote an original and this was the basis of House of Strangers . I didn't like what [writer-director Joseph] Mankiewicz did [with it]. He decided to shoot it like a play. Everything was done in full figure. If you look at the picture, you'll see the floor, the heads, and the feet. He should have done a lot of close-ups.
When they made the Western Broken Lance, they took my original story, which Fox owned, and they used that for the basis. That was the basis of the Oscar.
Picked it out of the story files? You didn't do any work on Broken Lance?
No. Fox owned it. I was a contract employee [when I wrote it]. If you go through the studio files, you'll find lots of original stories we wrote in those days. You'll find original stories of mine in practically every studio's files.
And if they used an original story of mine, it qualified. They didn't have to buy it.
But l've seen House of Strangers, and l've seen Broken Lance, and they could have gotten away with claiming it wasn't yours, right?
How could they? Not only that but, look, I had signed away all the rights, but I could have sued "Bonanza." They used my character, the father, Lorne Greene, and all the four sons—that's "Bonanza"—that's my House of Strangers . My original. But don't you understand? I was making $2,500 a week at Fox. They owned everything I wrote.
I don't see the Oscar you won for Broken Lance anywhere in your office .
Look, I must tell you that I was nominated for my first Academy Award for Dillinger, my original screenplay. At the time—I don't want to go into all the details, but in the 1940s the studios, all the majors, had signed a consent agreement not to make gangster pictures. Monogram was not a signatory, so when they made Dillinger based on my original screenplay, Louis B. Mayer was so indignant. He called up Frank King and says, "Frank, you gotta destroy the negative for the good of the industry." Frank says, "Sure, what'll you pay me?" Louis B. Mayer says, "I'll pay you nothing." Hell, the picture went out, the picture cost $65,000, and it made $4 million. I had a third of it.
I'm not sentimental about the Oscar, because I really won it for Dillinger . What happened is, at that time, there were several categories—original screenplay was one—and there were five nominations [in that category]. I was leaving my seat to pick up the Oscar because I had pull with a lot of the writers, all the nominators, when they announced that Marie Louise [1945], some picture made in Switzerland that nobody had ever seen, had won. [*] I can't prove it, but at that time Walter Wanger was high up in the academy, and later he told me, "Look, we couldn't give it to Dillinger . We pulled a switch." What the hell!
It doesn't mean anything to me anymore. At the time, it was important. Dillinger was one of the first crime films of its type. Darryl Zanuck ran that picture again and again, and used it for the basis of many pictures at Fox. In other words, I had created a style.
The person that really helped me on Dillinger, incidentally, was [producer-director] William Castle. I had a secretary and I dictated the whole script to her. William Castle was supposed to direct it. He was sitting with me as I dictated.
Everybody thought this poor bastard was a cheap talent and I couldn't get him work. He worked, he made these little horror pictures at Columbia. But he couldn't work on the bigger pictures. Until Rosemary's Baby [1968] . . .
You are adept at so many different genres—gangster pictures, Westerns, biblical pictures, historical epics, science fiction . . .
* In 1945 Richard Schweizer won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Marie Louise .
"I had created a style": Lawrence Tierney in the title role of Dillinger . Philip
Yordan's script was nominated for an Academy Award.
As long as it's real. I have no trouble doing biblical pictures like King of Kings . I found that very easy. And I find gangster pictures very easy. Westerns—the first Western was very hard to do, but once I broke through, then I did some of what I consider very excellent Westerns.
Why was it hard for you to break through at doing Westerns?
It's not that easy to do a Western. It sounds like it is, but it isn't. The Western hero is the last hero. He's been parodied as "yup" and "nope," but that's not it at all. He's a man who is accountable only to himself and God. He's alone, he's his own judge and jury, whatever he does.
What helped you to lick Westerns? To figure them out?
I project myself into everything. In other words, from my acting days, I act out everything. That's why I have a reputation for doing good dialogue. That's because I play the dialogue before I put it on paper.
You will write faster if you always have yourself in it. In other words, I always become the character. When I write the heavy, I'm the heavy. When I write the hero, I'm the hero.
Of course, I learn very easily. Milton Sperling was a brilliant producer and a good writer, but because he was Harry Warner's son-in-law, he was intimidated, and he could never express himself at Warner Brothers. I did a lot of pictures with Milton and he taught me a lot. He taught me that the size of your hero is determined by the size of your vilain, so spend more time with the villain than with the hero, because the hero will bask in the reflection of the villain. If you want to make a big hero, you have got to make a big villain.
For Westerns, you just had to work up to the point of being all alone. The mythical Western hero is a man who lives alone, a scavenger who lives off the land. He buys his supplies in a general store, he makes his biscuits and bacon. He doesn't necessarily hunt for a living or for eating. He doesn't need company. He does need a woman. He doesn't need anybody. Though I have always liked the idea of his chivalry toward women. I'm repulsed by men going around slapping women down. It doesn't do anything for me. I don't understand it.
What about the biblical pictures? I'm surprised to hear you say they came so naturally to you .
Those were very easy to do.
Let me just make a parenthetical comment. They say there was a Golden Age. That's for the birds. There wasn't. It was terrible in Hollywood. You had ignorant producers.
Today, you have committees of intelligent Harvard or Yale men, or men out of business college—acountants, lawyers, mainly lawyers. They are more intelligent. But they have no feelings, no religion. You can't appeal to them. A person who has no religion I find it difficult to communicate with because there is no base. I don't care what religion a person is, he doesn't even have
to go to church or believe in God, but he ought to have some faith in something other than himself.
You started writing these religious pictures twenty years into your career. Was that a challenge for you, or did it have something to do with film trends?
No. I had done Edge of Doom [1950] for Sam Goldwyn, which won the Christophers Award [a bronze medallion awarded for "high standards in communication"], and that was a Catholic film. Look, I believe there's only two religions—the Jewish religion and the Catholic religion. Everything else is weak tea. Everything else isn't half the strength.
And, if you're a writer, you can write anything.
Were these religious-themed pictures your idea or Sam Bronston' s?
Sam was a wonderful, generous man, but he never read the scripts. Sam never discussed a script.
Well, for example, whose idea was it to make a film about the life of Christ?
I was in New York. I had had a fight with Columbia. Harry Cohn had gone to the Hawaiian Islands and told me to write [while he was away] a script [of a story] that didn't make any sense. I was under contract at Columbia, but I had made a date to do some work for Howard Hughes at RKO. When Cohn came back, he raised hell with me. So I quit. He says, "You're not going to work in Hollywood while you're under contract to me, and you can't quit."
While this was going on, I got a call from Nick Ray. He's in Spain. He says, "I'm here with a producer by the name of Samuel Bronston," someone I had never heard of. He says, "We're doing the life of Christ and I have script trouble. Phil, can you fly over for one day?" I said, "I can't, I've got to go to Columbia and straighten Harry Cohn out and I've got to deal with Howard Hughes . . ."
Hughes was impossible. I always had to meet him at five in the morning. I always met him at Goldwyn [studios]. He would never walk on the lot of RKO. He had an office at Goldwyn in the basement.
Nick says, "Phil, I'm desperate. Please come over. One day only. One day." So, he sent me a round-trip ticket. I flew to Madrid; I met Sam and Nick at the airport. They were waiting for me as if I was the Messiah. Nick had built me up because it was after Johnny Guitar .
They had a script called "The Son of Man." It was just excerpts from the Bible. And they had built a hundred little sets on a back lot in Madrid.
I said to Sam, "This script doesn't make any sense at all to me. I can write you a script, but it will take me about six weeks" —I had my library back in Hollywood. "I'll go back and write it. In the meantime, you've got a camera-man. Fire everybody else. Tear down the sets. They're useless. Nick, go back to Rome where you are living. I'll be back in six weeks." I went home and I wrote a script in six weeks.
Oh yes, I said to him, "Son of Man is a terrible title. Why don't you call it King of Kings ?" He says, "How can we call it King of Kings without [Cecil B.] De Mille's permission?" I say, "Sam, in the library there's a dozen books called King of Kings . It's a public-domain title. It doesn't belong to anyone. For a six-cent stamp, you can get it registered. . . ." I typed up a letter and registered it.
Nick read the script and liked it. Sam said to me, "You have to stay in Madrid for a year to make this picture for me. . . ." I said to myself, "If I've got to be in Madrid for a year, I might as well make another picture here. Once I finish this script, I'll just be sitting around. . . ."
There were only two subjects I knew of for Spain: Don Quixote and El Cid . So I put out a flyer and discovered a script about El Cid written by one of De Mille's writers [Frederic M. Frank]. A terrible script. So I rewrote it.
Writing something like King of Kings, did you have to transport yourself into a whole other world of the imagination? Here you were dealing with as important a subject as a writer could deal with, the very opposite of, say, Dillinger.
No. It's really not much different. Christ was a loner. He's not much different than my usual character. The Western character. It's the same character. The man alone.
Later on, in Europe, you became heavily involved in horror and science fantasy, films like Day of the Triffids. . . . I notice a lot of collected Lovecraft and science fiction anthologies on your shelves. Did you develop an interest in fantasy and science fiction somewhere along the line?
Fantasy I don't like. I've always enjoyed science fiction. I got all my books someplace else. I just keep my reference library here. And I don't find them [the reference books] too helpful.
You went to Europe almost by accident, and you ended up staying overseas for how long—?
Fourteen years.
Why for so long? Just because the work was there at that point?
No. Europe was not like it is today. I left there because it changed. When I first went to London in '59 or so, in Rome or even Madrid, you stayed in a hotel and there, always, the hotel manager knew you, the concierge knew you, it was all personal. You tipped well and you got beautiful service. It was all the Old World.
Now, it's no different than America. Madrid is full of overpasses, smog—there were no cars in Madrid when I arrived in '58, just these little taxis—and there's a sort of working class that has developed which didn't exist when I was there.
It sounds reactionary, and it is. But I was living in the Middle Ages and I enjoyed it. I was a don. In fact, the son of the mayor of Barcelona, impoverished royalty, he worked for me. In Paris, I had a lovely apartment, and this
Writer-producer Philip Yordan on the set of the big-budget epic King of Kings, in
Spain in 1960, with producer Samuel Bronston (at right) and actress Siobhan
McKenna (left). (Photo: British Film Institute)
man always wore a majordomo uniform, and I would say to him, "Ah, Victor, when you go out to dinner with me, or if somebody comes over to the house, you don't have to wear this uniform. You are my guest." "No, no, no," he would say, "you don't understand Spain. If you were a rich industrialist, I couldn't work for you because my father is a duke and I am a count,
and I could not be your servant, but because you are an artist, it's okay for me to work for you."
Norman Krasna told me that because he lived in Switzerland and France and England for almost fifteen years, when he returned to Hollywood one of the problems was he didn't know anybody in a position of power anymore. And that is one of the reasons his, credits stopped .
Well, I had been making my own pictures in Hollywood long before I went to Europe, so I really didn't work for anybody else. When, I took an outside job, it was really for an old friend like Nick, Tony, George Pal, Sol Siegel, Walter Wanger, [Russian-born producer] Eugene Frenke—these were all friends of mine. I made my own pictures.
When I was with Bronston, I made these pictures for him. Then I made Day of the Triffids, The Thin Red Line [1964], Crack in the World [1964] for Paramount. I always made one picture a year, and I never tried to get a job. When I came back, eleven years ago, the smog, was so bad in Los Angeles I couldn't understand how people could live there. I really didn't. So we came here to San Diego.
Your official credits seem to stop after Captain Apache in 1971. Have you written any films since?
Oh, yeah. I got a picture, playing now called Cry, Wilderness [1986]. A nature picture. A company in Minneapolis. I'm the writer. I don't know if my name is on it as producer or not. The distributor, who had done Sasquatch [1978], which cost maybe $150,000 and made over $4 million profit, says to me, "Give me a picture about Bigfoot and I'll make millions." So I sat down and wrote a picture. He says, "No, no, no, you don't understand. You got scenes in beginning that will scare the audience. It's for kids." So I had to take out all the sacary scenes. Bigfoot couldn't be threatening; he had to be nice. Not blood, no violence, no sex, no bad language. I said, "You reallywant a picture about nothing!" He says, "That's it! Now you've got it! Nothing! I want nothing!" I said, "That's the most difficult thing to write." Well, the picture is about nothing, if you sit through it, which I don't know if you can.
I did Brigham [1977] for the Mormon Church.
I wrote three scripts for pictures that weren't made—in Canada. One was about the Russian Revolution. They had a budget on it of about $20 million. They couldn't raise the money. It was called "The Last Train From Moscow." Practically everything I wrote [in the past] was made, but recently, I've written a number of scripts that haven't been made because the prices are out of line. They can't raise the money.
I just finished a picture, a script I sold to a fella in Florida, called The Unholy [1988].
I just finished another picture; I don't know if it'll be played theatrically. It's based on a massacre at a coffee shop. I think it's very interesting. It's
Fifty years of screenwriting: actress Jill Carroll is tormented by a demon in The
Unholy, co-script by Philip Yordan, released by Vestron in 1988.
called Bloody Wednesday in Europe. Here it is called The Terrorists [1987].
I have just done a comedy. It's called "Joe Panda," and we're gonna shoot it in the [San Diego] zoo here. It's a triangle between a zoologist, a girl, and a panda.
Why did you never turn director? It must have been a great temptation .
Well, from Dieterle on, I always worked closely with the director, and usually went over the shots, shot by shot, the storyboard and everything. Not with Nick Ray, but with Tony Mann, I would. Nick, he'd storyboard it too, but he didn't need as much help as the others.
Why I didn't become a director was a conscious decision. Frank [King] didn't want me to direct in the beginning, and probably I did make a mistake because they always look at the director, not the writer. The reason I didn't
care to direct is because the scripts I wrote are really director's scripts anyway, like Truffaut says and this fella Agee.
Also, the idea of having to get up at five in the morning. The idea of having to go to bed at eight at night. The eighteen weeks of shooting. I think these pictures killed Tony, and Nick Ray, and Mark Robson too. It's a very unhealthy occupation. Terrific pressure. I like to play tennis while they're shooting. And the fact is, I had to go in and take over [directing] more than once . . .
Some screenwriters regard themselves as craftsmen. Others —more as artists in their own right. How do you look at your own work?
I think I'm a great imitator. I don't think I'm an originator. I'm a chameleon, I can adapt to anything, or I can write a picture about anything. It's more than just being a craftsman, because I can analyze and find the key. The key is, I like to lock into one thing which enables me to write the script, and that is the key.
For instance, on King of Kings, it defied me. Until I got an idea. The idea I got was Barrabas wanting to throw out the Romans by force. He wanted to use Jesus, because Jesus could arouse the people; when he found out that Jesus had a different idea than him, this is when he lost faith in Jesus. That was the key.
How did you learn to think visually? Isn't that a great leap for writers who came to Hollywood?
I'd seen a lot of pictures. It was very little visualization. Movies are still dialogue. Really, there's not too much visualization input. When I write it, I just write it straight. I only punch in a close-up when I feel it's necessary. I only describe a shot where it's really part of part of the story. Othewise, I don't.
Were there screenwritters you admired?
No. Frankly, when I saw movies, I never paid much attention to the credits, so I'm like the audience. In fact, my wife sees things in pictures [to the extent] she can anticipate what I can't. I look at a picture to enjoy it. I really don't know who wrote them. And I wouldn't go to a picture because [director] John Ford made it, no.
Were there literary gods you were emulating or imitating? The hard-boiled writers? Hemingway, Chandler, Hammett?
I didn't care for any of them. Except for the short stories of Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises was good, but that's about it.
Was there no one who opened your eyes to a particular way of writing?
A French writer, I think, influenced me. Céline. I was impressed. I didn't agree with him, but I was impressed.
Yet you portray yourself as being widely read .
Oh yeah, I'm very well-read, always was. I started reading when I was eleven years old. When I was eleven, we moved from the west side [of Chicago] to the last house on the edge of the river with the forest preserve behind us, and I started to read three, four books a day. I'd go into the woods with a
book. So I've read thousands and thousands of books. During those fourteen years in Europe, I read tremendously, because if you write one script and it takes a year to make, you have plenty of time to read.
Which of your films do you feel best about, proudest of?
It has nothing to do with the script. It may have to do with the associations during the making of the picture, rather than the script.
In fact, I'm surprised when I pick up [film] books and read them. Here [pointing to the shelf ] is a book about the fifty-two great epics of all time. I picked up this book and discovered that out of the great film epics listed here, I've done six of them.
But this was not conscious. In other words, I never was conscious of anything—except the great thrill to me was finishing the script and turning it in before the first day of shooting. It was like a reprieve. A condemned man gets a reprieve.
I do take pride in little things. For example, I knew George Pal [producer, director, and special-effects expert], a wonderful man. But he had no story sense at all. I forget what I had written for George [The Conquest of Space, 1954], but I was in England—Men in War and God's Little Acre were both hits, so Krim had given my wife and I a free trip to Europe. Three weeks, all expenses, limousine, and hotel expenses—they picked up everything as a gift. We went to Paris, Rome, London, a week in each place. When I arrived in London at the Savoy Hotel, it was summertime, August, and freezing. Jeez, it was cold.
