How They Write A Script: Daniel Taradash

Daniel Taradash’s screenwriting credits include many memorable movies such as From Here to Eternity (1953), Picnic (1955), and Hawaii (1966). Here are excerpts from an interview with Taradas from “Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters from the 1940s and 1950s.”

ON HOW HE BROKE INTO THE WRITING BUSINESS

I was an only child, and my father was extremely anxious for me to be a lawyer. I didn’t really know what I wanted — I just had a feeling I wanted to be a writer, because I had done some writing at Harvard and received favorable indications from some of the professors that there was possibly something there. But because my father wanted me to, I went to Harvard Law School — I think I had the largest number of cut classes in the history of the law school. And eventually I passed the New York bar exam. But while I was in law school I wrote a play which I sent to an agent in New York, and she indicated that it wouldn’t work on Broadway, but there was something there.

I looked at my father and I said, “You’ve supported me seven years. And I want you to give me enough money to live on one more year. I want to try to be a writer.” And then he looked at me and said, “Well, I think you’re a damn fool. If you would ask me for five years, I’d take that seriously and respect it. But the notion you can spend one year in New York and you’re going to be a writer is damn foolishness.”

But he did it, because, he said, “I don’t want you in ten years to say to me, if you’d only given me that one year I would have been so forth and so forth.”

Except I fooled him. I wrote a play that year and entered it in a nationwide contest, and the money for the contest was put up by the motion picture companies, which were fairly intelligent in those days about reaching out and finding people. There were three fellowships as prizes, and I won one and Helene Hanff won one! There was a playwriting course we took, and out of that — it was a great lucky break — came the first job in Hollywood.

ON WORKING ON THE MOVIE “RANCHO NOTORIOUS”

An agent named Milton Pickman called and said, “I can get you a job with Fritz Lang if you’re interested, but I want to be the agent.” Now I was doing something else, an anti-McCarthy picture for Stanley Kramer [which became Storm Center ], so I said, “I’ll ask for something outrageous and they won’t give it to me: $1,500 a week.” They agreed!

Another thing was I met Lang. I read the story which had been written by Sylvia Richards, but Lang had a great influence on it. He was a devotee of the American West, with a wonderful library. I said, “Mr. Lang, the only way I can see to do it is to put in something special. But instead of a narrator, I think we should use a ballad and jingles.” This threw him for a loop, but it didn’t change the picture much. Couple of days later, he said, “All right, let’s do it.” I learned more about screenwriting from Fritz Lang than from anyone. We would sit at his house over his dreadful coffee (the worst I’ve ever tasted) and we’d go over the stuff I was writing. I was showing him pages — that was mandatory. And he was literally working in every angle, over-the-shoulder shots, stuff like that. I learned how to choreograph a script. I said, “Why are you doing it this way?” He said, “I’ll tell you, Dan. I love this story and what you’re doing. But I am close to falling out with these guys” — our producers — “ and it would not surprise me if at some point I am off the picture. I want a script that even an idiot can shoot.”

But Fritz finished the picture, and he told me he had turned it in at an hour and forty-five. A few weeks later I ran into Howard Welsch, one of the producers, and asked how did he like it. “Oh, fine,” he said. “I cut fifteen minutes out of it.” Now I knew it had been a tight cut for Fritz, so I said, “What did you cut?” And, so help me God, Welsch said, “I cut the mood!”

ON HIS EXPERIENCE WORKING ON “FROM HERE TO ETERNITY”

I read the novel and thought, How the hell are you going to make a movie? And my wife and I were driving and I just sort of saw this movie. I went to Eve Ettinger and said I thought I could lick it. She got me in to see Buddy Adler, I told him a couple of ideas, and he flipped. In no time I was in Harry Cohn’s bedroom. This was where he liked to have his meetings.

I said, “I’ll give you two ideas. The first one is, instead of Maggio just petering out and being discharged and sent back to Brooklyn Maggio should be just the way he is [eventually portrayed] in the film.” And the moment in the book when Prew played “Taps” had no reason. I said, “It’s when Maggio dies! You’ve got a great second-act curtain.” And I said you should intercut the two love stories, but they should never meet. The audience will get the impression that somehow they are related.

So Cohn said, “Negotiate with Briskin [staff executive Irving Briskin].” I asked for 2 1/2 percent profit participation — which was really the first time a writer had had that. I believe they went with it because they never thought it would happen! We’re never going to get anywhere with this movie, so give him whatever he wants! Cohn, I think, had got discouraged about it. He paid $85,000 for the book, and he wondered if he had made a mistake, because the New York office was laughing at him. They thought, with all the “fucks” all over the book, you can’t do it. They didn’t stop to think you don’t need that word. So I said to Harry, “Do you mind if I do some of this at home?” I think I meant Florida. He said, “As far as I’m concerned, with this book you can write it in a whorehouse!”

There were innumerable conferences with Harry Cohn, and with Fred Zinnemann after he got on the project. Cohn always liked to talk primarily to the writers, and his whole method was to irritate you, ask the same thing over and over until he drove you to the wall. When he saw you were about to attack him physically, he said all right, go ahead, do it, because he knew you really believed in it. But that can drive you crazy after six months. At one point I walked out because I thought I was going to vomit. [Producer] Buddy Adler calmed me down. He had a soothing influence, and he helped Freddie by being a buffer.

