The Word Cloud

Apologies for the late appearance of this blog but I've been having major computer problems which have kept me off the internet.

So, just a brief blog this week, and not concerning a film that's on in the upcoming seven days but a tribute to Jimmy Sangster, one of Hammer Horror's defining writers, who died earlier this month.
X-The Unknown (1956) was Sangster's first feature script and it was one of the first 'genre' films that Hammer (which had been around since 1935) produced. But it was 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein that really reinvented the studio and created the brand of Hammer Horror, and once again it was Jimmy Sangster who provided the screenplay, a clever new take on the Frankenstein story that covers little of the same ground as Universal's 1931 version. That same year Hammer tackled Dracula, again with a Sangster script, two years after that it was The Mummy. And if you want an indication of how hard (and fast) Sangster worked, then in the intervening year he wrote another 5 films. I doubt they were all masterpieces, but Hammer films are seldom less than entertaining.
In the seventies Sangster tried his hand at direction but with little success; Lust For a Vampire (which Sangster did not write) is a teenage schoolboy favourite but has little of the quality of Hammer's best.
Of course Sangster did work for other studios and, later in his career did a great deal of TV work (including episodes of Wonder Woman, Ironside and Kolchak: the Night Stalker),  but nothing leaps off of his CV as much as those horror classics and I am sure those are what he will be remembered for. And why not? They cost nothing, but they reinvigorated the British film industry, poured new life into some tired stories and inspired a generation of low-budget film-makers. Above all, they are great entertainment, and that is due in no small part to Jimmy Sangster.

I got around to watching Johnny Guitar and to be honest I wasn't that impressed. I can see why it caused interest, its malice fuelled plotline was unusual at the time and the edge of surreality it boasts also marked it out as a bit different. But I don't think any of that, at least when viewed today, elevates it above its endless dialogue scenes and stilted performances. This week's pick is Heaven Knows Mr. Allison (1957) directed by John Huston and on... sometime this week I think on More4 (I'm away from home at the moment and don't have a Radio Times to hand, but trust me it is on). It's another film I haven't seen and one I would like to and it gives me a chance to look at a very different type of screenwriter to those I usually write about. I don't know how many times I've mentionned the Blacklist in writing these blogs and always from the point of view of the left-wing writers whose careers it ended, but there were right-wing screenwriters too. John Lee Mahin was a staunch conservative who was convinced that the original screenwriters guild had been infiltrated by communists. To his credit (and I'm once again relying on a Patrick McGilligan interview) Mahin had no time for McCarthy and had the good sense to acknowledge that many of the films accused of having communist subtext simply did not, but, like so many others, he did nothing to help those who were accused and suffered the consequences; in Mahin's view they had made their own bed. As you might expect, Mahin was mainly a writer of 'men's films', adventure pictures often in exotic locales. A favourite of Victor Fleming he also worked repeatedly with W. S. Van Dyke and Jack Conway, as well as occasional jobs for Howard Hawks and John Ford. He was prolific and was responsible for such classics as Scarface, Red Dust, Captains Courageous and John Wayne's North to Alaska. But he also had range as a writer, making uncredited contributions to A Star is Born, Gone with The Wind, and The Wizard of Oz, as well as having a flair for comedy (he co-wrote The Devil is a Sissy; best film title ever!). The other way in which Mahin was different to many of the writers I've looked at is that he was generally happy in what happened to his work after it left his typewriter, possibly because he ws friendly with so many of his directors. He was that rarest of beasts; a contented screenwriter. I'd also like to mention briefly how Mahin startd in pictures (according to him at least), he was a journalist and through that he met Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (ex-journalists beginning to make good as writers), they asked him to ghost write Unholy Garden (1931) for them while they worked on a play and guaranteed him more screenwriting work at the end of it. I wish it was still that easy to get into the industry!

