Word: screenplays
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...penned several successful films in the 1930s and '40s (The Shopworn Angel) when he was forced into exile by the blacklist. The script assignments eventually returned, but his talent didn't: his name first reappeared on dogs like Taras Bulba. But Salt made a comeback with his powerful screenplay for Midnight Cowboy, followed by Serpico and Coming Home. Nice work, nice...
...inside. In the opening scene, for instance, the studio executive played by Tim Robbins sits listening to a series of real-life screenwriters pitching plausibly dopey movie ideas -- among them Buck Henry, who co-wrote The Graduate, proposing a ridiculous Graduate sequel. Michael Tolkin, who wrote the screenplay and the 1988 novel on which The Player is based, also appears in the film as a screenwriter. But all the in-jokes are a secondary pleasure, not the essence. Even if you don't know what turnaround means, The Player is a satisfying thriller -- and besides, after reading magazines like Vanity...
...course, writers tend not to share Altman's easy, fungible attitude toward dialogue. And as in almost all things, he remains blithely impolitic in his regard for the screenwriting craft. "I get a lot of flack from writers. But I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing -- I mean, I think it's blueprinting." On Tanner, fortunately, because the story zigged and zagged according to actual events and incorporated real political figures, the writing was necessarily quick, sketchy, Altmanesque. "What Bob makes is a kind of visual jazz," says Trudeau, "and I thought of myself as providing...
...reality, Woody Allen is not the meek, uncertain man he usually appears as in his movies. After a small role in the 1967 hit What's Up, Pussycat?, his first screenplay, he vowed never to allow anyone else to direct his work. Since then, he has directed 21 of his own screenplays...
...withdraw from Vietnam had he been re-elected in 1964. Earnest yet overheated, grounded in footnotes yet prone to flights of conspiratorial conjecture, JFK and Vietnam (Warner Books; 506 pages; $22.95) reads like a strange hybrid between a doctoral dissertation and the rough draft of an Oliver Stone screenplay, and with reason: it was, indeed, Newman's dissertation, and Stone did use it as a basis for his movie...