I stumbled across this marvelous interview with Budd Schulberg, screenwriter for On the Waterfront, among other memorable movies, in the Writer’s Guild of America’s feature, “On Writing.”
Schulberg talked about how director Elia Kazan (whose nickname was “Gadg”) decided to tell part of the story of On the Waterfront by making a different use of dialogue, and how that fit into the broad artistic struggle: narrate through words or through images?
…The writers are always in love with dialogue, and the directors are saying, “But you don’t need all those lines. You just show a face, and you’ll see the expression.” That has been going on forever–I heard it growing up in my house in story conferences between my father and a lot of writers–and it happened here, again. I remember, in the scene when Karl Malden comes into the bar to get the gun from Terry, Gadg actually said he didn’t want me in there. At the time, he said that the bar was so narrow and so crowded with crew that there was no room for me. I was a little bit miffed. But the real reason, I learned later, was he felt that the dialogue shouldn’t be just line by line, that they should be shouting over each other, and you wouldn’t hear all the lines as neatly as I wrote them. And he thought that might upset me. It upset me more that they told me to wait outside. I remember waiting outside while they were shooting that scene, and wondering what the hell they were doing to my lovely words.
Schulberg’s insights came to mind when I recently re-viewed Tom Jones, Tony Richardson’s dynamic 1963 film (which won Best Picture), a reimagining of Henry Fielding’s novel. Richardson tells much of the story employing very little dialogue. There are two memorable scenes—a deer hunt through the English countryside, where we see the gentry at play; and the erotic devouring of a meal by Tom Jones and his soon-to-be lover—where dialogue is eschewed, to great effect.
John Wayne once noted in a documentary on the film-making of John Ford that Ford ruthlessly cut dialogue at every opportunity. Screenwriters are often bitter about their treatment in Hollywood, feeling that such editing (or “butchery”) is a sign of disrespect. Schulberg closed the WGA interview with a rant about directors hogging credit.
And again, nobody–there are all of these public opinion polls and people are asked who they would choose for Best Actor, Best Director, Best Picture, but the public has not a clue that somebody wrote the picture, not a clue. And how many times have we seen these actors get up there and thank everybody in the goddamn world except the writer. They’ll thank the producer, they’ll thank the director, fellow actors, and then they get down to their agent and their hairdresser, literally, and their family and brothers and sisters, and you wait and they never get around to saying, “I’d like to thank the writer for writing this role, without which I would have no character to play and nothing to say or do.” It just doesn’t seem to occur to them. I’m still waiting. It’s been a lifelong fight for me.
There won’t be any resolution to this tension, of course, nor should there be: the transformative push-and-pull between director and writer can lead to storytelling magic.
Writing; Movies; Budd Schulberg; Elia Kazan
Copyright © 2006 J. Flanders
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