Running late again so apologies.

The more modern the writers I talk about in these blogs the more information there is about them (or at least more is easily available), and since I don’t want to make the text intimidatingly long that also means the more I have to leave out. This is apropos of little, except to say sorry for all the stuff I leave
out.

Earlier today at 4.10pm, on Film4 Howards End was on, a film written by a writer who, for a number of reasons, is near unique in film history; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. I wrote recently about Lydia Hayward (and for all those who read that blog I have now discovered that she died in 1945), a screenwriter who specialised in literary adaptations and who worked frequently with director H. Manning Haynes, there’s certainly a comparison to be made but Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplays are all literary adaptations and she has worked almost exclusively with the director James Ivory, 22 films in all. The only exceptions being a couple of pieces for TV, a documentary directed by Ivory’s partner Ismail Merchant, and Madame Sousatzka for John Schlesinger.

So why has Jhabvala never written an original screenplay? Because she is also a very successful (and Booker prize winning) novelist and her original ideas tend to go into those. In many ways Jhabvala is an unlikely screenwriter, her background when she was first approached by Merchant and Ivory to adapt her novel The Householder was entirely literary, her influences have always been literary and yet she is an Oscar and BAFTA winning screenwriter.

Of course there is an argument to be made that if you start with a good and successful book then your job is made easier and you have a built in audience but it’s not quite that simple. For starters Merchant Ivory, while renowned for its period adaptations, has never taken the lazy BBC approach and just adapted Dickens and Austen in strict rotation, their choices have never been strictly populist. From a writer’s point of view adaptation has advantages but also challenges; on the one hand, yes, story and characters are in place, on the other, there is a wealth of material to be at best condensed and at worst cut. Doing either without the audience noticing is tough, you run the risk of upsetting fans of the books and of losing the subtlety and nuance of the original. To realise how difficult literary adaptation is all one has to do is look at all the failed ones.

What makes Jhabvala and Merchant Ivory so successful? When asked about her philosophy of adaptation by Vincent LoBrutto for Backstory 4, Jhabvala said ‘First, you must have reverence for the material you are doing. Then you have to be quite irreverent about it in order to make something else out of it.’ I’ve spoken about this before and I couldn’t agree more; a novel is not the same as a film, things must be cut, things must be changed, but at the heart of it all the spirit of the original must be retained. The screenwriter introduces a new voice into a story already dominated by one voice and although that original voice must remain, it would be impossible to write a heartfelt script unless the screenwriter’s voice is in there too. It’s a fine balancing act.

A big part of Jhabvala’s success as an adapter may stem from the fact that she is a novelist first and foremost and therefore has great respect for the written word. The books Merchant Ivory adapt are mostly classics and Jhabvala never falls into the trap of thinking she knows better than the author of a book that has been read and loved for decades (Peter Jackson could learn something there!).

The specific future of Merchant Ivory was thrown up in the air by the death in 2005 of Ismail Merchant, since then Jhabvala and Ivory have completed only one film, 2009’s The City of Your Final Destination. If it proves their swansong they leave behind a remarkable and unique collaboration.

In almost every way Merchant Ivory goes against the established ‘rules’ of cinema, their films should not be commercial and yet they are. From that perspective Ruth Prawer Jhabvala seems the ideal screenwriter for them; a novelist with no experience of film ought not to be a talented screenwriter, but the proof to the contrary is there on the screen.

This is my British Silent Film Festival special. It will be short and, to be honest, uninformative.
I was at the first day of the 15th British Silent Film Festival which took place last week, finances prevented me from attending more than one day which was a pity because that day alone was brilliant. Including shorts I watched ten films and was introduced to a new writer in Lydia Hayward.

Hayward wrote the first film of the festival, a light comedy called A Bachelor’s Baby. The film was based on a novel by Roy Bennett but it rises above it’s source material into a subtle, sweet and extremely funny story that has more than a hint of the great P. G. Wodehouse. Hayward is best known for her similarly toned adaptations of W. W. Jacobs’ hugely popular stories directed by H. Manning Haynes. The pair made a total of eleven films based on Jacobs’
stories during the twenties and early thirties and they have become festival favourites. This year A Will and a Way and The Boatswain’s Mate were shown and were probably the highlights of my single day there.

