The Word Cloud

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. Bu, 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.