Conversation with Paul Haggis

Paul Haggis (left) in Bologna

My conversation with writer and director Paul Haggis, recorded in Bologna on July 27,  2021.

"Nothing Sacred About My Stipend Either": A 1938 Interview with Ben Hecht

Ben Hecht

Interviewed for Variety by Radie Harris, printed in the UK in World Film and Television Progress, Apr-Nov 1938.

Ben Hecht, looking somewhat like a Goldwyn "folly" himself, in a blue moire dressing gown, sat in the living room of his three-room suite at the Hotel Algonquin, N.Y., and confided that he had just finished his daily dozen for the year by elevating his right thumb to his nose and waving all other four digits exuberantly in the direction of Hollywood!

It seems that Mr. Hecht and his latest employer, Samuel Goldwyn, have had a tiff, and now they're farther apart than Cecil Beaton and Conde Nast. "I left in a childish huff," Hecht explained, "because Sam wouldn't allow me to bring a few of my friends in to the projection room to look at some of the rushes on The [Goldwyn] Follies. I asked Sam whether it was in a desperate effort to save it from the public, but I'm afraid the significance was lost on him. I didn't really want to write another Follies, anyway. The current one was revealed to me in a dream and you know how unreliable dreams are so I packed my luggage, crossed off a couple of zeroes on my next year's income tax, and here I am back in New York, to write a novel for Covici-Friede, my first since A Jew in Love. I'm about a third way through now, but it won't be finished for another year. I'm calling it Book of Miracles—and it has no picture possibilities." (That's one of the major miracles; it will most likely be sold from the galley proofs!)

The Goldwyn Follies (1938)

Albert Maltz on This Gun for Hire

This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942) [Photo: LIFE Magazine]

Interviewed by Joel Gardner between 1975 and 1979 for an oral history series by the University of California. As a part of Guns for Hire: Frank Tuttle vs. Stuart Heisler retrospective, This Gun for Hire will be playing at Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, August 26, 9:15 AM, Cine Jolly.

***

The financial squeeze that I [was in] became too great in the spring of 1941. My friends Michael Blankfort and George Sklar had gotten work in Hollywood, and we made the decision that I would try also. And as soon as teaching was over, I went out to Las Vegas, New Mexico, because my mother-in-law was ill and my wife had taken our son out there earlier. And then after a few days I went overnight by bus to Los Angeles. And I, for about ten days, slept on a couch in the tiny cottage that the Sklars had. Although he was working, they had not yet accumulated enough money to move into anything better than the very simple little quarters that they had. 

By luck I got a job very quickly. The film director Frank Tuttle had a piece of material--had a novel, actually, by Graham Greene called This Gun for Hire which had been owned by Paramount, and he had worked out a way in which the story might be done which was acceptable. He wanted a  writer just at the time that I came into town and heard about me and knew my work, and I got the job at $300 a week.

Tonino Guerra (1920 - 2012)

«میكل‌آنجلو، هرازگاه، دوباره با هم نشسته بر قایقی روی آمودریای لغزان می‌رانیم، در حالی‌که با دندان‌هایمان تخمه‌های سیاه آفتاب‌گردان می‌شکنیم؛ در محاصره طناب‌ها و چلیک‌های روغن، و بقچه‌ای که زن کولی در مقابل موتوری صورتی می‌پیچد. در آن حال ملوانان با چوب‌های بلندشان قایقمان را از خوردن به کناره‌های شنی ساحل حفظ می‌کنند. ما در یک سوی قایق نشسته‌ایم و نمی‌دانیم ما را به کجا خواهد برد. به روبانِ آب در رود زُل می‌زنیم که در فاصله‌ای دور ناپدید می‌شود، در ابهام مهی رنگ پریده، که تو را به این فکر می‌اندازد، که سفر در فرارا به پایان خواهد رسید.» تونینو گوئرا

تونينو گوئرا، فیلمنامه‌نویس بزرگ ایتالیایی امروز درگذشت.

Profession: Anti-Fascist

Early in 1942 Dashiell Hammett signed on with producer Hal B. Wallis at Warner Brothers to adapt Lillian Hellman’s play Watch on the Rhine for the screen, and agreed to do so “in record time.” He wired on April 13 that he would finish the script that week if he did not break a leg. His wire on April 23 communicated his activity in one word: “Done.”

Hammett took this assignment seriously, both because of his respect for Hellman’s material and for the message the play, and the movie, put before the public. "All fascists are not of one mind, one stripe. There are those who give the orders...and there those who take them. They came late," thus Hammett was addressing the inevitable situation that he and the world was facing after outbreak of second war.

Paul Lukas portraying Hammett himself.

Those who are familiar with this ambiance of fear and tension, uncertainty and violence, will be touched by Hammett's subtle description of living with Fascism and its Fascist leaders, Fascist slaves, silent majority, and a few heroes.

Watch on the Rhine, during all his years in and out of Hollywood, was Hammett's only screenplay credit—his other credits stories for the screen which other writers finished. The movie came out in 1943, directed by Herman Shumlin, starring Paul Lukas and Bette Davis. Lukas won an Oscar as Best Actor of the Year for his performance. Hammett’s screenplay was nominated for an Oscar, but did not win.

Bette Davis in two shots from Watch on the Rhine
cinematography by Merritt B. Gerstad and Hal Mohr

The anti-fascist message of that movie clearly was important to Hammett, but he realized it was not enough to just make a statement. To Hellman’s disbelief, and against her protests, he enlisted as a private in the army in September 1942. "I am a man who has many kinds of fears," Hammett put these words in Lukas's mouth and with his old WWI wounds and tuberculosis went to another war.

-- Ehsan Khoshbakht

I'm a Poor Writer: Curt Siodmak on Siodmaks

Curt Siodmak (1902-2000) was a novelist and screenwriter, author of the novel Donovan's Brain, which was made into a number of films and the brother of great emigre director Robert Siodmak. His first horror credit was The Invisible Man Returns (1940), and he followed this with two Boris Karloff vehicles, Black Friday (1940) and The Ape (1940). he wrote famous I Walked with a Zombie (1943) for producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur.

Siodmak also directed some less than impressive low budget monster movies, including Bride of the Gorilla (1951), The Magnetic Monster (1953), and Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956). His final significant genre credit was for Terence Fisher’s German production Sherlock Holmes and the Necklace of Death (1962).His novel I, Gabriel was published in Germany, and afterward many of his early novels came back into print. Also, he's written an opera, Song of Frankenstein, and a play about Jack the Ripper.