Not my usual screenwriting blog this week because I spent last week at the silent comedy festival in Bristol, Slapstick 2012. I managed to see five events including the Friday night Gala at the Colston Hall featuring Buster Keaton’s The General supported by shorts from Laurel and Hardy and Charlie
Chaplin.

I’ve got nothing but good things to say about the festival (with the possible exception of Griff Rhy Jones’ unbelievably self-serving introductions to other people’s films), but the high spots for me were the two events hosted by Oscar winning film historian Kevin Brownlow. There is simply no one who has done more for silent film and Brownlow’s films and books on the subject are definitive and, annoyingly, as commerically unavailable as the films he’s talking about.

Which leads me to my topic; there is a vast body of silent film that remains unavailable despite already having had money spent on them for restoration purposes. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was one of the most successful films of all time, it features Rudolph Valentino’s first starring role and was a personal favourite of David Lean who always referenced its director Rex Ingram as an influence, and yet you cannot go into a shop and buy a decent copy (there’s probably a few ropey and illegal ones knocking about). Even currently popular stars like Buster Keaton suffer; The Camerman and Spite Marriage are so seldom seen that they have been at best glossed over by film history and at worst considered sub-par (which they are certainly not). As I’ve hinted, many of these films you can still get hold of one way or another, but then you run the risk of possible fines for viewing something that the copyright holders are not even releasing, which frankly takes the piss.

Can I do anything about this? I don’t know but I think I’d like to try. At least I can raise awareness, so watch this space.

Oh, and so this is still technically about screenwriting, let’s have a round of applause for the teams of gag-writers who helped make the great silent comedians so great!

In all of the Patrick McGilligan interviews with screenwriters I have read, George Axelrod’s is the only one to begin with the subject critiquing the Backstory books. I’m not sure what that says about him but I’m sure it says something.

As you may have guessed Axelrod wrote the screenplay for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, adapted from Truman Capote’s novella. It was in fact on TV last week but I’d never seen it before, taped it, and just got round to watching it today, plus I’d recently read the Axelrod interview. I really enjoyed Tiffany’s and I think part of the reason it’s aged as well as it has is because of the vagueness forced upon it by the production code. In Capote’s book Holly Golightly is a call girl and even as late in the day as 1961, a major studio would not have that. Worse still, the man in the book is likely homosexual, a subject about which major studios still get jittery. Axelrod made sweeping changes, the largest being that the man (played by George Peppard in his pre-A Team days) becomes a gigolo, so he and Holly are basically in the same line. It’s still impossible to mention either character’s profession but Axelrod uses that to his advantage, our uncertainty about what they are mirrors the character’s uncertain relationship, the undefined nature of which is the crux of the piece. From a remove of 50 years it also makes the film less dated; if they had talked about their occupations then the film would have showed its age, by not doing so Axelrod has inadvertently allowed it to stand the test of time. The film is not to everyone’s taste, but I enjoyed it and I think there’s room for an essentially sweet, offbeat romance amongst the more formulaic ones. The only thing I dislike is the same thing that Axelrod did; the bizarre casting of Mickey Rooney as the comedy Japanese neighbour. I’ve nothing but respect for Mr. Rooney and for Blake Edwards who directed, but the result is just not funny.

Axelrod was a favourite target of the Production Code, Legion of Decency, and various other killjoys, as his films (some adapted from his own plays where rules were less stringent) frequently dealt with sex (The Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter). But that did not stop him from writing some very
successful films, despite his belief that most of them were mangled to some extent, leading him to direct 2 himself (unsuccessfully). Arguably Axelrod’s greatest film was banned, but not because of any sexual content. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was banned after the assasination of President Kennedy and was not re-released until 1988. It is a phenomenal film, and one with a dark sense of humour that often goes unrecognised. It’s a film that has not dated and so had no need of a remake which made me very cautious of the 2004 version, but you know what? it’s actually a very good film too. How often does that happen?

An alcohol problem blighted the second half of Axelrod’s career and he never really recovered, but his work in the 50s and 60s is remarkable, capturing Hollywood as it evolves to keep up with the new era. If he had only written Manchurian Candidate he would be remembered as one of the greats, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s confirms that position and shows a range that most writers would kill for.

Properly it should say ‘screenwriters of the week’ as Hud was written by one of the few genuine screenwriting partnerships to be found in the latter half of the twentieth century; Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank jr. The pair met, fell in love and married while junior writers at MGM but it was a several years before they considered writing together.