Hayward enjoyed a 22 year career in cinema mostly working in the same lightly comic vein.

And that’s all I’ve got. Sure if I were to hit the libraries etc I could find more but from pure internet research in the time I can spare to write this, that’s the sum total of what I could find about Lydia Hayward. I don’t even know when she died. Come to think of it, I can’t be 100% sure she’s dead. So I’m afraid she’s added to the growing list of writer’s I’ve talked about here about whom I wish I knew more and who I will look out for in the future. What I can say, based on three films, is that Lydia Hayward had a real talent for screen adaptation and light comedy, particularly in the challenging medium of silent film, if you spot a film with her name on it (and she was active into the 40s so it’s not impossible) give it a watch.

Most of the writers I discuss in these blogs are barely represented on the internet. This week however I’m spoilt for choice, because I’m talking about Terry Southern (who wrote Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, showing this Tues on Film4 at 11.05pm), possibly the coolest writer I’ve ever discussed, probably the one who most defined the era in which he worked. With the exception of 1988’s The Telephone, Southern’s entire film career takes place between 1964 and 1970, he scripted some of the most zeigeisty films of the time, he even appears on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, now that’s a cool writer.

Strangelove was Southern’s first screenplay, prior to that he had mostly written short stories and was probably best known for the novel The Magic Christian (filmed later, though not particularly well, with a script co-written by Southern). He came on board to do major re-writes since director Stanley Kubrick was unhappy with the basic tone of the existing script, written by the man who also wrote the book on which it was based, Peter George. At that time the script was a drama, Kubrick felt it would work better as a black comedy and it was this that Southern was brought in to write, turning it into one of the most wholly unique films ever made.

The success of Strangelove made Southern a wanted man but his experiences as screenwriter for hire were not always good. The thing is, if a normal script is mucked about with or misinterpreted then it can turn out bad or dull, one of Southern’s can turn out completely bonkers. Candy, based on Southern’s novel was so poorly managed that Southern withdrew and the final script was written by Buck Henry. Henry is a very talented writer responsible for The Graduate and Catch 22 but Southern was extremely scathing about him (in interview with Lee Hill for Backstory 3) and the film is a mess. Casino Royale too became wayward and bizarre by the time it reached the screen and I personally don’t think much of Barbarella (though Southern seems to have no problem with it). But even in these credits Southern’s ‘hip’ persona comes through.

As if having Dr Strangelove on your CV wasn’t enough Southern also wrote the film that has become the greatest cinematic touchstone of the counter culture; Easy Rider. And I know what you’re thinking; Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper wrote that, well they didn’t (according to Southern at least, and for the rest of this let’s just assume everything I write is according to Southern). Hopper and Fonda certainly had the original idea but it was extremely basic, all of the actual writing was done by Southern, the only reason Hopper and Fonda receive credit is because Southern okayed it with the Writer’s Guild as a favour. This of course was before Hopper and Fonda started taking all the credit, which Southern describes as ‘vicious greed’. I also know what you’re thinking now; isn’t most of Easy Rider improvised anyway? That’s certainly what I’d always thought but check out the shooting script, even its most freeform moments are there on the page.

At the time Southern was happy enough to indulge the film’s stars, it was their story after all and he was riding high, but fashions were changing, risky projects scared executives and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Southern had a reputation for drink and drugs abuse, a reputation he did not entirely live up to. Despite writing constantly it would be almost two decades before another Terry Southern screenplay reached the screen. Most tantalising among his unrealised projects is A Clockwork Orange which would have reunited him with Stanley Kubrick (the director eventually wrote the screenplay himself).

Southern’s style was the making of him but it also seems to have been his undoing. It made people suspicious of him and made audiences assume that the films were ad-libbed. Which in some ways it could be seen as a compliment.

