Speaking Of Writing 9781644623169, 1644623161

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Speaking of Writing Richard Maibaum Compiled by and edited by Sylvia Kamion Maibaum

Copyright © 2019 Richard Maibaum All rights reserved First Edition PAGE PUBLISHING, INC. New York, NY First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019 ISBN 978-1-64462-316-9 (Paperback) ISBN 978-1-64462-317-6 (Digital) Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents General Lectures, Presentations, and Essays On Russian Drama (Invited Address, University of Iowa, 1947) The Social Role of the Motion Picture (Invited Address at the University of California at Los Angeles, 1950) How to Write a Successful Play (Invited Address, Loyola University of Los Angeles, 1951) On Freedom: Concepts for a Class (Visiting Professorship, University of Iowa, 1954) On Speaking (An Address to Professor Hitchcock’s Class, University of Iowa, 1954) On the New Drama, the New Play (Presentation at Northwest Drama Conference, Eugene, Oregon, 1962) Deus Ex Machina, 1965 Model (1965) On Writing the Bonds, 1965 A Review of the Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart (Presentation at Kehillat Israel Synagogue [Jewish community of Pacific Palisades], 1965) On the Economics of the Motion Picture Industry (Presentation before Dixon Harwin’s Class, Economics, California State University Northridge, 1972) Low Moral Tone and All That Jazz (or Gatsby Revisited, 1973) On the Dedication of the E. C. Mabie Theater (University of Iowa, 1973) Alan Ladd (1978) On the Gemini Contenders: Notes for Construction of the Script, 1978 On Confronting the Blank Page, Writing the Script (Presentation at Symposium of the University Film and Video Association, at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1985) The James Bond Syndrome and the James Bond Mystique: A Clarification, 1988 Transcripted and Taped Interviews On Writing the Bonds Appendices Pictures and Photographs

Foreword In a career that spanned sixty years as a playwright, screenwriter, and producer, Richard Maibaum never wrote a textbook. He easily might have. He wrote many plays while a student in speech and dramatic arts at the University of Iowa in the late 1920s. One of them, The Tree, was produced on Broadway while he was still a student. Two of his plays subsequently became Hollywood films while eleven of his plays were produced or published. Four of them were produced on Broadway in the 1930s and in one multiple production by the Works Progress Administration or the WPA Federal Theatre Project. In 1935, he went to Hollywood and commenced a career as a screenwriter/producer, and writer of television properties—a career that he was still actively pursuing at the time of his passing at the beginning of 1991. Along the way, he interacted with many students and colleagues who often sought his artistic opinion. He was always pleased to see younger talent enter the field and succeed and see contemporaries do well. Absorbed with his writing for stage and screen, he did not have time to write his ideas about creative writing. However, he was often invited to speak about his work and the writing process at universities and various organizations. He was born in the Bronx, New York City, on May 26, 1909. After attending New York City public schools, notably Evander Childs High School (where he met his future wife Sylvia Kamion), he attended New York University, University Heights campus on a scholarship. After a year and a half there, he left and resumed his studies in the Midwest at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, a school well-known as a demanding, challenging, spirited, innovative school in the areas of his interest. He majored in speech and dramatic art and minored in English, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. The Tree, which he wrote at college, won the interest of a Broadway producer and was produced on Broadway while he was still an undergraduate. He continued on at Iowa receiving the master of arts degree in 1932, during which he continued writing plays while pursuing his other mandated classwork. The Tree was the first anti-lynching play to appear on Broadway. Another play, Singing Acres, dealt with the terrible problems faced by Midwest farmers during the Depression. Meeting a group of German Jewish refugees in London in 1933, he was inspired to write, Birthrights A Play of the Nazi Regime. It was the first anti-Nazi play produced on Broadway. The use of the pen to shake peoples’ consciences and inspire others to a new understanding of problems and issues of the time was a motivating interest of his. All during his schooling, he also developed his talent as an actor. He played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at age sixteen, the title role of The Hairy Ape, and many other parts at the university and had experience in summer little theaters in New England. After completing his studies at the University, he spent a year with a Broadway Shakespearean repertory company directed by B. Aiden Payne. He played seventeen different roles. And at twenty-two, he was the youngest Iago ever to appear on Broadway! Some of his plays were in a lighter, humorous vein. Later in the thirties, he poked fun at the dealings of attorneys during the Depression (See My Lawyer), and the insurance business (Sweet Mystery of Life). Many years later, he was to reflect, “Time has changed, but it seems that the behavior of people today is not that much different in these areas than when I first wrote about them.” After the Broadway production of Sweet Mystery of Life, he was brought to Hollywood by Metro-GoldwynMayer or MGM and pursued what was to become a rarely paralleled career of fifty-five years writing and producing films. Ultimately, he was credited with writing, producing, and both writing and producing or cowriting sixty films. He worked in Hollywood until World War II when he was immediately commissioned a captain. He spent four and a half years in the Army attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. In his work with the United States Army, signal corp combat films division, Richard Maibaum assembled and organized information films for the public, films for military personnel, and histories of the war. One series of seven-hour-long films dealing with the war produced by his division was entitled, Why We Fight and featured respectively segments that dealt with “the prelude to war,” the initial Nazi successes, the progression of Axis alliances and Allied initial efforts, the Battle of Britain, the battles in Russia, the war in China, and American’s entry into the War. Other efforts resulted in a “know your enemy” series. Some of the material collected by the division during the War was used to produce series seen many years after the end of the War, by the public, chiefly on televisions like the Victory at Sea series and Battle Line. He made some documentaries in the service, such as Appointment in Tokyo and The Liberation of Rome,¹ and a documentary called Twenty-Seven Soldiers, and one of the branches under him produced a five-hundred-reel comprehensive history in film of the War.² His work explored many different themes and backgrounds. They Gave Him a Gun in the 1930s was an antiwar film. The changing world situation later brought forth I Wanted Wings, a story about training for war! It was about the need for building air power in the months before America’s entry into the war. He was credited with the first major Westerns, large-production efforts in Hollywood. Prior to those, Western films had been small production, low-cost endeavors. Two of his major Westerns in the 1930s were Bad Man of Brimstone and Twenty Mule Team both of them starring Wallace Beery. Some of his films had historical backgrounds, such as Ten Gentlemen from West Point and The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. He was meticulous and thorough in his research for all his projects. Working in the new medium of television in the 1950s, he cowrote Fearful Decision, the teleplay version of his and Cyril Hume’s play, Ransom!, other teleplays, program episodes, and vignettes, some of the latter adapted from earlier short stage plays of his. Then came the Bond films commencing with Dr. No in 1962. He has credits

of thirteen Bond films! His role in these pictures needs no elaboration here. He is credited with thirteen of these films. He was indeed an innovator as reflected in his work. Birthright was the first anti-Nazi play produced on Broadway. The film Bigger Than Life, with James Mason, was the first film dealing with medication abuse, and one of the first dealing with substance abuse. He wrote a play, less well remembered today, in the 1930s that was possibly the first play or other property to talk about what the United States would be like if run by a fascist, authoritarian government with a racist policy (Wanted and A Deluge). It came well before contemporary literary and television and film properties like Amerika, Fatherland, and the Philadelphia Experiment II. He wrote and produced one of the first films about the world of espionage, a predecessor of the spy film, O. S. S. (1946), starring Alan Ladd. And very early in his career, he wrote They Gave Him a Gun, a film about a demobilized World War I veteran who through perceived necessity gravitates into the world of organized crime. All along the way, he was always helpful to young writers and colleagues. Not primarily interested in being a teacher, he was invited to teach at the University of Iowa, however, for a year in the early 1950s. Again, a screenwriting assignment took him back to Hollywood. He interacted with and came to know scores of others interested in stage and film around the country who went on to pursue active careers in either medium. Enormously erudite, precise, and concise in how he described things and in how he wrote, he did extensive scholarly research on every project. Had he chosen alternatively to pursue an academic career he doubtlessly would have been the mentor and guide to students of film or theater. He did leave us, however, comments on his field of work. Over the years, he wrote articles for magazines, and gave lectures and speeches of a more academic orientation intended for the more selective university or university communities. And he was interviewed on various occasions. The copies and transcriptions of these have been collected and are presented here. The editors and compilers of this volume have collected his work here and faithfully reproduced it as it was, without adding or detracting anything. The only emendations to each piece of writing have been, in some cases, footnotes felt to be helpful to the reader about less well-known subjects and persons. These lectures, presentations, and interviews hopefully will convey to the reader and to students of theater arts and film pertinent, reflective and collective observations that he made about his work. They relate the distilled essence of what he found to be important in different areas of his work. Their major points should be useful to colleagues and students in the fields in which Richard Maibaum worked and to which he devoted his time and energies. And his Hollywood anecdotes will doubtlessly interest Hollywood moviegoers. His papers, research, plays, and filmscripts are preserved in the Special Collections Library of the University of Iowa. Copies of the filmscripts may also be found at the Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills. Copies of some of his television properties may be found in the Library of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (or ATAS) in Burbank, and copies of award-winning scripts may be found in the Library of the Writers Guild of America in Los Angeles. The interested student of the world of Hollywood and Broadway is encouraged to read Richard Maibaum’s screenplays and plays with an effort to analyze those components held to be so important in drama school and film school. But he or she should also consider and think about what Richard Maibaum says here. It has been said, “Make wisdom and knowledge that you possess survive after your time and you will continue to live, with it.” Richard Maibaum would want that for any student of his or of his work. He said on well more than one occasion, the most important thing perhaps a man can do is to show others how to do that which he can do. Finally, another statement that he himself would have fondly passed on to students and colleagues is an opinion from close to two thousand years ago, found in the Midrash, a commentary on the Bible, “Who shall bring redemption after all others have tried to and have failed? They who can make us laugh.” Sylvia Kamion Maibaum April 30, 1998 Los Angeles, California

Part I

General Lectures, Presentations, and Essays

On Russian Drama (Invited Address, University of Iowa, 1947) A speech delivered by Richard Maibaum at the University of Iowa, Department of Speech and Theater Arts, March 1947. For some inexplicable reason, Professor MacGowan usually asks me to discuss Russian plays. Not being an expert on the subject, and having no particular qualifications outside being a professional screenwriterplaywright with a reasonably extensive knowledge of dramatic literature, I am forced to the conclusion that he always thinks of me for this assignment because he first knew me as an ardent youth who rarely got a haircut. Yes, I’m sure it’s the memory of my unusually long hair which somehow associates me in his mind with Chekhov, Gorki, Andreyev, Gogol, and Ostrovsky. Since those days I’ve discovered it isn’t necessary to look like a fella with a poetic soul in order to be one and visit my barber with reasonable regularity. But first impressions, they say, are the abiding ones, so I suppose that even if I someday grow as bald as Charles Boyer he’ll still hold my appearance in his mind’s eye as a somewhat stout version of the young Leon Trotsky. Please understand I’m speaking from a sartorial and not a political viewpoint. Although it’s hard to forget politics when you think about Gorki’s plays. They derive a great part of their effectiveness from the social background against which they were written. Indeed, it is my belief that without that background and kind of play Gorki invariably wrote could not have been successful from either a popular or artistic standpoint. His loose construction, his blunt and clumsy plot progression, his irrelevant dialogue digressions, all his other weaknesses, would be disastrous except for the great overall theme that seems to tie everything together—man’s inhumanity to man. That theme, or the Russian equivalent of it, was in his mind, his characters’ minds, and in the minds of the audience. There was a rapport between them before the curtain even went up. I think this was evidenced by the fact that almost all his plays were, except for a few notable exceptions, poorly received by the bourgeois press, and well received by the public with, again, a few exceptions. Officialdom, the discredited intelligentsia, entrenched and entrenching forces all hated Gorki’s plays. The people approved of them. Like the audiences of the old Greek plays they enjoyed the demonstration over and over again of a single great theme. With the Greeks it was man’s struggle against the fate the Gods had prepared for him. With Russian devotees of Gorki it was man’s struggle against the exploitation to which his Russian masters subjected him. “There is no true and just land,” says Luka. “But we must look for it anyway.” Just so the Greeks had said, “You can’t win against the Gods but you must keep on struggling.” (Events for a time made Russians think they could find or had found the true and just land. I wonder how many of them still think so today?) When you read or see a Gorki play you had better keep the background against which they were written in mind or you’re very likely to be disappointed. The only reason they still stand up at all is because of Gorki’s gift for characterization and his humor. And I think we have there the subject of this discussion. As writers and would-be writers of plays, what can we learn from Gorki’s plays, and especially from his masterpiece, The Lower Depths? I think it is this. If you have striking characters truthfully and effectively revealed your play can overcome great faults. If you haven’t got those characters you can’t possibly overcome even slight ones. One of Broadway’s current hits, I Am A Camera, is a good example of this. It is nothing but a series of loosely connected incidents but its characters are so well-delineated and so moving that the play overcomes what would ordinarily be considered faulty construction. I have a notion that I Am A Camera is indicative of a trend in playwriting. The three mediums—theater, movies, and TV—are more and more taking on a character of their own. In the theater, the most popular form is the musical. Next comes plays of great emotional intensity dealing with characters and themes censorable according to motion picture standards. It is the motion pictures that are presenting, for the most part, melodramas of scope which are well plotted. And in TV, outside the comedians, everything is crime and crime is nothing but plot. The pun is intended. Next time you watch the television go from station to station and, excepting forms of variety and quiz shows, just count the number of programs that are nothing but plot, plot, plot. The characters are usually all stock. The only thing of interest is the twisting and turnings of the story in order to achieve suspense and interest. Member of the Wedding was another example. Here was a play that had hardly any plot at all. It consisted almost entirely of an almost psychopathic emotion generated inside one character—a girl who wanted to accompany her brother and his bride on their honeymoon. Added to that was the relationship between a Negro servant girl, an adolescent girl, and a little boy. This trio and their affection for each other was written with such warmth, understanding, and beauty, that I, for one, came back after each act only for the pleasure of continuing to participate in it. I thought the main idea of the play was silly, but somehow the character relationships generated such satisfaction that it overcame all my other objections. Death of a Salesman really had very little plot in the conventional sense, but the characters generate such overpowering emotion it doesn’t matter. It would only get in the way. Mind you, I am not saying that a play which has both a good solid plot and excellent characterizations isn’t really more satisfying. Come Back, Little Sheba which I enjoyed as much as any play I’ve seen in years is a good example of such a play. A man living with a slatternly woman has been fighting alcoholism. He had given up medicine to marry her when she was young and lovely and become a vet. Disappointment in his career and in his wife urge him to drink, and he struggles against it manfully. A young girl boards with them, and reawakens in the man his sense of the beauty of life—then he discovers the girl is having an affair with a local muscle man and intends to marry her fiancé anyway. The blow sends the man into a raging drunk in which he comes home and tries to kill his wife with an axe. He is taken away to the hospital and his wife tries to go back to her folks but is turned down by them. She decides to “grow up,” as it were, and when the

husband comes out of the hospital he recognizes this and together they face the future, whatever it might bring. Here is a play that has both plot (a story) and wonderful characterizations. I was completely satisfied. In the Lower Depths what is the plot? I suppose you would have to say that Vassilissa, jilted by Pepel who is in love with her sister Natasha, pretends to accept the situation, and even offers Pepel money—if he will kill her husband. Luka, a pilgrim, overhears this, and tells Pepel to go away. Pepel and Luka convince Natasha to go with him, but Vassilissa overhears this (Ouch!) and with her husband pours scalding water on Natasha’s feet. A minor character objects and starts a fight with the husband and in the scuffling Pepel wallops the husband who falls and gets killed. Vassilissa accuses him and he in turn accuses her of egging him on to kill her husband. Natasha who is really a screwy character then refuses to believe that Pepel had rejected Vassilissa’s plan and disappears while Pepel and Vassilissa are taken to jail. Such is the plot. You can realize how disjointedly the play is constructed when you recall that there is no scene between Pepel and Vassilissa or Pepel and Natasha in the first act. Not one. And that neither Vassilissa, Pepel, Natasha and, naturally, the husband, appear in the last act. You wouldn’t think it possible that a play constructed like that could be effective! Woven around this main story are at least seven others, although you can’t really call them stories, or even subplots. There is the one about the key maker Klestch and his unloved wife, Anna, whose death desolates him; there is a Mohammedan stevedore who is going to lose his hand; a drunken actor who hopes to cure himself, falls off the wagon, and commits suicide; a romantic prostitute who keeps an impoverished nobleman; a kind of Greek chorus ex-murderer and cardsharper, Satin; a policeman who gets fired and marries a fat, wary widowed dumpling-maker; and Bubnov the tailor, or whatever he is, who saves up a little capital as he calls it and then drinks it all up. His wife had run away with his assistant. I think there are one or two more, including a kind of village idiot who goes around spreading gossip and lying down in the street daring people to run over him. All this is given unity by the location, the cellar, where they lodge, and the overall theme that all these people and their dislocated lives are the victims of an unfair social order. But what really holds all this together today? Nothing more or less than superb writing. These people are so original, funny, sad, so dumb, so wise, so stripped of all pretenses (except the prostitute), so good, so evil, above all so human, that they provide superb entertainment. Gorki was a great humorist. And that too is why he and almost he alone has been able to successfully write this kind of play against the background which we spoke of before. I don’t advise any but great writers and great humorists to attempt it. But I also want to point out again, the ability to depict wonderful characters in an entertaining and truthful way is probably the greatest asset a dramatist can have. Be mindful of plot construction, but be constantly aware that real characters make a play live, and nothing else. Concentrate on that. The Lower Depths is a splendid example of a play that breaks almost every rule of conventional playwriting and is still, in my opinion, a great play. All I know is that I enjoy it more every time I read it.

The Social Role of the Motion Picture (Invited Address at the University of California at Los Angeles, 1950) Speech delivered by Richard Maibaum at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), November 1950 I’m going to start this talk with a whopping half-truth…which I’ve found, by the way, is a pretty good average… When I was told that the subject matter I was to discuss was the Social Role of the Motion Picture a statement instantly occurred to me which I had heard at a heated meeting recently sponsored by the Johnson office in an effort “to raise the moral standards of the industry.” An excited and frustrated producer, who claimed he was being hampered in the creation of good entertainment by the Johnson office regulations, shouted, “Fellas, let’s face it! We’re selling blood, sex, and money! Without them we’re dead!” That’s the half-truth. We are selling blood, sex, and money, because they have always been the staples of entertainment…all the way from Sophocles to Shaw. What was half untrue about the statement was the way this particular producer wanted to sell those eternally attractive commodities? As a matter of fact, if he and people like him continue to sell blood, sex, and money in the way they have in the past they will be dead…stone-cold dead in the marketplace. But we’ll come back to that later. Obviously, the first and foremost function of the motion picture is to provide mass entertainment. A good show was, is, and always will be the best therapy to apply for the bruises of life—escape, catharsis, identification, release—call it what you will, it all comes down to a way to forget your troubles…and laugh and cry at somebody else’s. It’s a funny thing, though… That somebody else is really you…and so you’re actually laughing and crying at your own troubles and thus make them bearable. Which reminds me of a card we once received after a preview which said, “Best tragedy I ever saw. Laughed my head off.” Yes, the number one job of the motion picture is to entertain millions of people. Man does not live by bread alone…he needs the circus too…and the motion picture is a magical kind of dream circus where we’re both spectators and performers and all as pretty as Gable or Grable. Take your pick. Incidentally, it might be interesting for you to know that 60 percent of the people who go to the movies are under thirty years of age, and a majority of those are under twenty. Which would seem to indicate that a dark place to hold hands is at least as much a lure as the title of the film being shown. I often wonder whether the socalled Main Attraction exerts as potent a draw as the sideshow in the balcony. Indeed, one might say that going to the movies plays a much greater role socially than the pictures themselves. I think we can safely say that Young America lives most of its puppy love life in motion picture houses. And that’s a good thing too. After all, nothing very drastic can happen in a crowd…and munching popcorn at that. I firmly believe that the movies are here to stay until the Television people figure out a way of getting Mom and Pop and Aunt Agatha out of the living room. But seriously. I think the main social role of the motion picture is so clearly understood we don’t have to discuss it any further. I’m sure what was wanted today was consideration of the subsidiary social functions of films. So let’s consider them. I suppose others have told you that the powers that rule the industry are not interested in socially enlightening or culturally uplifting audiences. Again we have a half-truth. They are interested in those worthy objectives—if it is also profitable. I’m reminded of a certain important producer who reluctantly permitted the production of the movie The Story of Louis Pasteur. Paul Muni had set his heart upon playing it, but the idea was so novel, so untried, that the head of his studio had no way of measuring the possible success of such a picture. Hence, he was understandably hesitant about investing money in it. There had never been such a film before. What guarantee did he have that audiences would accept it? So a deal was made. Muni agreed to make a second film which the studio had great faith in and which he had previously turned down. I think it was Bordertown, but I’m not sure. So Pasteur went before the cameras. I’m sure you all know what it was about. One day at the rushes while the executives were looking at a close-up of a slide full of bacteria as seen through a microscope, the big boss could stand it no longer. He jumped out of his seat and shouted, “This is insanity! We’ll chase the audience right out of the theater! Boys and girls they want, and we’re giving them germs!” It goes without saying that the very same man forgot his dire predictions in the excitement and pleasure of being presented with an Oscar for having produced the Best Picture of the Year. So you see, by trial and error and accident and under pressure from creative actors, writers, and directors, the powers that be discovered that social enlightenment and cultural uplift could be profitable too. The reason we don’t have many pictures of the same quality as “Pasteur” is that they are difficult to make, just as any work of art is difficult to create. And not just works of art either. So many people in other businesses and professions ask me, “Why are movies so bad?” I invariably ask them. “Sir, what business are you in?” Let us assume the reply is, “The dress business.” I then ask them a simple question, “Why are most dresses so god-awful?” Or if he says, “I’m a doctor!” I ask him, “Why do so many people die?” Or if he’s a teacher, “Why are most lectures so dull and so many people with college degrees ignorant?”

Most human activity is mediocre. To do anything well is unusual. Frankly, I think it perfectly amazing that some pictures are as good as they are, rather than that so many are as bad. The heads of studios want to make good pictures. It’s just difficult to do it. And that brings us to an important question. What criterion should we use in judging films? What motion pictures are socially valuable? Here’s a simple yardstick. Does this film enable a person to participate in a worthwhile experience? Now a sermon in a church is undoubtedly an enlightening discourse and listening to it should be eminently worthwhile, but I’m not talking about that kind of edification. I’m talking about worthwhileness in terms of the theatrical medium. And in a way in terms of all artistic media. Does watching this picture, or play, or hearing this symphony, or seeing this painting, or reading this novel, does it enrich my personality? Does it make me more understanding? Does it make me happier? Does it so engross me that the time I take to observe it is so full of enjoyment that I am not conscious of its passing? If the play or film is fashioned inexpertly I am prevented from participating in the experience it attempts to depict…or if it is well-fashioned the experience it asks me to share may not be worthwhile. I saw a film produced by Leni Riefenstahl glorifying Hitler and all his monstrous works. It was done superbly from a technical standpoint and yet any decent human being would reject participating in the experiences it unfolded. It was thus a bad film. And yet a silly little Mickey Mouse can give us true moments of lightheartedness and delight. That’s a good film. And this brings us to the question of responsibility…the responsibility of those who make films to the people for whom they make them. And this is responsibility in the sheerest social terns. Now we are really getting close to the heart of our subject. We all know the tremendous effect motion pictures have upon the tastes, habits, morals, of the public. I wrote a film called I Wanted Wings and a slim young unknown then named Constance Moore was cast as the bad girl. The Paramount hairdressing department came up with a brand new hairdo for her—a kind of rag mop motif that covered half her lovely face. The girl’s name was changed to Veronica Lake and a few weeks after the picture was released millions of girls were going to the beauty shops and asking for a sheepdog coiffure. Privately, I’ve often wondered how many girls were spattered with how many assorted fruits after the film in which Jimmy Cagney hit his ladylove in the face with a grapefruit. Alan Ladd once told me he has received as many as eighteen thousand fan letters a week. Think of it! The staggering influence exerted by how he looks and what he does on the screen. And I must say that Alan is aware of it and has certain taboos which he will not do on the screen because of the effect they might have on his following. Speaking very frankly there is much in our pictures that tends to vulgarize, to brutalize, and to distort, much that panders to low taste and cheap salaciousness. And I am not talking so much about those matters that the Legion of Decency objects to. I resent all pressure groups that attempt to censor the screen. Actually, most of the Bible could not be filmed as set down, and hardly a great piece of literature could be made into a film as written. This is wrong. Because it tends to create a special motion picture version of the world which simply isn’t true. Too often audiences find difficulty in participating in the experience depicted by a film because they instinctively sense this false perspective which distorts and offends taste and reason. I feel I must say something in behalf of the Johnson Office, however. Until a federal law which forbids the censorship of a film by local agencies the Johnson Office will serve a very practical purpose. It knows what will be cut out of a film in each specific locality and it forewarns the producer. In other words, you comply or have your film cut up into nonsensical tatters by bigots and bluenoses. “Make the cuts first,” says the Johnson Office. “And preserve an intelligible continuity.” What is not good about the Johnson Office is that it seems to make no real effort to mitigate these deplorable local censorship conditions. It merely helps you to cope with them instead of seeking to do away with them. You cannot show repentance without suffering in a film, suffering and punishment. A woman can be as adulterous as the screenwriter pleases just as long as she is run over by a truck at the end of the picture. Yet married people in their bedroom cannot be shown sharing a single bed. I don’t know the actual statistics on Mr. and Mrs. America’s sleeping arrangements but I’m reasonably sure not all of them use twin beds. Multiply these two examples many times and you will understand what I mean by the distortions caused by censorship pressure. I’ll only mention one glaring taboo. Divorce is never permitted to be shown as the solution for an unhappy marriage. All of us know perfectly well that most Americans who encounter marital difficulties solve them by divorce. I’m neither for or against divorce; all I know is that it exists as an American phenomenon and that phenomenon cannot be handled honestly in an American motion picture. If such a picture were made, it would be boycotted by the Legion of Decency and denied a seal by the Johnson office… As a result, it could only be shown then in a limited number of independent houses because the bigger chains are pledged not to run any film without the seal. So the industry works under difficulties when it seeks to do better films, but that does not mean it fails to surmount them. It does, time and again. Under men like Dore Schary, Darryl Zanuck, and others they have made and are continuing to make many films that utilize the social power of the medium. There is no need for me to enumerate those films. You all know them. However, the effect of this social force upon the thinking of the American public (I mean from a political, economic, and ethical standpoint) is perforce spotty and haphazard. In Russia where subject matter is dictated completely as well as the treatment of that subject matter I suppose you might say that the social force of the film is more potent than in our own country. Filmmakers are permitted only one point of view. Hence, everything is integrated and consistent even if for a misguided principle. In the United States, pictures like No Way Out, Home of the Brave, Pinky, Intruder in the Dust have, I believe,

strongly influenced the thinking of the American public on the subject of the exploitation of the Negro. They were good pictures and did a wonderful job. But we still see on our screens in many other films the Uncle Tom version of the Negro. We still see the Negro portrayed as a comical caricature. We still see the good old Mammy and all the other stock low-comedy Negro types. We have made films like Gentlemen’s Agreement and Crossfire on the Jewish problem. Excellent films from a sociological standpoint. I’m sure they were of great value and made many thoughtless people reexamine their own prejudices. And yet Major Ruven Dafni, the Israeli consul in Los Angeles, wryly pointed out to me that in Cecil DeMille’s Samson and Delilah, the story of the greatest Jewish fighting man (the word Jew was never used once). As far as audiences were concerned, Samson’s people were known as Danites. And I’m sure there are some misguided souls who are not under the impression that Samson came from Denmark* The reasoning behind the omission of the word Jew is quite interesting. It was feared that because of the prejudices of portions of the audience Samson would not be considered a “romantic” figure. Here we have a truckling to a prejudice rather than an honest attempt to overcome it. We have had pictures about civil liberties like The Lawless, yet time and again in westerns, we are presented with glorification of vigilantes. In view of this condition where good and bad are presented indiscriminately, I think we will have to say that the social force of the American film is less than it might be if all filmmakers were men of goodwill. However, as there is no group of living men who are all men of goodwill we would be naive to expect that condition to prevail in the motion picture industry. However, I do believe that things are improving. I was once called in by a producer who said he wanted me to write a picture which ended, as he described it, with “Indians on a bicycle,” which meant, I suppose, that the final sequence showed the beleaguered wagon train and mounted Indians riding around it. I wrote a treatment and was called in by the producer who glared at me as if I had committed treason. “What kind of people are these Indians you got in here?” he bellowed. “Just people,” I replied. “But they ain’t people!” he yelled. “After all, what is an Indian? A lot of extras from Central Avenue with paint on their pusses! Nobody takes an Indian seriously. You’d never get a jury to absolve an Indian. I’ll tell you what an Indian is! UG! That’s what he is! Just UG!” How different was the treatment of the Indian in the current film Broken Arrow, where for once the Original American is dealt with in dignity and sorrow. I think that we cannot avoid in this discussion some mention of the documentary film. The social force of the ordinary film made primarily for entertainment is in a way indirect; the avowed purpose of the documentary is always frankly the conditioning of a social attitude. I am somewhat familiar with the documentary field because of my work in the Army where I was first chief of the special projects film branch in the office of the chief Signal Officer, and later director of the combat films division at the signal corps photographic center. In my earlier capacity, among other films, I made a series to be shown in factories and union halls which sought to dramatize for the workers who produced our guns, tanks, and planes, the issues of the conflict as they effected their hopes and interests as members of organized labor and as Americans. We made films for specific industries—two-reelers mostly—and I am not exaggerating when I saw that we actually prevented strikes and slowdowns by the timely running of a film. This was an example of utilizing the social force of a film in the clearest sense. Later, I was in charge of a division whose job was the utilization of the millions of feet of combat film shot by our Army photographers in all theaters of war. We made propaganda films to be shown in motion picture houses to the general public, such as The Liberation of Rome which was an attempt to explain to the country the sort of difficulties the Fifth Army was encountering in Italy and indirectly to challenge their own capacity to endure and struggle and fight through as the men at the front were doing. We made a weekly film called the “Staff Film Report” which was sent to the sixty top-ranking soldiers in the Allied Armies to keep them posted visually on the progress of the war, the performance of new weapons, the types and capacities of captured enemy equipment, and many other matters best projected by motion pictures. We also made a six-hundred-reel history of the war which is used now by West Point, Annapolis, and the staff and command schools. And we made Divisional Histories which were shown to new members and replacements in an outfit to give them pride in the organization they were joining. Of course, you’ve heard of the magnificent series of documentaries made by Frank Capra called Why We Fight which was a must for every member in the Army. And the program of training films was considered to have cut the length of training in most categories by 40 percent. As a matter of fact, the effectiveness of all army films was well stated by General Marshall when he declared, “We have discovered two new weapons in World War II, the airplane and the motion picture camera.” Such is the power of film well utilized in a great purpose. At this moment, there is a representative of the state department in Hollywood seeking two hundred writers, directors, and producers to make films for the Voice of America in an effort to bring the case for democracy as against communism before the people of the world. No more effective way could be devised! And more and more special groups are bringing their special messages to people through documentary films— doctors, dentists, churches, industries, charities—they, too, are beginning to understand the advantages of visual education. Most of the films that I have seen made for these groups by independent commercial film outfits are pretty bad. There is a special technique of making documentaries, and it isn’t an easy one to learn. The trick is usually in finding some dramatic objective, thus using good old basic dramatic principles despite the ostensibly factual treatment. Or else to find some way of telling a story that is so compelling and unusual that it makes a film interesting despite its lack of dramatic progression. The best documentary I ever saw appeared in the Army-

Navy Screen magazine, a weekly compilation of film subjects of interest to servicemen. All these subjects were slanted subtly to make a point the Army wanted made—such as understanding our allies, racial tolerance in the services, or helping the soldier understand the contribution made by the civilians back home. None of these subjects were preachy, all were done in entertainment terms. The subject I am talking about was the one that dealt with the death of President Roosevelt. An entire issue was devoted to it, and it made use of the best footage of the thousands of feet of film shot by servicemen photographers from the time the funeral train left Hot Springs to the lowering of the coffin into the grave at Hyde Park. The footage was most impressive. Along Constitution Avenue, people wept as the funeral procession moved toward the White House. Then came the problem. What to say about it? We had some of the best young writers in America in our outfit, all of them tried and said quite frankly, “Anything you give the commentator to say seems weak and ineffectual compared to the emotional power of these pictures.” And then someone got the idea. The only words big enough to match the film were Roosevelt’s. And the only voice that could say these words was Roosevelt’s. So they found his recorded speeches and took from them phrases and sentences and statements that matched the action. It was thrilling. Roosevelt himself the commentator to his own last journey. When the camera was on the faces of people weeping Roosevelt’s voice said, “There are those who believe in the people, and those who do not… I believe in the people…” And as his coffin was lowered into the grave and the bugles blew taps, his voice said… “The health of this nation is good…the spirit of this nation is high…the hope of this is eternal!” That was documentary-making at its best. And the sheerest expression of the social power of a film I have ever seen. And now, recklessly perhaps, prediction of things to come. What is the future of the film in general? The future of the film is beyond our comprehension. We have only just begun… After all, the images on a television screen are in effect motion pictures. And motion pictures, I believe, will be the backbone of television—films will be made for television eventually and films made for television will be good. I say this despite the present low quality of the stuff you are seeing at present, which are feeble exploratory efforts. When you come right down to it only two things will count on the television screen—the face of the actor and the words he speaks, and they will have to be good. Ten thousand Indians riding over a hill coming full tilt at the camera don’t mean a thing on the television screen…spectacle and pageantry will go…as I said, what will remain is the actor and what he is given to say…and if they are found wanting…well…the public, unlike in the motion picture theaters, is always able to turn to another channel and try watching something else. Competition for the public’s attention will force the creation of better entertainment. Here’s what I think will happen. When a method is devised to install a box office into the living room—by Phonovision perhaps—which enables the telephone company to unscramble an otherwise unseeable, inaudible program on your television screen, and then bill you for the service. The gross returns on a picture will be enormous. This will permit the production of excellent films with the biggest stars and the motion picture companies will then go into the production of such pictures.³ They are fighting the idea now because of their need for the owners of the seventeen thousand theaters in which they are at present showing their films. But progress will prevail, unless we have a big war, and eventually they will have to abandon their friends the exhibitors. I predict that when this happens, almost all neighborhood theaters will close and become markets, garages, bowling alleys, what you want. The big movie palaces will remain and show stage shows and films that tend toward spectacle and pageantry on a very popular level. I believe this because of what I spoke about before the social necessity of movie going for the younger people in the country. Along with these five or six thousand bigger houses. I envisage a circuit of perhaps two thousand so-called art theaters which will show the best films of all nations an American films of very high quality specially made for exhibition in this circuit. These films will definitely not be for children. And such a setup represents a terrific possibility that “the art of motion picture” might at long last come into its own artistically and finally achieve its fullest expression as a social force in our national life.

