Two Oscars, one for best original screenplay, the other for best screenplay adapted from another medium; the Writers Guild West’s Laurel Award for distinguished achievement; a similar award (named for my friend Ian Hunter) from the Writers Guild East; the 1998 Nantucket Film Festival’s First Annual Writer’s Tribute—it sounds like a pretty impressive movie career. In fact, I’m impressed myself when I hear my accomplishments recited on a podium. What isn’t mentioned— what my admirers don’t even know about actually—are the unproduced scripts, just about twice as many on the shelf as ever made it to the screen. About twenty times in sixty years, I have typed a title page and the introductory “FADE IN:” with the expectation that the hundred or hundred and fifty pages I proceeded to write would be converted into the film I visualized, and . . . it didn’t happen.
Add in the occasions when a script gets “rewritten” at the behest of a director or producer (to say nothing of the alterations made by actors, cutters, or—the final affront—those unknown apparatchiks engaged in what is euphemistically called editing for television), and you can begin to see why I have never been much of an evangelist for my chosen profession. A publisher, magazine editor, or theatrical producer may all make suggestions, but it is the writer who does the rewrite or looks for another sponsor. For the screenwriter, ninety-nine percent of the time, there is no control over the transition from concept to frames of exposed film, and once the transition has been made, no previous version retains any significant reality. How can I match my paper draft of a scene against what is now implanted on celluloid?
In the spring of 1980, I got a phone call from Ray Stark, one of Hollywood’s most successful and powerful executives, who wanted me to consider working on a new version of Pal Joey, with Al Pacino as the star and Herbert Ross as the director. I would be free, he assured me, to start afresh with the original John O’Hara stories, and we would have access not only to the superb score of the original show but also to any other Rodgers and Hart number that suited out needs. Ross, a director I admired, was having a lot of commercial success at the time, and after a series of meetings, I laid out some ideas to which he responded with such enthusiasm that I agreed to do the script. Stark, in an equally effusive manner, promised to work out a deal with my agent while Frances and I went off on a ten-day vacation in Italy.
When my agent contacted Stark’s office after my return, he was told they needed a week to clear up a “technicality” concerning the rights to the material. And that was the last we ever heard from either Stark or Ross about the matter. What became of the updated Pal Joey? I can’t tell you because I don’t have a clue myself. It was just another stage in my endless education on the subject of producer-writer relations, which began when I was twenty-two and turned in the first screenplay I had written without a collaborator. I couldn’t wait for the producer’s reaction, but I wasn’t expecting to hear it before he had opened the script. “I’m sending this right over to Wald and Macaulay,” he said, referring to a well-paid writing team on the Warner lot. “I gave it to you so you could break ground for them while they were finishing another job.” It was hard to believe he was going to pass it on without reading a word, but that is just what he did. And on what basis could I object? I had been paid for my work, almost a thousand dollars as I remember it.
In terms of control, it was the fact of, rather than the amount of, payment that counted. When Mike Kanin and I sold Woman of the Year, we received a record sum, but in a transmutation so prodigious it could only be achieved by contract, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer became the “author” of the work. If anyone remains skeptical about this process, let him take note that when a Broadway musical version of that 1942 movie was produced forty years later, authors’ royalties for the source material went to M.G.M.
I recall the only time I thought, temporarily, that I had won an argument with Darryl Zanuck. We were discussing quite seriously (all such discussions seem of transcendent importance at the time) his proposal to cut from the script of Forever Amber a scene I thought essential to understanding the motivation of the leading character. Although motivation scenes were a prime Zanuck target (he preferred to strip any film down to pure action), he finally conceded that I might, in this case, have a point, and instructed Otto Preminger, the producer-director, to shoot the scene. A couple of months later we sat in a projection room, watching a rough assemblage of the movie, and the scene in question, which I never did see on film, was gone. Zanuck directed a comment at me over his shoulder: “Humoring you on that one cost us twenty thousand dollars.”
That closed the subject for good, and properly so. If I had pointed out that I still found the character’s motivation unclear, I would have been ignoring the several facts incorporated in his one short statement. It was a fact that I had wanted to retain the scene; it was a fact that he had made the binding decision to eliminate it; therefore, it was equally true that I had made a mistake costing the studio something like twenty thousand dollars.