Before I come to the point I really wanted to make in this blog I should say, I have not seen Hud (I plan to watch it Monday 11.05am BBC4), nor have I seen any of the films written by Frank and Ravetch, together or separately. Through the whole of The Story of Film last year I felt that Mark Cousins was berating me for not watching enough films from around the world, writing this blog I often feel like I’m berating myself for not having even watched enough from America!

Back to the point; working apart for ten years both Frank and Ravetch amassed a decent CV of Western credits, outside of film Ravetch tried his hand at playwriting while Frank was a very successful short story writer. But when they begin to work together, starting with The Long, Hot Summer (a loose adaptation of Faulkner’s The Hamlet) the whole tone of their work changes. Though it is still very American, most often southern in setting and can occasionally be called Western, their collaborations tend to have a strong social conscience, dealing with big issues like race (Hombre) or exploitation of workers (Norma Rae). Most of these collaborartions were directed by Martin Ritter who directed 8 of their films and with whom they enjoyed a more congenial working relationship than many of their contemporaries did with directors.

My interest in this is, how much do we change as writers when we take on a partner? In some partnerships there is decidedly a junior and senior partner, Billy Wilder’s partners sometimes seem like interpreters of his ideas (I’m not demeaning them, Wilder’s co-writers were a hugely talented bunch). In the case of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, the general tone of what they wrote seems similar whether they wrote together or apart, and both wrote successfully apart (though Gordon more for the stage than film). Ravetch and Frank seemed to become a distinct new writer when they worked together. Is that common? I don’t know, but it’s almost interesting enough to make me want to work with a partner again.

Frank and Ravetch are an interesting couple, they were interviewed by Patrick McGilligan for Backstory after a lifetime of refusing interviews (and more recently by William Baer which I haven’t read as it mainly concerns Hud and I don’t want to ruin a film I plan to watch tomorrow), part way through they broke off to argue whether film can be seen as art (Frank for, Ravetch against), it’s a fascinating exchange. Their explanation for the difference collaboration made to their styles was simple ‘…whatever faculties we had, we combined into a fresh view’.  Ravetch died in 2010, Frank, now 94, is still alive; They come across as an extremely likeable pair and I look forward to seeing Hud.

A tribute this week to one of the last of the silent era. Federica Sagor Maas died on January 5^th at the age of 111, she was a silent film writer who worked on such prominent films as The Goose Woman with Louise Dresser, Flesh and the Devil with John Gilbert and Greta Garbo (and Barbara Kent who died last October aged 103), as well as several Clara Bow films including ’It’ and The Plastic Age. Despite having seen a couple of her films I had never heard of Frederica Sagor Maas (partly because much of her work seems to have been uncredited) and from what I can gather from the various obituaries (which are by no means 100% consistent) she had a pretty frustrating career; she got little credit for what she did, saw ideas taken away from her and suffered during the McCarthy era. All of which left her with an understandably jaundiced view of Hollywood. Reading some of the more oddly forthright obituaries I find myself wanting to know more about Miss Sagor Maas so I can judge for myself, and the good news is that, at the age of 99, she was talked into writing an autobiography by film historian Kevin Brownlow. Once I’ve tracked down a copy (by which I mean; once my parents have tracked down a copy and given it to me for my birthday), I shall report back.

Until then, whatever her attitude towards Hollywood, whatever axe she might have legitimately had to grind in later life, the fact is that she contributed to some of the most notable films of the silent era. As well as those I’ve already mentioned she wrote the story for The Way of All Flesh for which German actor Emil Jannings won Best Actor at the first ever Academy Awards Ceremony. Although Flesh and the Devil is not a film I particularly like, it is the film that made Greta Garbo a star. The real gem here though is ‘It’, which is a delight, it’s fun, funny and features Bow’s best performance. On top of that, though it may seem dated now, at the time it’s portrayal of an unwed mother was extremely brave.

So there’s a happy thought to end on; perhaps Frederica Sagor Maas’s film career did not pan out as she would have wanted (she’s not alone in that), but the films she did work on are an impressive legacy.

Happy New Year!

