8/30/22
Newsletter88
The Crack of Dawn
“If the words inflammatory, contrarian and brilliant could all be used in the same sentence, it would equal the writings of Josh Becker. He’s also prolific, relentless and a raconteur/historian par none. Having said that, I can always kick his ass at bowling or pool.”
—Bruce Campbell, McHale’s Navy, Assault on Dome 12
Of course it’s dark, it’s night.
My buddy Sheldon was hired to write Rambo III. Sylvester Stallone had Sheldon audio tape all of their script meetings, and he was kind enough to let listen to them. Sly may sound like a dunce, but he’s not, and he’s really seen his movies. So during these meetings, where Sly did most of the talking, he made constant references to old movies. He’d say something like, “It’s like that scene in Viva Zapata, have you seen that?” Sheldon would say, “No,” and I’d say, while sitting in Sheldon’s kitchen, “I have.” This happened over and over again. I finally said, “Stallone should have hired me to write this script.” Sheldon smiled and said, “Sly hired me because of my military experience. If he wanted to just talk movies, he’d have hired Leonard Maltin.”
The Rambo III production offices was located on the old MGM lot, which was just being reconverted into Sony. I accompanied Sheldon to the Rambo III office in the hope of meeting Stallone, but he wasn’t there. Sheldon had a meeting with the director, Russell Mulcahy, who was momentarily hot shit for having just directed Highlander (1986). So, Stallone wasn’t there, Sheldon was in a meeting, so I wandered around the lot. I came upon the copy building. There was entire building – admittedly small – just for making copies of scripts. There were ten copiers, and because they were remodeling, there was a mountain of screenplays as tall as me all headed for the shit-can. Well, I was a little piggy in a pile of shit. I sat there for a couple of hours looking at scripts. Of the 500 or more scripts I looked at, most of which had been made into movies, I took two: Blue Velvet (1986) and The Great Escape (1963).
The cover page of the Blue Velvet script reads: Blue Velvet, Original Screenplay by David Lynch, Revised Third Draft, August 24, 1984, Registered with WGAw, Property of: Dino De Laurentiis Corporation, 1 Gulf + Western Plaza, New York, NY 10023, with #27 handwritten. The script is 226-pages long, and typed on at least three different typewriters with different fonts. There’s 100-pages of unused material, all as creepy as the rest of the movie, but understandably cut. But here’s the thing: the 120-pages David Lynch shot is exactly as it’s written. Dennis Hopper did not improvise one word, nor did anyone else. Mr. Lynch treated his script like it was Shakespeare, and I think it shows in the movie.
The cover of The Great Escape script reads: The Great Escape [in a shadowed font], James Clavell, April 26, 1962, The Mirisch Company, Inc., 1041 North Formosa, Hollywood 46, California. It is 210-pages (the film is 168-minutes), and it’s a shooting script, meaning the scenes are numbered, so this is probably the draft they shot. The missing 42-pages is about a fourth tunnel – in the movie there are three: Tom, Dick and Harry – and, once again, very understandable why it was cut. But here’s the thing: the screenplay credit on the movie says, “Screenplay by W. R. Burnett, James Clavell, based on a book by Paul Brickhill.” It doesn’t say W. R. Burnett on the script.
W. R. Burnett was an extremely interesting guy, and the Godfather of the Gangster Movie. Briefly, the first gangster movie is D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), a 17-minute shoot-out in an alley. The first “real” gangster movie is Josef Von Sternberg’s Underworld (1928), which is silent, but it’s exactly what we came to know as a gangster movie. But the first big, through-the-roof, talkie gangster movie was Little Caesar (1930) with Edward G. Robinson, based on the 1929 novel by W. R. Burnett. He then co-wrote Scarface (1932), wrote the novel and the script for High Sierra (1940), wrote This Gun For Hire (1942), and 25 other scripts and books.
You can’t know how a Hollywood writing deal was done. However, I’ve seen all of W. R. Burnett’s films, and I’ve read all of James Clavell’s books, and seen his movies, plus I own this script, and I’m telling you that James Clavell wrote the script for The Great Escape. Burnett may have taken a crack at it, and undoubtedly had the toughest, oldest agent in Hollywood – Abe Lastfogel, I bet – and got co-credit. This is the stupid shit I think about.
It's still dark. The crack of dawn may change, but I don’t.