Script archaeologists may unearth film gems
Peering at the pile that awaited me that weekend, I freaked: Hurling all of them into the closet, I abruptly summoned the story editor. I was up-to-here with action and coming-of-age scripts, I said. What I needed to see that weekend was a sort of highlight reel of screenwriting. I wanted to pore over scripts by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Ben Hecht, Dalton Trumbo -- the best scripts by the best writers that had not been made into films.
An hour later, two dazed emissaries from the story department appeared in my office bearing an armful of very dusty scripts, brown around the edges. "You really want to read these?" the story editor asked.
"I need nourishment," I gasped.
The old guy smiled. "You're in for a treat," he confided.
He was right. That weekend, I was introduced to superbly weird characters, brilliant dialogue, astonishing narratives -- and some pretty awful story structures. I could see why most of the scripts, remarkable as they were, had never been made. But I was also reminded of something I'd almost begun to forget -- that there was a difference, as Truman Capote liked to put it, between writing and typewriting.
ALL OF THIS came to mind the other day when I learned that a couple of studios had decided, in effect, to emulate what I had done that weekend, except on an organized basis. Exasperated by the soaring prices of spec scripts, by the stratospheric demands made by "hot" screenwriters, and by the generally dismal level of screenwriting, these studios had embarked upon a sort of archaeological dig to find long-abandoned material from their story vaults. As a result, bright young execs found themselves sifting through stacks of decades-old projects in an effort to discover some long-forgotten gem.
The launching of these treasure hunts is extraordinary in a town that has long spurned its own history. Many hot-shot development mavens have never heard of the writers whose work they're being asked to re-examine. They can tell you what Shane Black ate for breakfast but go blank if you mention Michael Wilson. They can recite Jeff Boam's credits but think Waldo Salt was a steak tenderizer.
John Calley, the man charged with resuscitating United Artists, is one exec who supports these probes into the cinematic past. Having just hired 29-year-old Jeff Kleeman from Francis Coppola's staff at Zoetrope, Calley plans to send him digging through some long-abandoned UA scripts written by those two masters, Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, and is convinced he'll find a viable project.
Calley had also hoped to revive Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate," but discovered to his dismay that MGM/UA sold the underlying rights some years back. "There are some great projects that were stalled by extraordinary circumstances," Calley notes. "A star pulled out at the eleventh hour or a company ran out of money. But when you read the basic material, you cannot help but be amazed by the quality of writing compared with much of what is being written today."
WARNERS IS ANOTHER COMPANY that is actively looking to its past, and has even brought in shrewd industry veteran Barry Beckerman to supervise the activity. Two of Warners' biggest hits last year were based on screenplays that had moldered in the vaults for some time --"The Bodyguard" for 17 years and "Unforgiven" for 12. It was Warners exec VP Bob Guralnick who, with Kevin Costner, unearthed "Bodyguard," a film that has since passed $ 400,000 worldwide , and the experience persuaded him that "we are sitting on a gold mine of unproduced properties."
Among the works being scrutinized now are those by Budd Schulberg, Arthur Miller, Frederic Raphael, Larry Gelbart and Larry McMurtry. But the digging doesn't always come easy. Beckerman and Guralnick spent weeks trying to unearth a fabled Nunnally Johnson original called "The Frontiersman," which at one time was slated to be Jack Warner's first independent production. The script, which had vanished from Warners' story department, finally was located in a long-forgotten Warner archive at the Burbank Public Library.
One question still unanswered: Will today's hot stars and directors be willing to committo scripts written a decade ago?
Beckerman, for one, believes the "classic" scripts will carry the day. "It comes down to this: The writing is so much better than what's being turned out today that there's no comparison. There are great parts to play."
If his theory is correct, many more people will, as I did that dismal Friday in February, sneak a few old screenplays into their weekend reading bags, without feeling guilty about it. "I've just got Kevin Costner to commit to a brand new -- er, old -- script by F. Scott Fitzgerald," some bright young development exec may pipe up sometime soon.
That would be a meeting-stopper.
