Introduction

Backstory began as a single volume devoted to the life stories, behind-the-scenes reminiscences, craft methodology, and professional point of view of the best screenwriters of the once-upon-a-time Golden Age of Hollywood. It has evolved into a running series, a stateside Paris Review devoted to screen-writers.

The first Backstory (1986) presented a collection of transcribed interviews with illustrious scriptwriters who began their careers and earned their reputations during the era of early talkies and the heyday of the 1930s. Backstory 2 (1991) grouped together interviews with the next generation of Hollywood writers who rose to prominence in the studio system of the 1940s and 1950s.

Backstory 3 continues the chronology with close-ups of expert scenarists who reigned in their field during one of Hollywood's rockiest periods, the decade of the 1960s, when the studios were undergoing a process of collapse and renovation, when turmoil in the world meant extreme changes in narrative style and screen values, when events in Hollywood, as elsewhere, sometimes seemed a confusing, delirious stampede. Screenwriters were as ever part of and integral to what was happening on- and offscreen.

The word backstory is a tried-and-true screenwriter's expression for what happens in the plot of a movie before the story on the screen unfolds. In the oral tradition of this series, the designated subjects speak into a whirring tape recorder (or, in one case, a fax machine served as the medium), answering questions about themselves, their scripts and film credits, their modus operandi, and life and activities in the motion picture capital. The result is part biography, part historical record, part anecdotage, and part instructional seminar.

The screenwriters of the 1960s were not a youth movement. Typically, the people interviewed for this volume were born into the first age of motion pictures—long before 1960. Actually, most of the fifteen writers in this book were born before the depression and, in one or two cases, during the time of World War 1.

They spent long years learning to write, developing their skills, and making professional progress before they peaked—some are still peaking—in the 1960s. Some cut their teeth in low-budget filmmaking and also in television, radio, theater, newspapers, magazines, and publicity. Walter Bernstein had only one Hollywood job before being blacklisted in the late 1940s; Ring Lardner Jr. already possessed his first Oscar. Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. started at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) under the studio's apprentice writing program in the 1940s. But most of the first credits of the screenwriters interviewed here begin in the middle to late 1950s, and by 1960, most of the people in this volume were already into their forties.

These screenwriters grew up, therefore, in the shadow of motion pictures, as fans since childhood. They developed fewer prejudices against movies than their pioneer forebears had possessed. Some screenwriters represented in the earlier Backstory books were oppressed by their ambivalence—a love-hate attitude. For some of them, movies weren't serious, and some yearned to write novels or plays. In general, however, the screenwriters of the 1960s did not have any hostility toward film. Their passion was wholehearted. They may not always have liked the way they were treated as screenwriters and they may not have liked Hollywood when they finally arrived there, but they did love movies.

The screenwriters of the 1960s did not carry any grudge against television. In contrast, many older screenwriters, among those profiled in Backstory and Backstory 2, had seen television, when it first swept the nation in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as a sinister rival; and from their perspective, this view was reasonable. However, coming from outside the studio apparatus, the relative newcomers of Backstory 3 took television more in stride. Early television was a legitimate stepping stone for many of them. Writing for television could be a grind, but it could also be "different" in ways that Hollywood wouldn't dare. Many screenwriters of the 1960s learned useful dos and don'ts in television. For some, television was more than a laboratory: it was a creative refuge.

From the late 1940s on, the once-vaunted studios began to crumble under attack. The disarray seemed systemic. The "consent decree actions" that forced the sale of studio-owned theater chains meant cutbacks in production and personnel. The cold war witchhunt for Communists and left-wing sympathizers ignited a purge of Hollywood citizens. (The ranks of writers probably suffered most.) Television, in its novelty phase, soared in popularity.

For writers, there was work, and plenty of it, in television. Blacklisted writers could hide behind "fronts" and operate with impunity there. Aspiring writers could learn from senior writers, many of them old hands on sabbatical or layoff from Hollywood. Thus, the torch was passed.

