How They Write a Script: Ernest Lehman

Wrote Sabrina, The King and I, North by Northwest, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? among others.

Ernest Lehman was one of the most critically lauded and commercially successful screenwriters in Hollywood. In a writing career that spanned three decades, Lehman wrote many notable movies including Sabrina (1954), The King and I (1956), North by Northwest (1959), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Lehman was nominated four times for the Best Writing Academy Award and was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in 2001. Lehman died on July 2, 2005.

These excerpts, taken from “Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age,” edited by George Stevens, Jr., are divided into two parts. The first part today covers a broad range of subjects including Lehman’s history and approach to screenwriting. I thought Lehman’s comments re his work with Alfred Hitchcock on the movie North by Northwest deserved its own post, so Part Two will cover that tomorrow.

HOW HE BECAME A SCREENWRITER

“I was a short-story writer in New York. A couple of my novelettes, including Sweet Smell of Success, brought me to the attention of Paramount Pictures. Their New York office contacted my agent and asked if I was interested in writing for film. I was very interested, and Paramount brought me and my family out to California. I’ve been out here ever since.”

WHAT HIS SCREENWRITING PROCESS IS

“Usually I do some sort of outline for myself. Sometimes I write a long treatment before going into the screenplay. Quite often I take filing cards and I write out a scene on each one. I tack them up on a wall and step back and sort of look at the movie. I may notice that I’ve got twenty-four cards in act one and six cards in act two and fifteen in act three, and I realize that something is a little out of balance. Sometimes I take a card and say, ‘Wait a minute, this scene would be better over here.’ I just move the cards around. It’s a way of getting a visual look at a film when I don’t even have a film. It has always helped me to use these cards.”

HOW DOES HE GO ABOUT ADAPTING A BOOK INTO A SCREENPLAY

“The first thing I do is put on the hat of a studio head or the head of a distribution company and say to myself, Is there something about this that might grab audiences? Motion pictures are an art form but also a business. Then the second thing that comes to mind is whether there is something about this that appeals to me as a writer? The third thing I think of is, Do I believe I have the ability to do this? Can I bring this one off? Do I have what it takes?

So I look for these things first of all, because many projects from prominent producers or producer-directors or heads of studios come into my hands. I read the material and think, What the hell do they want to make that for? It doesn’t have a chance. Either it can’t be dramatized and they don’t know it because they’re not writers, or no one is going to see the movie. I don’t tell them that. I just say that it doesn’t seem to be right for me. But I’m always astonished at the decisions nonwriters make. Some of them don’t realize that the projects they have fallen in love with are probably unlickable.”

HOW HE SURVIVED WORKING WITH DEMANDING DIRECTORS

“The screenwriter winds up for the most part in an antagonistically cooperative or cooperatively antagonistic relationship with everyone he’s working with: the producer, the director — even the actors, if they’re intellectual types like Paul Newman or Burt Lancaster. Almost everyone unconsciously feels he knows as much about writing as a writer. It would be unthinkable for a writer to tell a director how to direct or a producer how to produce or an actor how to act or a cinematographer how to light a scene. But it is not at unthinkable for anyone to tell a writer how to write. It comes with the territory.

Now that is bound to produce problems, unless you have a superlatively integrated psyche so that you can take anything and always remember that it’s the picture that counts. But your ego, your sense of professionalism, comes into play, and you often notice a glaze coming into the eyes of the director and the producer when the script is finished. You get the subtle feeling that they would not weep if you got hit by a truck. I’m not exaggerating. Somehow the mere fact that the director didn’t write the picture — he’s only directing it — is very difficult for him to take, and some of them have never learned to take it… After you’ve struggled with the script, done some of the casting, and somehow it has been your picture, in comes the director. Once that picture starts shooting he’s the captain of the 747, and it’s pretty tough to move to the back of the plane and just sit there, particularly if you see things you don’t like in the dailies. Sometimes it gets to be an antagonistic relationship, to put it mildly.