From Russia With Love was in fact on today (Saturday  at 3.45pm on ITV) so if you wanted to see it sorry, but since Dr. No was on last week I think there's a good chance that another Bond film will be on next Saturday, presumably Goldfinger, and the screenwriter is the same for all three, and he's a man I've wanted to talk about for a while.
Richard Maibaum has one of the most improbable careers in screenwriting, a profession which throws up more than a few unusual career paths. He began in the early 30's as a playwright, specialising in socially conscious and sometimes experimental works. When one of his plays (The Gold Diggers of 1937) was bought by Warner brothers he moved into screenwriting and worked on such well known films as Pride of the Yankees, The Great Gatsby and Foreign Correspondant (a film on which every writer in Hollywood seems to have worked). He was also a pioneer in what we could call 'quality television', unlike many screenwriters of the time he was prepared to embrace the new medium.
Though he remained in work comfortably I think it would be fair to call Maibaum's Hollywood career solid, but not spectacular, and his CV also features some pretty forgettable, and even poor, films (whose doesn't?). Then, through a longtime association with Alan Ladd, Maibaum met near-legendary British producer Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli who gave him the opportunity to work on such films as The Red Beret and Cockleshell Heroes, stories that gave Maibaum the chance to indulge his boyhood passion for adventure stories. He was so successful with these that Broccoli invited him to work on the James Bond series, the rights for which he had just purchased. After a false start (the first script Maibaum wrote was actually for Thunderball, eventually made in 1965) Maibaum co-wrote Dr. No (1963) with Johanna Harwood and Berkely Mather, and a cinematic phenomenon was born. At this point Maibaum was 54, he continued with the Bond series, writing or co-writing almost every film for Connery, Lazenby, Moore and Dalton, penning his last entry, Licence to Kill, in 1989 at the age of 80. It would be his final cinema credit.
Or at least it was his final credit while he was alive, a teleplay he wrote  called Fearful Decision had already been made into a film 1956, in 1996 it was remade by Ron Howard as Ransom, starring Mel Gibson.
I think  what fascinates me most about Maibaum is not so much his longevity as a writer but the way he managed to stay relevant through that impressive longevity. It may seem odd that a man who started with such serious plays should finish his career with the tongue in cheek action of James Bond, but Maibaum claimed that the secret to writing Bond films was taking them seriously. You had to be aware it was nonsense, but if you did not take it seriously then the audience would not invest in that nonsense. It was a technique he learnt from his frequent writing partner Cyril Hume who, as well as being a respected novelist, wrote the Tarzan films. If there's a lesson to be learnt here, and I suspect there is, it's that the techniques that worked in the 30's worked equally well in the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's, and still hold true today.

Another film I haven't seen this week and one I plan to catch (which probably means I'll forget it's on). Johnny Guitar (1954) is on More 4 at 10am on Wednesday and was written by... well let's see...
A few weeks ago I wrote about the question of who wrote Casablanca, where there is considerable confusion over authorship because of the old studio practice of assigning multiple writers to a project without letting the writers know they are not alone, and then getting multiple re-writes. The other reason for their being confusion over who wrote classic films is somewhat darker; the blacklist. Any discussion of 50's screenwriting runs into the blacklist, I've mentionned it a few times in these blogs and I just assume people know what I'm talking about but, just in case, the blacklist was a list of Hollywood screenwriters who were denounced as having communist sympathies during the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)hearings; if you were on the list studios would not employ you and you risked jailtime. The hearings resulted in the jail for the so called 'Hollywood Ten' and cut short the careers of many others, mostly writers, mostly Jewish. The only way to get leniency was to 'name names', to give the committee names of people with communist ties; little more proof was ever required. 
But writers write, and studios were loath to lose good writers, so the practice of blacklisted writers 'borrowing' the name of another writer emerged. Philip Yordan, the screenwriter of Johnny Guitar, leant his name to at least 5 black-listed writers (which sounds altruistic but Yordan did make a good living out of it). Yordan in fact head a headstart, he was using other writers and putting his name to the script before the blacklist and continued after, he basically employed a staff like a rennaisance painter with his apprentices. This was no secret, nor was it unique to Yordan (the impossibly prolific Ben Hecht is believed to have had a similar system), but it does lead to some difficulty when it comes to his filmography, especially when memories differ. In Patrick McGilligan's backstory interview (to which I am massively indebted) he lists a separate filmography for Yordan's 'disputed' films.
And among these is Johnny Guitar. Ben Maddow certainly wrote films using Yordan's name and Yordan has never denied this, but both men claim to have written Johnny Guitar. To be honest, based on the interviews, Yordan's claim is a lot stronger, he gives a full account of writing the screenplay based on an existing treatment by the author of the original novel ,Roy Chanslor, while Maddow on watching the film did not even recognise it (though remained sure he had written it!). On the other hand, Yordan arguably has more to gain; because of his use of 'surrogates' he was not the most respcted writer amongst his peers. His best known and most respected credits are almost all disputed, the stand out being The Man from Laramie. Man from Laramie is a brilliant film but Johnny Guitar is a unique one, a cult classic. Yordan's reputation largely rests on this one film.
In his McGilligan interview Yordan called Maddow an outright liar. Maddow went further and claimed that not only did Yordan not write Johnny Guitar but that he never wrote anything, that he was 'incapable of writing' and always used other people. That seems unlikely, and makes Maddow sound bitter, but he probably was, Yordan had a very long and successful career while Maddow lost a decade of his. But there is a final twist; in his interviews McGilligan found Maddow accused by other writers of 'naming names' to HUAC, McGilligan re-interviewed Maddow and (althought the exact situation is more complex than I have space for) in essence Maddow admitted that he did co-operate with HUAC.
In many ways this has not been a blog about writing,  as with Casablanca I am in no way able to say who wrote Johnny Guitar, but the confusion would not have existed were it not for the saddest period in Hollywood history.