How to Write a Successful Play (Invited Address, Loyola University of Los Angeles, 1951) Speech delivered by Richard Maibaum at Loyola University of Los Angeles, March 1, 1951. Gentlemen, my subject for today will definitely not be you too can write a successful play. No one can teach you or tell you that. As the Irishman said when he first saw a giraffe, “Begorra! There’s no such animal!” I’m convinced of it after twenty years of trying to find somebody to tell me. Not that a lot of people don’t try to tell you, particularly relatives who are always coming up with ideas for plays guaranteed to run as long as Tobacco Road and with probably more reason to run than Tobacco Road, remember it? A bunch of degenerates living like pigs whose main enjoyment was public back-scratching. For once in my life, I almost agreed with certain moralists who want to censor plays and declared that everyone concerned with the production ought to be arrested. However, as is common knowledge now, Tobacco Road ran about five years, maybe more, and earned several million dollars. Actually, joking aside, there was inherent in “Tobacco Rad” one underlying theme which lifted the play to the status of a real folk play… Jester Lester’s strange and deep love for his parched piece of earth, his home. In spite of the filth and degradation of his life he identified himself with something greater than himself—the land and its promise…and because of that one aspect of the play it, strangely enough, represented an experience worth sharing…which is just about the best definition of a good play I have ever come across. All right, so Tobacco Road was a successful play. All you have to do is get a bunch of unusual preferably filthy people doing socially distorted things and you have a hit on your hands… But wait a minute…what about Life with Father? There was a play about a most conventional bourgeois proper family…the Day household positively reeked with disinfectant… One of the Day boys didn’t dare let his sweetheart sit on his lap while he was wearing his father’s pants. Mother Day was a paragon of all the accepted motherly virtues. It was a gentle play, a nostalgic play, a heartwarming, lovable, homey play and it ran ten years, and made twice as much money as Tobacco Road. Now we really have it. Write something like Life with Father and you can’t miss. That’s exactly what Buck Crouse and Howard Lindsey, the authors of Life with Father thought, too…so they wrote Life with Mother and they didn’t make a dime… However, we can rule that out and say Life With Father, the kind of play it was, ought to be a pretty good kind of thing to write. Gentle, homey, that’s what people like. Something like Guys and Dolls which a friend of mine produced and off which he will live for the next fifty years on caviar and humming-bird’s tongues. Guys and Dolls is about as gentle as Sugar Ray Robinson and as homey as Grand Central Station. But it isn’t hard to understand the success of Guys and Dolls… Damon Runyon’s characters delighted millions…and in a cock-eyed kind of way were really as sentimental as lavender and old lace… Sentiment! Perhaps that’s the magic word. Never mind the deep intellectual. Just good old fashioned “schmaltz!” That’s what it takes! Hold on there—Did somebody say, The Cocktail Party? I saw The Cocktail Party and I fancy myself a fairly receptive intelligent fellow. I give you my word neither I myself or the audience had the foggiest notion what Mr. Eliot was trying to say. Of course, the British accent didn’t make it any easier, but I looked around at the people seated about me and all I could see were a few highbrow phonies pretending to be entranced and complete stupefaction on the part of everyone else. But we all must be wrong. The Cocktail Party is a very successful play. Intellectual soul-searching must be what the public wants…Hmmm. Maybe that’s the open sesame… Let’s write something intellectually soul-searching, like South Pacific. High point, I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair sung by Mary Martin while taking a bath on stage and a platoon of sex-starved gobs bellowing There is Nothin’ Like A Dame! However, if we analyze South Pacific we realize the secret of its success must be the appeal the far-off romantic place exerts upon us…Bali Hai…mystic island…and all that… Escape! There’s the end-all and be-all! People want to escape, to get away from it all, to forget the petty inconvenience of living. So I went to see a poor, bare, stark little play called Come Back, Little Sheba about a vet who is a drunk and his sloppy wife who is hipped about a dog she had when she was younger. Said dog, called Sheba, has run away, and it certainly showed very good sense about that, and she keeps going out to the back porch and whistling for it…’til one day her husband falls off the wagon and comes home with a hatchet which he tries to plant in her peanut-brain… After the husband sobers up, she tells him she has decided not to whistle for the pooch anymore…which presumably means she has grown up and will now wash the breakfast dishes now and then… Escape, huh? No, certainly not…but a little thinking indicates the reason for the terrific impact this little play had on audiences… There isn’t a family in the country I don’t believe who hasn’t had to face the problem of drinking…and the handling of Come Back, Little Sheba was expert enough, especially in the acting, to be universal. Universality! That’s the best key of all! Write about something that has happened or could happen to anybody… Universality! Where’s my typewriter! Whooaaa! Don’t start ordering that Cadillac just yet. Ever hear of a show called The Member of the Wedding? All about an adolescent girl who becomes obsessed with the idea that she is going to accompany her brother and his new bride on their honeymoon. Happens every day. Common occurrence… Here is a play about something not universal at all… I dare say it happened just once before…to Carson MacCullough the author of the novel from which the play comes…and never again and never will again to anyone else… “The Member of the Wedding” has just been sold to Stanley Kramer to be made into a film… Miss MacCullough has probably earned herself close to a quarter of a million dollars so far from it… What was haunting about “member,” however, was really the sense of human loneliness it projected…it was heartbreaking…and yet Lost in the Stars which could give Member of the Wedding heartbreak in spades was not successful… Go figure it out! There is no way to certainly write a successful play and there is no formula to ensure it. And now, to add to your confusion and bewilderment I shall be glad to answer any questions not only

on this subject but any other except why doesn’t UCLA play Loyola football? Yes. Any questions?

On Freedom: Concepts for a Class (Visiting Professorship, University of Iowa, 1954) Concepts for a Class, University of Iowa, 1954 We are going to try to do something that has never been attempted before about the most important thing in the world. The thing that has never been attempted before is tackling a writing problem in quite this way—and the most important thing in the world is freedom… I think we’ll have to do some listening about it, some reading about it, some thinking about it, some talking about it, some feeling about it, and eventually some writing about it. Our objective first is to turn out a series of scripts for a Television Program. The purpose of these programs is to stimulate thinking about freedom in a democracy and to deepen loyalty to the traditions on which our way of life rests…or perhaps I should say grows…because the processes we are going to examine and then project are never-ceasing, ever-changing, and as flexible as life itself. After we have soaked up an understanding of the underlying concepts of this program…what freedom is…how it is achieved…how it can be lost…we’ll proceed as a group and try to discover the best overall approach to the writing of our scripts…what format shall we use…if any? What is the best way of telling the freedom story? What production methods can be utilized to most effectively televise that story? We’re going to search for ideas…and every idea, no matter how impractical or far-fetched it may seem, should be thrown into the pot for discussion and analysis, because often the so-called crazy idea suggests an acceptable practical one… Don’t be hesitant about speaking up… This stage of our project will be a big collaboration… We’ll set up ideas and knock them down if we can… After we arrive at an overall conception…we’re going to look for stories…stories that will illustrate what we’re trying to say… We’re going to have to dig down into our own experience…or the experiences of others… Each story will have to be concentrated on one aspect of freedom…although it is often difficult to entirely isolate one aspect from many others akin to it. Most probably these stories when we find them will be about people and their particular relationship to some problem of freedom… When I say find them, I mean, of course, create them within ourselves from the experiences, personal or impersonal, we have contemplated… At that point, we’ll start writing…either by ourselves…or in collaboration, depending on individual backgrounds and ability… I’ll be available for whatever help or advice or cooperation is required… We’ll have conferences on individual scripts, their construction, characterization, dialogue, and general progress. The amount of time I give to any individual will depend upon two things…the individual feeling, he needs help…or my feeling he needs help. When the scripts are completed some of them will be televised…the kinescopes, or films of the program, will then be available for showing both over TV or as motion pictures… There are many problems ahead of us… The most difficult is to so shape our scripts that they not only entertain but also teach… You’ll have to learn about principles of playwriting in general…and how they apply specifically to television writing… You’ll have to learn something about TV production methods…or your scripts won’t be shootable… You’ll have to learn the TV script form… You’ll also have to learn about the things a camera can and can’t do… You’ll have to learn what kind of shots to call for when writing your script… You’ll have to learn how to write with a realization that your story must basically be told in terms of pictures augmented by words… As a matter of fact, there are so many things you’ll have to learn that I had better not try to enumerate all of them here because I don’t want to frighten you prematurely… I’m not frightened…not much…because I believe we can do this thing if we tackle it together…never forgetting though that in the last analysis, like being born and dying…you write alone…except of course if you collaborate and that’s like being twins… Screen writing book…freedom books…from Mercer and Whitsel…freedom to work—feet walking behind a plow… Freedom of conscience—feet walking up steps of church, a bell is ringing… Freedom of expression—the feet of a toe-dancer Freedom of association—feet of men and women on a picket-line freedom to learn—feet of children going to school, books swinging on straps Claims to possession of property—feet of people in bank Freedom from physical interference—feet walking down road…freedom of contract—? Freedom of opinion—feet of people stopping to buy papers at newsstand General Security and safety—feet filing into a jury box Freedom of belief—steps going into curtains of voting booth—claim to honor and reputation (End)

On Speaking (An Address to Professor Hitchcock’s Class, University of Iowa, 1954) An address to Professor Hitchcock’s Class Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts University of Iowa Iowa City, 1954 I hope you will permit me an occasional reference to these typewritten sheets—I didn’t have enough time to prepare to speak extemporaneously. Besides, I want to protect myself as much as possible and say more or less what I intend to say. I’ve had too much experience with the three versions of a speech every speaker is familiar with: The speech he wants to make, the speech he does make, and the speech he makes to his pillow that night. As a playwright, screenwriter, TV and motion picture producer I am somewhat out of my element in the field of forensics. However, I sense we have some things in common and there have occurred to me several observations I’d like to pass on to you for what they might be worth. That’s something like a fellow in the wrong church insisting he’s in the right pew. But here goes anyway. But first, let me confess that when Professor Hitchcock asked me to address you, I was conscious of certain qualms. I do a good deal of holding forth in story conferences and now and then lecture on entertainment matters to various groups, but I’m certainly not accustomed to speaking to speakers about speaking. After some hesitancy, however, I agreed to appear and almost immediately regretted it. To buoy myself up I went over to the library to see if I couldn’t brush up on a few fundamentals. And I must say I soon regained my confidence. How could I go wrong after a thorough perusal of Putnam’s Ready Speech-Maker, George W. Hibbit’s How to Speak Effectively on All Occasions, The White Sunlight of Potent Words by J. S. MacKintosh? L. O. Smith’s A Compendium of Source Material to Make Your Speech Sparkle, and most helpful of all, Homer S. Hannah’s Public Speaking Without Fear and Trembling. And speaking of fear and trembling there’s a great deal of it going on these days. I divide my time between Hollywood and Hew York and on second thought I realize that many people there are beyond the fear and trembling stage and definitely in the wailing and gnashing of teeth category. For the foundations of the entertainment world as we know it have been shaken and cracked by the impact of a monstrous hurricane that threatens to blow it into entirely new shapes. To hear people talk you would think that compared to it the invention of the alphabet and the appearance of the first printing press were merely minor zephyrs in the draughty corridors of history. Oratorical touch approved by the aforementioned J. S. Macintosh’s The White Sunlight of Potent Words. I’m speaking, of course, of a small boxlike apparatus found in the living room of the American Home called innumerable names, most of them unpleasant, technically known as “the audiovisual facsimile transmission system.” TV to you. And there are twenty-five million audiovisual facsimile transmission systems. And more to come… Stop for a moment to think about it in these terms… Time was when a private theater represented the gaudiest display of personal magnificence. Lorenzo the Magnificent, Marie Antoinette, the Emperor Caligula— such are the names we associate with private theaters. Today, in the United States alone, there are twenty-five million private theaters in twenty-five million homes, presenting entertainment of an infinitely wider scope, putting to shame the sort of minor pleasantries enacted in the private theaters of the past… After all, they didn’t have My Friend Irma, or Hopalong Cassidy, not even Howdy Doody, to say nothing and nothing is precisely the right word there, Martin Kane, Private Eye. Twenty-five million private theaters—and all for free—the economic upheaval in the entertainment world has been enormous. In Hollywood where seventy and sometimes more pictures would be shooting at a time there were last week exactly twenty films before the cameras. Many neighborhood theaters have closed. The major companies are living off the distribution of their back-logs, some pictures made as long as four years ago. Cinemascope and for a short while 3-D helped somewhat, but the general fate of the entire industry is still very much in doubt. I personally believe it will survive but in a much contracted form. TV will probably take over the responsibility of supplying the greater part of mass entertainment. And the motion pictures will turn to a more selective form, on more adult themes. This will necessitate a change in the production code as regards censorship, but I’m convinced that will come about. The same thing that happened to the New York stage when motion pictures appeared until now, I think, happen to the motion picture confronted by television. Where before pictures the stage was the medium for mass entertainment, reaching the entire country through innumerable road shows and stock companies, after the advent of the silver screen the stage survived by filling a real need for a higher type of entertainment. It is not accidental that Eugene O’Neill appeared and revolutionized the American Theater just about the time that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were pioneering in saccharine and somersaults. So perhaps the American public will benefit substantially by all this. Pictures will be better, and when the television screens will be considerably enlarged, and programs televised in color, many wonderful things will be possible in that field too. How does all this affect you specifically? Yes, the impact of TV has been tremendous, terrific, and colossal on the industry that endeared those adjectives to our hearts. But has it any meaning to you as people interested in public speaking? I’m sure it does. Why, if Marc Anthony had made his funeral oration over TV the citizens of Rome would still be rioting. Obviously, television multiplies the audience to a size never before contemplated. Of course, the radio did that, too, and oratory took great strides forward in radio. Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Al

Smith, Adolf Hitler, and those wonderful words of President Roosevelt’s, “My friends”—all these took great advantage of the new medium. But in the last analysis, they could bring you only voice… Jane Cowl took my advice and the change in her performance was perfectly amazing. So too, anyone who seriously thinks about television oratory will have to learn certain essential techniques. President Truman, for instance, seriously impaired his effectiveness as a speaker in his TV appearances by jerking his hands up and down in sharp, quick movements. Actually a slight blur results, not enough for an audience watching their television screens to become conscious about, but still subconsciously dissatisfied by an intrusive element. I think it’s significant that the fine motion picture and television actor, Robert Montgomery, spends a great deal of time at the White House before President Eisenhower’s appearances. Let me say this. There is a law of diminishing returns, as the TV audiences become satiated with the kind of entertainment they have for the most part been getting. When they turn off the umpteenth version of the Private Eye getting hit on the head, or the umpteenth-umpteenth variation on the eternal squabble supposedly going on between husbands and wives, there will be more and more discussion groups, panels, debates, educational programs, and so forth. Appearing on these programs will be as casual to the trained speaker as appearing before his club, if he is well-prepared and not half-baked as a television personality. One or two more observations. A great audience emphasizes the importance of responsibility. A lie is a damnable thing whenever and wherever it is uttered, because in the last analysis it is only through confidence in each other and the words we speak that make this planet at all inhabitable. A lie before millions is a frightening thing to contemplate. Do I hear the frightful echoes, “Heil! Heil! Heil!” And in the last analysis, and most important of all, a good speech in any medium is one that has something to say. Don’t forget the single greatest oration ever made, and sometimes we forget that is exactly what it was, the speed that most profoundly changed the heart of man, was made under the glowering glances of Roman soldiers to a multitude on the outskirts of Jerusalem. We call it the Sermon on the Mount. Finally, of some importance to a speaker is knowing when to stop.

On the New Drama, the New Play (Presentation at Northwest Drama Conference, Eugene, Oregon, 1962) Presentation at Northwest Drama Conference, Eugene, Oregon, 1962. When I was a little boy, about seven years old, my father took me to see a performance of the Barnum and Bailey Circus at the old Madison Square Garden in New York. I was bewitched, entranced, transported, completely. On the way home in the subway my father asked me what I’d liked best—the clowns, the acrobats, the jugglers, the animal tamers, the trapeze artists? “Daddy,” I replied, “those men who rolled up the rugs were wonderful!” Evidently I had been watching the roustabouts throughout the performance. According to that early indication of what I considered important in the theater I should have become a stage hand. Indeed, there have been times in my career that suggestion has been made to me. And times I considered taking it. Be that as it may, I chose to become a playwright. I have been one now for about thirty years. It is my profession, and I am stuck with it. The previous speaker has conveyed to you some of the problems on becoming a playwright. Having been one a good deal longer than I would like to tell, I would like to tell you about what happens after you become one. First let me say that playwrights as playwrights have more problems than anybody else. Of course, other people have problems too. As people, I mean. And in all instances where playwrights also happen to be people, they have those problems too. Take for instance actuarial tables. According to them, astronauts present the maximum insurance risk. Scanning the list of occupational diseases common to playwrights we find such relatively minor ailments as migraine headaches, hypertension, writer’s cramp, and certain unmentionable afflictions caused by excessive periods of sitting down. But the actuarial tables do not reflect the true statistics. Because the chief mortality factor among playwrights is the usually undetected ailment commonly known as a broken heart. And this condition is unique in that it enables the victim to go living, sometimes for many years, while dead. You can readily see how this louses up the actuarial tables. Playwrights have always had more problems than other people. But recent developments in the media of communications have further increased the ratio. A playwright today, such as myself, the kind called a working pro, who writes for stage, screen, and television, for money, to please the audience, is faced with a multiplicity of opportunities to pile up problems, quantitatively and qualitatively, hitherto unknown in the history of the theater. This is so because the people chiefly responsible for those problems, the Producer, the Director, the Actor, and the Scenic Artist, have extended their egos, their ignorance, and their ingratitude, into the new media with characteristic avidity. In television, of course, there are in addition two Johnny-come-lately menaces, the Sponsor and the Advertising Man, who gleefully join in the sorrowful spectacle of what is known to writers as “spitting in the chicken soup.” Before proceeding any further let me assure you that all this is in the nature of good clean fun. I am purposely exaggerating to put the playwright’s plight as pungently as possible. And any similarity to actual persons or places is unintentional, uninspired, and un-American. I realize that most of you are or will be connected with community or collegiate theatrical organizations, in an area where what is known as the professional theater is limited. And let me hasten to add that I have never been guilty of the peculiarly New York–ish provincialism that “professional” and “excellence” are necessarily synonymous. Last night’s production is as fine a production as you will find anywhere. I have had better productions of my plays in Roslyn, Long Island; Iowa City, Iowa; Skowhegan, Maine; and such places than ever I had on Broadway. It has always seemed to me that the very lack of “professional” theater creates an atmosphere of do-ityourself, in the best sense, which very often gives theatrical endeavor a vitality and an importance found nowhere else. My very first play, The Tree,⁴ which I wrote while I was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa and was initially produced there, is a case in point. In some ways, the subsequent Broadway production, although slicker and smoother, lacked the intensity and power of the original performance. And this despite the fact that the New York version was directed by Robert Rossen later to become celebrated as the director of motion pictures such as All the King’s Men and the current, The Hustler. There is often a certain magical atmosphere about a play done in Little Theatre that no amount of professionalism can match. So I speak to you as people I believe are capable or someday will be of producing meaningful, worthwhile plays worthwhile, especially if people like myself write them for you. Perhaps it will be of some value to you to know something about the problems of the professional playwright as I have encountered them during those almost thirty years of considerable activity. It might enable you to better project that most important of all theatrical objectives, the playwright’s intention. Incidentally, I also am aware of the general theme of this conference, the new drama — the new play . And although I am not what you would designate a representative of the new drama and the new play, the playwright’s problems whether he be classified as new, slightly soiled, or moth-eaten, are essentially the same. To achieve one’s ambition. Incidentally, the new drama is going precisely where the playwright has been skillful enough to convey new meanings. When we fail, the critics usually say, “It can be ambiguous on many levels.” But let’s get back to the playwright’s problems. First artistic problems.

When I close my eyes and try to visualize a stack of all the scripts with which I have been connected in some way as a writer (or as a producer, and I often confess I have been one of those too) my mind boggles at it. I would say that those scripts represented about two hundred theatrical projects—plays, screenplays, documentary films, teleplays. And each one represents one or more problems. Many of them unsolved. Most of them represent one or more mistakes. Indeed, I believe I have made, both as an individual and as a member of a group, almost every kind of theatrical mistake it is possible to make. Every kind, that is, except the ones I shall discover working on future projects. It would be a miracle if I hadn’t an ulcer. Indeed, it would take a miracle, because I have one. Looking back now I realize that the basic reason for most of these mistakes was my inability to realize my own intention or my inability to convince someone else to faithfully project that intention if I had realized it. Most of my plays have been realistic, with solid, recognizable themes. If I have had difficulties in achieving my intention, how much more difficult it must be for men writing what is called the new drama , where theme is deliberately veiled and concealed, where the symbolic is open to numerous interpretations, and where dialogue, action, and setting are implicatory rather than explicit. Messrs. Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Pinter, Genet, et al., must live in a veritable hall of mirrors where every problem known to the conventional playwright is multiplied ad infinitum. I implore you to help them all you can. But we’ll return to that later. Actually, it was a toss-up whether I would become an actor or a playwright. I became the latter because I am slightly knock-kneed. I’d had two of my plays already done on Broadway, with no financial but some critical success, and to make a living as an actor. I’d heard that Norman Bel Geddes was interviewing young men for his Raymond Massey Production of Hamlet. So I went over there and found myself with about a hundred other eager applicants, tall, short, skinny, fat, all sorts of shapes and sizes. Mr. Bel Geddes addressed us from the orchestra (we were standing on the stage). “I have no doubt,” said Mr. Bel Geddes, “that you are all excellent actors. But before I read any of you I must satisfy myself of one thing. I am determined that this will be the most beautiful ‘Hamlet’ of all time from every standpoint. And as I cannot abide legs that look anything less than perfect in tights, will you all kindly remove your trousers, please.” I looked around at the hundred other chaps unbuttoning and unzipping, said to myself, “This is a hell of a profession for a man,” and walked out. I’ve never acted since. For a while, I told myself it was my sense of personal dignity that prompted me to walk out of an acting career. But in my heart I knew it was those slightly knocked knees that never would have gotten by Mr. Norman Bel Geddes. So thereafter I concentrated on playwriting. As a profession playwriting has one tremendous advantage over all others. The overhead is very small. All you need is a pencil, a pad of paper, and an idea. The first two items are relatively easy to obtain. Where and how does a playwright get this idea? Well, first he has to be ready, emotionally and intellectually, to receive it. Then some pieces of information, or incident or image triggers it off. In my own case, the sight of a rope dangling from the branch of a huge, blasted dead oak (I think it must have been once part of a child’s swing) started me thinking about the subject of lynching. That was the beginning of The Tree. Seeing a group of young German Jewish refugees in London, one of them with his head bandaged, launched me on Birthright.⁵ Once during the Depression, waiting in a cubbyhole lawyer’s office at two in the morning while a young barrister called various judges in an effort to get a writ of habeas corpus to spring a black sheep uncle out of jail, I saw a list of fourteen names on the glass door. I asked the young lawyer who they all were. “My partners,” he replied. Six weeks later, I completed the first draft of See My Lawyer.⁶ Fearful Decision,⁷ first performed on the United States Steel Hour program, and later made into the MGM picture, Ransom!⁸ about a father who refuses to pay ransom for his kidnapped young son, was the result of a vague feeling many years ago that Lindberg had been morally wrong in dealing with the people who stole his child. Then when Mr. Greenlease, twenty years later, also paid, with the same heartbreaking result, I was prompted to do some research in the FBI files. I was staggered to discover that six out of ten times a kidnapped person is recovered, whether the ransom is paid or not, and paying the ransom, if the child is still alive, often causes his death. Whereas if the parent refuses to pay ransom the criminal knows there will be no profit in what he is doing and may think twice before committing murder. As you see, there are a variety of things which stimulate the playwright’s imagination in choosing a theme. For a pro who is often given the theme and story, the most effectual stimulation, of course, is the sole requirement to produce palpable work. Next comes the task of selecting the proper stimulation in which that theme can best be exploited. Here we run into one of the immutable laws of playwriting. There are thirty-six dramatic situations, no more, no less. I am prepared to make a bona fide offer of one hundred thousand dollars to anyone who can find the thirty-seventh for me. Do it and that hundred grand is yours. Before seizing your pencils however I think I must warn you not to spend the money before you have received and deposited it. Here is a quote from a fairly inventive new drama practitioner, the author of Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Schiller took great pains to find more than thirty-six situations, but he was unable to.” By the way, there is a most interesting book called the Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations by George Polti, published in 1916,⁹ which every aspiring young dramatist should own. It is the secret Bible of the playwriting profession. And the despair. That elusive thirty-seventh situation is the Holy Grail, the Alchemist’s Stone, for which we all continue to search. There is a story about the great jazz trumpeter, Bix Beiderbecke. During a jam session, he suddenly burst into tears. His fellow musicians tried desperately to console him, but to no avail. “Don’t carry on like that, Bix,” said one of them. “That note you’re tryin’ to blow ain’t on the trumpet.” Incidentally, the so-called new dramatists, no matter how far out they get, have not yet blown that note. Every one of their plays falls into one of those thirty-

six situations. Waiting for Godot, for instance, situation number one: Supplication to a power whose decision is doubtful. Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, situation Number Twenty: Sacrifice for an ideal; Pinter’s The Caretaker, situation Number Seven: Falling prey to cruelty or misfortune, or the unfortunate robbed of their only hope. I could go on. So the playwright reconciles himself to the fact that he is telling an oft-told tale and seeks to make his personal statement novel in terms of style. This is particularly difficult in Hollywood where mass production relies so heavily on the stereotype. Once when I was telling a producer a story I had cooked up for a Wallace Beery vehicle, he interrupted me indignantly. “No, no!” he exclaimed. “It doesn’t go that way. It goes this way!” In other words, not only were there only thirty-six situations but only one way to tell each situation, the way it had always been told by that studio. Innovation in the not so old days of Hollywood was anathema. Rodgers and Hart once sold a story to MGM called I Married an Angel.¹⁰ One day, Louis B. Mayer, who hadn’t read it, asked the story editor what it was about. The editor told him. A man says he wouldn’t marry a woman unless she was an angel. Whereupon an angel flies in the window, he marries her, and his troubles begin. LB stared at the story editor incredulously. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “An angel flies in the window, a real angel?” “A real angel,” the story editor assured him. LB shook his head grimly. “We’ve thrown out our money,” he said. “We can’t make it.” “Why not?” asked the bewildered story editor. “Because it couldn’t happen!” shouted LB. It might interest you to hear the rest of the story. When Rodgers and Hart learned that the studio had shelved their story, they bought it back for a pittance and made it the basis for a successful musical which ran for two years on Broadway. It was then once more bought by Hollywood and made into a film. By what studio? You guessed it. MGM. Yes, playwrights do have the most amazing problems. So now let us assume we have our theme and our situation. Characters take shape to participate in that situation and we draw them from prototypes we have met going about the daily business of living. We are ready to begin writing. And here we must pause and take a deep breath. Ferenc Molnár has put it brilliantly. “The only thing irrevocable about a play,” he said, “the only thing that cannot be changed, is the decision to write it.” In other words, the third act can be strengthened, funny lines can be made funnier, scenes can be cut or added, but the project is doomed if it carries in the original concept the seed of its own failure. So before plunging in we ask ourselves the fateful question. Should I or shouldn’t I? Really, there’s no way of knowing. You might as well toss a coin. Naturally you want the play to be a hit. But what assurance have you that the subject matter is timely, attractive, or whatever it is that makes people want to pay money for the privilege of witnessing it? You see a play like Tobacco Road with its cretinous, verminous characters living in filth and moral degradation. It makes five million dollars and runs five years. That must be what the public wants, you think. Then along comes a nice clean wholesome sugary play like Life with Father and it makes ten million dollars and runs ten years. Aha! That’s what the public wants. Lindsey and Crouse, the authors of Life with Father, must have thought so too. Because they wrote another play, just like Life with Father, called Life with Mother, and it flopped. I ask you now. Is there any other profession where doing what was done successfully is just about the best way to be unsuccessful? So we write the play. During this time, the men of my profession are not pleasant people, no more than an elephant in labor can be expected to be pleasant. Some playwrights work fast, others slow. Ionesco takes two days, I hear. Sidney Kingsley, on the other hand, takes years, patiently building his structure, as though it were a house, brick by brick. Sometimes he writes one line of dialogue a day. In my youth I used to write quickly, completing a play in three days. Unfortunately, some of them sounded like that. Now I write more slowly, probably because I have enough sense to be scared of the consequences. Sometimes, especially in motion pictures, you write with a collaborator. Let me assure you there is really nothing more enjoyable than stretching out on a sofa after a good lunch in a studio commissary and listening to the tapping of your collaborator’s typewriter. Naturally, there are times when you fight with your collaborator. This is not only to keep up appearances but serves a definite aesthetic function. After all, if collaborators don’t disagree there’s one collaborator too many. A typical Hollywood incident in which I was involved might be illuminating. Samuel Goldwyn was producing Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper.¹¹ He hired me and then introduced me to my collaborator, Herman Mankiewicz. “Herman’s great on story,” said Sam. “And I hear you’re good on emotion.” I had never worked with Herman before, only met him fleetingly a few times socially. I soon discovered that Herman, a brilliant raconteur, was also a two-fisted drinking man at times and this was one of those times. He rarely came to the office. So I ploughed on by myself and had completed about forty-five pages of screenplay when Herman and I were called to a conference in Mr. Goldwyn’s office. Sam had discovered Herman’s dereliction from duty and castigated him violently. “You’ll never work again in Hollywood,” he told him. Then he turned to me with an expression which I interpreted as one of gratitude and admiration. “So,” he said, picking up the forty-five pages, “you’ve done these all by yourself!” I nodded modestly.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “I think it’s awful. I’m going to get Dorothy Thompson to do the screenplay.” I left, somewhat chastened. That night, Collier Young, Goldwyn’s assistant, called me. “Sam had to say that because he didn’t want to hurt Herman too much, they’re very old friends. Just stand by and as soon as Thompson gets to town, you’ll go back on the script and work with her.” I felt better. I waited. And waited. Two weeks later, having heard that Dorothy had arrived and was at work, I called Collier. “I meant to call you,” he said. “I don’t think things will work out exactly the way we planned. I mean, it’s this way. Dorothy’s working with Herman Mankiewicz.” Assuming, however, that nothing of that sort happens and the play or screenplay, either with or without a collaborator, is written, at that moment when you would think a playwright’s main difficulties are over, they actually only began. Getting a play on, for instance, is a miraculous confluence of circumstances involving a particular producer’s taste, or lack of it, finding the proper cast, a theater, which is today increasingly difficult, and a thousand other factors over which the playwright has absolutely no control. Again assuming all this is somehow accomplished, rehearsals, and the playwright’s ultimate agony, begins. I once wrote a play with an insurance agent, Mike Wallach, about the insurance business.¹² In its original form, it was a lovely satire on American business. Herman Shumlin, who bought it, insisted on bringing in a very talented man named George Haight to help with revisions. During those revisions and during the rehearsal, the play grew from eleven scenes to thirty, and the cast from fifteen to fifty. It took three revolving stages beautifully designed by Donald Oenslager to contain all the action. By the time the play opened our lighthearted spoof was something between The Miracle and Getting Gertie’s Garter. Robert Benchley’s review in the New Yorker is now quoted as a classic piece of modern criticism. Benchley wrote, “It was a triumph of lumber over a good idea.” What could I have done about it? Do about it? I aided and abetted the slaughter because I lost sight of my own intention. I listened to the great Herman Shumlin’s theories about comedy (his forte was the sort of play Lillian Hellman writes) and let myself be convinced when all the time in my heart of hearts I knew everything was going to pot. My only consolation in the whole affair was that representatives of Warner Brothers practically forced us to sign a contract for the motion picture rights for a sum just ten minutes before the curtain went up opening night.¹³ So you see a playwright’s profession isn’t as hard a crust as it’s made out to be. And things do go right aesthetically, too, at times. Laura Bowman, a magnificent Negro actress, on the opening night of “The Tree” suddenly began to chant a long dramatic passage she had previously only spoken. The effect was electric. It was a hundred times better than I had ever imagined it could be. On the other hand, I have had an actor on an opening night suddenly slow down his performance, so that by contrast with the swift pace of the other actors he would draw attention to himself. It’s an old trick. Watch out for it. I’ve had actors in my plays whose minds went blank, who lost their voices, who introduced carefully concocted revisions on opening night which they’d made no previous mention of. To say the least this was somewhat disturbing to the rest of the cast as they waited for cues which were no longer in the play. Directors represent a special problem. For every one like George Abbott, who is a writer himself, and the original dreamboat,¹⁴ there are dozens who butcher and manhandle your scripts beyond recognition. Even good ones can make dreadful mistakes. Alex Segal is considered a brilliant director. He did the United States Steel Hour version of “Fearful Decision” and it was nominated for an Emmy as the best written screenplay.¹⁵ He also did the motion picture version.¹⁶ When he came to Hollywood, I buttonholed him and cautioned him about a serious pitfall I saw looming up. In the shorter television script, the savage intensity he evoked from the actors was endurable. In the motion picture, which would be exactly twice as long, I cautioned him to take it somewhat easier. Or else he would wear out his audience before the climax. He disagreed. He was going to win an Oscar his way. Exactly what I’d feared happened. It was, I think, a good film, but it could have been a great one. I am picking these incidents at random to give you some idea of the problems that beset the professional playwright. But, I realize, time is limited, and I’ll close with a few thoughts that have helped me and might help you as we play our respective roles in this wonderful, terrible world of make-believe. Never kid yourself. If you’re doing something for commercial reasons, admit it to yourself. Do the best job you can under the circumstances. A real pro knows when he’s in there to carry the champ and when he’s in there to knock his block off. Playwriting is my profession. I write for money. But not all the time. There are times when I remember Sainte-Bueve’s marvelous definition of a masterpiece and try to achieve it. “A masterpiece,” he said, “is that work in an accepted art form, which reveals, where all had seemed known, a new aspect of the human heart.” Thirty-seventh situation or no thirty-seventh situation, that’s what we’re all trying to achieve, the new men in their way, the older boys in ours. It all comes down to answering a single question. Does this book or symphony or painting or statue or play enable the people reading it, or listening to it, or looking at it, does it enable them to participate in a worthwhile experience? I’m sure you realize I’m not necessarily using the word “worthwhile” in a moral or educational sense, but in the sense of that which quickens my emotion, deepens my understanding, and enriches my life. If the drama can do that, if a play can do that, it will always be new. I would now like to announce the title of my next plays The Thirty-Seventh Situation.