I like to digress from my normal format when I notice the death of a screenwriter and Tonino Guerra (who died last Wednesday at the age of 92) is one who is extremely worthy of the digression. If you can name an Italian director the chances are that Guerra worked with him at some point, most notably Fellini (Amarcord), De Sica (Amanti) and of course Antonioni, with whom he worked on 10 occasions including for the Oscar nominated Blow Up.

I should say up front I have only seen two of Guerra’s films, both for Antonioni, L’Avventura (still described as both men’s masterpiece) and Zabriskie Point which, I have to admit, I struggled with, although I watched it at about two the morning which, in hindsight, was dumb given the nature of the film. In short I’m probably the last person who should be writing a piece about Guerra but I would be thoroughly ashamed of ignoring his death so here goes.

Guerra was a poet as well as a screenwriter, largely keeping up both careers throughout his life. He started writing in a German concentration camp during the second world war, publishing his first collection of poems in 1946. His first screenplay was Uomini e lupi, about which I know little save that it starred Yves Montand who went on to star in Jean De Florettes (it must sometimes seem in these blogs that Jean De Florettes is the only foreign film I’ve heard of!). His CV is not without it’s blots; 1963′s Perseus Against the Monsters or Andy Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein, which is at best an acquired taste, but even the most artistically inclined writer has to eat.

Outside of Italy he worked with the Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky, the Greek director Theo Angelopolous and many more. In fact there are 104 writing credits on his IMDB profile, making him far more prolific than most of his contemporaries.

From what I read in the various obituaries and tributes (many contradictory) which I’ve plundered for this blog, Guerra was a visual writer both in his poetry and his screenplays. This obviously endears him to a silent film fan like me but the way in which Guerra did it also makes me a little jealous. I like the way I write and the stories I tell but I can only write technically. I need to plan and structure a story, I’ve never had the simple courage to let images be the story entire. There’s a lot written about how to structure a screenplay, and a lot of it’s true, but if the films of Tonino Guerra can teach a writer anything then it’s that there’s more than one way to write a screenplay.

Although 1992′s The Last of the Mohicans (on this Tuesday at 9pm on 5USA)  was based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, if you check the credits you’ll see that screenwriters Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe adapted their film from the earlier 1936 film written by Phillip Dunne.

Dunne appeals to me as a writer for number of reasons but most notably that he consistently refers to writing as a craft rather than an art, comparing it to cabinet making, which is very much in line with my own views. Dunne was a consumate craftsman, specialising in adaptations (he willingly admitted his own shortcomings as a creator of original stories) and emphasising the importance of character and the three act structure. My favourite quote from him  is ‘Don’t try to make the characters fit into a preconceived idea. Rather, see how the characters develop the story’ (in interview with Tina Daniell for Patrick McGilligan’s Backstory).

His most famous script (garnering him one of his two Oscar nominations) was for John Ford’s How Green was My Valley and he also worked with such notable names as Allan Dwan, Henry King, Henry Hathaway, Otto Preminger, Jacques Tourneur and Carol Reed. He turned director himself in the mid-fifties and though he continued as a writer/director for much of  the rest of his career it is as a writer that he is remembered.

In the fifties he worked on a string of the large scale Biblical epics that were popular at the time, including Demetrius and the Gladiators, a film made because the sets and costumes for The Robe (released the year before) were expensive and the studio wanted to get their money’s worth, so swiftly greenlit a sequel that could re-use them. Dunne was not particularly proud of these features, but reading about them he does seemed to have enjoyed working on them for the most part.

I don’t usually deal with writer/director’s but in Dunne’s case I’ve made an exception, partly because, as I said, he is mainly remembered as a writer, but also because he had interesting things to say on the director versus writer subject that has been a major theme of these blogs. He made what I think is an important distinction between writing and directing, and the writer and the director, saying that writing is more important than directing because directing is just interpretation, but this does not necessarily mean that the writer is more important than the director. I think what he was saying is simply that you can’t have a good film without a good script, but a good script is worthless unless someone realises it’s potential on the screen. It also admits that a director
may have an influence on the writing, while the reverse is seldom true.

