7/10/23
Newsletter #392
The Crack of Dawn
When my buddy Sheldon was writing Rambo III for Sylvester Stallone, the production office was located on the MGM lot. This was right when MGM had sold the studio to Lorimar Tele-Pictures and the change-over was occurring. Since I was only there in the hope of meeting Stallone, and he wasn’t showing up, and Sheldon had some things to do, I went wandering around the lot. There was an entire small building dedicated to script copying. There were about twenty copiers sitting hither and thither around a big room that was lined with metal bookshelves, all of which were presently empty because all of the scripts that had been on them had been dumped into a big pile in the middle of the room that was six feet tall. There were hundreds of scripts in the pile that were obviously going to be thrown out. Well, like a pig in shit, I could’ve sat there on the pile looking at scripts for the next three days. However, I knew that Sheldon would be wanting to leave soon, so I began to madly go through the scripts to find which ones I needed to abscond with. I ended up taking: The Great Escape, Blue Velvet and Hud.
The script for The Great Escape has a brown cover and is a hefty 210 pages long. The cover page says, The Great Escape in a 3-D font. On the bottom left it says, “The Mirisch Company, Inc., 1041 North Formosa, Hollywood 46, California,” and on the bottom right it says, “James Clavell, April 26, 1962.” The credit in the movie is, “Screenplay by W. H. Burnett & James Clavell.” W. H. Burnett was a famous novelist and screenwriter who partially invented the gangster movie with his 1929 novel, then the screenplay for Little Caesar (1931), starring the astounding young Edward G. Robinson (real name, Emmanuel Goldenberg). W. H. Burnett also wrote High Sierra (1940) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and more than 25 other movies. I don’t know what his draft of The Great Escape looked like (both scripts were based on a book by Paul Brickhill), but the script that I have makes no mention of W. R. Burnett, and really seems like it was written by James Clavell (and I’ve read all of his books). Within this script is the entire movie as we know it, plus two more tunnels that were cut out. I don’t know where W. R. Burnett came in, nor how he ended up with top billing, but my sense is that he was the first writer hired who initially adapted it from book to script, then — and I’m only assuming — nobody liked his script.
Enter James Clavell, who had actually been a POW during WWII in a Japanese camp in Singapore, that he wrote about in his bestselling novel, King Rat, that came out in 1962. James Clavell had already written the hit 1958 film, The Fly, which he immediately parlayed into an independent writer-producer-director deal. He quickly knocked out two extremely odd, low-budget movies, Five Gates to Hell (1959), with Neville Brand, that’s just awful (but it’s his first film as a director, if that somehow excuses a terrible script); and Walk Like a Dragon (1960), a western with Jack Lord (about which I have written before), that I not only really like, but I stole the entire story for an episode of Hercules (that could well be Lucy Liu’s first screen appearance).
Here's another assumption of mine that I bet is true. The producer-director of The Great Escape, John Sturges (a director-producer that I greatly admire), had wanted to make this book into a movie for several years. Sturges had purchased the rights to book and had hired W. R. Burnett to write the script. He then produced and directed The Magnificent Seven (1960), that was an enormous hit. Sturges then found himself in the proverbial catbird seat – he could make any movie he wanted with any actors he wanted, with a big budget, and complete freedom from the progressive production company, the Mirisch Co. Also, Sturges had just worked with the young Steve McQueen, and he knew McQueen was going to be a huge star. And he was in the right place at the right time to cash in on that.
As the producer, John Sturges put together a really big, expensive production, with as fine of an ensemble cast as any movie that’s ever been made — Steve McQueen, James Coburn, James Garner, Charles Bronson, Richard Attenborough, David McCallum, Donald Pleasence. I know that they shot the film in Germany, which was a bold move since most of it could easily have been shot in Hollywood on sets. But here’s the point, John Sturges got James Clavell to rewrite the script, and received Clavell’s draft on April 26, 1962, fourteen months before the film opened, and this is the movie that he made. But there was still one more draft to come, I’m sure, the shooting script, because the five tunnels in this draft became three tunnels. But that’s really just a cut.
Also, and this is simply me assuming, it was during this April draft and the next draft, which had to come pretty darn soon for this big-assed movie to be shot and cut and advertised for its opening on the 4th of July, 1963, that John Sturges decided to do the opening of the film as a gigantic, 35-minute scene, where many of the characters attempt to escape. This is where Steve McQueen notices a blind spot between the guard towers and rolls his baseball over the wire to see if it’s true. In the draft I have he gets away with it, then is caught trying escape under a truck. In the movie he gets caught right there with the baseball. But the scene plays out after that exactly like the movie. The German officer is Strachwitz.
STRACHWITZ
You may come out now, Hilts!
Hilts emerges and faces Strachwitz, his eyes cold with hatred at ferrets and guards converge. Hilts lifts up the tab of the collar of his shirt. Under it (as was often done by Americans in combat) is his insignia of rank.
HITLTS
It’s Captain Hilts.
STRACHWITZ
Cooler!
Hilts turns away, under guard, recovers his baseball mitt and ball from Goff and heads off toward the cooler. Strachwitz turns to Ives. Points at him.
STRACHWITZ
Cooler.
Ives goes after Hilts followed by two sentries.
It’s already 8:52. The dawn cracked when I wasn’t looking.
It’s a sunny pretty day here in Detroit.