Deus Ex Machina, 1965 Model (1965) Invited Address, 1965 If Variety, the show business trade paper, had covered the plays in the amphitheaters of ancient Athens a typical review might very well have been captioned: Greeks gimmick gaga . Anachronistic? Not at all. For Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, et al., were no less gadget-happy than our present-day James Bond scriptwriters. As one who has worked on the screenplays of all four Ian Fleming novels to be made into films, I find a measure of literary balm in knowing that the old Greek masters who rocked the cradle of the drama were also not above resorting to mechanical devices. Invariably, when they enmeshed their hero in a particularly sticky situation, they would fall back on the old “machina.” This was a kind of crane or derrick used to fly actors playing gods or goddesses on stage a la Peter Pan. Said divinity would extricate here from his predicament and fly off again. The Romans later called this bit “deus ex machina,” the God from the Machine. It was the granddaddy of all the gadgets and gimmicks we dream up for the Bond films. Naturally we’ve chimed a lot of changes on the classic idea of a contraption rushing a super-being to the rescue. James Bond, super stuff too, personally operated most of the machinery and usually rescues himself. Occasionally, however, lesser mortals like Felix Leiter of the CIA are permitted to help out a bit. A case in point is in Thunderball when Felix saves Bond by pulling him up through the blowhole of an otherwise sealed underwater cave. Felix either winches him out by helicopter or utilizes the fantastic new US Army Skyhook technique. At present writing, it hasn’t been decided which. But save him he will and in the latest scientifically exciting way. All Ian Fleming’s characters are larger than life, including his villains. So it is only fitting that they, too, should have at their disposal the gadgetry to implement their outsize diabolism. Fleming himself revealed in fast new cars, boats and planes, and was fascinated in adapting the latest scientific developments for the secret agentry gimmicks, both offensive and defensive, with which he galvanized his stories. In Thunderball, for instance, he had his villains use an enormous hydrofoil in their plot to hijack the atomic bombs and blackmail the governments of Great Britain and The United States for a hundred million pounds. We’ve gone Ian one better by adding a false superstructure to the hydrofoil, thus disguising it as a much slower conventional yacht. At the touch of a button the superstructure can be jettisoned, enabling the unencumbered hydrofoil to achieve its maximum getaway speed and leave the US Navy wallowing in its wake. But not James Bond. He pursues and overtakes the hydrofoil in a still later development in boat building, a Hovercraft, which skims along above the surface on an air cushion. The struggle for power has become a contest between men using all the marvelous machines made possible by technological progress. No small part of the success of the Bond films can be attributed to their reflection of this hair-raising condition of contemporary life. Presented in terms of exciting entertainment audiences somehow find it all enormously rewarding. They never seem, even momentarily, to be appalled by the implications of eventual destruction to the planet. I suppose we can thank the old Greeks for that too. They called this magical, identifying yet escapist ability of the audience “empathy.” It enables them to participate in peril without danger, violence without pain, love without the morning after, tears without sorrow. The only price they ever have to pay is for admission. A spoil-sport part of me sometimes whispers that I am merely explicating popular mechanics oiled with sex and sadism. It may be so. I can only plead it’s just as much fun for me as it seems to be for the public. It takes considerable research and constant alertness to news of industrial and military devices which could conceivably be useful in Bond’s adventures. Sometimes a device like the laser beam in Goldfinger can replace Fleming’s more conventional circular buzz saw. And I think the all-purpose exploding attaché case is From Russia with Love was an improvement on the gun in the binding of a volume of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. So too the electronic and nuclear establishment we gave Dr. No lent itself to more exciting action than Fleming’s birdfertilizer processing plant, whimsical though that might have been. And, of course, Fleming’s version of the Aston-Martin in Goldfinger was a mere child’s toy compared with the complex lethal weapon it became in the film.¹⁷ In other instances, gadgets have suggested episodes not in the novels. In Thunderball, among others, we use radioactive pills taken internally to emanate impulses which can be picked up to locate our missing hero. He also carries a plastic hood, coated with silicon, which extracts just enough 0 from H20 to enable him to continue breathing and survive for the few crucial seconds he needs to escape man-eating sharks through a water-filled tunnel. We also screen the latest developments in military techniques and equipment. The sensational Aquaparas, stationed at Fort Orlando in Florida, frog-men-parachutists used primarily in air-sea rescue work, suggested an entirely novel way of handling one aspect of the climax in Thunderball. In the book Fleming used frogmen surfacing through the escape hatch of a nuclear submarine. We felt that was no longer newsworthy enough to produce the series of shocks and thrills we wanted. In the opening of Thunderball, Bond escapes from the thirdstory balcony of a French chateau by jet-pack, soaring away and over a broad expanse of lawn to the safety of his

car, parked strategically behind tall hedges along the road. The episode is not in the book. It’s in the film only because there is such a device in existence and it cried to be buckled onto James Bond’s broad back.¹⁸ I hope I haven’t given the impression that I am solely responsible for including all these gadgets and gimmicks in the films. Everyone connected with them is on the lookout for striking new devices. It’s the writer’s job, however, to integrate them effectively into the action. He has to do that first, on paper, then the director does it for real. The British Secret Service, MI6 particularly, for which Bond works, has what Fleming calls “Q Branch.” It develops the espionage and counterespionage devices Bond and his fellow Double 0 agents use. Eon Productions, which produces the Bond films, has what amounts to a Q Branch too. All of us who work for Eon belong to it. Even relatives are allowed in. And some have come up with the best ideas we’ve had. Naturally none of these suggestions would ever appear effectively on the screen without the superb talents of Eon’s technicians. In a hot war I’d much rather be bucking Ml6’s Q Branch than Eon’s. And I’d vastly prefer to cope with M than with Messrs. Broccoli and Saltzman, Eon’s producers. Their showmanship with these infernal machines is only equaled by their demand for more of them! They are willing to spend considerable sums required to achieve the very latest, positively most sensational thrills ever to be flashed upon the screen. And I’m not sure that isn’t the main reason they’ve captured a world audience of such rabid fans. I’m pretty sure James Bond and his gadgets will be with us for a long time. As overt war becomes increasingly unthinkable, governments will more and more resort to clandestine conflict which can be denied officially. The era of the Secret Agent is only dawning, and his doings, both real and fancied, will continue to interest the public. Most fascinating of all will be the equipment yet to be invented with which he will fight his country’s battles, and which Eon Productions will immediately snatch up for its next James Bond film.

On Writing the Bonds, 1965 1965 I had turned in the final draft of the Goldfinger screenplay and was about to leave for London Airport and the plane to Los Angeles. At the door of his office, Harry Saltzman, who produces the James Bond films with his partner, Mr. Broccoli, shook my hand. “Thanks for knocking your brains out for us,” he said, then quickly corrected himself. “I mean for letting us knock them out for you.” The emendation was the customary ploy to minimize the writer’s efforts as a basis for negotiating future deals with him, but in this instance actually bore some relevancy to the fact. A certain Hollywood magnate once turned down a suggestion his studio make a costume film about Lord Byron with the classic remark, “The public won’t go for pictures where a guy writes with a feather.” Today, of course, we use electric typewriters, but the conventional image of the writer at work is still that of a suffering isolate, concentrated to the point of self-hypnosis. My association with the Bond films began several years ago when Mr. Broccoli, a close personal friend for whom I had worked on such English films as “The Red Beret” and “Cockleshell Heroes,” called me from London. He was embarking on a new venture, filming Ian Fleming’s marvelously exciting suspense novels, and wanted to know if I would write the first screenplay in what he hoped would be a highly successful series. I had read all the books and enthusiastically accepted. It didn’t occur to me at the time that my background in the theater, motion pictures, and television indicated I was a rather sensible choice for the assignment. I had written spoofs of the insurance business¹⁹ and the legal profession²⁰ for the Broadway stage, and close to forty screenplays. They include dramas, westerns, service stories, comedies, and thrillers. I had also been a producer at Paramount and the Executive Producer of MGM TV. In the event it turned out that my previous professional experience had evidently prepared me to handle and combine four of the five essential elements in the James Bond scripts: suspense, action, comedy, satire. The fifth, unabashed sex, is added, I presume, by sheer sublimation. More important, perhaps, is that I had become something of an expert on the heroic. Three of my films were for Wallace Beery, five for Alan Ladd. On the screen Beery and Ladd were poles apart in personality and appearance, but like Sean Connery, authentic, larger-thanlife presences. When they said, “Nobody comes through this door,” nobody ever did, and the audience believed it. Their aura of command was undeniable. I left for England. There it was quickly decided the first film would be Thunderball. After several congenial conferences with Mr. Broccoli and Mr. Saltzman, I went to work. I have that script in front of me now. It wrote easily, followed the book closely, took six weeks to complete, and was pronounced acceptable by the producers. It then transpired that Thunderball had become the crux of complicated litigation between Mr. Fleming and Mr. Kevin McClory. Mr. McClory claimed, and rightfully as events subsequently disclosed, that the novel was based on a screenplay he had written with another writer and that Mr. Fleming had not properly credited them. Broccoli and Saltzman felt it would be unwise to proceed under the circumstances. They set Thunderball aside and selected Dr. No as their kick-off opus. Unlike Thunderball, Dr. No was a monster to lick, especially under the modus operandi which began to evolve during the preparation of the screenplay: The US Method. After the sensational success of Dr. No it became standard operating procedure on From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball when we got around to it. The US method operates in the following manner. After I write and submit my first draft of the screenplay, revisions are discussed in committee. Put baldly this is essentially a group attempt to hammer out a final shooting script. The writer is both the anvil and one of the sledges. He participates as a clangor in this nerveracking anvil chorus while simultaneously recording it. The wear and tear on his psyche is understandably harrowing. It reminds me of the married vaudeville team whose act featured the wife balancing large rocks on her head as her husband shattered them with a crowbar. One day he regretfully informed the management the team would have to develop a new turn because his wife had broken down. “Fractured skull?” the booker inquired sympathetically. “No,” replied the husband. “Fallen arches.” Who are the US? On Thunderball, to which Mr. McClory had been given the screen rights by Mr. Fleming, my chief assailants, as usual, were my esteemed producers, Mr. Broccoli and Mr. Saltzman. They had joined forces to produce Thunderball with Mr. McClory because they wanted the property and he wanted Sean Connery who was under contract to them. Socially affable, amusing, likable men, professionally they are savagely determined. Mr. Saltzman, mercurial, quick-thinking, continually interrupting, spouts hot ideas like a geyser. Mr. Broccoli, on the other hand, is volcanic. His eruptions, preceded by ominous rumblings of discontent, are infrequent but devastating. Mr. S is inclined to first reject ideas not his own but can usually be persuaded. Mr. B accepts them readily unless they conflict with his own ideas fixers. Mr. B is hipped on Bond’s gadgets, Mr. S on Bond’s dames. Both clamor for “bumps,” thrills, shocks, surprises, a concept of Alfred Hitchcock’s. Both are concerned with Bond’s image as a super sleuth, duper-brawler, super-lover. Both dislike too much dialogue and press for action! Action! Action! Together they mount a formidable opposition. Mr. McClory, new to the US method, soon learned to participate in his own paradoxical Irish way. Alternately stubborn and elusive, he belies my secret name for him, The Banshee, with shrewdly maintained convictions. An expert skin-diver, his suggestions on that aspect of the film (about 20 percent of it takes place underwater) brooked no contradiction. Naturally he had many preconceived ideas in other areas of the story for the very good reason that he thought it up in the first place. Complicating matters was the fact that he had his script and I had mine and I had amalgamated them trying to combine the best features of both.

Aiding and abetting the producer contingent was Terence Young, the director of Dr. No and From Russia with Love. Guy Hamilton had spelled him on Goldfinger. Mr. Young, deceptively casual, masks considerable erudition and conscious artistry behind an Old Pro manner. A writer himself, his demands usually involve what he calls “Bondism,” and ways and means of achieving it in dialogue and action. He dotes on sex-play, spectacle, refined varieties of mayhem, and Bond’s invaluable safety-valve quips. Like all directors he holds the whip hand and the rest of us know it because he is the man who will stand closest to the camera. “Cut—and print!” is the final say. Next in the US is Mr. Ken Adam, the Production Designer, the only one we all, Mr. Adam included, admit is a genius. After “Dr. Strangelove” and “Goldfinger” his place in that category is assured. Burdened by the manifold aspects of physical production he is only an occasional combatant, but his appearance always contributes heavily to the overall pressure on the scenarist. The specific feud between Mr. Adam and myself is whether scripts are written to tell a story or to exhibit sets. Finally, there is the film editor, the unsung hero of Bondiana, Mr. Peter Hunt, who joins the US whenever some projected idea which outrages his impeccable filmic sense is somehow brought to his attention. Naturally there are ground rules for our conferences. Most important is that everyone is expected to say exactly what he thinks. The wildest notion is encouraged. It might suggest discussion of some unusual but more practical one. The amenities are dispensed with. Lacerated sensitivities are ignored and forgotten immediately after the melee ends. The floor belongs to whomever at any given juncture can either command attention by his fervent cogency or by the simpler expedient of shouting loudest. Broccoli, Saltzman, and myself are Americans, McClory and Young, Irish, the others British. National characteristics are submerged in the general clamor, tempers lost, good manners waived. And all this is accompanied by an obbligato of insistently ringing telephone which Mr. Saltzman seems incapable of not answering. Is it necessary? Apparently, it is. The scripts are unusually complex. The most difficult problem is preserving a swift, more or less coherent story progression while working into it the special hijinks eagerly anticipated by the fans. How they love the fantastic villains, the posh locales, the nonstop sex, the torture scenes, the incredible escapes, and above all, the gadgets. Each of the US fights tooth and nail for his own conception of how to accomplish variations on it all. I defend mine to the point of exhaustion. If I am overwhelmed, I try to support the alternative suggested by someone else which I hope will best preserve my original intent. When the rumble is over, I lick my oozing wounds and set about revising the sequence in the light of what has been decided. And because writers can somehow irrationally rekindle their faith in what they are doing by doing it, I start believing it and myself all over again. All the Bond pictures are brain-busters before they become blockbusters. Each one is expected to top its predecessor and thus far has. Comparing the present Thunderball script with the one I wrote four years ago I realize how much we have been influenced by audience reaction. We sensed what we had in Dr. No but were honestly not prepared for the kind of acceptance it received. That response told us what aspects of Fleming they enjoyed, and more importantly, how they wanted his stories treated. Dr. No was a murder mystery, Goldfinger a man-to-man duel, From Russia with Love and Thunderball suspense yarns, but all of them are similar in style and our attitude toward them. The common denominator is dead-pan spoofing. We know it, the audience knows it, yet they are perfectly willing to alternatively believe and disbelieve what is happening on the screen. A case in point is the scene in Goldfinger after the hilarious chase of the trick Aston-Martin by Goldfinger’s minions. Literally gales of laughter continue while Bond and Tilly, trapped, tumble out of the car. Tilly runs for cover as Bond holds off their pursuers with his trusty Walther. Odd Job appears, removes his fantastic ironbrimmed bowler and scales it after her. It hits the back of her graceful swanlike neck and kills her. Instantly, there is silence in the theater, silence as dead as Tilly. A girl has been killed, impossibly, ludicrously, yet the audience accepts her death as real and tragic. Why? Obviously, because they want to, need to, so they can continue to participate accordingly in a story they find entertaining. We can be as wild and illogical as we please, provided we now and then pull the balloon down. The tie between James Bond and his audience must never be strained beyond the snapping point. Occasionally, he must behave as lesser mortals do. In From Russia with Love he brutally slapped Tania around because he thought she was involved in the death of his friend, Kerim. He reacted like a recognizable, normal human being. Thereafter the audience could again blast off with him into orbit. Characterizing Bond in Thunderball posed a problem that had not completely materialized when I was working on the previous scripts. There is hardly a comic who has not attempted a takeoff on him. All of them in my opinion have fallen flat because you can’t spoof a spoof. There have also been numerous more serious pseudo-Bonds on television and the screen. All this imitation, I feared might create a stereotype, which, ironically, I wanted somehow to avoid. How? Characterization isn’t time for anything but a few bold strokes. For a misguided moment, I was tempted to accept the stereotype by letting Bond spoof himself. A spoof of a spoof of a spoof, I decided, however, would be fatal. But I do have Felix Leiter reply to Bond’s “I still say it’s impossible!” after he has been miraculously rescued from a sealed underwater cave, “Sure it is. For anyone but Double 0-7.” Eventually, I decided to rely on Sean Connery’s undiminished impact on his audience and kept him as he had been. His James bond is the real one. Another must for the Thunderball script was thrust upon it by the audience. Their delight in Bond’s gadgets is even greater than their fascination with his girls. It all started with when I gave Bond a Walther to replace his Beretta in Dr. No. The all-purpose exploding attaché-case in From Russia with Love led to the incredible AstonMartin in Goldfinger, probably the most talked-about prop in the history of motion pictures. Obviously, the US had to come up with something approximating it in Thunderball. I think we have although this time it belongs to the opposition. Wait till you see Largo’s ninety-knots-an-hour, hundred-ton hydrofoil disguised as a fifteen-knots-

an-hour conventional yacht by a false superstructure which it sheds in emergencies. Additionally, there are numerous smaller but even more ingenious Q Branch devices and contraptions. Incidentally, Q, whose line in Goldfinger, I never joke about my work, double-oh-seven!” got one of the biggest laughs in any of the films, is emerging into one of our favorite running characters. An enormous radioactive pill, issued to Bond so that his whereabouts can be detected by a special receiver which picks up its emanations, evokes a few comments from both Q and Bond which we hope will be equally memorable. Satyriasis is psychiatrically defined a “excessively great sexual desire in the male.” Our James is afflicted by it, in a nice sort of way. His amours, even when motivated by professional reasons, are countenanced and encouraged by his audience because he so obviously enjoys them. Vicariously, of course, so do they. Only two girls have ever resisted Bond. Tilly Masterson, because she got killed before she had time to think about it, and Miss Moneypenny, perhaps because she really loves him and is holding out for matrimony. In a way we use her to pull the balloon down, as I explained before. There is always one Stonewall Jackson a guy can’t make out with. But Sylvia, Miss Taro, Honey Ryder, Tatiana Romanova, the gypsy girls, the dancer in the tub, Jill Masterson, and Pussy Galore all succumbed. Thus US, to a man, never stop trying to throng the screenplays with successors to these assorted people. It is the one script necessity all are agreed upon. However, this, too, presents problems. When Bond kills by shooting, stabbing, or clubbing, the US feels they have failed. He may have a license to kill, but he should do it imaginatively. Similarly, Bond’s romantic propensities must not be exercised in ordinary ways. In Thunderball, he consorts with three ravishing young ladies, English, French and Italian. For the first time, one of them will make love but not thereafter be his devoted, willing slave. Fleming’s villain in Thunderball, Largo, never rises to the stature of Dr. No, Red Grant, or Goldfinger.

A Review of the Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart (Presentation at Kehillat Israel Synagogue [Jewish community of Pacific Palisades], 1965) A lecture presented at Kehillat Israel Congregation, Pacific Palisades, California, 1965 When Rabbi Winokur asked me to review The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart, I was understandably reluctant to accept. Firstly, my background in Jewish history and Jewish literature is not extensive, and secondly the book is tremendously important and I stood in awe of it. I’m not sure I can do it justice. To prepare myself, I read reviews by other people. Here is one of Ronald Cassell, Professor of Pragmatic Philosophy at St. Beowolf’s College in Manchester, England, and author of the Rational Syndrome. I quote from professor Cassell. The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart is undoubtedly one of the most savagely irreligious books ever written. Its theme is quite clear. There is no God, or if there is, he’s a lunatic and only another lunatic could possibly believe in him. Professor Cassell continues, “I assume you’ve all read the book and know it’s about the legend of the LamedVovniks, the thirty-six so-called just men whose presence on earth underwrites God’s continued interest in the world. When the last Lamed-Vovnik perishes, God, like Pontius Pilate before him, will presumably wash his hands of the whole human mess and turn his attention, hopefully with happier results, to Mars or Venus. The story follows the descendants of Rabbi Yom Tov Levi of York, elected to Lamed-Vovnik status for cutting the throats of his own wife and children to prevent them from being sprinkled with holy water. It follows the rabbi’s unlucky descendants through experiences that make those endured by Voltaire’s Candide seem like idyllic interludes, from the twelfth century to the twentieth, when last of the just, an ineffectual masochist called Ernie Levy voluntarily surrenders himself and dies in a Nazi gas chamber.” But where Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide chirps blithely, “This is the best of all possible worlds’ to excuse the presence of optimism about human conduct, these pathetic Jews, suffering unspeakable martyrdoms, merely keep distractedly tugging at their beards asking, ‘Oh, Lord, why do you make the world such an insane asylum?’ And well might they ask. If God is all powerful, then he, not Hitler, decreed the murder of six million Jews in the ovens of the concentration camps. Why? Because the Jews are his chosen people. Because he loves them. Obviously, as I began this review, God is a madman. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.” There is another review which appeared in the Tamarisk, a small Israeli magazine written by Zvi Neiman, who, as a mere boy in the Stern Gang, participated in the assassination of Count Bernadotte. He is the author of many articles on activism and the secret manual for terroristic tactics. Recently he was visited in Safed by Rabbi Kahane of the Jewish Defense League. Neiman’s review, in part, reads: The Last of the Just is a chronicle of futility. The author has completely missed the point about the Jewish predicament. Actually it is a saga of shame and cowardice, a record of sustained debasement and ignominy unequalled in the history or the human race. Never has a people submitted so mildly and supinely to its own destruction, to the rape of its women, and butchery of its children. Sophistry and hypocrisy, masking cowardice, provided the rationalization for accepting dishonor and universal contempt. We are the good, the meek, the just, the gentle, the hope of the world, says Schwarz-Bart. We are more Christian than the Christians. We turn not one cheek but millions. We are the original peaceful demonstrators. Long before Ghandi’s Hindus we stretched our necks under the knife and told the executioner, ‘Strike!’ Six million in the gas chambers. Incomprehensible. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Was ever a people meeker and milder? How un-Jewish could Jews become? I condemn this book as a pandering to the concept that the gentle Jew is somehow the hope of the world. The gentle Jew’s name is not Jacob, but Christ.” Here is yet another reaction to The Last of the Just. It was written by Wolf Hundt-Radowsky in his literary quarterly Judenspiegel. published in Buenos Aires where Hundt-Radowsky lives in exile. I quote from his review. “André Schwarz-Bart, the author of this insidious subversive novel, has resorted to the usual Jewish literary devices to distort and misinterpret. Good becomes bad, black becomes white, truth becomes falsehood. In no other pursuit has the criminal Jewish mentality expressed itself so subtly as in literature. The noble task of either converting Jews or exterminating them is always characterized by wily Jewish scribblers as the deluded, demented, depraved activities of psychopathic hysterics or morally defunct political opportunists. From Pharaoh, through Tiglath-Pileser, Titus, King St. Louis, Torquemada, Jose de Capistrano, Chmelnicki, to the epitomic and ultimate social crusader Adolf Hitler, any effort to purify the human race has been denigrated and falsified. In this instance Schwarz-Bart has chosen to use the clap-trap about the thirty-six just men, a murkily symbolic meaningless folk fable, to disarm the public about the true aspects of Jewish syndicalism. That, of course is truthfully described in the exposes of The Protocols of Zion. The talk of the so-called thirty-six “just men” is merely a pinch of dust thrown into the eyes of the world to obscure the actual conspiracy of the Jews to conquer it. Today, with the State of Israel their unsinkable aircraft carrier, it is all the more important for us to make The Protocols available to every schoolchild. The antidotes to a poisonous book like The Last of the Just are still castration of Jewish men, relegation of Jewish women to brothels, and eventual genocide. As an example of the bias evident in The Last of the Just, nowhere in it are there scenes of Jews conducting ritual murders, raping nuns, poisoning wells, desecrating the wafer of the host, preparing Passover matzos with Christian blood, or perpetrating any of the many other outrages they inflict upon the long suffering world. Instead we have a ludicrous attempt to evoke sympathy and even respect for this degenerate species whose continued existence on the planet condemns us to nuclear war, pollution, communism, free love, cancer, and all the other problems that beset us. As a final indication of the basic untruthfulness of the book there is absolutely

nowhere in it the fact that Jews have a characteristic offensive odor. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. By now I’m sure you’ve guessed I’m indulging in a hoax and concocted the three foregoing reviews myself. The Last of the Just is a book that operates on many levels and numerous reactions to it are not only suggested but obligatory. Incidentally, a Hundt-Radowsky actually wrote a treatise called, Judenspiegel in 1891. We could have gone on with imaginary reviews by a Marxist, a Hasidic Jew, a Freudian analyst, etc., each of whom would speak from his special position and, of course, like all specialists, grind his own axe. Incidentally, I felt a little squeamish about this method of approaching The Last of the Just because it might be interpreted as an attempt to be, quote, “clever,” and this is a book of such depth and majesty, an attempt at mere cleverness wouldn’t be clever at all but merely bad taste. I risked that however to try to give an impression of the book’s breadth and depth. Like life itself it cannot be encompassed by a single viewpoint. Which, in the last analysis, I now must attempt. What is a viewpoint? I’m an agnostic who likes chicken soup¹. That is to say I like many things about Jews, their homemaking, their cooking, their humor, their love of learning, their loyalty, and their astonishing bravery except for inexplicable periods when they seem to be transfixed into inaction by either the weight of their sorrows or Hamletism carried to its ultimate reductio ad absurdum. I am also a practical writer and producer in the commercial entertainment industry—although I occasionally feel the urge to write a poem as I did when I was younger and purer in heart or a play with no thought of only selling tickets, which I also did in my earlier days when I agonized more about man’s inhumanity to man and was determined to alleviate some of it by writing. Schwarz-Bart has done in this book what I once dreamed of doing. Why he and not me. It’s very simple. André Gide said it very succinctly. “A man of talent does what he wants. A man of genius does what he must!” SchwarzBart is a genius. As a man of some talent I would like to write the screenplay and produce a motion picture based on Schwarz-Bart’s book, despite the considerable difficulties that would entail. The problems of compressing such a wealth of material into a coherent story encompass-able on film; the problem of not exhausting an audience emotionally long before the last fade out; of finding a director and actors to implement Schwarz-Bart’s apocalyptic vision; to say nothing of finding the money to finance and distribute such an unmitigated chronicle of woe as The Last of the Just. Actually I believe that such a picture should be made and in the long run would be commercially successful. I repeat, this is a picture that should be made, and periodically released from now to the end of time as a memorial and reminder of what has been and must never be again. The Holocaust. Which the feckless mind of man is letting slip away out of his memory, out of his living brain cells and nerves, to be fed into the impersonal computer statistics of history. Even some Jewish children know nothing about the six million. Why should this be? Personally I think it’s because the Holocaust is almost impossible to explain. Even convoluted theological reasoning cannot, in the last analysis, explain it. The Talmud says that God knows the thoughts that will be in the brain of a man even before the man and his brain are conceived. So God knew all about Adolph Hitler’s final solution long before it was put into effect by Himmler, Eichmann, et al. And yet it was put into effect. No heavenly marines came to the rescue at the last minute. The Talmud tries to resolve this problem by saying that God permits man free choice of good or evil. Personally I think this is a cop-out thought up ex post facto to get God out of a pretty sticky predicament. I was once told by a distinguished archeologist that during the reconstruction of an excavated building which was being attributed to the eighth century BC a fragment of statuary was found which was known to come from a later date. So the fragment was simply thrown away to keep the selected date of the edifice consistent. In the same way theological systems can be kept consistent by either throwing away or adding a fragment. Anyway, we don’t tell children very much about the Holocaust because we can’t answer “Why?” Not in the theological terms anyway. The greatness of Schwarz-Bart’s book lies not so much in content as in treatment. Recently I’ve read several other books about Jews and Jewish history. Werner Keller’s Diaspora, which I found engrossing from an informational standpoint, but did not make me weep. Uris’s QB VII held me from a suspense angle. Who was the mad doctor who experimented on the inmates of the concentration camp? Again I neither wept or sang. I’m afraid Mr. Uris’s rather journalistic style doesn’t do much for me along those lines. He’s just not a very good writer. But The Last of the Just is a great artistic achievement. All through the book, I kept saying to myself, “This man writes the way Chagall paints.” The writing has both clarity and mystery. Both pity and irony. Both sophistication and simplicity. In the movie I would like to make there would be beautiful triangular love-story, Ernie Levy, his forbidden strange woman, Use Bruckner, and the slightly maimed Golda, one of his own. The other, only slightly less important relationship, would be between mother Judith and Mordecai. And the enemy would include not only the monstrous Dr. Mengele, et al. but also the confused and eventually heartbroken gentile teacher, Herr Kremer. There is no time now to go into the marvelous roster of other characters threaded through the novel. The problem here, would be one of selection to keep the film a practical length. I’m afraid I must end with the obvious. How do I know The Last of the Just is a great work of art? It made me sob. It knotted my throat almost unbearably. I experienced a true catharsis, the objective of all tragedy. I was purged and cleansed by emotion. But let’s not end on such a lofty sentence. I once attended a show on Second Avenue. A musical comedy in Yiddish. Like all shows of its kind, although it starred Menasha Skulnik the great Jewish comic, it had interludes about blind girls, pogroms, reunions in America after twenty year separations. The audience, as it left the theater, were handed cards advertising the show which they were asked to send to friends, perhaps adding something on them about the play. One card had been blown up to billboard size and was featured outside the theater. It reads, “ Best musical comedy I ever saw. Cried my eyes out. ” MacArthur said there was no substitute for victory. I say there is no substituting anything to measure André

Schwarz-Bart’s victory but tears.

