How They Write A Script: Wendell Mayes

Wendell Mayes (1918–1992) had a significant career as a screenwriter and TV writer with quite a range of movies including The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and Death Wish (1974).

These interview excerpts are taken from the excellent “Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s”, one of a 4-part series edited by Patrick McGilligan.

ON HOW HE ENDED UP IN HOLLYWOOD

I must tell you, I didn’t come out here with any rosy ideas of being an artist. I was an actor in the theater. I didn’t really know much about motion pictures. I had always known I could write. When television began to rule in the early days, I realized, when I was at liberty, that I could probably write something that could sell, and I sold the first thing I wrote. Then I sold four or five others. Then Billy Wilder picked me up and brought me out. If you collaborate with Billy Wilder, you have a career.

I was by this time well into my late thirties. I wasn’t doing well as an actor. I knew if I was going to have any money, I’d better grab the chance. The jobs came fast. They were pouring over me, and they poured over me for twenty years. I could pick and choose. and there were a couple of years that I didn’t even bother to work. But I never got over my love of the theater. I had great respect for motion pictures, but it was not something I had chosen to begin with. I fell into it. I’m not mocking motion pictures, understand, because I’ve done awfully well out here.

ON WORKING WITH BILLY WILDER ON “THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS”

My first screenplay was with Billy Wilder, who brought me from New York to Hollywood for The Spirit of St. Louis in 1955. The great problem with the film was we had a man sitting in an airplane by himself, and the problem was how to sustain the interest in the story. I think it was a picture that was made thirty years too late, and I think it should have been called “The Lindbergh Story” or something like that, because when they put it out as The Spirit of St. Louis, everyone seemed to think it was an old musical, and they didn’t know what the Spirit of St. Louis was.

There was something unusual about the way I was employed by Billy Wilder. He’s a great bridge player, and he read a man called Goring on bridge at the time. He had had one writer working on The Spirit of St. Louis, and they had either disagreed or the writer got sick or something, and he was looking for a writer. And he was reading Colin Goring on bridge, and right next to the column was John Crosby’s review of one of my television plays. He read that, and he called up New York and said, “Let’s hire this fellow Wendell Mayes.” So if he hadn’t been a bridge player, I would never have been employed.

Billy Wilder’s a writer, and we simply wrote a screenplay together, in a room together, walking around, talking it out, We would write a scene just as you would imagine a scene would be written. I would say, “Suppose he says this . . . ,” and Billy would say, “Yeah, let him say that, and then he says . . . “ It isn’t the best way in the world to write, and it doesn’t work for everybody, but it does work for Billy Wilder. We would scribble it down on a piece of paper, then call in a secretary, and she takes it out and types it, and then we look at it. That’s the only collaboration that I’ve ever had. Everything else I’ve done by myself.

ON WORKING WITH OTTO PREMINGER ON “ANATOMY OF A MURDER”

Then I did Anatomy of a Murder for Otto Preminger. It was a good movie. I think it was one of my best screenplays. And I did two other pictures for Otto — Advise and Consent and In Harm’s Way. I wrote another script for him, but it never did get off the ground, not because of the script, but actually because the rights to the material were confused — that was Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.So it sits on the shelf, but maybe some day it will be made.

No one was cast when I started working on Anatomy of a Murder. Stewart was cast after it was written. Lana Turner was cast and then stepped out, and Lee Remick came in. It was written without any actors in mind.

I didn’t know Otto when he called me from New York. I don’t really know how he got on to me or why he employed me. But he called me from New York and asked me if I’d read a novel called Anatomy of a Murder [by Robert Traver, and I said, “No, but I will read it.” And I read it and called him back, and I said, “I think it’s a filmable motion picture.” So he called my agent and made a deal, and I went to New York and met Otto there and started to work on it.