There’s a lot to say about Dunne (his involvement with the blacklist is fascinating and very much to his credit) but with limited space I’ll finish with Dunne’s cure for writer’s block, because it’s one I’ve never come across before; a hangover. I can’t say it’s ever worked for me but if you’re struggling why not give it a shot?

Rio Bravo was on TV on Sunday but if you wanted to see it you probably already have and, to be honest, you probably won’t have to wait too long before it’s on again, besides, I wanted to talk about it’s writer.

Leigh Brackett (who co-wrote Bravo with Jules Furthman) was a trail blazer in more ways than one. Not only did she establish herself as a successful screenwriter (a world which had been male-dominated since the end of the silent era) but also as a science fiction writer, another largely male preserve. And she was not writing ‘women’s pictures’, far from it, she was writing almost exclusively for director Howard Hawks, and four of the films she wrote for him starred John Wayne, neither man suffered sissy dialogue. Howard Hawks kept using Brackett because she could write like man, and few people watching her films would disagree. Indeed there is a story that Hawks hired Brackett, having read her noirish novel No Good From a Corpse, under the impression that she was a man and was wise enough to keep her on when he learnt she wasn’t. Androgynous names can be a pain the arse (trust me, I know) but it may have served Brackett well, she was judged by the quality of her writing rather than her gender.

Of course, two of the films Brackett wrote are basically the same; El Dorado is a remake of Rio Bravo in all but name, while a third film Rio Lobo is pretty damn similar. Brackett was not over the moon about this and apparently tried to talk Hawks out of it but the director was insistent and, you know what, they’re all entertaining films.

Perhaps the most interesting (or surprising) entry in Brackett’s CV is The Long Goodbye, the satirical update of a Raymond Chandler story directed by Robert Altman. Brackett got the job on the strength of her first screenwriting job for Hawks; The Big Sleep. But while Sleep is a classic film noir detective
story, Long Goodbye is a fascinating beast that divides viewers massively, particularly in Brackett’s downbeat ending (and it was Brackett’s, Altman came
onboard largely on the strength of the ending).

Brackett’s final screenwriting job tends to surprise people but it is in fact very much in keeping with the rest of her CV; The Empire Strikes Back. George Lucas, lest we forget, used to be an extremely astute film-maker and film fan, Star Wars drew heavily on older traditions and Brackett, with her sci-fi and Western credentials was an ideal choice. There’s some disagreement here; Brackett died after handing in her first draft and Lawrence Kasdan finished the script. Brackett’s original has never been published but it’s been said (notably by Laurent Bouzereau) that her draft was scrapped more or less completely. It’s very hard to tell without seeing that original because Lawrence Kasdan (and I’m sure he would take this as a compliment) has a similar ear for dialogue; Raiders of the Lost Ark and Body Heat are covered with the fingerprints of a man who knows his Hawks and has a great affection for noir film and hardboiled dialogue. Picking the two writer’s styles apart is damn near impossible. My respect for Kasdan is enormous but I’d like to think that the same unerring ear for male dialogue wrote Han Solo’s acerbic barbs as wrote Philip Marlowe’s witty put-downs. In the end the question of whether or not Brackett did write much of Empire is meaningless, had she lived there’s no doubt in my mind that she could have. It’s the sort of film she’d always written, and nobody did it better.

This should be interesting. The Big Trees is a 1952 Kirk Douglas film about a Quaker colony defending giant sequoia trees from a timber baron, that’s about
all I know about the film. It was written by James R. Webb (with John Twist) and I don’t know much more about him. Usually a little research will reveal something but in Webb’s case his wikipedia biography barely mentions he was a screenwriter and the rest of the internet wasn’t much better.

So why pick Webb as the subject of this week’s blog? Partly because I am running out of screenwriters about whom  do know something but mostly because I feel like he should be better known and if I can’t be informative then I’d like to at least give some overdue credit. And credit is certainly due, this is a writer who gave us The Big Country, Pork Chop Hill, Vera Cruz, How the West was Won (for which he won an Oscar), Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford’s final film), and of course Cape Fear. He was president of the Writers Guild of America and continued to work right up to his death in 1974. Why is so little information available on such a prominent and talented writer?

