Screen Shots

By Jesse Graham

Huston to Hopkins - Pacino to Peckinpah. Screen Shots is about writing a screenplay. And a few other things that go to make up an education in the backstage world of theatre and the movies. Larger than life characters stride through the scene, making their own rules as well as hits and misses. All of it observed by one wide eyed young witness in settings from Egypt to Mexico, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden to the Old Vic. Sharing the stage with Hopkins. Olivier pulling one's ear. George Sanders in drag. And more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jesse Graham
• Release date: Apr 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215170595

Jesse Graham

Jesse Graham was born and raised in the Far East. He has been variously an oil rig roughneck offshore, a stagehand in London, a tour/travel guide in the Western United States, a film maker and screenwriter (details on IMDb.com) and a bull runner (retired).

Book preview

Screen Shots

by

Jesse Graham

Copyright © 2023 Jesse Graham

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author or publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

To request permission, contact [e-mail]

ISBN: 9798833137482

For Katy and the Dog Brothers

Contents

THE SCREENS

A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

A DIGRESSION

THE PATH TO ROME

SUMMER’S CHANGE

CAVE OF WONDERS

BACK STAGE FRIGHT: A season with Olivier, Hopkins and Co.

INTERMISSION

THE ROAD TO SIWA

THE PRODUCER : EXAMPLE 1

THE PRODUCER : EXAMPLE 2

THE SCREENWRIGHT’S TALE

WALTER BROWN NEWMAN

STAR TIME

JOHN FORD AND HIS BASTARD SONS

THE TRAIL TO AGUA VERDE

It is ten o’clock. A warm fall night in Manhattan. I am sprinting across the traffic on West 45th, matching strides with the Godfather. Al Pacino. People on the street recognize him, call out his name as we run by. I have no idea where we are headed. We cut up a block and turn onto 46th. And safety is in sight. The sign for Joe Allen. As we arrive at the restaurant door, it is swung open for us. We have been expected. We do not even check a step as we are led smartly to a private corner table.

We sit. We order. Al is chatty. We talk of the Mamet play we have just seen. He is open and sunny as he has been any time I have been with him in Los Angeles or New York. I finish my steak and sit back in my chair.

Al stops talking. I look up. The eyes of Michael Corleone are staring at me with cold intent. There is no appeal to be made. Judgment has been reached. Sentence has been handed down.

He leans forward, those unmistakable eyes completely locked on mine.

"Are you going to eat those french fries?"

"No. No. All yours," I said, hastily shaking my head.

The Godfather vanishes and a once more amiable Al takes possession of my plate.

(Screenplay Rule 1: Need to know – story must be restless. We must want to know more. A ball should be in the air. Someone is knocking at the door. Attack scene late and finish before it ends.

THE SCREENS

As a child I grew up in a remote part of the tropics. A post-colonial world. The common diversions of ‘back Home’ were far distant, hardly known to me. There were no trips to the movies or the theatre. Television was unheard of and would not exist for years. There were no comics to spend pocket money on. My grandmother sent a bundle every six weeks or so. It took that long by sea mail. My mother tried to ration me to an issue a day once the parcel had arrived. But I hungered so for fresh tales that she would relent and let me read, unchecked, rushing the pages, greedy, gobbling for story. It was nearly my only source.

There were glimpses however of other ways. We had a large garden surrounded by a wall which ran behind the servant quarters. On the other side of the wall was an area of cleared ground where on certain nights people would gather for the show. Wayang Kulit – a shadow play with stick puppets made of buffalo leather. The shadows were thrown onto a white cloth screen by lamps of coconut oil. The Dalang was the puppet master, the storyteller. The tales he acted out upon the screen were accompanied by gamelan music. On the far side of the screen, the audience sat on the grass. The scent of kretek clove cigarettes drifted from them on the night air. Forbidden to go closer, I peered from a distance, perched on the wall with Dje and Sup the servants. We were on the puppet master’s side of the screen.