When I work with Otto, we discuss over a period of time, say, the first fourth of a screenplay, where we want to go with it; and then I will go off and sit down, and I will write the first fourth. Then I come in and Otto reads it and we discuss it again and we get the construction and the arrangement of scenes to please both of us. Then we move on to the next fourth of the story. I’ve never gone through a whole screenplay with Otto and then gone off to write, because Otto doesn’t like to plan that far ahead — and actually, I don’t either because sometimes good things come without planning step-by-step straight through a screenplay. With other directors, I have gone off and written a screenplay and handed it to them. They’ve asked for certain changes, and that was it. Otto’s very good from a writer’s point of view. Unlike many directors and producers, Otto does not make up lines when the writer isn’t there. He will call the writer and say, “Look, I need a line of dialogue here.” One of the things that drives a screenwriter absolutely crazy with many producers and directors is that they won’t call the writer; they will simply toss in ad lib lines of dialogue that are almost invariably absolutely dreadful, that the characters wouldn’t say. It isn’t really done quite so much anymore. They used to hate the writer, and the moment they got the screenplay, they used to say, “Get off the lot; we don’t want you around bothering us.” Nowadays, a writer out here has a good deal more respect and a great deal more money.

ON WORKING WITHIN THE STUDIO SYSTEM

Hotel was a big best seller and Warner Brothers employed me to write a screenplay and to produce the picture. The studio felt that Richard Quine and I would get along well together, which we did, so he came in as director. We had a terrible time casting it. It was one of those situations where the studio wants to make a picture because they need something to take care of their overhead. They had nothing shooting, so we had to move very quickly in the casting. We all recognized that it was an old-fashioned formula picture, and perhaps if we had had bigger stars, it would have gone at the box office as well as Airport[1970].

I am very fond of Hotel, but afterwards, I swore I’d never produce anything again. I took the producing job because Jack Warner was a friend of mine. When he called me and asked me to do the book, he said, “Listen, could I ask you to produce it and save me some money?” I said okay. But I found producing to be the most boring occupation I’d ever encountered. The detail that you have to be burdened with is just not worth the effort — like whether one of the actors should have pockets in the rear of his britches. And you have to be on the set all the time. Shooting motion pictures is a very tiresome job.

If you ask me what kind of person Jack Warner was, my answer will be a cliché: he was a showman. Zanuck was a showman. Harry Cohn was a showman. All these people were showmen, and that’s the only way to describe them. They were in the business from the time they were sixteen years old; they grew up in it, and they had the feel and scent of show business about them, which doesn’t exist now. Jack Warner would make a decision about a piece of material, not because it would make a lot of money, but because he liked it as a story. If you look at the studio’s record of motion pictures, it’s a fascinating record. And Jack Warner was the person that said yes to all of them.

He was also involved in the scripts. Now, that isn’t true anymore. If a writer is working on a script for 20th, Paramount, or any of the studios, he never meets the man running the studio anymore. As far as I know, the man running the studio doesn’t even read the scripts anymore; he’s too involved with the corporation. But when you wrote a script at Warner Brothers, you dealt with Jack Warner. You went and sat in his office. He had read the script, and he had notes in the margin of his copy for you. He told you what he liked and he didn’t like. Look, Jack was a very astute, hard-nosed businessman when it came to dealing with the people who worked for him. A lot of people didn’t like Jack Warner. But I’ve discovered that the people who didn’t like Jack Warner were the people who didn’t get what they wanted from Jack Warner. And I was very fond of Jack Warner because he was kind to me when I was young.

ON WORKING ON “DEATH WISH”

Around the same time I was also working on Death Wish. I think the first studio involved was United Artists. Because I’d worked for Otto Preminger at UA [United Artists], Arthur Krim was a friend of mine, and through Krim, Hal Landon, the producer, sent the book [Death Wish, by Brian Garfield (New York: McKay, 1972)] to me. I was immensely intrigued with the book. I must tell you, from the moment I read it, I knew it was going to be a blockbuster because it was coming at just the right time. The outrage at crime in the streets was a big item. It didn’t surprise me when I read in the papers later on — I was in London at the time of the opening — that audiences were stamping their feet and screaming in the theaters.

I had a great deal to do with how the film turned out; I could see it in my mind before I put a word on paper. I didn’t stick to the book very much. I had to do an awful lot of inventing, which I must say [the author] Brian Garfield was not very happy with. But sometimes novelists are not happy, and there’s not much you can do about that. I think when novelists sell to the motion pictures, they should do what Hemingway did, and just walk away and forget about what might happen to their work.