The decision to put a new writer on a project caused Irving Thalberg or David Selznick no more angst than a football coach feels about sending in a wide receiver to announce the next play. But at least if yours happened to be the final script approved by the man in charge, you knew no one else had the authority to make changes from then on. By the mid-forties, the pioneering generation of studio bosses was beginning to pass from the scene and one of our beclouded visions of the postwar world was the idea that, in the less hierarchical and factory-like movie business to come, writers would have more opportunity to choose their projects and find collaborators and financing for them. Little did we suspect that, quite apart from the blacklist, the future would bring a reduction rather than an increase in the writer’s status.
My first experience with the new ethos came when Ian Hunter and I, under a pseudonym, wrote a screenplay for a British company. After meeting with the producers and the director on the Caribbean island where the movie was to be filmed, we made some necessary changes. Then, just before shooting began, we were startled to receive a “final shooting script” that was quite a drastic rewrite of ours, with the added defect of being, in our opinion, not nearly as good. Sidney Poitier told me later that he and John Cassavettes, who had agreed to do the picture, Virgin Island, based on our script, shared our disappointment in the new one. The producers’ only response to our protest was that standard British practice entitled the director to a final revision after the writers were through. (Our pseudonym, Philip Rush, remained intact on the screen credits, and when the movie was released in London, a historian of that name wrote an indignant letter to the Times, disclaiming responsibility.)
By the time I was able to write under my own name again, this inflation of the director’s authority was already taking hold in Hollywood, as my experience on the Cincinnati Kid taught me. Soon it had reached a point where, as a condition of agreeing to do a movie, a director could single-handedly change its whole purpose and thrust, even though no other party to the production had seen the need for such an adjustment.
I had done a couple of drafts of an adaptation of Semi-Tough, a book about professional football by Dan Jenkins. The producer liked it; Jenkins liked it; most important of all, according to the old standards, the heads of United Artists liked it enough to take the crucial step from “developing the property” to scheduling it for production as a starring vehicle for Burt Reynolds. The only missing element was a director, who was suddenly supplied in the person of Michael Ritchie. Although I conveyed to him indirectly my willingness to discuss even major revisions of the script, he told the studio he didn’t want to talk to the old writer; he wanted to talk to a new writer. He also announced that he wanted to make Semi-Tough a satirical comedy not about professional football but about consciousness-raising groups.
The producer and the studio regarded these demands as arbitrary but not excessive. They displayed their adaptability by transferring their entrepreneurial endorsement from the book and screenplay they had bought and set for production to whatever Ritchie and his new writer might devise to take their place. (The new writer was a friend and one of the best in the business, Walter Bernstein, who called me when he was offered the job and received my blessing, just as I would have received his if the situation had been reversed.)
Some of the leading directors when I first went to Hollywood— Howard Hawks and William Wyler for example—viewed themselves more like directors in the theater interpreting what the writer had conceived, though of course they had far more to do than a stage director. The idea of the director as a creative force took root in Europe after World War II when figures like Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut actually thought up their own ideas for their films and used writers sparingly, if at all. Except for Billy Wilder, John Huston, and a few other cases, that didn’t happen in American movies until quite recently. But the idea of the all-powerful director is so much a part of the job description now that even among members of the profession who make no pretense of being writers and are in no danger of being compared to Billy Wilder or John Huston, total authority has become the norm—and bringing in a new writer is just one of the standard ways of asserting it.
Under the circumstances, you’re lucky to wind up, as I did in the case of M*A*S*H, with a director whose abilities aren’t drastically outstripped by his ego, who sees the material as you do, and who makes changes that more often than not are improvements. But if the movie is a hit, it’s best not to expect anyone to think you had very much to do with it.
The first hint of M*A*S*H’s extraordinary success came at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix. My own presence at the festival was something of a fluke, precipitated by a conversation over supper with the Preminger brothers. “Ring, are you going to Cannes?” Otto inquired.
“Hell no,” I said, “nobody ever invites a writer to go.”
“Ingo, how come?” Otto said, disapprovingly. “I’m taking my writer.”
Thus was Ingo inspired to ask Fox to pay my travel expenses, arguing that my presence, as one of the Hollywood Ten, would make a useful publicity angle.