I had seen Teresa: I thought Zinnemann had done a marvelous job with the GIs in that picture. I said to Adler, take a look, and he was very impressed. And we said, Let’s see if we can talk Harry into this. Zinnemann was then shooting a picture up in Stockton, Member of the Wedding [1952], and word was coming down that he was being very difficult. Cohn said, “Look, I can’t do it, Dan. I got too much at stake on this picture to take any chance with a guy who may be trouble.”

By then Zinnemann had seen the script, and we had a very good relationship from the word go. I said, “All right, Harry, it’s your studio. But one day I’m going to work with Zinnemann.” I think that impressed Cohn. He said, “I’ll tell you what. Zinnemann is finishing next week in Stockton. I’m going to have him in my office, and I’m going to have the other fellow who’s been feeding me the information about the trouble. At the same time. Is that fair?” And that’s the last we ever heard of Zinnemann not doing the picture.

[The movie] broke every record for twenty weeks. And it’s the first movie where the screenwriter stole the reviews. Because it was still felt that the book was impossible to film.

ON “BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE”

We had a problem getting Cohn to buy it. Selznick wanted $100,000, which was modest, I thought. Cohn kept saying it’s a fantasy and we can’t do fantasy to make money. I said, “Fine, Harry, but how did Here Comes Mr. Jordan make money?” He said it made $800,000, and it would have been $8 million if it hadn’t been a fantasy.

We were going for Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, and we tried to get Alexander Mackendrick to direct. Mackendrick wanted changes we didn’t want to make. Grant the same. Then Kelly got married. So we were hoping for Rex Harrison then, and Cohn kept saying, “You know, [Kim] Novak has got to play it.” But he couldn’t give us Novak for ten months and Harrison wouldn’t wait.

Cohn in a way was lucky he died when he did. Because he would never have been able to cope with the type of independent production that began. On Bell, Book and Candle, for example, we gave him the script and he said, “I’m not going to tell you what I think of this. Because you can turn me down. Unless I get the last word, I don’t want to get involved.” It was bothering him terribly.

ON THE MOVIE “HAWAII”

It took up a solid year, ‘60–’61, and I was very depressed after I left the picture. It was my proposal to Freddie Zinnemann that we do two pictures and sell tickets as a pair — there’s no way of doing that whole book even in three hours.

United Artists liked the idea and so did [producer] Harold Mirisch. We had a big meeting planned in this house. Freddie and I were here and Harold was late. He had had a heart attack and he died a year or so later. It was a bad omen. And I overresearched the picture. I had written forty pages of screenplay, and I felt I just couldn’t do the two pictures in time. I suggested getting Dalton Trumbo in. But they read the forty pages and they were crazy about it. They said they’d wait. The two films were budgeted at about $17 million. Well, I got 180 pages of script and I had lunch with Freddie and told him, “Do just the one film and call it a day. I don’t know whether any one director would have the stamina to cover this entire thing.” He wanted to go all the way, though, and that’s when I left. They brought Trumbo in and then [director] George Roy Hill. Freddie could never get the money for two pictures.

ON THE MOVIE “MORITURI”

Fox was in chaos. This was ’62. Zanuck was living in Paris with Bella Darvi. The studio had this German novel, Morituri . I did the script on the third floor of that long, long administration building. I swear rabbits were running around! There was no business. No cars parked. A deserted village! Then Dick Zanuck came in. Then Darryl came back from Paris, and we had wild meetings with him in New York. He wasn’t drunk, but he wasn’t making much sense. He was furious about the room being overheated, but he didn’t know to fix the gadget that turns it down. He did the same kind of things on the script!

It was absurd. I couldn’t write like that, and the producer, Aaron Rosenberg, said even if I could, he wouldn’t want to produce the film. Two years pass and Aaron meets Brando on Mutiny on the Bounty. They talk. One day my phone rings and it’s Akim Tamiroff. No doubt about it — except that it’s Brando doing the most marvelous imitation. And he was raving about Morituri, about what he thought it was! By God, we’ll do this! On and on. And I signed.

We talked many times at Brando’s place up on Mulholland, and he had a giant Newfoundland up there. He’d come in at eleven, hung over, sexed over, and God knows what. Then he wanted Bernhard Wicki to direct it. Wicki is a darling man, probably a good director in German. But he only spoke enough English to have dinner with. Brando changed enormous quantities, cut things, added. Wally Cox was in there, not credited, monkeying around.

Brando would come to a story conference and curl up in a chair in the corner in a fetal position. He was the Method actor carried to the wildest extreme. And he had complete control! He would like a scene one day. Next day he would say, “I can’t do this. Let’s do it this way.” I would say, “You ‘re not doing this. It’s the character.”

Then my wife and I went to Egypt on a trip. When I got back a month or so later, I guess it was almost in the can. Aaron said to me, “It’s just terrible, the things that have been going on. Brando barring the director from the set, then walking in at 5 P.M. and going to a dressing room, coming out at 6:30 and handing the scene to Wicki and saying, ‘This is the way we’re going to shoot it.’ “

One scene was impossible. Rosenberg told me: “You’ve got to look at this scene and do something with it. We can’t let the picture go out this way.” It was a scene with Brando and the girl in the cabin and there was a porthole, but the porthole was covered over because this was a ship that was not supposed to be at sea. I’m watching the scene in the projection room and Brando walks over to the porthole and looks out. Aaron says, “What in the hell is he doing that for?” Well, he went over there because the blackboard was right outside and he was trying to read his lines!

I shouldn’t have done the picture. I don’t know — I thought it could make a good adventure story.

For more on Daniel Taradash, go here.

For more How They Write a Script articles, go here.