Word: scenarists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Watching the film is often like staring at a confounding blur: Pretty Baby's narrative often seems to be languishing somewhere in the film's hazy background. That's a shame, because the screenplay is built around an exciting idea. Malle and Scenarist Polly Platt have hypothesized a romance-and eventual marriage-between Heroine Violet (Brooke Shields) and E.J. Bellocq (Keith Carradine), the legendary photographer of Storyville's glory days. This couple's bizarre March-December affair, like the equally promising relationship between Violet and her prostitute mother (Susan Sarandon), is described only intermittently. Instead...
...statement of Coming Home. The movie starts to lose its grip on you after about the first hour, but it is nevertheless an excellent film. Perhaps its problems lie in the fact that there were too many cooks. Gilbert and Fonda took their original idea to the then untried scenarist Nancy Dowd, who has since won critical acclaim for her original screenplay of Slapshot. Over a year later, Dowd came up with a long, ultimately unusable screenplay. Next they approached Waldo Salt, an Oscar winner for Midnight Cowboy, who ended up writing the screenplay. He suggested producer Jerome Hellman. Hellman...
...times exhilaratingly funny. But Ritchie still doesn't know how to use actors--he should hope six-foot eight, 275-pound Doug Atkinson, the prototype for Jenkins' defensive end T.J. Lambert, doesn't see this movie. Ritchie's biggest mistake might have been firing Ring Lardner Jr. as the scenarist. Lardner's credits include M.A.S.H. and he probably genetically knows more about pro athletes than Ritchie. Kristofferson is woefully in need of direction; his lines are often on the order of "Sounds good, B.J.," delivered in his nasal "Me and Bobby McGee" tones. Kristofferson played college football at Pomona...
...author (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce) known for stark portrayals of violence and sexual betrayal; of a heart attack; in University Park, Md. After a stint as an essayist for H.L Mencken's American Mercury, Cain moved to Hollywood. Although he failed as a scenarist, his crime stories and novels won critical acclaim for his portrayal of what Cain called "the dreadful, the impious, the shame of God." His adrenal, brooding style influenced later writers, including Albert Camus...
Jhabvala, a talented novelist (Heat and Dust) and scenarist (Shakespeare Wallah), knows better than this. She and Director Ivory should also be aware that audiences distrust booming epiphanies of the cruel demands made by human affections. Still, Roseland is probably immortal. It has survived much in its long history, and it will doubtless survive the film that bears its name...