When I got to Cannes and began to sense the interest that our movie was generating, I thought it prudent to jot down some ideas to discuss with some of the horde of reporters in attendance. There had been talk about whether M*A*S*H was an “antiwar movie.” That struck me as a diversion; if there were any pro-war people around, a movie wasn’t going to change their minds. But the picture did have an incidental comment to make about a special kind of war, one waged in a weak country, far away, by a strong country—or, more particularly, an American war on the Asian mainland.
Some people had portrayed M*A*S*H as an attack on religion, and I thought I had better address that issue as well. It wasn’t about religion per se, I reasoned, just about the inappropriateness of religious sentiment in the combat zone. War is such a distinctly man-made institution, it seems to me, that it is quite unfair to involve God in it at all.
I had prepared these thoughts, for a press conference, and sure enough there was one, following a screening of the film on the second morning after our arrival. But I didn’t make any of my points because I wasn’t there. Whoever was supposed to tell me about it hadn’t, and, as far as I know, my absence didn’t provoke any outcry from the assembled masses.
It would be misleading to leave the impression that no interest what- soever was expressed in my contribution to the picture during my whole two weeks in Europe. In Hamburg a few days before we got to Cannes, a commentator from an intellectual weekly said he knew I had been imprisoned and blacklisted as one of the “Hollywood Ten.” Was this obnoxious, reactionary, and militaristic film, he wanted to know, the price I had had to pay in order to work under my own name again? Otherwise, everyone seemed to assume that the director (who had not even been part of the project until I had written two drafts of the script) had created the movie pretty much unassisted and that he alone was capable of explaining what it meant.
Bob himself, understandably, was rather charmed by the idea that M*A*S*H had sprung pretty much full-blown from his head. He suggested in several interviews that he had treated the script as a mere blueprint, and, I regret to say that, for my own part, I failed to give him his rightful, and large, degree of credit the following spring when I accepted my Academy Award. I can only say in my defense that I fully expected Bob to be up there on the podium later in the evening to accept the Best Director award that went instead to Franklin Schaffner for Patton.
Bob had encouraged the actors in M*A*S*H to improvise many of their lines. Maybe that’s what he had in mind when he implied that he had all but discarded the screenplay. (The only time I visited the set during shooting, he made a joke of it, calling out, “Hey, somebody find the script! Here comes the writer!”) But the departures weren’t as drastic as he made out; much of the improvisation involved a couple of scenes between Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould in which they rephrased lines in their own words. Even in those scenes, they stuck to the basic outlines of what I had written, and as any screenwriter will tell you, dialogue is not the essence of a movie script.
When silent movies became the “talkies,” Hollywood studios imported Broadway’s most successful playwrights to fill the new need for dialogue. Both parties saw little difference between a drama performed by live actors in a theater and one recorded by the new sound cameras, and both were dismayed when audiences found many early talkies wordy and tedious. The devices the movie-makers had developed in the silent days—the close-up, the reverse angle, the moving shot, the abrupt cut, the dissolve, the divided screen, different lenses, varying depth of focus, montage, camera speeds, flashbacks and flash forwards among other novel techniques—had created a whole new storytelling language. For the first time, that language included sound, which meant sound effects and background music as well as dialogue. But the spoken word turned out not to have the same all-important significance it had on the stage. You couldn’t plant a vital story point in a line of dialogue and be sure it had registered; you had to reinforce it with another plant, preferably a visual one.
Waldo Salt has described our craft as “a separate form, and what it is, is writing in images. There is a separate aesthetic that is quite different from the theater or the novel. It comes closer to the technique of poetry.” Waldo was a talented amateur artist, and the rough pages of his movie scripts were full of sketches of the action as he envisioned it. I happen to be completely inept at drawing, but when I am writing a movie, my attention goes back and forth between the word processor and an imaginary screen on which the action I’m conceiving is taking place. The sight—what is included in the shot and what is not—and the sound, if any, are equally important, and are complementary in the sense that each serves to limit the need for the other.
