Sundays with Sidney Lumet’s “Making Movies”

A weekly series featuring reflections on filmmaking by one of the truly great movie directors.

Roger Ebert said this about Making Movies: “It has more common sense in it about how movies are actually made than any other I have read.” That alone is enough reason to read this book authored by Sidney Lumet.

Known as an actor’s director, Lumet directed 17 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Katharine Hepburn, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Chris Sarandon, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Beatrice Straight, William Holden, Ned Beatty, Peter Firth, Richard Burton, Paul Newman, James Mason, Jane Fonda and River Phoenix. Bergman, Dunaway, Finch and Straight won Oscars for their performances in a Lumet movie.

Among his filmmaking credits are such stellar movies as 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Equus, Prince of the City, The Verdict, and Running on Empty. He also has five screenwriting credits including Q&A and Night Falls on Manhattan.

As I’ve done with Sundays with Ray Bradbury and Sunday’s with Stephen King’s “On Writing,” I will work my way through Lumet’s book focusing on insights applicable to the craft of screenwriting.

Today: From “Making Movies,” Chapter 2: The Script: Are Writers Necessary?, pp. 28–29.

During some of my hot periods, and even some cooler ones, a script arriving from a studio usually has an accompanying letter that almost always includes the same phrase: “Of course we know the script needs work. And if you feel that the present writer can’t do it, we’re prepared to put on anyone you want.” I’ve always been amazed at that. It’s always a bad sign period to me, it indicates that they have no conviction about what they bought in the first place.

The contempt that writers have endured from studios through the years is too well known to discuss again here. Most of the horror stories were true, as when Sam Spiegel had two writers working on the same picture on two different floors of the Plaza Athénée in Paris. Or when Herb Gardner and Paddy Chayefsky, who had adjoining offices at 850 Seventh Avenue in New York, one day received identical offers for a rewrite on the same script. The producer was too dumb or too preoccupied to notice that scripts were being sent to the same address, one to Room 625 and the other to Room 627. The writers typed identical letters, turning down the offer.

I come from the theater. There, the writer’s work is sacred. Carrying out the writer’s intention is the primary objective of the entire production. The word “intention” is used in the sense of expressing the writer’s reason for having written the play. In fact, as defined in the Dramatists Guild contract, the writer has final say over everything — casting, sets, costumes, director — including the right to close the plate before it opens if he is dissatisfied with what he sees on stage. I know of one instance when this happened. I was brought up with the concept that the one who had the initial idea, who suffered through the agony of getting it down on paper, was the one who had to be satisfied.

As screenwriters, we may fantasize about a different kind of Hollywood in a parallel universe where studio executives, producers, and directors alike shared the same sensibility as Lumet: the writer’s work is “sacred.” Alas, that is most certainly not the case in Real Hollywood and never has been dating back to the inception of the filmmaking business. When a studio purchases a screenplay, they not only obtain ownership of the material, legally they become its author. This reflects the longstanding studio attitude toward scripted content: since they own it, they can do any damn thing they want with it.

This does not by necessity mean that what they do with the script is a negative thing. In the best of all worlds, the collaborative effort of making a movie, including the script development process, combines to produce something better than the writer may have even initially imagined.

More often than not, however, when a movie is released, there will have been multiple writers at work on it. Why do you think that just last year (2021), the Writers Guild of America approved a new feature film credit: Additional Literary Material. This acknowledges the status quo: Everybody gets rewritten in Hollywood. Sometimes this benefits the end product. Often, it does not.

The film projects where a studio throws multiple writers at the story more than likely have been written by a writer who has what Lumet wanted to see in any script he read: A clarity of intention. I think it goes beyond the reason why the writer wrote the project in the first place. It extends to the nature of the story’s central characters … why they exist in the dramatic situation in which they find themselves … and the direction of the narrative as it unfolds over the course of the script.

Unlike television, which is a writer’s medium, movies are a director’s medium. It’s they who go off and make the movie. A screenwriter may hope against hope their script ends up in the hands of a director as enlightened as Lumet was when it came to the sanctity of the written word. More often, that is not the case. In any circumstance, it is imperative for a writer to have a clear understanding of the intention of the script, both as it pertains to their personal motivation and vision, and the story itself and where it will take its characters.

When a screenwriter does that, they set themselves on a path toward writing a story which has a sense of inevitability to it: the story that needs to be told is the story they have written. This is perhaps the single most powerful safeguard as to the efficacy of the original screenplay.

It is that subject which Lumet takes up in the next few pages in his book, something we will explore next time.

Drop by next Sunday for the next in our series on the Sidney Lumet book, Making Movies. For previous installments, go here.

For more background on Sidney Lumet’s filmmaking career, go here.