ON WORKING ON “GO TELL THE SPARTANS”

Go Tell the Spartans took about eight years to get produced. I really didn’t have much hope of anyone ever buying it. But I was fascinated with Vietnam and why nobody had made a picture about Vietnam. The Green Berets[1968] was a gung ho picture; it could have been World War II. Vietnam was an absolutely fascinating war, however. The political ramifications are quite fascinating because it [military involvement in Vietnam] tore this country asunder the way it tore France apart. The same thing happened here that happened there, and to an extent, this is what my story was about. It took place in 1964, shortly before escalation when all the soldiers were professional, and they were fighting the war the same way the French had fought the war, with these little outposts everywhere. A group of American advisers with a company of Vietnamese are sent to regarrison an old French garrison that was deserted in

1953. There is a French graveyard there of three hundred graves. Nailed on the tree is a sign in French that says: Stranger, Go Tell the Spartans That We Lie Here in Obedience to Their Laws. Now you know that exactly the same thing that happened to the French is going to happen to them. My script wasn’t gung ho; it wasn’t anti-American; it was, I hope, the truth and an interesting tale.

When I first submitted the book [Incident at Muc Wa, by Daniel Ford (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967)] around town, they ran screaming. Fox ran from it. Paramount ran from it. They all ran from it. They would not make a picture about Vietnam. So I took an option on the book myself and wrote the script and started, slowly, pushing it, peddling it. I carried the option all those years. I had optioned several other things over the course of time, which I had written screenplays for, but this was the first thing that I optioned that finally did go. It was also one that I was in love with. I could see how the relationships of the people who were in the novel could be turned into a story, a war picture that could really get hold of you.

The script isn’t faithful to the book at all, incidentally; but the novelist loved the movie. I sent him the script, and he wrote me a little note, saying he wished his novel was as good as my screenplay. That was very sweet of him. For one thing, in the novel there was a newswoman wandering through the story, and I eliminated her completely. I invented some characters that were

not in the novel. I made the story much more of a tragedy; the wipeout at the end [of the film] was not in the novel. And the part [Burt] Lancaster played was much stronger than in the novel. He was not a man who had been a major, for the curious reasons I gave him, all of his life. All this and more was invented.

Finally, one day, Teddy Post called me. Ted hasn’t done a lot of features, he got stuck in TV; but he’s a good director who has never been recognized for his real talent. He had read the script and remembered it. He was working for the American Film Company and called to ask, “Whatever happened to that script of yours about Vietnam that I read a few years ago?” I said, “I’ve still got it.” He asked me to send it over to him, and within three days, he called back and said they’re going to go for it. Just like that. The American Film Company was prepared to go with anyone they could get. Burt Lancaster was the first one they submitted it to, and he said, “Yes, I’ll do it. Let’s go.” He didn’t ask for a thing, not a single line change.

The filming was done right out here near Magic Mountain, down near a little river, and if you panned up too high, you could see Magic Mountain. They had to do extra work on the sound, because when they were shooting at night, you could hear the roar of the freeway. Some of the cast were Vietnamese refugees; some had been officers. I thought Lancaster was wonderful in it. He put up some of the completion bond himself. The picture was made for a million bucks, and I think it’s better than Platoon [1986].

ON THE CURRENT STATE OF HOLLYWOOD

The people who run the studios nowadays all seem to me to be stamped out of the same cloth. They’re film-school people, and what they know is what they have been taught in film schools. I don’t sense any original minds at all. I’m not saying there aren’t any original minds, but in my few encounters — I’m pretty well retired, except for the things I’m writing myself; at least I’m no longer for hire — that’s the sense I have. There may be some very talented people in the studios. I haven’t met them if there are.

Hollywood studios are conglomerates now. When I came out here, I got in on the tail end of old Hollywood. It was quite wonderful. What has changed in the studios now is that they simply are not happy places. The fear is tangible. There is no continuity of employment for people. The managements of the studios are icy. They don’t know the people down the line like they used to. All that has changed, and I don’t think for the best.

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