How They Write A Script: Garson Kanin
Garson Kanin (1919–1999) was a Broadway actor and director, but best known as a screenwriter. His most renowned movies: A Double Life…
Garson Kanin (1919–1999) was a Broadway actor and director, but best known as a screenwriter. His most renowned movies: A Double Life (1948); Adam’s Rib (1949); Born Yesterday (1950), based on his stage hit; The Marrying Kind (1951); Pat and Mike (1952); and It Should Happen to You (1954). He was also married to actress Ruth Gordon.
These interview excerpts are taken from the excellent “Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s”, one of a 4-part series edited by Patrick McGilligan.
ON HOW HE GOT INTO WRITING AND DIRECTING
I was never as interested in film as an art form per se as I was in the theater. Which is still quite true. The theater is my love and my life and my wife, and the movies are a mistress. A very delightful mistress, and a very valuable mistress — but no, I consider myself a theater animal.
But I had a good time in Hollywood, working first for Goldwyn. When I wanted to leave him after a year, he was rather irritated with me. I told him I was interested in directing, and I never would get an opportunity there with him, and eventually he understood that.
So I left his employ on a Saturday — in those days, in Hollywood, we would work a six-day week, with only one day off, Sunday. And I went to work at RKO on Monday. There, things went a little better, and after about six months there, I eventually wormed my way into directing my first picture.
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I had met a fellow by the name of Robert Sisk, who had been the chief press agent for the Theatre Guild in New York. In my theater days, working for Abbott, I had come to know Bob Sisk. We were theater friends. When I came to RKO, he had become an RKO producer. We used to see each other and lunch together once in a while. Dalton Trumbo was writing a picture for him. I got to know Trumbo — who had an adjoining office to mine. We used to talk late into the night.
I got to talking about this picture he was writing. It wasn’t called A Man to Remember [1938]; that’s the title I put on it later. We talked and talked and, as people do when they talk, I sparked some ideas from him, and he from me, and at the end of that process, he said to me, “How would you like to direct this picture?” I said, “I’d like to if they let me. Do you think they’d let me . . . ?” He said, “Let’s go and talk to Bob Sisk.”
No one seemed to have any objection. Because I was very cheap — I think I was getting $400 a week, which was nothing from Hollywood in those days. Actually, on my first picture, the cameraman was making more money than me; he was making $800 a week. That didn’t bother me. I would have paid them for the opportunity.
So began my whole work as a film director, and in that stretch I think I did seven pictures.
ON THE DIRECTOR AS ‘AUTEUR’ THEORY
Something has to be remembered here, and that is that the director occupies the important creative position in Hollywood, even today. I deplore it, I think it’s a fake, I think it’s a mistake, I think it’s terribly unfair. You can imagine how I feel when I pick up, say, the New Yorker magazine and in the front are all the listings of the revival pictures. Adam’s Rib is always listed — they’re crazy about Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike . And they always refer to it as “George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib.” “George Cukor’s Pat and Mike.”It’s always the director who has that possessive on a picture.
Quickly in Hollywood I got the idea that the director is the kingpin, and that was the thing to be. The directors were the royalty and everyone else was small fry. That still obtains, I’m sorry to say.
ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WRITING A NOVEL AND A [SCREEN]PLAY
Playwrighting is a difficult mystique. I remember my master and mentor Thornton Wilder once saying to a group of friends, “Playwrighting is not an intellectual pursuit. Nor is it particularly a literary pursuit. I know some very fine and successful plays that have been written by dopes, by near-illiterates.” I didn’t appreciate the fact that he was looking right at me as he said all this.
Yet it’s quite true. You cannot imagine a man who does not have a solid, sound literary background sitting down to write a good or successful novel. To write a good novel or even to write a passable novel is an extremely difficult job. It takes long preparation. But Thornton was right: I have known some very lowbrow, near-illiterate guys who wrote successful plays. Writing plays is something quite different from writing a novel or short story.