The screen was both a barrier and a gate between the storyteller and his audience. This division was underlined for me in a different setting. Expatriates made their own amusements. Many volunteered for amateur theatrical productions. Plays were mounted such as FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS. One time as a treat, I was seated on the lap of an adult in the prompt box downstage centre. To be so close, to be craning one’s head back to view the actors looming over you, while being invisible to that rustling shifting audience behind was a heady sensation. Even more significant was the hush as the stage curtain fell, muffling the audience applause and telling you that you were on the other side of the frontier, the concealing curtain. That was to be my only step into that backstage world for some years. But I never forgot what it felt like. It all came back in a rush the first time I saw the climactic sequence of the movie CHARADE in which Audrey Hepburn cowers in the prompt box of a deserted theatre, desperately trying to hide from the villain Walter Matthau.

Yet that is a movie. And I had so little experience of them. I once read an account by Paul Schrader how in obedience to a religious edict from his father he had not seen a film until he was seventeen. The experience was overwhelming. I knew something of what he had felt. It was as if we were uninoculated Aztec villagers coming into contact with the conquistadors’ common colds.

My case was not so severe. Yet by the time I was ten, I could still count on one hand the films I had seen. A Christmas showing at the Club of SNOW WHITE. The witch queen gave me nightmares. Disney had the power to make those dreams communal. For the first time in history generations and nations went to bed sharing the same images in their sleep. Of live action movies, I can remember only one. A black and white print of THE CRIMSON PIRATE. The acrobatics of Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat stayed undimmed in my head for years. I did not see the film again for another decade. It was exactly as I remembered except for one thing. This print was in riotous colour. As for television, only one scrap remains in memory. On leave, in my grandparents’ house, we viewed the fuzzy grey images of the Russian tanks rolling into Budapest to put down the Hungarian uprising.

I was nearly ten. It was time for me to undergo that rite common to expatriates since Kipling’s day. Being packed off home to boarding school and the care of unfamiliar relatives. I was sent back to a world I did not know except from books. I imagined Dickensian stagecoaches held sway over the snowy streets of London and the coachmen continually blew trumpet flourishes.

I was pitch forked into the winter round of great Irish mansions and their house parties, the foxhunters of Galway riding over the green fields marked with bleak stone fences. There were cousins, uncles and aunts and grandparents. I struggled to learn the customs of this new tribe I had been enfolded into and tried not to give in to the frequent waves of homesickness that came upon me without warning. My great refuge as ever was books. I would steal off into a corner whenever I could and forget the entire world except what was in the pages before me.

We went one day to a neighbouring estate and were welcomed with much bustle and greeting in the main hall. A tall leather faced man, a cigar in hand, came down the great staircase. He seemed different from the other grownups. He had a theatrical manner and his voice was a distinctive husky caramel drawl. He wore a flared corduroy suit. Something came off him like the electricity one can sense from a thorough bred racehorse. If you had passed him in the street, you would turn to wonder who he was, knowing that he was someone uncommon. He did not stay for long. He had somewhere else to be. I don’t remember hearing his name.

A few days later a reciprocal visit was paid. I was in the library by myself, reading. The tall man came in to use the phone. After he had made his call, he walked over and asked what I was reading. I showed him. The Black Stallion by Walter Farley. I had been given it as a Christmas present.

A good choice, he smiled approvingly, showing a mouthful of horse teeth. He took the book from me and picked up a pencil from a side table. Allow me to – he hesitated, selecting the word with deliberation – "decorate it for you." Rapidly he sketched a cartoon horse’s head with dilated nostrils, snorting puffs of air on the fly leaf. He inspected his handiwork and gave it back to me.

There was a call of ‘John’ from the hall outside. His presence was necessary elsewhere. That was my first encounter with John Huston.