I’m playing catch up a bit this week as the film I’m talking about was on last Sunday but, to be honest I’m not talking about it that much. I’m not a massive fan of the Harry Potter series in print or onscreen. Don’t get me wrong, I think anything that gets children reading books bigger than the Bible is a good thing, I just don’t understand why adults read them. None of which has much to do with this blog.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how directors tend to divert the attention from screenwriters but there is one group that does so to an even greater extent; original novelists. The Harry Potter films are not written by Steve Kloves, they’re written by J K Rowling; Great Expectations will always be Dickens, Lord of the Rings is Tolkien etc etc. And to a degree that’s pretty reasonable, it’s the author not the screenwriter who came up with the story, the characters and their journey, and to an extent the structure, why should the screenwriter take a great share of the credit? Because it’s hard. Adapting an existing novel is a very different skill to writing one from scratch, but it’s no less difficult, it’s just difficult in different ways.

The fact is that a novel needs to be cut down for the screen, but fans of that novel are the target audience and losing too much of what they loved about the book is fatal. Take Bram Stoker’s Dracula, adapted by James Hart, the love story between Dracula and Mina is entirely invented, and wholly detrimental. On the other hand the film retains a chase scene across Europe from the book which is equally detrimental because a chase in which one of the protagonists is asleep on a boat throughout works in print but not on film. Most film buffswould agree that the best adaptation of the much-adapted Dracula is the silent Nosferatu, adapted by Henrik Galeen, in many ways it bears only a cursory similarity in plot terms but it captures the spirit of the original.

In my opinion, this is what makes a successful adaptation; being true to the spirit of the book. Great Expectations (adapted by David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan,Kay Walsh and Cecil McGivern) is considered one of the best ever adaptations of Dickens’ work but the ending is completely different in the book. The Lord of the Rings is a pretty faithful adaptation (despite some bizarre additions) but to me (and I know I’m in a minority here) it fails to capture what made the book special.

How do you capture that spirit? Search me, it probably depends on the book. Another good recent example would be Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (adapted by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughn), an extremely complex story full of tension and suspense, and the solution to adapting it seems to have been to accept that if the audience is to understand all that is going on the characters would be talking constantly; so just accept the audience’s ignorance and focus on the tension. And it worked brilliantly.

As I said, I’m not a big Potter fan but it seems to me that Steve Kloves (who adapted all but one of the books) has done a good job, if nothing else they are films that stand alone as films, dramatic and involving, and, crucially, never feeling like cut down books.

I didn’t plan on leaving it quite this late in the day but here is the second part of my Christmas blog and as I am writing it the film itself is about to start on Channel 5. But don’t worry about missing it because it’s the colourised version which really does rob it of a lot of its charm. There is considerable argument about which is the best version of the oft-filmed Dickens story ‘A Christmas Carol’ and based on the response I got last week there is a considerable movement in favour of the Muppet version, but there is far less argument about who is the best Scrooge; it is the part that Alistair Sim was born to play. He was one of our finest comic actors anyway but as Scrooge he simply excelled.

But of course I’m not here to talk about Sim I’m talking about Noel Langley who did this particular screen adaptation, and it would be wrong to ignore the contribution that script makes to the film’s success (which goes way beyond Sim’s dominating central performance).

I just assumed that the writer of Scrooge would have a raft of Ealing comedies and small British films I had never heard of on his CV, but Langley is actually quite intriguing. He was born in South Africa but worked predominantly in the US, though Scrooge is far from his only UK cedit. His best known credit I was shocked to find is for The Wizard of Oz, a job he won on the basis of his successful children’s book the Tale of the Land of Green Ginger. Oz famously went through 3 directors but it was also worked on by 18 writers! Including some I have already blogged about (John Lee Mahin is one of the most surpising names), Langley was one of only 3 to get a credit, ironically since he hated what was done to his script and didn’t like the finished film to the extent that he tried to make a sequel using the bits of his original which were cut out.

Adaptation seems to have been a something Langley specialised in; he adapted Dickens again for a largely unregarded version of Pickwick Papers, as well as Tom Browne’s Schooldays and Svengali. Swashbucklers seem to have been another interest (and I should make it clear that I’m interpreting from his CV here, I know next to nothing about the man!), he scripted Knights of the Round Table, Prisoner of Zenda (The Stewart Granger version) and, most famously, Ivanhoe.

Though the screenplay work seems to have stopped in the fifties I have to say that my main interest in Langley is his abilty to write in different media. As well as film he was a novellist and playwright, he wrote for both television and radio as well as being a short story writer for various magazines. As a jobbing writer myself who has tried his hand at everything and will happily go where the money is, I identify with this and admire it. A writer isn’t a writer unless he writes, doesn’t matter what, and Noel Langley was clearly a writer through and through.