¹ It would be apparent to all who knew Richard Maibaum that his epigrammatic characterization of his view of theology was minimalistic and at least in part, facetious. He did reflect, in years earlier than 1965, that, “Well, I really don’t know for sure what is Out There,” a not infrequent comment at the dinner table. However at the time of a historic visit to London in the early 1970s, he met with Rabbi Dr. Ignatz Maybaum of London, a distant relative, considered by some one of the leading Jewish theologians of the twentieth century and by some, the leading Jewish theologian of Europe in the twentieth century. He had been a noteworthy member of the Conservative Movement in England and then a member of the Progressive Movement (Reform in the United States) in Judaism there. The two observed that, whether you like it or not, if Man doesn’t believe in a God that wants you to be moral, he will ultimately pursue nothing but self-aggrandizement and there isn’t anything much to keep him decent. Later, in the 1970s, while watching a science program on television in Los Angeles, - for he was interested in all things – he remarked, “Looking at all these marvelous creatures out there, all these animals, you just have to believe that some Superior Intelligence created all of this. I can’t believe that all if this just happened by chance.” It is probably fair to say that what theology he had, changed over time in some respects and eludes easy description by others.

On the Economics of the Motion Picture Industry (Presentation before Dixon Harwin’s Class, Economics, California State University Northridge, 1972) University guest lecturer presented to the class of Professor Dixon Harwin, Economics Department, California State University, Northridge, California, 1972. Let me quickly confess that my expertise in Economic Theory is practically nonexistent. Despite a BA and MA from the University of Iowa, and a Phi Beta Kappa key, the only course in the subject that I ever took was way back there in the dark ages in high school. All I remember about it are phrases like Supply and Demand, Gresham’s Law, and Marginal Utility. My wife, who went to high school with me, somehow kept all her textbooks. Our economics teacher’s name was Ms. Moran and she particularly liked reading the following: “Marginal utility is determined by the usefulness of the least important unit of a series of goods. For instance, Robinson Crusoe had four sacks of corn, each exactly alike. One he reserved for food; one he seeded; one he fed to the fowls, thus adding meat to his diet; and one he fed to the monkeys whose antics amused him. By which of the four uses does he measure the importance of a sack of corn? To ascertain which is the least important suppose one of the sacks is lost. Obviously, it is the sack which feeds the monkeys.” “The antics of the monkeys which amused him.” What an apt description of the entertainment industry. Of all the manifold needs we have as humans, food, shelter, clothing, etc., etc., obviously “entertainment,” specifically stage, screen and TV, is the least necessary for absolute survival. Consequently, the economics of show business (i.e., the antics of the monkeys to provide amusement) is a rather unimportant aspect of the total economic picture. However, it’s the one that affects me most directly. As the bumpkin shepherd in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, says of his simpering girlfriend, Audrey, “A poor thing, my Lord but mine own.” So if I’m to say anything at all about economics, it has to be related to the entertainment world. Along with the relative unimportance of showbiz economics, is the traditional unreliability of the statistics concerning it. My favorite story about that deals with the cashier of a Broadway theater playing a dismal attraction. I mercifully omit its title and star. Anyway it was an unmitigated financial disaster. One evening the total box office take from tickets sold was exactly eight dollars and fifty cents. Eight dollars and fifty cents. A new low. After the curtain fell and the audience of five departed, the cashier walked down the street and ran into the cashier of another theater. “Do you know how much we took in tonight?” he asked his friend. “The absolute bottom gross of all-time— $9.50!” Exaggeration in figures announced by show business are notoriously unreliable. Methods of bookkeeping are bewilderingly suspect. Pedro Armendáriz, a great matinee idol in Latin America, once told me he kept a battery of relatives in the book office to check the total (he worked on a fifty-fifty basis with the management of the theater). They put every second peso taken in into a peach basket. Before the curtain went up and he made his first appearance they brought the basket to his dressing room. Then he went on stage. That was bringing things down to essentials but accurately describes the atmosphere in which money matters are conducted in even the highest echelons of the entertainment world. No one really turns to anyone else. It’s still the milieu of the carnival, the fair, the amusement park, where moral and ethical standards are those of “gypsies, mountebanks, and charlatans.” If you detect a tinge of bitterness in these observations, I assure you it is intended. I have written about forty films, including six James Bond films. Variety estimates the overall worldwide gross of the forty films somewhere around three hundred million dollars. Along the way numerous gentlemen have become millionaires from that. But I assure you I haven’t. Why not? Because I am essentially an artist and not a businessman. Perhaps I should have taken a lot more courses in economics with Professor Harwin. But even if entertainment is not a large segment of our economy it is an important one. Man does not live by bread alone. We need circuses too. And despite the definition of marginal utility which indicates that amusement is not the most important of our needs it is significant that the amusement industry, except in the severest of depressions, often exhibits an amazing resistance to downward economic trends. As one economist put it about 1933, “We went to the movies and waited for the New Deal to come our way.” And that was before the welfare state, unemployment compensation, and Social Security. With, all that today the industry is further insulated against bad times. There are other paradoxes which apply. For instance, in other forms of endeavor the law of supply and demand seems to apply. Undoubtedly it also applies to the motion picture industry. But exactly how does one determine what the demand is? Show business thrives on novelty, innovation, surprise, the unexpected. Who would have anticipated that in this era of sex and violence in the theaters Love Story would become the greatest hit of the decade? Or that my own James Bond films, tongue-in-cheek, campy spoofs of secret agentry, would become the most successful series of films ever made? There were countless spy films before. Even those of us concerned with the production, writing, etcetera, have been astounded by the overwhelming audience response. Personally I believe the answer lies in the fact that in the character of James Bond we provided a heroic figure with which audiences could identify and escape from their own humdrum existence into the exciting never-never land of high adventure, romance, and wish-fulfillment of all their extravagant impossible fantasies. That’s a commodity too. When I talk like this you can see how bewildering the entertainment world must be to sturdy, practical, down-to-earth bankers and businessmen.

Because in the last analysis we fantasists could dream all our impossible dreams and that’s exactly what they would always be, dreams, idle fancies, no more, without the hardheaded guys who make things happen, these very scorned bankers and businessmen. The men who ask what, who for, how much, etcetera. So let’s get down to the subject Mr. Harwin asked me to discuss: Economics of the Motion Picture Industry. Suppose you wanted to produce a motion picture. How would you go about it? First you’d have to know what kind of a film you wished to make. You’d have to buy a story (a novel, or a play, or a screen treatment) or an option on it. In the old days (when many years ago six major studios ruled the roost) you’d have had very little chance of swinging a deal unless you were a very experienced and successful producer. Now if you find a good story, a writer to develop it, and a star interested in playing it, most studios will evaluate your project and either accept it or turn it down. Experience helps but isn’t absolutely necessary to get a favorable decision. With a script and a star they like, the studio or producing/distributing company will finance you. That means they will borrow the money from a bank at 8 percent and then charge you 10 percent. Let’s say your film has been budgeted at a million dollars. The studio will not proceed until you have convinced some other financially responsible person or corporation to put a bond guaranteeing what is called end-money. In other words, if the production costs exceed a million the guarantor will pay for the overages. For this he of course receives a percentage of the film gross whether he eventually has to put up the money or not. The director, scenic artist, cameraman, etc., are then hired, sets built, and shooting commences, either in the studio or on location, which can be in the US or overseas. Recently overseas shooting has been preferred because a film can be made less expensively there. The film is then shot, edited, scored, advertised, and released. Release arrangements vary. Whatever they are, the company which put up the money takes up to 40 percent of the gross of film rentals (what the exhibitor pays to show the film in his theater). Film distribution includes the cost of prints, transporting them to theaters, advertising, publicity, etc. Actually the cost is considerably less than the up to 40 percent they charge so about 20 percent of the gross rentals goes into the pockets of the producing distributing company as gravy. From the other 60 percent of the gross are deducted the cost of the production, and other charges such as interest on the money borrowed to pay for it. What is left is then split between you and the company at a prearranged division, usually 50 percent to you both. If a picture costs a million, it has to gross two and a half in film rentals to break even. After that you’re in profit. Very few films ever get there. But the companies rarely lose because they’ve taken their “distribution” cost of 40 percent or so off the top before all the other bookkeeping begins. Of course there are big runaway hits which make fortunes. As I said however, most films lose money for everybody but the distributors. Films were originally badly hit by the radio (1922–1927) but managed to make a comeback when sound pictures came in (1927). The TV has almost finished films. One hundred million tickets used to be sold for films every week. Now, there are about twenty million, mostly to people between ten and twenty-five years old. Other countries whose motion picture industries have run into difficulties are assisted by the government by subsidies or various plans to augment the gross of a film through remitting part of the tax on theater tickets to the producer. Various attempts have been made in the US for similar relief but to no avail, despite the fact that other industries are in effect supported or subsidized by government help, the airplane industry, agriculture, mining, oil, for instance. The big stumbling block seems to be that reactionary elements want censorship of the content of films before investing in them. In England, there is no such control, except for a very few prohibitions concerning what they call “preservation of good taste” (i.e., you can’t insult the queen in a film and get the government to partially back you). So there you are. Make Easy Rider for six hundred thousand dollars and become a multimillionaire. Except that fifty others tried to imitate Easy Rider and fell on their faces. Why? Because mine is the only business where if you do what was successful over again you’re sure to fail. That’s what makes it so dangerous, so fascinating, so infuriating, so fabulously rewarding for some, so abysmally defeating to others. It’s a business where the stakes are high and the players in the game ruthless. The economics of it are bewildering but apply to every facet. For instance, the Academy Awards. They are economically valuable, adding millions to the grosses of the films that win them. So is censorship economically oriented. When the industry is rolling along making millions in happier days they could afford the luxury of a Hays office Code, or a Johnson Code, or a Valenti Code. Then when TV made things tough everybody got less interested in safeguarding morals, etc. In order to lure people back into theaters, they had to make more salacious, prurient, sexier, violent pictures. In 1955 the Bond films were unproduceable because of the sex and violence in Fleming’s novels. In 1961, they were mild in those departments. Morality, I’m afraid, follows the buck. At least in motion pictures. However, there is a bright side. The theater, that is, plays produced in New York and toured by traveling companies throughout the country used to be pretty awful. Then came the movies which became the big entertainment popular form, supplanting the theater. For a while the theater almost went under. Relieved however of supplying the popular, mass entertainment, the theater became great, producing Eugene O’Neill, Edmar Rice, Sherwood,²¹ Maxwell Anderson, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, etc. The same thing has been happening now that TV has taken over from the movies. The motion picture industry will be smaller, will attract fewer patrons, but is and will become better and better, more artistic, more truly reflective of the country’s best cultural aspects. Those of us who work in the industry may not make as much

money but we just may find more fulfillment and satisfaction artistically and spiritually. We’ve gotten far away from economics at this point, but what is it all about if America’s business, as Calvin Coolidge said, is only business? I’m a dub golfer, as Professor Harwin well knows, but I’m sure he recalls Walter Hagen’s wonderful remark. “Take the games seriously, but don’t forget to smell the flowers as you go along.” If there are any questions you have, and they’re not too technical from an economic standpoint, I’ll be glad to answer them. But remember, what I said about the unreliability of show business statistics. So check my answers. (Laughter from audience followed by applause)

Low Moral Tone and All That Jazz, or Gatsby Revisited

Low Moral Tone and All That Jazz (or Gatsby Revisited, 1973) 1973 “Gene Tierney,” John Farrow insisted quietly. He was a handsome towheaded Australian with China blue eyes and a cool, smiling, faintly derisive manner that both charmed and infuriated. “Betty Field,” I responded stubbornly. We were in Production Head Henry Ginsberg’s office at Paramount sometime in February 1948. Henry was about to take off for a Hawaiian vacation and wanted the part of Daisy in The Great Gatsby cast before he left. I had produced The Big Clock with John directing and the studio had reteamed us for “Gatsby” despite a few restrained personality conflicts. On the set, John sometimes held off people who approached him by poking them in the chest with a cane he carried. He poked it once at me. The next time I spoke to him, I had provided myself with a baseball bat from the prop room. Thereafter, the armed truce between us worked reasonably well. Our dispute about the choice of an actress to play the enchanting but faithless Daisy Fay had cogency on both sides. We were agreed that the character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and the screenplay I had written from it with Cyril Hume was a beautiful, glamorous, unstable girl. Farrow however placed more importance on the glamour and beauty than I did. Hollywood was full of beautiful girls. I wanted more, an actress who could handle what has been called “the disharmonic chatter of the twenties,” the authentic sound of the feckless, disillusioned lost generation. Then, too, Daisy’s own voice, as described by Gatsby himself “has money in it.” What we needed was a fine actress who could make believable the obsessive love she evoked from him. Poor boy turned mystery man, bootlegger actually, Gatsby’s fabulous campaign to win Daisy back from the polo playing, multimillionaire socialite for whom she jilted him is merely amusing unless motivated by the idealism which makes it heartbreakingly romantic. Henry Ginsberg, impatient with our impasse, and for whatever reasons of his own, turned to me. “You’re the producer. Cast it your way. I’m going to Hawaii.” Then he started toward the door. John beat him to it. “I don’t direct pictures under conditions like that,” he told him calmly. “Find yourself another boy.” He walked out. A moment later, he stuck his head back into the office, grinned, said “Aloha, Henry,” and was gone. I assume John went back to his Beverly Hills home, to his lovely, talented, actress-wife Maureen O’Sullivan, and their five breathtakingly beautiful small children. One of them was called Mia. I was reminded of all this several months ago when Paramount announced that Mia Farrow was replacing Ali McGraw as Daisy in their current remake of The Great Gatsby. Unhappily, John died several years ago, and although Mia seems more like Betty Field than Gene Tierney, I guess, somewhat irrationally, that John has the last word. Elliot Nugent, who replaced him as the director, was enthusiastic about Betty. He later confessed he had reservations about our other star, Alan Ladd, but said nothing to that effect at the time. Nor did he tell us, as he does in his biography, Events Leading Up To The Comedy,²² that he was mentally disturbed during his employment. He once actually went up onto the roof of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and almost jumped off. Personally, I never got that close to the brink myself but Gatsby was a labor of love and frustration from the start. World War II had ended, the O. S. S. had opened its files, and all the studios in Hollywood wanted to make films about it. After four years in the army I signed at Paramount as a writer-producer, and O. S. S., with Alan starring, beat in everybody to reap substantial profits. People had warned me about Alan and his wife Sue, saying they were tough to work with, but we got along marvelously. We soon became personal friends and one day when my wife and I were visiting them Alan took me into his bedroom to show me his wardrobe. He must have had about sixty suits and seemed pleased when I looked duly impressed. “Not bad for an Okie kid.” He laughed. “Eddie Schmidt makes most of them for me.” Like an echo in my mind, I heard Jay Gatsby say, “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.” And I remembered the scene in the book where he piles a profusion of monogrammed shirts on his bed for Daisy and she begins to sob. I glanced at Alan opening closet doors containing shoes and ties and got goose pimples. Here was Jay Gatsby of East Egg, Long Island, born Jimmy Gatz in a small Midwestern town. There was the same carefully cultivated speech and the manly controlled voice, the strong, slim athletic body, the enigmatic smile. And a certain self-consciousness, wonder, perhaps, that Hollywood stardom, like Gatsby’s reputation as a host and a nabob, had descended upon him. There, too, was an essential goodness, decency, loyalty, and a concealed romanticism. One of the problems with Alan during the shooting of a scene was that he refused to remove from his finger the wedding ring Sue had given him. It had to be taped and covered with flesh-colored makeup. Alan Ladd as the Great Gatsby? Why not? I knew Paramount still owned the novel, having made it originally in 1926. with Warner Baxter. I got Alan and Sue to read the book. They both liked it, particularly because it would be a change of pace for him from the usual action stuff, and an opportunity to prove he was more of an actor than Hollywood thought. We approached the studio with the idea. The studio was unenthusiastic. This was in late 1946. F. Scott Fitzgerald had been dead since 1940. So it seemed, except in the hearts of a few devotees, were his out-of-print novels. His reputation was at its lowest ebb. The Jazz Age he celebrated was regarded as an aberration. But I saw a similarity between what was happening in 1946 to what had happened to

the country in 1920 and with Alan and Sue’s help kept badgering the studio until it agreed to let us prepare a script. We did. Then the roof fell in on us. Or perhaps I should say the Breen Office. We were informed the script was totally unacceptable. The overall objection was that like the novel it had “a low moral tone.” Specifically, it violated the Code then in effect because it dealt with adultery, unpunished manslaughter, glamorized a gangster, depicted excessive use of liquor, undermined the institutions of marriage and the home, lowered moral standards, presented impure love as attractive and beautiful, etc., etc. There was more to it than that. F. Scott Fitzgerald was anathema to Breen and the Legion of Decency. They had banned his screenplay, “Infidelity,” and the subject matter of his novels in general represented everything they opposed as screen entertainment. Furthermore, Fitzgerald had antagonized many producers in Hollywood during the numerous times he visited or worked there by his obvious contempt for it. We found an accumulated resentment toward him and his writings which went far beyond the usual operation of the Code. There then began an exchange of memoranda and a series of meetings, either in my Paramount office or at the Code building. I remember conferring with Joe Breen, Geoff Shurlock, and Jack Vizzard, sometimes individually, more often in concept. Breen himself, perhaps because he wanted to make sure I didn’t think he was personally a prude or a blue nose, habitually used risqué language. Shurlock and Vizzard were more circumspect and I sensed a certain sympathy for my predicament but they were powerless to alter the strict application of censorship. I argued desperately that the Great Gatsby was actually a morality play depicting the dire results of irresponsibility, Joe Breen had a well-known, crafty ploy for that. Where was that he called “the voice of morality”? I replied the message was self-evident. Gatsby and two other Fitzgerald novels, The Beautiful and Damned²³ and Tender is the Night,²⁴ were really versions of the Faust story. A man makes a pact with a devil of some kind to attain either a woman, a fortune, or even another’s happiness. He achieves what he sought and then discovers he has wrought his own self-destruction. There’s only slight justification for this interpretation but I was desperate to get the film made and fell into Joe Breen’s trap. “Make that clear to the audience,” he said. “Cut out the explicit code violations, just infer all that jazz, clean up the characters a little, and we’ll see what we can do for you.” He then suggested a prologue, another of his famous gambits, and I fell for that one too. I suggested we start the film at Gatsby’s grave, years after his death. On the tombstone would be an appropriate biblical quotation, originally requested by Gatsby’s understanding friend, Nick Carraway. “Great!” said Joe. “What’s the quotation?” It took me almost a month to find one: Proverbs 14:12. “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” It seemed apt enough at the time but I think now it was anti-Fitzgerald, too explicit, too much on the nose. Fitzgerald wasn’t a moralizer. When you pailed things down like that you lost his elusive quality. The beauty of his writing was always somewhere on the periphery of his narrative, never near dead center. So I made a pact with my particular Devil, Joe Breen, with whom I was now quoting scripture. Perhaps I shouldn’t have made the film with the limitations he imposed. Ten years later a similar situation occurred when Cubby Broccoli sent me several of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels to read. We decided against them at the time because the Code was still operative and we felt that cutting out the sex and violence would damage 007 irreparably. Several years later when censorship had relaxed I wrote six of the Bond films for Cubby and we were glad we had waited. In that regard I’m afraid I served Fleming better than I did Fitzgerald. Incidentally, I only met Fitzgerald once and Fleming several times. I respected them as authors but didn’t care for them much as people. I thought they were both snobs. With the green light from Breen I revised the Gatsby script. There were more meetings, more memoranda. Sometimes I felt that the studio people were in cahoots with Breen to delay production because they had doubts about it. They weren’t sure how Ladd’s audience would like him in an uncharacteristic role. Even when Breen finally approved a draft of the screenplay, “subject to viewing the completed film,” the studio held back. They used the script as a carrot to make Alan do several other films, each time promising that his next would be Gatsby. Finally, after two long years of this he rebelled and threatened to take a suspension. That did it. Elliot Nugent asked for a few more good revisions and we put together the rest of an excellent cast: MacDonald Carey as Nick Carraway, Barry Sullivan as Tom Buchanan, Ruth Hussey as Jordan, Howard da Sylva as Wilson, and a young slender bombshell Shelly Winters, as Myrtle. We had a surprisingly difficult time digging up the cars and props of the twenties.²⁵ The unfamiliar hairstyles and clothes were subjects of continuous controversy. Nugent and myself were all for recreating the Jazz age as it was but here again the studio chickened out and insisted we do nothing too outlandish. The flat bosoms of the flappers, for instance, were definite no-nos. Somehow we got started shooting and things went surprisingly well. Although Elliot seemed a bit indecisive the cast was so professional scenes played well and even the laundered Fitzgerald characters began to emerge with reasonable effectiveness. Our only troublesome incident came from, of all people, Alan Ladd himself. One day, deep into the schedule, Elliot called me and asked me to come to the set. His voice sounded particularly agitated, hysterical almost. I hurried over and found things at a standstill. The scene not being shot was the very one I mentioned before where Gatsby shows Daisy his shirts. She breaks down, admits she’s never forgotten him, still loves him, promises to leave her husband, and he takes her in his arms and kisses her. Elliot looked at me with stricken eyes. “He won’t kiss her!” he told me. “He absolutely, positively refuses!”

I looked around for Alan. He was nowhere in sight. “Where is he?” “Locked in his dressing room.” I left Elliot jittering and knocked on the dressing room door. Alan growled that he didn’t want to be disturbed. This was very unusual behavior because he was always most cooperative. I finally got him to let me in. “What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Has Betty offended you in some way?” He shook his head. “She’s lovely,” I went on. “I can’t believe she’s physically repulsive to you. So why won’t you kiss her? The scene has no ‘topper’ without it.”²⁶ “I’ll level with you, Dick,” Alan finally replied. “I get thousands of letters a week from my fans. Lots of them are kids. And I don’t kiss married women in my pictures.” I stared at him incredulously, eventually found my voice. “But, Alan,” I pleaded, “you and I have dreamed about making this picture. For two years we’ve battled like hell for Gatsby. And you know as well as I do it’s a story about a man who tries to take a woman, his long-lost love, away from her husband. How can you sit there and tell me you won’t kiss her?” “I just know it’s wrong for me,” he said. “As an actor, I mean.” I argued with him for an hour, but he never kissed her. Of such are the Kingdom of Heaven. And so was our Gatsby. To show how far the pendulum has swung the other way there’s a scene not in the novel Francis Ford Coppola has put in the present script, Gatsby and Daisy in bed together making love. Goodnight, Joe Breen, wherever you are. Despite studio fears our versions of Gatsby did well financially although the reviews were mixed. Critics differed much as John Farrow and myself had about Betty Field’s Daisy. Some thought she was perfect, others that she was subtly wrong. Alan, for the most part received surprisingly good personal notices. In spite of everything he vindicated my hunch that he and Gatsby had much in common. Several reviews warmed our egos. Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune. Eileen Creelman of The Sun, Wanda Hale of the Daily News, and Alton Cook of the World-Telegram all gave us raves. They said things like “One of the finest American novels has been given a brilliant screen translation… The flashback has rarely been employed so superbly…a motion picture of genuine distinction…a savage pace which is irresistible to filmgoers of any generation… Everyone concerned can congratulate himself on one of the important achievements of his career…one of the year’s really good films…” Ironically one critic complimented us on having remained “remarkably faithful to the original.” My own satisfaction stemmed from what Charles Brackett²⁷ of sainted memory to all screenwriters said to me. “You’ve personally started a Scott Fitzgerald revival.” There’s an even greater one at the moment. Besides Paramount’s new remake of Gatsby with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, MGM has just announced doing Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.²⁸ The fashion magazines are increasingly featuring the Gatsby Look. The new Fitzgerald groundswell is unmistakable. The one we began seems a long time ago. Compared to the girl of Last Tango in Paris our unkissed Daisy Fay seems a little like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.²⁹

On the Dedication of the E. C. Mabie Theater (University of Iowa, 1973) Speech Given at the University of Iowa, September 1973 Dean Stewart (Interviewer): I’d like now to introduce to you another alumnus of the University Theater program, Mr. Richard Maibaum. He was an undergraduate here and received his master’s degree in 1932. 1932 was a good year, it’s already been mentioned and, I could go ahead even and say that that was the year that I received my master’s degree, except that I am afraid that it would bring in too-bold attention the disparity between the degrees of fame and success that Mr. Maibaum and I have achieved. I graduated about the same year, but that’s about all I can say at this point. Mr. Maibaum is famous all over the world as a writer producer. He has written well over one hundred scripts for the stage, the movies and TV, and himself, has produced many of these scripts. He was for many years executive producer for MGM TV, and over the past twenty years he has spent much time in Europe as well as in Hollywood, occupied with the writing and producing of the James Bond series. And it all started way back in the early 1930s, when the Boss³⁰—as he says, as Sydney said, the Boss produced a play of his, The Tree. Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Maibaum. Richard Maibaum: Dean Stewart, oldsters, youngsters, and friends, this occasion was conceived of, as a happy one, and it is. Of course, it would be happier if Grace Mabie was here with us. But this is a theater, a place of illusion, so let’s just pretend that she is. I am a little at a loss here because Clay Harshbarger had told me that I would speak after the unveiling of the picture³¹ and I had geared my remarks to that, but anyway, I’ll try to adapt to the situation. I was asked to represent Mr. Mabie’s students. I can’t do that. You know the Japanese play, Rashomon, which is a threecharacter play and is told three times—each time from the viewpoint of one of the characters and, of course, there are three completely different versions. So everyone of Mr. Mabie’s students has his own particular relationship with him. You know, I’ve seen a photograph of the portrait, and it’s very, very good. Matson sent it to me. It’s very, very good. At least it’s a picture where you don’t say, “The frame is marvelous.” From the picture, there is an image of the Boss as a rather academic-looking gentleman, a sort of professorial looking gentleman, and that was one aspect of him, no doubt. But the images of the Boss I have carried around with me all these years are somewhat different. I have some favorite images that come and go and have sustained me and have enriched my life and my career and I’d like to tell you about a few of them. One of the most vivid, is when we did “The Hairy Ape,”³² which is one of the Boss’s favorite plays and I was playing Yank, and the play was pretty ailing and we were coming toward the first rehearsals and lo and behold we did it over at McBride’s Auditorium³³; and the Boss strode in—someone else was directing his play now you know—he had on corduroy trousers, hunting boots, a flannel shirt rolled up to his elbows. He says, “Now, let’s get this play on the road.” And he went after us and he battered us, and he bashed us and he screamed at us and he kicked at us and he shook that play and us to pieces and he infuriated us and he, he insulted us, and he wheedled with us, and he coaxed us, and he cozened us and he wooed us. In my own case, he’d say, “Maibaum [in a loud voice], I want you to hit the back wall of McBride Theater.” One of the lines was that Yank always said, “Speed, twenty-five knots an hour.” “That belongs, that’s going somewhere.” He had me there for a half an hour saying, “Speed, speed, speed.” He said, “Speed, speed, speed,” and he had me simply exhausted. There was one scene where Yank has to become enraged at a girl who has come down there and looked at him, and looked at him in such a way, that he says later, she looked at me like she thought I was some kind of a hairy ape or something, and he takes a shovel and he wants to throw it after her and the five other fellows in the…great big husky fellows picked for being stokers, they were supposed to jump on Yank and subdue him. Well he didn’t like the way the scuffle was going. So behind my back he told these five or six other truck drivers to really jump on me and I found myself fighting for my life on the stage of the McBride Theater. I was never in such physical peril in my life. But by the time this session was over, and it lasted from about eight to about one, the play had come to life. It came so such life that Kenneth McGowan,³⁴ who came here to see this play—he was one of O’Neill’s producers, he was one of O’Neill’s friends—he gave an interview to Daily Iowan and, he said, “Parts of The Hairy Ape, as played by the University Theater last night, were more poignant than those in the Broadway production.” That’s the kind of theater that the Boss wanted from us. That’s the kind of theater he had in his heart, his brains and his guts. He was a very, very brave and courageous man. He did a play of mine in 1931, in a tiny, little theater in the basement of the Memorial Union, called The Tree,³⁵ which was the first American play about lynching and the first American play about lynching ever done on Broadway. The next year, he did a play of mine about euthanasia. He did a play of mine about the Nazis, Birthright³⁶; one about stage censorship which in some instances could have been considered even anti-religious because it was the church in Massachusetts at that time that was at the forefront of stage censorship. Incidentally, Professor Gillette designed for that play the best set I’ve ever had for any one of my theatrical productions, play or theater. It was simply a magnificent design.

And in 1940, when this was a difficult thing to do in this state, he did a play of mine called—right here on this stage—called “Middletown Mural,” which I directed, about American Fascism, in which we pulled no punches. This man was afraid of nothing. This man wanted theater and not just the “Regional Theater” which he spoke a lot about, but I always had a feeling that Mabie talked about Regional Theater, because somehow it made it more palatable to an agriculturally oriented legislature.³⁷ Something about the Iowa soil and the people of Iowa and “the horny-handed sons of Dole” and so forth, and somehow he could get through what he wanted by putting it in this guise. He was a very prejudiced man; He was prejudiced against fools, whom he did not suffer gladly. He was prejudice against the untalented and the indolent, and he was prejudice against the fellows who wouldn’t play his way on the team. And, brother and sister, if you didn’t play the Boss’s way of his team, you got off the team and you got off quick. I have so many memories of him, so many talks that we had, at Smitty’s³⁸ after the shows, at our homes when he would visit us and when we would visit the Mabie’s. He was really such a strange man, as Sydney has said. One of the most emotional men that I have ever met in my life. He would hear a line of dialogue, or of poetry, or strand of music at a rehearsal or see a child, and his eyes would fill with tears. It was all so close to the surface and I think sometimes that this tough, rough exterior was there to cover all of this up. The last time, the last image I have of the Boss—he had gone to a meeting in Los Angeles of I think it was one of the National Theatre—before I go on, I want to say that of course “the Boss” had help, tremendous help from Dean Seashore.³⁹ And, incidentally, where is there a Carl Seashore Building on this campus? But anyway, he had great help from Carl Seashore. He had help from Arnie Gillette, he had help from Hunton Selman,⁴⁰ he had help from Sam Becker⁴¹ later, and all the people that he felt were worthy of his trust and his companionship in this venture to bring theater to this city and to this university. I will go back to the last time I saw him and he had not been well. So I took the opportunity to invite him to be my guest for a few days, and he accepted and we spoke. We spoke about many things, and incidentally one of his great sorrows which he didn’t speak about too many people, was that the Federal Theater got mired down in politics and didn’t outlast the Depression, because he felt in it the seeds of a truly great national theater that would have existed beyond the Depression. And time came for him to return to Iowa City, and when he got to the airport, he was in not good shape. So he allowed me, very reluctantly to call for a wheelchair. And he sat in a wheelchair and he said goodbye and when you see the picture, you will see a kind of a shy smile on his face and in the picture it is not quite as mischievous as his smile could be. He looked up and said, “Well, Dick, goodbye” and the porter rolled him away and he never looked back. Grace told me about two or three weeks later—had told me that he had passed away. And so he was gone. This indomitable, unique, irreplaceable man. I think it was Ben Johnson, who in a preface of one of the Shakespearean portfolios, speaking of a portrait of Shakespeare that was in the beginning of the portfolio. He said, “Look not at his picture but his book.” So today, let’s paraphrase that here, and let’s say, look both at his picture and his theater and the magnificent Hancher Auditorium down the bank of the River⁴² a bit because without the Boss and what he did, and the climate he created, that beautiful auditorium would not be there either. (Applause.)

