I was born into the work of film writing.<\/p>\n
Or so I used to believe. Before World War II, my father had had a promising career as a political satirist and playwright, with a certain intriguing connection to Hollywood. But after I arrived, he\u2019d put aside his writing to support his new family, i.e., me. So, throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was suffused with an Olympian purpose: if the brilliant father I worshiped had made such a sacrifice for me, I, his first born, would take up the shield he\u2019d laid down and under this aegis continue his work.<\/p>\n
When I presented to him my first screenplay and asked him to read it, I figured he\u2019d be proud.<\/p>\n
Man, was I wrong. My father\u2019s single cold comment about my first effort was, \u201cWe all have our failures.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crushed, I spent nine months lolling around on my couch in a state of apathy, not writing. What eventually propelled me off the couch was a conversation I had with a writer friend. I was sharing with him my angst about being a failure in my father\u2019s eyes, and was launching myself into an analysis of hubris when suddenly he cut through the mythology.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour father?\u201d he yelled. \u201cYour father? Why the fuck would you care what your father thinks about your writing after what you told me about him!\u201d<\/p>\n
Oh. Right. Here\u2019s the story I\u2019d told him:<\/p>\n
In the summer of 1939, my parents and a couple of friends, all New York City school teachers, rented a large shabby Victorian house on the shores of a Martha\u2019s Vineyard lagoon. My mother rode horses; my father was working on satire and a children\u2019s book. Everyone played tennis, talked war and leftist politics, went skinny-dipping at night.
\nDad would get up at 5 in the morning to bake butterkuchen in the living room fireplace for the slews of friends and relations who dropped in, and stayed.<\/p>\n
One of my parents\u2019 friends, Murray Burnett, a writer, ferried out to the Vineyard one weekend with his wife, bearing a play he was working on, was excited about. It was a multi-character contemporary drama called Everybody Comes to Rick\u2019s<\/em>. He read it to my father over the weekend. The play was almost finished, even down to a rudimentary background score \u2014 while at college, tone-deaf Murray had fallen in love with a moderately popular song from an old Broadway revue, and although he couldn\u2019t even hum it with any accuracy, had woven it into the plot.<\/p>\n But Murray was struggling over the play\u2019s finale, couldn\u2019t figure out how to end it. He asked Dad, known to be a fastidious craftsman, to work on it with him. Murray offered a share in any future profits, a possible co-credit.<\/p>\n Throughout his life my father was a highly critical and incorruptibly honest guy. That weekend, he privately confessed to my mother that he wasn\u2019t too impressed with Murray\u2019s play.<\/p>\n But harsh and tactless as Dad would later be with his kids, he was always the essence of gentility with his friends. Gnashing his teeth in affecting chagrin, he sighed to Murray that he was so damn entangled by the internecine warfare in the teachers\u2019 union he just couldn\u2019t cut himself loose for creative work. Although the play was terrific.<\/p>\n Murray went back to the city and at Brighton Beach or Long Beach, some beach, was introduced to an agent, a brassy brunette lady name of Joan Alison. She convinced Murray to give her a co-writing credit and equal share of his play in return for her self-proclaimed wizardry as an agent. She was a hard broad; Murray consented.<\/p>\n There remained, however, the problem with the play\u2019s ending and since the brassy co-writing Alison couldn\u2019t actually write, she and Murray paid a visit that autumn to my parents at their Bronx apartment. Once again, Murray tried to persuade my father to work on the play. But now, in addition not to caring too much for the story, Dad didn\u2019t care at all for Alison so…he just couldn\u2019t, rotten politics, eat up all your time, these lousy commitments.<\/p>\n A well-known Broadway producer did express some interest in Rick\u2019s but never got around to staging it. Eventually Rick\u2019s<\/em> was sold outright to Warner Brothers for twenty grand and a year\u2019s writing contract for Murray, two-hundred fifty bucks a week.<\/p>\n Murray split the fee fifty-fifty with Alison and trekked out to Hollywood. The play went into Warners\u2019 files, Murray onto Warners\u2019 lot.<\/p>\n When the year was up, the studio opted not to renew Murray\u2019s contract and he came back east where he went on to a successful career developing and writing radio shows.<\/p>\n (I remember Sunday nights when I was a little kid, parked in front of our huge Emerson radio and listening to Murray\u2019s “Man Against Crime” \u2014 true detective stories. At the end of each episode, the announcer would describe the physical particulars of the criminal-of-the-week, selected from the FBI\u2019s Ten Most Wanted List…\u201dARMED AND CONSIDERED EXTREMELY DANGEROUS…\u201d and I\u2019d spend the rest of the week narrowing my eyes for him up and down the Grand Concourse.)<\/p>\n Then came the shock of Pearl Harbor. America joined the war and someone at Warners was inspired to pull out of the files Murray\u2019s story about a desperate group of people trapped in a dangerous town by the encroaching Nazi storm. Its film adaptation was assigned to a screenwriting team, the brothers Epstein who, despite reputed problems with the ending, managed to come up with a screenplay. No one was knocked out by the finished product.<\/p>\n Who knows why the Epsteins preserved for their film version the song, the nearly forgotten song that Murray had loved, had written into his play? It was \u201cAs Time Goes By.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s disheartening to realize that I was conceived, in my mother\u2019s mind at least, the summer that my father wasn\u2019t too impressed with Casablanca<\/em> in its<\/em> nascent form, but it must be interpreted propitiously that the film and I opened together, same year same month.<\/p>\n When Murray Burnett died, the New York Times obit got a lot of his story right. One thing they got wrong, though: Joan Alison didn\u2019t write any of Rick\u2019s<\/em>. Nor \u2013 damn it \u2013 did my father. It was all Murray.<\/p>\n I wonder what Dad, who died in 1988, would have done with the ending. Should have asked him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was born into the work of film writing. Or so I used to believe. Before World War II, my father had had a promising career as a political satirist and playwright, with a certain intriguing connection to Hollywood. But … Continue reading