Then I got a call from Pal. He had traced me from Hollywood. He says, "Phil, I'm doing The Time Machine [1960] and the script's just terrible." I said, "George, I'm here on holiday." Anyhow, my wife is a good sport, so I hold up and write him a script in a week at the Savoy Hotel. He had very little money—Metro had very little faith in George Pal, for some reason. Science fiction had no class, in those days, it was a downer.
So, I had to invent stuff that would not cost money. I had to think of a way to show the whole history of the world. In the book, they had great settings and descriptions. We couldn't afford any of that. So I said, "Give me a coin in a scene. A big metal coin on a table. The character picks it up and hits it, and, as it spins, the whole history is told by a coin with a voice. It's a soundtrack. It costs nothing." That's what I take pride in. Stuff like that.
Like when I did The Chase [1946]. Bob Cummings was a chauffeur working for a crazy heavy, Peter Lorre. I had to show that this guy was crazy, somehow. So, they got into the limousine, Cummings is driving, Lorre is sitting in the back seat. Suddenly, Bob Cummings sees the speedometer go fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, because in the back seat the heavy has a button for the accelerator that he pushes. Lorre controls the speed while Bob drives. They head for a train-crossing, because the guy loves to beat this train, and Peter Lorre slows the accelerator down just enough so they barely beat
the train. Bob Cummings is sweating all the time. This costs nothing, only what it takes to rig up a pedal in the back seat. This is what I take pride in. The devices where you use your head and you don't have to build a million-dollar set.
Let me turn the question around. Which scripts do you feel best about?
I feel very good about Detective Story [1951]. Now, it was based on [Sidney] Kingsley's play, and [director] Willy Wyler had [Dashiell] Hammett work on it. But, in fact, Hammett was only on it for six weeks, when Willy called me in to write the script.
In that case the Academy Award nomination was divided between me and Robert Wyler. Robert Wyler was Willy's older brother. He couldn't write a word. But Willy says to me, "Robert's on the Paramount payroll. And to justify the payroll, put his name on the script." What did it cost me? He was a nice man. So, I think I've been pretty generous in my life with people. I put his name on.
Like with Battle of the Bulge [1964]. There was some fella [John Nelson] in Spain who did research for me and I put his name on the script. When I rewrote the script with Milton Sperling, Milton objected to putting this fella's name on it. I said, "Milton, he's living in Spain, what does it hurt? You're the producer, your name is first. My name is first on the script, your name is second. Leave this guy's name on. It helps him a lot, and what does it hurt us? We're not giving up anything."
Why Detective Story? Because you did something interesting to open up the play?
When I went in, they gave me Hammett's office. I found a few little cigars in the desk and a typewriter with a cover on. I lifted up the cover—this is a true story—and there was a page in the typewriter that said, Detective Story, page one up in the corner, and "Fade In." That's all there was. That's all Hammett did in six weeks. Never wrote a word.
The play was done on Broadway with three areas on the stage, and when they switched from one area to the other, it was done by blackouts, blackouts, blackouts. In film there's no [such thing as a] blackout! Boy, this was one of the most difficult tasks I ever had in my life. How do you keep that fluidity going? And Willy had said, "I don't want to leave the police station." Boy, that was a complicated job.
It was so complicated I couldn't do it at home. I had to rent a suite at the Ambassador Hotel and hire two secretaries and get about four copies of the play and a couple of pairs of scissors and line the scenes all up on big buffet tables. It was like trying to hold onto a slippery snake, because Willy never sat down and helped you with the script. Never. In fact, when I finished the script, he called in the whole cast and I had to sit for a week at the table just reading the lines with them all.
But he's a tremendous director. When I gave him the script, the set was
already built. I remember walking around the set with him, and him saying, "Here's the first setup. Bingo! Shoot!" Then a still photographer took photographs, Willy put them up in his office, he called in the whole crew and he says, "There's the whole picture. Look at the stills. There's every setup." Willy was in bad shape at Paramount because of Liberty Films—he, Capra, and Stevens had made nothing but flops. So they gave him only thirty days to shoot the picture. That's one of the reasons why he didn't want scenes outside of the police station. He had to film it in thirty days.
How about The Big Combo? Are you fond of that picture?
No.
What about Studs Lonigan? I have half an idea that it was a labor of love for you, because of your Chicago upbringing. Did you read and admire James T. Farrell's trilogy?
No. I never liked his [James T. Farrell's] writing because there's no hero in it.
Studs Lonigan was a terrible mistake. Sidney Harmon cast it. There was a very handsome boy who played the lead [Christopher Knight]; good man, but he couldn't act, he was lousy. Jack Nicholson had the fifth role. If we'd given Jack Nicholson the lead, we might have had something.
Originally, I had Warren Beatty for the lead. He was coming to my house every day, swimming, using the pool. He'd never made a picture, but he was under contract to MCA. MCA says to Beatty, "Look, low pay, just minimum wage, but we want you to do Studs Lonigan because it'll kick you off." Well, I gave the directing to Irving Lerner. Irving comes to me and says, "I can't do this picture for $300,000 with Beatty. Even though he hasn't made a picture yet, he has ideas, and I can't deal with him. We'll never finish in time." So I had to drop Beatty.
I had a deal with somebody who had to finish the picture by a certain date, or they lost their rights. Krim called me in and said, "Can you finish the picture in ten weeks? I'll give you 10 percent of the distributor's gross." So, I wrote it, but I must say that when it was shot, I was in Europe with Sam [Bronston] already.
And The Harder They Fall?
No. [Director] Mark Robson only had one theory: "Attack the establishment!" I'd say, "Mark, who gives a shit about attacking the establishment? Let's try to make a good picture." Also, Steiger's part was the picture. Bogart had a contract with Columbia, so he had to do the picture, and he had no role. He raised hell and gave me a bad time. He behaved very badly on the picture because it wasn't his picture.
He was dying at the time too, right?
Yeah, but I didn't know that. (Pause .) I said to Mark, "Let's get Victor Mature to play the prizefighter." He says, "No, let's get a real fighter." So he found this wrestler [Max Baer] and he ruined the picture. Guy couldn't
act! I said, "Mark, I don't feel anything with this guy. The picture's cold." But Mark was only interested in social content. It's the same thing today with the pictures on television about rape and newspaper headlines and all of this. I'm not interested in this. To me, a thing is interesting or it's not interesting.
When Marty Ritt came to Fox, his first picture [No Down Payment, 1957] was based on an idea of mine. I had read in Life magazine about the building of these new subdivisions where there are no alleys, no separation, no neighborhood, no community. I had an idea about a no-down-payment subdivision of four houses, and I called in a novelist who had written paperbacks and I dictated about fifty pages.
His name?
John McPartland. I paid him, I think, $7,500 to write a novel [based on my idea] and I bought the motion picture rights. He wrote it in about six weeks. Well, he couldn't get it published, so I found a publisher for him, Simon and Schuster, and he made about $35,000 on the novel. I never cut into his royalties. And I held all the rights, everything!
I sold the motion picture rights to Fox and wrote the script and Marty Ritt came in from New York. Jerry Wald was the head of the studio under Zanuck. Marty read the script and he didn't like all of the sex stuff in it. He was only interested in the economics. So I went to Jerry and I said, "Look, this guy is way out of left field, and a very good director, intelligent man, very talented. But he wants to make a social documentary out of this picture. And I wrote a sex picture with the economics in there." Well, I had to cut out all but just a little sex. When the picture was finished, [executive Spyros] Skouras looks at the picture and says, "Hell, this is a leftist picture, I can't release it here." He killed the picture.
When it comes to movies, I'm not interested in social content. [Spits out cigar-end .] Yet you'll find it in all of my pictures.
And what does it say?
It's [a theme of] the loneliness of the common man. But he has an inner resource that enables him to survive in society. He doesn't cry, he doesn't beg, he doesn't ask favors. He lives and dies in dignity. The best example of a character like that is Jean Gabin, the French actor, who [often] played the common man. And I think Gabin was so far superior to [Spencer] Tracy, his American counterpart. But Tracy couldn't compare because Gabin was always in Europe [in his films], where you do not rise—the workingman does not rise.
How do you react when you pick up a distinguished film encyclopedia that says, "Philip Yordan is known for writing tough and gutsy screenplays"?
I don't pay any attention to any of that junk. It's because I got into a situation where that was called for, that's all.
Philip Yordan, publicity photograph (early 1940s).
(Photo: USC Special Collections)
But do you feel that it's a fair statement: that you are tough and gutsy and that that is what is generally communicated in your films. You said so yourself, that with your most recent film, the producer wanted to take the sex out, the bad language out, the violence, whatever. Well, that's what most people take out to begin with, whereas that is what you put in to begin with .
Well, I think you've got to keep them from falling asleep.
But you're also reflecting real life, real people, real situations .
Not real real. In the real sense, life is too depressing and nothing really happens. It's a quiet desperation.
Do you know the picture Edge of Doom [1950]? Boy, if ever there was a downer, that's the picture. It opens up with a guy killing a priest because he can't afford a funeral for his mother. Again, this is [Mark] Robson directing—very depressing. And Goldwyn, who liked me, hired me to put some juice into this.
Well, I started writing the script. Goldwyn calls me up for lunch after the second week, and he says he read the scene where the boy comes home from burying his mother—where, in the book, there's a prostitute who lives on the second floor who asks him to have a cup of coffee with her. I wrote—this is not in the book—that when he sits down and is drinking the coffee, he looks
at her and her dress opens a little, and he looks at the rise of her breast and he feels a pressing in his pants and he feels so ashamed, this good Catholic boy, that he doesn't finish his coffee—he runs out of the room.
Goldwyn says, "Ah! Disgusting! I vomited! I vomited right on the floor when I read that scene! How can you write such a degenerate scene? I'm gonna have to hire psychiatrists to help you, my boy! That's so filthy! I gave it to my secretary—she threw up! I gave it to [studio vice present] Pat Duggan—he hasn't shown up for work today!"
I said, "Mr. Goldwyn, it's just a scene. I'll cut it out." "No! No! No!" he says. "You probably got a mental problem." I said, "Well then, fire me, kill me, anything." He says, "No! No! No!"
So I sat in the room for about three days, paralyzed. I couldn't work. The fourth day comes—I had my own secretary with me, who had been with me for years—and Goldwyn comes in and closes the door and sits down and puts his chair against the door. He says, "Now, you write the script." I said, "I can't write with you in the room." He says, "I'm paying you. Write!" I said, "Mr. Goldwyn, you'd better get somebody else. I've never quit a job in my life, but I just can't write it. You don't like what I'm doing." He says, "What you're doing is disgusting! I'll tell you why you gonna write this script. I'm a rich man. I'm paying you three thousand dollars a week. And you're gonna sit here. I just did The Best Years of Our Lives [1946], which made $11 million, so I can afford it. I'll make other pictures, while you sit here on your weekly salary for five years, because I've got a week-to-week contract with you, and as long as I pay you, you have to work on this script. I can demand as many changes of you as I want. After five years, I'm gonna come in on a Monday morning and fire you. Then, you can call your agent. He will tell you Yordan is never going to be offered another job. They will ask: What has Yordan done the past five years? He has disappeared. You'll never work again . . ."
Well, I wrote the script. I had a scene in it where the kid goes into an agency to buy a coffin, and they take him on a tour and show him the bronze coffins, which he can't afford. So the salesman calls his assistant, who takes him down to the basement, where they show him these pine-board coffins. That's when the kid says, "They're not gonna bury my mother in a pine box and throw her in the ground. I want to give her a funeral like they have for rich people. . ."
Well, Goldwyn came on the set with all these coffins when we were shooting and it was the only time he hung around the set. We went to Pasadena for a preview, the whole audience is about eighty years old, and when all the coffins are up on the screen, they get up and walk out. I don't know if the picture even played in the theaters. And Goldwyn loved it.[*]
* Goldwyn did not love the scene enough to include it in the release print, however. At least, that coffin scene is missing from television prints today.
I like to write about something, okay, something gutsy. You can't do The Harder They Fall, for example, and not be tough. The Westerns I wrote were hard to write, but at least they were dramatic. Milton Sperling used to say, "Phil, your writing is too purple." I guess that's what you mean by gutsy and tough. It's too purple. Maybe I go overboard, yeah.
You are certainly not very affectionate towards most of the films that resulted from your labors .
No. Because there's too much association [for me] with the problems on the pictures.
Like on 55 Days at Peking [1962]. There were problems with Ava Gardner getting drunk. She wouldn't come out of her dressing room. I knew Ava because I gave her her first real picture—Whistle Stop [1946]. So I pounded on her door and said, "Ava, open up the door or I'm gonna break it down." Well, what does she do? She runs out of the room, drives over to Bronston's house, wakes him up in the middle of the night, and says I'm abusing her. You know what I finally did? I said screw it. I put a double in a bed, I wrote a scene where she gets wounded and she's lying in bed, dying or something, and I gave all of her dialogue to Paul Lukas and [Charlton] Heston, and they had a scene over the double's body in bed where Lukas read her lines.
And David Niven—I remember he signed for $350,000, he arrived in Madrid, and he didn't like the script. I said, "David, you signed for the picture. You read the script before you came. Why are you here, if you don't want to do the picture? We're already shooting. Why don't you go tomorrow and do your first scene. Go look at the rushes the next day, and if you don't like it, we'll redo it." He says, "No, no, no, I don't look at rushes. I hate my face! I won't go to see the rushes. I have never seen a picture I made." Well, he gave me a bad time.
Finally, came the opening scene when he went to see the dowager empress of China with Heston. They had to go into a big palace with her on the throne, both of them standing in a big, empty room. Niven was very upset. It took me a half a day to figure out why. What he didn't want to do was walk in with Heston—with his big shoulders and beautiful uniform. He felt he looked bad [standing next to Heston]. You know how I solved the damn thing? I separated him and Heston by twenty feet, so they're seen in individual shots. When they are seen together, it's a long shot, not a two-shot. And I put a hassock in the room, so when he came in, he could put his foot up on the hassock and stand there with one foot on the hassock. That's all the changes I made.
Or on The Harder They Fall . Robson called me in. Bogey wasn't cooperating. So I went to see Bogey and he says, "Well, ah, this scene . . . ah, I don't like it." I said, "Well, what do you want? You want to change something, we'll change it." He says, "What are you, Shakespeare?" I said, "No, but I'll do my best. . . ."
It was really Steiger's scene. Bogey is standing there in a room when Steiger reads off a long speech and tells him, "You're nothing. I don't need ya. Blow." So, Bogart says what he wants to do is to slam the door when he goes out and almost break it. I said, "Fine, slam the door when you go out."
But it wasn't his picture. He was [supposed to be playing] a weak man that sold out. He didn't want to play that.
Okay, you don't love the films per se. Then what's the upside for you of being a screenwriter? Has there been a positive side?
I guess the appreciation of people I troubleshot for. I have gotten a lot of people out of predicaments. And most of my employment came through, not an agent, but through directors or an actor asking for me.
My life, aside from playing tennis and running around at night, having fun, my day life was always on a picture in trouble. Get it made. Always had a picture in trouble. Very rarely was I sent down on a normal thing. There would always be three, four writers in there before me, and they'd call me up at the last minute. Like on Studs Lonigan, when they were losing their option. Like with The Bravados, when they were losing Peck. Like Why Girls Leave Home, when the bank was going to cut off Republic.
Challenges. I enjoyed the challenges because I felt I could do anything. Nothing bothered me. Analyze it, read it, and I'll find some way out.
I notice most writers have very few credits. Not that my credits are so striking, but when I was called in on a situation, the picture was made. The pictures were made. Good, bad, or indifferent, they were made.
Did you get gratification from the writing itself?
No, not really.
Why not?
When Sidney Harmon was a producer in Harlem, I started to write plays for him. He came to me once and he says, "Phil, when I read your plays, everything turns grey and dark and the walls start creeping in on me. I'm depressed and it's depressing, and nobody wants this." So, in order to survive, I had to take this quality, which is my basic quality, and put it into melodrama like gangster [films] and Westerns, and then I could get away with it. Because if my scripts weren't melodramatic, they would be depressing.
Why is that?
There's an expression in Yiddish: finster . Which means everything turns finster (dark) before my eyes. I've always seen people that way. (Laughs ).
Like I knew a fella in Chicago. Big, tall, handsome fella I used to meet with a lot and go out at night with to the all-night bars. Here was a fella, about twenty-eight years old, starting to age already. He had lost his teenage looks. Lived with his mother. Already he was doomed. Guy was doomed.
When I met Nick Ray, I knew he was doomed. This man was doomed. George Pal was doomed. I knew Val Lewton. He died of a broken heart.
Tony Mann had a heart attack. There was no respect for these people. They were doomed.
There is that edge of doom in so many of your films —
I like the guy that's struggling against that doom. I don't like a guy that's passive and is crashed . . . and goes down like a cock-a-roach.
Bibliographic Notes
Director Howard Hawks was not famous for giving much credit to screenwriters where it might otherwise reflect favorably upon himself. Consequently, Leigh Brackett receives cursory if complimentary mention in the Hawks oral reminiscences collected in Hawks on Hawks by Joseph McBride (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), as well as the more critically oriented Focus on Howard Hawks edited by McBride (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972).