Well of course I haven’t researched that hard, I haven’t scoured libraries and if I delved deeper into the net I daresay I might find more. But I usually don’t have to research that hard. The fact is that even talented screenwriters with famous credits to their name can fall off the radar.

So here’s what I know about Webb; he seems to have specialised in action films from the start, writing westerns for the low budegt studio Republic. he worked for Burt Lancaster’s production company (Hecht-Hill-Lancaster), tailoring material like Trapeze especially for Lancaster. Gregory Peck was another star who favoured Webb’s work. There is a 6 year gap in Webb’s credits between 1941 and 48 when he was personal aide to General Lloyd Fredenhall, notably in the North Africa campaign. He had been a prolific short story writer prior to his screenwriting career.

Like I said, I can contribute nothing to the net’s sum total of knowledge about James Webb, but if via this blog a few more people have heard of him then that’s good enough for me. The man who wrote Cape Fear deserves at least that much.

This is kind of my Oscar special, but it may not be immediately apparent why.

As I’ve had cause to mention time and time again in these blogs, during the 1950s a great many writers and other filmmakers were barred from working in Hollywood having been blacklisted; basically denounced as communists as a result of the HUAC hearings (I’m simplifying a little because I have limited space and it’s a huge subject). Of those people, a group of 10 refused to answer one way or another, believing this to be their first amendment right, HUAC disagreed and the Hollywood Ten were sent to prison for contempt of Congress.

If you’ve only heard of one of the Hollywood ten the chances are it’s Ring Lardner jr. one of the writers of Cloak and Dagger (a fairly mediocre entry on Fritz lang’s CV showing this Friday on Film4 at 4.30pm). Partly this is because he has a memorable name, partly it’s because he had the best comeback when the committee asked if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party; ‘I could answer it, but if I did I would hate myself in the morning’. But I would venture that the main reason is that Lardner has the best ‘story’, he’s the man who won Oscars for writing either side of his blacklisting, for best original screenplay for 1942′s Woman of the Year, and best adapted for MASH in 1971. (there’s my Oscar link)

Almost from the first Lardner was a problem figure to producers, he tended to favour controversial subject matter, something that affected the number of films he got made even after his blacklisting was lifted in the more permissive sixties. When Woman of the Year was ready to be shown to MGM boss Louis B Mayer, it was star Katherine Hepburn who presented it, hiding the identity of it’s writers (Lardner wrote it with Garson Kanin) whose poitical associations were already raising eyebrows.

During a decade and a half in the wilderness Lardner did some uncredited work, wrote under pseudonyms and may have used other writers as a front (one such writer, Lardner claimed, won an Oscar for Lardner’s script, though he declined to say who). Friends like Otto Preminger threw work his way and he did a lot of TV stuff under pseudonyms, including Richard Greene’s Adventures of Robin Hood. In the recent BBC production of Robin Hood one of the episodes was called Lardner’s Ring in tribute (still an excreable series but a nice gesture). Finally in 1965 Norman Jewison gave Lardner credit on The Cincinnati Kid and he was legitimate once more. Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Lardner’s high profile status allowed him to make a decent recovery, culminating in his Oscar for MASH (and yes I know Altman changed bits and there’s some improv but look at the book it’s based on and tell me a writer didn’t structure that film).

For what it’s worth, and I personally don’t think it matters, Lardner was a member of the Commuinst Party, he later became disillusioned and my favourite quote from him is ‘…Communism, like Christianity, is a beautiful theory that has yet to be tested, because it has never been put into practice.’. But, although his situation draws attention, I think it’s important to remember him as what he was; a writer, whose work was tragically limited by circumstance, but one who still managed to produce an impressive body of work.

I went through a period not long ago of writing about writers of classic musicals and I just asssumed that I must have done arguably the two greatest writers of the genre, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, but it turns out I didn’t, and since On the Town is on this Thursday (5.05pm Film4) I thought I’d rectify that.