To some extent, the new writers also learned from each other and from people who knew nothing about Hollywood verities. Inexperience and brashness, even boldness, contributed to an infusion of fresh ideas and points of view. Much of the work of the first generation of television writers is lost forever. (A book about the writers and scripts of the Golden Age of Television would be a precious act of archaeology.) But these interviews show that writers benefited from the hurly-burly of early television: passing through, they learned expedient methods during "live" broadcast. They practiced workups of eventual films (more than one writer went on to write one of his or her television episodes for the bigger screen in Hollywood); they developed close relationships with directors, producers, and collaborators that tended to continue throughout their careers.

Television was a mixed bag, but it was undeniably an outlet for the budding talents of many of the screenwriters of the 1960s. Ironically, some established screenwriters have returned to television. Nowadays the wide-open territory of cable and pay channels provides a closing of the circle. Certain screenwriters, like Walter Bernstein and Arnold Schulman—both of whom came to Hollywood at the twilight of the studio era—have rounded out their long, productive careers by returning to the small screen with high-profile projects.

It is true that, dating from the silent era, the vast majority of screenwriters have hailed from the East Coast, especially New York. That city's scenes, vitality, humor, and point of view (sometimes an eastern point of view about the West) have enriched and, in effect, dominated motion pictures. Partly because of television but also because of Broadway and Manhattan publishing, that is also the case with the screenwriters of the 1960s (at least among those represented in this volume). There are occasional westerners (in Backstory 3, two hail from Texas, one from California, and one was born in the Pacific Northwest), but most are New Yorkers and transplanted New Yorkers. As George Axelrod points out in his interview, in the so-called good old days, if a screenwriter came to Hollywood a successful novelist or Broadway playwright, he or she arrived with a cachet among studio executives.

With the breakdown of the contract system, however, it became more acceptable, even vital, to accept scripts from outside the studio radius—from outside Hollywood. The 1960s screenwriters were the first genuinely bicoastal generation, to the point where many of the people represented in this volume never did settle down on the West Coast and chose to live elsewhere—even, in Stirling Silliphant's case, as far away as Thailand. Perhaps for those off-site

the flow of assignments suffered. Perhaps, as Walter Bernstein comments, the production heads preferred to assign scripts to a "local."

In the long run, though, living elsewhere had some advantages. And in both cases the long-term survivors were those writers who could roll with the punches or even lurch back to their feet after a knockout (nothing has changed about this truism).

The number of motion pictures filmed and released by the major film companies plunged from 391 in 1951 to 131 in 1961. In 1951, for example, MGM produced 41 films; however, the MGM total for 1961 was 21 (in 1969, the last year of the decade, MGM produced only 16). Columbia went from 63 movies produced in 1951 to 28 in 1961, and by 1958, RKO (36 movies in 1951) had ceased to exist altogether. There was a corresponding drop in regular attendance, from an average 87,500,000 weekly in 1949 to 42,000,000 in 1959. By the end of the 1960s, this figure had dropped to 17,500,000 weekly, and moviegoing looked passé.^[*]

Less movies meant less movie writers. There was a distinct change in the screenwriter population. It was as if a long, cruel winter had set in. Most of the veterans from the early sound era had retired; a few, the hardiest of the breed, hung in there. During this period, the studios understandably did not recruit many young screenwriters. The vast majority of the screenwriters interviewed in this volume already had a foot in the door by 1960, whereas afterward, it was hard for newcomers to break in.

Very few young women broke in, for example. Ironically, there had been female screenwriters galore under the old contract system because women were sought out and hired with regularity—often by female scouts, agents, and story editors. "Women's subjects" were a staple of the old studio lineup. There was no longer a proliferation of teams formed by studio dictate (the only bona fide team in this book is the married couple Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr.). Shared script credits, symptomatic in the 1930s, became again epidemic in the 1960s. But this time there were no writers' tables in the studio commissaries (the commissaries were shutting down too), and a screenwriter might never glimpse a colleague, who was also off the lot. Because of the shrinking rolls, there are a high number of coincidentally shared credits among the subjects in Backstory 3: writers who collaborated (never in the same place at the same time) on The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Barbarella (1968), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and Funny Lady (1975).

