excerpt interview from the book Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age, edited by Pat McGilligan. A number of greats, such as W. R. Burnett (High Sierra, This Gun for Hire), James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce), and Julius J. Epstein (Casablanca, Arsenic and Old Lace) to name a few, were interviewed for this book. They share fascinating stories throughout, well worth seeking out if you love classic film.
A few answers by Phillip Dunne stuck out to me as interesting to note, even though he singles out two films I like quite a bit.
Dunne received Oscar nominations for his screenplay How Green Was My Valley in 1941 and David and Bathsheba in 1951. In 1961, Dunne received received the Laurel Award for Achievement. His filmography shows the range and scope screenwriters had of his era. He either wrote or co-wrote the Count of Monte Cristo (1934), Suez (1938), the Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Pinky (1949), the Robe (1953), and countless others that are frequently shown on Turner Classic Movies and Fox Movie Channel.
The interview was conducted by Tina Daniell, who wrote for the Hollywood Reporter and Milwaukee Journal, and is a noted author of three books of her own which you can find on Amazon.
On writing for an audience
Q: Did you always write with an idea of the audience in mind?
A: Always, I always believed you had to do your very best, that you never should write down to an audience, and I wonder now if all that is disproved by the popularity of some things going on today. If Superman (1978) and Star Wars (1977) are what the audiences wants, we’ve got a pretty juvenile audience. I always wrote for the most intelligent people I could think of. I hoped my audience consisted of Albert Einsteins and Albert Schweitzers. Not the New York Film critics —-a much higher level. (Laughs)
Q: Did Zanuck (Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck) think that way too?
A: He told me that once. He said, “Never write down. Do your best, always.” And he meant it. He would say sometimes, as producers will, “I don’t understand that,” meaning an audience won’t understand that. It referred to a lack of clarity. Don’t ask too much of an audience in understanding an elliptical thing. If you give them a nice round thing, it can be as complex as you like. But make it clear.
On writer’s block
Q: Did you ever suffer from writer’s block?
A: All the time. That’s endemic. Even doing a little newspaper story like this (Dunne was in the process of writing a newspaper column commenting on the death of Jack Dempsey), to get a lead…
Q: Did it ever stop you from writing for long periods?
A: No. Two or three days. The strangest thing happened. I usually found that resolutely going to a party, having a bit too much to drink, and getting a hangover was an awfully good un-blocker. I don’t know why. The other thing is to take a drive. It’s probably a bad idea. You should concentrate more on your driving. But if you go out on a long dull highway with no distractions….
The block’s a terrible thing. I don’t know of any writer who doesn’t suffer from it occasionally. There’s another thing I used to suffer from—-the writer’s nightmare. I still get it. The dream is: a story you’re trying to solve and it just keeps eluding you. There’s no solution. The great relief is when you wake up and realize thereisno story. You don’t have to solve it. That sort of roadblock can happen even when you’re adapting a published book. A sort of example: when I was doingTen North Frederick, we had a major problem because we weren’t allowed to show an abortion on the screen, and an abortion is a major part of the story. So I had to cook up a thing in which Edith Chapin, the wicked mother, so harassed her daughter that she brought on a miscarriage —- an emotional trauma. Luckily, I had a great actress in Diana Varsi who could play the trauma and did, beautifully. You can get blocked on something like that because, what are you going to do?