Alan Ladd (1978) 1978 Three weeks after the release of Paramount’s This Gun for Hire, starring a virtual unknown, Alan Ladd, the studio had received three thousand fan letters for him. A month later it was almost five thousand a week and continued at that rate for many years. Even in an industry accustomed to runaway successes this was phenomenal. And all the more unusual in that he played the role of an unsympathetic professional killer for which the studio had forced him to dye his naturally blond hair black. After his stunning initial impact on Hollywood his wife and agent, Sue Carrol Ladd, who had been a star in her own right, insisted he appear in the future as a blond despite the then prevailing casting cliché that romantic leading men should be dark, Viz Valentino, Gilbert, Navarro, Colman, Gable, et al. Sue’s instinct was sound. Both as a performer and a personality Alan’s appeal was essentially low-key. Black hair would have been too vivid for his quiet, modulated voice and restrained facial expressions. Like Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda, Alan was a born underplayer but unique in that he was also unusually athletic. A onetime West Coast Diving Champion, with a slim, slight but perfectly proportioned body, he was undoubtedly the most graceful American actor since Douglas Fairbanks. He didn’t so much walk as glide. In O. S. S., the first film we did together, which I wrote and produced, the script called for him to race at top speed across several fields, jumping over fences and stone walls, in a hopeless attempt to rescue Geraldine Fitzgerald from the clutches of The Gestapo. Without losing the impression of agonized desperation he still was able to project a beauty of leap and stride that was breath-taking. Throughout the other four films we worked on I was continually impressed by his fluidity of motion and the deft way he threw or evaded punches, scaled a wall, rode a horse, landed by parachute, danced, swam, held a girl in his arms, I could go on and on, I never saw him make an awkward or clumsy gesture. Or an unmasculine one. As an actor I thought he was much underrated. Like Spencer Tracy, Bill Powell, and Cooper, he was incapable of exaggeration. All of them were photogenic in the best cinematic sense. They had the perfect motion picture mask. Even their eyes were slightly veiled. Many fine stage actors have never made it in Hollywood because of the broadness of their expressions. Conversely, there are those whose expressions fleet too swiftly over their faces to register effectively on film. Alan’s restrained projection of emotion was not so much controlled by conscious thought but limited by physiognomy. He had precisely the right degree of facial muscular play. But he was, despite some adverse criticism as an actor, a “conscious” performer. His stardom was no accident. He knew what he was doing and what was right for the scope of his personality and screen persona. In O. S. S., the director asked him to cry when he discovered the girl had been captured and probably executed. He thought about it, then quietly decided to play the scene dry-eyed. “It wouldn’t be me,” he told us. On film I’m sure his mute grief actually reflected deeper emotion than would have been achieved by weeping. All actors have tricks. Tracy gazed steadily, then blinked. So did Bill Powell. Barrymore did a variety of eyebrow lifts. Cagney a variety of scowls. Alan would keep his head down and his eyes slightly hooded. At the proper instant he would look up slowly, simultaneously widening them a little. The effect was a deepening mood and interest. He also allowed an enigmatic gentle half-smile to flicker momentarily over his lips. It always evoked interest in his thought process. And he held interest by the brisk but somehow still quiet authority in his deep manly voice. Alan was even more conscious of his physical routines during action sequences. He meticulously choreographed them. Time and again, I watched his work with a director’s suggestion and improve it with defter, cleaner, more playable movement. Invariably, it added excitement and interest. Incidentally, he did his own stunt work and particularly enjoyed that aspect of filmmaking. All the stuntmen working for other actors in a film with him were his special pals. He used to play cards with them and invariably lost. Deliberately, I think. As in life, big men in the movies usually project strength and gentleness. Alan wasn’t big but measured up to those who were when he played with them. There have been three very different personalities I’ve written for who could say, “Nobody comes through that door!” and make an audience believe it. They were Wallace Beery, Sean Connery, and Alan Ladd. I personally think it was a mistake for the studio to try to conceal Alan’s actual height which was somewhere around five six. Cagney, Bogart, Robinson, Garfield, and others proved that lack of stature does not necessarily limit star appeal. In Alan’s case the deception with the help of lifts, platforms, specially designed sets with stairs and ramps, etc., was unfortunate in that it contributed to his own dubious image of himself as an actor. If he had made it “as himself,” his confidence would have been greater. I never knew a less egotistic actor. Or a more decent one. Only once did I hear him use one of the milder four-letter Anglo-Saxon expletives. And that was while recounting an episode making fun of himself. About a contest between him and another untall actor cast in one of his films who appeared in makeup one morning ready for shooting with an impossibly high false forehead. Just enough to make him taller than Alan. On the set, Alan was quietly affable. He liked the grips and the gaffers. And he loved John Seitz, the great cameraman, who made him look rugged. Some of the actresses who worked with him complained John made them look rugged too. Alan seldom joined in the usual on-set male comments about physical endowments of the starlets, etc., although he once confided in me that he continuously dreamt about melons while working opposite Sophia Loren in Boy on a Dolphin.⁴³ Presumably at eye level. But ego is the operative factor in acting. The commodity sold is oneself. Alan’s ego was fragile. I’m talking now about his professional psyche, not that of his personal life which for the most part was lived effectively.

Many popular actors dislike being seen in public, but Alan’s fear of it was almost pathological. I once helped Sue convince him to accept an invitation to a Royal Command Performance in London by assuring him, in so far as recognition on the basis of his own talent and effort was concerned, he was as eminent as the King himself. He finally agreed to go but then added wryly, “They’ll all see how short I am.” Alan’s most successful role in my opinion was “Shane.”⁴⁴ George Stevens understood his physical effectiveness and used him visually, subordinating dialogue. His scenes with Brandon de Wilde reflected Alan’s deep love for his own children who, in turn, adored him. The long farewell with Jean Arthur where they face each other without speaking before he leaves to shoot it out with Palance to keep him from killing her husband is one of the most moving in the history of westerns. Talking about it, Alan, with his customary modesty, said, “I thought he’d never say cut.” But Stevens knew more objectively how effective Alan’s presence was, especially in a scene with an actress like Arthur, and kept it going to the last possible frame. Alan as Shane was a triumph of that much maligned institution, typecasting, a perfect blend of role and actor. It seldom happens, but when it does, the magical occurs. The inarticulate becomes eloquence. He gave other successful performances in the Glass Key,⁴⁵ Blue Dahlia,⁴⁶ Proud Rebel,⁴⁷ O. S. S.,⁴⁸ and The Red Beret in which he played a man reluctant to assume command, another instance of the fortuity of typecasting. In “The Carpetbaggers,”⁵⁰ as an aging, tough, loyal henchman of a tycoon, he indicated in an excellent, moving performance what the future of his career might have been. The Oscars that eluded him as a leading man might still have been his as a character actor in supporting roles. My own favorite among his acting performance was his title role in The Great Gatsby. Warner Baxter had preceded him as Jay Gatsby and Robert Redford was to follow. F. Scott Fitzgerald was literally out of print when I suggested to Alan and Sue that we ask Paramount, who owned the novel, to let us make it. I felt after O. S. S. that Alan could project a combination of qualities uniquely suitable for the role: Strength, authority, grace, good looks, and most of all an enigmatic ambivalence of naiveté and ruthlessness. Robert Redford is technically more skilled than Alan was but at no time did I feel Redford’s Gatsby had actually been a gangster, someone who had started out as one of Wolfsheim’s gunmen. That aspect of Gatsby was oddly unstressed by Jack Clayton’ s direction and Gatsby’s love and sacrifice for the worthless feckless Daisy Fay has no depth without it. Paramount agreed to let us make “Gatsby” and after several false starts and a tussle with the Hays Office we did it with Elliot Nugent directing. I produced and wrote the screenplay with Cyril Hume who like Fitzgerald had been a successful novelist in the twenties. Everything Alan had working for him worked for us in “Gatsby.” And the screenplay, by dealing with Gatsby’s early association with the Devil in the person of Old Dan Cody, who indoctrinated him with the American worship of materialism, made Gatsby’s character more comprehensible. Gatsby may have been a mystery man to others. He knew himself, or thought he did, until like all of Fitzgerald’s protagonists he discovered that what he had bargained away his soul for in the end had turned to dust and ashes. All Fitzgerald’s novels are Jazz Age American versions of Faust. It may surprise some that Alan and I spent many hours discussing all this. He instinctively understood Gatsby because in a way he was one himself. Alluding to his Hollywood stardom he once remarked, “Not bad for an Okie kid.” We had an excellent cast on “Gatsby,” including Barry Sullivan who played Tom, Daisy’s millionaire polo playing faithless husband. Barry is almost six three, but when Tom and Gatsby are cheek by jowl in the novel’s famous confrontation scene at the Plaza, no one ever questioned Gatsby’s innately more dangerous physical menace. It’s difficult to understand why. I think it had something to do with Alan’s terse quiet delivery, his latent authority, and a catlike quality which suggested he would strike more swiftly and more effectively. After shooting on “Gatsby” was over Alan for the first time commented on the physical disparity between Barry and himself. “Please, Dick,” he told me ruefully, “Don’t ever do that to me again. It’s just too tough.” Finally, when everything is considered, the answer to “What made Alan Ladd a star?” comes down to a very simple one. Women in the audience loved him. Shopgirls, showgirls, college girls, housewives—they wrote him most of the fan letters, sensing his own capacity in his personal life for devoting and protectiveness and responding to that more than to his extraordinary good looks. Not that men and boys didn’t help him to stardom, too, vicariously sharing in his heroic screen exploits, but it was the girls of the world, young and old, who made and kept him a star. No fan letter he received ever went unanswered. Sue saw to that. She had sensed the possibilities in him and nurtured them to fulfillment. She was right about the color of his hair and right about a lot of other things. She once said to me, “All I want in a script for Alan is for him to be in every scene.” Excessive? No. A good script for Ladd had the camera seeing everything through his eyes. It’s a good way to write a script for any star. It gives one a point of view toward the material. I look back now with a certain measure of satisfaction that I wrote several for Alan I still rather like.

On the Gemini Contenders: Notes for Construction of the Script, 1978 Notes for Construction of the Script, 1978 What is at stake?⁵¹ During the War (World War II) the possession of the documents by the Axis (the knowledge that Christ was not divine) could have been a terrific psychological weapon for them, undermining the contention that the Allied effort was a moral crusade against godlessness. Similarly, the possession of the documents now by Russia would help them in their long run objective of communizing the world. Religion, and especially Christianity, is supposedly the basis for “freedom” as we know it. The Declaration of Independence says men are endowed by the creator by certain unalienable rights. It also speaks of the laws of nature and nature’s God entitling them to separate and equal station etc. Finally, it speaks of relying on the protection of Divine Providence, etc., for pledging to one another life, liberty, fortune, sacred honor, etc. To much of the western world Christ was co-equal with the Father and the Holy Ghost. Proof that he never existed or if he did that he was not divine would have shattered the moral basis of resistance to tyranny, etc. Both the Nazis and the Russians, in a different way, claim that religion as we know it is evil. The state is all powerful, untrammeled by moral considerations, etc. From a propaganda standpoint a Christless west would be a weakening of resistance to totalitarianism. The church and especially the Catholic Church in the west would be mortally stricken. Christ is the humanizing aspect of its creed. Without him their authority, their credibility, their appeal, would crumble. The church would be revealed as propagating a fallacy for twenty centuries, a circumstance the Nazis would have exploited then and the Russians would dearly love to exploit now. Clearly it is better for the world as we want it to be for this document or documents not to be publicized. First because it may be a forgery, second because it could be misused and misinterpreted for political purposes. So we should be rooting for the good brother to win not only because he then would be true to his father and grandfather and the sacrifices they made and the suffering they underwent, but also for the good of humanity (unless of course we believe with Marx that religion is the opium of the people). England’s sovereign, among other titles, is called Protector of the Faith. What faith? Christianity. What would Christianity mean without Christ’s divinity. It would be apparent England and France, etc., have worshipped a mere man, an unusual great personage to be sure but still only a man. The Jews for instance have never shared belief in Christ’s divinity and have been brutally persecuted because of it. The Crusades were in the name of Christ, God’s son, to find his sepulcher, etc. Were they meaningless? It would be a negation of much of the history of the first twenty centuries. It would mean the Christian world has perpetrated a fraud. The Nazis were right. The Russians were right. Christianity would stand at a disadvantage compared to Judaism and Mohammedanism as a true religion. No matter how you look at it the expose of the documents would seriously disrupt western thought and leave it divided and weak. The objective is to write a great action adventure story, but in this instance, the “weenie” isn’t a diamond or gold or a formula for a new explosive or a caper. It is something that would change the world which stands on the brink of anarchy now. Publishing the document might start a chain reaction in this volatile situation which no one can foresee. If only political or monetary gain is the goal, with no holds barred, we may be plunged again into barbarism. Perhaps this is what the evil brother wants rather than Fascism. Perhaps he is an anarchist who wants to destroy the world as we know it. As it stands now he hopes to use the documents to blackmail the church into supporting new-fascism in the United States and in other countries. He’s mad either way. But which is more believable. Either way, he must feel dedicated, hence ruthless. Andrew and Eye Corps is ponderous and should be simplified to an officer’s plot (if we retain Andrew’s being a soldier). Adrian as a civil rights lawyer is awful pat. Perhaps he should be drawn into it as his father Victor was, because he’s a decent loyal man, because he feels compelled to complete Victor’s guest now that Victor is dead, or perhaps crippled and old and unable to do it by himself. Savarine Conti-Fontini was chosen by the monks of Xenope because he was a powerful industrialist but uniquely endowed with compassion for people. His success came about because of his relationship with his workers, etc. Victor on the other hand begins as a rebel and a hedonist but becomes a great person almost in spite of himself, as does Adrian. Andrew, on the other hand, inherits only his father’s brains and capability. He has no heart. (Perhaps Savarini accepts because he doesn’t want Mussolini and Hitler to win. Not so much because they’re evil but because they would destroy him. Perhaps this is better. This allows Victor to achieve something, to grow into himself.) His one son Adrian is like himself. His other Andrew, like his grandfather. This is too complicated… Next problem. How cut down into manageable proportion: Should Victor have a twin brother who’s a fascist? What then is the role and function of the girl Victor meets and marries? Bearing the twins during the bombing is a terrific sequence. I’d hate to lose it. The story, as is, would lay out this way.

On Confronting the Blank Page, Writing the Script (Presentation at Symposium of the University Film and Video Association, at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1985) Presentation at Symposium, University of Southern California, 1985 I was informed by Duhayne Waecker that our subject this morning was, how can the screenwriter best serve the wide and varied discipline required to finally create a motion picture? Wow! I’m afraid all I can offer on that momentous topic in the time allowed us are a few very random thoughts. Such as they are, here goes. First find a story. I recently read the following in a review by an observant young Los Angeles Times critic, Patrick Goldstein, in which he wrote: “The real horror story among Hollywood writers today is ‘high concept,’ the one sentence story premise. Anything beyond that is supposed to lose the producer’s interest.” For your information, dear Patrick, “high concept” has been with us for many, many years. At one time, Paramount, then, very temporarily, headed by the great German director, Ernst Lubitsch, was desperately looking for a property to star W. C. Fields whose forte as a comedy genius was the ability to project seething frustration. I hope some of you are old enough to remember Bill Fields on whose tombstone is engraved, “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” Well, one morning, Lubitsch received a telephone call from an important agent informing him that his client, the English novelist and playwright J. B. Priestly just happened to be in Hollywood and had heard about Paramount’s W. C. Field’s predicament. Mr. Priestly had given the matter some thought and if Lubitsch would meet with him he would tell him two words. If Lubitsch liked them, he would then and there give a twenty-five-thousand-dollar check to Mr. Priestly, who would then immediately return to Blighty. Mr. Lubitsch agreed to those terms and met with Priestly later that afternoon. “So, Mr. Priestly, those two magic words you think are worth (a sum of money). What are they?” Mr. Priestly, deadpan, replied, “ Piano tuner .” Lubitsch stared blankly at Priestly for a moment then burst out with “Ja. Ja. I see it, I see it, Bill Fields with all those strings, und keys, and pedals, und felts, and tuning forks! He vill be vunderful!” So JB grabbed the check and went home, and a succession of talented writers (perhaps even including some seated on this platform) tried to write a script about a piano tuner. Alas, to this day no one has licked it. That anecdote, like most Hollywood tales, is probably apocryphal. As is the one about Bob Riskin selling Frank Capra the story “It Happened One Night” by saying, “Claudette Colbert lifting her skirt above the knee and doing this.” Apocryphal or not anecdotes like the foregoing make the point that an idea, a springboard, no matter how amusing, or striking, or stimulating, is not always enough to guarantee a successful screenplay. And I don’t mean only financially but also artistically. The most important factor in successful screenwriting, assuming the writer is moderately talented, is an awareness of the basic principles of dramatic structure. They apply to all forms of entertainment writing, stage plays, motion pictures, television. Too many of the younger hands, it seems to me, are not conversant with what I call the rules of dramatic necessity, the surging forward of the story line from one incident to another until a targeted objective, whether comic or tragic, has been satisfyingly reached. Films often don’t seem to “end” these days, they have no denouement; they just “stop.” The freeze frame is a current cinematic cliché, and there are others. Dreary repetition of the four letter Anglo-Saxon expletives. The admiration of what is known as street smarts, the new phrase for dishonesty. The generally derisive view of cultured or graceful pursuits. A scholar is always an object of scorn. The name Shakespeare is always good for a brainless laugh. And, of course, “honor” is a funny word that has something to do with an old-fashioned misconception of life as it really is. I’m sorry to say that too many writers have contributed to this unhappy state of affairs. They are too often far away from Mr. Waecker’s “varied disciplines” needed to create beautiful films. I understand that quite a few of those attending this seminar teach screenwriting. I have a tip for you. During the fifties I did a stint as a visiting lecturer at the University of Iowa, my Alma Mater, and worked with fifteen students who had never written a play before. I broke every pedagogical tenet by actually “collaborating” with them. Naturally the pedagogues were outraged. They said the exercise was meaningless because the students weren’t doing the work completely on their own. I had no such compunction in taking the kids by the hand and leading them for the first time through those terrifying dark woods. Well, fourteen of the fifteen (with my help) turned out finished, and not altogether inept, scripts. Only one chap dropped out of the class, and he became a world famous actor, director, producer, and scenarist with several prestigious writing awards to his credit. So nothing is for sure. Draw your own conclusions but give my method a try despite the exception to it. That’s all for now, except don’t be surprised if in my next James Bond screenplay, if there is one, a bomb is rigged to explode inside a Steinway by Double-Oh-Seven posing as a piano tuner.

The James Bond Syndrome and the James Bond Mystique: A Clarification, 1988 Invited magazine article by R. Maibaum, August 19, 1988 The James Bond Films have appeared since 1962 and as we all know, they have been credited with exemplifying, if not creating that genre we call the “spy thriller.” Two terms have also emerged in discussion about Bond films or in a discussion of the persons of James Bond himself. One is the “James Bond Mystique,” and the other is the “James Bond Syndrome.” I would like to if possible clarify these terms for the interested public and film fan. This is not in any attempt to quash any lively discussion of what James Bond may mean to the men and women of the world—savant par excellence, ladies’ man, a seeming aficionado of all things, and penultimate victor over the enemies of our Western world. Rather it is simply to clarify. These two terms have indeed been heard, at least by me, over the years, and I have been credited with writing most of the Bonds. I can say I have not coined either term, nor to my knowledge has anyone connected with the production or conception of films in which James Bond left his mark. Indeed, they are both compelling terms, and I seem to have heard them used by film commentators and even by news men when referring either to Bond films, or to real-world events in which at least somebody out there wished for a real James Bond to be present to set things straight when they were awry. So I will proceed. I should like to remind the reader (audience?) that I am no Henry Kissinger, no political scientist. I have long been an avid reader of history, out of general interest, and I do have a background of studying, and playing in Shakespeare, and a background in dramatic arts and speech. So with the insights I have gained from there, and from working on Bond movies since 1961, I shall proceed to clarify the above subject. It is always nice when a work of art, such as a film, and for the moment at least I should like you to entertain the Bond films as art, creates terms that pass into more general use. The first term is the James Bond mystique. I don’t recall when I first heard this term used, nor can I find a reference to it in print that satisfies me as the first. The James Bond mystique seems to relate to those characteristics of James Bond, as constructed by writer Ian Fleming, and then the filmmakers, as a collection of admirable traits too rarely found in actuality in real public servants that fight the enemies of their country. Perhaps, as women in the audience might muse, too rarely found in men in general. But I leave that judgment to others. James Bond I think, we can all agree, is elegant. He always knows what to wear, and when, and how to look. He is always unflappable and unflustered, almost always proper and in control, traits we consider quintessentially British. He is an admirer of and knower of all the finer things in life, and as well as a well-read savant in general knowledge who might rival a Cambridge professor. Ask him anything, as his supervisor “M” will, and he will know all about it, much to M’s chagrin. “I didn’t know your expertise extended to that, Double 0 Seven,” and his expertise indeed would appear to extend to everything. But, he is also efficient and swift in his exercise of his duties, and in his decisions. He is ruthless, which may strike some to be at odds with his dapper demeanor at other times. In Dr. No, he says to a clumsy, attemptive assassin, “That’s a Smith and Wesson [pistol]… And you’ve had your six,” after that man shoots six times at him. Bond shoots him dead, abruptly. He enjoys women and is not above using women to gain information about his adversary, turning them against their former mentor who is evil, or to get them to take him closer to his quarry. Women enemies even become allies. He finds himself in almost impossible situations, and both escapes, and finds highly unusual ways to turn the tables on his adversary, usually an equally larger-than-life villain, destroying him and his lair. He turns anything at hand into a tool of destruction, and deftly, and it can be argued always with an economy of time, racing against a clock (and mind you, we try to stay within 120 minutes of script). In Spy Who Loved Me, he gets the crews of two hijacked submarines to destroy each other with nuclear missiles, instead of the Western world’s leading cities. In Diamonds Are Forever, he disables villain Blofeld’s satellite control center by bashing it with a miniature submarine suspended from a crane. He eludes one villain after another in a lengthy escape from Eastern Europe in Russia with Love. And he emerges at the end with little to do, prior to walking off into the sunset with a beautiful costar, other than taking her to a superb dinner, other than cursorily dust off his cuffs. Why should such a man have an appeal today? Perhaps that begs the question. However perhaps something of an answer lies in all of the things that James Bond is, that so many other people in the world around us today seem not. Our age has been characterized, fairly or not, to be an age that has lost what has commonly been called class. Elegance is not in style, while we still admire it when we experience it. Broad knowledge of things, particularly the finer things of life too, is something most of us feel we do not have, nor can we have it. Elegance of education and erudition seem something unobtained by us in an age where education all too often seems to mean a grasp of technical skills, a profession and technology. And yes, being efficient and ruthless is something at which we recoil, even if the world on occasion demands we be that way. It is hard for most of us to “do what [we] have to do.” We are paralyzed by regrets, even before we act. Alas, that is perhaps the essence of civility. But we are also told that there are times we have to act with ruthless precision, and we have a grudging admiration for those who can. And nothing needs to be said about endless skills in winning over the affection, and the company, of the other sex. And the opportunity to travel to far-off places, exotic and unusual in an atmosphere of excitement—well—perhaps that is why any of us travel, or reminisce at times about our ancestors from faraway places. Or read history. Or rejoice in a well-turned phrase from long ago, almost always from elsewhere. Tacitus, Julius Caesar, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. The Bible. I think perhaps it isn’t even the capers as we call them, that create the James Bond mystique. It is true that the measure of a man, some say the maker of a man, is his enemy. But I just must think that it is what James

Bond is, the way he acts, regardless of his mission, where it is, and what his adversary is all about, that creates his mystique. The public knows, when they go into a movie theater, that Bond will prevail. That is perhaps the one given one can count on, when going to see a Bond film, even if you do not know anything else about the picture or its plot. All else is very much a commentary on him, and what he can do. “What will he do this time?” How will he get out of whatever impossible situation put on a plate before him? All of us wish we could be that sort of person, and carry that sort of mystique. It has been said before that James Bond is Everyman, but an ideal of an everyman we wish we were. Now for the perhaps more difficult companion issue. The James Bond Syndrome. This is not the same thing as the James Bond mystique. I am not a doctor but I have been apprised that a syndrome at least in the world of medicine means a collection of interrelated problems, the ultimate cause of which is unknown, that create other problems if left undealt with. But once you deal with them you cannot be sure that the results will be lasting, and you leave questions afterward about the efficacy, finality, ethics, and other applicability of that treatment. Moving from medicine to the world of International Relations, and international intrigue, this is the problem. A villain, almost always eccentric and usually bizarre, with grand plans to enlarge his place in history further, attempts to basically hold the world hostage. And given the fact that he deserves to be investigated, the best investigator available is sent by the British Commonwealth to see what this bad man is about. At first his activities are curious; it emerges soon, usually about halfway into a picture, that what he is up to is terrible. And in the absence of effective other parties that can do something about him, James Bond for the most part singlehandedly takes him on and with a combination of brains, and physical prowess, destroys him. And this is done with remarkably little reliance on anybody else, if you look carefully at Bond’s record of achievements across the various films since 1962. The airplanes, aircraft carriers, ships, tanks outside Fort Knox, soldiers, guards, and officials of the British Secret Service and their American allies are more background props than helpers. They move about on that political stage; it is Bond who is the true “actor,” in the language of political science. The person who makes the decisions that matter, pursues them, succeeds at them, and leaves as little undone as possible, or as little left as possible to come back and make more trouble. Boom! Goodbye, oil drilling platform, pursuing gunboats, Dr. No’s island, Blofeld’s snowy retreat full of viruses. Arguably, only Blofeld survives, and he survives from one picture to the next, perpetually there, and perpetually thwarted, as that contretemps to Bond’s endless capacity to engage and defeat evil. We live very much in a world that historians, military men, government leaders, and the students in schools everywhere that read ‘their memoirs lament is one of Impersonal Combat. The enemy, for everyone everywhere, is dehumanized and depersonalized I seem to remember that in France in the Middle Ages there was a wellknown battle between fifteen armored knights on one side and fifteen armored knights on the other, called the Battle of the Thirty. They slammed away at each other on a grassy field, with axes and halberds, until there were more survivors on one side than the other. And someone declared a victory. I remember that the leader of the victorious commented later on that he was sad, even in victory, because with all that armor, “You could not even see your opponent’s face!” You did not know the man you were fighting. And so it is; war today has become increasingly a battle between men in gas masks and in mace shields, helmeted and encased against the air around us, carrying weapons of increasingly long distance lethality. Or it takes place in a tank two thousand yards away, or in the sea or in the air, where you never see whom you are shooting at. Shades of Midway, I am told the first battle like that between opposing dreadnoughts, only more so. And, in that Other War as some call it, the world of espionage and of thwarting international destructive intrigues, you do not even know who anybody really is. We have spies, and counterspies, and double and triple and rogue agents. None of this is new. It was not when Fleming sat down in his house and thought James Bond into our world and put pen to page. It is not new but it is so current, also so central, today. There seem to be so many enemies about; and there seems to be such a need in the real world to mobilize so many people, with such great unwieldiness of time, and expense, to do something about it. So many visions of helicopters taking off, and Marines in full battle dress boarding a Hercules, so many sailors tearfully kissing their wives goodbye and trudging with their seabags up ramps onto the “New Jersey.” Fighting the evildoers of the world seems so messy. In that context, do we not dream of a time, an echo of the past perhaps, where one man, superbly equipped by self and friends, able, motivated, physically fit, dashes into the fray and humbles the foe? Is it not all the better if he be good looking, broadly knowing, and capable with the ladies, and add to that someone unflustered, and a superb dresser? Compellingly likable, and unforgivably efficient. We have had heroes like him, yet we are told to believe in them, and are told they are mythic, things of our distant past. David, before Goliath, who made his hordes flee in terror. Heroes of Sparta and Troy. Heroes of our Civil War. Sergeant York and Audie Murphy. And Elliott Ness. Today, in a world we are told is increasingly impersonal, where those who purvey evils in our time and those that summon to fight them both seem to have become more diffuse, the individual conqueror seems to be gone. And we wish that he were still here to do our work for us. I am going to perhaps surprise you. I am not going to say that James Bond is an illusion, that heroes like him do not exist or that we should not believe they should or do. There are and have been spies and agents that have shown extraordinary capacity to grapple with the secrets and evildoings of the other side. Most are simply not well-known, and for obvious reasons: they were not supposed to be. Some are, like for instance Moe Berg, Princeton graduate, consummate linguist, baseball player, and World War II spy. Fleming had his own models, in real British Secret Service operatives perhaps the foremost of which was active around World War I, Lev Davidovitch Rosenbloom. And the point is not, either, that superbly talented, and well trained persons cannot grapple the horns of larger-than-life demons and divert disaster themselves. It is that, in the real world, it is all

too easy for a government to rely too much on too many talents, found in, and too many responsibilities vested in, one person, and expect him to do many, many things at once, to quickly and completely set the world aright. Faced with a world crisis, created by an industrial magnate of a country—our films focus on industrial giants but the principle is the same—the government says, “Well, what will we do? Send James Bond.” Send one superbly capable, consummately efficient person basically alone, to infiltrate, learn about, and then undo that evil. His exploits bring relief to his employers, because they show economy of effort, and is one person, easier to direct than a mass. His exploits are interesting to the film viewer, because his confrontation with things bad in the world is intimate, face-to-face, the clash that is his clash of expertise in the service of goodness confronting evil with a single human face. The elemental conflicts of the universe become infinitely more intimate, more understandable, more enjoyable. I am not willing to say nor am I going to say that wars cold and hot, like those that have traversed our world in this century, should be fought man to man by so many James Bonds against diabolical cartels and their diabolical leaders to the increasing exclusion of other ways of fighting them. What I do offer is that in the real world two things obtain. We have a tradition in most countries, and in our own, that you mobilize many men, and many kinds of resources, to fight the bad guys. In this century our country has varied between thinking that an economy of effort, and a show of overwhelming force—as in World War II—are the appropriate course. The pendulum seems to have gravitated, however, into the realm of bigger is better: use more ships and planes, more men, more kinds of weapons. And another point, made perhaps more by the writer, the student of the individual man, what have you, is that you cannot in most cases expect one man to truly embody such strengths, and such skills, that he can be a one-man army. A real person like that, we say, would have too many burdens upon him, too many decisions to make right at once, would have to know too much, and would have the resilience of a hundred others. Such a man does not and cannot exist; yet he does, because we believe he must. And we believe he must because in a world, and a century, of seemingly endless conflicts, we wish he did. As Aristotle reminds us, that which Man wishes would exist, now does, because we have conceived of him, and hence, he has been created. Now all that remains is to call such a man forth, from somewhere, or to declare someone to be him. I for one will tell you a secret. I for one do believe that in fact, the fighting of the Bad Guys of the world shall continue to be done for the most part by what is in fact a collection of rather faceless, varied, hardworking, usually unacknowledged, and often not perfect people in our security services and police and armed forces. They may not be James Bond. But I also look about myself at world events, and at crises that arise time to time, and I think about all the servicemen and the Special Agents, very real people all of them, with lives that may be lost, indeed on missions that may not work, and I say, I wish James Bond really were here. James Bond, where are you? August 19, 1988 Los Angeles, California

Endnotes ¹ Reproduced by Alpha Video Distributors Inc. Piscataway, New Jersey, 1994, 7 volumes. Originals were produced 1942–1945. ² See McGilligan, Pat. Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Ace, Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1986, 279. The five-hundred-reel history was made available for showing, in part as needed, at the United States Armed Services Academies including West Point and Annapolis. ³ Obviously, Richard Maibaum here is predicting cable/pay-per-view television in 1950. ⁴ The Tree: A Play of the Lynch Law by Richard Maibaum, 1931. Unpublished master of arts thesis, Speech and Dramatic Arts, University of Iowa. Produced on Broadway by Alan Morrill and Ira Silberstein, 1932. ⁵ Birthright by Richard Maibaum, 1933. Produced on Broadway by Irving Barrett and Robert Rossen, at The Forty-Ninth Street Theatre, 1933. Published by Samuel French (New York, New York), 1934. ⁶ See My Lawyer by Richard Maibaum and Harry Clork. (1939.) (Originally titled “I Want a Lawyer.”) Produced by George Abbott at The Biltmore Theatre, New York City, September 1939. Published by Dramatists Play Service (New York, New York), 1939. ⁷ “Fearful Decision,” original teleplay by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, based on a play by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum. (1954). Produced on “US Steel Hour.” ⁸ Ransom! by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, 1954. Play was originally titled “The Davis Decision.” Published by Samuel French (New York, New York), 1963. ⁹ Polti, Georges. Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, New York, New York, 1916. ¹⁰ I Married an Angel, story for a musical/screen story by Rodgers and Hart, based upon an original play by Vaszary János. Film produced by MGM, 1942. Screenplay by Anita Loos. ¹¹ Pride of the Yankees, produced by RKO, 1942. Screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Jo Swerling. Screen story by Paul Gallico. ¹² Sweet Mystery of Life by Richard Maibaum, George Haight, and Michael Wallach. It was produced on Broadway in The Shubert Theatre by Herman Shumlin in October 1935. ¹³ Sweet Mystery of Life was made into the film, Gold Diggers of 1937 produced by Warner Brothers, 1936. ¹⁴ George Abbott produced See My Lawyer on Broadway in 1939 (see note 3). “Dreamboat” in that era meant among other things, someone given to and in love with creative ideas. ¹⁵ Fearful Decision received an Emmy nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for Best Original Teleplay of 1955. ¹⁶ Ransom!, screenplay by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum. Produced by MGM, 1956. ¹⁷ Contrary to some popular opinion and to film historians, and histories, the Aston-Martin did exist in Ian Fleming’s novel but as a less fabulous machine. At the time of the film’s emergence, the Aston-Martin DB5 was in any event at the forefront of the sports auto world with its streamlined features and over three-hundredhorsepower engine. ¹⁸ The device is officially called the Bell Rocket Belt and was developed experimentally to satisfy a US Army interest in a jet-propelled “lifting unit” that could transport one trooper airborne for short distances in the strike or reconnaissance role. In the film sequence it was operated by a US Army specialist. ¹⁹ Sweet Mystery of Life was copyrighted 1934, produced on Broadway 1935, it was later made into the film Gold Diggers of 1937. ²⁰ See My Lawyer. It was copyrighted 1939 and produced on Broadway in 1939. ²¹ Referring to Robert E. Sherwood ²² Elliott Nugent, Events Leading Up to the Comedy, an autobiographical work (New York, New York, 1965). ²³ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and The Damned (New York, New York: The Scribner Library: 1922). ²⁴ F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is The Night (New York, New York: The Scribner Library: 1934). (Originally, Charles Scribner Sons, 1933.) ²⁵ Most prominent of which possibly were the two Duesenberg 1928 two-seater roadsters, a type later popularized by their use by Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo, and the 1928 Duesenberg Town Car limousine driven by the Barry Sullivan character, Tom Buchanan. ²⁶ “Topper” meant, in that era, an emotionally or intellectually insight-inspiring high point. ²⁷ Charles Brackett, screenwriter of such films as Sunset Boulevard, The Emperor Waltz, The Lost Weekend, Five Graves to Cairo, Hold Back the Dawn, and Ninotchka. Richard Maibaum also wrote on Hold Back the Dawn, which won an Oscar. ²⁸ Which was produced by MGM, appearing in 1976. It starred Robert De Niro with Ingrid Boulting in the female lead ingenue role and with a cameo appearance by Jack Nicholson. The unfinished novel was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons Inc. (New York, New York), 1941. ²⁹ The Great Gatsby was originally published 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York, New York). Later reprinted in The Scribner Library Series as “SL1.” ³⁰ Professor E. C. Mabie, Head of the Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts, University of Iowa, Iowa City. ³¹ Portrait of Professor Mabie, hung in the theater that bears his name, presently being dedicated (September

1973). ³² The play by Eugene O’Neill. ³³ Another, older auditorium on the University of Iowa campus. ³⁴ Later to become director of the theater arts department at UCLA. ³⁵ Produced on Broadway in 1931. ³⁶ Birthright: A Play of the Nazi Regime, produced on Broadway in 1933; published by Samuel French Inc., New York. ³⁷ I.e., in Iowa in the 1930s and 1940s. ³⁸ A local restaurant in Iowa City. ³⁹ Carl Seashore, professor at University of Iowa. ⁴⁰ A professor. ⁴¹ Head of the Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. ⁴² The Iowa River, which flows past the University of Iowa campus. ⁴³ Boy on a Dolphin, Fox Studios, 1957, ⁴⁴ Shane, Paramount, 1953. ⁴⁵ The Glass Key, Paramount, 1942, from the Dashiell Hammett novel. ⁴⁶ Blue Dahlia, Paramount, 1946, novel, screen story and screenplay by Raymond Chandler. ⁴⁷ Proud Rebel, Buena Vista Pictures, 1958. ⁴⁸ O. S. S., Paramount 1946. Screen story, screenplay, and produced by Richard Maibaum. ⁴⁹ The Red Beret, British release alternate name for Paratrooper, Columbia, 1954. Screenplay by Richard Maibaum, Frank Nugent and Sy Bartlett. Based on the novel The Red Beret by Hilary St. George Saunders. ⁵⁰ The Carpetbaggers, Paramount, 1964, based on the novel by Harold Robbins. ⁵¹ The Gemini Contenders, by Robert Ludlum. New York, New York: Dial Press, 1976.