The era of Writers Guild of America (WGA)^[**] muscle, escalating bidding on high-concept scripts and chunky profit-percentage clauses, was still far in

* Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records (New York: Vintage, 1978).

** The WGA, in effect the labor union of Hollywood screenwriters, has a long, complicated history that is chronicled in The Hollywood Writers' Wars, by Nancy Lynn Schwartz (New York: Knopf, 1982).

the future at the dawn of the 1960s. Screenwriters made a good living, but their fees were nowhere in the neighborhood of those of stars and directors. Writer-directors, other than those handful already firmly established (Billy Wilder is mentioned by more than one subject of Backstory 3 as an inspirational figure), were not encouraged. Of the writers in this book, only George Axelrod tried film directing during the decade of the 1960s, and only Axelrod, Walter Bernstein, and Charles B. Griffith made a sideline out of it.

When the studio setups became dysfunctional, most of the screenwriters of the 1960s had to learn to function as their own career gurus. They had to keep alert, scrambling from teetering studio to studio, playing tag with hopeful projects, keeping track of fleetingly important people. It was a period that called for luck and fortitude, as well as initiative. Although screenwriters had more than the usual job insecurity, they also had unusual independence and were able to push personal and passionately believed-in material. Taking advantage of studio vicissitudes, they were able to usher their stories out of the office of the man of the hour and onto the screen with surprising speed and lack of interference. Sometimes.

There was maneuvering room in the 1960s. In the first Backstory, the screenwriter Julius J. Epstein sounded a typical complaint that he specialized in adaptations because in the 1930s and 1940s, producers did not welcome or value original scripts, and anyway, "in those days you soon found out that no matter what you wrote, original or adaptation, it never wound up the way you wanted." The pendulum swung the other way in the 1960s. Without the studio story departments to ferret out properties, there was more of a market for original ideas. Every writer in Backstory 3 has both adaptations and originals in his or her filmography. The opportunities were such that, more often than in the past, screenwriters could also act as producers of a cherished project themselves, which proved the case at least once for nearly every screenwriter in this volume.

The quantity of films may have dropped in the 1960s, but thanks to screenwriters, at the same time the range of subjects widened. There were old-fashioned dramas and comedies, musicals and westerns, historical epics and thrillers, but also clever new hybrid genres, breakthroughs in form and substance, changes in filmmaking that were challenging as well as liberating.

The civil rights and black power struggles, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the feminist movement and ecological awareness were rattling the foundations of society. Screenwriters were Hollywood's shock troops, obliged to confront the times. Social upheaval was transformed into integrationist stories, alienated characters and pre-feminist heroines, anti-war and anti-establishment themes. The accepted frontiers of sex, violence, and language changed swiftly, continuously, and radically.

Even the most "far out" of 1960s films may look tasteful by today's standards. Because of censorship and outdated taboos, the vast majority of 1960s' films remained unaffected by the social upheaval going on around Hollywood. The Production Code and Legion of Decency (to name two bastions) managed to withstand repeated assault before finally withering away in the period from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.^[*]