The only way that a writer can have the upper hand is to write something that is so unfailingly, unarguably perfect that there’s just no way that anybody can take any objection to it. The problem is, who the hell knows where it’s that good, including the writer? It’s a very inexact science. Everybody has an opinion. My advice is to be smart enough or lucky enough in all these creative battles to lose the right battles.

You have to understand that people feel threatened by a writer. It’s very curious. He knows something that they don’t know. He knows how to write, and that’s a subtle, disturbing quality that he has. Some directors, without even knowing it, resent the writer in the same way that Bob Hope might resent the fact that he ain’t funny without twelve guys writing the jokes. The director knows that the script he is carrying around on the set every day was written by someone, and that’s just not something that all directors easily digest.”

ON ADAPTING MUSICALS

“I’ve adapted The King and I, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Hello, Dolly! Usually I see the show three or four or five times and I begin to get ideas as I’m watching. I think, why the hell did they put that number there? I know it’s working, and this is a famous Broadway musical, but I wonder if they realized that it would have been so much more effective there! For example, “Gee, Officer Krupke,” in West Side Story. That’s a hilarious number. But on stage, “Gee, Officer Krupke” took place in the second act, after the rumble had happened. To me that was totally out of dramatic context.

Apparently it was perfectly all right for a Broadway audience to break into laughter at this funny number, even though the audience was supposed to be caught up in the terrible drama. But I don’t think it would have worked in a movie. It may be immodest of me to say so, but I think “Gee, Officer Krupke” fit perfectly where it was placed in the movie. The Jets were quite nervous, they were going to meet the Sharks in the candy store, and all it took was a policeman coming along and telling them to get off the street to get them into a bitter, defiant, funny number.

In The Sound of Music I did a lot of changing around of musical numbers. There, again, it seemed somehow inappropriate for the mother abbess to be singing ‘My Favorite things.” I felt how much more appropriate it was for Maria to try to pacify the children, who were frightened by the thunderstorm, and to tell them what she does when she gets upset. She thinks about some other favorite things, and before you know it you’re into the number. Much more appropriate. But musical numbers are what you must get to, and they shape your work in that way.”

ON WORKING WITH ALFRED HITCHCOCK

“It was fun in a way but it was extremely difficult. I recall having tried to quit that picture at least a dozen times, unknown to Mr. Hitchcock, who was off shooting Vertigo while I was writing the first seventy-odd pages. I never knew what the hell I was going to write next. I used to go my office and be scared to death because I just didn’t know what came next. I would write an opening scene and then the next scene. Some days I wouldn’t write anything. It was a lonesome and scary experience because I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Occasionally I would talk to Hitch, who was very helpful as we would bounce ideas off each other. Then I would go back to my office at MGM and call my agent and tell him, ‘I quit.’

One day Hitchcock said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore.’ Terrific, I thought, and wrote it down. He told me all the ideas he wanted to do, and I wrote them down. Lots and lots of ideas. He wanted to do a sequence with the longest dolly shot in history, taking place at the assembly line of the Ford Motor company. It would start at the beginning of the assembly line. The camera follows a car being put together before it’s driven off the assembly line and they discover there’s a body in the backseat. He always wanted to do a scene in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Somebody is giving a speech to the Assembly and refuses to continue until the delegate from Peru wakes up. So someone taps the delegate from Peru, and he falls over dead. I wrote all these ideas down, but the only idea that is actually in the picture is the chase across Mount Rushmore. I also wrote out a list of possible protagonists, like a Frank Sinatra-type singer, or a famous sports announcer, or a newspaper man or a Madison advertising executive. I decided the easiest thing for me to write was a Madison Avenue advertising executive, not because I knew any, but because I know how to stereotype him.

