Not much sense of history
Yes. The list suggests that contemporary screenwriters don't really have much awareness of their Golden Age predecessors beyond people like Preston Sturges to whom people like The Coens and QR regularly pay homage. To my slight shame I didn't recognize about half the names on your list until two days ago: e.g., I was bugged by Pressburger and Lederer and Ogden Stewart not making the list but I'd somehow never internalized the name 'Jules Furthman' before reading comments yesterday: Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, Shanghai Express, To Have and Have Not, Only Angels have Wings... and many many more. How could I have missed him? Presumably for the same reasons that the massed working screenwriters did: director/auteur-centricity, laziness, limited memory? Another example: Carl Foreman I only associate with High Noon.... but, of course, he *must* have done a pile of other great stuff. Uh-oh. Still another example: Stage Door (1937) is one of my favorite films but for some reason I've not remembered who wrote it: it's Morrie Ryskind who it turns out wrote Penny Serenade, A Night At The Opera and My Man Godfrey... oh dear.
Anyhow, a couple of more modern omissions that irked me: Anthony Shaffer (Frenzy, Sleuth, and Wicker Man are three scripts for the ages), Tonino Guerra (who recently got one of those Honorary lifetime Oscars and wrote most of Antonioni's key films, great Fellini's like Amarcord and a bunch of other slow-mystery-art-film staples for Tarkovsky and others of his ilk - in other words, No Guerra, No one whole, influential side of art-cinema!).
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telegonus (727)
7 years ago
Thanks for the response, Swanstep, and it's good indeed to see a name from the old days of the IMDB. BTW: hint, hint...I did a search at another site, and I have posts going back ten years listed here (probably more elsewhere), and my "dialogues" with ECarle go back that far. Whether every single exchange is still there I can't say. My ego wasn't THAT much in overdrive when I did that but it was nice to see some old stuff.
To return to the topic at hand: good names. I forgot about Morrie Ryskind. John Farrow's name was also missing, I believe. He was a writer as well as a director and deserves to be remembered as if not one of the very greats one of the very goods. A lot of the names on the list you linked weren't half as good as Farrow.
Also worthy of honorable mention (and then some) is Sam Fuller, who, I believe, wrote every film he directed. An amazing talent and a total one off of the sort young film writers ought to know something about. T.E.B. Clarke, an Ealing guy, also worth pulling out my my hat. Think The Lavender Hill Mob. Another Brit worthy of mention is R.C. Sherriff, who, in addtion to writing the play Journey's End also wrote many film scripts as well. Dramatists such as Maxwell Anderson and Robert Sherwood wrote for Hollywood. The latter wrote the screenplay for The Best Years Of Our Lives, which ought to count for something.
Then there's James Agee, the great film critic, who wrote the screenplay for The Night Of The Hunter. So many others: from Hugh Walpole to John Paxton. Then there's that Georgia wit Nunnally Johnson, a Fox contractee for decades. De Witt Bodeen may not be a name even old movie buffs can recall but think Val Lewton and you're there. Another gifted, rather limited author, Mel Dinnelli. Ditto for A.I. Bezzerides. Millard Kaufman deserves at least a mention for Bad Day At Black Rock. Surely Bertram Milhauser, who wrote so many entries in the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes series deserves a mention.
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movieghoul (213)
7 years ago
Orson Welles 41? Behind Nancy Meyers? That's the end of civilization as we know it!
And no Comden and Green who wrote screenplays for a slew of the greatest musicals ever made? And John Michael Hayes with his Hitchcock trifecta?
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swanstep (2616)
7 years ago
Orson Welles 41? Behind Nancy Meyers? That's the end of civilization as we know it!
Tee hee. Meyers' high placing jumped out a bit for me too... Has she ever written a movie that's at all ingenious? more than just pleasant?
When one picks over some of the less worthy placings on the list, it does feel like there might have been a bit of an editorial thumb on the scales of the raw poll results to ensure inclusiveness/representativeness at the expense of pure merit/historical importance. No one (including Meyers herself I'd say) *really* thinks that Meyers is a better screenwriter than Welles or Hecht or Lederer or Waldo Salt or Barry Levinson or lots of people not on the list at all. Similarly I'd guess that Jordan Peele himself will be embarrassed at creeping in at #100 when his career's barely started.