The 1970s brought the real youthquake, a delayed reaction to the 1960s Films such as Easy Rider and its many imitations opened the floodgates to the first wave of post-film school, pre-MTV filmmaking. In a Hollywood that prized youth more than ever, the changing marketplace was mirrored by ever younger people in charge, behind-the-scenes and behind-the-camera, including (though still at the bottom of the totem pole) a new generation of up-and-climbing, hard-charging screenwriters and another new species of "hyphenates," the screenwriter-directors. These came out of film schools, the first generation to take film self-consciously and sometimes pretentiously as art. For American film and scriptwriting, the 1970s was a decade of sharp contrasts and distinctions, of highpoints as well as of flash-in-the-pan excitement and overall blandness. It was a decade of doddering old genres (star-laden disaster movies, inflated in expense and importance; a last hurrah of musicals and westerns) and invigorated, startlingly revamped ones (some stellar gangster films, action-adventure, and science fiction). Talented newcomers made show-offy moves, while venerable figures of the 1930s and 1940s, those handful still in the game, notched final credits. Veteran screenwriters came under pressure, like everyone else. Many abdicated.

After the 1960s, screen credits spread out. They were more likely than ever to be shared, often with a youthful writer added at the end of a process begun by a veteran. Another passing of the torch. By 1981, the majority of the people featured in Backstory 3 had been squeezed out of the profession. The new management style, the youth orientation and generation gap, the radical shift in screen values—as well as personal problems and ambivalences—made careers tenuous. People moved farther and farther away, not just back to New York City. The few in this volume who continue to write screenplays are the exception, exemplars tilting against the odds. Too often there are strikingly

* The Production Code was established by the motion picture industry to regulate the presentation of sex, violence, and other social mores on the screen. The Legion of Decency was a similar organization, independently operated by the Catholic Church. For additional background on their history, see Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons's Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990); James M. Skinner's Cross and the Cinema: The Legion of Decency and the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993); and Gregory D. Black's Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

concise careers that seemed to have reached their peak in and been set off in time by the 1960s.

If there is a continuing theme of the Backstory series, it is that Hollywood extracts a price, a piece of the soul, from the writer. Screenwriting is fraught with anecdotes about the studio system, but some of the worst horror stories for screenwriters come in the 1970s and the 1980s. In these interviews, the 1960s appear almost idyllic, a dreamland by contrast. But the highhandedness and vacillation, job uncertainty, the arrogant director and meddling producer, were constants. Only the most resolute screenwriters stuck it out with any integrity and self-esteem. Only the most fortunate manage to guard their souls.

The people interviewed in the Backstory series are among the most prolific and most accomplished scriptwriters. But they are also those who were willing to submit to lengthy grilling. In most cases, they have acknowledged status, but others have had relatively quiet careers or are cult figures who are not instantly recognizable but who wrote admirable films.

Originally from Texas, Jay Presson Allen may be considered almost a quintessential East Coast screenwriter by virtue of never having lived anywhere else for very long (certainly not Hollywood). She specializes in New York types of things—hardboiled characters, crackling dialogue and repartee, streetwise material like Prince of the City. She has had success in television and on Broadway, as well as in motion pictures. She helped turn one of her several plays and one of her two novels into motion pictures. Her reputation is guaranteed by prestigious 1960s and 1970s credits—a collaboration with the director Alfred Hitchcock, the adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the film version of Cabaret directed by Bob Fosse, an adaptation of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt for the director George Cukor (with Katharine Hepburn busy behind the scenes), and several high-profile projects in close association with the director Sidney Lumet. Few women in her day and age have had her success as a scriptwriter while remaining aloof from the Hollywood mill. Few film writers, Jay Presson Allen says, without a pinch of modesty, have her versatility and range.

George Axelrod is well known for his sex-obsessed comedies such as The Seven Year Itch and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, high romantic comedy like Breakfast at Tiffany's, scathing black comedy such as The Manchurian Candidate, no-holds-barred, absurdist comedy like Lord Love a Duck —and, well, just comedy. Like Jay Presson Allen, Axelrod has adapted his own plays and contributed original stories and scripts to motion pictures, as well as churning out some sterling adaptations. He is a child of show business: his mother was a silent-screen actress; and his father, someone whose show business aspirations were thwarted and whose influence haunts his son's life story. From alienated adolescence to World War II trenches to radio and TV joke-

smithing to Broadway and Hollywood heights, Axelrod's life touches common as well as uncommon chords. Nobody threw more extravagant and glittering parties in the twilight of the Golden Age of Hollywood, no screenwriter had a more brilliant career, and none fell off the map, after the 1960s, more completely and dramatically. Axelrod is candid about the reasons, and hopeful for a comeback in the 1990s.