There is an excellent career interview with Brackett in the now-defunct Take One magazine of January 1974 ("From The Big Sleep to The Long Goodbye and More or Less How We Got There") and an appreciation of her career at the time of her death in the same magazine (Take One, November 1978). Another wide-ranging interview, comparing Hawks' interpretation of Raymond Chandler with Robert Altman's, is contained within a broader discussion of the detective film in Jon Tuska's useful In Manors and Alleys: A Casebook on the American Detective Film (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988).
Brackett wrote an interesting piece about Hawks and Hawksian women in Women in the Cinema, edited by Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1977). And her adaptation of The Big Sleep is discussed in a perceptive article by Roger Shatzkin in The Modern American Novel and the Movies, edited by Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin (New York: Ungar, 1978). The annotated script of The Big Sleep is available in the University of Wisconsin Press screenplay series, with an introduction illuminating its creative development.
An informative essay about Brackett and her scripts appears in American Screenwriters, Volume 26 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Randall Clark, Robert E. Morsberger, and Stephen O. Lesser (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984). Essays about Arthur Laurents and Stewart Stern are also included in that volume.
In John Huston's autobiography, An Open Book (New York: Knopf, 1980), Huston's one-time screenwriting partner, Richard Brooks , earns brief, anecdotal recollection. But Brooks is an interview source in The Hustons by Lawrence Grobel (New York: Scribner's, 1989) and receives more expansive treatment there. (Ben Maddow is also interviewed by Grobel about his films for writer-director Huston.)
Brooks' collaboration with Huston on Key Largo is detailed in two unusual legal memos (to ward off possible litigation stemming from text comparisons with The Petrified Forest and To Have and Have Not ) quoted in Inside Warner Brothers (1935–1951), edited by Rudy Behlmer (New York: Viking Press, 1985).
Brooks' contract years at MGM in the 1950s are noted by then-studio head Dore Schary in his memoir, Heyday (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979). Schary, who also supervised Crossfire earlier at RKO, tells his version of the filming of The Blackboard Jungle, complaining good-naturedly that Brooks is "sometimes forgetful" about Schary' s role in the production. Good material and observations on Brooks generally, and with regard to Something of Value as well as The Blackboard Jungle specifically, are to be found in Sidney Poitier's autobiography, This Life (New York: Knopf, 1980).
Brooks' involvement in the saga of the Hollywood Ten and the showdown at the Directors Guild is touched on, dramatically, in Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz by Kenneth L. Geist (New York: Scribner's, 1978).
Brooks' adaptations of Tennessee Williams' plays are covered in The Films of Tennessee Williams by Gene D. Phillips (Cranbury, N.J.: Art Alliance Press, 1980), and in A Look at Tennessee Williams by Mike Steen (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), a variety of transcribed interviews with film and theater notables on the subject of the playwright and his work.
Of the many interviews with Brooks that have been published in cinema journals, there is a searching one in Movie (Spring 1965) and a valuable update in American Film (October 1977). Two interviews have appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma (February 1959 and June 1965); and Positif, another French film journal, features an extensive interview with Brooks in its November 1975 issue.
Brooks is featured in American Screenwriters, Volume 44 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (second series), edited by Robert Morsberger, Stephen O. Lesser, and Randall Clark (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1986). Also profiled in that volume are Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Ben Maddow (David Wolff), Daniel Mainwaring (Geoffrey Homes), Walter Reisch, Curt Siodmak, and Daniel Taradash.
Only fleetingly are Betty Comden and Adolph Green noted in director Vincente Minnelli's autobiography, I Remember It Well (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), and they fare no better in Minnelli's career interview in that seminal anthology of director interviews, The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak, by Charles Higham and Joel Greenbelt (New York: Signet, 1972).
In the Arthur Freed interview in People Will Talk by John Kobal (New York: Knopf, 1986) there is a congenial producer's perspective on the Comden-Green films. ("I liked working with them, very much," said Freed. "They didn't get hurt if you didn't like something, or wanted to do something a little different.") The Comden-Green films receive more individual treatment, albeit also largely from the point of view of producer Freed, in the comprehensive and enlightening The World of Entertainment! by Hugh Fordin (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975).
The screenwriters' relationship with director Stanley Donen is discussed in the valuable Stanley Donen by John Andrew Casper (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983).
As globe-trotting dinner guests, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon are seemingly ubiquitous in the memoirs of their contemporary theater, literary, and motion picture friends.
Of course, Kanin's own books, especially Hollywood (New York: Viking, 1974), are the best references on Kanin's own career. The early RKO films he directed (but did not write) are discussed at some length in an interview in Focus on Film (Spring 1974).
Director George Cukor always took care to praise the high calibre of the Kanin—Gordon scripts with which his career was blessed, notably with expansive comments in On Cukor by Gavin Lambert (New York: Capricorn Books, 1973) and The Celluloid Muse . The Kanin—Gordon collaboration with Cukor is also explored in an article in the Spring 1955 issue of Sight and Sound .
Kanin himself wrote an illuminating short essay about his wife, "Ruth Gordon: Late Bloomer," for Close-Ups: The Movie Star Book, edited by Danny Peary (New York: Galahad Books, 1978).
Though Dorothy Kingsley is noted in passing in many of the books about Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, there seems to be little, if any, serious consideration of her career in film histories and memoirs.
Tidbits about Arthur Laurents, particularly in regard to his early plays, are sprinkled throughout Irene Selznick's memoir, A Private View (New York: Knopf, 1983).
In Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), director Alfred Hitchcock contends that Hume Cronyn did the final adaptation of Rope, and in American Screenwriters, Volume 26 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and in Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend by William MacAdams (New York: Scribner's, 1990), Ben Hecht is also alleged to have toiled on the screenplay. In his interview in the present book, Laurents disputes these sources.
Laurents is provocative on the subject of the psychosexual pathology of director Hitchcock in The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983).
There is no acknowledgment of Laurents' adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse in director Otto Preminger's slender volume of autobiography, Preminger (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977). Nor are Laurents' contributions to Summertime noted in David Lean by Michael A. Anderegg (Boston: Twayne, 1984). In Stephen M. Silverman's David Lean (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1989), director Lean admits that Laurents "hated" the film. Katharine Hepburn is quoted as saying: "I knew David was going to throw out the whole script to the play, and instead of having a lot of details about this and that and the other thing that The Time of the Cuckoo was about, he would just concentrate on a sort of forty-year-old secretary going to Venice for the first time and being flirted with across the Piazza San Marco and reacting to it in the most enthusiastic way, and then leaving because it was totally impractical. And he was going to keep it just that."
Laurents' politics and blacklist experience are touched on in The Hollywood Writers Wars by Nancy Lynn Schwartz (New York: Knopf, 1982) and in Naming Names by Victor S. Navasky (New York: Viking, 1980).
One of the few screen personalities of his era willing to be quoted on the subject of homosexuality in Hollywood and in film stories, Laurents is liberally quoted in Vito Russo's pioneering tome on the subject, The Celluloid Closet:Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).
For background details on Laurents' life and career, see his entry in Current Biography of November 1984.
Ben Maddow 's career as David Wolff, at the forefront of the 1930s documentary movement, is covered in William Alexander's Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) and in Russell Campbell's Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States, 1930–1942, edited by Diane Kirkpatrick (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982). The Documentary Tradition by Lewis Jacobs (New York: Norton, 1979) discusses Maddow's later independent works, particularly The Steps of Age and The Savage Eye .
For cross-reference, there is a noteworthy interview with filmmaker Leo Hurwitz, co-founder of Frontier Films ("Native Land: An Interview with Leo Hurwitz"), in Cinéaste, no. 6, 1974.
In John Huston's autobiography, Maddow receives scant mention for his co-scripts of The Asphalt Jungle and The Unforgiven . Indeed, Huston claims that he "saw in Maddow's script [for The Unforgiven ] the potential for a more serious—and better—film than either he [Maddow] or [producers] Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had originally contemplated; I wanted to turn it into the story of racial intolerance in a frontier town, a comment on the real nature of community 'morality.' The trouble was that the producers disagreed."
Maddow's stint with Stanley Kramer, in the early 1950s, is confirmed, with some embroidery, in the narrative of Stanley Kramer: Film Maker by Donald Spoto (New York: Putnam, 1978).
Maddow's adaptation of Intruder in the Dust has been scrutinized by many critics and writers, notably in Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust: Novel into Film by Regina K. Fadiman (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978) and in "Rites of Passage: Novel to Film," an essay by Pauline Degenfelder in The Modern American Novel and the Movies .
Navasky's Naming Names is an essential starting point for anyone interested in exploring the moral dilemma of the blacklist years and, specifically, in understanding Maddow's sad postscript as an eleventh-hour "cooperative."
Daniel Mainwaring (Geoffrey Homes) functioned in relative low-budget obscurity. But he worked often for two disparate directors who were appreciative of his gifts: the intellectual's cult director Joseph Losey and the thinking-man's action director Don Siegel. Losey expounds on Mainwaring's merits in On Losey by Michel Ciment (New York: Methuen, 1985), and Siegel pronounces Mainwaring his favorite scriptwriter in Don Siegel: Director by Stuart M. Kaminsky (New York: Curtis Books, 1974).
A stimulating article on Siegel/Mainwaring's The Phenix City Story ("This Will
Happen to Your Kids, Too" by Mark Bergman) is included in Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System, edited by Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn (New York: Dutton, 1975).
It seems that the French critics have been particularly alert to the nuances of Mainwaring. In his salad days as a critic, filmmaker Claude Chabrol wrote about film noir in Cahiers du Cinéma, trying to make sense of divergent works lumped together in the same genre. (His essay was reprinted in Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, edited by Jim Hillier [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985].) Chabrol could not quite explain why he liked Mainwaring's Out of the Past so much; he only knew that he did.
He wondered:
Aren't the best criteria of an authentic work most often its complete lack of self-consciousness and its unquestionable necessity? So there's nothing to restrict a preference for the freshness and intelligence of that almost impenetrable imbroglio, Out of the Past [UK title: Build My Gallows High ], directed by Jacques Tourneur and scripted clumsily, and utterly sincerely, by Geoffrey Homes, rather than for Dark Passage, with its skillful construction, its judicious use of the camera in its first half, and its amusing surreal ending. But what makes the first of the two films more sincere than the other, you mayask. The very fact of its clumsiness!
The Daniel Mainwaring interview in this book is but a fragment of a longer recording made on the occasion of Mainwaring's appearance as part of a gangster-film seminar at a midwestern college. Tom Flinn edited the original tape for publication in The Velvet Light Trap, but the remainder of the transcript, and the tape itself, alas, has been lost over the years.
Walter Reisch is warmly remembered in the many books about his principal U.S. directors—Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor. He crops up, too, in some published interviews with Billy Wilder, with whom he co-wrote Ninotchka and with whom he worked, sub rosa, now and then Over the years.
Cukor professes his admiration for Reisch ("a marvelous, very inventive screen constructionist") in The Celluloid Muse and in On Cukor .
The best Lubitsch reference is The Lubitsch Touch by Herman G. Weinberg (New York: Dutton, 1971), in which there are many priceless anecdotes about Lubitsch. Included in The Lubitsch Touch is an interview with Reisch, excerpts from Ninotchka, and a wonderful postmortem essay, constructed from an interview with Reisch after Lubitsch's death. This last provides intimate details of Lubitsch's second heart attack, of the disposition of Lubitsch's estate, of the funeral (Reisch was a pallbearer), and of many curious facts surrounding Lubitsch's life and death. For example, his longtime secretary was buried next to the great director at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Greendale. ("She had saved all her life for this posthumous privilege, to sleep in death next to her boss," says Reisch. "It was only a short time after 1947 that her wish was fulfilled. ") The piece ends with Reisch's admission that he never called Lubitsch "Ernst," but always referred to him as "Herr Lubitsch."
Some background on Song of Scheherazade, the only Hollywood film Reisch directed, can be found in Yvonne: An Autobiography by Yvonne De Carlo with Doug Warren (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987).
Though many of his ideas became classic movies, Curt Siodmak plays second fiddle to his brother, director Robert Siodmak, in most film encyclopedias and other sources.
Contradicting Siodmak's account in this volume, Luis Buñuel himself comments on his involvement in the cult horror film The Beast with Five Fingers in My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel (New York: Knopf, 1983). Buñuel claims he suggested one scene to director Robert Florey and star Peter Lorre, and that later, when he saw The Beast with Five Fingers in Mexico, he realized that "my scene in all its original purity" remained in the film. Buñuel says he considered suing, but ultimately dropped the issue. Buñuel's supposed contribution to the script of The Beast with Five Fingers is also cited in Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography by Francisco Aranda (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976).
Certain of Siodmak's specific titles are intelligently appraised in Cult Movies by Danny Peary (New York: Dell, 1981) and in Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films by Kenneth von Gunden and Stuart H. Stock (New York: Crown, 1982). There are general articles about Siodmak's career in Films and Filming (November 1968) and in L'Ecran Fantastique (April 1983).
A worthwhile interview with Siodmak appears in an anthology of interviews with top scriptwriters, Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures, by Lee Server (Pittstown, N.J.: Main Street Press, 1987).
Stewart Stern is one of the sources for anecdotes and perspective in the biography of Montgomery Clift, Monty, by Robert LaGuardia (New York: Arbor House, 1977).
Stern is captured intelligently in Hollywood Speaks! An Oral History by Mike Steen (New York: Putnam, 1974), in a long interview that was updated in a question-and-answer session transcribed for the October 1983 issue of American Film .
Daniel Taradash 's debut as a scriptwriter on Golden Boy is discussed, complimentarily, in Rouben Mamoulian by Tom Milne (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969) and in King Cohn by Bob Thomas (New York: Putnam, 1968).
Director Fritz Lang was always very effusive about Taradash, and he talks about him in The Celluloid Muse as well as in Fritz Lang in America by Peter Bogdanovich (London: Studio Vista, 1967), where Lang describes him as "a man I admire very much." However, the adaptor of Picnic is relatively neglected in writer-director Josh Logan's two volumes of show business memoirs, Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life (New York: Delacorte Press, 1976) and Movie Stars, Real People, and Me (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978).
Significant background on Taradash's only directorial effort, the social-consciousness film Storm Center, is offered in Bette Davis: Mother Goddam by Whitney Stine with Bette Davis (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974). Taradash is a source for some provocative material in Brando by Charles Higham (New York: New American Library, 1987) and in Golden Boy: The Untold Story of William Holden by Bob Thomas (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983).
An article about Taradash's work as an adaptor appears in the May 1959 issue of Films and Filming .
That man of mystery, Philipa Yordan, has escaped notice in most film histories, and the entries on him in many sources and references are understandably a mass of confusion.
Yordan's version of events apropos House of Strangers is contradicted, vehemently, by writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz in Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz by Kenneth L. Geist. Robert Wyler is given his due as the co-scriptwriter of some of his brother William Wyler's films (including Detective Story ) in the authorized biography William Wyler by Axel Madsen (New York: Crowell, 1973). And in an interview in the October 1987 issue of Fangoria, director Camilo Vila, co-writer of the grisly horror film The Unholy, clarifies aspects of that eleventh-hour credit of Yordan's long career.
Yordan's approach to the Western genre is examined in The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western by Jon Tuska (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1985).
The only other significant Yordan interview extant is with Bertrand Tavernier in Cahiers du Cinéma (February 1962).
Select Bibliography
The principal books noted in the text and footnotes, and some recently published books about screenwriters, are listed here as recommendations for further reading.
Agee, James. James Agee on Film . New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958.
Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
American Screenwriters . Edited by Randall Clark, Robert Morsberger, and Stephen O. Lesser. Vol. 26 of Dictionary of Literary Biography . Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984.
American Screenwriters . Edited by Robert Morsberger, Stephen O. Lesser, and Randall Clark. Vol. 44 of Dictionary of Literary Biography . 2nd ser. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1986.
Andrew, Joseph. Stanley Donen . Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983.
Balio, Tino, ed. The American Film Industry . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.
Behlmer, Rudy, ed. Inside Warner Brothers (1935–1951) . New York: Viking Press, 1985.
Bessie, Alvah. Inquisition in Eden . New York: Macmillan, 1965.
Biskind, Peter. Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties . New York: Pantheon, 1983.
Bogdanovich, Peter. Fritz Lang in America . London: Studio Vista, 1967.
Bosworth, Patricia. Montgomery Clift . New York: Bantam, 1979.
Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets, American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940 . New York: Atheneum, 1981.
Buñuel, Luis. My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel . New York: Knopf, 1983.
Campbell, Russell. Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States,
1930–1942 . Edited by Diane Kirkpatrick. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982.
Casper, John Andrew. Stanley Donen . Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983.
Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 . Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980.
Ciment, Michel. Conversations with Losey . New York: Methuen, 1985.
Corliss, Richard. Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema . Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1974.
De Carlo, Yvonne, with Doug Warren. Yvonne: An Autobiography . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.
Fadiman, Regina K. Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust: Novel into Film . Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978.
Fordin, Hugh. The World of Entertainment! Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.
Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s . New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Geist, Kenneth L. Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz . New York: Scribner's, 1978.
Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons . New York: Scribner's, 1989.
Higham, Charles. Brando . New York: New American Library, 1987.
———, and Joel Greenberg. The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak . New York: Signet, 1972.
Huston, John. An Open Book . New York: Knopf, 1980.
Jacobs, Lewis. The Documentary Tradition . New York: Norton, 1979.
Kaminsky, Stuart. Don Siegel: Director . New York: Curtis Books, 1974.
Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia . New York: Perigree Books, 1979.
Kay, Karyn, and Gerald Peary, eds. Women in the Cinema . New York: Dutton, 1977.
Kobal, John. People Will Talk . New York: Knopf, 1986.
LaGuardia, Robert. Monty . New York: Arbor House, 1977.
Lambert, Gavin. On Cukor . New York: Capricorn Books, 1973.
Lawson, John Howard. Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting . New York: Putnam, 1949.
MacAdams, William. Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend . New York: Scribner's, 1990.
McBride, Joseph. Hawks on Hawks . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
———, ed. Focus on Howard Hawks . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972.
McCarthy, Todd, and Charles Flynn, eds. Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System . New York: Dutton, 1975.
McGilligan, Pat, ed. Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Madsen, Axel. William Wyler . New York: Crowell, 1973.
Maltin, Leonard, ed. Leonard Maltin's TV Movies and Video Guide . 1990 ed. New York: New American Library (Signet), 1989.
Milne, Tom. Rouben Mamoulian . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969.
Minnelli, Vincente. I Remember It Well . Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974.
Navasky, Victor. Naming Names . New York: Viking Press, 1980.
Negulesco, Jean. Things I Did and Things I Think I Did . New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Odets, Clifford. The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets . New York: Grove Press, 1988.
O'Hara, John. Selected Letters of John O'Hara . Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Random House, 1978.
Peary, Danny Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird and the Wonderful . New York: Dell, 1981.
———, ed. Close-Ups: The Movie Star Book . New York: Galahad Books, 1978.
Peary, Gerald, and Roger Shatzkin, eds. The Modern American Novel and the Movies . New York: Ungar, 1978.
Phillips, Gene D. The Films of Tennessee Williams . Cranbury, N.J.: Art Alliance Press, 1980.
Poitier, Sidney. This Life . New York: Knopf, 1980.
Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies . New York: Harper & Row, 1981.
Sayre, Nora. Running Time: Films of the Cold War . New York: Dial Press, 1982.
Schary, Dore. Heyday . Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
Schwartz, Nancy Lynn. The Hollywood Writers' Wars . New York: Knopf, 1982.
Selznick, Irene. A Private View . New York: Knopf, 1983.
Server, Lee. Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures . Pittstown, N.J.: Main Street Press, 1987.
Silverman, Stephen M. David Lean . New York: H. N. Abrams, 1989.
Spoto, Donald. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock . Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.
———. Stanley Kramer: Film Maker . New York: Putnam, 1978.
Steen, Mike. Hollywood Speaks! An Oral History . New York: Putnam, 1974.
———. A Look at Tennessee Williams . New York: Hawthorn, 1967.
Steinberg, Cobbett. Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records . New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
Stempel, Tom. FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in America . New York: Continuum, 1988.
Stine, Whitney, with Bette Davis. Bette Davis: Mother Goddam . New York: Hawthorn, 1974.
Thomas, Bob. Golden Boy: The Untold Story of William Holden . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.
———. King Cohn . New York: Putnam, 1968.
Truffaut, François. The Films in My Life . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.
———. Hitchcock . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Tuska, Jon. The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western . Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.
———. In Manors and Alleys: A Casebook on the American Detective Film . Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988.
Vizzard, Jack. See No Evil: Life Inside a Hollywood Censor . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.
Von Gunden, Kenneth, and Stuart H. Stock. Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films . New York: Crown, 1982.
Weinberg, Herman G. The Lubitsch Touch . New York: Dutton, 1971.
Wiley, Mason, and Damien Bona. Inside Oscar . New York: Ballantine, 1987.
Notes on Interviewers
Tina Daniell works for Laughlin & Constable Inc. in Milwaukee. She interviewed Philip Dunne in the first volume of Backstory .
Dennis Fischer is a Los Angeles-based schoolteacher whose byline has appeared regularly in science fiction and fantasy film magazines. He has contributed chapters to books on such subjects as Star Trek, Kung Fu, the Alien movies and Bela Lugosi. His book Horror Film Directors: 1931–1990 was published by McFarland in 1991. He interviewed Curt Siodmak in Backstory 2 .
Tom Flinn edited the Daniel Mainwaring interview for The Velvet Light Trap .
Joel Greenberg, a resident of Sydney, Australia, has published film history and criticism in England, Australia, and the United States, and is the co-author of Hollywood in the Forties and The Celluloid Muse . He interviewed Casey Robinson in the first volume of Backstory .
Margy Rochlin contributes to many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Esquire and Playboy . She is also a contributing editor on National Public Radio's "This American Life." In 1994, she was awarded the Pen Center West Literary Award for Excellence In Journalism for her article, "The Mathematics Of Discrimination."
Steven Swires interviewed Leigh Brackett at the 32nd World Science Fiction Convention in Washington, D.C., in September 1974.
David Thomson is the author of A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes, Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Wells, and of two novels, Suspects and Silver Light . He interviewed Niven Busch in the first volume of Backstory .
General Index
Italic numbers indicate references to photographs .
A
Abbott, George, 95 , 96 , 98
"Adieu, mein kleiner Garde Offizier" ("Goodbye, My Little Grenadier"), 202 , 215
Adler, Buddy, 150 , 205 , 317 , 320
Adler, Ellen, 147
Adler, Stella, 147
Agee, James, 348
Akins, Zoë, 119 -120
Albers, Hans, 202 , 213 -214, 217
Aldrich, Robert, 254
Alexander, William, 157 , 165
Allen, Dede, 301 , 302
Allenberg, Bert, 318
Altman, Robert, 9 , 15 , 23 -25, 292
American Business Consultants, 49
American Film Institute, 193
Anderson, Maxwell, 44
Andrews, Ralph, 310
Angeli, Pier, 281 , 284
Annabella, 40 , 214
Anouilh, Jean, 224
Ardrey, Robert, 98 -99
Aristotle, 258
Arlen, Michael, 224 , 229
Arthur, Robert Alan, 274
Astaire, Fred, 80 , 81 -82, 86
Aswell, Edward, 35
Atkinson, Brooks, 286
Author's League of America, 104 -105
Autry, Gene, 351
Ayres, Lew, 263
B
Bacall, Lauren, 20 , 42 , 45 -47, 46,61 -62
Backus, Jim, 290
Baer, Max, 375 -376
Bailly, Auguste, 51
Balderston, John, 224 , 231
Ball, Lucille, 98
Balzac, Honoré de, 105 , 258
Bancroft, George, 361
Bankhead, Tallulah, 329
Barry, Philip, 123 , 344
Barrymore, John, 258
Barzman, Ben, 333
Basehart, Richard, 239 , 357
Bates, H. E., 148
Beatty, Warren, 303 , 375
Beck, George, 346
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 208
Behrman, S. N., 224
Bel Geddes, Barbara, 141 -142
Bellamy, Ralph, 63 -64, 259
Bell and Howell, 237
Bellini, Giovanni, 202
Bemelmans, Ludwig, 224
Bennett, Constance, 117 , 118
Benny, Jack, 116 , 286
Bergen, Edgar, 113 , 118 -119, 128
Bergman, Ingmar, 310
Bergman, Ingrid, 139 , 147 , 149 -150, 230
Bergner, Elisabeth, 212
Berlin, Irving, 150
Berman, Pandro, 52 , 54 , 57 , 58 , 96
Bernadotte, Jean Baptiste (King Charles XIV John), 320
Bernhardt, Sarah, 116
Bernstein, Leonard, 73 , 74 , 151
Bernstein, Walter, 158 , 171 , 185 -186
Berry, Jack, 141 -142
Bessie, Alvah, 186 -187, 322
Biberman, Herbert, 322
Bickford, Charles, 190
Bischoff, Sam, 346
Biskind, Peter, 7
Bjork, Anita, 240
Blacklist, 2 -4, 47 -50, 51 , 130 , 142 -149, 150 , 152 , 158 -160, 178 -188, 360 -361
Blaustein, Julian, 314 -315, 320 , 323
Blees, Robert, 345
Block, Libbie, 141
"The Blue Danube," 211 , 215
Bodenheim, Maxwell, 169
Boehm, Sidney, 50
Bogart, Humphrey, 9 , 18 , 20 , 23 , 24 , 41 -42, 45 -47, 46, 61 , 69 , 194,200 , 263 -264, 315 , 358 , 375 , 379 -380
Bogdanovich, Peter, 245
Boland, Bridget, 230
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 320
Bond, Ward, 353
Boone, Pat, 243 -244
Borgnine, Ernest, 62 , 254 , 319 -320
Borneman, Ernest, 2
Bosworth, Patricia, 286
Boyer, Charles, 217 , 218 , 230 -231, 256 , 316
Brackett, Charles, 111 , 203 , 204 , 205 , 224 , 226 -229, 232 -233, 236 -239, 239,240 -244, 245
Brackett, Elizabeth, 227
Brackett, Leigh, 8 , 9 , 19;
interview, 15 -26;
introduction, 15 ;
filmography, 16 ;
working with Howard Hawks, 17 -23;
working with William Faulkner, 17 -18;
on Jules Furthman, 17 ;
The Big Sleep,17 -18, 20 , 23 -24;
on Raymond Chandler, 18 , 23 -25;
on Humphrey Bogart, 18 ;
El Dorado, 20 , 21 , 22 ;
on John Wayne, 20 -22;
Rio Bravo, 20 , 21 , 22 ;
Rio Lobo, 21 -22;
on Westerns, 22 -23;
working with Robert. Altman, 23 -25;
The Long Goodbye,23 - 25 ;
on Elliott Gould, 23 , 25
Bradbury, Ray, 61
Brady, Scott, 347
Brahms, Johannes, 208
Brand, Millen, 136 -137
Brando, Marlon, 11 , 57 , 147 , 254 , 275. 281 , 292 , 293 -301, 296,306 -308, 320 , 325 -326
Brando, Marion, Sr., 293
Brecht, Bertolt, 143 , 224 , 257
Breen, Joseph (the Breen Office), 229 , 242 , 319 -320
Breen, Richard, 236 -239, 239
Bregman, Martin, 327 -328
Brenman-Gibson, Margaret, 67
Brennan, Walter, 21
Brentano, Lowell, 344
Brice, Fanny, 117
Bridges, Harry, 187
Bright, John, 178
Briskin, Sam, 317
Broidy, Steve, 347
Bromfield, John, 266
Bronston, Samuel, 11 , 331 , 334 , 348 , 359 , 362 , 367 , 369,370 , 375 , 379
Brooks, Richard, 2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 31, 46 ;
interview, 27 -72;
introduction, 27 -32;
filmography, 32 -33;
early career (newspapers and radio), 33 -38;
family background, 35 -36;
on Sinclair Lewis, 35 , 58 -60;
coming to California, 36 ;
writing radio scripts, 36 -38;
Universal films (White Savage, Men of Texas, Don Winlow of the Coast Guard), 38 -40;
Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater, 38 -39;
The Brick Foxhole (novel) and Crossfire (film), 41 -42, 59 ;
on Humphrey Bogart (and Lauren Bacall), 41 -42, 45 -47, 69 ;
on Mark Hellinger, 41 -44;
Ernest Hemingway and The Killers,42 -43;
working with John Huston, 42 -47, 50 , 61 -62, 66 ;
Key Largo, 43 -47, 64 ;
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the blacklist, 4445, 47 -50;
working at MGM, 49 -58;
on script collaboration, 50 -51;
F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Last Time I Saw Paris,50 , 51 ;
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,51 , 52 , 53 ;
Blackboard Jungle,51 , 52 -53;
The Catered Affair,51 , 63 ;
Something of Value,54 -57;
on Winston Churchill, 55 -57;
The Brothers Karamazov,57 -58;
Elmer Gantry,58 -60, 64 ;
Lord Jim, 60 -61, 64 ;
on Truman Capote, 61 -62;
In Cold Blood,61 -62;
The Happy Ending,62 , 64 ;
autobiographical films, 62 -64;
The Professionals,63 -64;
script training and approach, 64 -70;
on Clifford Odets, 66 -67;
on humanism in movies, 67 -70;
"The David Susskind Show," 68 ;
on Frank Capra, 68 -70;
on Gary Cooper, 68 -69;
writing technique and philosophy, 70 -72
Browder, Earl, 166 -167
Brown, Clarence, 126 -127, 171 -173, 176
Brown, David, 354 -356
Brown, Nacio Herb, 82 , 87
Browne, Roscoe Lee, 22
Brynner, Yul, 57 , 150
Buchman, Sidney, 13 , 349
Buñuel, Luis, 262
Burdick, Eugene, 297
Burg, Hansi, 213 -214
Burnett, W. R., 2 , 157 , 175 -177
Burr, Raymond, 264
C
Caan, James, 21
Cagney, James, 67 , 69
Cahiers du Cinéma,334 , 348 -349
Cain, James M., 198 -199
Caldwell, Erskine, 184
Calhern, Louis, 176
Campbell, Alan, 69
Capote, Truman, 9 , 30 , 61 -62
Capra, Frank, 7 , 29 , 67 , 68 -70, 111 , 155 , 236 , 313 , 375
"Caprice Espagnole," 232
Carlson, Richard, 265
Carroll, Jill, 371
Carson, Robert, 69
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 192
Caruso, Enrico, 35
Castle, William, 364
Cather, Willa, 35 , 103
Catholic Legion of Decency, 59
Cavett, Frank, 344
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 372
Ceplair, Larry, 3 , 4 , 44 , 142 -143
Chandler, Raymond, 9 , 18 , 23 -25, 199 , 372
Chaney, Lon, 259 , 259,264
Chaney, Lon, Sr., 264
Chanslor, Roy, 351 -352, 359
Chaplin, Charlie, 4 , 7 , 143 , 144 , 310
Charles XIII (king of Sweden), 320
Chavez, Cesar, 200
Chayefsky, Paddy, 30 , 50 , 62 , 151
Chodorov, Jerome, 278
Christophers Award, 367
Churchill, Winston, 55 -56
Ciment, Michel, 193