Then we moved over to Hitchcock’s office at Paramount where he was working on Vertigo. We wasted a lot of time talking about the pleasantries of life. One day he told me something rather crucial, that a newspaperman in New York had told him that something like the CIA had once invented a decoy, a nonexistent agent, to throw the scene off a real agent. I thought that sounded good. Our hero, whoever he is, could be mistaken for this decoy. That I liked. I wrote the script page by page, scene by scene, never knowing what was coming next. The only thing I knew for sure was that we wanted to end up on Mount Rushmore, which is my least favorite part of the film, though most people remember it for that. I got only about one-tenth of the way through the story when Hitch gathered all the MGM executives together and told them everything we had. At the point where he ran out of story outline, he told them he had to go and that he’d see them at the preview. That was it.

Then Hitchcock arrived at MGM and he signed Cary Grant and fixed a starting date. Here I am, sweating my way through a first draft, and I still didn’t know what the whole third act would be. I was so desperate I called Hitch and said I needed to see him. I think he could sense how things were because he didn’t say, ‘Come down to my office.’ He said, ‘I’ll come down to your office.’ We met and I told him the truth. I said, ‘I’m totally stuck.’ I haven’t written a word in two weeks. It’s a disaster. What do we do?’ He said, ‘We’ll call in a novelist to sit with us and kick around some ideas.’ I said, ‘What will MGM say? I’m supposed to writing this movie.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell them it’s my fault.’ I felt very guilty. We went down to his office and he talked about which novelist to get. It was a very gloomy scene.

But I’m sitting there, and it’s not as if I wasn’t listening to him, but in the middle of this gloomy conversation I said, ‘Suppose he pulls out a gun and shoots him. Fake bullets. In a minute I’ll figure out why.’ My brain must have been working for months on this without my knowing it, because suddenly it became clear to me what the third act would be. Eva Marie is forced to shoot Cary Grant to draw suspicions away from herself because James Mason was beginning to wonder about her, then Marty Landau would discover the gun and the fake bullets, and only Cary Gratn would know that her life was in danger. And it sort of got easy. I left the office and never again was there any mention of bringing anyone else in. I continued writing through the shooting of the film up until Chicago. Then I went back to California and continued working on the final script. Then I went up to Bakersfield where the crop-dusting sequence took place.”

ON WHY LEHMAN FEELS LIKE THE PLOT OF NORTH BY NORTHWEST HAS HOLES

“Once I decided Cary Grant had been mistaken for a nonexistent man called George Kaplan, my first problem was how to do this. It’s a very hairy thing in this film. I once showed the film to a class at Dartmouth College. After we ran it, I asked them how many understood how he had been mistaken for George Kaplan, and only half of the students said they understood. It wasn’t really done properly in the film, either by me or Hitch. It was a little too subtle.

ON THE FAMOUS CROP-DUSTING SCENE

“Hitch and I acted out the entire crop-dusting sequence in his living room. Then I incorporated every move into the script, and that was the way he shot it.

Storyboarding is really an illustrator’s work for the director. A motion picture illustrator puts pictures on paper and puts them on boards. In story-boarding a script for a Hitchcock film, the illustrator is told what pictures to put on the boards by the script, which has benefited from my conferences with the director. Of course, I participate in what is going to appear on that storyboard, because even without the storyboard the script describes exactly what is going to be on the screen. Hitch would have it no other way. The script even describes the size of the shot, whether it’s a medium or a tight close-up, whether the camera pulls back and pans to the right as the character walks toward the door, whether it tilts slightly down and shoots through the open doorway, getting the helicopter as the lights go on outside. That’s why Hitch says it’s a bore for him to get the picture on the screen, because it has all been done already in his office.”

That’s some amazing stuff, especially to see how a professional screenwriter with numerous hits under his belt, could hit the wall creatively. Then just as remarkably, how a solution emerged: a shooting with fake bullets. And how about that image: Lehman and Hitchcock working out the entire crop-dusting scene — in Hitchcock’s living room!

By the way, if you’re ever in Austin, TX, you can see “The Ernest Lehman Collection” which is housed at the University of Texas.

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