Well, I missed Letter from an Unknown Woman so I remain none the wiser on that film.
This week I was spoilt for choice, there's a few films written by people I could talk about on this week, but I've gone for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is on at 1.05pm Monday on Channel 4, a classic 1953 film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell and directed by the great Howard Hawks. Its writer Charles Lederer would be an excellent man to blog about, a screenwriter in the classic mould with plenty of interesting credits, but I'm cheating again and using this as an excuse to talk about a screenwriter best known for her work in an earlier era; Anita Loos.
Loos wrote the stage musical (along with Joseph Fields)  and the original book on which the film was based, and the tremendous (not to mention unexpected) success of a book based on a series of magazine sketches is what she is best remembered for. She had nothing to do with the Hawks film but thought Monroe to be inspired casting.
She did however write the 1928 silent version of the story. Loos was one of Hollywood's most successful early screenwriters, she claimed to have sold her first film scenario at the age of 12, although since that was New York Hat which was made in 1912 and Loos was born in 1888  we can safely assume she was being a little vague about her age. But however old she was that short film was directed by D. W. Griffith and starred Mary Pickford, not a bad start.
In the early 1910s Hollywood did not really work from scripts, producers were still loath to make 'long' films and were welded to one and two reelers (a reel is 10-15 minutes of film depending on how fast the camerman cranks). So writers were not really screenwriters, they were scenarists, wiritng scenarios that were only a paragraph long from which directors would shape a film. As film evolved writing evolved with it, directors began to work from full scripts and scenarists became screenwriters, adaptors and title writers. One thing I should make clear; although it's gone down as historical fact that many of the great directors worked without anything on paper at all, that's at best a massive exaggeration, it's one of those things one director said and then suddenly no one wanted to be the director who needed a script, but think about it, Griffith's Intolerance (titles by Anita Loos) was originally 8 hours long, even if he was capable of keeping every scene and shot in order in his mind, why would he bother? Why would anyone? It wouldn't be impressive it would be dumb. The smart person writes things down and I'm sure that's what Griffith, De Mille and every other director did.
Back to Anita, when the silent era ended she got a contract at MGM, starting with Jean Harlow's Red-Headed Woman which was a huge hit. Her career continued well into the talking era with such notable screenplays as The Women for Cukor but in the mid forties she left Hollywood for New York to concentrate on plays and books. Both careers proved only sporadically successful compared to her film work and her most lucrative writing in her later years was about herself and her experiences, largely because she knew not to let the truth get in the way of a good anecdote.
She died in 1981 at the age of 93 and is probably the best known writer of the silent era, as well as being a reminder that for writers (and many other jobs) gender was significantly less of a barrier in the early years of film than it would be in the talkies. And continues to be today.

This week's films is one I haven't seen but its pedigree is unimpeachable; Holiday stars Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant and was directed by George Cukor, the team who would make The Philadelphia Story two years later, so I'll definitely be sitting down this Thursday to watch (1pm BBC2).
The other member of the Philadelphia Story team who also worked on Holiday was writer Donald Ogden Stewart (co-writing with Sidney Buchman) who adapted it from the play by Phillip Barry, who also wrote the play of The Philadelphia Story; they really hit on a good formula here and Stewart would win an Oscar for his adaptation.
Stewart had one silent film adaptation to his credit before hitting his stride with the talkies as a dialogue writer specialising in comedy and adaptation. He was comfortable with the studio system, writing in the knowledge that he had taken over from someone else and that his work would likely be re-written by another writer yet. Cukor was one of his favourite directors, he worked well alongside writers and kept them involved in the process which, at the time, was almost unheard of. But even when working with less obliging directors or just doing uncredited re-write work, contributing odd lines or scenes where necessary, the bread and butter work of the contract writer, Stewart seems to have had a very good attitude about his job.
I mention this because many writers of this ear did bear a grudge to the way their contributions were treated and the hoops they had to jump through to get recognition. Not so Donald Ogden-Stewart, and he had as much reason as any to bear Hollywood a grudge. The other reason that writers of this era can seem bitter when interviewed later is that many were affected by the Communist Witchhunts, and Stewart was no exception. In 1935 he joined the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, an organisation mostly of writers which worked to alert America to the dangerous rise of facism in Germany and Italy. Stewart even wrote an anti-nazi film called Keeper of the Flame (again starring Hepburn). Unbelievably after the war anyone who was anti-nazi prior to America's entry into the war became suspect of communist tendencies. In 1950 Stewart was blacklisted. Afraid of being subpoenaed, and with no intention of naming names, he left for England where he would spend the rest of his life doing uncredited and pseudonymic work (notably on David Lean's Summertime, yet again with Hepburn).
Perhaps time dulled his righteous anger, but in the interview I read with Stewart he seems sanguine about his fate, perhaps the legacy of great films he left behind was some comfort. Whatever the case, I can't wait to see Holiday, I know nothing about it but I am expecting great things.