But, heck, I'd bump the LOTR and Matrix writers off any Top 100 list for their subsequent flounderings and their retrospectively-tarnishing sequel travesties (The Hobbit films and the Matrix 2&3 respectively) in particular. Lots more room for Comden and Green and other faves then!
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
I've simply enjoyed reading this thread and (luckily) recognizing a lot of screenwriter names while not necessarly knowing what they did.
Interesting that four of the Top Five pretty much direct their own scripts: Wilder, The Coens, QT, Coppola. Robert Towne has been dining out on Chinatown for decades; but he's got "script doctor" work on Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather(the final scene between Michael and Don Vito) to burnish his rep. And some co-writing on The Last Detail and Shampoo. Towne was the "go to seventies hipster."
William Goldman never directed (to my knowledge) but his name is sure on some great scripts, including two Oscar winners(Butch and Sundance; All the President's Men), and as his blurb reveals...he wrote THAT book on movie-making and script-writing(the one that rats out Dustin Hoffman as a pig and says the Psycho shrink scene as awful.)
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
The Hitchcock screenwriters:
Ernest Lehman was lucky. There is only his name on the screenplays for North by Northwest and Family Plot(on the latter, Lehman to was sold to a cinema-savvy audience as a "film history celebrity" just like Hitchcock.) Whereas the screenplays for Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much '56 and The Wrong Man have multiple authors.
Ben Hecht should be higher. Hitchocck was just one of his muses.
Joe Stefano: Well, what ya gonna do? Nobody sings the praises of The Black Orchid or The Naked Edge(at the movies.) Or Eye of the Cat. Or his 70's TV movies. It all boils down to one movie(Psycho) and one TV series(The Outer Limits). And as Stefano said, "my wife said Psycho and The Outer Limits should be enough." But oh did Stefano struggle over the years. That's why the best thing about Van Sant's Psycho is that Stefano got paid about 10 times more than he did for the original (inflation not impacting anything.)
Jay Presson Allen? Not for her Marnie script, for God Sake's. Even SHE said it belongs in Hitchcock's bottom third. It is as overlong, repetitive and dull as Psycho is sharp and fast. (To some extent, the cinematics overcome the script.)
John Michael Hayes: It was four in a row (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much)...or was it? I think he gets sole credit only on the first three. Hayes ends up as the Grand Wit in the Hitchcock circle, elegant, funny lines. Definitely should be on the list for Rear Window alone, but I actually think his script is more important for To Catch a Thief. Rear Window is carried by its cinematics; To Catch a Thief needs those great lines.
I like this exchange:
Grace Kelly: I told the police EVERYTHING that happened last night!
Cary Grant: Everything? The boys at the precinct must have been amused by that...
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Hitchcock scholar Steven DeRosa contends that the four Hayes scripts were the last truly "warm and human" Hitchcock scripts; it all gets psychological, bleak, grim and violent after that, said DeRosa(well, except for North by Northwest and Family Plot, two Lehman scripts built for fun.)
Samuel Taylor has one great Hitchcock movie on his resume(Vertigo) and one not so great(Topaz.) He wasn't allowed the wit of Ernest Lehman or Joe Stefano in his scripts.
And Anthony Shaffer did manage to do three major things -- Sleuth(a giant hit on stage, a solid hit on screen); Frenzy(saving a legend, an achievement of which Shaffer was most proud) and The Wicker Man(a cult classic.) Plus "Forbush and the Penguins," a favorite film of a significant other I once had. We were amused to find that we both liked Anthony Shaffer scripts...just wildly different ones.
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Meanwhile, away from Hitchcock:
Who was that lady who wrote Rio Bravo?
Some favorite exchanges:
Ward Bond: A drunk and a crippled old man. That's all you got?
John Wayne: That's WHAT I got.
John Wayne: Let's walk around the town. Can't let them think we're scared.
Dean Martin: Well, aren't we?