A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

It was now when I was made free of the joys of the local fleapit by my grandparents. I could go to the ‘fillums’ on my own. The Royal in Bray. I ran wild. All the pictures were intoxicating. I think back now at how I went to see anything. The simple elements of size, colour, movement and sound overwhelmed me. Badly dubbed Edmund Purdom in THE COSSACKS. Twice. THE MILLIONAIRESS. Twice. THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM scared me so much I ran all the way home. I still think one of the bravest things I ever did was to crawl out of my attic bed at midnight and find my way in the dark down the stairs to the bathroom to relieve my bursting bladder. Some ten years later in London the picture was showing on television. I came into the room just as the finale happened. And I had to look away. I could not bear to watch the stricken eyes staring out of the mask of the Iron Maiden.

Interestingly, though I knew John was in the ‘fillums’, I did not really make the connection. In fact, I had not seen one of his films. These were the days before video. Though there was a day when we were all invited to be part of the background during a staged fox hunt. A time or two Huston’s children, Tony and Anjelica, were brought over to play with my cousins and myself. All I remember us doing was jumping off stacked bales into the loose hay in the barn. Anjelica got her hair caught and tangled and was not best pleased.

After a formal dinner one night, a number of the guests including John set up for a game of serious poker in the drawing room. John beckoned me and said in that confidential voice, Lad, could you do me a favour and bring me a small basket.

I went into the dining room and liberated a bread basket. I brought it back. Will this do, John? He took it with due solemnity and said, That’s perfect. One of the other players asked, What’s the basket for, John? John took a puff of his cigar and beamed around the table. Why, to put my winnings in of course.

Films for me were like carnival rides. Enjoyable and addictive. But they weren’t serious like books were. There was the occasional exception. I remember me and my father being stunned at seeing LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. But I did not know anything of John’s work until I went on to public school. The weekly film show in the school theatre began to give me an education. Between over many viewings of REACH FOR THE SKY and THE DAMBUSTERS other films slipped through. Buster Keaton’s THE GENERAL had me face down in the aisle, gasping for air in hysterics. And then THE AFRICAN QUEEN. THE MALTESE FALCON. It was with a genuine sense of shock that I saw John’s name stamped on the credits.

Slowly it dawned on me that these pictures were written. To me writing came to a point of resolution on the page. The pages of a book were the ultimate goal and destiny. But I was beginning to understand that what was presented on the screen had to be written too. I knew nothing of how to go about it. I had not the least notion of what a screenplay looked like.

When I went up to university I began to haunt the art house screenings. I was overwhelmed by Eisenstein with his striking compositions. IVAN THE TERRIBLE, ALEXANDER NEVSKY. I fell in love with the school of montage. It was later that I came to appreciate Murnau and the moving camera. I made attempts to educate myself. I rewrote a Salinger short story as a script. It was a straight transfer and the only thing I gained from it was a deeper appreciation of Salinger’s dialogue.

Many years later in Los Angeles, I found myself playing squash with Salinger’s son Matthew. During the preliminary warm up, I asked him if he would mind answering a question about his reclusive father. He indicated to go ahead.

"I just want to know if he’s still writing," I said.

Matthew returned the ball to me. Yes, he said. He’s still writing. There was a pause and he continued. Of course, whether any of it will see the light of day is another matter entirely.

I wrote another adaptation. This one was effectively a silent movie. It had almost no dialogue. It was a Steinbeck story about a man on the run in desert country. I learned a little more from writing that one. I was not the only person to respond to the story. I discovered that some time afterwards when the writer Barnaby Conrad told me of his attempts to get a short movie made of the story. He at least got Steinbeck’s permission.

These were five finger exercises that would never lift off the page. I needed to make a film of some kind no matter how small. But I had no access to camera equipment or any knowledge of how to go about things. The only person who seemed to have any interest in the subject had the rooms next to mine. We shared a tutor of Anglo Saxon – Christopher Tolkien, son of the great J.R.R. – and a common short cut to the back garden of the Turf Tavern. But James was the son of the director Basil Dearden and had a head start, being destined for the family business.

And then an idea fell into my head.

A DIGRESSION

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