Half the strength of a successful movie, Irving Thalberg once said, lies in its basic idea, whether it comes from a book, a play, or an original screenplay. It is important, however, to understand what constitutes a movie idea. Many would-be writers think that a subject (“Let’s make a movie about the Bayou country in Louisiana,” or “Nobody’s made a picture about a tyrannical captain in the 18th-century British Navy”) is the same thing as an idea. A character or a background that hasn’t been dealt with before can be a valuable asset, but it’s still a long way from an idea for a movie. Even if you say a tyrannical captain and a law-abiding first mate, you’re not there yet. You still have to develop it: “The situation becomes so intolerable that the first mate, despite his loyal adherence to form and tradition, leads a mutiny against the captain.” Then you have a dramatic situation that will work not only for this movie but against other backgrounds as well. Thus, when a friend of mine saw Red River and congratulated its screenwriter, Borden Chase, his reaction was, “You didn’t get it? It’s Mutiny on the Bounty.”
With M*A*S*H, the idea originated neither with Bob Altman nor with me but with the co-authors of the book. For all of Bob’s interpolations and improvisations, however, the basic structure of the movie is the one laid out in my script, and each scene has the beginning, middle, and end that I gave it.
The last movie that I wrote, The Greatest, was the life story of Muhammad Ali, with Ali himself in the role. The director, Tom Gries, and I worked closely together, and when shooting was over, he explained to me just how he planned to assemble the footage, which had been shot in a somewhat haphazard fashion. Taking a couple of days off to relax before he went to the editing room, Tom was playing a vigorous game of tennis when he suffered a heart attack and died on the court. After the shock wore off, I realized what a problem it was going to be for strangers to edit the picture in anything like the way Tom had devised in his head. So I instructed my agent Jim Preminger (Ingo’s son), to ask the studio, Columbia Pictures, to let the assistant director and me serve as an advisory committee to the film editor in order to convey as much as we could of Tom’s intentions. I offered to join the effort without any compensation. Columbia promptly rejected the offer, establishing instead an advisory committee composed of studio executives who, they said, would know better what would work at the box office. The movie they came up with, besides departing in a number of ways from Tom’s plan and my screenplay, didn’t work particularly well at the box office either.
It is a temptation for a writer to fantasize that his unshot scripts could have become more original and provocative movies than the ones that ran the gauntlet to theatrical exhibition. A sober review of the files in my case shows that this would be self-delusion. Among the unproduced screenplays are a sizable number that were poor ideas to begin with, undertaken for misguided or unworthy motives, including the classic cop-out of the indentured artist: “If they’re dumb enough to pay all that money for this crap, who am I to object?” In the end, “my best scripts are on the shelf” has to be amended to “my best and worst.” But there still remain just enough of the former to make up a small but rewarding festival of superior pictures. The greatest appeal of this imaginary festival is the brilliant fidelity with which my scripts have been translated into film. In what other festival has each entry been photographed with flawless taste, accented with an unassuming yet telling musical score, directed with imaginative respect and played to the hilt but not an inch beyond by inspired and selfless actors?
My festival of unrealized films begins with my first original story, which was definitely ahead of its time. Five years before Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder wrote The Lost Weekend, I had outlined a movie about a woman ravaged by alcoholism. The part is still played by Carole Lombard in my imagination, because it was Carole who responded with such excitement and took my story from studio to studio, only to be told by all of them that the subject was unacceptable.
Early in World War II, I read a short story in a magazine by Ira Wolfert, who had covered the fall of France as a war correspondent. There were so few available young men for the French resistance that they had to recruit elderly ones to take the rap when the Nazis closed in on them. The dramatic conflict arose from the fact that one of these recruits was a lifelong bum who made no distinction between the conquerors and the French police he had always defied. All that interested him was the food and shelter offered for signing up to be a potential martyr. I sold Dalton Trumbo on the idea, and together we wrote a screenplay, The Fishermen of Beaudrais. No studio offered us what we considered a reasonable price and the project was never sold, though the script was admired at the time and again, more than half a century later, when it was chosen for publication in an issue of Scenario magazine.
In 1946, just after the war, Trumbo and I were part of a group of six or seven writers and one producer who decided that the best way to fight the studio system was to choose our ideas, write the scripts, and only then try to get a studio to back us as a production unit. We began by optioning the film rights to a wonderful novel, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. Most of my partners in the new company had existing commitments. I didn’t, and happily undertook the task of converting the book into a screenplay. The beauty of the story lies in the title character, who loves only himself but devotes all his time to his children because they alone are tolerant enough to listen to him recount his virtues and accomplishments. When I had done a draft and revised it in accordance with my partners’ criticisms, we were ready to look for financial backing. At that moment, history intervened in the form of the Un-American Activities Committee and its subpoenas. Our independent artists’ company was stillborn, and The Man Who Loved Children was relegated to my private festival. (Other filmmakers, including John Huston, later glimpsed the rich movie possibilities in that book, but it remains unproduced.)
