Hollywood Tales

Screenwriter Ben Maddow with a great story about 1950s Hollywood producer Philip Yordan.

If you gave him a good idea, he’d steal it from himself later on. There’s an idea in Men in War [1957] in which the platoon commander is killed, they strap him into this jeep, and they drive him around as though he is alive just to keep up the morale. Well, Yordan used exactly the same idea in some film about Spain, El Cid [1961], where the guy is strapped into the saddle.

That brings me around to a really great story about Yordan. Somewhere along the line he said to me, “I’m sure we could sell a Western — there’s always a market for one. Have you got an idea for a Western?” This was a Thursday and I said, “Well, no, but I’ll think about it.” He said, “Well, let’s talk about it on Monday.” So I came back with an idea for him on

Monday and he said, “Fine.” He didn’t really want to listen to it too much; he just said, “Do it. And get the screenplay done as fast as possible. I’d like to have it done in three weeks.”

I actually wrote the screenplay in about three and a half weeks, and when I brought it back, he sort of cursorily looked at it to see how many pages it was. It was 134 pages, so that was okay. He changed the names of the characters because he carried with him a little book that said things like “James means ‘noble,’ “ right?

He said, “Now, we have to go to work.” I said, “What work?” — expecting him to talk about revisions. He said, “Now come with me.” He sat in the study and he made the following phone calls. He called Simon and Schuster and said that he had just sold a screenplay of a Western to Warner Brothers and were they interested in the book from which it was taken? Well yes, they would be interested. Then, he called the script department at Warner Brothers and told them he had sold a book to Simon and Schuster and would they be interested in the screenplay? He’d send it right over, which he did.

He sat there and worried for about three quarters of an hour. Then he said, “This is really very shaky, I’ve got to make this certain . . .” He called up a minor executive at Warner Brothers and said, “I know you owe $14,000 in Vegas. I will pay that sum for you and get you out of this trouble. All I want you to do is the following. I have sent a script over to Jack Warner. It has a blue cover and is called Man of the West . Get to it before he does, in the morning, pick it up, and return it at four o’clock and say, ‘I picked this script up by mistake, instead of mine, and I started reading the first page and I couldn’t put it down.’ That’s all I want you to do.”

Well, he had to pay the $14,000, but so what? Because the screenplay was sold. Now he called Simon and Schuster and told them he was going to send them the book manuscript right away because the film was going to be made. So I had to sit down and write the novel, which I did.

Old Hollywood. So many great stories. For more Hollywood Tales, go here.