Part one of what I optimistically plan to be a two part Christmas special looks at one of my favourite adaptations of one of my favourite stories. I try to make
a point of seeing as many versions of A Christmas Carol as I can, I even have the incomplete Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost, produced by British film pioneer R W Paul in 1901 (still can’t quite face the Jim Carey/Robert Zemeckis version though), I know the version I’ve chosen here is performed by pieces of felt but I still find it one of the most moving. Perhaps it’s because I grew up with the Muppets so when Kermit the Frog cries I feel like I’m watching someone I know in pain.

In 2005 The Muppets lost possibly their most important ‘collaborator’ since the horribly premature death of Jim Henson. Kermit has never sounded quite the same since Henson’s death (though all credit to Steve Whitmire for the excellent job he does) and, though I am looking forward to the new film, I feel that none of the Muppets will ever sound the same since the death of Jerry Juhl.

One of the first of the regular team, Juhl met Henson in 1961 and worked initially as a puppeteer as well as writer on Henson’s series Sam and Friends. He stayed on as writer for Sesame Street and was head writer on the one and only Muppet Show. Juhl’s mix of childish puns, well timed slapstick and jokes that play to kids and adults alike is almost pantomime but it’s only half the story. Though the characters were created and brought to life by their performers, the way in which Juhl wrote for them showed a great talent for character comedy. Kermit may play Bob Cratchit but he’s still Kermit and we won’t accept him as anything else. A Fozzie joke will not work in the mouth of Miss Piggy. Juhl was essentially writing for a theatrical troupe of regulars, he knew and understood his cast and the material he wrote for them was suited to their particular talents and their sense of humour. The way they interact with each other shows the same savvy mind at work. The comedy is so inventive, so anarchic and so surreal that it’s easy to overlook this character element but without it we would not believe in the Muppets, and that’s the only reason they work; we buy into the fantasy without question.

Juhl was involved in almost every Muppet venture (and other Henson projects like Fraggle Rock as well) right up to Muppets in Space, and yet Christmas Carol, written over 15 years after the first Muppet Show, shows no lack of imagination, no dulling of the humour, and no boredom with the characters, it is a joyous experience. As I said, I hope the new movie will be good, but it will be missing a voice. I also hope the writers have the sense to look at what Jerry Juhl achieved, not just as a gag writer, but as a character writer.

Breaking my own rule this week by talking about a writer/director but, like a lot of writer/directors, Lawrence Kasdan started as a writer, still writes  without directing and is probably best known as a writer.

Body Heat (on this Wednesday BBC1 11.55pm) was Kasdan’s first and probably best film as a director, it’s one of the most successful modernisations of film noir and a great film but it does rather suffer in comparison to some of Kasdan’s films as a screenwriter because they include some of the most successful films of all time.

Kasdan’s first credit as a screenwriter was The Empire Strikes Back which he took over after the death of Leigh Brackett (incidentally a writer of classic film noir who wrote almost exclusively for Howard Hawks and was one of the most prominent female screenwriters of her generation). How he managed to get that gig as his first credited job is a longer story than I really have space for, plus it’s not the Empire script, good though it is, that I wanted to talk about. Whenever I want to use an example of perfect film structure there is one film I always go straight to; The Raiders of the Lost Ark. You don’t have to like the film (although I can’t think of one good reason why you wouldn’t!), but it hits the beats of the classic three act structure with a precision you can set your watch by. The plot, protagonist and antagonist, and imperative are introduced by the 20 minute mark, the characters and situation build to a mid point twist then things spiral out of control as we head for the big climax.

And more than that, think about the way the character of Indy is introduced; the opening set piece is a tight ten minutes, for the first five Indy can do no wrong, his whip never misses, he out smarts every booby trap. Then, on the five minute point, Indy switches the idol for the bag of sand and everything goes to hell, for the next five minutes he can do no right and only gets away with his life through luck. That’s the character of Indiana Jones in a nutshell, he’s a hero but not a superman, a hero you can believe in and identify with. To make that point using structure and do it so that no one watching notices (unless they’re an anal film-obsessive with a stopwatch like me) is simply brilliant. I’m not going to pretend that Steven Spielberg had nothing to do with this, that would be ridiculous, but it’s still a very fine piece of writing.

I’ve no doubt that part of the reason that Kasdan wrote in this highly structured, textbook way is that he had not been doing it long, and when you start it’s best to stick to the rules. But another reason is that he is a fan of Kurosawa, another very structured writer. He was working with Lucas and Spieberg, two film buffs who revered older movies where structure was king. And of course the most important reason; it works. It worked in the thirties and it works today. Nobody is saying that you can’t play with the structure, Hitchcock did it brilliantly, but it’s best to learn how to use that structure first. And to keep in mind above all else; structure works. It just does.