Walter Bernstein has come back once, twice—who's counting? After service in World War II and a nonfiction book of his reportage, he is one of the few writers in this volume who set foot in Hollywood in the 1940s; however, Bernstein was blacklisted, after his first screen credit, for steadfast political beliefs. Early television sustained him. After slipping the noose of the blacklist, Bernstein had colorful and eye-opening jobs with the directors Michael Curtiz and George Cukor, including the last, unfinished film starring Marilyn Monroe, Something's Got to Give. But his more reliable experiences were with his director friends Sidney Lumet and Martin Ritt, with whom he worked in television, and with whom he built a string of solid, usually intensely dramatic, often socially conscious screen credits including That Kind of Woman (1959), Paris Blues (1961), Fail-Safe (1964), and The Molly Maguires (1970). Starting in 1976 with the quasi-autobiographical The Front (still the most truthful film about the blacklist), Bernstein found fulfillment in "serious comedy" in the 1980s. He made a stab at directing and after slowing down with film credits, like some other screenwriters in Backstory 3, took work regularly behind the scenes as a script doctor. An unregenerate New Yorker, he has returned to television to write and sometimes direct significant telefilms.

One of the foremost American playwrights of our time is Horton Foote, who has had a steady and impressive parallel career as a scenarist for motion pictures. A Texan, Horton Foote writes about the small town where he grew up, imagined into drama. He has adapted his plays into novels, teleplays, and films with surprising frequency and success. He is quite capable of adapting other people's work into film also, usually kindred small-towners, southerners, or ruralists. The list of his script credits includes adaptations of popular works by Harper Lee, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. Foremost, Horton Foote writes about people who—though they are scarred by family, society, or harsh experience—remain admirably indomitable. He has the distinction of having twice received an Oscar for Best Screenplay: in 1962 for To Kill a Mockingbird and again in 1983 for Tender Mercies. Foote has a new play in production, which he is also directing, and at the age of eighty, he shows no signs of slowing down.

A Johnny-come-lately compared to others in Backstory 3, is Walon Green. His first script credits come in the early 1960s, in television, where he won awards writing an assortment of documentaries for the producer David L. Wolper. His first motion picture screenplay credit, The Wild Bunch directed by Sam Peckinpah in 1969, was a watershed film that set the fashion

for future westerns, stylistically and in terms of graphic violence. He received an Oscar for his documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle. In the early 1970s, Green formed a strong collaboration with the director William Friedkin (Sorcerer and The Brink's Job ), and for Friedkin and others, he has specialized in hardboiled characters, fatalistic situations and exotic climes. He continues to work regularly for the most prestigious and cutting-edge dramatic television series (Hill Street Blues, Law and Order, and N. Y. P. D. Blue ). At sixty, Green is the youngest of the screenwriters included in this volume, and The Wild Bunch is the last "first credit" among those represented in the book.

Roger Corman, as producer-director-entrepreneur, is a name to reckon with, yet it is fair to say that without Charles B. Griffith there would be a smaller Corman body of work and less of a Corman mystique. Griffith was one of Corman's key lieutenants. Like Curt Siodmak (who was interviewed in Backstory 2 ), Griffith proved a catchpenny master of the macabre and of all subjects absurd or fantastical. His scripts for so-called exploitation films livened up the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, packing audiences in at double bills and drive-ins, appealing mostly to young people and cineasts. Today, the best and worst of these films (sometimes the line between them is thin) still seem eternally young and raw, their stories as wonderfully weird as ever. Griffith always worked outside the mainstream and the major studios, but in this volume he is the only example of a writer with family ties to Hollywood and a California upbringing.