Part II

Transcripted and Taped Interviews

Richard Maibaum Interview for Canadian Television, Spring 1985, Pacific Palisades Please note that in the following interview, “CC” denotes “Canadian Commentator,” who interviewed Richard Maibaum. IntervieweR. We’re running a picture that I long admired, and I read the book again last year, and it is called The Big Clock, which you produced back in 1948. When I mentioned it, what does Richard Maibaum, what does his mind do when that title is thrown at him after all these years? Richard Maibaum. Well, I still get a queasy feeling, because they said they had a novel they wanted me to read at Paramount, and I read it, and they said, what do you think about it because we can get it for fifty thousand dollars, which was a lot of money at that time. And I said, it’s great, but it has no third act and they said, well, do you think you can cook one up and I said, well, the premise is so good. No policemen, and it’s a man looking for himself, that I’ll take a chance. So it was quite a risk to start that thing. And, of course, we had a great screenwriter, Jonathan Latimer, who worked on it with John Farrow and myself and we finally got this excellent script out, I thought. It was one of the best written scripts that I had ever produced or had anything to do with. CC. Once you had made it, what about the editing of that picture and so forth? There were some stories in connection with it. RM . Well, you know, John Farrow always resented somebody coming in and then recutting his cut, the director’s cut. So what he would do is, he would sit on a boom. He’d put the camera on the boom and he liked to shoot a whole scene without a break. As a matter of fact, the big scenes between Janoth and George Stroud, is about eight or nine pages long, and that was done in one take, with the camera on a boom going from one to the other and following them around and stuff like that. He did this because you can’t cut it. And sometimes, cutters hold their heads and say, “How am I going to cut this picture if a fellow shoots this way?” So the entire picture was shot that way. Consequently, there wasn’t much cutting that you could do, because it was limited by the shots that he had made. So we took this picture out, we previewed it, and we brought it back and we cut out sixty-seven feet and released it. That’s the first time and the last time in my experience that I have ever had this happen. CC. That is without precedent in the history of motion pictures, isn’t it? RM . Yes, absolutely. CC. But how cohesive that movie is! RM . Yes. CC. And you’ve explained something I never realized about the picture that way. Richard Maibaum, the setting of a corporate business world and so forth in that film. That was very fresh to movies. You’re way ahead of “Executive Suite,” and you’re way ahead of one of my favorite, Rod Serling’s “Patterns.” RM . I never thought that Earl Janoth would be reincarnated as “Mr. Murdock.” CC. Were you making a statement about the corporate world and the ruthlessness of it that could be? Were you personally making a statement back then in making this picture? RM . Well, no, I don’t think so. I think it was a fascinating character. I must tell you a story about that. We got Charles Laughton to play Janoth, and his wife, Elsa.¹ CC. Wasn’t she incredible as that eccentric artist? RM . Marvelous—and we signed him up, and about four days before the picture was to start shooting, they came into my office and Elsa said, “Oh, Mr. Maibaum, dear Mr. Maibaum, Charles and I can’t be in the picture.” I said, “For heaven sakes, why not? You’re all signed up!” She said, “We simply have to get out of it someway.” I said, “Why, why?” She said, “Because, Charles and I don’t know who we are!” I said, “What do you mean?”

She says, “Well, we always have to have a hook, something to hang our hats on. When we would make a characterization, we would tend to be somebody.” So I knew that, you know, they were just in a kind of a funk. So I said, “We’ll go and try to think about that.” A couple days later, they burst into my office and they said, “Oh, Mr. Maibaum, we can be in the picture!” And I said, “Oh, isn’t that good!” She said, “We know who we are!” I said, “Who are you?” She says, “Charles is Colonel McCormick, and I’m Dorothy Parker.” And I said, “Oh, that is wonderful.” And then they went out and, of course, they get in the picture and they were just exactly the same as they were in every picture. CC. Well, that’s a wonderful tale. Tell me about Laughton. He was a strange man. RM . He was a strange man, but a wonderful man too. CC. Well, how strange? Give us an idea of how strange he was. RM . Well, you know, the scene where he’s being massaged in the picture, by Harry Morgan, and he blew his lines and he was unhappy; he had just been wrapped in a towel because he was kind of fat and pudgy, you know. And Farrow said to him, “Charles, for heaven sake, what’s the matter with you?” And he said, “I don’t like this scene. He doesn’t sound like an intelligent man. He sounds like a gangster with intellectual pretensions.” He says, and furthermore, “I don’t like the scene because the world at last will know the truth about Charles Laughton.” The scene where he backs into the elevator… That, of course, wasn’t in the book. He wouldn’t get into—it was just that you had to fall onto a lot of cushions, four feet. He wouldn’t do it. And so we tried a stuntman. The stuntman looked terrible. It didn’t look like Laughton backing into the elevator. His face was out to the camera. So we got an idea. We had somebody from the publicity department, loaded with cameras, come walk onto the set and during the argument of whether he was going to do it or not—because Elsa was saying, “Charles, you’re back—don’t do this for any Australian [talking about Farrow], don’t risk a hair of your head for him.” And, finally, this guy walked by, and Laughton says, “Who’s he?” And Farrow said, “Well, that is the live photographer, who is here to show that you do your own stunts. He thought a moment, and he went over and looked at the thing, how deep it was, you know.” And he said, “Well, I’ll try one, but just one.” Well, they had him there, for a half hour, diving and falling— CC. With his bulk? RM . Anything. CC. Did he require much stroking and praising? I am told he was very, very insecure. RM . Yes, he was. You had to flatter him. And, of course, if he didn’t like something he could be terror. In that big long scene I’m talking about—he didn’t get that shot the whole day, not one foot of film. He obviously didn’t like himself vis-à-vis Ray Milland in the part, you see. So he went home, he worked with Elsa, he came back and liked what he was doing. We got the thing on the first take the next morning, because he worked it out. He would deliberately blow it, if he thought he wasn’t able to do it, you see. CC. Tell us about Ray Milland. What sort of a man, on the screen, off? We have this sense of screen persona. What was the real man like? RM . Well, it’s amazing. I thought Ray was not particularly gifted, but he was a very intelligent man and he learned his craft, he learned his job very, very well, and he was marvelous to work with. He was always a rather, oh, economical about spending money, and there was a kind of funny thing about the studio. He’d say, “Come on over to my office and have a drink,” after a day’s shooting. And we’d go over there, and he’d say, “Just ran out! You wouldn’t have a bottle in your office?” But, actually, a most intelligent actor. And, of course, he worked with marvelous people, Lost Weekend. CC. I’ve always admired him, never met him. Of course, he’s still alive and going, isn’t he? RM

. Oh I know, very much so. Marvelous horseman. CC. John Farrow, that Australian you referred to today. Different from any other directors in any other way? How was John Farrow, because his name is a legend in cinema? How was he, Richard Maibaum? RM . He was a very interesting man and a peculiar man. CC. In what way, sir? RM . Well he was very tyrannical on the set and so forth, and I at that time was a young producer. That was my second picture, you see, I had just come back from the war. And he always had a cane that he flourished around, and when I approached him to ask him about something, he held this cane out—he held me off with the cane. And so I turned around and walked away. I went to the Prop Department and I got a baseball bat. I came back, I approached him holding the baseball bat and he burst into laughter and from then on we were friends. But he wanted to get the edge on you and you couldn’t let him. CC. And obviously, there were those he intimidated that didn’t have baseball bats— RM . Or the courage or the wit to even do something like that. Maureen O’Sullivan now, there his wife, the girl we know as Tarzan’s mate, just wonderful. CC. Any special deference to her in the picture because she was his—? RM . No. I was a little leery about it when he suggested that she play it and the studio went along with it, but I thought she played it very well. I loved her dearly. You know they had eight, seven, or six children, or something like that. My wife and I were trying to have a baby at that time, and so after she had six, I sent her a telegram, and I said, “How do you do it?” I got a telegraph back that said, “How do we do it? Oh, Dick!” CC. That does speak of a very gracious lady. Not too temperamental or anything like that? RM . No, not at all. Just marvelous and the only human being in the world that John Farrow was afraid of. CC. Did you ever meet Kenneth Fearing, who wrote the book? RM . No, I did not. CC. Do you know anything about him? RM . No, I know he is a fine poet. That’s all I know about him. A friend of mine knew him. He said he was an interesting man. But he never had anything to do with the script, or he didn’t have script approval or anything of the sort, but the basis was there. He did another one, I think it was called the Loneliest Girl In The World, or something like that, and I eagerly read it, but it didn’t have anything—not like The Big Clock, which was instantly apparent that it was something very unusual. You know there is not a policeman in that story.² CC. Richard Maibaum, you wrote a number of scripts for Alan Ladd, whom I’ve admired, I guess, all my moviegoing life, and produced a number of films for Alan Ladd. I want to start off by asking you about the man’s personality. I’m fascinated, of course, by the screen persona versus the man in real life. What was Alan Ladd like? His tastes, maybe his temperament, what sort of a man are we dealing with? RM . He was one of the gentlest, and if you can use the word sweet, one of the sweetest individuals I’ve ever known in my life. He was kind, he was retiring, very low-key, had a quiet sense of humor which didn’t surface that often; was very much at ease with the people on the set. He loved animals. He had a magic way with animals, and children. And he kind of lacked confidence in himself and his ability as an actor. And, of course, he was always kind of aware of the fact he wasn’t very tall. He would work with you. He never begs off, he was always there, and always cooperative, and I think, unlike what some people thought, that he knew exactly what he was doing as an actor. And O. S. S. which was the first picture I made with him when he discovered the girl had been taken away by the Gestapo at the end, he sits down there. I said to him, “Now, cry, Alan,” and the director would say to him. He said, “No, I can’t.” I said, “Why?” “It just isn’t me. That isn’t my thing, I can’t. I’ll just try to project sorrow, but I don’t think I can cry.” He knew it.

As far as his technique—of course, he had a marvelous voice, a strong manly cultured voice and he moved—he moved more gracefully than any other actor that I ever had anything to do with. I’ve been associated with three actors who were physical. Wallace Beery, Alan Ladd and Sean Connery, and of the three men, if somebody says, “Nobody comes through this door,” those three when they say it, you knew they meant it. He was one of those three. He was quiet but he had—he exuded poise when he really didn’t have it. He worried so much about all of those things and one of the things that I think that I got along well with him is, that I would bolster him up and encourage him, and when he felt that you were his friend, he would do anything for you, absolutely anything. I really loved him. CC. Did fame do anything to him? I was thinking of his role in “Shane,” which was one of his legendary roles. Did it change him at all? RM . Never. He was always the same. CC. And a great friend of yours. RM . Well, we were good friend yes and I loved to be with him. Of course, some of the unfortunate things that happened to him at the end— CC. What did happen? RM . Nobody really knows. There were rumors that he had committed suicide, but I’m sure he didn’t. It must have been some kind of an accident. I’m absolutely sure of that. And, when we made Gatsby,³ we had made O. S. S.⁴ and I was over to his house and he took me to his wardrobe, this long thirty-five-foot closet, he opened it up— there were all these suits and coats—suits that he had used and worn in his pictures and which he had kept—and he looked at me and he said, “Not bad for an Okie kid, huh?” And at that moment, I was reminded of the Great Gatsby saying to Daisy, “I got these from a man in London. Every Spring and Fall he sends me a selection.” And I said to myself, “This is The Great Gatsby.” And that’s how the idea came.⁵ And Paramount owned it. It had been made previously with Warner Baxter years and years ago. So I approached the studio, and they said, “Oh, we don’t think he’s up to it.” He wanted to have an action picture as usual, and I kept pestering, and he read the book, and they liked it. And Alan threatened to quit if they didn’t make that picture. And finally they made it. So we wrote the script and then the Breen Office comes in and said it can’t be made.⁶ It’s all about an unpunished murder, illicit love, all kinds of things that you couldn’t do at the time and I was very upset—and the studio was pleased about that because they didn’t want to make the picture. But I was fighting for the picture, and so was Ladd. I said to Joe Breen, “Don’t you see, this is a Faust story! A man makes a pact with the devil and doesn’t get what he wants,” and stuff like that. But he says, “Where is the voice of morality in the picture?” So I said to him, “Well, I’m sure I can find it.” He said, “You do and I’ll let you make the picture.” So I hunted in the Bible for several weeks and I finally found it. It was from Proverbs, and it says, “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”⁷ And I went to Breen, and I said, “This is the voice of morality.” He says, “Good, you have to put that into the picture.” I said, “How in the world?” He said, “I don’t know, but you’ve got to do it and at the beginning too to show this is a moral lesson.” In those days, you had to do those things, and I’ve always regretted it, but it was the only way I could get the picture made. The first scene if you recall, Nick and Jordan are visiting Gatsby’s grave. On the tombstone is this thing, the Proverbs 14:12 or whatever it is, you see. CC. Oh, that’s how you did it. RM . It was so un-Fitzgerald. If anything, Fitzgerald never labored the point. Everything that was great, because Fitzgerald was on the periphery—that was kind of hinted at, it was never explicit. And that was so explicit, it still makes me shudder. But the rest of the picture I’m proud of. It was about something, because we had Old Dan Cody in that picture, who was the devil; and Mr. Redford’s picture⁸ didn’t have anything at all. You didn’t know what that picture was about except gold plates. CC. It didn’t “make it,” did it? RM . No.

CC. But how did the Ladd version do, it did well, didn’t it? RM . It did quite well. CC. It was different. RM . Yes, it was different. But Alan received better―outside of “Shane,”―better reviews for that picture than any he ever made. So that and “Shane,” in terms of his acting accomplishments would be right at the top. CC. You love both of those films, don’t you? RM . Yes, I do. CC. How did they compensate for his shortness? He was short, 5 something. I’m just wondering on screen, how was that done for people who don’t know? RM . Well, I don’t think they ought to give away those trade secrets. Actually, there was something about Alan—I’ll answer you this way. He played opposite Barry Sullivan in that thing. He played Tom, Daisy’s husband.⁹ Barry was an ex–baseball player and football player and he’s six feet three at least, and he was playing opposite Alan Ladd. He was a friend of Alan’s too, and not a word was said about the difference in stature, and there is a scene there where Ladd and Tom were cheek by jowl and about too—he says, “Why, I could, I wouldn’t go with sports— I’m pretty good you know with my fists,” and stuff like that. And he thinks of size, at the scene at the Astor.¹⁰ And it was only when it was over, after the picture was shot, and Alan said, “Dick, I want to ask you something.” I said, “What is it, Alan?” He said, “Never do that to me again.” He didn’t say anything and I knew exactly what he was referring to. Never complained. Of course, he had something that—he carried this physical—although he was not large, he was perfectly proportioned. He had a beautiful body. You know he was a diver, a swimmer, and he reflected a kind of physical competence that he had which was unmistakable and that was why he had menace as an actor and you believed he could do all those things that you saw him do. CC. It’s interesting today that people like Dustin Hoffman who are short, often appear in scenes where the girlfriend is much taller. They don’t seem to worry about that anymore, do they? RM . No they don’t. CC. Back in those days though I know, and the public is aware of boxes and trenches and put people like Cagney in, but you’re right, I saw him at Shepperton Studios—in The Red Beret¹¹ and two thousand extras jumped up and applauded. Richard Maibaum, I want to ask you about the James Bond series. I’ve loved them as millions of others from Dr. No, right straight through. You’ve written something like your eleventh, “A View To A Kill,”¹² which is out. Certainly, when the viewers see this interview on the air, it will be out, and I know, blazing its own path of glory. Do you have any notion, going way back, that it would be such a legend?¹³ RM . No. Nobody did. We knew—there was a kind of a myth, that we took them seriously and that it just happened to be funny in places and we were unaware of it. But this was not so. As a matter of fact, right from the start, we understood that there were possibilities here of spoofing them a bit, but never too much. Sometime in the last, and a few in the middle, the spoofery became too overt, and the whole point is that, I think Penelope Gelly said, the whole operative factor is dead pan spoofing, you see. She hit it right on the nose. CC. We like to believe in Bond. RM . That’s right, and if you go too far, you lose the sense of reality. There has to be a frame of reference that has some relationship to reality. CC. A wonderful opening you know, at the very beginning of the “Three Blind Mice” sequence,¹⁴ how did that creation come, because that was one you wrote? RM . Well I think that’s the book.

CC. And you just simply followed the course. You don’t always follow the book, do you Dick? RM . Not anymore, we haven’t got any books to follow anymore CC. So what are you doing now? RM . We’re taking titles from a few of the short stories that are left and creating entirely new stories. When Cyril Hume¹⁵ and myself did The Great Gatsby, we’d stop and say, “Would Scott approve?” And I ask myself when I’m writing and I want to do something, I say to myself, “Would Ian approve?” Because there is no doubt in my mind that the success of the Bond, basically is caused by the James Bond “syndrome.” The creation James Bond. The two moments where the series became successful was when she said at the gambling hall at the beginning,¹⁶ “And you Mr.—” and you cut to where he says, “Bond, James Bond.” And if everybody had said, “Oh, come on, there would have been no series. And later on, where the real thing occurred was, was in this Tara’s bedroom after he’s had an affair with her and after carted off to the police station, he waits for the people that tried to kill him before, and the professor comes in, and he puts the pillows under the blanket and the professor shoots six times, and you cut to him there, and then, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,”¹⁷ and he says, “You’ve had your six, bing, bing, bing.” That’s when James Bond was born, the character. CC. The “license to kill.” RM . The killer instinct, and the ruthlessness, and the brutality, but at the same time, the wit and the justice of it. You see, only once in the Bond film, does Bond ask, do you mind? He is being sent to assassinate somebody. I think it’s in “For Your Eyes Only.” And he said, “Not if it’s a kind of justice.” CC. I was going to ask you about the morality, about the Bond character, how you felt. RM . Well there’s a lady who said he’s St. George of England, but he’s St. George of England with a twist, that’s for sure. He is dedicated to Queen and country. He is always on the side of the right. He’s a positive force, but he would use any means to accomplish the triumphs of a righteous cause. CCs . Ruthlessness, killing— RM . Every means, but with a certain kind of a humorous thing, which Roger¹⁸ had accentuated. CC. I’ve always wanted him to take Ms. Moneypenny. I am very fond of Lois Mack Maxwell, she’s a great actress. RM . I love her. CC. And in A View to aKill you have her there, don’t you? RM . Yes, we have. Lois keeps begging me. She wants to leave the series and she thinks she should only leave sacrificing her life for James Bond. I say, “Well, Lois, you can’t do that. She’s part of the series. She’s as indestructible as Bond is. You can’t have her killed for any reason,” and she’s so unhappy because she says, “I say the same thing all the time.” CC. Yes, the relationship is—and bless your writing sir, is just wonderful. RM . It’s bound to take away from the performances, but it’s fun to write those things.¹⁹ CC. I had wished that they’d kept Cee Linder as Felix Leiter, I liked him very much, I think it was Goldfinger. Any reason why they wouldn’t want Cee as an identifiable character like with Ms. Moneypenny, because the Felix Leiter does turn up in the Bond stories? RM . Well, I like Jack Lord very much and I like—Linder too, but as time and tide carries this further and further towards the future, they sort of got—Linder got fatter or older, so it wouldn’t be too much of a contrast (laughter). I don’t know why they didn’t keep them. I hear Jack Lord wanted too much money to continue as Leiter. CC. A View to a Kill, what have we got in store for it? What can you say? We’re very excited about it. RM

. Well the most difficult thing about writing a Bond script, especially today, when you don’t have marvelous capers like Goldfinger looting Fort Knox and stuff like that, we have no stories left, so we have to cook up our own stories. And that whole story is usually determined by what is the villain’s caper. Now when you get that, you’re four fifths on the way, and the rest falls into place. Because the caper dictates what sort of a villain it is, what the subvillains will be, what Bond will do, where it will be and so forth, and that is a very hard thing to do. And in this particular A View to a Kill, we have a very unusual caper. It’s an attempt to—just as Goldfinger wanted to radiate all the gold in the United States and make it unusable for fifty-eight years, at which his own gold would increase in value a thousand times, this villain played by Christopher Walken now, tried to corner the microchip market. And how do you do that? Why, you simply destroy Silicon Valley forever. Because, the United States supplies 85 percent of the microchips in the world. CC. Their contribution is that large! RM . But if you knock out Silicon Valley and about ten—fifteen thousand great American engineers and technicians, you not only cripple our whole electronic business, but also our military establishment. You’re going to reduce the United States to a fourth rate power. Now how do you destroy Silicon Valley? That’s what the picture is about. CC. You’re going to have me down there buying the first ticket. RM . And I won’t tell you. CC. Ian Fleming, you must have known him. RM . Well I met him several times and the only thing that he really said to me which is memorable, he didn’t seem to be too interested in the scripts. Naturally, he didn’t have script approval. We sent him a script, and then in minuscule writing, he’d write in the margins, and it was invariably not about the story or anything like that, but it was always a matter of protocol. M would not call Bond the same thing at their club as he calls them in the office in front of other people. He was very pointillist about all the protocol that was involved. The one thing that I remember that he said, and this always stuck in my mind—he said to me, “You know, it’s odd,” he said, “The films are so much funnier than my books.” And, of course, I didn’t tell him we tried to make them funny deliberately! He laughed once, when he’d ask something about why they were different, and I didn’t know what to say. I knew he was a great admirer of Fitzgerald, you see. So I said to him, “Well, I tell you, Mr. Fleming, just as with Fitzgerald, there’s an untransferable quality in your writing.” What a statement. He turned around to the Duchess of Bedford, he said, “Did you hear that, Nicole?” or whatever her name was, “Did you hear that?” CC. Thank you, Richard Maibaum. RM . It has been most pleasant.

On Writing the Bonds Symposium by Richard Maibaum for the Writer’s Guild of America, Beverly Hills, California, October 1987 Speaker. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the first Writers Circle this season. My name is Duhayne Waecker. I’m currently the Chairman of the Academic Liaison Committee which, this committee is responsible for this series. We have—I see a few old faces. I see some new people. How many people are here for the first time, as far as the Writer’s Circle? For those of you who are new to this, the whole purpose of this in theory is not to have somebody come and give a speech. It is intended to provide an opportunity for everyone to really be in on a oneon-one conversation with our particular guest and I think this particular evening, I can’t imagine anybody more enjoyable to spend an evening with than Richard Maibaum. So I have to tell you that my introduction to Richard came when I went to the University of Iowa. There were really two legends that I heard about when I was a graduate student there, one was Tennessee Williams and the other one was Richard Maibaum, and they seemed to be interchangeable in many respects and when I came to Hollywood, I continued to hear about Richard Maibaum and the many people who knew him and eventually I had that opportunity. I went up and introduced myself—two Hawkeyes—we hit it off pretty well. So we’ve been friends for a long time, and he is doing his thirteenth James Bond.²⁰ So when we talked I suggested for people who say, it’s tough coming up with new ideas. He not only has to come up with a lot of new ideas, but he has to deal with the problem of working with a known quantity and using different actors to play the same part and there’s a lot of problems there. So I think there’s a lot of very interesting things. After Richard gives his little background, then I want everybody to feel free to ask questions. This is very informal and the evening will be guided by your questions. So without further ado, Richard Maibaum. RM . There have been four James Bonds. And I don’t look like any of them. I also don’t conduct myself like them. I’m a peace-loving conventional loving husband, father, and grandfather, reasonably observant of law and order and to the best of my knowledge I have never been considered one of the world’s greatest lovers. How then can I identify, as every writer must with his protagonist, James Bond—dashing, stylish, witty, sophisticated, cultured, and procurian, brilliantly clever, unflappable, ruthless, invariably triumphant 007, Licensed to Kill who regularly rescues the world from the machinations and toils of archvillain-y. How can I identify with all of that? Because, writing the Bonds is for me, the ultimate sublimation. You see, my real name is Walter Mitty. Yes, writing the Bonds has been great fun. Brought material rewards and a certain amount of kudos. There has also been hard work, hard thinking, and hardheadedness. Nothing comes easily. But the Bonds haven’t been Dick Maibaum’s whole story. They’ve been my main preoccupation for the last twenty-five years. But I started out fifty-seven years ago while I was a student of the University of Iowa taking BA and MA degrees in Speech and Dramatic Art. My mentor there was a great teacher, Edward C. Mabie. When I was a sophomore, I wrote a play about lynching, The Tree, and “the Boss,” that’s what we called Mabie, let me put it on in a tiny theater at the Memorial Union. I directed it and played the lead. A year and a half later, while I was a graduate student, it was produced on Broadway. I was twenty-three. Robert Rossen directed it. It didn’t run very long, but I got some encouraging reviews. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times said I was, “An author with a more than common awareness of the strange things that pound in the blood of human beings.” My first Broadway review, and I’m still proud of it. After that, I acted with the New York Shakespearean Repertoire Theater. I’d played seventeen roles, most of them villains. There is marvelous experience. I got to feel how good dialogue feels in the mouths of actors. Put more simply, it taught me what an actor could say effectively and what he couldn’t. I went to Europe, met the first refugees from the Hitler lunacy and wrote a play about it, Birthright.²¹ Then I decided to write a comedy, a satire on the life insurance business.²² This brought me to Hollywood, and a contract with MGM. Since then, I’ve written or cowritten more than fifty screenplays at MGM, Columbia, Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox. They include twelve Bonds. I’m presently on my thirteenth. Along the way, I wrote other plays including See My Lawyer, which ran a whole season,²³ and when the War came, I was commissioned and wrote and produced eleven films to be shown in war production plants. Films intended to raise the morale of workers by impressing upon them what they had to lose in the event of a fascist victory, and what a tremendous part they had to play to prevent it. Then I became the director of the Army’s Combat Films Division. After the war, I produced nine films for Paramount, some of which I wrote. After Paramount I freelanced in TV as a writer, wrote several off Broadway plays and then became executive producer of MGM TV. Three years later, Cubby Broccoli for whom I had written eight films in England, came back into my life and asked me to do the first Bond, Dr. No,²⁴ for him and Harry Saltzman. That’s where it all started with Mr. Bond. A friend of mine who called the Guild and asked who the guest would be tonight, was told, “Richard Maibaum, he writes the Bond screenplays.” Fair enough, that’s an apt description, but when I thought how that would look on my tombstone I didn’t know if I felt like laughing or crying. Then I was reminded of something the philosopher George Santayana wrote, “The young man who has not cried is a savage, and the old man who has not laughed is a fool.”

As I’ve said, I’ve been at this fifty-seven years. That covers a lot of territory. [I see we’re being videotaped.] Now if I say anything defamatory of persons now living or dead, I assure you I’ll mean every word of it. So fire away. Q1 . Earlier when I looked at your video, I knew who you were and the only thing I could do was raise my cup to you, and had I had a second cup and had I heard that I would have raised them both. RM . You’re very gracious. Q 2. The thrill of the Bond films—and I can remember when the Bond books came out. I’ve read—I bought them all, I was the disc jockey in Stockton. I bought all the books and I read them through. The thrill of your pictures is—I mean there are a lot of them—but the openings, it’s the ultimate first page for a writer. Because you’re so taken in. Before you start the story, when you, and I don’t remember that well, Dr. No, but is that the form that you pretty well started with? RM . No, Dr. No, unlike the others—the opening of Dr. No was the beginning of the story and the beginning of the adventure if you’ll recall. These three chaps went in and shot up a fella coming out of the club in Nassau and that began it, who and why and what and so. Later on, actually in, we had it in From Russia with Love, and in From Russia with Love it started there too where there was this exercise in this garden and they were practicing killing James Bond and they killed him and they pulled off the mask and it wasn’t James Bond at all, it was somebody else and they were just practicing. In Goldfinger, however, we decided to have a little mini-adventure at the start of it which had nothing to do then with the story that followed. And it all depends. We are finding now, that after having done this business of having the mini-adventures,²⁵ it makes a picture too long and we’re beginning to start now with something that is exciting and yet starts the story of the film. Of course, we have a hell of a time trying to top some of the things that we’ve done. That guy that skidded off the mountain, you know on the skis and then opened up the Union Jack²⁶—that’s awfully hard to top those things but we’re forced to trying to top some things that have been quite extraordinary. Q 3. You have learned what an actor can say and what he cannot say in dialogue. Could you elaborate on this? RM . Well it’s hard to—I thought it would be self-evident. Obviously, you cannot write a speech that is too long or one that is too short or one that is too packed with meaning, or that is difficult to say phonetically. And I think it’s invaluable that anybody who writes should really have some acting experience because it does help in the writing of dialogue. I don’t know how better to express it, but I know that it helped me very much. Q 4. Can you comment on how studying acting can help you to be a writer? And how studying other related things in school can help you to be a writer too? In school sometimes you can do that, and sometimes you can’t. RM . That certainly is one thing. In teaching, I have complained about this to the students that I’ve had anything to do with. But in Iowa you took acting. If you wanted to write you took acting. If you wanted to direct, you did those things before you did the other things, and because you’re actually working backwards. So too often this isn’t part of the process. Q 5. In writing the Bond pictures, you have first Sean Connery and then you had to change and go into other actors, including Roger Moore. With each actor, do you find a different challenge, or do you have one Bond, and get him to represent a part just as you write it and conceive of it? RM . Well, in my mind, I have one Bond. He’s not exactly Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Ian Fleming had some very odd notion about James Bond and who he should be. He wanted his—original choice for James Bond was David Niven. He thought he was a sophisticated, English gentleman, University,²⁷ and all that kind of stuff and fortunately his view did not prevail. You see—so let me say this, when I write for James Bond, he’s my vision of James Bond qualified by what the audiences seem to like about him. Sean, this is odd now, wasn’t hardly any of the things that I enumerated before when I said what I thought James Bond was. He was nothing like that at all. He’s a rough, tough, Scotch football player, and Sean Connery, and my attributing to him all these gentlemanly qualifications and stuff was the cream of the jest. It made it funny and it also made him instantly acceptable. The ordinary guy sat there and said, that’s me. And the ordinary girl sat there and said, “This is the kind of a guy I’d like and he’d like me I’m sure,” you see. It was funny. Of course, Sean Connery, although he is a marvelous actor, don’t get me wrong, and he’s the best that we’ve had by far I think, he was miles away from what Ian Fleming wanted with the part. Q 6: Why did Sean Connery leave the part of James Bond? I have heard that he wanted to go off and do other things, other kinds of parts.

