Classic American Films: Conversations with Screenwriters. By William Baer. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. Pp 265. $49.95.

At a telling moment in Sunset Boulevard (1950), embittered Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, complains that “audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.” That sentiment pretty much sums up the view of screenwriting that even Hollywood itself has done much to popularize: a task performed by low men (and sometimes women) on the totem pole, “schmucks with Underwoods,” to quote Warner Brothers studio head Jack Warner. With the development of the auteur theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the status of screenwriters suffered another blow: according to critics like François Truffaut in France and Andrew Sarris in America, the directors were the true authors of Hollywood films. Writers were merely one cog in the studio system machine; only the directors were able to impose their personalities on the finished product. This, of course, was a simplification of the filmmaking process, but it gave rise to a mini-industry of scholarly and popular books and essays on Hollywood directors, past and present, with little attention paid to the men and women who wrote the screenplays. A further problem, perhaps, is that “screenplay” is too often equated with “dialogue.” There undoubtedly are some great—or, at least, near great—films that are remembered for their dialogue—Casablanca, for example, which could be described as one memorable verbal riff after another. But a screenplay is always more than dialogue, which is one reason that silent films needed writers, too. A good script provides structure and shape and rhythm to a film, even a film that may include no spoken words at all.

William Baer’s Classic American Films at times reinforces and at times contradicts the myth of the disrespected screenwriter that has become more or less standard in Hollywood lore. The myth is supported in part in the volume’s introduction, where Baer provides the Warner quote cited above and describes the screenwriter as “a figure often ignored or maligned in Hollywood.” Either by accident or design, however, the majority of Baer’s interviewees recount the positive experience of screenwriting even as they contribute to the overall myth. Horton Foote, for example, tells Baer (with reference to Tender Mercies): “Unlike the typical Hollywood picture, the script was never altered without my consultation and approval.” These writers, almost to a man and woman, are evidently the lucky ones—they had the understanding and caring directors, the generous writer-collaborators, the ego-free actors, the hands-off producers. If, like Ernest Lehman (interviewed twice, once for North by Northwest and once for Sound of Music), they express some anger or resentment over the status of Hollywood writers, their own experiences appear to differ almost entirely from the norm. Lehman has nothing but kind words for Alfred Hitchcock (North by Northwest) and Robert Wise (Sound of Music). All of this makes one suspect that those horror stories of mistreatment and contempt may have become exaggerated through frequent retelling. Even Budd Schulberg, the author of one of the most acerbic depictions of Hollywood’s mistreatment of writers—his 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run?—has only positive memories of On the Waterfront’s director and producer, Elia Kazan and Sam Spiegel.

Baer’s title is somewhat misleading, as only some of the films discussed would generally be thought of as classics, however we wish to define that term. Each interview is devoted to a single film, from Singin’ in the Rain (1952), which is undoubtedly a classic, to Tender Mercies (1983), which is probably not. Other recognized classics in this collection would be On the Waterfront (1954), Rebel without a Cause (1955), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Wild Bunch (1969). If we apply Baer’s criteria of films that are “significant, influential, and popular,” one might want to add Jaws (1975). The remainder of the films includes three very good movies, Hud (1963), American Graffiti (1973), and Tender Mercies, and four very popular but undistinguished ones, The Sound of Music (1965), The Sting (1973), The Exorcist (1973), and Rocky (1976). The thirty-plus years spanned by the films in this collection represent the transition from the classical Hollywood of the studio system to a post-classical era of blockbusters and independent productions. At the beginning of the period we have Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who charmingly remember being called into producer-songwriter Arthur Freed’s office and being told, “well, kids, your next movie is going to be called Singin’ in the Rain, and it’s going to have all my songs in it,” while near the end we have Sylvester Stallone’s account of his struggle to get himself cast as the lead in his own script for Rocky. Baer’s interviews, while providing a multifaceted examination of the screenwriting process, give us as well an account of the changing nature of the American cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s.

It would be tempting to report that the most interesting interviews are with the writers of the most interesting films, but that is not entirely the case. One of the liveliest encounters is with Carl Gottlieb, the screenwriter on Jaws, who appears to have virtually no ego investment in his work: he gives credit to other writers, to actors, to Steven Spielberg, to nearly everyone involved in the filming or preparation of Jaws. He also provides an entertaining insider’s account of how a popular film is put together, which he was well-placed to do given that he worked on the script while the film was already in production, even living in the same house as the director. Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., the writers of Hud, are also attractive interviewees who are quite generous with their collaborators. It helps that they worked with a director, Martin Ritt, who did not have a strong directorial personality and who was perfectly happy to bring their script to life without imposing himself on it. And Sylvester Stallone, perhaps surprisingly, reveals himself to be a canny, insightful observer of the Hollywood game whose challenges in bringing Rocky to the screen very much reflect the film’s own narrative trajectory. On the other hand, the chapters on American Graffiti, The Sting, and The Exorcist are of considerably less interest, either because the films are not in themselves particularly notable—The Sting is one of least worthy winners of the Best Picture Oscar—or because the screenwriters are not sufficiently forthcoming or self-aware.

