Word: scenarists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...English playwright turned Hollywood scenarist find, in his late 40s, happiness and the right woman? By making this question the premise of his fourth novel, English Author John Fowles runs several risks, chief among them being another question: Should anybody care? And Fowles is far too thoughtful a writer not to have anticipated this reaction in advance. His novel raises and then rubs constantly against the doubt that any single life-particularly that of an overprivileged, overpaid clerk in the bureaucracy of mass entertainment-is truly worth caring about amid all the wreckage, the past and potential dooms...
Throughout their four-year marriage, Kris and Rita have led a not-so-private life that would have a soap scenarist sudsing with envy. Can Kris deal with his drinking? Can Rita deal with his drinking? Can she accept his fame as a songwriter, singer and movie actor? Is she furious because he restaged some torrid love scenes from the film The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea with Actress Sarah Miles for a Playboy photographer? What's this? Rita has a hit album and a smash single, Higher and Higher. What will her success...
...either. Besides the dialogue, which sounds like counsel from "The Playboy Adviser," the twists of plot have been extensively mapped by previous train thrillers, from The Lady Vanishes to Gary Grant's interlude aboard the Twentieth Century Limited in North by Northwest. Director Arthur Hiller (Love Story) and Scenarist Colin Higgins (Harold and Maude) are simply following along the tracks...
Always a shrewd, careful scenarist (Accident, The Go-Between), Harold Pinter pays particular attention to the functional unreality of moviemaking. In one scene-not from Fitzgerald-a film editor expires noiselessly during the running of a new film. He is slumped in the front-row leather armchair, head rolled to one side in what must have been a last act of deference to the assembled executives. No last words, not even a cry for help. "He probably didn't want to disturb the screening," muses one of the nabobs...
...writer's anti-communist rhetoric was motivated less by reason than by sheer emotion and petty frustration. Mea Culpa, for example, was partly a virulent response to the rejection of Celine's script for a ballet by the Marinski Theater in Leningrad, although his failure as a choreographer and scenarist never enters into the pamphlet. A similar flopped attempt at film writing in Hollywood set his anti-semitism ludicrously into gear: "The Hollywood Jews ... know what a pretty girl is. Ah Goldwyn Mayer! I would have given ten years of my life to sit for one moment in their armchairs...