Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nine TV plays, although the playwright retains movie and stage rights. This week televiewers got a look at Sherwood's first offering, The Backbone of America, sponsored by Miller High Life Beer. Sherwood had been promised there would be no censorship ("Unless, of course, I loaded the script with four-letter words"). NBC went even further: Sherwood got free run of the set, and the actors (Thomas Mitchell, Wendell Corey, Yvonne de Carlo, Gene Lockhart) were to listen to and obey all his instructions. Sighed Sherwood: "If it's a flop, it's my own damn fault...
After two weeks of rehearsal and constant rewriting of his script, Sherwood conceded that "TV is far and away the most difficult medium to write for, because of the terrific precision of the timing." Sherwood's second play, scheduled for February, is still untitled but "is full of slapstick and pratfalls." The third, to appear at Easter, will be a serious drama with a Biblical theme, called The Trial of Pontius Pilate. Says Sherwood: "I thought the first ones should be comedies. I wanted to sort of ease into television...
...transpose A Farewell to Arms into a contemporary setting, proved that you can't get high twice on the same old vermouth. Act of Love shows that the third time around can be a distinctly sobering experience. The hero of the picture is a G.I. intended by the script to be just like every other G.I., and played by Kirk Douglas with aggressive averageness. The heroine is the girl of a censor's dreams-a nice-girl prostitute. Trying to be both at once, Actress Dany Robin seems most of the time like nobody...
Kirk and Dany meet in Paris toward the end of World War II. Kirk asks her to go to bed with him. She says no. Thereupon Kirk does what the script seems to think any red-blooded American boy would do: he asks her to marry him. After that, they do a lot of touring around Paris while the camera takes travel-poster shots. In the end, Kirk's C.O. refuses to approve his marriage to the girl, and though Kirk fakes a marriage permit, he is picked up by MPs on the way to his wedding. Moviegoers...
...other respects, the picture is pleasant enough. Cantor's voice, cued into the song sequences, still keeps much of its first freshness. Also, the script manages to get a few words in between the big production numbers, and even provides a couple of probable parts for Marilyn Erskine, as Ida Cantor, and for Aline MacMahon, who carries the first half of the picture as Eddie's grandmother...