Of the chapters on classic films, those on Singin’ in the Rain (Betty Comden and Adolph Green), On the Waterfront (Budd Schulberg), Rebel without a Cause (Stewart Stern), and, to a lesser extent, North by Northwest (Ernest Lehman), are the most useful. Comden and Green paint an admittedly rosy picture of their experience at MGM, but they were in a uniquely privileged position of belonging to a semi-independent production unit within the larger studio structure. Stewart Stern, on the other hand, cannot hide his bitterness toward Nicholas Ray, who not only changed things in the script of Rebel without a Cause without consultation but also took credit for the writing: “He couldn’t be satisfied with being the director of a successful picture; he had to pretend that he wrote it as well.” The interview with Budd Schulberg, apart from what it reveals concerning the genesis and production of On the Waterfront (much of which, it should be noted, Schulberg has commented on more than once elsewhere), shows off Baer’s skills as an interviewer: he does his homework (at times remembering things about the films that the interviewees have forgotten), he asks probing questions, and he praises the writers without falling into sycophancy. With Schulberg, he holds off what he calls “the inevitable HUAC question” until near the end, and he gently presses Schulberg on his contention that neither he nor director Elia Kazan ever thought of On the Waterfront as a self-justification for having given names to the Un-American Activities Committee.

The interviews with Ernest Lehman, though each contains interesting material, reveal as well an egotist who, in spite of his success, very much resents any suggestion that the writer may not be the most important player in the filmmaking hierarchy. Although he is willing to acknowledge that his screenplay for North by Northwest was “enhanced by the way Hitchcock did it,” he is more than a bit disingenuous when he claims that he “had no other films in mind” when he worked on the script, even though he admits to having seen Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, unquestionably a source for the later film—“I was a kid when that picture came out and I’d mostly forgotten it” (actually, he was nearly twenty years old). But if Lehman had no other films in mind, Hitchcock certainly did, which would lead one to suppose that Hitchcock had a larger role in the script’s development than Lehman is willing to admit.

Working with Hitchcock is central as well to Baer’s interview with Josef Stefano, the screenwriter on Psycho. Stefano’s account, however, suggests (in a casual and unassuming way) that he was responsible for virtually every significant detail in the film. He is seemingly unable or unwilling to differentiate the script from the finished product, and he only alludes in passing to Hitchcock’s well-known habit of shaping the screenplay along with whatever writer he has hired for the purpose. On the other hand, Stefano talks with authority on the challenge of turning Robert Bloch’s novel into a film. Bloch’s Psycho, which begins with a conversation between Norman and “mother,” depends for its effect, at least in part, on the reader’s inability to see that when he is talking to his mother, Norman is really talking to a corpse. The filmmakers had to find ways to disguise this sleight of hand without making the manipulation of the audience’s point of view too obvious. As Stefano notes, this problem led to major structural changes, including the crucial decision of placing Marion, not Norman, at the center of the narrative for the first part of the film. We cannot now know whose decision it was to make these changes, of course, and, to be fair to Stefano, separating out the contribution of the screenwriter from that of a director like Hitchcock is a tricky matter. Hitchcock, perhaps unsurprisingly, never even mentions Stefano’s name in his interview with François Truffaut.

In novels and screenplays about Hollywood, writers often become the objects of pity as well as contempt, and they generally come to a bad end. Sunset Boulevard’s Joe Gillis, for example, ends up in a swimming pool, convincingly performing the dead man’s float. Classic American Films presents a very different view, reminding us both of the craft and the art that goes into the making of a good screenplay and at the same time introducing us to a gallery of writers proud of their work and comfortable with their experiences. A number of these writers are modestly aware that they are part of a larger process over which they only have limited control, though few of them would go as far as Walon Green, the screenwriter on The Wild Bunch, who notes that “a person shouldn’t become a screenwriter unless he’s willing to accept the fact that film is the director’s medium—it’s not a writer’s medium.” Whether one agrees with Green or not, it is nonetheless true that what makes a successful film is not something that can be determined in advance, and the ingredients are not interchangeable. Is it really likely, as Budd Schulberg claims, that “either [Frank] Sinatra or [John] Garfield could have played the role of Terry Malloy” in On the Waterfront? And is it possible to separate Cary Grant from Ernest Lehman’s line, “how does a girl like you get to be a girl like you” in North by Northwest? In the end, one can give full credit to the writer and still insist that to single out the contributions of any one individual, whether writer, director, or actor, simplifies a complex and always unpredictable process. But perhaps a screenwriter should have the last word. When Baer asks him what he now thinks of The Wild Bunch “after all these years,” Walon Green replies: “I think it’s a terrific film. It was one of those rare times when the chemistry of the script, the directing, the performances, and everything else magically coalesced and created something totally unique. It certainly doesn’t happen very often in this business.”