It's about time I did a British film on here and Genevieve (showing on film4 this Friday at 3.05pm) is a classic. One of the great British comedies made in the 50s, mostly by the Ealing studios (although Genevieve is from Rank). Perhaps not up there with Kind Hearts and Coronets or Whiskey Galore! but still worth checking out if you haven't seen it.
It was written by William Rose and here I run into some trouble; like most of the people I write about in these blogs I'd never heard of him but, unlike most of the people I write about in these blogs, research has not really paid off. He gets brief entries on IMDB and Wikipedia but they are seriously lacking in detail. If you put William Rose into Goolgle you get a London butchers. If you put William Rose Writer you get author Rose Williams.
If Rose had just written Genevieve he would deserve better than this but he many other films including The Ladykillers, possibly the finest of the Ealing comedies and one of the best film comedies of all time (hideously mistreated by the Coen Brothers' 2004 remake). Not only that but because of his transatlantic background (the fact that he was born in the US but moved to Britain after the war is one of the few facts I could unearth) he was a fluent writer for both UK and US films and in 1967 wrote Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a truly classic film and Spencer Tracy's last (and hideously mistreated by Bernie Mac's 2005 remake). He won an Oscar for the latter film and a Bafta for the former, along with a Writers Guild award for The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming! and a Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement.
And, beside the fact that he was in the Black Watch and died in 1987 I can't find out anything else about the man.
Normally at this point I would go on about how poorly recognised screenwriters are, Rose would seem a prime example. But there is so little on Rose I have to wonder if screenwriters as a group invite a certain degree of anonymity, working behind the scenes has it's advantages and not everyone wants the spotlight. Did William Rose treasure his privacy? Did he deliberately eschew fame? I've no way of knowing.
So I would like to invite anyone who knows anything about William Rose to get in touch. I'd be fascinated to know more about the mind behind The Ladykillers.

Something struck me the other day and it wasn’t the rocks that children traditionally throw at me either. I have realised, perhaps significantly later than many others, that our era is historically irrelevant. Ok, maybe not irrelevant, maybe... invisible?

Think about it. We are slowly eschewing the tactile physicality of media for the ephemeral nuance that is electronic information. As we abandoned vinyl so are we abandoning CD’s and to what replacement? Media players and downloads.

But what good is an iPod to tomorrow’s archaeologist? Sure, they have a physical object that can be poked and prodded and dissected, but to what end?

As we rapidly run out of oil, plastics with the half-life of Uranium become scarce, and new equipment will be made from bio-oil, grown on plantations around the world predominantly at the expense of the indigenous wildlife and until Orang-utans get a bank account are pretty much persona non grata. Bio-oil has the added disadvantage of attracting swarms of mice and rats to the electronics graveyards as the little critters feast upon version 6 of the iPad. So we will, as we have done in the past, leave scant physical evidence of our entertainment.

Maybe somewhere, in a moisture-free cave deep within the French countryside will be hidden a treasure trove of today’s toys-for-boys (and girls... chortle) and our descendants will, in, say, a thousand years, discover this time capsule and rejoice at the artisan that fashioned such a wondrous device.

But what is the point? Granted, the battery will probably be flat but that can be overcome by a quick boost from the portable thermo-nuclear recharger they carry as a matter of fashion. But once the machine is charged, then what? Ultimately, electronic devices are not going to maintain their state indefinitely so the state of the “toons” or “vids” will be degraded or perhaps just not even there. This is for solid state equipment, but even the old pit-and-plateaux of CD’s/DVD’s would, in that thousand years, become pit-and-more-pits as the metals oxidise or the plastic melts allowing the platinum to leach out at the speed of the ultimate tomato ketchup.

