To hell with technology, it's words that matter
PAUL JOHNSON
The world of the arts is a battle between creators and parasites. Often it is the latter who make off with the publicity, fame and money. I despise an opera director who thinks he knows better than the composer and librettist, and draws attention to himself by subjecting a work of art to shocking updatings and incongruities, usually making a crude sexual or political point unworthy of an intelligent teenager. The latest example here is the nudity and simulated sex which opens Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House and mars a superb musical performance of one of the finest operas. There was, I hear, an even worse case at Salzburg this season. where a disgusting production of Figaro forced a lady I know, a mild person whose devotion to opera is celebrated, to boo for the first time in her life.
When did the director, once a humble or non-existent functionary, begin to take over and assume airs? I date it from the second decade of the 20th century, when the early cinema — where special effects and crowd scenes were everything and story and dialogue nothing — made heroes of men like D.W. Griffith. In the operatic and theatre worlds, ambitious ears pricked up and the way was open for Don Giovanni in a coal mine and Hamlet as a democratic left-wing hero at a fascist court. In fact, the coming of talkies made the director much less important and the screenplay absolutely central to the success of the movie. In the golden age of Hollywood, 1935-55, indeed for some time after, few successful films were made without a first-class script, usually based upon a brilliant novel, like Gone with the Wind. To take an instructive example, The Maltese Falcon, often rated one of the finest movies and a prime feather in John Huston's overloaded bonnet, owed its success almost entirely to Dashiell Hammett's superb thriller and the screenplay which followed it exactly. The dialogue in book and play is virtually identical. All Huston had to do was to shoot it, and he had the sense to follow the script.
Gore Vidal, who is wrong about most things but knows about writing and movies, once told me, 'The key to a really good movie is the writer. Any mediocre director can make a success out of a first-class script, but the greatest director on earth can't make a bad script work.' A case in point is Billy Wilder. I have seen movies of his where the script was no good, and they
stink. In Some Like it Hot he had the advantage of a good book and a superb script constructed from it by a genius. He shot it with great professional skill, but I think he had a nerve putting on the credits 'Screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond' so that most people have now forgotten that Diamond was the inspiration of the most enjoyable movie of all. I suspect Wilder's most important contribution was not to lose patience with Marilyn Monroe, extracting from her the performance of a lifetime, which makes the film so endearing.
A gifted director can provide style and even wit by cunning cutting, but the wit that stays in the mind is always vocal, as in Casablanca: 'The usual suspects' has become among the most quoted lines from movies in the language. And it is usually the writer or writers who determine the degree of pleasure and the memorability. In Enigma Robert Harris provided a thrilling tale. but Tom Stoppard, in the script, added style. wit and a touch of real class. Called in at the last minute, he turned Shakespeare in Love from a ticking bomb into a spectacular firework display which I suspect Shakespeare himself might have found dazzling. (Imagine a movie with a Shakespeare script directed by Garrick and with Kean and Siddons starring!)
I have been reading a new paperback by William Goldman, author of that illuminating searchlight on movie-making, Adventures in the Screen Trade. This one is called Which Lie did I Tell? and is dedicated to 'Screenwriters suffering everywhere'. He says that action movies are the most difficult to script and that the longer an action sequence — a typical one is 12 seconds — the harder it is to make it work. One of the
longest in cinematic history is the famous 'crop-dusting' scene in North by Northwest, in which Cary Grant is hunted by a murderous biplane, and which lasts all of eight minutes. This haunting episode is often cited as an outstanding example of Alfred Hitchcock's directorial art. In fact, says Goldman, the entire scene was written directly for the screen by Ernest Lehman, one of the greatest of all Hollywood writers. It evolved in conversation with Hitchcock. but in essentials it was Lehman's work, and all Hitchcock had to do was to shoot it.
It was the same with the unforgettable cabin scene in A Night at the Opera. On the only occasion when I met Groucho Marx (in the notorious Studio Nine at the bottom of Kingsway), he told me that the scene was imagined by him and his brothers — the director's role was merely to be patient and shoot it, or bits of it, again and again until it was perfect. Groucho said, 'It could not be done today because of the time and the cost of the crew.' In my experience of directors. confined, I admit, to television documentaries but quite extensive, they are a bit like computers: they are, with some notable exceptions, only as good as the material you put into them. An example is the hugely funny but shocking fake orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally, which takes place in New York's Carnegie Sandwich Bar. Goldman gives the full text of this too. It was written entirely by Nora Ephron, down to all the directions. She imagines the brilliant scene of a smart woman showing a cynical Lothario how she could fake an orgasm. with other sandwichmunchers gradually falling silent around her. This was a daring raid across the then frontier of taste, which provided Meg Ryan with a matchless virtuoso acting opportunity and gave the director, Rob Reiner, his first commercial hit. But it is essentially a writer's creation, as is all good cinema — with one exception: when Ryan subsides and starts to eat her sandwich again, the woman at the next table, asked to order by the waiter, says, 'I'll have what she's having.' That gets the biggest laugh and was suggested by the Lothario-actor, Billy Crystal. Ephron grabbed it. So what is the moral of all this? There is no substitute for the writer, who remains the ultimate source of entertainment, just as he/she did in Homer's day. So, directors — scram: we can get along without you.
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