Clift, Montgomery, 11 , 61 , 130 , 139 , 285 -286, 293 , 309 , 318 -320
Cocks, Jay, 24
Cocteau, Jean, 219
Cohan, George M., 116
Cohn, Harry, 12 , 127 , 309 -310, 317 -320, 322 , 323 , 324 -325, 349 , 367
Cole, Lester, 322
Collins, Joan, 240 -242, 244 , 303
Colman, Ronald, 105 -106
Comden, Betty and Adolph Green, 6 , 9 , 43 , 74 , 77 ;
interview, 73 -88;
introduction, 73 -74;
filmography, 74 -75;
early career, 75 -76;
coming to Hollywood, 76 ;
working at MGM, 76 -85;
working with Gene Kelly, 73 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 -81, 82 , 84 ;
working with Stanley Donen, 73 , 78 , 79 , 80 -81, 82 , 84 ;
working with Vincente Minnelli, 76 , 78 , 80 ;
on Arthur Freed (the Freed unit), 73 , 76 -78, 79 , 80 , 82 , 83 -84, 87 ;
Singin' in the Rain,73 , 78 , 81 -83, 84 , 86 -87;
Band Wagon, 73 , 80 , 84 , 86 , 88 ;
It's Always Fair Weather,73 , 83 , 84 , 88 ;
the autobiographical strain, 87 -88
Committee for the First Amendment, 44 -45, 47
Communist Party (Hollywood section), 144 -145, 166 -167, 178 -179, 185 -188, 322
Congressional Record,300
Conrad, Joseph, 9 , 30
Conway, Tom, 261
Cooper, Dennis, 363
Cooper, Dorothy, 120
Cooper, Gary, 68 -69, 119 , 360
Copland, Aaron, 167
Corda, Maria, 211
Corliss, Richard, 13 , 18
Corneille, Pierre, 89
Cosby, Bill, 67
Costigan, James, 303
Cotten, Joseph, 230 , 238
Coward, Noel, 76 , 215 , 221 , 223 , 320
Cox, Wally, 325
Crain, Jeanne, 135 , 235 -236
Crawford, Broderick, 101
Crawford, Joan, 318 , 351 -354, 352, 356 , 358
Cronyn, Hume, 139
Crouse, Russel, 106
Crowther, Bosley, 197
Cugat, Xavier, 119
Cukor, George, 8 , 9 , 10 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 68 , 97 , 108 -109, 110 , 230 -231, 234 , 235 -236
Cummings, Jack, 50 , 119 , 121 , 123
Cummings, Robert, 357 , 373 -374
Cunningham, John W., 178
Curtis, Tony, 254
Curtiz, Michael, 210 -211, 212
D
Dahl, Arlene, 243
Dalrymple, Jean, 316
Dalton, Audrey, 238
Daly, Tyne, 129
Daniell, Tina, 73
Darvi, Bella, 325
Dassin, Jules, 48 , 333
Daves, Delmer, 50
Davies, Marion, 228
Davies, Valentine, 344
Davis, Bette, 62 , 71 , 323
Day, Frances, 256
Dean, James, 9 , 11 , 275 , 286 , 289 -292, 303 , 306 -308, 307,358 -359
De Carlo, Yvonne, 204 , 232 , 254
Dee, Frances, 261
De Havilland, Olivia, 137 , 219
Del Ruth, Roy, 121
De Mille, Cecil B., 50 , 58 , 368 -369
Derek, John, 315
Deutsch, Helen, 51 , 120
De Vries, Peter, 278
Dial, 163
Diamond, I. A. L., 108 , 111
Dickens, Charles, 104
Dickinson, Emily, 163
Dickinson, Thorold, 230
Dieterle, William, 331 , 343 -344, 346 -347, 348 , 360 -361, 362 -363, 371
Dietz, Howard, 87 , 88
Dillinger, John, 347 -348
Directors Guild of America, 50
Dix, Richard, 156
Dmytryk, Edward, 142 , 322 , 327
Doctorow, E. L., 242
Donen, Stanley, 9 , 73 , 78 , 79 , 80 -81, 82 , 84 , 95 , 127
Donovan, Arlene, 327 , 328
"Don't Ask Me Why" ("Frag' nicht warum"), 202 , 215
Dorraine, Lucy, 211
Dorsey, Tommy, 346
Dostoevski, Fyodor, 9 , 29 , 34 , 50 , 51
Douglas, Kirk, 127 , 197 -200, 198, 239
Douglas, Melvyn, 227,229
Dovzhenko, Alexander, 164
Dowling, Allan, 263
Dozier, Bill, 197
Dramatists Guild, 109 , 111 -112
Dreiser, Theodore, 270
Dressier, Marie, 232
Dreyfuss, Richard, 345
Dudley, Jane, 166
Duff, Warren, 197 -198, 200
Duggan, Pat, 378
Dunne, Irene, 230
Durbin, Deanna, 228 , 314
D'Usseau, Arnaud, 183 , 333 , 359
E
Eastwood, Clint, 44
Edens, Roger, 77 -78, 79
Edwards, Vince, 362
Eggerth, Marta, 218
Eisenhower, Pres. Dwight D., 126 , 309
Emery, Gilbert, 41
Encyclopedia Brittanica,110
Engels, Friedrich, 187
Englund, George, 293 -301, 296
Englund, Steven, 3 , 4 , 44 , 142 -143
Epstein, Julius J. and Philip G., 50 , 272
Ericson, John, 284
Esquire, 35 , 58 , 274 , 344
Esterhazy, Countess, 218 -219
Ettinger, Eve, 315
Evans, Gene, 263
Evans, Madge, 256
Evans, Ross, 235
Evelyn, Judith, 230
F
Fabray, Nanette, 88
Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 221
Falk, Peter, 189
Farber, Manny, 348
Farr, Jamie, 52
Farrell, James T., 375
Faubus, Gov. Orval, 55
Faulkner, William, 9 , 17 -18, 171 -173, 174 , 175 , 184 , 267
Fearing, Kenneth, 169
Fehr, Rudi, 259
Feiffer, Jules, 74
Fein, Rudolf Walther, 213
Feist, Felix, 263
Feldman, Charles, 232
Fenton, Frank, 198
Feuchtwanger, Leon, 346
Field, Sally, 275
Fields, Joseph, 278 -279
Fields, Marian, 279
Figaro, Le, 219
Film and Photo League (branch of Worker's Relief League), 165
Fischer, Dennis, 246
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 50 , 51 , 270
Flaherty, Robert, 158
Fleming, Rhonda, 200
"Flight of the Bumble Bee," 232
Flinn, Tom, 193
Florey, Robert, 262
Fonda, Henry, 68
Fontaine, Joan, 356
Ford, Glenn, 53
Ford, John, 7 , 22 , 100 , 111 , 353 , 372
Forman, Milos, 242
Forst, Willi, 202 -203, 212 , 214 , 215 , 216 , 218 -219
Forster, Rudolf, 212
Forster, Susie, 272
Forsyth, Frank, 263
Fosse, Bob, 125
Foster, Susanna, 262
Foy, Bryan, 279
"Frag' nicht warum" ("Don't Ask Me Why"), 202 , 215
Francis, Freddie, 263
Frank, Frederic M., 368
Franklin, Sidney, 261
Frankovich, Mike J., 326 , 327
Fredericks, Larry, 302
Frederick the Great, 218
Freed, Arthur (the Freed unit), 9 , 73 , 76 -78, 79 , 80 , 82 , 83 -84, 87 , 118 , 119 , 150 , 151 , 230
Freeman, Y. Frank, 58 , 293
Frenke, Eugene, 370
Freud, Sigmund, 156 , 356
Friedrich, Otto, 1
Froelich, Carl, 213 , 214
Froeschel, George, 261
Frontier Films, 157 , 164 -169, 184 , 191
Fulbright, Sen. William, 300
Furthman, Jules, 17
G
Gabel, Martin, 134 , 143 , 292
Gabin, Jean, 376
Gable, Clark, 118 , 203 , 213 , 228
Gallop's Audience Research, 197
Garbo, Greta, 58 , 68 , 74 , 137 , 172 , 173 , 203 , 225 , 226 , 227, 244
Gardner, Ava, 42 , 137 , 254 , 318 , 337 , 379
Gardner Herb, 151
Garland Beverly, 266
Garland, Judy, 78 , 119 , 151
Garson, Greer, 221
Gassner, John, 5
Gaynor, Janet, 69
Genet, Jean, 160 , 189 -190
George, George W., 292
Gershwin, George, 45 , 76
Gershwin, Ira, 45 , 48 , 76
Gibbons, Cedric, 57
Gibson, Charles Dana ("Gibson girl" creator), 241
Gibson, Henry, 25
Gilbert, John, 58 , 82
Gilbert and Sullivan, 76
Ginsberg, Henry, 278 , 290
Gish, Lillian, 190
Glad, Gladys, 44
Gloria Jean, 314
Goebbels, (Paul) Joseph, 214
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 209
Goldberg, Whoopi, 55 , 91
Golden, Leo (pseudonym), 361 -362
Goldwyn, Sam, 91 , 95 -96, 367 , 377 -378
"Goodbye, My Little Grenadier" ("Adieu mein kleiner Garde Offizier"), 202 , 215
Goodman, Benny, 346
Goodman, David Zelag, 297
Goodman Theatre, 331 , 343 -344
Goodrich, Frances (and Albert Hackett), 127 , 224
Gordon, Bernard, 183 , 333 -334
Gordon, Billy, 244
Gordon, Ruth, 10 , 89 -91, 99 , 104 , 105 -110, 109,220 . See also Kanin, Garson
Gould, Elliott, 23 , 25 , 25
Goulding, Edmund, 243
Graham, Martha, 166
Graham, Sheilah, 200
Grant, Cary, 130 , 139 , 324
Grant, Lee, 189
Grayson, Kathryn, 228
Green, Adolph and Betty Comden. See Comden, Betty and Adolph Green
Green, Johnny, 83
Greenberg, Joel, 201
Greene, Lorne, 364
Greer, Jane, 197 -200
Greshler, Abby, 291
Greville, Edmond T., 240
Griffith, D. W., 4 , 201
Grobel, Lawrence, 147 , 190
Group Theatre, 66 , 158 , 185
Guffey, Burnett, 309
H
Hackett, Albert (and Frances Goodrich), 127 , 224
Hagen, Jean, 176
Haid, Liane, 215
Haig, Alexander, 113
Haines, Roberta, 318
Halevy, Julian (a.k.a. Julian Zimet), 333
Hall, Alexander, 229
Hall, Jon, 29 , 38 , 39 , 40
Hall, Oakley M., 327 -328
Hamilton, Edmond, 15
Hamilton, Patrick, 230 -231
Hammett, Dashiell, 18 , 199 , 263 , 372 , 374
Hanff, Helene, 313
Hanlon, Alma, 113 , 116 -117
Harmon, Sidney, 158 , 180 , 331 , 360 -362, 375 , 380
Harris, Jed, 310 , 315 -316
Harrison, Rex, 324
Hart, Moss, 106 , 107
Hartl, Karl, 265
Harvey, Lillian, 216 , 244
Hathaway, Henry, 234 , 237
Hawks, Howard, 7 , 9 , 15 , 17 , 18 -23, 19, 228
Hayden, Sterling, 25 , 176 , 352,353
Haydn, Franz Joseph, 208
Hayes, Alfred, 279 -280, 281 , 282
Hayes, Helen, 149
Hayton, Lennie, 83
Hayward, Susan, 350
Hecht, Ben, 17 , 100 , 139 , 181 , 203 , 224 , 228 , 332
Hecht, Harold (Hecht-Hill-Lancaster), 170 , 190 , 254
Heflin, Van, 350 -351
Hellinger, Mark, 29 , 41 -44, 47 -48, 50 , 62
Hellman, Jerome, 306
Hemingway, Ernest, 17 , 42 , 43 , 103 , 141 , 270 , 372
Henderson, Capt. Ian, 54 , 55
Henie, Sonja, 221 , 236
Henreid, Paul, 262
Hepburn, Audrey, 190
Hepburn, Katharine, 10 , 89 , 108 -110, 109,148 , 315
Henandez, Juano, 172 , 174
Heston, Charlton, 359 , 379
Heymann, Warner, 215
Heywood, Anne, 263
Hill, George Roy, 325
Hiller, Arthur, 326
Hilton, James, 224
Hitchcock, Alfred, 7 , 10 , 100 , 130 , 138 -139, 226 , 245
Hitler, Adolf, 8 , 11 , 202 , 212 -214, 217 -218, 255 , 257 -258
Hoffenstein, Samuel, 223 , 224
Hoffman, Dustin, 346
Hogarth, William, 188
Holden, William, 101,327
Hollander, Friedrich, 215 , 256
Holliday, Judy, 10 , 73 , 76 , 84 , 90 , 101,109
Holliner, Mann, 36
Hood, Richard B., 47
Hope, Bob, 117 -118
Hopkins, Arthur, 98 -99
Hopkins, Miriam, 203 , 219 -220
Hopper, Dennis, 11 , 274 , 275 , 285 , 291 , 292 , 293
Hornblow, Arthur, 120 , 176 -177, 229 , 230 -231
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 2 , 4 , 10 , 44 , 47 -50, 67 , 142 , 144 , 147 , 158 -160, 185 -188, 322
Howard, Sidney, 100
Hubley, Faith, 158
Hudson, Rock, 54
Hughes, Howard, 140 -141, 197 , 367
Humphrey, William, 327
Hundred Hussars, 215
Hunnicutt, Arthur, 21
Hunter, Evan, 53
Hunter, Kim, 349
Hurwitz, Leo, 158 , 165 -167, 169 , 186 -188
Huston, John, 6 , 29 , 42 -47, 46, 50 , 61 -62, 66 , 143 , 157 , 176 -177, 190 -191, 263 -264
Huston, Walter, 177 , 256
Hutton, Brian G., 23
Hyman, Bernie, 223 -224
I
Imperial Ballet, 203
Inge, William, 322
J
Jackson, Rep. Donald, 185 -186
Jack the Ripper, 273
Jaffe, Sam, 176
Jagger, Dean, 349
James, Harry, 119
Jannings, Emil, 255
Jaray, Hans, 218
Jarman, Claude, Jr., 174
Johnson, Nunnally, 6
Jones, Carolyn, 266
Jones, James, 309 , 316 -317, 319
Jurgens, Curt, 191
K
Kael, Pauline, 18 , 140 -141
Kahane, Benjamin B., 323
Kanin, Garson, 2 , 7 , 8 , 10 , 43 , 90, 109 ,220 ;
interview, 89 -112;
introduction, 89 -91;
filmography, 91 -92;
Ruth Gordon's solo credits, 93 ;
early career and upbringing, 93 -94;
interest in theater, 94 -95;
working for George Abbott, 95 ;
coming to Hollywood, 95 ;
working for Sam Goldwyn, 95 -96;
directing at RKO, 96 -97;
and RKO screenwriters, 97 -98;
on his mentor, Thornton Wilder, 98 -99;
writing scripts during World War II, 99 -100;
Born Yesterday,100 -102;
on Hollywood screenwriters, 100 ;
on tapping into the unconscious (Hemingway, Cather, Wilder, Maugham, Balzac), 102 -105;
collaborating with Ruth Gordon, 105 -110;
A Double Life,89 , 105 ;
Hepburn-Tracy films (Adam's Rib, Pat and Mike ), 89 , 97 , 106 , 108 -110;
working with directors (especially George Cukor), 108 -109;
solo writing, 109 -110;
Broadway vs. Hollywood, 110 -112
Kanin, Michael, 94 , 108
Kantor, MacKinlay, 324 , 329
Karloff, Boris, 259 , 262
Karlson, Phil, 193
Kastner, Elliott, 23
Katz, Ephraim, 11 , 13 , 336
Katz, Sam, 119 , 278
Katzman, Sam, 265 -266, 314
Kaufman, George S., 106 , 107
Kaye, Danny, 45
Kaye, Nora, 154
Kazan, Elia, 41 , 49 , 51 , 134 , 147 , 160 , 185 -187, 288 , 289 , 319 , 323 -324, 358
Keats, John, 162
Keel, Howard, 125 , 127
Kelly, Gene, 9 , 73 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 -81, 81,82 , 84 , 286
Kelly, Grace, 139 , 324
Kennedy, Pres. John F., 158 , 291
Kenyatta, Jomo, 55
Kerr, Deborah, 150 , 309 , 319
Kidd, Michael, 170
King, Frank and Maurice (brothers), 331 , 346 -347, 349 -350, 363 , 364 , 371
King, Henry, 234 , 354 , 356
King, Hugh, 17
King, Stephen, 263
Kingsley, Dorothy, 8 , 10 , 43 , 115, 124 ;
interview, 113 -128;
introduction, 113 -114;
filmography, 114 -116;
family background, 116 -117;
coming to Hollywood, 117 ;
early radio career, 117 -119;
working for Edgar Bergen, 118 -119;
working at MGM, 119 -128;
women writers at MGM, 119 -120;
MGM directors, 121 -122;
gravitating to musical comedy, 123 -125;
writing for Esther Williams, 114 , 119 , 120 , 122 , 123 , 125 , 126 ;
Angels in the Outfield,125 -127;
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,127 ;
Frank Sinatra and Pal Joey,127 -128;
favorite films, 128 ;
working habits, 128
Kingsley, Sidney, 374
Kingsley, Walter J., 113 , 116 -117
Kiser, Terry, 302
Klein, Melanie, 281
Klimt, Gustav, 217
Knight, Christopher, 375
Knopf, Alfred, 269
Koch, Howard, 38
Kohner, Paul, 232
Kolowrat, Count Alexander, 201 , 210 -211, 217
Korda, Alexander, 10 , 203 , 204 , 210 -211, 212 , 219 -220, 227
Korda, Vincent, 210 -211
Korda, Zoltan, 210 -211
Koster, Henry, 320
Krahl, Hilda, 204 , 239 -240
Kramer, Arthur, 326
Kramer, Stanley, 134 -135, 178 , 191 , 281 , 310 , 316 , 322 -324, 328
Krasna, Norman, 6 , 106 , 370
Krim, Arthur B., 351 , 373 , 375
Kurnitz, Harry, 143 -144, 145
L
Ladd, Alan, 295
La Marr, Barbara, 222
Lamarr, Hedy (Hedy Mandl), 221 -222, 228 , 229 -230
Lamour, Dorothy, 256
Lancaster, Burt, 42 , 59 , 63 , 190 , 252 -254, 319,319 -320, 326
Lang, Fritz, 7 , 212 , 217 , 218 , 246 , 316
Lang, Walter, 122
Langman, Larry, 13
Lardner, Ring, Jr., 322
Lastfogel, Abe, 127
Laurents, Arthur, 2 , 4 , 8 , 10 , 37 , 43 , 132;
interview, 129 -156;
introduction, 129 -131;
filmography, 131 -133;
early ambition, 133 ;
radio writing, 133 -134;
Home of the Brave,134 -136;
coming to Hollywood, 136 ;
Anatole Litvak and The Snake Pit,136 -137;
Alfred Hitchcock and Rope,138 -139;
Max Ophuls and Caught,140 -142;
the HUAC witchhunt, 142 -147;
traveling in Europe, 146 -147;