Ward Bond: Who's better with a gun?(Dean Martin or Ricky Nelson)
John Wayne: They're both good. I wouldn't want to live on the difference.
That's great stuff, in my book.
Oh, and this one:
(Dino punches Duke in the chin)
John Wayne: That's the second time you've hit me. Don't do it again.
Dino: I'm sorry.
John Wayne: Sorry don't get it done, Dude.
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And I liked Peter Stone, who wrote the twisty and witty thriller scripts for Charade and Mirage.
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swanstep (2616)
7 years ago
Who was that lady who wrote Rio Bravo?
Leigh Brackett together with Jules Furthman. Brackett's on the list, Furthman whom we discussed above isn't.
A *huge* omission from the list pointed out by one of the commenters at vulture is Budd Schulberg, author of On The Waterfront and A Face In The Crowd (and you could argue that his 1941 novel What makes Sammy Run? is the prototype for all the not-noir-but-close, cynical insider tales that were arguably Hollywood's most brilliant output in the '50s from Sunset Blvd to Sweet Smell of Success). Even with a little discounting because Schulberg doesn't have many movies outside his big two, he's such an archetype of the novelist-screenwriter that he *has* to be pretty high up.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
A *huge* omission from the list pointed out by one of the commenters at vulture is Budd Schulberg, author of On The Waterfront and A Face In The Crowd
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For Elia Kazan, the both of them.
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(and you could argue that his 1941 novel What makes Sammy Run? is the prototype for all the not-noir-but-close, cynical insider tales that were arguably Hollywood's most brilliant output in the '50s from Sunset Blvd to Sweet Smell of Success).
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"What Makes Sammy Run?" is one of those titles I've spent my life hearing about....but not really knowing or reading. It was made into a movie I think, but evidently not a classic one (too "on the nose for Hollywood to make?) Truthfully, its the title I use in conversation more than anything else: "He's kind of a "What Makes Sammy Run" guy."
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Even with a little discounting because Schulberg doesn't have many movies outside his big two, he's such an archetype of the novelist-screenwriter that he *has* to be pretty high up.
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I really LOVE this thread. All the worship poured on movie star actors and star directors and yet...without a good to great script, making a good to great movie is well nigh impossible. Hence, all those writers truly are the unsung heroes of moviedom -- and some of the best of them made sure to get that director's chair to tell their stories.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
The horrible downside modernly is the use by arrogant producer directors of "writer teams" to do "group writes." Arnold Schwarzenegger probably didn't realize how arrogant he sounded when(in his peak years) he said: "I use a team of writers on every script. One for plot, one for dialogue, one for jokes, one for action..." It rather removes "authorship" from the equation and , frankly, most of Arnold's movies proved what happens when you do. (Forgettable.)
That said, while Hitchcock gave guys like Hecht, Hayes, Lehman, Stefano, Allen and Shaffer sole screenwriting credits, he wasn't above bringing in re-writers and script doctors: Man 2, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, Torn Curtain, and Topaz had multiple writers.
And of course, Hitchcock himself "co-wrote" his scripts. Evidently, he wasn't ever writing dialogue, but he was a great "story editor," a key example being how he instructed Stefano to re-write the cop in Psycho to be menacing and neutral rather than young and flirtatious.
He also eliminated Jay Presson Allen's wedding/honeymoon scenes in Marnie to one shot of a champagne bottle in a bucket with a "Happy Honeymoon" card on it.
Its funny: Billy Wilder proudly took screenwriting credits when he had partners (IAL Diamond, Charles Brackett.) You'd think Hitchcock coulda/shoulda done that too. Nor did Hitchcock take the "Produced and Directed by Alfred Hitchcock" credit(which was his to take for years.) No, he felt it fine to have "Alfred Hitchcock's" and "Directed by Alfred Hitchcock" to take all the credit needed. The auteur credit.
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movieghoul (213)
7 years ago
I think Hitchcock was quite content posing as a hired hand director who found scripts written by someone else and just walking onto the set with them. It certainly deflected how personal all of his films were to him. SO no screenwriting credit, although he slaved over every line of dialogue and story board.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
I think Hitchcock was quite content posing as a hired hand director who found scripts written by someone else and just walking onto the set with them. It certainly deflected how personal all of his films were to him. SO no screenwriting credit, although he slaved over every line of dialogue and story board
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Yep.