John Michael Hayes wrote four features for Alfred Hitchcock in the mid-1950s, which set his career in motion and placed his name forever in film reference books. A onetime crime reporter and radio mystery writer, Hayes seemed perfectly attuned to Hitchcock, writing the scripts for Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). But their relationship was complicated by rivalry, and they parted bitterly. Hayes went on accumulate solid credits in the 1960s, working with the directors Mark Robson, Henry Hathaway, William Wyler, and Edward Dmytryk, among others; but his script work dwindled for personal reasons in the 1970s. His life story includes repeated setbacks and tragedy, as well as an unusual twilight comeback in the 1990s.

Ring Lardner Jr. also has received Oscars for Best Screenplay in two separate decades, under unique circumstances. The eldest of the writers gathered in Backstory 3 (he was born in 1914), he is the son and namesake of the famed humorist and sportswriter Ring Lardner. In Hollywood since 1936, he came under the wing of the producer David O. Selznick and made his mark, at a young age, sharing an Oscar for the script of Woman of the Year (1942). Other respectable credits followed, but like Walter Bernstein, Lardner had his career momentum interrupted by the blacklist. He speaks candidly in this

interview about his activity in the Communist Party, his experience as one of the jailed Hollywood Ten, and his nom de plume years of the 1950s. One of those screenwriters who clawed his way back to prominence, Lardner earned his second Oscar for Best Screenplay for his adaptation of M&astric;A&astric;S&astric;H, the seminal sixties' film (actually released in 1970) that launched the director Robert Altman.

Another master of fear and fantasy, and another veteran of close encounters with Roger Corman, is Richard Matheson. Matheson is well known in his own right as the author of numerous, oft-reprinted short stories and novels straddling science fiction, fantasy, horror, and western genres. In Hollywood since the late 1950s, Matheson is responsible for classic television episodes, a cycle of stylish horror films for Corman in the 1960s, a number of collaborations with the director Steven Spielberg, landmark telefilms, and memorable science fiction and fantasy films, some of which are based on Matheson's fiction. His odyssey as a writer—his years of anonymity and his struggle to make a living and achieve recognition—is reflected in a highly personal body of work that emphasizes ordinary people trapped by fate or in peculiar circumstances of terror.

In the 1950s, Wendell Mayes was one of the respected writers of teleplays who was drafted by Hollywood, where he stayed much in demand for two decades. He worked with the director Billy Wilder on The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), with Henry Hathaway on From Hell to Texas (1958), and North to Alaska (1960), with Dick Powell on The Enemy Below (1957) and The Hunters (1958), with Delmer Daves on The Hanging Tree (1959), with Otto Preminger on Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and Advise and Consent (1962), and In Harm's Way (1965). Mayes was known for his tightly structured plotting and complex characterizations. Like others in this volume, Mayes was sidetracked in the late 1960s and moved into producing and writing glossy, big-budget films. But in 1978, he topped off his career with one of the first and finest of the anti—Vietnam War films, Go Tell the Spartans, a project he shepherded into existence.

The only pure team represented in Backstory 3 is also the only married couple, Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. Harriet is the daughter of one of MGM's Scheherazades, who was duly employed to regale Louis B. Mayer and other executives with synopses of prospective screen stories.^[*] As a boy, Irving, the son of a rabbi, came west to maintain his health, a move that had the side effect of nurturing his love of movies and westerns. Ravetch and Frank

* According to Norman Zierold, The Moguls (New York: Coward-McCann, 1969), "Harriet Frank was herself a sound actress. When she recited a story for [Louis B.] Mayer, a table lamp was carefully arranged to highlight her face, especially to show a single tear rolling down her cheek. Almost always the tear, which she had an uncanny ability to produce, made Mayer buy the property."

met as junior writers in MGM corridors, married, and for a while pursued separate bylines. Their films took a leap in quality and prestige when, out of loneliness, they began to work together. They made a habit of adapting William Faulkner, wrote gritty westerns, returned again and again to the social tapestry of the South, occasionally taking up a cause, as in their moving, pro-union Norma Rae (1979). Their friend Martin Ritt was usually their director and close collaborator, and they did not work very often without him. Like Horton Foote and Ring Lardner Jr., they have been honored with the Writers Guild Laurel Award, the highest citation of the Guild, for their lifetime achievement of intelligent films with integrity.