Summertime (The Time of the Cuckoo),147 -148;
Anatole Litvak and Anastasia,148 -150;
Otto Preminger and Bonjour Tristesse,150 -151;
Gypsy and West Side Story151 ;
The Way We Were,151 -153;
The Turning Point,152 -154;
unproduced scripts, 154 -155;
"emotional reality," 155 -156;
future projects, 156
Laven, Arnold, 331
Lawrence, Gertrude, 203 , 219 -220, 221
Lawrence, Marc, 176
Lawson, John Howard, 144 , 322 , 361
Lazar, Irving "Swifty," 141 , 145 -146, 150
Leakey, Louis S. B., 54 -55, 56
Leakey, Mary, 54
Lean, David, 10 , 130 , 147 -148
Lederer, Charles, 228
Lederer, William J., 297
Lee, Bernard, 263
Lehar, Franz, 202
Leigh, Vivien, 228
LeMary, Alan, 190
Lengyel, Melchior, 203 , 225
Lennart, Isobel, 120 , 124
Lennen and Mitchell, 36
Leonard, Robert Z., 230
Lerner, Alan [Jay], 77
Lerner, Irving, 158 , 179 , 188 , 331 , 332 , 359 -363, 375
LeRoy, Mervyn, 151
Levant, Oscar, 88
Levin, Henry, 243
Lewis, Sinclair, 9 , 29 , 30 , 35 , 51 , 58 -59, 60 , 270
Lewis, Thomas, 123
Lewton, Val, 173 , 260 -261, 380 -381
Liedtke, Harry, 202
Life magazine, 366 , 376
Lillie, Bea, 285 -286
Lindeman, Mitch, 191
Lindsay, Howard, 106
Litvak, Anatole, 10 , 136 -137, 138 , 148 -150
Loesser, Frank, 125
Loew family, 274
Loew, Arthur, Jr., 277 -278, 282 , 286 , 290 , 303
Loew, Arthur, Sr., 277 , 279 -281, 283
Loew, Marcus, 277 , 279
Logan, Joshua, 278 , 322 , 324
Lollobrigida, Gina, 61
Loos, Anita, 224 , 278
Lord, Robert, 315
Loren, Sophia, 359
Lorre, Peter, 217 , 262 , 373 -374
Los Angeles Examiner,196
Losey, Joseph, 193 , 333
Lovecraft, H. P., 368
Lovejoy, Frank, 193 , 358
Lubitsch, Ernst, 9 , 203 , 204 , 213 , 225 -229, 245
Lucas, George, 9
Lugosi, Bela, 260
Lukas, Paul, 379
Lumet, Sidney, 171 , 327 -328
Lund, John, 233
Lupino, Ida, 193
Lyons, Leonard, 89
M
MacAdams, William, 228
MacArthur, Charles, 17 , 100 , 203 , 224
MacGowan, Jack, 263
Mackendrick, Alexander, 324
MacKenzie, Aenas, 357
MacLaine, Shirley, 154 , 240
Maddow, Ben (David Wolff), 2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 10 , 159, 332 , 333 , 334 , 359 -61;
interview, 157 -192;
introduction, 157 -160;
filmography as "David Wolff," 160 -161;
filmography as Ben Maddow, 161 -162;
passion for poetry, 162 -164;
social consciousness, 164 ;
early interest in film, 164 ;
writing documentaries, 165 -169;
poetry and scriptwriting, 165 ;
Frontier Films' internal schism, 166 -169;
Native Land,167 -169;
World War II and Signal Corps documentaries, 169 -170;
coming to Hollywood, 170 ;
writing a novel, 170 ;
first script credits, 170 -171;
William Faulkner and Intruder in the Dust,171 -174;
working with Clarence Brown, 171 -173;
writers at MGM, 173 -174;
The Asphalt Jungle,175 -177;
working with John Huston, 157 , 176 -177, 190 -191;
the blacklist, 178 -188;
working with Philip Yordan, 179 -184;
cooperative HUAC testimony, 185 -188;
on Elia Kazan, 185 -186;
opinion of Hollywood Communists, 185 -188;
on directing, 188 -190;
credits after the blacklist, 190 -191;
writing photography books, 191 -192
Maddow, Frieda, 166 , 170
Mainwaring, Daniel (Geoffrey Homes), 4 , 8 , 194;
interview, 193 -200;
introduction, 193 -194;
filmography as "Geoffrey Homes," 195 ;
filmography as Daniel Mainwaring, 196 ;
early career, 196 -197;
writing mystery novels, 197 ;
filming of Out of the Past (based on his novel Build My Gallows High ), 197 -200
Malleson, Miles, 263
Maltin, Leonard, 73
Maltz, Albert, 44 , 174 , 186 -187, 322
Mamoulian, Rouben, 313
Mandl, Fritz, 221 -222
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 50 , 180 -181, 344 , 363
Mann, Anthony, 7 , 183 , 331 , 332 , 356 -359, 362 , 370 , 371 -372, 381
Mann, Thomas, 143 , 257 , 346
Mannix, Eddie, 52 , 226 , 228
Mantle, Burns, 331
Mao Tse-Tung, 190 , 191
March, Fredric, 69
Marcus, Raymond T., 265
Margaret Herrick Library, 310
Martin, Dean, 21
Martin, Paul, 217
Martin, Steve, 262
Marton, Andrew, 265
Marvin, Lee, 63 , 64
Marx Brothers, 42
Marx, Karl, 144 , 146 , 155 , 156 , 166 -167, 187
Mason, James, 140,244
Matson, Harold, 269
Mature, Victor, 357 -358, 375 -376
Maugham, W. Somerset, 55 , 104 , 105
Mauldin, Bill, 282 -283
May, Joe, 212 , 257
May, Mia, 212
Mayer, Carl, 213
Mayer, Louis B., 8 , 10 , 49 , 50 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 56 , 65 -66, 121 , 172 -173, 203 , 204 , 220 -222, 225 , 228 , 230 , 364
Mayer, Roger, 56
McBride, Joseph, 17
McCambridge, Mercedes, 351 -353, 352
McCarthy, Joseph/McCarthyism, 50 , 146 , 158 , 204 , 316 , 322 -324, 333 , 334
McDowall, Roddy, 285
McElwaine, Guy, 327
McIntire, John, 176
McKenna, Siobhan, 369
McPartland, John, 376
McQueen, Steve, 346
Meltzer, Lewis, 313
Mencken, H. L., 58
Mercouri, Melina, 48
Mercury Theatre, 38 -39, 141
Meredith, Burgess, 229
Messler, Oskar, 214
Meyers, Sidney, 166 , 168
Midler, Bette, 156
Milestone, Lewis, 7 , 143 , 237
Miller, Alice Duer, 224
Miller, Arthur, 57
Mineo, Sal, 307
Minnelli, Vincente, 9 , 77 , 78 , 80 , 229 , 230 , 231
Mirisch, Harold, 325
Mitchum, Robert, 21 , 197 -200, 198, 349
Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 107 , 209
Moll, Elick, 322
Monks, John, 315
Monroe, Marilyn, 57 , 68 , 176 , 237 , 238,286
Montalban, Ricardo, 50
Montez, Maria, 29 , 38 , 39 , 40
Morris, Chester, 347
Morrow, Vic, 53
Moscov, George V., 347
Motion Picture Daily,13
Motion Picture Production Code, 229
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 202 , 208 , 211
Murat, Jean, 214
Murphy, Audie, 190
N
National Endowment for the Arts, 193
National Geographic,39 -40
National Socialist Chamber of German Writers, 255 -256
Navasky, Victor, 3 , 4 , 142 , 160 , 185
Neal, Patricia, 243
Negulesco, Jean, 143 , 234 , 239
Nelson, John, 374
Nesbit, Evelyn, 240 -242
Newman, Paul, 11 , 43 , 52 , 275 , 301 -303, 302
New School for Social Research (Studio Theatre), 343
New Yorker, 97
New York Times,13 , 87 , 197
New York World-Telegram,28
Nichols, Dudley, 5 , 6
Nicholson, Jack, 375
Niven, David, 150 , 379
Normandie, 203 , 221 -222
North, Edmund H., 314
Northwestern University, 193
Novak, Kim, 324
Novelli, Valerio Giorgio, 327
O
Oberon, Merle, 229
O'Brien, Edmond, 193
O'Connor, Donald, 81
Odets, Clifford, 41 , 66 -67, 303 , 305 , 313
Offenbach, Jacques, 257
O'Hara, John, 89
Okada, Eiji, 298
Olivier, Laurence, 228
Olson, James, 301
O'Neill, Eugene, 65 , 345
Ophuls, Max, 10 , 129 -130, 140 -142
Ornitz, Sam, 322
O'Rourke, Frank, 354
Orwell, George, 34
Osborn, Paul, 186 , 224
Ouspenskaya, Madame, 259
P
Pacino, Al, 327 -328, 346
Pal, George, 370 , 373 , 380
Parker, Cecil, 263
Parker, Dorothy, 69 , 235
Parker, Eleanor, 137
Parsons, Estelle, 302
Partos, Frank, 136 -137
Pasternak, Joe, 51 , 121 , 123 , 228 , 231 , 314
Pater, Walter, 89
Patterson, John, 193
Paxton, John, 41
Peck, Gregory, 354 -356, 380
Perkins, Anthony, 303
Peters, Jean, 237
Philadelphia Record,28
Picasso, Pablo, 164
Pickford, Mary, 277 , 322 -323
Pine and Thomas, 197 , 198
Poe, Edgar Allan, 183
Poe, James, 50 , 51
Poitier, Sidney, 27 , 54 , 67
Pollack, Sydney, 43 , 151
Polonsky, Abraham, 141
Pommer, Erich, 10 , 202 , 216 -217, 218 , 246 , 255
Porten, Henny, 214 , 216
Porter, Cole, 10 , 76 , 84 , 125
Potts, Nell, 301
Powell, William, 221 , 229
Power, Tyrone, 40 , 214
Pramjo, Kukrit, 299
Pratt, Judson, 298
Preminger, Ingo, 322
Preminger, Otto, 10 , 130 , 150 -151, 235
Previn, Andre, 84
Price, Vincent, 230 , 257
Production Code, 229
Puttnam, David, 50
Q
Quine, Richard, 324
R
Racine, Jean, 89
Raft, George, 42
Rainer, Luise, 221 , 223 , 230 , 313
Rains, Claude, 259
Ralston, Vera Hruba, 263 , 361
Ransohoff, Martin, 326 -327, 328 -329
Raphaelson, Samson, 226
Rapper, Irving, 331
Rawlinson, A. R., 230
Ray, Aldo, 318 , 357
Ray, Nicholas, 7 , 182 , 286 -290, 292 , 307 -308, 315 , 331 , 332 , 351 -354, 356 -359, 362 , 367 -368, 370 , 371 -372, 380
Reagan, Nancy (Davis), 177 , 263
Reagan, Ronald, 170 , 263
Red Channels,49
Red Cross, 314
Redford, Robert, 130 , 151 -152, 153, 326
Reed, Carol, 252
Reed, Donna, 309 , 318 -321, 321
Reik, Theodor, 145
Reiner, Carl, 262
Reinhardt, Gottfried, 142 , 346
Reinhardt, Max, 212 , 225 , 346
Reinhardt, Wolfgang, 142 , 346
Reis, Irving, 322
Reisch, Walter, 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 43 , 123 , 205,239 , 255 ;
interview, 201 -245;
filmography in Europe, 206 -207;
filmography in U.S., 207 -208;
early career in Austria, 208 -211;
on Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz, 210 -211;
on Count Kolowrat, 201 , 210 -211, 217 ;
first film script, 211 ;
approach to writing silent scenarios, 211 -212;
working in Berlin, 212 -218;
on Hans Albers, 213 -214;
working with director Carl Froelich, 214 ;
working with director Geza von Bolvary, 215 ;
writing song lyrics, 215 -216;
Erich Pommer and UFA, 216 -217;
F.P. 1 Does Not Answer (F.P. 1 antwortet nicht),217 ;
working with Gustav Ucicky, 217 -218;
return to Vienna and working with Willi Forst, 218 -219;
working for Korda in England, 219 -220;
coming to Hollywood, 220 -223;
boat trip with Louis B. Mayer, 220 -222;
discovery of Hedy Lamarr, 221 -222;
script collaboration at MGM, 223 -225;
Ernst Lubitsch and Ninotchka,225 -227;
on Charles Brackett, 203 , 204 , 205 , 226 -229, 232 -233, 236 -239, 240 -244, 245 ;
Comrade X, 228 ;
That Uncertain Feeling,228 -229;
The Heavenly Body,229 -230;
George Cukor and Gaslight,230 -232;
directing Song of Scheherazade,231 -232;
The Mating Season,232 -233;
adapting to Darryl Zanuck and Twentieth Century-Fox, 233 -235;
The Model and the Marriage Broker,235 -236;
Niagara, 236 -238;
Titanic, 237 -239;
return to directing in Germany, 239 -240;
The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing,240 -242;
Jules Verne and Journey to the Center of the Earth,243 -244;
approach to and philosophy of scriptwriting, 244 -245
Remarque, Erich Maria, 257
Resnais, Alain, 74
Revuers, The, 73 , 76 , 85
Reynolds, Debbie, 81,239
Richards, Sylvia, 316
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 204 , 240
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay, 202 , 204 , 232
Ritt, Martin, 171 , 376
Ritter, Thelma, 232 -233, 235 -236, 238 -239
Rivkin, Allen, 263
Robbins, Jerome, 142 , 145 , 151
Roberts, Marguerite, 120
Robespierre, Maximilien, 357
Robinson, Edward G., 45 -47
Robson, Mark, 372 , 375 -376, 377 -379
Rochlin, Margy, 274
Rogers, Ginger, 141 , 243
Rogers, Will, 117
Romance, Viviane, 51
Romanoff, Mike, 241
Rooney, Mickey, 119
Roosevelt, Pres. Franklin D., 48 , 164
Rose, William, 191
Rosenberg, Aaron, 325 -326
Rosenberg, Ruby, 266 -267
Rosenman, Leonard, 286
Ross, Herb, 154
Rossellini, Roberto, 252
Ruhmann, Heinz, 255
Rukeyser, Muriel, 169
Russell, Harold, 314
Russell, Rosalind, 151 , 285
Ryan, Robert, 41 , 140,141 -142, 357
Rydell, Mark, 22 , 23 -24
S
Sabu, 29 , 38 , 39 , 40
Sagan, Françoise, 130 , 150 -151
St. Cyr, Lili, 337
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,34
Salinger, Conrad, 83
Sarafian, Richard, 328
Saxon, John, 190
Schary, Dore, 52 , 57 , 125 , 200
Schenck, Joseph, 49 , 221
Schenck, Marvin, 49
Schenck, Nicholas, 49 , 221 , 225
Schermer, Jules, 175
Schiller, Friedrich von, 209
Schmidt-Gentner, Willy, 215
Schneer, Charles H., 265 -266
Schneider, Hortense, 257
Schnitzler, Arthur, 202
Schreiber, Lew, 205 , 244
Schubert, Franz, 202 , 208 , 218 -219
Schulberg, Ad, 220
Schulberg, B. P., 220
Schulberg, Budd, 147 , 220 , 272
Schulman, Irving, 286 -287, 288
Schwartz, Arthur, 87 , 88
Schwartz, Nancy Lynn, 3 , 4 , 5
Schweizer, Richard, 364
Scott, Adrian, 41 , 48 , 144 , 322
Scott, Allan, 315
Screen Writers Guild, 5 , 13 , 144 , 205 , 310 , 323
Seberg, Jean, 150
Selznick, David O., 44 , 230 , 251 , 314 -315, 324 , 356
Selznick, Irene, 137 , 143 , 324
Selznick, Myron, 17
Sennett, Mack, 252
Shakespeare, William, 10 , 151 , 162 -163, 209 , 264 , 334 , 344 , 379
Shanley, John Patrick, 155
Shaw, Artie, 346
Sheldon, Sidney, 328
Shelley, Percy, 162
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 89
Sherwood, Robert, 100 , 125
Shirley, Ann, 48 , 144
Shuftan, Eugene (né Eugen Schüfftan), 251 -252
Shurlock, Geoffrey, 229 , 319 -320
Sidney, George, 122 , 125 , 127 -128
Siegel, Don, 193
Siegel, Sol, 363 , 370
Signal Corps Photographic Unit, 278 , 314
Simenon, Georges, 350
Simmons, Jean, 30 , 64
Simon, Michel, 51
Simon, Simone, 337
Sims, Ginnie, 272
Sinatra, Frank, 10 , 127 -128, 309 , 318 -320
Siodmak, Curt, 7 , 8 , 11 , 217 , 248, 253 , 271 ;
interview, 246 -273;
introduction, 246 -247;
filmography, 247 -250;
on Robert Siodmak, 246 -247, 251 -255, 261 -262, 264 ;
Menschen am Sonntag,251 -252;
"sibling rivalry," 252 -254, 261 , 264 ;
working for UFA, 254 -255;
F.P. 1 Doesn't Answer,255 ;
leaving Germany in 1933, 256 ;
arriving in Hollywood, 257 ;
German refugees in Hollywood, 257 ;
horror specialist, 257 -258;
Invisible Man series, 257 -258;
The Wolf Man,258 -259;
Frankenstein series, 260 ;
I Walked with a Zombie,260 ;
The Beast with Five Fingers,262 -263;
Donovan's Brain,263 -264;
turning director, 264 -267;
writing science fiction novels, 267 -268;
attitude and approach towards scriptwriting, 269 -273;
works in progress, 273
Siodmak, Henrietta, 246 -247, 256 -257
Siodmak, Robert, 7 , 10 , 217 , 246 -247, 251 -255, 253,261 -262, 264
Sirk, Douglas, 7
Sisk, Bob, 96 -97
Skelton, Red, 119 , 122
Skerrit, Tom, 154
Skofic, Drago Milko, 61 -62
Skouras, Spyros, 376
Small, Edward, 350
Smith, Oliver, 77 -78