When his films were badly reviewed -- which happened more and more in the 60s -- Hitchcock could say "well, I had a bad script." Even when he helped write it and fashion it. Someone else to blame.
Conversely, though, Hitchcock didn't seem to want the screenwriting glory when he had hits like Rear Window and Psycho.
Hitchcock's key need in screenwriting, it seems to me, was good dialogue. He bought books and plays with good plots and used the screenwriter to get the talk right. That's why he stuck with radio writer John Michael Hayes for four films, and sought playwrights for other films(Rope, Dial M, Frenzy.)
Ernest Lehman's pungent NYC dialogue(shared with Clifford Odets) in Sweet Smell of Success was a great lead-in to the NXNW stuff(though James Mason got his own kind of elegant speechifying), and Joseph Stefano -- a songwriter by first trade -- came out of nowhere with the great dialogue in Psycho("If it doesn't jell , it isn't aspic.." "It would be cold and damp, like the grave.")
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swanstep (2616)
7 years ago
"What Makes Sammy Run?" is one of those titles I've spent my life hearing about....but not really knowing or reading. It was made into a movie I think, but evidently not a classic one (too "on the nose for Hollywood to make?) Truthfully, its the title I use in conversation more than anything else: "He's kind of a "What Makes Sammy Run" guy."
That's my situation too. My understanding is that the novel was made into a very long-running Broadway-hit in the '40s, and that it's from *that* as much as the novel that it massively influenced a whole school of writing and film-writing for the next twenty years.
There's another great example of this type of massive influence on movies from outside: Hecht and some other guy wrote 'The Front Page' in 1928 for Broadway and had a blowout hit with it. Its fast-paced dialogue was *the* prototype when the transition to sound was made in Hollywood. When you read histories of the period, *everyone* admits that they just wanted their movies to sound like Broadway's The Front Page. B-TFP was turned into a movie of the same name (directed by Wellman IIRC), but it wasn't as good as or influential as It Happened One Night and Twentieth Century and Sylvia Scarlett all of which were aping and building on aspects of B-TFP. The Golden Age in turn reaches one of its peaks when Lederer and Hecht rewrite B-TFP as a comedy of remarriage for Hawks as His Girl Friday. Wonderful!
Anyhow, B-TFP and B-What Makes Sammy Run? (and a few more like B-Streetcar & B-West Side) are like the dark matter organizing the starry matter of Hollywood from the '30s through to the '50s.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Truthfully, its the title I use in conversation more than anything else: "He's kind of a "What Makes Sammy Run" guy."
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That's my situation too. My understanding is that the novel was made into a very long-running Broadway-hit in the '40s, and that it's from *that* as much as the novel that it massively influenced a whole school of writing and film-writing for the next twenty years.
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Well, there ya go. I couldn't find a movie of What Makes Sammy Run listed anywhere so its influences must emit from book and stage versions only.
Its like "Catcher in the Rye," I suppose. Everyone of a certain generation knows that book(and its mysterious author)...but it couldn't be made as a movie in the Hays code period and no one has wanted to take the risk years after that. (Of matching the greatness of the book.)
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
There's another great example of this type of massive influence on movies from outside: Hecht and some other guy wrote 'The Front Page' in 1928 for Broadway and had a blowout hit with it. Its fast-paced dialogue was *the* prototype when the transition to sound was made in Hollywood.
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Its rather the seminal "fast paced over-lapping dialogue" play, isn't it? Predates Howard Hawks using the style, even though Hawks used it great with the gender-changed His Girl Friday.
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When you read histories of the period, *everyone* admits that they just wanted their movies to sound like Broadway's The Front Page. B-TFP was turned into a movie of the same name (directed by Wellman IIRC), but it wasn't as good as or influential as It Happened One Night and Twentieth Century and Sylvia Scarlett all of which were aping and building on aspects of B-TFP. The Golden Age in turn reaches one of its peaks when Lederer and Hecht rewrite B-TFP as a comedy of remarriage for Hawks as His Girl Friday. Wonderful!
