An article FROM THE ARCHIVE in this year's summer edition of Sight and Sound Magazine is headed by the title above. The director Elia Kazan's contribution in the summer of 1957 was all about the writers. This was after a dozen or so years directing films such as A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront and East of Eden. He talks about his first producer Louis Lighton "working on the script". (Is that what producers actually do?). He remembers his first day at Twentieth Century Fox and lunch at the commissary, (my old company built a commissary store at the US airforce base at Lakenheath) and describes the setting out of the tables. All those for the producers reserved along the best wall and then the stars in the middle. But that remote table was for .... the writers. They "seemed to be embarrassed to be there". "As I say, I'd come from Broadway where the writer was God and his lines were sacrosanct by contract".
Kazan talks about the studios having bought the book rights and turned it over to the "construction man" to put the plot into shape, then over to the "dialogue man", then the "polish man" and maybe an "additional dialogue man" before the producer and even others who work on the final version of the script. "All pretty confusing" and it did "thrust power and pre-eminence on the directors".
But things have changed. He goes on the mention the recent Academy Awards (1957 remember) where three films were recognised where the writers "carried through from start to finish". "So now the writers, who used to sit in that caustic clump in the farthest corners of the studio commissary, are being brought forward. A number have been moved forward to non-writing jobs. Above all, writers are being invited ...... to write original and serious pictures. The last is the big step, and the big hope".
No comments:
Post a Comment