Somers, Edith, 243
Sondheim, Stephen, 150 , 151 , 156
"Song of India," 232
Sparks, Robert, 200
Sperling, Milton, 183 , 331 , 332 , 333 -336, 358 , 366 , 374 , 379
Spewack, Bella and Samuel, 224
Spiegel, Sam, 141 , 147 , 232
Spielberg, Steven, 303
Spigelgass, Leonard, 174
Stanfill, Dennis, 328 -329
Stanwyck, Barbara, 239
Stark, Eric John (fictional hero), 15
Stark, Ray, 43 , 151 -152, 156
Stars and Stripes,282
Steiger, Rod, 375 , 380
Stein, Gertrude, 89
Steinbeck, John, 288
Steinberg, Cobbett, 1
Steiner, Ralph, 165
Stempel, Tom, 5
Stern, Marilee, 275
Stern, Stewart, 2 , 6 , 8 , 9 , 11 , 43 , 276, 284 , 302 ;
interview, 274 -308;
introduction, 274 -276;
filmography, 276 -277;
family connections, 277 -279;
on Joe Fields, 278 -279;
Fred Zinnemann and Teresa,279 -285;
on the Loews, 277 -279, 281 -283, 286 , 290 , 303 ;
on psychodynamics of characters, 280 -281;
on Montgomery
Stern, Stewart
Clift, 285 -286;
Nicholas Ray and Rebel Without a Cause,286 -293;
Rebel script credits, 286 -288;
James Dean's death, 290 -291;
"Tiger on a Kite," 293 -295;
working with George Englund, 293 -301;
on Marion Brando, 275 , 281 , 292 , 293 -301, 306 -308;
The Ugly American,293 -300;
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, 301 -303;
Dennis Hopper and The Last Movie,303 -305;
writer's block and retreating from Hollywood, 305 -306;
affinity with anti-heros, 306 -308
Stevens, George, 7 , 102 , 375
Stewart, Donald Ogden, 224
Stewart, James, 68 , 139 , 324
Stolz, Robert, 215
Stone, Oliver, 262
Stradling, Harry, 219
Strand, Paul, 165 , 167 , 169
Strauss, Johann, 202 , 208 , 211 , 223
Streep, Meryl, 118
Streisand, Barbra, 130 , 152 , 153
Strick, Joseph, 158 , 160 , 188 -190
Strickling, Howard, 221 -222
Sturges, John, 50
Sturges, Preston, 6 , 7 , 41 , 108
Sunday, Billy, 59
Susskind, David, 68 -69
Swires, Steve, 15
T
Talman, William, 193
Tamblyn, Russ, 352
Tamiroff, Akim, 325
Taradash, Daniel, 2 , 7 , 8 , 11 , 67 , 68 , 123 , 311, 321 , 328 ;
interview, 309 -329;
introduction, 309 -310;
filmography, 310 -312;
early career and background, 312 -313;
Golden Boy,313 ;
World War II, 314 ;
Knock on Any Door,315 ;
Jed Harris and Broadway, 315 -316;
Fritz Lang and Rancho Notorious,316 ;
Fred Zinnemann and From Here to Eternity,316 -320;
casting of Eternity,318 -319;
Désirée,320 ;
William Inge and Picnic,320 -321;
directing an anti-McCarthyist film, 322 -324;
Bell, Book and Candle,324 ;
Harry Cohn's death, 324 -325;
Hawaii, 325 ;
Marlon Brando and Morituri,325 -326;
Castle Keep,326 -327;
series of disappointments, 327 -329
Tavernier, Bertrand, 334
Taylor, Don, 266
Taylor, Elizabeth, 52 , 53 -54, 291 , 300
Taylor, Eric, 261
Taylor, Robert, 346
Tennessee Valley Authority, 186
Thalberg, Irving, 221 -222, 261
Tharp, Twyla, 85
Thau, Benny, 52 , 221 -222
Thaw-White case (Harry K. Thaw), 204 , 240 -242
Thiele, Wilhelm, 217
Thomas, Bill (Pine and Thomas), 196
Thomas, Bob, 327
Thompson, Dorothy, 60
Thomson, David, 309 , 332
Tierney, Gene, 233
Tierney, Lawrence, 347 , 365
Time magazine, 265 , 326 , 360
Tolstoy, Count Leo, 34
Tors, Ivan, 264 -265
Tourneur, Jacques, 197 -200
Tourneur, Maurice, 117
Tracy, Spencer, 10 , 89 , 100 , 106 , 108 -109, 109,376
Truffaut, François, 252 , 348 -349
Trumbo, Dalton, 4 , 96 -97, 142 -143, 151 , 322 , 325 , 363
Tucker, Mel, 300
Turner, Lana, 51
Turner, Ted, 113
Twain, Mark, 110
Twist, John, 97 -98
"Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time," 202
U
Ucicky, Gustav, 213 , 217 -218
UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft), 202 , 213 , 216 -217, 218 , 251 , 254 -255
Ulmer, Edgar G., 251
"Unfinished Symphony," 218 -219
Uris, Leon, 286 -287
V
Van Doren, Mark, 162 -163
Van Druten, John, 224 , 230 -231, 324 , 344 -345
Van Dyke, Willard, 158 , 167 , 169
Van Eyck, Peter, 263
van Pallandt, Nina, 25
Variety, 13 , 334 -335
Veiller, Anthony, 43
Verne, Jules, 204 -205, 243 -244, 246 -247
Vidal, Gore, 30 , 50 , 62
Vidor, King, 7 , 228
Viertel, Peter, 61
Viertel, Salka, 143 , 144
Vizzard, Jack, 242
Vogel, Joseph, 57
von Bolvary, Geza, 215
von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, 202
von Menzel, Adolf, 218
von Sternberg, Josef, 17
W
Waggner, George, 38 , 259 , 260 , 270
Wagner, Robert, 238
Walbrook, Anton, 230
Wald, Jerry, 68 , 205 , 356 , 376
Walesa, Lech, 310 , 328
Wallace, Henry, 48
Wallach, Eli, 319
Wallis, Hal, 331
Walsh, Raoul, 7 , 98
Walters, Charles, 122 , 191
Wanger, Walter, 229 , 348 , 350 -351, 357 , 364 , 370
Warner, Harry, 366
Warner, Jack, 182 , 354
Wasserman, Lew, 351 -354
Wayne, John, 20 -22, 353
Webb, Clifton, 234 , 237 -238, 243 -244
Webb, Richard, 198
Wechsler, Lazar, 280
Welles, Orson, 4 , 6 , 29 , 38 -39, 141 , 348
Wellman, William, 7 , 69
Welsch, Howard, 316
Werner, Oskar, 214
Wessely, Paula, 203 , 219 , 225 , 244
West, Claudine, 224
Weston, Edward, 192
White, Stanford (Thaw-White case), 204 , 240 -242
Whitman, Walt, 34 , 162
Whitmore, James, 176
Wicki, Bernhard, 325
Wiene, Robert, 213
Wilbur, Dr. Cornelia, 280
Wilcox, Fred M., 191
Wilde, Oscar, 235
Wilder, Billy, 6 , 108 , 111 , 120 , 202 , 203 , 204 , 216 , 218 , 225 -229, 232 , 245 , 251 , 254 -255
Wilder, Thornton, 98 -99, 103
William Morris Agency, 127 , 185
Williams, Esther, 10 , 114 , 119 , 120 , 122 , 123 , 125 , 126,236
Williams, Tennessee, 9 , 45 , 51 , 52 , 61 , 270 , 295
Williams, Warren, 259
Wilson, Michael, 363
Winters, Shelley, 189
Wister, Owen, 22
Woche magazine, 251
Wohl, Burton, 21
Wood, Natalie, 291 , 307
Woodcock, Johnny, 22
Woodward, Joanne, 11 , 301 -303
Woolf, Manny, 256
Wray, Fay, 256
Wrixon, Maris, 259
Wyler, Robert, 374
Wyler, William, 170 , 180 , 314 , 323 -324, 374 -375
Wyngard, Diana, 230
Y
Yablans, Frank, 328 -329
Yates, George Worthington, 265 -266
Yates, Herbert, 263 , 350 , 351 , 361 -362
Yordan, Philip, 4 , 6 , 8 , 9 , 11 , 157 -158, 179 -184, 337, 369 , 377 ;
interview, 330 -381;
introduction, 330 -338;
filmography, 338 -340;
"anti-filmography," 341 -343;
coming to Hollywood, 343 -344;
acting and writing background, 344 -346;
middle-class Chicago roots, 345 ;
on William Dieterle and The Devil and Daniel Webster,331 , 343 -344, 346 -347, 348 , 360 -361, 362 -363, 371 ;
the King brothers and Monogram, 346 -350;
writing habits, 350 -352;
Johnny Guitar,351 -354;
The Bravados,354 -356;
Nicholas Ray vs. Anthony Mann, 356 -359;
"surrogate writing," 359 -364;
on Ben Maddow, 332 -334, 359 -361;
the blacklist, 360 -361;
on Irving Lerner, 331 , 332 , 359 -363, 375 ;
on Sidney Harmon, 331 , 360 -362, 375 , 380 ;
an Oscar for Broken Lance,363 -364;
Dillinger's Oscar nomination, 364 ;
genre versatility, 364 -371;
Sam Bronston and working in Europe, 367 -370;
recent credits, 370 -371;
self-appraisal, 371 -377;
on George Pal, 373 -374;
favorite films, 374 -377;
Detective Story,374 -375;
Studs Lonigan,375 ;
King of Kings,330 , 366 , 367 -369, 372 ;
The Harder They Fall,330 , 375 -376, 379 ;
Edge of Doom,377 -378;
challenges and gratification, 380 -381
Young, Loretta, 123
Z
Zanuck, Darryl F., 10 , 204 , 210 , 233 -239, 240 -241, 243 -244, 320 , 325 , 331 , 333 , 335 , 344 , 362 , 364 , 376
Zanuck, Richard, 325 , 354
Ziegfield, Florenz, 116
Zinnemann, Fred, 68 , 251 , 281 -285, 284,309 , 317 -320, 325
Zola, Emile, 343
Zukor, Adolph, 274 , 277 , 278
Index of Films, Plays, Television Programs, and Books
Italic numbers indicate references to photographs .
A
Action in the North Atlantic,144
Actress, The,89
Adam's Rib, 89 , 97 , 106 , 108 -110
Adelita, 327
Affair of the Skin, An,160 , 188 , 190
African Genesis,99
"After Love" (unproduced), 154
Aimez-vous Brahms?,151
"Alfred Hitchcock Presents," 3
Algiers, 228 , 230
All Quiet on the Western Front,95
Along the Great Divide,313
Alvarez Kelly,327
Amazing Story,330
American Film Industry, The,2
American Film Institute' s Catalog of Feature Films,13
American Tragedy, An,223
Anastasia, 148 -150
Anchors Aweigh,120
Andersonville,324 , 329
And Now Tomorrow,136
Andromeda Strain, The,265
Angel, 226
Angels in the Outfield,113 , 125 -127, 128
Anna Christie,180 , 331
Anna Karenina,140
Anna Lucasta,180 , 331 , 353
Annie, 190
Anyone Can Whistle,150
Apache, 254
Ape, The, 259
Asphalt Jungle, The,2 , 10 , 157 , 175 -177, 178 , 332
Auntie Marne,285
Awful Truth, The,13
B
Baby Face Nelson,193
Backstory, Volume 1 , 2 , 5 , 6 , 50 , 198 , 224 , 315
Back to Bataan,333
Balcony, The,160 , 188 -190, 189
Band Wagon, The,9 , 73 , 80 , 84 , 86 , 88
Bank Holiday,252
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations,223
Bathing Beauty,119
Battle Circus,9
Battle for Britain,29
Battle of China,29
Battle of Iwo Jima,29
Battle of Russia,29
Battle of the Bulge,331 , 374
Beast with Five Fingers, The,262
Beat the Devil,61
Bell, Book and Candle,310 , 324
Bells Are Ringing,80 , 83 -84
Ben Hecht:
The Man Behind the Legend,228
Ben-Hur, 265
Best of Edmond Hamilton, The,15
Best Years of Our Lives, The,170 , 314
Big Combo, The,330 , 375
Big Knife, The,67
Big Sleep, The,9 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 23 , 24
Big Steal, The,193 , 200
Big Town, 196
Big Trees, The,98
Biographical Dictionary of Film, A,332
Birth of a Nation, The,201
Bite the Bullet,30 , 64
Blackboard Jungle, The,6 , 9 , 27 , 30 , 37 , 51 , 52 -53, 53,69
Blockade, 144
Blonder Traum, Ein (A Blond Dream),216
Blonde Venus,17
Bloody Wednesday (The Terrorists),371
Blue Angel, The,256
Bombardier, 98
Bombshell, 17
"Bonanza," 3 , 364
Bonjour Tristesse,130 , 150 -151
Book of Knowledge, The,93 -99
Born Yesterday,10 , 89 , 91 , 100 , 101, 102 , 107
Boy Meets Girl,95
Boy with Green Hair, The,333
Brain, The, 263
Bramble Bush, The,331
Bravados, The,354 -356, 380
Brick Foxhole, The,9 , 29 , 35 , 41 , 58 , 59
Bride of the Gorilla,264
Bridge, The,169
Brigham, 370
Broken Lance,180 -181, 335 , 363 -364
Brothers Karamazov, The,30 , 51 , 57 -58
Brute Force, 42 , 44 , 47
Build My Gallows High,193 , 197 -200
C
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The,213 , 255
Cage aux Folles, La,129
Camille, 223
Camino Real,319
Candida, 294
Captain Apache,331 , 336 , 370
"Captain Fathom," 265
Captain Newman, M.D.,236
Carrie, 170
Casablanca, 42
Castle Keep,326 -327
Cat Ballou, 333
Catered Affair, The,30 , 50 , 62
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,50 , 51 , 52 , 53 -54
Caught, 129 -130, 140 -142, 140
Cause for Alarm,123
Chairman, The,190 , 191
Chase, The, 373
China Strikes Back,191
Cid, El, 181 , 330 , 359 , 368
Cinderella Liberty,22
Circus World (The Circus Story),334
City in the Sky,267
City of Fear,158
City of Nets, 1
Claudine, 141
Cleopatra, 348
Clifford Odets, American Playwright,67
Climax, The,262
Cloak and Dagger,331
Cluny Brown,223
Cobra Woman, 29
Cobweb, 41
Colorado Territory,98 , 314
Come and Get It,17
Comrade X, 203 , 227 -228
Conquest, 223
Conquest of Space,373
Conversations with Losey,196
Cornered, 41
Cornet, Der,204 , 240
Country Girl, The,66 -67
Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, The,331
Cowboy, 314
Cowboys, The,22
Crack in the World,370
Crime Doctor's Manhunt (Crime Doctor series), 16
Crimson Pirate, The,254
Criss Cross,254
Crossfire, 9 , 29 , 41 , 48
Cry, Wilderness,370
Cucaracha, La,97
Curucu, Beast of the Amazon,266
Custer of the West,158 , 333
D
Damn Yankees,95
Danse Macabre,263
Dark Victory,71 -72
"The David Susskind Show," 68 -69
Day of the Triffids,330 , 368 , 370
Day the Earth Stood Still, The,314
Deadline U.S.A.,9 , 62
Désirée,320
Destination Tokyo,44
Detective Story,11 , 180 -181, 330 , 374 -375
Devil and Daniel Webster, The (All That Money Can Buy),346
Devil's Prayer-Book, The,117
Diary of a Sergeant,314
Dillinger, 11 , 330 , 347 , 348 , 364 , 365 , 368
Distant Drums,331
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,223
$/Dollars, 30
Domenica d'agosto, La (A Sunday in August),252
Do Not Disturb,236
Donovan's Brain,11 , 246 , 262 , 263 , 269
Don Quixote,368
Don Winslow of the Coast Guard,29 , 38
Dorado, El, 15 , 20 , 21 , 22
Double Life, A,89 , 105 , 220
Down and Out in London and Paris,34
Dracula, 231
Dragnet, 236
E
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,265 -266
East of Eden,186 , 288 , 292
East Side, West Side,120
Ecclesiastes, 191
Ecstasy, 221
Edge of Doom,367 , 377 -379
Edward Weston:
Fifty Years,192
84 Charing Cross Road,313
Elmer Gantry,30 , 58 -60, 64
Empire Strikes Back, The,9 , 15
"The Endplay" (unproduced), 154
Enforcer, The,331
Episode, 203 , 219 , 225
Epistles to the Germans,273
Escapade, 221
Executive Action,158
F
Faces:
A Narrative History of the Portrait in Photography from 1820 to the Present, 192
Faded Flower, The,117
Fail Safe, 171
Fall of the Roman Empire,330
Fan, The, 235
Fatal Attraction,268
FBI Story, The,98 , 236
Fever Pitch, 31 , 62
55 Days at Peking,330 , 333 , 379
Film Encyclopedia,11 , 13 , 336
Film in the Battle of ldeas,144
Film on the Left:
American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942,157 , 165
Films in My Life, The,349
Film:
The Creative Process,144
Final Curtain, The,117
Finian' s Rainbow,170
Flame and the Flesh,51
Flesh and the Devil,58
"Flipper," 265
Flötenkonzert, Das,218
Flower Drum Song,278
Flying Saucers from Outer Space,265
Foreign Affair, A,236
For Kings Only,256 , 257 , 267 , 273
44 Gravel Street,170
Four Feathers,220
14 Hours, 41
F.P.1 Does Not Answer (F.P.1 antwortet nicht),8 , 217 , 243 , 246 , 255 , 255,268
Framed, 175
FrameWork, 5