I’ll come clean, I have written about Robert Riskin before but it was 18 months ago and not in the context of my ‘screenwriter of the week’ blogs. Plus, Riskin is a fascinating writer and one whose story has definite relevance to the writer vs. director theme that occasionally pops up in these blogs.

First things first; Lost Horizon is a great film that tanked on its release and it is on BBC2 this Tuesday at 11.45am. It was directed by Frank Capra and Capra is a key player in the Riskin story. When we think of Frank Capra we think of little man making good versus the big, we think of communities pulling together, we think of liberal values. But Capra was a lifelong Republican (even after HUAC had a pop at him), the tone of his movies came largely from his most prominent screenwriter; Robert Riskin. Riskin was a staunch liberal and probably had some communist sympathies as well, it is his beliefs that Capra so brilliantly translates to the screen. Which probably accounts for why their relationship was marred by frequent arguments over credit, which eventually ended the association during the making of Meet John Doe. On the face of it, it sounds like Riskin has a point; he was the author of these stories, without him what would they be? And although Capra’s most famous film, It’s a Wonderful Life, was made long after they had parted ways, it uses many of Riskin’s themes and techniques. But, with other directors calling the shots Riskin’s films were average at best, the simple truth is that Capra was by far the best interpreter of Riskin’s work, even when he tried directing his own material it came up short. Capra may not have done as much of the writing as he claimed, but he certainly contributed something.

The sad moral of this story is that neither man was as good without the other and if they could just have accepted that and acknowledged each other’s strengths they probably would have been all the happier for it. But Riskin had to watch Capra getting praise (not to mention a lucrative profit share scheme) heaped on him for what the writer felt was his own work. Meanwhile, Capra was so plagued by insecurity that he tried to take credit for every aspect of his films. The last word went to Capra as Riskin died in 1955 aged only 58, following a stroke which left him incapable of writing for the last 5 years of his life. His body of work in the 1930s is as good, and as astutely of its time, as that of any other screenwriter.

There’s a huge amount that could be written on the relationship between these two men who so defined  each other’s work (if you want to know more avoid Capra’s revisionist and self-serving autobiography), but the thing that I take from it is that, contrary to the current trend of writer/directors, there is a real value to director and screenwriter being different but equally skilled and strong-willed people; it maybe be a volatile relationship, but the whole is likely to be greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Sorry it’s been a while since I wrote but I’ve been a bit under the weather. Feeling better now and this week (Monday 10.35 on More4) a real classic is on. The Day the Earth Stood Still is a rarity, a truly great science fiction film from the first half of the 20th Century. There are a few fun films, a whole lot that are so bad they’re good, but very few which are classics and Day the Earth Stood Still (directed by Robert Wise) certainly deserves it’s awesome reputation (it did not deserve the hideous Keanu Reeves starring remake, no one deserved that).

The screenplay was written by Edmund North (story by Harry Bates), but if you’re hoping for more science fiction on his CV then you’re largely out of luck, his last screen credit was for 1979′s Meteor but that’s it. Which is not to say that North’s CV is uninteresting, on the contrary he shared an Oscar with Francis Ford Coppola for the screenplay of Patton (a great biopic with a powerhouse central performance by George C. Scott). He worked on the usual mix of war and western that dominates a lot writers’ CVs in the fifties, including Sink the Bismarck and Colarado Territory (not classic perhaps but good solid films). He also wrote one of my favourite film noirs, In a Lonely Place, possibly the darkest of all noir’s and featuring Humphrey Bogart playing against type as an absolute bastard. It’s not one you see a lot but if it’s on, watch it.

Though the best of his films will no doubt stand the test of time, North’s most lasting legacy is perhaps his involvement in the Writers Guild of America. He served as president  of the screenwriters branch and served on more than 40 committees, fighting for the rights of screenwriters. On his death in 1990 a WGA award was named after him to be awarded to writers ‘whose courageous leadership, strength of purpose and continuing selfless activity in behalf of
the guild through the years — as well as professional achievement of the highest order — have served to establish the Writers Guild of America as a pillar of strength and security for writers throughout the world.’

I can’t speak to what he achieved for the guild, but Edmund North’s professional achievments were certainly of the highest order.