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That's a fun one. Peak Cary in his forties flippant tone; possibly Rosalind Russell's best romantic role(Auntie Mame is her famous role.)
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Anyhow, B-TFP and B-What Makes Sammy Run? (and a few more like B-Streetcar & B-West Side) are like the dark matter organizing the starry matter of Hollywood from the '30s through to the '50s.
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Interesting.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
More on The Front Page
It was made and re-made and gender-switched a few times:
The original film: Adoplhe Menjou as the boss, who as the ace reporter?
His Girl Friday: Cary Grant as the boss, Roz Russell as his ace reporter -- ex-wife! (Who returns to the fold after maybe going off with...Ralph Bellamy?)
The Front Page 1969: This is the first one I ever saw. It was odd -- done for TV but in syndication, not on network. Back to men. Robert Ryan as the boss, George Grizzard(a Barry Foster lookalike -- THERE's an obscure reference for ya) as the ace reporter.
The Front Page 1974: Men again. Universal put this out at Xmas 1974, almost exactly a year after Newman and Redford had scored a blockbuster with The Sting. This Front Page was meant to cash in on that -- with Matthau as the boss, Lemmon as the ace reporter, a newbie Susan Sarandon as Lemmon's fiancé -- and Carol Burnett as a hooker who loves the convict at the core of the tale.
The other big name on the movie was its director-screenplay adaptor, Billy Wilder.
And boy, did this hurt Wilder's career. Billy couldn't leave classic enough alone and so wrote a bunch of new mildly dirty jokes to "try to keep up with the times." He portrayed two gay male reporters in mocking, insulting terms. As would happen again disastrously with Buddy Buddy(ANOTHER Lemmon-Matthau picture), the great Wilder was revealed to be way too old-hat as a contemporary screenwriter. Hitchcock in his older age at least used other people to write his films.
When Carol Burnett was on a commercial jet and learned that The Front Page would be the in-flight movie, she took to the intercom to apologize for the movie to all her fellow passengers!
The Front Page 1974 was no Sting; the careers of Lemmon(no longer a romantic leading man and still too neurotic), Burnett and especially Billy Wilder were damaged. The Great Matthau walked away unharmed and kept going as a star for a few years.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Switching Channels 1988: One more gender switch. Burt Reynolds as the boss; Kathleen Turner as the ace reporter ex-wife; Christopher Reeve in the thankless Bellamy part.
Cary Grant himself had praised Burt Reynolds as working well in Grant's comic style, and Reynolds is good here. The story is contemporary to 1988 and moved from the newspaper world to broadcast news.
The problem with the whole thing is that Reynolds had had career problems in the early eighties and spent the second half of the eighties in cheapish-looking mid-budget movies(like this one), in a bad wig looking like an aging stud trying to make a comeback. Soon he would be back on TV (Evening Shade.) Kathleen Turner was still a hot star -- IF paired with Michael Douglas, but rather "losing it." And gaining weight(a no-no for a "sexy actress.) And even poor Christopher Reeve -- years before his terrible accident -- seemed to have lost HIS star career. So "Switching Channels" had three good actors looking "past it" in a rather stale attempt to recapture their pasts...and the past of His Girl Friday.
Winner: His Girl Friday
Loser: The Front Page 1974
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
BTW: hint, hint...I did a search at another site, and I have posts going back ten years listed here (probably more elsewhere), and my "dialogues" with ECarle go back that far. Whether every single exchange is still there I can't say. My ego wasn't THAT much in overdrive when I did that but it was nice to see some old stuff.
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Hey there, telegonus, you mean HERE, here? (Moviechat). Or somewhere else?
I haven't gone looking much at this location or others, but I was intrigued to find that old Hombre thread in which it seemed like EVERYBODY's posts were allowed to go on forever. For likely better and maybe a little bit worse, that isn't allowed here at moviechat(unless on the blog page?) but it might be fun to go back and see what we said. Ten years, huh? Wow.
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