“I’m working in the outhouse again.” That’s how Ben Hecht, the fabled screenwriter, used to describe toiling in Hollywood. “And the nitwits are still in charge,” he assured his friends. Hecht wrote…
that he bought out its first printing so no one could steal the idea, then promptly fired Bloch before he could even finish his first draft.
The great Italian filmmaker, Michelangelo Antonioni, once explained to me that he would systematically fire his screenwriter after committing to a movie. “An auteur must discard the pages and focus on the aesthetic, not the words,” he said. David Hemmings, the star of his filmChinatown , Jack Nicholson reminded Bob Towne that his dialogue was unimportant to the movie. “Skip the words, I can do it with a ‘look’,” Steve McQueen, the greatDirectors have famously wanted to fire their writers even when they themselves wrote the script. In his new book,. He felt the same way even after he saw the finished product.
Out of curiosity, I once took a couple of weeks off to read several of the screenplays written by these “greats.” Alas, I found them pretty awful. But the “notes” exchanged between the star writers and their studio benefactors contained memorable invective. Hecht, who once did a rewrite on, told producer David O. Selznick, “You bought a hack-for-hire so you got hack work.”
While the script battles have often been operatic, lasting friendships also developed. Billy Friedkin didn’t know William Peter Blatty when he committed to shoot, but they bonded as they worked their way through the complex script, with one important exception. Blatty felt the movie’s ending was too abrupt, lacking a positive note. The disagreement continued for decades. Almost 30 years later, when the hit was ready for re-release, Friedkin decided his lifelong friend had a point after all.
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