RM . Yes… Actually, you see when Sean decided “we’ve had it.” Frankly, there have been all sorts of stories why he quit. He felt he was being restricted and he was married to a girl named Diane Cilento at that time. A very good actress on her own. She would say to him, “What are you? You’re a Tarzan in evening clothes,” she’d tell him. So the poor guy wanted to play Hamlet. He wasn’t satisfied with James Bond. He wanted to express himself and he cut loose and he’s come back too and did that Never Say Never Again for another company.²⁸ But when he left we got this fellow George Lazenby who was a very handsome boy, a model. Had never read a line of dialogue in his life and I think that the picture we made with him, “Oh Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” is one of my favorites and many people think it’s one of the best of the Bonds. But he, the poor director, Peter Hunt, had an awful time getting a performance from him, and he didn’t last. So then we turned to Roger.²⁹ Now Roger knew he wasn’t a muscle man the way that Sean was. You wouldn’t believe that he could knock down a guy the way Sean did and so on. So he didn’t try to. He spoofed the part. From the very first he began to spoof the part and when the actor doesn’t believe the part and doesn’t believe the story then the audience starts not to believe it. And I thought it was a great mistake and so did other people but lo and behold the rest of the world loved Roger Moore. And as a matter of fact, his pictures were much, much more successful financially than Sean’s. But Roger began to get a little old in the tooth you know and the young girls didn’t care much for him and so we finally had to go with Timothy Dalton, who I think was a very good choice. I don’t know if you’ve seen him or not. He’s an excellent actor. By far one of the best actors of the four. From the Royal Shakespearean Company in England and he makes James Bond real again and he believes it and I think he made the audience believe it. It’s very hard you know differentiating about the Bonds because somebody always jumps up and injects their favorites but mine was Sean and always will be because he had, without trying, an inborn Scot irony of a kind, an irony and an aggressiveness. So that he didn’t have to put on anything. Everything he said was kind of aggressive, and I’m sorry that he left, but I guess that’s what he wanted. I like him very much as a person. Yes. Q 7. What you said before about a good idea about a writer to have training in being an actor, I think that also goes for—that’s a very good thing to know in selling a story. RM . Oh yes, I think so. Q 8. What is going on in current efforts to make another James Bond film? What can you say about that? If have heard that it will take place in China, at least much of it will take place there. And how do you come upon ideas for major locations for a Bond picture? And for some of those great original scenes? RM . I was there today. I was there today over at MGM, over at United Artists in a story conference. We’re supposed to make a new picture. We thought about putting it in China. And there are terrible restrictions in writing a James Bond picture in China. You can’t have any violence, you can’t have any love scenes, you can’t have anything that makes a James Bond picture. So we went round and round and round. I must say—see this is my—I wrote eight pictures, nine pictures for Cubby and twelve Bonds so this is my twenty-second film with him. That goes back thirty-five years, so we know each other pretty well. As a matter-of-fact when I said I’m going to meet a discussion group at the Writer’s Guild tonight, have you got any message for them and this is what he said—He said, “Tell them to listen to what the other fella has to say and then tell them to fight it out, and then when you’ve fought it out, respect each other.” He was talking about the relationship between writer and producer and so forth, which I thought was very well put. He’s a marvelous man, Cubby Broccoli, with a great instinctive sense of showmanship. He just, for instance—in the novel “Goldfinger,” and in our first script, the attempt to break into Fort Knox and steal all the gold there was foiled before they got into Fort Knox. Cubby kept saying, “There’s something wrong, there’s something about this. If you make a story about trying to break into Fort Knox and stealing all that gold you gotta get in there and you gotta see it and you got to show it to the audience.” Everybody, except myself that was involved, Harry Saltzman the other producer at that time said that not even the President of the United States has never been in the inside of Fort Knox. And Cubby says, “That’s all the more reason why the audience should get a big kick out of going in there. What I see in there is a cathedral of gold.” Well, that’s being a showman. And so eventually, we talked the director, Guy Hamilton and the other producer into the fact that we would actually show the interior of Fort Knox. And in other ways, he has a great, great sense what the audience wants to see. You know, lots of things in the Bond films and in all films happen accidentally, the way you come upon things. For instance, in a picture called, I believe it was “For Your Eyes Only,” yes. There was a scene there where a parrot was in the scene and there was also a scene where Bond was knocked out and then there was something in the plot spoken between the villain and one of the subvillains and I had it that Bond could lip read at a distance and therefore knew what they were talking about. And Cubby said, “Ah, I don’t like that.” He couldn’t see that far and all that sort of stuff. And then so in exasperation I said, “Then what the hell do you want Cubby? You want that goddamn parrot to hear what he says and say it at the right moment?” He says, “That’s what I want.” Not only was that in the picture, but we got the best finale out of that thing and because the parrot was always saying, “Give us a kiss, will you, give us a kiss, will you,” and at the end when Bond and the girl are on the deck of the ship and they leave the parrot on the deck and he’s near an open microphone and they dive off together to swim nude and the girl who’s playing Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of England was calling to congratulate Bond and all she got was the parrot. She said, “Oh, Mr. Bond, I want to compliment you on all that you’ve done for us” and the parrot says, “Give us a kiss, will you, give us a kiss, will you,” and it cut to her, Margaret Thatcher, the girl who played Margaret Thatcher who said, “Oh, Mr. Bond.” All accidental from an argument. That’s how great things

sometimes happen in pictures. Yes. Q 9. How long does it take you to write a script for a Bond picture? RM . Well that depends. See, we used to have those beautiful novels to work from and they needed a lot of fixing too. So we had to add to them and change them to some extent. But then we ran out of the novels. And now we’ve not only run out of the novels, we’ve run out of even the short stories. And—the last three or four pictures really have been original stories just with the titles of some of Bond’s short stories. So when I had a book like From Russia with Love, which is a marvelous book. Incidentally, it’s my favorite Bond picture—it took six weeks to write. And then others take twenty weeks, thirty weeks. Some you work on, you have to put them aside and come next year and work on them. It all depends upon how lucky you are in getting the story worked out. My usual contract to write upon takes about twenty-six weeks, but as I say it’s been six weeks and it’s been a year. It all depends on how it goes. Q 10. Do you write a treatment first, and how much effort is put into it if you do? RM . Oh yes. We always write a treatment anywhere from fifty to eighty pages. Because as Cubby says, he didn’t want any surprises. He wants to know before he starts where he’s going and it also helps the writer too, to put it down that way. And many things happen in the treatment that you hadn’t contemplated while you’re writing it. So as I say it varies. Q 11. Have you used the basis of any of these later novels, that other people have added to the Bond movies? RM . No. No, as a matter-of-fact today, today we’re having a hell of a time with a story that’s supposed to take place in China. As a matter of fact, I brought up the fact—I said, well, John Gardner has written five or six of these books, why don’t we look into them. I’ve read several of them, but they haven’t got the thing that Ian Fleming’s work has. Ian Fleming was a very stringent person. His father was the outstanding World War I hero. He came from a very wealthy family. He had a brother who became a famous writer you know. He had all the prejudices in the world that anybody could have—Ian Fleming had them. I tell one story well I don’t know if I should, well, I’ll tell it. The first time I ever met him, I flew over to England to start work on—we didn’t start on Dr. No, we started on Thunderball. We thought that was the best of the films to make a motion picture and we, Cubby, got sued. There were some plagiarism claims involved about Thunderball, so we turned to Dr. No, and I’m glad we did because it was a smaller canvas and we could concentrate more on the characters. But I went over there in England, and I went to the producer’s office, and Harry Saltzman said to this tall, elegant Englishman, “Ian,” he said, “this is Dick Maibaum. He’s going to write our screenplay for us.” And Fleming looked down from that patrician height, and he looked at me and said, “Maibaum, Maibaum, Dutch name?” I didn’t have enough wit to say what I thought of to my pillow that night, which is where you really think of things you shouldn’t say. I should have said, “Yes, Dutch, like Johannas Bronx as in the Bronx,” you know, but I didn’t get to say it. He derated everybody that wasn’t English. Q 12. Did you ever do work in between working on the Bond films? RM . Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I did two—one two hours, and an hour and a half television shows which I wrote and I produced one of them. I also—There was a time where I had a battle with Cubby about something and I didn’t do one or two and then he brought me back. That’s happened I don’t know how many times. They put somebody else on after I finished, and then they called me up and said, “Come back.” Q 13. Have you ever had any general difficulties doing screenplay work or doing the day-to-day work of screenplay writing on a Bond film? I ask this because I assume you would not have much, given that in the previous Bond films you worked on you knew Bond so well. The character I mean. Was it hard to get started and hard to keep going? RM . No. No. After all, as I told you, I’d written more than fifty screenplays. Q 14. Could you say precisely how many hours a day you work when you work and what kind of schedule you try to keep? RM . Well, it’s difficult (to say). A writer never stops working you know. Even at night when I sleep. I’m dreaming and I come to a point where I say to myself, “No, no, it doesn’t go that way,” and then when I wake up—I’m so glad that it isn’t going that way. I know like, Julius Epstein is a very dear friend of mine—one of the great screenwriters. He says he writes two hours a day and that’s it. And I sometimes write fifteen to sixteen hours a day. It depends on how you’re going. It’s a compulsion. It’s a kind of a self-hypnosis and if it’s going well you just

keep on going, and then the next day you keep going you look at it, it’s awful. Q 15. So in that case, you go back and work on it again until you are satisfied? RM . That’s right. Q 16. Can you say something about James Bond, and sexuality, in the current era? RM . My dear, I can’t tell you how much trouble I’ve had by the statement I’ve made about that. There was a lady whose program was on three thousand radio stations. I forget, her name is Lori Lerner or something like that and she interviewed me and she asked me what was the love story in the picture and so I was rash enough to say that in this age of AIDS, James Bond and other motion picture heroes cannot go alley-catting around anymore. I said, that’s just plain common sense. Wow, did I get a call from the MGM Publicity Department. “What are you doing to us, to say that James Bond isn’t going to have a lot of girls on the show, and all that sort of stuff?” I got an awful lot of flack from that. Q 17. I appreciate the scenes of male-female attraction in the early films particularly between Bond and the woman. RM . Well, of course, you have this problem that James Bond uses himself as a “sex machine” to accomplish his mission again and again. It’s a kind of a standard part of the thing. He has no integrity when it comes to serving Queen and Country. Q 18. If I may, I want to ask you, do you see the story going perhaps in a direction where—do you see the Bond Films perhaps evolving away from “good spy stories” and more in the direction of “fantastic” stories? Do people say that to you and how do you feel about it? RM . I agree with you completely and I’ve argued this and argued this. You see what happened was that the films started out to be surprise hits. Good hits. Then they gradually became such megahits and the audience kept insisting upon more fantastical effects. You know, more of everything, until the monster ran away with us and there was no way of stopping it. Now the picture that has been most successful financially is the wildest one of all, and that is Moonraker, which, thank goodness, I didn’t write even though it was this great commercial success. Q 19. Can you comment on the relative appeal of the Bond Films abroad, versus their appeal domestically? I have heard that the Bond films either make all their money abroad, or in the United States, depending on the particular film. Is that true? Is the “appeal base” of the films changing? RM. Well not quite. As of now, and this is what I like—The Living Daylights has grossed about fifty-two million dollars in the United States, but it has grossed about eighty million already worldwide and we’re still counting you see. So it will end up and certainly from a worldwide standpoint, it will end up I think the most successful of the pictures. Now it’s interesting. You know, we gross more than twice as much in the rest of the world as we do in the United States and Canada and no one can understand this, why this should be, but I think I know why. I’m not belittling anybody in the United States, but I do think that foreign audiences in France, London, Japan even, Germany, Italy, and so forth, they want something a little more sophisticated than the American audience wants and that is why I think they like the Bond pictures more than Americans and Canadians do. Another thing that we’ve discovered now is that the people who go to see the Bond films now used to be all the kids. The kids are not going to see the Bond films now. The people who are going to the Bond films were kids when they started you see and have stayed with them all along the way and to them the Bond films are nostalgic. This is the odd thing. Everybody says, give the kids what they want. The kids don’t want us. The kids want androids and stuff like that you know, which is fine. I got a big kick out of what’s his name, Arnold Sch——, of whatever his name is. They said to him, “Why don’t you kill me?” or something, and he said, “I don’t do requests.” Yes. Q 20. The audience members liked I think, some of what may be called silliness or childishness in some elements found in the earlier Bond films. But today, you can’t go back again into the silliness and childishness of the earlier stuff. Do you think they’ve (i.e., the audience members) grown more mature? RM . That’s hard to say. I know that the studio wants us to appeal to the kids and do that sort of stuff. I know Mr. Broccoli doesn’t want to and I certainly don’t want to. It’s hard to say. I don’t think as long as Dalton³⁰ is in it, he’ll sit still if it gets too childish and too juvenile, you know. He’s a very serious actor, too serious at times. Now our problem with him is, we want to loosen him up a little bit. We want to make him—he’s a great classical actor, and yet I was astounded that any beginning actor knows that if you say a funny line, you stop, you wait for the reaction of the laugh, if there is one and then you go on. He won’t do that. He thinks that’s pandering to the audience, so he’ll have a funny line or something like that and he’ll keep right on talking and he won’t give the

audience an opportunity to react to it. He does that deliberately. He wants to be absolutely legitimate in what he does. I don’t want to hurt your appreciation of Mr. Dalton, but the only thing I don’t like about him is, that he is the longtime lover of Vanessa Redgrave and that bothers the hell out of me. She burned the American flag in Trafalgar Square, you know, and so forth and so forth. She is a consummate actress, don’t get me wrong. Q 21. All writers, I think, are always fascinated in the Process, the Writing Process. Something really difficult to describe, since we all write differently. Thinking about how you approach the beginnings of new work, do you have a process? RM . Yeah, I write in longhand. Oh, I know what you mean. Well, it’s the usual sharpening pencils, and you know, doing everything not to get right down to it, and so eventually, you must do it. But you see everything in the motion picture is like that. I don’t think anything would ever get done except for the deadline. And I’m glad you asked me about that, about writing and how writers work. I’ve got a favorite story, and with your permission I’ll tell it to you. Most of you have heard of the great Hungarian playwright, Ferenc Molnár. He wrote some of the most delightful comedies of the last century. The Play’s the Thing, Liliom, and so forth. But Ferenc Molnár was a kid named Franz Muller who came to Budapest who wanted to write and he did write. He began to write a few things, papers and stuff like that. So he began to make his way. And he married a kind of a half-ass countess who thought that she had married well below her—beneath her and was always complaining about him and his habits and his friends because he had a very peculiar way of writing. He played cards all day long, all night long on the boulevard, and while he played cards he would write. He would play and then he’d put the hand down and then he’d write and stuff like that and his wife couldn’t stand this. So then he wrote Liliom and Liliom was put on. It was badly cast, and the first night, the audience stood up and hooted and hollered and they were throwing the benches upon the stage and all that kind of stuff and they had to bring down the curtain and they were never finished beyond the first night. Later, they recasted it, and of course, it became one of the world’s greatest classics. But they got home that night, Molnar and his wife, and she said, “Ferenc, I’m going to make you go down on your knees now and on your mother’s life, swear to me that you will change your habits. You won’t play cards all day long and write in between the card game. You’re going to go to the country and you’re going to write like other writers write. Now get down on your knees and swear to me that you will never write another play like Liliom.” And Ferenc used to say, “I swore, I kept my promise.” He never did write anything as good as Liliom again, that he wrote while he was playing cards! So how does a fellow write? Everyone has a different way. Q 22. I think you know mentioning people who write two hours, and you’re always writing. You’re still thinking about it for the other twenty-two hours. Probably. Yes? RM . Huh? Q 22. You say you write two hours, you’re thinking of it—always. RM .—Of course, you never stop. Q 23.—And there is always something else to write? RM . I was just trying to think of a line for Bond— Q 24. (Question/comment from Waecker) If you come up with a line for Bond and you put it in, it will go in our archives! The thing about China, what’s the problem? RM . They’re too restrictive for what they will allow you to do and that’s terribly expensive. It is, it is. Q 25. Have you seen that film that came out recently that took place in China and was about the Emperor? The Last Emperor? RM . Yes, I haven’t seen it yet. I hear it’s most interesting. Q 26. When you pick and use a location for a Bond film do you go there and shoot there, preferably? I know that in other areas of filmmaking you use many special effects. I have imagined that you will rely on special effects to represent some place Bond has to go rather than going there, presumably because of the costs involved. RM . Well but that isn’t what the Bonds are known for. We really go to the place and do it and show it. There is no substitute for really being there. Sure you could build a stretch of the Great Wall some place but it wouldn’t be

the same. Q 27. Is it specifically politically difficult to organize shooting and producing a Bond film in Communist China? Is it politically and financially viable to try and make a movie there and would a film company get returns on the investment of effort to make a film there? RM . Well, it’s starting to open up but you just get a few pennies out of the place. It doesn’t amount to anything. Q 28. If you shot a film in Mainland China, and you wanted to show it in Taiwan, would the Nationalist Chinese government let you exhibit the picture in Taiwan? You couldn’t show it in Taiwan. RM . No, you couldn’t. Q 29. If you “market” China, I mean Mainland China, you could show the next Bond film, centered there, to an audience in Mainland China alone of six hundred million people. RM . Where Bond should go? I wish somebody would tell me! Q 30. Do you think it would be feasible to go around and scout a variety of locations in China at this time and make arrangements to shoot there in them? RM . Well, that could be done but it’s very, very difficult. And what’s more difficult than finding a locale, and it’s the oddest thing about writing the Bonds, is the villain’s caper. That’s the point. Because once you get that then you know what James Bond has to do to foil him. Q 31. In the early James Bond movies, the villain was always Russian, but you don’t do that anymore? RM . No, no I’m glad we’re over that. Q 32 Do you wish ever these days that the villains were all Russians? RM . No. Q 33. Do you get technical specialists to consult to MI5, or satellite deals [sic]? I mean, have you had a lot of conversations with technical advisors that can consult on facts, for the films? RM . No, actually not. I had a lot more of that when I wrote and produced “OSS,” with Alan Ladd, which was the first picture about our OSS. I had about, before I was done, about ten or eleven technical advisors and we’d hold up the shooting while these technical advisors would be at each other’s throats and saying, no it didn’t go like that, it was this way. He stabbed him in the back. He didn’t kick him in the foot and all that kinds of stuff that went on. I was up to my neck in technical advisors and all that. And one of them’s name was mentioned, the guy who was the top technical guy for me was a fellow named John Shahine who was mentioned as the pal of Mr. Casey, head of the CIA, and was very prominent in trying to set up an independent secret organization you know under Casey’s management and he was quite a chap, John Shahine. Q 34. Do you know about that new book recently written about spying? What was its name? RM . Spy Catcher—it’s called Spy Catcher. Q 35. Could you comment on that idea that if there were no lies and cheating among spies themselves, there wouldn’t be any problems in the world? That they create the turmoil, in order to keep their jobs? RM . Well, perhaps, perhaps, I think they do sometimes. However, I have this feeling that the spy organization serves a very valid purpose these days. God, let’s keep it all covert rather than overt with differences between countries and stuff like that. Let it be as covert as possible and many things might get settled and worked out that way without recourse to guns and shooting. Q 36. What can you say about the authenticity of production design and related art work in the Bond films? What comes to mind foremost in my mind is Goldfinger and that sequence in Fort Knox. RM

. You know we had a magnificent art designer. Ken Adam. He was one of the great ones. He did “Dr. Strangelove,” and he does all these great pictures. He did that and they got a little worried, or the government did, after they had heard we had shot the Fort Knox sequence.³¹ It was shot in London and they wanted stills of the exterior and the interior of Fort Knox portrayed in “Goldfinger.” So we sent them that, and the director of the Mint wrote back to Broccoli, and he said, “The pictures of the exterior of Fort Knox, as you’ve built it, is correct down to the last blade of grass. But the interior, let me just say that your art direction has a marvelous imagination.” Q 37. As a writer do you find people are cooperative when you want to call people up and say you’re researching something? I mean, people give you enormous help with the immense power that you have with all the Bond stuff? Formalized cooperation? RM . Yes, they’re very cooperative. Very many of them. Q 38. Who conceives of the action scenes in Bond films? And how do you as the writer conceive of them, and make use of creative suggestions of stuntmen themselves? Could you comment on that? RM . Well, that’s interesting that you should ask that because it’s a combination of things. You get an idea as a writer that you want something to happen but you don’t quite know how it can be achieved. So we have some fellows that work out the stunts for us. Usually, they take the ones that we suggest, but very often they’ll go far beyond it, you know, and they’ll suggest things to us too. Stuntmen will say I can jump out of a plane without a parachute and then my buddy can dive out with a parachute and can catch me and carry me down the rest of the way. They say that and they do it. I think it was Octopussy, we had a fight on top of an airplane, two guys fighting. Well they were five thousand feet up in the air in that plane. These two guys were fighting on the top of the airplane. Of course, they had—and one fellow punched the other and knocked him off the airplane. He fell right out of the camera thing and he got below camera level—he got out of his jacket and pulled the—he had a small chute underneath the thing and then floated down you see. But the things that they do are really amazing, and I think, “They must be crazy.” They suggest these terrible things and they do them and they get a great thrill out of doing them, and they get hurt doing them sometimes too. Q 39. Have the making of Bond films ever incurred any accidents? I’ve heard that nobody was ever hurt in making them, even with those action scenes. RM . No. No, we’ve had some accidents. We had one fellow who is our cameraman and was always doing big stunts, he got killed on another picture. He fell out of a—he was photographing something and the plane lurched and he fell right out of the open door. Q 40. What picture was that? RM . I don’t know what picture it was on. It was not ours. Q 41. Is there anything after doing all this, that you’ve always wanted to do… Is there a direction you’d like to go with that maybe different or something, you think, after having done so many of them? RM . If I can come up with another new locale or idea or villain or something like that. And it gets tougher and tougher. However, I think one of these days, I’ll go back to playing golf. Q 42. I can’t remember the name of the picture, but it worked well as a scene. Remember, a jet plane came out of somewhere. Bond in it, and flew through a hangar, with a missile after him, and it blew up the hangar and all in it, but he got out the other side unscathed! What was that? RM . The jet came out of the truck, yeah, that was a good opening sequence.³² Q 43. It was, and that was a surprise. RM . That was in “Octopussy,” and I think that was in the first scene of the film too. Of course, that’s a stunt that the fellow flies anyway. Q 44. Mow, you take a stunt that somebody already does. I mean, there are a lot of stuntmen that do things and specific stunts each one can do. RM

. Oh, yes. Q 54. In fact, there was a guy going off a mountain on skis in the Bond film and he hit the air and a parachute opened. Does that stuntman do that kind of stunt often? RM . No, that was the first time anybody would do that.³³ That kid’s family wanted him to be a dentist in fact. He lives here in Beverly Hills, and they go mad when he does these things. He writes every now and then that he’s got some mad idea that he wants to do but as yet he hasn’t got them connected as yet. Q 46. Is there a temptation to bring in a “historical view” of a younger Bond? A “young bond”? RM . Well, we did you know when we knew that what’s his name was going to leave.³⁴ We did write a treatment and I thought it was a very good one where we were going to get a very young guy about twenty-three or twentyfour years old to play Bond and the picture would be “How Did James Bond Get to be the Great 007.” And we put together a damn good script about it, but Mr. Broccoli, as I say, who is a marvelous showman, he eventually said, “No, the public does not want to pay to go and see a tyro, an amateur James Bond learning his trade. They want to see James Bond at the peak of all his power, you know the superman, the great lover, the everything, the confident fellow—he is—that’s the image—the escape image that Bond is for many people all over the world.” Q 47. I would imagine you have to listen to what the other fellow has to say. I think that, interestingly enough, this provides you with that sort of treatment. You certainly can have a young man who portrays Bond when he was at a stage earlier in his life. RM . Yes, but I thought that Broccoli was right. I don’t know that it would have been successful. To have a guy kind of learning his trade, you know. It was an interesting idea I thought, but I—we never got a chance. Q 48. Well—making some kind of historical reference to Bond’s background within a picture, where he got his outlook on life, and some of his motivation from his background—using it within the picture—it would be successful, wouldn’t it? RM . Oh yes, of course. And the interesting thing was, in one of the novels, somewhere the statement is made that Bond’s family motto was “The world is not enough”—which I think might be a good title for one of the pictures. The point was that, the way we did it, that this Bond was a young naval officer, a firebrand, a fellow who couldn’t stand authority or repression or stuff like that, wouldn’t toethe line, wouldn’t be disciplined and stuff like that and got himself into such trouble gambling and with the girls, that he was about to be cashiered, you see. And that his grandfather in Scotland was a friend of M’s, who ran MI6. And he said, what am I going to do with this guy, the grandfather said. And so M called him in and said if you’ll take a job here as a subagent, take the training for it, I’ll see if we can’t quash your court-martial, you see. And that’s how he got into it. And the idea that the world is not enough, you must be honorable too, was the idea. It worked out. Q 49. On another note, can you tell us something about your first stage play, The Tree? RM . Oh yes, it was the first American play on lynching. It was put on Broadway.³⁵ It was the lynching of a Negro and the people involved in it. The set—it was done—it’s just this blasted tree, old tree at a site, the whole thing. And that was where they lynched this boy. And it was pretty, pretty grim stuff. My second play was pretty grim stuff, about the Nazis.³⁶ And it’s interesting, after I did three of four plays like that, social plays, that is one of the reasons why I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. When I think about those sayings, he writes the James Bond’s screenplays. I started out writing the things that were very much different than the Bond things. Q 50. I can understand that mortality causes a change in man, but why in the latest Bond picture, is Lois Maxwell not seen? How come she was not cast in the latest picture? RM . Ah, she was such—she’s such a darling, we love her, but she’s an old lady, for crying out loud. Q 51. Did somebody feel that Lois Maxwell’s³⁷ character, or that of Ms. Moneypenny, was no longer appropriate in the films? RM . No. No. No you see the image, unfortunately, the image, stays forever, and the actor, you know, ages. When I was there last time when we were casting and working on Living Daylights, she called up and asked to have tea with me and I went to her—she had been told that this would probably be the last time that she would be—no it wasn’t from Living Daylights—it was the one before it, and that would be her last, A View To Kill. And she said to me, “Well, I have an idea how she should bow out.”

And I said, “How Lois?” And she said, “She should die saving James Bond’s life.” I said, “What?” She’d be killed saving his life, you see. Quite an idea. You know, it would be good for her, but immortal Ms. Moneypenny is still that perk young person sitting there that’s bouncing everything back and forth with Bond and sighing and hoping that someday he’ll have time for her. I would have rather have had her than the new ones that we’ve had you see, but maybe we’ll be lucky and find a good one. Q 52. Could you please work in Mrs. Thatcher again? But that was a wonderful casting. The girl who played her was perfect! RM . Yes, well, she does that—that’s her thing you know. She goes all over. And the funny part about it was that Dennis was there, her husband and she did that funny… [laughter], and that’s all accidental. Another one of those things I wasn’t involved in. And I think it’s, ah, The Spy Who Loved Me. You know, Jaws the guy with the steel teeth, the big guy, seven feet tall. He got into a fight with a shark at the end and they were arguing now what the heck’s going to happen here. So Michael Wilson who is now collaborating with me and who is now the coproducer, he said, “Cubby, I think that George should bite the shark” and everybody said, “What?” and it was Cubby who said, “Yeah, that’s a great idea.” Q 53. Now there was a situation where the bad guy eventually outdid Bond. RM . You see what happened with Jaws was, he started out with being this monster with steel teeth and all that kind of stuff and along the way, this big guy, what’s his name— Q 54. Richard Kiel? RM . He’s kind of cute, you know, that we started to—somebody got the idea that, well, we’ll make him a smaller monster and it worked. You know everything we did worked out wrong and so they decided they couldn’t kill him, he had to be saved somehow. How was he saved? He bit the shark. Q 55. Even Mel Brooks did a takeoff on him. (Pause from audience.) Moderator Waecker . Come people, one and only opportunity. Q 56. Question about Timothy Dalton as Bond. Have you been working on different approaches to try to get a desired rendition of your dialogue? RM . Oh, no, no, no. Q 57. No, I meant from a writing sense, so that the dialogue is rendered as it was intended, by the writer… RM . Oh, no, no, no, I think it’s partly the Director’s fault. He’s busy with other things, and he doesn’t catch it. And he should say, “Wait, slow up there.” Of course, the director is kind of hesitant to tell Timothy Dalton how to act. But this business of stepping on lines is just a small carp I had personally. He’s a really excellent actor. Q 58 What happened to the first Aston-Martin DB5 car we saw in Goldfinger? I don’t remember. RM . Mr.Solo’s limousine got crushed in Goldfinger, wasn’t it—crushed I think. That sold for twenty thousand dollars as a curiosity piece for somebody who uses it as his coffee table.³⁸ Q 59. What will be the name of the next Bond film? RM . We really haven’t come to any real conclusions about the whole thing. The possible title that we thought of was the only remaining short story. No, there is one other called “From the South” which I can’t see as a Bond title. It’s called “The Hildebrand Rarity” and it’s a very good little story and we may use a bit of that as a springboard for the next story but we’re not sure yet. Q 60. What story line would you have, for a Bond film that takes place in China? RM