Frankenstein,231
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,257 , 260
Frankenstein series,260
French Touch, The,279
From Here to Eternity,6 , 11 , 309 , 316 -320, 319, 321 ,322
From Thirty Years with Freud,145
Front, The, 158 , 171
Front Page, The,228
Funny Face, 78
Funny Girl, 120
G
Garbo Speaks,74
Gaslight (A Strange Case of Murder, 1939), 230
Gaslight (1944), 230 -231
Gentleman's Agreement,135
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,228 , 278
Giant, 290
Girl Crazy, 119
Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, The,204 , 240 -242
Glass Menagerie, The,275 , 303
God of Little Children,117
God's Little Acre,11 , 184 , 330 , 332 , 359 -360, 373
Gold, 265
Gold and the Woman,117
Golden Boy, 1 , 67 , 310 , 313 -314
Golden Boy:
The Untold Story of William Holden,327
Golden God, The,117
Gone with the Wind,356
Good Earth, The,39
Good News, 76
Great Bradley Mystery, The,117
Great Man Votes, The,98
Great Profile, The,331
Great Waltz, The,211 , 223
Great Ziegfield, The,230
Greenwich Village,77
Guadalcanal, 29
Guide to American Screenwriters, A,13
Gun Glory, 360
Gun Runners, The,193
Gypsy,10 , 129 , 130 , 151 , 156
H
Hairy Ape, The,65
Hamlet, 209
Hand, The, 262
Happy Ending, The,30 , 62 , 64
Harbor Scenes,165
Harder They Fall, The,330 , 375 -376, 379
Hatari! 15 , 22 , 144
Hauser's Memory,267 , 268
Hawaii, 325
Hawks on Hawks,15 , 17
Heartsong, 143
Heaven Can Wait,226
Heavenly Body, The,229 -230
"The Heels of History," 37 , 38
Heiress, The,170
Heller in Pink Tights,171
He Ran All the Way,141
Here Comes Mr. Jordan,324
Her Jungle Love,256
Hero, The, 41
High Noon, 160 , 178
High School Confidential,313
High Sierra, 2 , 42
His Girl Friday,228
His Glorious Night,82
Hitch-Hiker, The,193
Holiday, 13
Hollywood, 91 , 93
Hollywood Writers' Wars, The,3 , 4 , 5
Home of the Brave,134 -135, 139 , 156
Hoosiers, 305
House I Live In, The,44
House of Strangers,11 , 180 -181, 330 , 363 -364
House on Carroll Street, The,171
House on Fire,98 -99
How to Steal a Million,144
Hustons, The,147
I
I Can Get It for You Wholesale,154
I, Gabriel, 273
Images, 23
I Married a Communist,197
In a Lonely Place,314
In Cold Blood,30 , 61 -62, 69
Informer, The,5
Inquisition in Eden,187
Inquisition in Hollywood, The,3 , 4 , 44 , 143
Inspector General, The,144
International Motion Picture Almanac,13
Interviews with My Lai Veterans,188
"Intimate Notes" (unproduced), 315
Intolerance,201
Intruder in the Dust,6 , 10 , 157 , 171 -173, 174,177 -178, 179 , 332
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,193
Invisible Agent,257
Invisible Man Returns,257
Invisible Man series,257 , 260
Invisible Woman,257 , 258
It Happened in Brooklyn,120
It's Always Fair Weather,9 , 73 , 83 , 84 , 88
It's a Wonderful Life,155
It Should Happen to You,89 , 91 , 110
I Walked with a Zombie,260
I Want to Go Home,74
I Was a Male War Bride,228
J
James Agee on Film,348
James Dean Story, The,291 -293
Jane Eyre, 38
Jennie Gerhardt,136
"Jessica" (unproduced), 306
Jet Pilot, 17
"Joe Panda" (unproduced), 371
Johnny Guitar,9 , 11 , 158 , 183 , 330 , 332 -333, 334 , 351 -354, 352,355 , 356 , 358 , 359 , 362 , 367
Journey to the Center of the Earth,204 , 205 , 243 -244
Julius Caesar,209
Junior Miss,278 -279
Jupiter's Darling,125
K
Kampf mit dem Drachen, Der (The Fight with the Dragon ), 254 -255
Kangaroo, 237
Keep Moving,117
Kentuckian, The,254
Key Largo, 9 , 43 , 44 -47, 46,64
Khartoum, 98 -99
Killers, The,42 -43, 44 , 254
King and I, The,215
King Kong, 256
King Lear, 38 , 209
King of Kings,330 , 366 , 367 -368, 369,372
King Solomon' s Mines,265
Kismet, 228
Kiss Me Kate,125
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands,170 -171
Knock on Any Door,315
Kotch, 41
Krakatoa, East of Java,333
L
Lady and the Monster, The,263
Lady for a Day,155
Lady Hamilton (That Hamilton Woman),204 , 228
Lady in the Lake,24
Lake, The, 315
Land, The, 158
Land of the Pharaohs, The,144
Last Frontier, The,357 -358
Last Movie, The,274 , 275 , 293 , 303 -305
Last of the Mohicans,231
Last Outpost, The,136
Last Time I Saw Paris, The,50
"Last Train From Moscow" (unproduced), 370
Laura, 223
Lawless, The,193
Law That Failed, The,117
Leise flehen meine Lieder,202
Let There Be Light,177
Lied ist aus, Das,202 , 215
Life of Emile Zola, The,343
Light in August,172
Liliom, 218
Listening with the Third Ear,145
Little Bit of Heaven, A,314
Little Caesar,2
Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The,231
Long Goodbye, The,9 , 15 , 23 -25, 25
Looking for Mr. Goodbar,30 , 69
Look Ma, I'm Dancing,145
Lord Jim, 30 , 60 -61, 64 , 69
Losey on Losey,193
Love Me or Leave Me,120
Love Me Tonight,223
Love Slaves of the Amazon,266 -267
M
Madame Bovary,98
Mademoiselle Docteur,240
Mad Love, 231
Magnetic Monster,264 -265
"The Make-Believe Ballroom," 28 -29
Maltese Falcon, The,42 , 199 , 263
"The Man Behind the Gun," 134
Man Crazy, 179 , 332
Man from Colorado, The,175
Man from Laramie, The,330
Man I Killed, The/Broken Lullaby,226
Mann der seinen Mörder sucht, Der (Looking for His Own Murderer),246 , 255 , 256
Man of the West,182 , 332 , 333 , 360
Man to Remember, A,96 -97
Man with the Golden Arm, The,313
Man with Two Brains, The,262
Marianas Islands, The,29
Marie Louise,364
Marrying Kind, The,89 , 109
Maskerade, 202 -203, 221
Masochism in Modern Man,145
Matchmaker, The,99
Mating Season, The,202 , 232 -233, 236
Meet John Doe,68 -69
Member of the Wedding,317 -318
Memphis Belle,170
Men, The, 281
Men Are Not Gods,203 , 219 -220
Men in War, 181 , 332 , 357 , 359 -360, 373
Men in White,180
Men of Texas,38
Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday),246 , 251 -52, 255
Mephisto Waltz, The,160 , 191
"Mercury Theatre on the Air," 29
Merry Widow, The,226
Merry Wives of Windsor, The,209
Metropolis, 246
"The Milkman's Matinee," 29
Misérables, Les,131
Mrs. Miniver,261
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,155
Moby Dick, 61
Mogambo, 318
Molly Maguires, The,171
Monkey Business,228
Moonraker, 267
Moonstruck, 155
Morituri, 325
Morocco, 17
Mücke, Die (Madame Mosquito),204 , 240
Mummy, The, 331
Murder, My Sweet,27 , 41
Murder by Contract,158 , 179 , 332 , 362
Muscle Beach,188
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), 17
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), 228 , 266 , 325
My Favorite Year,74
My Love Came Back,219
My Sister Eileen,278 , 279
Mystic Hour, The,117
Myth and Guilt,145
N
Nacht gehört uns, Die (The Night Belongs to Us),214
Naked City, 44
Naked Jungle, The,332
Naming Names, 3 , 4 , 142
Naples au baiser de feu,51
Native Land, 10 , 157 , 167 -169, 168,174
Neptune's Daughter,125
Never on Sunday,48
Next Time I Marry,98
Niagara, 204 , 236 -237, 238
Nightmare Alley,17
Ninotchka, 202 , 203 , 204 , 225 -227, 227
No Down Payment,376
None But the Lonely Heart,67
No Tricks in My Pocket,275
O
Objective Burma!,186 -187
Ocean's Eleven,228
Of Mice and Men,264
Old Music, 221
One-Eyed Jacks,254 , 296
One Hour with You,226
One Touch of Venus,144
Only Angels Have Wings,17
On the Beach,41
On the Town, 73 , 76 , 78 , 85
On the Waterfront,147 , 185 , 281
Ordways, The,327
Other Side of Midnight, The,328
Outcasts of Poker Flat,98
Out of the Past,193 , 197 -200, 198
Outsider, The,297
Over 21 ,106 , 107
P
Pacific Blackout,257
Painted Veil, The,137
Pajama Game, 95
Pal Joey, 127 , 128
Paris Blues,171
Party, A, 76
Pat and Mike,89 , 97 , 108 -110, 109
Patton, 314
People of the Cumberland,184
Pépé le Moko,230
Period of Adjustment,120
Pete Kelly's Blues,236
Petrified Forest, The,42
Peyton Place,205
Phantom of the Opera, The,223 , 262
Picnic, 11 , 320 , 324
Pinky, 134
Planet Stories,15
Poetics, 258
Portrait of Jennie,186
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A,188
Possessed, 316
Pratermizzi, Die,202
Prelude to War,29
Pride of the Marines,44
Prisoner of Zenda, The,231
Producer, The,29
Professionals, The,30 , 63 -64, 63
Profiteer, The,117
Proud Ones, The,314
Psychoanalytic Experience in Life and Literature,145
Psychology of Sex Relations,145
PT 109 ,236
Public Defender,117
Pursued, 331
R
Rachel, Rachel,275 , 301 -303, 302
Rack, The, 275 , 278 , 289
Ragtime, 242
Rancho Notorious,11 , 316
Rebel Without a Cause,6 , 9 , 274 , 275 , 286 -293, 303 , 306 , 307, 358
Red Gloves, 315 -316
Red Mill, The,117
Red Planet Mars,231
Reign of Terror,351 , 357
Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker, The,243
Reel Facts, 1
Riders to the Stars,264
Ride the Pink Horse,228
Rio Bravo, 15 , 17 , 19,20 , 21 , 22
Rio Lobo, 15 , 21 , 22
Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, The,335
Road to Rome, The,125
"The Rockford Files," 25
Roomful of Roses, A,243
Room Service,95
Rope, 130 , 138 -139
Rope of Sand,41
Rosemary's Baby,364
Rosenkavalier, Der,202
Royal Hunt of the Sun, The,361
Ruby Gentry,316
Rugged Path, The,100
Running Time:
Films of the Cold War,7
S
"Sabra" (unproduced), 275 , 285
Saint Joan, 150
Sanctuary, 267
San Francisco,223
Sasquatch, 370
Savage Eye, The,160 , 188 -189
"Say It with Music" (unproduced), 84
"Sea Hunt," 265
Search, The,280
Secret Beyond the Door, The,316
Secret of Santa Vittoria, The,191
Seeing Is Believing:
How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties,7
See No Evil:
Life Inside a Hollywood Censor,242
Semi-Tough, 171
Serenade, 98
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,127
Seven Sweethearts,228
Seventh Sin,137
Shadow in the Sky,177 -178, 191
Shanghai Express,17
Shanghai Gesture, The,17
Shop Around the Corner, The,226
Silhouetten,204 , 219 , 220 , 239
Sinbad the Sailor,98
Sing, Baby, Sing,331
Singin' in the Rain,9 , 73 , 78 , 80 , 81 , 81 ,82 -83, 84 , 85 , 86 -87
Sins of the Children,117
Ski Fever, 267 , 269
Smiling Lieutenant, The,226
Snake Pit, The,129 , 135 -136
So Big, 98
Social Contract, The,99
Some Kind of Nut,91
Something of Value,30 , 51 , 54 -57
Song of Frankenstein,273
Song of Scheherazade,204 , 231 -232, 239
Song of Songs,223
Son of Dracula,257 , 261 -262
South Pacific,186
Spartacus, 4
Spider, The,345
Spirit of St. Louis, The,228
Star Is Born, A (1937), 69
Star Is Born, A (1954), 151
Stars in My Crown,53
Star Wars, 9 , 268
Steps of Age, The,177
Stopover Tokyo,236
Storm Center,310 , 316 , 322 -324
Storm of Strangers,160 , 188
Story of G.I. Joe, The,200
Story of Louis Pasteur, The,343
Story on Page One, The,67
Stranger on the Third Floor,136
Streetcar Named Desire, A,185 , 294
Studs Lonigan,11 , 330 , 359 , 375 , 380
Suez, 40
Summertime, 130 , 147 -148
Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams,275
Sun Also Rises, The,372
Sundowners, The,120
Suspicion, 226
Sweet Bird of Youth,52
Swell Guy, 41 , 42 , 44
"Sybil," 275 , 280
Syncopation,345 , 360 -361
T
Talking Pictures,13
Talk of the Town,158
Tap Roots, 350
Taxi Driver,337
Teenage Rebel,242 -243
Teresa, 274 , 279 -285, 284, 286 , 317
Territorial Imperative, The,99
Terrorists, The (Bloody Wednesday),370
Texas Carnival,122
That Kind of Woman,171
That Lady in Ermine,226
That Uncertain Feeling,204 , 228 -229
Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting,144
They Knew What They Wanted,98
Thief of Baghdad, The,220
Thieves Highway,48
Thing, The, 228
Things I Did and Things I Think I Did,143
Thin Man, The,144
Thin Red Line, The,333 , 370
Third Ear, The,268 , 270
This Gun for Hire,44
Three Days, 258
Three Musketeers, The,98
"Tiger on a Kite" (unproduced), 293 -295, 300
Time is Ripe:
The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets, The,67
Time Machine, The,373
Time of the Cuckoo,130 , 147 -148
Tingeltangel,202
Titanic, 204 , 236 , 237 -39, 239
To Have and Have Not,21
Tomahawk, 316
Tonight at 8:30,221
Tony Rome, 236
Too Many Girls,98
Topaz, 139
Torn Curtain,139
To the Victor,50 -51
Train, The, 171
Tropic of Cancer,188
Trouble in Paradise,226
Tunnel, The (Transatlantic Tunnel),256
Tunnel of Love,278
Tunnel 28/Escape from East Berlin, 253
Turning Point, The,130 , 135 , 152 , 154
Tuttles of Tahiti, The,313
TV Movies and Video Guide,73
Two for the Seesaw,120
Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time,215
Two Loves, 191
Two Mules for Sister Sara,44
U
Ugly American, The,275 , 293 -300, 296
Ulysses, 188
Under Capricorn,139
Underworld, 17
Unfinished Symphony,202
Unforgiven, The,190 -191
Unholy, The,370 , 371
Uninvited, The,136
Unknown Guest, The,348
V
Valley Town,158
Vampire's Ghost, The,16 , 17
Virginian, The,22
W
Walzer von Strauss, Ein (A Waltz by Strauss),201 , 211
War Comes to America,29
Way West, The,191
Way We Were, The,10 , 43 , 130 , 151 -152, 153 , 154
Web, The, 144
Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, Die (Cornets Christoph Rilke),204 , 240
West Side Story,10 , 129 , 130 , 142 , 150 , 151
What Next, Corporal Hargrove?,144
When in Rome,126
When Strangers Marry,348 , 349 , 363
When You and I Were Young,117
Where It's At,91
Whip, The, 117
Whistle Stop,379
White Savage,38
Who Wrote the Movie?,13 , 136
Why Girls Leave Home,350 , 380
Why We Fight series,68
Wild Calendar,141
Wild Oats, 117
Wild One, The,160 , 178
Wild River, 185 -186
Wings, 69
Witches of Paris, The,269
Witness for the Prosecution,144
Wolf Man, The,257 , 258 , 259 , 259
Wolf Man, The (series), 246
Wonderful Country, The,98
"Wonderland" (unproduced), 84
Y
Yanks, 171
Yearling, The,186
Years Ago, 89 , 106 , 107 -108
Preferred Citation: McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0z09n7m0/