After the enormous success of M*A*S*H, I had plenty of job offers; that, in turn, led me to choose the boldest and most controversial subjects— and the ones most likely to be rejected by a nervous front office. In the early seventies, I read a novel called Farragan’s Retreat, a black comedy about a Roman Catholic family in Philadelphia so disgraced when one of its scions flees to Montreal instead of taking his patriotic place among our troops in Vietnam that they sentence him to death and assign his own mortified father to perform the execution. My fourth nominee was such rich movie material that I optioned it myself, wrote a screenplay on speculation, and then submitted book and screenplay to Paramount, which immediately bought them and set about finding a director for what the then studio head felt would be an outstanding picture. He was suddenly replaced, however, and the new chief executive abruptly canceled the production on the grounds that Vietnam might become a “forgotten issue” during the year it would take to make and release the movie. As it turned out, Dick Nixon and Henry Kissinger were keeping the issue very much alive fourteen months later when they ordered their Christmas bombing of North Vietnam.
Years after that, when the war was long over, another producer saw the same comedy values I did in the script and was eager to make it. The rights, however, had reverted to the author of the book, who had expressed great delight with my script and then died suddenly at the age of forty, leaving his estate, including the book rights, to his parents. They, we discovered, were loyal to the side of the family on whom the heavies in the book were based, and they had no intention of selling the rights to anyone.
To those of us who came of age in the 1930s, no event was more critical and partisan than the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. My own feelings on the subject were, of course, bound up with the death of my brother Jim on the final night before the International Brigade was withdrawn. Liberals all over the world had tried to help the Spanish government prevail, and many felt that its defeat in 1939 made a world war inevitable. But it wasn’t until the early 1970s that it became feasible to treat that conflict in realistic terms in an American movie. At that time I proposed a script called The Volunteer, based on Jim’s story. The same Hannah Weinstein who produced The Adventures of Robin Hood during the blacklist was now producing movies at Columbia Pictures, where the studio head welcomed the project and contracted with Hannah and me for a screenplay and a production to follow. This time, it seemed that no obstacle was likely to stand in the way of what would have been my favorite movie. Then the same commonplace but always-unanticipated blow that had doomed Farragan’s Retreat at Paramount struck at Columbia: a sudden switch in studio command. The new chieftain told Hannah right off that he hated the idea and would have no part of it. His opinion notwithstanding, it is probably the best script I ever wrote, but its only market seems to be as the fifth entry in my dream festival.
The sixth and final nominee for my festival of unmade movies is called Death Row Brothers. It is a true story that Eleanor Jackson Piel, the outstanding lawyer who secured the freedom of two men who had spent eight years awaiting execution, originally told me. In order to make the film as real and gripping as possible, I accumulated a file of newspaper clippings about the case and spent time with the men themselves as well as with all the principal witnesses. There was no reason to concoct a single detail to make the story starker or more dramatic. Law enforcement officers having decided the brothers were guilty, proceeded to doctor the evidence to secure their conviction. Ms. Piel became involved solely out of her opposition to the death penalty, never suspecting she would find her client entirely innocent of the crime and be able to prove that fact beyond any doubt. With no fictional embellishments whatsoever, the screenplay is a strong indictment of capital punishment.
In the spring of 1998, I was invited to receive the First Annual Writers’ Tribute at the Nantucket Film Festival, the only festival I know of that honors writers rather than directors as the major creative force in filmmaking. I was introduced by Frank Pierson, author of many screenplays including Dog Day Afternoon, and Cool Hand Luke, and director of The Looking Glass War and the Barbra Streisand remake of A Star Is Born. He traced the beginnings of the idea that movies were directed rather than written back to the publicity sixty years ago about “the Capra touch.” And he reported the reaction of Robert Riskin, the screenwriter of most of Frank Capra’s greatest hits, including It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe, and You Can’t Take It with You. Putting together a stack of a hundred and twenty sheets of blank paper, Riskin dumped them on Capra’s desk with the words, “There, Frank. Put the Capra touch on that!”