. I, I don’t know. It’s very difficult to do what you want to do in China and I think we’re losing interest in it. They’ve gone and they’ve looked at, you know, the locations and so forth but I think they are losing their interest to a certain extent. Q 61. Didn’t some of The Living Daylights take place in mainland China? Part looked like it may have been shot there. RM . No, that was in Morocco. Q 62. Do you go on location yourself, for the making of the Bond films? RM . Sometimes. I haven’t gone recently. I find that going on locations and climbing mountains and walking through swamps and stuff and looking for good places to shoot I can do it all more easily by reading The National Geographic. Q 63. How long do you take to make a Bond film? RM . Well, we make one every two years. That’s about— Q 64. When might we expect the next Bond film to appear? And what would be the timeline for the major parts of the production process on it? RM . Well we would hope to have a script by January, February, and then start shooting in May and June and then it takes about a year after that.³⁹ Q 65. Do you do all your writing here in the States or also elsewhere? Do you do all the writing here? RM . Oh no. What we do, you see, a lot of us are Americans. We do the treatment here usually and the Director comes over here and sits with us and then we get the treatment. The pictures are produced in Pinewood, in London, and then we go over there and do the screenplay. Q 66. You get around a lot. RM . Oh yes. Waecker . I know we talked periodically, and either something is just finishing, or and the minute the last one finishes, we talk, and the next one is in the process. So it is an ongoing process. It’s almost like doing a twenty-five-yearold television series.⁴⁰ RM . I don’t know how much longer I can last. I don’t know, the series may go on forever. But it’s a chore. It’s a very difficult thing. You see it’s a different kind of screenwriting. There are so many facets and things that have to be all woven together. The love story, the action, the capers, the backgrounds—all of that. And then it has to be reasonably amusing. It also has to be serious enough so the audience sits there in suspended disbelief. It’s very hard. It’s not like writing the ordinary sort of thing guided by the characters who take you along. I will admit that it’s a more mechanical kind of screen writing rather than an inspirational kind, although I have never “written down,”⁴¹ and I always tried to write something would end up in having a certain beauty to it, as an exciting adventurous story, love story and give people a lift. It’s about goodness against evil, and so I’ve never sold them short. Not once. When I start doing that, I’ll quit. I have sort of taken them seriously. It reminds me of a fellow I’ve collaborated with here, the name is Cyril Hume. A wonderful novelist from the twenties. My Sister, My Bride and Wife of the Centaur. It was a famous novel and he came here to Hollywood and before you knew it, this brilliant novelist was writing the Tarzan pictures for Johnny Weissmuller. When I came to Hollywood, we were kind of thrown together and told to collaborate. We were very different people. Gradually, we began to see that fundamentally we had many things in common. But I would say to him, “Cy, how in the hell can you write those ‘Tarzan’ things?” He looked at me and said, “What are you talking about? Kipling wrote Jungle Tales, didn’t he?” He took them that seriously and that’s why when you see a good “Tarzan,” one of the old ones, it is still a good picture because he was spinning a yarn the way Kipling did. And whatever you write, you must to a certain extent believe in it or it’s not going to be any good. You can’t write off the top of your head or write “down” to anybody. You just try to write as well as you can. You know, things like The Thirty-Nine Steps are classics too in their ways and they are not to be sneered at and I think that the best of the Bonds which I think are From Russia with Love and Goldfinger. You know Goldfinger is the most popular of the Bond pictures. Goldfinger has been seen by sixty percent of

the people in the world that look at movie pictures and it’s the kind of a picture that you know when you’re bowling, and bang and all, the ninth pin—you go down a strike—that’s the way everything was in Goldfinger. Everything worked. And the villain that we had, Gert Frobe. And Sean,⁴² Sean was magnificent in that picture. After Goldfinger, he lost interest, he really did. But I’m proud of that and I’m proud of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service too because I took that seriously, and that was Fleming’s best novel you know with the best ending. So we had a problem there because at the end of that picture he gets the girl, Diana Rigg,⁴³ and they go on their honeymoon and in the book she’s shot and killed on the honeymoon. And so what arguments raged. “You cannot end a James Bond picture with the heroine getting shot to death,” “They won’t stand for it,” and so forth. And we went around and around and around and then finally we did the Fleming ending and you know why? Because, what would you do with James Bond as a husband and a father that had to come home at six o’clock every night? It just wouldn’t work. That’s not James Bond. So they got to look at it as the saddest happiest ending of all times. We were able to avoid having James Bond as a married man in the next picture. I liked For Your Eyes Only too. I thought that girl, Carol Bouquet, was marvelous, wonderful. And there were lots of parts of the other pictures. I like this one, Living Daylights very much.⁴⁴ Q 67. Regarding the basic overall stories for the Bond pictures, most of them, did you create the basic stories or did you stick to the story of a novel? I have heard you basically created the story for the films. RM . Yes, we did. We made them up. Q 68. Was the character “Odd Job” in Goldfinger your creation, in film, or was he originally created by Ian Fleming in his novel? RM . Well, of course, they’re our versions of Odd Job, which was Fleming’s, you know. He was a great guy. I will never forget in the scene in Fort Knox when Bond is chained to the bomb that’s going to go off. You know we had to change that and Goldfinger’s plan in the novel was just to steal all the gold. But that would take two-and-a-half weeks to do. It would take fifty men two-and-a-half weeks to carry all the gold out of Fort Knox. So we broke our heads—Mr. Fleming never thought about that. We broke our heads—now what could we do? So then we got the bright idea that he was going to detonate a small atomic bomb—cobalt bomb, and it radiated the gold for fifty-eight years, so it was useless, which would make his gold go way up. And I forgot the point I was going to make about— Q 69. The character Odd Job and the actor portraying him. RM . Oh yes, and finally he got out. But there was Odd Job and they had to have this titanic struggle in the bowels of Fort Knox while something was ticking, and all of this sort of stuff and they had—you know—Sean⁴⁵ did a lot of his own stunts and fights and Odd Job was a professional wrestler, a marvelous guy who used to write Japanese poetry and there was a fight in there and Sean threw a punch and he didn’t show Harry⁴⁶ where they had practiced where he would throw it, and he hit Odd Job, Harold Sakata, his name was, in the mouth and he split, he split his lip wide open. And the blood just gushed out and Hamilton,⁴⁷ the director said to the cameraman, “Keep going, keep going,” and he didn’t call for them to cut. So they went and did the whole fight and when it was over, the director said, “Cut.” Everybody “held it”—what’s Odd Job, Sakata going to do? He had blood running down his face. He went up to Bond and he took his face and he held it in both hands and he went—he kissed him right on the lips. The blood—all over both their faces. Q 70. Have there been any difficulties in taking Fleming’s novels and converting them into films? And what was Fleming like, himself, as a writer? RM . Actually doing the seven novels had some difficulties. They are filled with the most marvelous exposition and descriptions and on film they are just a pretty piece of film and so you have to be very ruthless and throw that out and cut to the action and keep going and not stop for pretty speeches or pretty pictures. That’s one other thing that is difficult about doing the Bonds. He was an excellent writer. You know he was a quiet man and he was married to the widow of Lord Robinmere the press lord. And that was a funny thing. What’s his name, Fleming used to be a man about town, very sophisticated. And although he was an old crotchety guy and she was a young girl and so—don’t write about some of this. He used to squire her around. Robin he used to say, oh why don’t you take Annie out. I don’t like to go out anymore, and still like that… And so Fleming did! Then the old guy kicked off and Robinmere’s son, her stepson, he came to Fleming. He said, “Well, you’ve got to marry Annie now.” He said, “Why? I don’t want to get married.” He said, “Well, everybody thought you were having an affair” and everything like that. “I don’t know if you were or you weren’t but they thought you did so you’d better get married for the sake of Appearances.” So very much against his will, Fleming who was a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor man around town, he married her. When they got married she wanted to go out every night and he didn’t want to and she was the hostess in the town and they—their house was always filled with some brilliant people and stuff like that, but he’d never

come. He’d come in the back and sneak upstairs and go in the attic and that’s where he started to write the Bond picture as a kind of a therapy. He really did. And she thought they were terrible, just awful, you know, those silly things that he writes. Well, you know, they were published and people began to read them and then there was a cult about them. And then the pictures were made and I think they sold about four million copies before the pictures and when the pictures started to be made, there were soon forty million sold and the money poured in and he was the great Ian Fleming, and she kept saying I don’t care, they are lousy. He could never impress her with his being a writer. Q 71. I understand that Fleming was quite old when he began writing the James Bond novels. RM . Yeah, he was fifty-four or something like that. And now, she didn’t need the money, but she’s made a fortune out of those books. Q 72. Could you tell us what you know about Fleming’s own interest in and success at, personally selling his novel to filmmakers? RM . That’s interesting. Fleming could not sell any of his stuff to the movies but he did sell Casino Royale to whom do you think—of all the people in the world, least like Ian Fleming, Gregory Ratoff bought Casino Royale. When Gregory died he left it to Eugenia Leontovich and Charlie Feldman gave her ten thousand dollars for it. So that’s how he had the rights to that. I’m sorry that we didn’t have it because it was a very good book. Q 73. Have other groups tried to make James Bond pictures, and what successes did they have? RM . Well, you know what they did there. We’ve had had three or four successes and Feldman wanted us to give him—Sean Connery to be the hero, and we wouldn’t do it, and so he said, “I’ll fix you.” He said, “I’ll make a spoof of the Bonds that nobody will ever go see another Bond.” It’s so foolish you can’t spoof a spoof. And there were five directors, six Bonds. Even the great John Huston just made a terrible mess of the couple of reels that he did. Because that’s what I talk about. You cannot “write down” to something. John Huston could certainly have made a wonderful picture out of it, Casino Royale, but that’s the way it comes down. Q 74. How much longer do we have here tonight, where we can ask questions? Waecker. We are here as long as somebody has something to ask Richard.⁴⁸ Q 75. What is the name of the latest Bond film to be coming out? RM . The Living Daylights. Q 76. Where was Daylights filmed? I heard it was filmed in Afghanistan. RM . No, Living Daylights was shot in Morocco, then Austria, and some scenes in northern Italy. Q 77. Was it supposed to be depicting a locale in Soviet Central Asia? RM . No, Afghanistan. Q 78. It was? RM . Yes. With a Russian-occupied Afghanistan. Q 79. The early part, was it? RM . No. Oh yeah. It was shot—it was supposed to be a place in Czechoslovakia, but that was shot in Austria. Q 80. So the place in the countryside represented in the film that Bond and the girl escape from was supposed to be inside Czechoslovakia, but not itself in Austria. RM . Close by, just over the border. Q

81. Does it matter to a director how you write the basic script, from the standpoint of the scenes he specifically has to organize and shoot, and the angles he has to consider? RM . A great deal. A great deal. It all depends, you see. Usually a lot of directors resent having you break it up at the camera angle. They say, “Give me a scene with the dialogue and stuff, and I’ll break it up.” But I’ve always, whenever I could, I broke it enough into camera angles because I think that’s a legitimate part of screen writing of what the image should be. How far you should be aware from the characters and so on. As a matter of fact, an ordinary screenplay has sometimes about two hundred, 220 scenes. A View to Kill had thousands. A thousand scenes. Q 82. How much cutting is done on scenes for a Bond film, once they are written in the script, and then shot? RM . Every one of them’s cut. It’s practically a cutting version before you start. This director likes it this way. And this director, John Glenn, he storyboards everything. You know, every shot is created by an artist before he gets it and works with it. Q 83. So the whole process is very collaborative? RM . Oh yes. Q 84. Which is not always the case—⁴⁹ RM . No. Q 85. Sadly. But this is probably the best of all worlds. The working relationship at the end. The director⁵⁰— (Pause.) How would you, compare the different directors that worked on the different Bond films? RM . Despite what I said about persons living or dead, I would say exactly what I meant to say about it. I think that’s one I should duck, you know. I will say that I don’t think that Terence Young was given enough credit for really setting up a style in the first two pictures⁵¹ and his love scenes were by far the most passionate and the most moving, but he’s a very peerless kind of a director, Terence. He comes in the morning, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s going to do and around three o’clock in the afternoon, they’d get an idea and they’d do it and they’d do it and it drives you mad, you know, but he’s a very talented director and very brilliant man and he hasn’t had the credit that he should get for launching them that way! What’s his name, Guy Hamilton, is a very stern dictatorial director. You know, Sean would say, “Ah, Terence, it’s three o’clock, we’ve worked enough. Let’s go play golf.” And Terence would say, “Sure, I’ll be right with you.” But if Sean Connery said that to Hamilton, he would say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Connery, we still haven’t done the work that I’ve laid out for us to do so I don’t think that would be a good idea at all. Let’s stay on and finish up what we’re supposed to do.” And Hamilton would also say for which I like him very much, when Sean or somebody would say, “Don’t you think that if I said—” he would stop them right there.⁵² And he said, “Look, the writers and myself have worked for months trying to get this dialogue right, and I hardly think that in the next two or three minutes we’re going to think of something better than we have here, so please read it as it’s written.” Now how many times have you heard a director say that? And they don’t say it enough times, and they don’t you know. It’s fair play. Everybody throws everything into the hopper, and it looks that way. Q 86. Has the process been collaborative all the way on all the projects? RM . Oh yes. Q 87. So it’s always been a writer, director, producer— RM . Yes, yes, yes, yes. There is one director that I worked with on a script that I didn’t—I worked with him on Spy Who Loved Me,⁵³ and then he brought somebody else in—that’s Louis Gilbert, also an excellent director. He and I didn’t get along, somehow didn’t jive. You know you’ve got to have simpatico somehow in everything. He’s a very hard worker and a good one, and John Glenn was a magnificent cutter, and it’s so amazing when you tell them an idea, he’ll tell it back to you with the scenes all there. The way he’s going to shoot. It’s all cut in his head already. Before it’s even written it’s all in his head. He’s really marvelous, and I think he’s one of the greatest action directors in the world, although sometimes I think he’s so great that the emphasis goes too much onto action and it goes on too long because he’s always very inventive in the actions that he does. He does a car chase but each car chase has something you’ve never seen

before in a car chase and the other director who was an interesting man was Peter Hunt. Peter Hunt, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service⁵⁴—we worked on that very closely, and I admire him very, very much. As a cutter, he’s a wizard. Q 88. How did the writer and the director work together, collaborate, on the film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service? That involved you working with Peter Hunt, I believe. RM . On On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, we worked on that together very closely, and I admire him very, very much. As a cutter, he’s a wizard. He’s just amazing. As a director, he has exquisite taste, exquisite taste. He is good with actors and I don’t know. You know, they say he spends too much money; but it takes two to do something… And time is of the essence you know in the picture business. I remember a producer who used to go onto the set and he’d holler, “My god, my god, nothing is turning but the clock!” Q 89. Did you work on all of the James Bond films? RM . No. No, I didn’t write Moonraker, I didn’t write You Only Live Twice, and I didn’t write Live and Let Die—I wrote all the others. And those are generally considered the inferior ones. Q 90. How much are actors being paid contemporarily, for their parts in Bond films? I have heard that actors do not really make very much money, other people involved with the film make more money than the actors do. RM . Well, darling I don’t know if that is so. I heard today that Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to get twelve million dollars for his next picture. Can you imagine such a sum. Twelve million dollars for that. Q 91. I have a question about Bond’s love interest in the most recent Bond film. She strikes me to be different from the historic Bond Girls, sort of vulnerable, young, unsophisticated, not entirely at ease, not terribly independent. Different than many women or most women in Bond movies in the past. The part played by Maryam d’Abo. Kara Milovy. RM . Well, we deliberately, they deliberately did that. They wanted―with Timothy―They wanted a more romantic story. So they couldn’t get a sexpot for that part, and I’m glad they didn’t.⁵⁵ Q 92. But Maryam D’Abo worked. She was appealing enough. RM . I think that’s right. I think she was appealing enough. Although, it could have been much better, because she was the first Bond heroine that really had talent or something, you know, she could at least play the cello. Q 93. I have a question. What kinds of inputs have been made into the script, or at least attempted, by studio executives who are themselves not in the creative end? RM . Well, people that run studios have some ideas, funny ideas, of what they should do to make good pictures. I don’t think they know at all what the hell they’re doing from that standpoint. Q 94. Did studio executives ever make comments or inputs about Bond scripts or stories in progress? RM . They did. Q 95. Can you make some comment about the writer and the issue of Creative Control, and others’ input into the writing of a script? And if you can, reflect on writing for film, as different from writing for Broadway. I know you have written for both. RM . No one had ever made a great picture out of a bad script, but a lot of lousy pictures are made out of good scripts. You know, they loused it up. On this business of “creative control” for writers, it’s very, very difficult because sure writers should have a certain amount of control. But, see, I’ve been a producer too, and unfortunately I’ve read things by people who claim to be writers and it’s shocking. It happens. We’ve got six thousand members and there must be some of them that are not quite up to snuff. But yes there are things that you resent to change. Usually it makes an argument and you win or you lose, you know. And as Broccoli said, listen to the other fellow, fight, and then decide what to do. It’s difficult. I wouldn’t know how— how would you say, for instance, “Every writer should have a right to make all changes requested”? If he doesn’t want to make them, what happens? The difference is when you write a play in New York, you spend a couple of years or year writing a play, you don’t earn a penny during that time. You pour everything into it. Then you sell a lousy option for a thousand

dollars and they hold it for six months or something like that and then they drop it. Now, when you sell a play, that producer or director cannot change a comma without your permission. Why? Because you own that material. When a writer comes out here and he gets quite a decent salary to be paid while he’s doing something, there is a slight difference you see. The fellow in New York, who has risked everything for a year or so, he’s entitled to that additional protection. It’s a very hard thing. Of course, we know that there are all kinds of vulgar boobs that get their hands on a script. I mean, talking about producers and directors, that don’t know what the hell they’re doing and they change it and it’s disgraceful but how to protect a writer from that, I don’t know how it can be done. Q 96. Unless, you can be in a—if you’re in a collaborative environment, that’s the one thing. But too often the material goes on and ends up in the hands of others too. On the other hand, the directors have the same problems with actor’s job, with those same people cutting behind them. So it’s probably a problem that goes on and on and never has a complete resolution. RM . No, not at the moment. You know quite often there are producers that ask me to read something or ask me if I’m interested but they usually give me imitation Bonds to read. If I’m going to do that kind of work, I want to do the genuine article. Q 97. You’re being typecast just like an actor? RM . I guess so. Q 98. Well to follow on that same line, do you have something that you want do that you—yet a project you know, that you would just like to do? RM . Yes. I would like to do “Scaramouch.”⁵⁶ I think the time is right for it. I think that would make a hell of a television series. Done seriously. You know, not campy or anything like that. There are certain things like that around that I’d like to do. There is also a trilogy of books by Stribling. The Forge, Unfinished Cathedral, the books about the south.⁵⁷ They are very under evaluated, underrated, and not recognized. They’d make marvelous pictures, I think. There’s a lot of stuff that can be made. Well, I’ve sold “originals,” you know, written them and sold them. But they’re hard to sell. Q 99. Well, could you say something else about—It was asked before— RM , Getting a “high sign” from Waecker, the moderator, that it is time to conclude, I’m afraid I’ve said too much already. Chuckle. Waecker . Okay, if there aren’t any more questions, I will simply say thank you.⁵⁸

Endnotes ¹ Elsa Lanchester, who also played in the film as an eccentric artist. ² Allusion to the significance of this fact inasmuch as it is a crime mystery and drama with all the crime analysis and criminal-baiting done by “nonprofessionals,” as it were. ³ The Great Gatsby (1949). ⁴ Made in 1946. ⁵ I.e., to do a remake of the picture with Alan Ladd, which picture subsequently appeared in 1949. ⁶ Organization functioning in the commercial film industry that strived to assess and guarantee that things moral and ethical and none other would be maximally portrayed in films. It enforced moral guidelines in the industry. ⁷ Mishlei’ Proverbs 14:12. ⁸ Remake of The Great Gatsby subsequent to the Alan Ladd picture, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. It was released by Paramount Pictures in 1974. ⁹ Barry Sullivan played Tom Buchanan. ¹⁰ Where he and Sullivan interacted closely on screen, and in close shots. ¹¹ The Red Beret, also called “Paratrooper,” released in 1954, about British paratroopers in North Africa. Alan Ladd in the leading role portrayed one of them, nicknamed “Canada.” Shepperton Studios are near London. ¹² Which was released a little later, in 1985. ¹³ The James Bond series altogether. ¹⁴ Opener of Dr. No released in 1962. ¹⁵ Screenwriter and novelist writer of such books as Wife of the Centaur and Cruel Fellowship. ¹⁶ Dr. No (1962). ¹⁷ Said by the professor, to Bond, before Bond shoots him. In the course of Dr. No (1962). ¹⁸ Roger Moore, who succeeded Sean Connery in the series and was in several films. Connery returned and followed Moore and portrayed Bond in one last Broccoli and Saltzman produced Bond film, “Diamonds Are Forever” (released December 1971) to be following in subsequent films by Moore. ¹⁹ I.e., he does not want to draw attention away from the superb characters drawn, and acting, and relationships, but also wants to intimate that writing the Bond films is in itself also fun, in fact. ²⁰ I.e., working on License Revoked as original titled, then License to Kill, released Summer 1989. ²¹ Birthright, 1933, produced on Broadway. ²² Sweet Mystery of Life, a play also produced on Broadway. Richard Maibaum came to Hollywood in 1935. ²³ On Broadway. ²⁴ Which film was finished and released in 1962. ²⁵ I.e., the somewhat elaborate, longer “teasers” at the beginning of the film in the earliest Bond films. ²⁶ I.e., the opener (pre-title sequence) of Spy Who Loved Me, released spring 1977. ²⁷ Usually meaning, in England, one’s having gone to Oxford or Cambridge. ²⁸ The film was first shown in Summer 1983. ²⁹ Roger Moore. ³⁰ Timothy Dalton. ³¹ Referring to Goldfinger (1964). ³² The opening sequence, “teaser,” or Octopussy (1983). ³³ In the teaser, opening sequence, of Spy Who Loved Me (1977). ³⁴ Roger Moore. ³⁵ The Tree (1931). ³⁶ Birthright: A Play of the Nazi Regime (1933), also produced on Broadway. ³⁷ Who played Miss Moneypenny in prior Bond films, the secretary/assistant to M, Bond’s supervisor. ³⁸ In point of fact, the car crushed in Goldfinger was a Lincoln Continental, with dead criminal kingpin “Mr. Solo” in it. Its compacted remains were subsequently driven off in a Ford Ranchero pickup. ³⁹ As of the fall of 1987, the next, subsequent Bond film being worked on was License to Kill, initially titled “License Revoked,” which premiered in the summer of 1989. ⁴⁰ Comment by host/moderator, Duhayne Waecker. ⁴¹ I.e., assumed that the audience was less intelligent or sophisticated than it was. ⁴² Sean Connery. ⁴³ Playing Theresa or Tracy, daughter of Italian business magnate Marc Age Draco, played by actor Gabriele Ferzetti. ⁴⁴ Which opened in mid-1987 not long before this interview. ⁴⁵ Sean Connery. ⁴⁶ Harry Sakata, portraying Odd Job, Auric Goldfinger’s bodyguard and driver.

⁴⁷ Guy Hamilton. ⁴⁸ Comment by Duhayne Waecker. ⁴⁹ Comment by Duhayne Waecker. ⁵⁰ Comment by Duhayne Waecker. ⁵¹ Dr. No (1962), and From Russia With Love (1963). ⁵² E.g., said something other than that was in the dialogue line written by the writer, attempting to improve upon it. ⁵³ Released April 1977. ⁵⁴ On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, premiering December 1969. ⁵⁵ Referring to The Living Daylights (1987), with Maryam D’Abo opposite Timothy Dalton. ⁵⁶ The old Italian farce character, “braggart and fool,” introduced into English literature just after 1670. Scaramouch appeared as a character in John Dryden’s (1631–1700) Epilogue to the Silent Woman. ⁵⁷ Thomas Sigismund (T. S.) Stribling, born in 1881 in Tennessee, who, among his novels, wrote the trilogy about life in the South before, during, and following the Civil War, The Forge (1931), The Store (1932), and Unfinished Cathedral (1934). The Store received the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. ⁵⁸ Closing comment by moderator Duhayne Waecker.

Part III

Appendices

Appendices 1

List of Stage and Screenworks of Richard Maibaum Plays produced, published, or optioned: The Tree Singing Acres Birthright Sword in the Scales Apennine Grape Middletown Mural A Moral Entertainment Sweet Mystery of Life Paradise Question Ransom! See My Lawyer

Plays published, optioned, rehearsed, brought, or performed, and year of its copyright:

Play

Copyright

The Tree

1931

Singing Acres

1933

Birthright

1933

Sword in the Scales

1931

Apennine Grape Middletown Mural

Bought (opt)

Rehearsed

Perf

Loc

1931

1931

Broadway

1933

1933

Broadway

1931

1931

1939

1939

1935

1944(opt) 1939

A Moral Entertainment

U.Ia WPA¹

Sweet Mystery of Life²

1934

1935

1935

Bdwy

Paradise Question

1953

1953

1953

Phila

Ransom!³

1953, 1963

1954

1954

See My Lawyer⁴

1939

1939

1939

Bdwy

Films written.

Film

Year

Credit

Gold Diggers of 1937

1936

Coplay basis credit

We Went to College

1936

Coscript

They Gave Him a Gun

1937

Coscript

Live, Love and Learn

1937

Coscript

Stable Mates

1938

Coscript

Bad Man of Brimstone

1938

Coscript

Coast Guard

1939

Coscript

The Lady and the Mob

1939

Coscript

Foreign Correspondent

1940

Uncredited Contribution

The Amazing Mr. Williams

1940

Coscript

20 Mule Team

1940

Coscript

The Ghost Comes Home

1940

Coscript

Hold Back the Dawn

1941

Uncredited Contribution

I Wanted Wings

1941

Coscript

Pride of the Yankees

1942

Uncredited Contribution

Ten Gentlemen from West Point

1942

Solo script

See My Lawyer

1945

Coplay basis credit

O. S. S.

1946

Solo screenplay and producer

The Great Gatsby

1949

coscreenplay and producer

Song of Surrender

1949

Solo screenplay and producer

Hell Below Zero

1953

Adaptation

The Paratrooper (Red Beret)

1954

Coscript

Cockleshell Heros

1956

Coscript

Ransom!

1956

Coscript

Bigger Than Life

1956

Coscript

Zarak

1956

Solo script

Tank Force (Not Time to Die)

1958

Coscript

The Bandit of Zhobe

1959

Coscript

The Day They Robbed the Bank of England

1960

Coscript

Killers of Kilimanjaro (Adamson of Africa)

1960

Coscript

The Battle at Bloody Beach

1961

Coscript

Dr. No.

1962

Coscript

From Russia with Love

1963

Solo screenplay

Goldfinger

1964

Coscript

Thunderball

1965

Coscript

Chitty, Bang

1968

Additional dialogue

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

1969

Solo screenplay

Diamonds Are Forever

1971

Coscript

The Man with the Golden Gun

1974

Coscript

Logan’s Run

1976

Uncredited Contribution

The Spy Who Loved Me

1977

Coscreenplay

For Your Eyes Only

1981

Coscreenplay

Octopussy

1983

Coscreenplay

A View to a Kill

1985

Coscreenplay

The Living Daylights

1987

Coscreenplay

License to Kill

1989

Coscreenplay

The Day They Kidnapped Queen Victoria

1991

In progress contribution

Teleplays for television, written and produced: Fearful Decision (1954) Vignettes (short teleplays) “The Medal” Episode of Combat! TV series Jarrett (movie for television) (1973) Code Name: S. H. E. (1979) Screenplays (producer only): No Man of Her Own Bride of Vengeance The Big Clock Sainted Sisters Captain Carey, USA

Dear Wife Other work, both nonpublished nonproduced plays: Beyond These Voices Triumph Flesh of the Earth Wanted: A Deluge Young As We Are The Glory Path This Strange Reality The Darkling Plain Words Like Forever Fool’s Mate The Hot Pillow The Lonely Man A collection of short plays, including: Trueblue Tommy Catch As Catch Can Callahan’s Courage Something for Art Detached Duty Heart Line After School The Light Fantastic Champagne for Two Film and TV properties written and sold, but not made: Sold to the Lady! a TV playlet See Mike Kramer Stagg’s Way Promised Land Continental Contract: Mack Bolan The Playroom Galaxy Batman The Gemini Contenders Logan’s Run The Catcher: The Moe Berg Story The Fugitive Pigeon S. H. E. II The Day They Kidnapped Queen Victoria (in progress, 1990) Films and TV properties written, but not sold or made: Howie and Hummel Clark Sellers: Examiner of Questioned Documents The Prospector The Glass Chain Windows of Heaven The Elusive Mr. Finley Bug Eyed Monster (B. E. M.) I’ll Take the High Road Hands Across the Sea The Itch Hill Proposition

Published versions of plays written: Birthright: A Play of the Nazi Regime. New York, New York: Samuel French Inc., 1934, 90. Addie Sails Away. Chicago, Illinois: Row Peterson Inc., 1935. See My Lawyer, a comedy in three acts (with Harry Clork). New York, New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1940, 113. Ransom! A drama in three acts with Cyril Hume. New York, New York: Samuel French Inc., 1963. The Tree. University of Iowa, 1929. Singing Acres, Louisville, Kentucky: Aran Press, 1989.

Appendices 2

List of Interviews with Richard Maibaum by Others in Publications Interviews Altman, Mark A. “The 007 Files: Writing Bond.” Starlog magazine, 1989. Wilson, David “Richard Maibaum: How to Write Bond.” Los Angeles Times Calendar. October 7, 1978, 26–30. Kretschmer, Kevin C. “An Interview with James Bond Screenwriter Richard Maibaum.” Marion, Iowa, and Iowa City, Iowa. Unpublished manuscript, University of Iowa Library. July 3, 1989, 6. McGilligan, Pat “Richard Maibaum: A Pretense of Seriousness.” In Pat McGilligan, Ed., Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1986, 266– 289.

Appendices 3

List of Nonfiction Articles by Richard Maibaum List of nonfiction articles by Richard Maibaum “My Word Is His Bond: A View From the Back Room.” Esquire, June 1965, 73, 139–141. “James Bond’s Girls.” Playboy, November 1965, 133. “Cheers, 007!” The Hollywood Reporter, July 14, 1987, 1.

Appendices 4

Recent Articles and Chapters in Books About Richard Maibaum’s Work Recent articles and chapters in books about Richard Maibaum’s work Burgess, Anthony. “Oh, James, Don’t Stop: The High Tech Epic Continues with a Brand New Bond.” Life magazine, June 1987, 115. Greene, Sparky. “Aerial Derring-Do for Living Daylights.” American Cinematographer, July 1987, 75. Johnson, Greg. “Secret Agent Man.” Iowa Alumni Quarterly, Autumn (No. 3) 1995, 32–34. McGilligan, Pat. “Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age.” Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1988.

Appendices 5

List of Awards Professional writing: Exhibitors’ Laurel Award for The Big Clock, 1948. (Producer). Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Mystery Writers of America for best screenplay, Goldfinger, 1964 (coauthor credit). Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Mystery Writers of America for best screenplay, Thunderball, 1965. Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy Nomination, for best original teleplay, “Fearful Decision,” on United States Steel Hour, 1955 (coauthor credit). Writers Guild of America annual award nomination for screen writing achievement, The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977. Writers Guild of America annual award nomination for screen writing achievement, For Your Eyes Only, 1981 (coauthor credit). Other awards: Geode Award, University of Iowa, 1987. University Medal for lifetime achievement, the University of Iowa, 1988. Academic awards: Phi Beta Kappa, University of Iowa, 1931. AB, Summa Cum Laude, University of Iowa, 1931, Major in Speech and Dramatic Arts Minor in English. Collections of his works: Richard Maibaum’s scripts, stage plays, and articles were given to the University of Iowa Library in 1991. Copies of all screenplays coauthored with Cyril Hume, plus a copy of the coauthored play Ransom! can be found in the library of Yale University where Cyril Hume went to college. Copies of award scripts can be found in the library of the Writer’s Guild of America-West in Los Angeles. Copies of miscellaneous TV scripts can be found in the Library of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Burbank, California. Copies of film scripts can be found in The Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.

Endnotes ¹ Given multiple production around United States and WPA Federal Theatre ² Film title, Gold Diggers of 1937 ³ Original title “The Davie Decision” ⁴ Original title “I Want a Lawyer

Part IV

Pictures and Photographs

Richard Maibaum and other cast in an unidentified play, Evander Childs High School, the Bronx, New York, the mid-1920s, circa 1923–1927. He stands in the doorway.

Richard and Sylvia Maibaum in London, April 28, 1986

Sylvia Maibaum, London, March 10, 1986

Sylvia Maibaum in a flat in London, April 1986

Richard Maibaum in his library study, sometime in the 1980s

Richard Maibaum at his typewriter, London, March 11, 1986

Richard and Sylvia Maibaum in the living room of their home in Los Angeles, 1980

A playbill from the Broadway production of See My Lawyer featuring a young Milton Berle

The Maibaum residence at 848 Manning Avenue in Westwood (Los Angeles 90024), California, adjacent to UCLA, where Richard Maibaum resided 1946–1952. It was the first house in which Richard, Sylvia, Paul, and Matt all lived. He lived here when he wrote and produced The Great Gatsby with Alan Ladd and Barry Sullivan.

The ranch house at 826 Greentree Road, in Santa Monica Canyon, Pacific Palisades, California, where Richard Maibaum resided and work from 1952 to his passing early in 1991 and where he lived for the period in which he worked on the James Bond films from 1962 to summer 1988.

Richard Maibaum flanked by his sons Paul (to his right) and Matthew in the 1980s

Original set design for Singing Acres.

Endnotes Stage play scene designs ¹ Scene design, Birthright ² Scene design, See My Lawyer ³ Scene design, Ransom!

About the Author Richard Maibaum was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1909. He knew, at an early age, that he wanted to be a writer, as he finished his first novel at age fifteen. He attended University of Iowa, where he graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1931 in speech and dramatic arts. He wrote his first play to appear on Broadway while a college junior and went to Broadway in his senior year to assist production. He wrote eight plays ultimately on Broadway or produced or done elsewhere and, in 1935, was recruited by Hollywood to write screenplays, which he did from 1935 through the 1980s. He wrote such films as The Great Gatsby and The Bad Man of Brimstone and was friends with the likes of Alan Ladd, Wallace Beery, and Barry Sullivan among others. He and lifelong friend Cyril Hume (of Forbidden Planet fame) cowrote the original Ransom! as a play and teleplay in the early 1950s. He and colleague Albert R. Broccoli looked into making English writer Ian Fleming’s spy novels into films at the beginning of the 1960s, and the rest is history. Maibaum wrote or cowrote thirteen of the Bond films. He taught at the University of Iowa, lectured at times at UCLA and USC, and was an Iowa University medalist.