So they can power it up; maybe. Actually... this is unlikely too as time is the great leveller in many respects. Once a sufficient time has passed all the baby atoms in a material, straining like Charles Atlas on steroids (...!) calling out “look at me! Look at me!” and after a thousand years of no-one looking are likely to suddenly, one day say “ah, fuck it. What’s the point?” and relax causing a chain reaction amongst its atomic brethren who all follow suit and what was once bright shiny resistors and capacitors in day-glow colours or moody black become sad tramp-like blobs with their arses hanging out and their taupe duffel coats on back to front.

At least with vinyl you had a chance of playing it back. At least with vinyl you could see, under a microscope (ever done that?) the grooves and deep within those grooves the mountains and valleys that represented the pinnacle of musical talent such as Elvis Presley, The Beatles or... The Sex Pistols. So long, of course, as the temperature remained at a steady state; i.e. room temperature on typical English summers day (not too hot and not too cold but with the threat of rain...). Too cold and the records will become brittle and possibly not recover, and not too hot or you could pretty much drape the bloody things over your arm and create Roman gladiator wristbands (ever done that?)

And then... to be topical for this website... we have books. Books, for their delicate material have a proven track record of, in limited cases granted, survival. Of course, ignoring combustibility, both physical and metaphorical, with content igniting prejudice slightly earlier in the day than the prejudicial igniting a bonfire...

But what of eBooks? Like eMusic, eFilms and eByGum (I made that last one up so don’t go looking for it) the issue for me is, as a wannabe author, fame and fortune today are fine but will become quickly passé, so immortality through prose is my ascendancy. I can rise amongst the immortal and take my place in the pantheon next to Socrates (curiously... does anyone else call him so-crates? No? Must just be me then...), Plato, Homer (the hirsute historian not “Duff!” the tragic buffoon) and JK Rowling (I really must commend her on her choice of moniker; naming herself after an already famous and widely marketable musician was inspired; even I was fooled into picking up the wizard books in the mistaken belief it was Jamiroquai’s (or JK as he is known... for those of a classical bent) autobiography recanting his days as a scarred orphan with a cupboard fixation...)

So what chance do I stand when, one thousand years hence, the media upon which we are currently fixated will need someone to fix its current? The chances of an archaeologist of the future being able to critique my tome and declare “schmah, could do better...” are rapidly disappearing.

And if you think the Internet is eternal, think again. Check out http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. It is the first ever web page and it no longer exists in situ. A copy exists, granted, that is two years old, but even that bastion of everything web, Google, does not contain an original copy – but then, why would it? Google didn’t exist in those days. In fact Google didn’t exist in the days of my first foray onto Internet. Now there is scary! (Also Google, whilst phenomenally comprehensive, falls short of having the whole Internet at your fingertips.)

Just a thought.

I'm not making resolutions because they're always good intentions which go to hell before Spring, so these are things I will do. I will. 1) Most importantly, and the base on which all other declarations are built, I will take my career in my hands and make things happen for myself. It's too easy to write something, send it out and wait for a response, plus it just doesn't seem to be working. I will stop putting things off and making excuses and will apply for anything and everything regardless of how unlikely I am to succeed. 2) If I get no postive responses on my last screenplay from agencies or production companies by July (a year after I started) I will find a local producer and director and try to get it made myself. 3) I will write a radio sitcom. It's a challenge and it's much easier to get them made than TV ones. 4) I will start entering short story competitions regularly again. 5) I will adapt some of my existing short stories for short film. 6) I will write a one act play, people always seem to be looking for them. 7) I will get over my luddite tendencies and use the internet to promote myself better. 8) I will ignore the rule about not cold-sending material to existing sketch shows. (I will also not get my hopes up about their responses) 9) I will do stand up again. 10) I will quit my day job and find another one. I am not doing another Christmas sale! I will now print this out and stick it above my computer. Happy New Year.

Just before Christmas I went to a preview screening of The Next Three Days. Due to be released nationwide on 5th January 2011, The Next Three Days is the latest film by writer-director Paul Haggisstarring Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks.

The story follows teacher John Brennan (Crowe) who, when his wife is convicted for murder (I’m not going to tell you if she did it – that would spoil the film for you!), sets out to clear her name.  When his attempts fail, and she tries to take her own life, he decides to break her out of prison.

What then follows feels rather like a fly-on-the-wall eye view of John Brennan – an everyman with no special prison-breaking skills – plotting and preparing for the prison break also trying to keep life as ‘normal’ for his young son Luke (Ty Simpkins) as possible.

As a thriller it’s perhaps a little predictable, but as a character study of a man driven to an extreme act in order to protect the woman he loves, I think it’s an engaging drama with plenty of suspense.