Arnold Schulman has had a checkered career, as he is the first to admit. Hollywood has exacted a toll from him. He started as an aspiring playwright and author of prime-time teleplays. His career in motion pictures began in the twilight of the Golden Age with an offbeat project for the director George Cukor and the producer Hal Wallis. Then his first serious play was tinkered with repeatedly before it was finally adapted into a comedy, transformed almost beyond recognition, by Schulman himself and the director Frank Capra. Schulman had a winning streak in the 1960s with an original, Love with a Proper Stranger (1963), and the adaptation of Philip Roth's novel Goodbye, Columbus (1969), both much-lauded screenplays. The 1970s were a professional nightmare he can laugh about now, because Schulman bounced back in the 1980s and 1990s with richly textured scripts for the quixotic Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988, directed by Francis Coppola) and the critically acclaimed telefilm of Randy Shilts's book about the history of AIDS, And the Band Played On (1993).

The phenomenal Stirling Silliphant retreated to Thailand, where he managed to keep up an active Hollywood career. Arguably one of the most produced scriptwriters of his generation, Silliphant started in journalism and studio publicity, then began writing movies in 1955. In the 1960s, he wrote (often as adaptations) Village of the Damned (1960), The Slender Thread (1965), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Charly (1968), Marlowe (1969), A Walk in the Spring Rain (1970), and The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970). Silliphant spent almost as much time in television and wrote dozens of original teleplays for Route 66, Naked City, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and many other noteworthy series. Continuing to write films with regularity in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, Silliphant contributed to disaster films, the Shaft and Dirty Harry films, and more.

Two of the quintessential films of the 1960s are Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and Easy Rider (1969). Terry Southern left his imprint on both, although these films' respective directors, Stanley Kubrick and Dennis Hopper, have promoted a more auteurist view of how these modern classics were created. Southern seemed everywhere at once in the 1960s, hanging out with the cool crowd and making all the hip

scenes, a friend to trendy artists and influential people. He was involved with the development of curious and curiouser 1960s and 1970s film projects. It may seem that the coauthor of the novel and the screenplay Candy kept a low profile and had an unfulfilled screenwriting career since his 1960s heyday; however, the reasons are fascinating, and his story is a sympathetic one.

Here it might be appropriate to quote from the introduction to the first Backstory: "Taken together, these interviews comprise an affectionate group portrait of the movie writers of a bygone era—of their lives and lifestyles, of their vast body of work, of their differing approaches to the challenge of writing motion pictures. This book is not meant to be a scholarly or historical work, a purely factual study, or even a complete representation of the profession. Names and faces are missing. It would take six hundred such interviews to reflect the diversity of writers who wrote our favorite movies."

And here it might be appropriate to quote from the introduction to Backstory 2: "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 conflicting rumor, gossip, legend, folklore and reminiscence. 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' points 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."

Both of the above statements continue to be part of the Backstory credo. There are dozens upon dozens of books about famous stars and directors, producers and studios, but not as nearly as many as there ought to be about the people who are fundamental to the creation of films, yet who rank as, in the words of Albert Hackett in the first Backstory, "less than dust" in the Hollywood hierarchy.

It is startling how long ago the 1960s seem and how few of the screenwriters interviewed here are still screenwriting. Hollywood has a short memory for them and their accomplishments. This series continues to be not only a backstory of individuals and their classic (as well as negligible) film credits but also an informal backstory of the profession and a wishful corrective to film history.