Unlike most of the people I write about the names Comden and Green are comparatively well known. Partly that’s because they are known as songwriters as well as screenwriters, in fact if you look them up on IMDB it identifies them as songwriters first, which threw me for a while as it means that films such as Leon and Ronin are listed among their credits. Another reason they are well known is that they were theatre people as well and the stage has always been kinder to writers than the screen. The final reason may simply be the high regard in which they are held and the near uniqueness of their position as screenwriters.

Comden and Green were based at MGM studios for most of their screen career and, unlike virtually every other writer of their generation, they had no horror stories; no scripts re-written behind their backs, no directors or producers polluting their vision. Why? Because MGM’s golden era musicals were produced under the auspices of the famous Arthur Freed Unit, a subsection of the  studio that worked independently and without interference. Freed’s producing career began as an uncredited producer on The Wizard of Oz and includes such films as Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade and An American in Paris (as well as the Comden and Green ones which I’ll come to later). With credits like that Freed was given freedom to run his unit as he pleased. This meant that and writers like Comden and Green were in the loop at all times, no changes were made without their say so, they chatted ideas through with producers, directors and stars, all of whom were friends of theirs, their scripts were shot almost immediately after they were finished. In their entire screen career only two films they wrote were unproduced, a staggering record.

They specialised in songbook musicals (although they wrote original lyrics as well, as in On the Town, scored by Leonard Bernstein), rather weirdly making their films the precursors of shows like We Will Rock You. They were given a book of songs to select from and would structure a story around them. It sounds like a terrible way to write a story but this method produced such films as The Band Wagon, and of course Singin’ In the Rain.

With a track record like that it’s somewhat surprising that no one today has picked up Freed’s model, but one of the problems writers will always encounter is that everyone thinks they can write. And of course everyone can write, it’s writing well that’s the tough bit. Perhaps the greatest gift the Freed unit afforded Comden and Green is that it was run by people who recognised the craft of writing and left it to those who knew what they were doing. And if you write Singin’ In the Rain (and On the Town) then you obviously know what you’re doing.

First up, congratulations to Michel Hazanavicius for his best original screenplay BAFTA, I personally don’t think The Artist was the best screenplay of the year but I’m pleased if only because it’s a slap in the face to the people who said a film without dialogue shouldn’t be nominated, displaying a fantastic misunderstanding of how a screenplay works. I was also delighted by Tinker, Tailor’s win for best adapted screenplay (that would have been my choice), and thought Peter Straugham gave the most moving speech of the evening, dedicating the award to his late wife and writing partner Bridget O’Connor, who died before the film was released.

Back to normal, this week’s film is Frantic (on ITV3 this Friday at 11.05pm), directed by Roman Polanski. The main reason I chose Frantic (besides it being a cracking thriler) is that I’ve yet to look at many, or in fact any, foreign language screenwriters in these blogs. The astute will have noticed that I’m easing my way in since Frantic of course is in English (I need to see more foreign films) but it’s writer Gerard Brach is French, while his films are fairly international. Brach is best known for his collaborations with Polanski, they worked together on ten films, including Polanski’s breakthrough feature Repulsion, and their work shares many of the same themes (make of that what you will). Frantic is one of the most commercial of their collaborations but is still well worth seeing. Away from Polanski, a quick look at Brach’s CV suggests that he wrote or co-wrote virtually every break out European film of the last 40 years, most notably The Bear and The Name of the Rose for director Jean-Jacques Annaud, and the sensational double bill of Jean de Florettes and Manon des Sources for Claude Berri. That’s only the best know portion of a lengthy list of credits (Brach continued to work right up to his death in 2006 at the age of 79), and it already displays and extremely impressive range, from the disturbing thirllers of Polanski to more wokr pastoral for Berri. Brach was a very prolific writer (particularly for the era in which he worked), IMDB lists 59 credits, and it’s hard not attribute that at least partly to his agoraphobia, for the last ten years of his life he barely left his Paris apartment, and I’d guess he spent a lot of that time writing. One of the great things about doing this blog is that it forces me to find out about screenwriters myself. I would never have thought that Frantic, one of my favourite thrillers, was written by the same man who wrote Jean de Florette, or either of them by the same man who co-wrote The Name of the Rose. It’s interesting, but it’s also extremely inspiring.