ON THE ENJOYMENT OF WRITING
For me, there’s nothing more deeply and thoroughly enjoyable in life than writing. That’s the apex of true enjoyment. I know how many writers talk about the torture of it all and how difficult it is and how they sweat blood and how they can hardly bear to face that empty page. I’m sure it’s true. I don’t think they’re pretending. I’m sure there are many writers who find writing extremely difficult. I’m not saying I find it easy . It’s not easy at all. But I do find it enjoyable.
ON HOW HE APPROACHES WRITING
I have no objective sense of what I do. I do it deeply and automatically, which is a result of the teaching I got from Thornton Wilder. When I sit down to write, I don’t have any idea what I’m going to write. As I told you, when I sat down to write Born Yesterday,it was going to be a serious play. It turned into a comedy.
The same thing happens when I write novels. Things happen in the novels that astonish me. I can’t believe they’re happening when they do. As Thornton used to put it, “When you sit down to write, you never know what’s going to run down your sleeve.” Because if you’re truly writing fiction or plays well, you’re writing with your unconscious. If you are writing imaginative literature of any kind, whether it’s poetry or plays or films or novels, it’s inside of you, somewhere.
To give you an example: What makes people laugh? Only one thing, not two: surprise. That’s the only thing that ever makes me laugh, or makes anyone laugh. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds for a writer, because there are perhaps 200,000 different kinds of surprises and variations on surprises. But any time an audience laughs, it is because it’s been surprised by the use of a word, by a piece of business, by a look.
So the question is, If you’re writing and you suddenly laugh, if it is true that you only laugh at surprises, how can you laugh at something you yourself have written? The answer is, you didn’t know you were going to write it a moment before you wrote it. You were writing along in an unconscious way. Your conscious mind observes it, your eyes see it, your sensibility digests it quickly, and it makes you laugh, because you really are surprised at what you wrote. That’s one of the most important lessons of writing anything. People who write strictly on a conscious level do not write well.
ON THE PRAGMATICS OF WRITING
The most important thing is concentration. The two enemies of any kind of creative work are interruption and distraction. Which is why so many writers feel they have to go away somewhere. When you sit down to write, you have to make a journey, a journey from the real world into the world of the
imagination. Part of learning the lesson is learning how. I cannot advise young writers on how to make that journey into the imaginative self. I can tell them what other people have done. I can tell them what I do. It’s not really going to help them until they find their own way.
Now, Ernest Hemingway had a very exact system. Ernest Hemingway always wrote on blocks of paper with pencil. When he had finished work, usually in the late afternoon, he would pick up a handful of his pencils and he would slam them down on his desk, successfully breaking every point of the pencils. Then he would throw the pencils down on the desk and leave his workroom, and he wouldn’t see that room again until the following morning.
When he got up in the morning, he’d get some air and eat some breakfast and do whatever else it was he had to do; then he would go into his study and close the door and sit down at the desk. He had some penknives that he especially liked. He used to acquire them all the time and carry them everywhere. He would pick up one of his favorite penknives and he would pick up the first pencil and he would very carefully, laboriously, brilliantly, carve a perfect point on that pencil. Then he would lay it down. Sometimes he would pause and sharpen his knife; that would be another little distraction. Then he would pick up the next pencil and put another point on it.
He told me once that sometimes it would take four, five pencils — he said on some days when he had a hangover it might take seven or eight pencils to be sharpened — but somewhere along the line, when he finished sharpening either the fifth or the sixth or the eighth pencil, he would put down the penknife and he would pick up the pencil and he would begin to write again.
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING GOOD CHARACTERS
It is also just writing good parts, which is the essence of writing a play or a film. You have to write good parts for actors to play. If you don’t, you’re not going to get good actors.
Usually, if you write one smashing part in a play, it can be enough, if the other parts are at least adequate. It’s been pointed out to me, what makes Born Yesterday what it is, is that it has not only one marvelous part, but two and sometimes three — if they’re lucky in the casting of the third part. They’re good acting parts.
And I would say to young playwrights, especially, don’t worry so much about the story. There are no original stories. All the stories have been told in one form or another. The only thing that makes a successful play is the delineation of character. Be sure you write good parts. Interesting, dramatic, amusing, romantic — it’s the characters that make the play.
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